How Cults Work 5 - Attachment Theory

This is the fifth post in a series dedicated to the book Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein.

In this post we zero in on attachment theory and look at it in depth regarding cultic relationships.

Stein wrote: "In 1958, John Bowlby, the originator of attachment theory, wrote this to his wife: Most people think of fear as running away from something. But there is another side to it. We run TO someone, usually a person....It's screamingly obvious, but I believe it to be a new idea, and quite revolutionary. (End quote by John Bowlby)"

"Bowlby's revolutionary idea helps to explain the relationship that exists both at the heart of these systems - between follower and leader - and in the heart and brain of each individual who is successfully coerced or brainwashed. The leader positions themselves (or the group as an extension of the leader) as the benevolent safe haven to which each follower will turn when afraid. The principal means of achieving this involves two subsequent elements: isolate the follower from any other possible safe havens and then arouse fear in the follower. The result ? Frightened, stressed followers who "run TO someone":to the leader of the group.
      But this "running TO" is not adaptive , healthy seeking of protection when frightened - something all of us do as both children and adults, seeking the comfort of our close relationships in times of stress. In the case of the totalist organization, it's a particular and problematic form of this hardwired behavior, a form termed disorganized attachment. In this chapter I outline the basic principles of attachment theory to explain this type of relationship. "Page 26 - 27

This idea is a lot to take on and after reading dozens of books on cults I can tell you it is one many people do not discuss in literature on cults. Some may believe it but feel it too complex for lay people and so they leave it out of descriptions and books but it is extremely important for seeing how cults work and with further information from neuroscience it can offer a partially physical explanation for cultic influence and phenomena. And physical explanations include the ability to observe and consistently repeat something. I feel that can help to forward our understanding and give us things to look at and look for to see if our ideas are supported or contradicted by evidence.

Fortunately Stein elaborated on this so we can know what is going on.

She described a bit on the brainwashing process itself. A former cult member named Masoud is introduced. He was a member of the Iranian Mojahedin aka the MEK. They claimed to oppose imperialism and at one time the Khomeini regime in Iran.

Masoud was encouraged to "forget your idealism and face reality. You must accept things, including the Mojahedin, as they are, not as you wish they were or think they should be." Page 27

Stein wrote: "Masoud states that this was his "moment" - these words: were like a hammer banging on my head - but instead of awakening me, they knocked me unconscious...Instead of forcing me to think, I shut my mind to all doubts and questions. " Page 27

 "This was just one moment - but importantly, this was the first of years of such moments - moments where clear and systematic thinking became so difficult, so dangerous, that giving up the effort seemed to make the most sense of all. This is the process that is central to brainwashing - the pushing aside of doubts and questions and beginning to passively accept the dogma on offer. " Page 28

 "In Masoud's case this submission did not happen overnight (though in some cases - most famously the Unification Church, known as the Moonies - it can happen much more quickly). In most instances getting a person to this point is an iterative process. That is, it may involve many cycles of the basic dynamic that includes a progressively more isolating environment, establishing the group as the main (and eventually only) reference point for the individual, and generating levels of fear  or stress arousal that cause the person to keep turning towards the group for support. It is this, often cyclical, process that causes the dissociation that is induced in the brainwashed follower." Page 28


Now I should comment that my own cult indoctrination exactly fit this description. I was in Scientology about two months and had to memorize over twenty departments and their corresponding awareness characteristics in order verbatim to pass a drill and just gave up on my system I had for "trying" Scientology. I had been learning dozens of Scientology ideas and hundreds of Scientology terms and abbreviations and additionally hundreds of definitions for English words in Scientology indoctrination.

You study many, many pages and listen to many tapes in Scientology indoctrination and better be able to rattle off definitions for any word on your course instantly or you will need to go back to where any flunked word first appears in your materials and restudy from that point forward. Sometimes it is a page or two but sometimes it is at the beginning of a course you were about to finish, maybe a hundred or more pages back. So you get an extreme anxiety about never passing any word you cannot immediately define perfectly.

