Excerpt from Steve Hassan's Releasing the Bonds

Empowering people to think for themselves

What is Destructive Mind Control?

In the 1950's, military psychologists and psychiatrists Margaret Singer, Robert Lifton, Louis West and Edgar Schein were sent to research thought reform and devise ways to protect soldiers from it in the future.

Like Lifton, Edgar Schein turned to the brainwashing programs in China. His book Coercive Persuasion, which he based on interviews with former American prisoners, mirrored Lifton's thoughts that physical coercion seemed to be an important feature of "brainwashing." However, Lifton later came to believe that thought reform could in fact be accomplished without physical coercion or violence.

As senior psychologist at Walter Reed Army Hospital in the 1950s, Margaret Singer studied the effects of thought reform on Korean War Prisoners. Singer, who has gone on to do pioneering work in the field of cult mind control, summarizes fifty years of her work on thought reform processes in her book Cults in Our Midst.. She lays out six conditions for thought reform.

SINGER'S SIX CONDITIONS FOR THOUGHT REFORM

1. Gaining control over a person's time, especially his thinking time and physical environment.

2. Creating a sense of powerlessness, fear and dependency in the recruit, while providing models that demonstrate the new behavior that leadership wants to produce.

3. Manipulating rewards, punishments and experiences in order to suppress the recruit's former social behavior and attitudes, including the use of altered states of conscious- ness to manipulate experience.

4. Manipulating rewards, punishments and experiences in order to elicit the behavior and attitudes that leadership wants.

5. Creating a tightly controlled system with a closed system of logic, wherein those who dissent are made to feel as though their questioning indicates that there is something inher- ently wrong with them.

6. Keeping recruits unaware and uninformed that there is an agenda to control or change them. Leadership cannot carry out a thought-reform program with a person's full capacity and informed consent.

The Evolution of the BITE model

There are three components to Festinger's theory-

control of behavior

control of thoughts

control of emotions.

Each com- ponent can be affected by the other two. It is by manipulating these three elements that cults gain control over a person's identity.

Through my experience working with former cult members, I have identified a fourth component that is equally important

control of information.

When you control the information that a person is allowed to receive, you limit his capacity for independent thought.

These four factors, which can be more easily remembered as BITE (Behavior, Information, Thoughts, and Emotions), will serve as the foundation for your understanding of mind control.

THE BITE MODEL

Behavior Control

1. Regulation of individual's physical reality

a. Where, how, and with whom the member lives and associates

b. What clothes, colors, hairstyles the person wears

c. What food the person eats, drinks, adopts, and rejects

d. How much sleep the person is able to have

e. Financial dependence

f. Little or no time spent on leisure, entertainment, vacations

2. Major time commitment required for indoctrination sessions and group rituals

3. Need to ask permission for major decisions

4. Need to report thoughts, feelings, and activities to superiors

5. Rewards and punishments (behavior modification tech- niques-positive and negative)

6. Individualism discouraged; "group think" prevails

7. Rigid rules and regulations

II. Information Control

1. Use of deception

a. Deliberately holding back information
b. Distorting information to make it more "acceptable" c. Outright lying

2. Access to non-cult sources of information minimized or discouraged

a. Books, articles, newspapers, magazines, TV, radio
b. Critical information
c. Former members
d. Keep members so busy they don't have time to think and check things out

3. Compartmentalization of information; Outsider vs. Insider doctrines

a. Information is not freely accessible
b. Information varies at different levels and missions within pyramid.
4. Spying on other members is encouraged a. Pairing up with "buddy" system to monitor and control
b. Reporting deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions to leadership
c. Individual behavior monitored by whole group.
d. Leadership decides who "needs to know" what and when
5. Extensive use of cult generated information and propaganda
a. Newsletters, magazines, journals, audio tapes, video- tapes, and other media
b. Misquotations, statements taken out of context from non-cult sources
6. Unethical use of confession a. Information about "sins" used to abolish identity boundaries
b. Past "sins" used to manipulate and control; no for- giveness or absolution

7. Need for obedience and dependency

III. Thought Control

1. Need to internalize the group's doctrine as "Truth"

a. Adopting the group's map of reality as "Reality" (Map = Reality)
b. Black-and-White thinking
c. Good vs. Evil
d. Us vs. Them (inside vs. outside)

2. Use of "loaded" language (for example, "thought-termi- nating cliches"). Words are the tools we use to think with. These "special" words constrict rather than expand under- standing and can even stop thoughts altogether. They function to reduce complexities of experience into trite, platitudinous "buzz words."

3. Only "good" and "proper" thoughts are encouraged.

4. Use of hypnotic techniques to induce altered mental states

5. Manipulation of memories and implantation of false memories

6. Use of thought-stopping techniques, which shut down "reality testing" by stopping "negative" thoughts and allowing only "good" thoughts

a. Denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking
b. Chanting
c. Meditating
d. Praying
e. Speaking in "tongues"
f. Singing or humming

7. Rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism. No critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy seen as legitimate

8. No alternative belief systems viewed as legitimate, good, or useful

IV. Emotional Control

l. Manipulate and narrow the range of a person's feelings

2. Make the person feel that if there are ever any problems, it is always his fault, never the leader's or the group's

3. Excessive use of guilt

a. Identity guilt

1. Who you are (not living up to your potential)

2. Your family

3. Your past

4. Your affiliations

5. Your thoughts, feelings, actions
b. Social guilt
c. Historical guilt

4. Excessive use of fear
a. Fear of thinking independently
b. Fear of the "outside" world
c. Fear of enemies
d. Fear of losing one's "salvation"
e. Fear of leaving the group or being shunned by group
f. Fear of disapproval

5. Extremes of emotional highs and lows

6. Ritual and often public confession of "sins"

7. Phobia indoctrination: inculcating irrational fears about ever leaving the group or even questioning the leader's authority. The person under mind control cannot visual- ize a positive, fulfilled future without being in the group.

a. No happiness or fulfillment outside of the group
b. Terrible consequences will take place if you leave: hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc.
c. Shunning of leave takers; fear of being rejected by friends, peers, and family
d. Never a legitimate reason to leave. From the group's perspective, people who leave are "weak," "undisci- plined," "unspiritual," "worldly," "brainwashed by family or counselor," or "seduced by money, sex, rock and roll."

LIFTON'S EIGHT CRITERIA

1. Milieu control
Control of environment and communication within that environment. This includes not only what people com- municate with each other, but how the group gets inside a person's head and controls his internal dialogue.

2. Mystical manipulation
The contrived engineering of experiences to stage seem- ingly spontaneous and "supernatural" events. Everyone manipulates everyone else for the higher purpose.

3. The demand for purity
Establishing impossible standards for performance, thereby creating an environment of guilt and shame. No matter how hard a person tries, he always falls short, feels badly, and works even harder.

4. The cult of confession
The destruction of personal boundaries, and the expecta- tion that every thought, feeling, or action-past or pre- sent-that does not conform to the group's rules be shared or confessed. This information is not forgotten or forgiven but, rather, used to control.

5. Sacred science
The belief that the group's dogma is absolutely scientific and morally true, with no room for questions or alterna- tive viewpoints.

6. Loading the language
The use of vocabulary to constrict members' thinking into absolute, black-and-white, "thought-terminating cliches" understood only by insiders.

7. Doctrine over person
The imposition of group beliefs over individual experi- ence, conscience, and integrity 8. Dispensing of existence
The belief that people in the group have the right to exist and all ex-members and critics or dissidents do not.

Need help deprogramming a current member of Scientology?
Call Arnie Lerma at 703 241 1498