Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992, Page 48
contrition. To deny or ignore this vital ethical dimension is to deny or ignore the heart of
psychological abuse and to short-change abuse victims seeking help. (Part of what makes
child abuse --psychological as well as physical --so reprehensible is that young children
often have not yet had an opportunity to develop a mature enough sense of right and wrong
to feel moral outrage. Indeed, the psychological abuse may permanently damage their
capacity to internalize a sense of right and wrong.)
Condemning certain actions as culpable does not mean that one cannot show understanding
and compassion for culpable persons. Rosedale (1989) points out that the law distinguishes
between culpability and exculpability, that is, diminished or nullified liability due to special
circumstances. To help clarify the relationship between these two concepts in matters
involving psychological abuse, he proposes a continuum of intent in which culpability and
exculpability vary inversely and are not mutually exclusive. Thus, a cult member who, under
the psychological influence of others, psychologically abuses a new recruit is culpable for his
actions, although his or her culpability is diminished --is exculpated to some extent --by
the psychological abuse to which he himself is subjected.
Rosedale‟s formulation is echoed in a psychological analysis by Shaver and Drown (1986).
These researchers conclude that much of the empirical literature on self-blame is equivocal
because researchers have not distinguished blame from responsibility and causality. Shaver
and Drown say that
the cause of an event is that antecedent, or subset of antecedents, that is sufficient
for the occurrence of the effect...responsibility is a label applied to the outcome of a
process...by a perceiver who takes several different dimensions into account...blame
is the attribution made after the perceiver assesses and does not accept the validity
of the offending person‟s justification (disagreement that the act was morally wrong)
or excuse (claim of mitigation of one sort or another) for an effect that the perceiver
believes was intentionally brought about. (p. 701)
Distinguishing between causality, responsibility, and blame and between culpability and
exculpability can help mental health professionals avoid becoming “salesmen for the victim
industry.” The politicization of victim concerns has too often resulted in simplistic
formulations in which victims are portrayed as helpless pawns of individual or corporate
villains. Such distortions may bring media attention --and even government funding --but
in the long run they interfere with treatment and preventive efforts.
Treatment should also distinguish between recovery and healing. “Recovery” refers to a
return to a state from which one has fallen --or been “pushed” in the case of victims.
“Healing” refers to a restoration of a state of health in one who was in some way diseased
or troubled. The distinction is subtle but important. A troubled person may be made more
troubled by a victimizer. Recovery from the victimization would entail a return to the
original troubled state. Healing would then involve a movement from the original troubled
state to an untroubled one. A person who was “pushed” from an untroubled to a troubled
state would merely have to return to that state, that is, recover. I stress this subtle
distinction because victim groups often assume that recovery is all that is needed, that is,
they underestimate the number of people who were troubled before victimization, whereas
helping professionals often overestimate the number of people who were so troubled and
underestimate the role of psychological manipulation. Professionals, then, must guard
against blaming the victim (i.e., assuming that the person‟s distress results only, or even
mainly, from inner motivations), whereas victim groups must guard against overprotecting
the victim (i.e., assuming that all distress results from the actions of the victimizer).

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992, Page 49
Cultural Implications
Because it implies variety and the freedom to choose, pluralism inevitably results in
competitive marketplaces --whether of goods, services, or ideas. Although free compared
to the social structures of an authoritarian or totalistic society, such marketplaces are not
absolutely unrestrained. Legal and, more importantly, unwritten ethical rules of influence
undergird the marketplaces and ensure that no individual or group so dominates that
freedom is lost. The legal rules are essentially codified guides for dealing with more serious
wrongs. Ethical rules restrain wrongs that are not damaging enough to warrant the
freedom-limiting intrusion of legal rules.
Understanding these kinds of influences and the legal and ethical rules which govern them
is a demanding task. The less successfully citizens of a free and pluralistic society master
this task, the more vulnerable will they be to unscrupulous and skillful influencers who seek
to control and exploit them.
Social psychologists have shown that we are unaware of many of the influences that affect
how we think, feel, and act. In his book Influence, Cialdini (1984) analyzes what he calls the
“click-whirr” nature of a kind of automatic, mindless compliance that causes us to say “yes”
without thinking, but that also helps us adapt to a complex environment.
The blitz of modern daily life demands that we have faithful shortcuts, sound rules of
thumb to handle it all. These are not luxuries any longer they are out-and-out
necessities that figure to become increasingly vital as the pulse of daily life quickens.
(Cialdini, 1984, p. 267)
Because these information-processing shortcuts are necessities, our freedom depends more
than ever upon society‟s demanding strict adherence to rules of fair play. We simply must
be inclined to trust others not to exploit us. Caveat Emptor will not suffice. In a rule-
flouting, high-rev world, no individual can be so knowledgeable, so alert, so vigilant that he
can go through life without “having his pocket picked” --not once or twice, but countless
times.
To keep our freedom, we must understand how the psychological “pickpockets” operate.
Only through such understanding can we protect ourselves in our day-to-day lives and
establish appropriate ethical and legal restraints on their behavior. Focusing only on legal
restraints, which has been the modern tendency, can place a crushing burden on the judicial
and law enforcement systems. Furthermore, such a reliance on law can indirectly encourage
the very behavior the system is trying to restrain. Because the population at large fails to
imbibe the rules of fair play that keep most people well clear of the legal-illegal boundary,
the population is implicitly encouraged to test that boundary. The society then becomes
increasingly legalistic, resulting in either an enlargement of the zone of permissible behavior
or the range of behaviors which the law controls. In other words, when the law and ethics
are coterminous, ethics deteriorates or the law becomes tyranical --or both occur in
different areas of society.
The study of psychological abuse can contribute a great deal to the elaboration of the rules
of fair play because it exposes the rule breakers, the psychological “pickpockets.”
Moreover, through understanding psychological abuse we also come to understand its
opposite --respect. Respect is foundational to civilized society. All rules of fair play rest on
respect for other people.
More than a decade ago, many people decried “the new narcissism.” During the past few
years much has been written and said about the “me-decade” of the 1980s. Surveys of
youth often produce troubling findings, such as one survey of seventh- to ninth-graders that
found that 65% of the boys and 47% of the girls said it is acceptable for a man to force a
woman to have sex if they have been dating for more than six months (Kikuchi, 1988, cited