In addition I kept ideas grouped into several categories that I tried to make distinct. These included my own beliefs, the ideas Hubbard introduced in his doctrine including his definitions for words and the English definitions I learned in indoctrination.

Imagine a juggler as a person keeping ideas in their mind. They have lots of ideas that they treat normally and treat like balls of the same size and weight. Okay. They have occasional contact with other objects they add that are different. Maybe different size balls or different objects that they juggle. This is like having your own ideas and occasionally getting an idea that you do not necessarily agree with or believe to remember. To handle it you have to know it is not yours but it is easy enough as you can see it is different from your usual ideas or ones you believe.

Now imagine the game is changed intentionally in Scientology. You are a juggler who keeps hundreds of balls going at once. You are quite good. But in a surprise twist you get asked to add two new groups of balls to the ones you already juggle. The two new groups are ideas from Hubbard including his doctrine and definitions of terms and definitions for English words you also learn in Scientology indoctrination.

There are so many ideas to keep track of and such a rapid pace at which they come in that you stop seeing them as different. It is like having to juggle red balls blue balls and white balls and remember which are which and someone pills a truck of making them all become white ! They are all the same now and you are struggling to just keep them going ! Then the cult has won.

 The red balls were Hubbard's ideas and definitions and the blue were English definitions you learned and the white were your own beliefs. But in the frantic dash to retain all of it perfectly and constantly while pushing through your courses you lost yourself and your own beliefs and all became one.

But as the words piled up into the thousands and thousands and the strain of keeping straight which ideas were my own and which were from Hubbard and his  - he defined them - and all the English definitions I learned it just became totally overwhelming and too much. My mind shut down. I just tried to retain and recall everything without evaluation. And that is how I sunk under a fog of confusion and did not emerge for over two decades. I covered that in my blog post Two Roads


http://mbnest.blogspot.com/2015/12/two-roads.html?m=0.



Stein wrote: "Attachment theory is a key to understanding this dissociative mechanism that lies at the heart of a totalist system. It can help make sense of why the five elements of leadership, structure, ideology, process and outcomes are seen together, and what holds them together - they do not appear randomly, and they do not act randomly. Totalist systems are made up of a predictable pattern of behaviors and, with help of attachment theory, we can go some way to explaining why they appear in concert and the function each serves in maintaining the system.
       When I talk about attachment theory in this context, people are often prone to jump to the conclusion that I mean the follower has some type of attachment disorder that led them to seeking out a cultic or extremist group. "Aha," says the listener, "As I suspected, such followers are needy seekers, looking for some authority figure to tell them what to do." Let me make clear, at the outset, that this is not at all the direction of this explanation. In fact, it is my belief that followers start out with a similar variety of attachment-related dispositions as we find in the general population: some are well adjusted (securely attached) while others may be more or less so, and some, perhaps perhaps not well adjusted at all. My contention is that the system itself acts upon followers and, regardless of their original attachment status, attempts to change that status, to what is known as disorganized attachment. Further, the system aims to remove the follower's prior attachment figures and replace them with the leader or group as the new - and disorganized - attachment relationship. The people you love are pushed out and replaced by the leader or group as the new and sole focus of your emotional commitment. " Page 28

This has some key points to really get down. They are the foundation of Stein's model. She sees five key ingredients which she calls elements in leadership, structure, ideology, process and outcomes as essential to cults and further that they are held together and display predictable behaviors and we can use attachment theory to understand them.

That is a tall order because people have been trying to understand abusive relationships, cults and totalist systems for a long time, often with mixed results. Stein further offers to explain why this cultic components appear together, something else that is useful.

She emphasized that people of all types of backgrounds can end up in cults, regarding their attachment styles but that cults end up taking away both the old attachment style and people who one was attached to and replace them with a disorganized attachment to the cult leader or group.

That is a huge change for a person certainly but plausible and can explain the tremendous changes we find in people from their pre cult behavior to their cult behavior and even post cult behavior. To me it is worthwhile to consider.

