How Do The Pros Get Someone To Leave A Cult?

There are cults like we all "know" as cults. 

Then there is a toxic cocktail cults of ideology, culture, religion, politics, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, free-market, communism, human centrism, binary thinking lens et al., This cocktail cult is not called cult since billions of sapiens fall into this bucket. Somehow, this has been rebranded as something else - tribes. 

Then there are very very few people who are open minded to see these two cults and they make the wheels of civilization, kindness, decency, progress over time. These human had an ability to change their minds with time and grow as a living being. 

Thanks to those unknown humans for what they did so that I am able to live a very comfortable life. 

I hope I am doing a little of the same for the future when I am gone. 

We should have a lot more Ryan's and Kelly's in our worlds to help the cocktail cults:

What Ryan and Kelly do is unusual: they help people leave cults. Over the past 40 years, they have handled hundreds of cases – some simple and local, others stretching across borders and decades. They have been hired by families of both modest and considerable means. They say they have even been hired by government agencies, and that some cults they have investigated have left them genuinely afraid for their lives.

Although many people are involved in cultic studies and education, fewer than 10 people in the US do anything like what Ryan and Kelly do. And among those, only Kelly and Ryan practice their strange and unique method: embedding themselves in families’ lives, pulling on threads like marionettists, sometimes for years.

Their method goes something like this. A family reaches out about their daughter, husband, nephew or grandchild. Ryan and Kelly conduct an assessment that can take anywhere from a day to a week (they would not say exactly). They charge $2,500 for the assessment, then $250 an hour after that, interviewing the family until they understand the dynamics well enough to devise a strategy. Then, over months or sometimes years, they work to create the conditions in which a person might begin to question the beliefs their life has been built on.

Normally, Kelly and Ryan work by strengthening the existing relationships in a person’s life. It can be a long game. They will educate the family about the cultic group, and give advice about what to say (or not to say). They will bring in experts: psychiatrists, lawyers, priests that can provide perspective and counsel. The goal is to untangle the family dynamics that might have made someone vulnerable to a cult in the first place.

[---]

One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. “I can’t get into all the details,” Ryan said. “He was horrible, a horrible man.” Ryan and Kelly had been flying regularly to Australia to work on the case. The client’s niece, a girl in the group, was beginning to fall out with the cult. The leader had been arrested and was on trial for crimes related to the cult’s activities.

In their process, Ryan and Kelly require what they call 50 things: “You have to find 50 things that you could agree with the person on.” Ryan gestured to a painting on the wall in their living room. It was a strange, surrealist-looking canvas with a big Tesla coil in the center and lightning shooting out at some pigeons. Ryan said, “If you look at this piece of art and say, ‘That’s really ugly,’ then we’re going to start off … not on the right page, right?”

But if I could appreciate what he found appealing, then, he said: “I think you have the right to criticize it.” The number may seem arbitrary, but their goal is to find 50 things a family can appreciate about a cult before discussing what they do not agree with.

I put this number to Lalich and she said the notion of having to find 50 things seemed a bit extreme. “ I certainly could never find 50 things about my cult that I thought were good.” The spirit of it seemed right to her though, at least: that the family needs to tone down their rhetoric, or they will just push the cult-involved member away.