I should add this is an accurate description to me of my experience in Scientology. Everyone and everything besides L Ron Hubbard and Scientology is treated as at best worthless and worst genuinely evil in Scientology. People only have value to the degree they benefit Hubbard or Scientology in Scientology but you have to accept this very gradually and once you do your entire worldview is different. It is like becoming a different person.

Stein went on "It is, in fact, the primary task of the totalist system to effect this change: to gain control of followers it must, in fact, rewire attachment behavior and utterly reconfigure followers' attachments. If we understand this, then the features of totalism begin to make sense and to be predictable. We can then make sense of why the system is deceptive, why it isolates people from their loved ones and controls close relationships, and why its ideology is often impenetrable, contradictory, fictitious (As Hannah Arendt puts it) and, in most cases, fairly insane. But first we need to learn a bit about attachment theory, and in particular how our attachment status affects both our emotional and our thinking lives. " Page 29

This is extremely important for understanding cultic relationships and behavior. I cannot emphasize that strongly enough. Lots of books and models I can reference will tell you that cults repeatedly follow certain patterns and are built with certain features but they often do not say why these patterns and features are there over and over.

The ideology of groups alone is not sufficient to determine which groups are cults or not and also are not enough to predict which groups will behave like cults. Religious or strange beliefs do not predict this and reasonable sounding beliefs also do not show whether a group is cultic.

So, it is worth zeroing in on what does make a group a cult. And how the consistent features of cults are all tied together.

I am giving a very abbreviated version of the ideas Stein presents. Obviously actually reading her book is ideal for examining her ideas and she even gives clues about where to look to study these concepts more fully. If you like her ideas But want more explanation of them I absolutely recommend reading her book. Her use of attachment theory is something I have found nowhere else and I have read dozens of books on cults by many experts.

She commented on the origins of attachment theory in the work of John Bowlby " The core idea of attachment theory is that human attachment behavior has evolved as a survival mechanism. Attachment to others serves as a source of protection and seeking attachments in order to gain such protection - a safe haven, in attachment theory terms - is as much an imperative for humans as seeking food, shelter or sex. Babies who stayed in close proximity to their caregivers survived to have their own children - and so attachment behaviors evolved with this function of maintaining proximity. Equally, Bowlby argued, successful caregivers evolved a reciprocal caregiving system with this function of protecting their young. He elaborated attachment theory from these roots, and created a field of research that continues frightfully to this day. For the past thirty years, attachment theory has been the basis for research, not only of child development, but also of a wide-ranging set of topics spanning the life course and ranging from interpersonal violence to religious affiliation, and from altruism to prejudice and authoritarianism. " Page 29

This concept is not an entirely original idea, but saying attachment is as important as seeking food, shelter or sex is noteworthy. We will die without food, shelter and as a species without reproduction. They are literally life and death for humanity.  So adding attachment to this list as an equal priority, an equal need and drive is a strong assertion.

Bowlby took this on and through his work and the work of others on attachment theory has created a framework to consult to analyze relationships. Stein took this and much more to form her hypothesis on how cults work.

I believe that it starts with  a plausible explanation for the age old question -  Why do we stay with people who are harmful or the dangerous to us ? If we in our past few hundred thousand years evolved and benefited from staying with our parents even if they occasionally were harsh or cruel but still gave us food and protection then our chances of survival went way up. Lone young children on their own have had a far, far lower chance of survival to pass on their own genetic material than children that have been stayed with their parents.

Imagine being a six or nine or twelve year old trying to survive on your own five thousand years ago or twenty or thirty or a hundred. Your odds of surviving to mate and raise your children even with the support of your family and clan would have been poor. Life was harsh and the environment unforgiving.

To me the deeply instilled need for attachment is a concept that makes sense. Bowlby and now Stein believe different kinds of attachment exist and further Stein has stated the changing of attachment and who a person is attached to is a fundamental part of how cults work. And that is what we will look at next.