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When one woman decided to leave both her arranged marriage and the ashram community,
she was sent before a tribunal of members, deemed unfit, and cast out. She was
condemned and warned not to expose any yogic secrets. The guru came personally to her
house and condemned her for seven lifetimes. Aided by the distance of the
excommunication, the support of her new partner, and counseling at a rape crisis center,
the woman was finally able to stop protecting the cult leader. After having given 20 years of
her life to a psychological con artist, at last she was able to see that yogic secrecy was not a
spiritual technique. She realized that the secrecy only served to shield her abuse and that of
many others. This realization put her on the path to recovery.
Aftereffects and Treatment
Besides the typical aftereffects of cult membership (see Tobias &Lalich, 1994), women who
are sexually exploited or abused in their cult have specific issues to confront. Even after
leaving the cult, they frequently continue to blame themselves, often still believing that they
deserved the abuse. Typically, they are still afraid to talk about their feelings for fear of
betraying sacred secrets. Often they carry a great deal of confusion about sex, intimacy,
and sexual relationships. In sorting through all of this, it becomes most important to help
the woman see that cultic manipulations were central to the sexual exploitation.
Most likely the sexual norms within the cult and the abuses perpetrated have become so
intertwined with the overall belief system that the victimized woman may not even
recognize what happened to her as exploitative or harmful. Clinical psychologist Margaret
Thaler Singer states that it is an “intellectual mistake” to equate the sexual abuse found in
cults with the sexual abuse in outside society. Sexual abuse in society is more random,
furtive, and associated with guilt, whereas sexual abuse in cults may be an integral, open,
and accepted part of the system (Singer, quoted in Gelman, 1993, p. 54). The interlocking
and penetrating nature of the cultic system of influence and the insidiousness of its effect
will certainly have a large impact on a person‟s recovery process.
Psychoeducation: One Approach to Recovery
In working with women who have been sexually manipulated, controlled, exploited, and/or
abused in their cult, I have found that the most helpful approach is to assist them in
understanding exactly how they were taken advantage of. Central to cult membership is the
idea of deception. I have yet to meet a person who went out and knowingly joined a cult.
Cult members are recruited, and deceptively so. If they knew what they were really getting
into, they would never have joined. Once they realize the nature of the psychological
swindle perpetrated on them, former cult members are less likely to continue with their
attitudes of self-blame, sense of failure, and self-deprecation. Time and again, that
realization has been key to the person‟s ability to recover from the loss, devastation, and
personal harm. The hurt and sense of betrayal may remain, but once the manipulation has
been exposed, life begins to seem a little more bearable.
Physical Safety
Because of the power dynamics of the cultic situation, safety and redress of wrongs are
generally hard to come by so long as the victim remains in the cultic environment. If there
was severe abuse or if a woman is escaping a particularly harmful cult situation, then she
should seek appropriate avenues of safety and assistance, such as finding a secure place to
stay, either with family, a trusted friend, or a women‟s shelter, and getting the necessary
medical help. If need be, she may want to go to or call a rape crisis center or the police.
Psychological Recovery
Without intending to minimize the destructive nature of sexual exploitation, I believe that
the approach with former cult members is essentially the same whether or not they have

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been in an environment of sexual control or direct sexual abuse. By this I mean that until
the cult‟s hidden agenda has been exposed, cult members or former cult members can
make little progress. Tearing apart and examining bit by bit the cult‟s covert program of
manipulation is critical to getting to the heart of the matter.
How is that done?
There is not one simple answer since each cult is different, and even within the same cult,
conditions may vary at different times and different locations. Equally important, every
person‟s experience is so individual, as is each person‟s recovery. But as much as cults
might differ from one another, in certain ways, they are similar. When the ideological veil is
stripped away, cults look very much alike because of their use of classic thought-reform
techniques and processes (colloquially, brainwashing). That is why in support groups of
former cult members, participants may come from groups that on the surface appear to be
vastly different (for example, from ultra-conservative Bible-based to radical left-wing
political to intensely interpersonal psychotherapeutic), yet they understand one another
quite easily because, across all types of cults, the control techniques more or less boil down
to the same familiar few.
Together, the former cult member and I begin to look at the system of influence to which
she was subjected. If she was involved in a group I‟m not already familiar with, I do
whatever I can to educate myself about that particular group, the leader, and the
underlying belief system. That way I can work as an interactive partner in her exploration.
Other tools I use are (1) suggesting related readings, including handouts, article reprints,
and books (2) together viewing and discussing videotapes on cults, psychological cons,
hypnosis, and related material and (3) assigning homework.
One helpful task is for the woman to do a chronology of her time in the cult. I usually advise
not doing this in great detail, but starting with broad outlines by year or by month. She is to
reconstruct as best she can what was going on, where she was living, what work or
“practice” the group was engaged in, what policies were in place, what the leader was
doing, what her level of involvement was, and so forth. Long-term cult members often have
trouble piecing together a chronology. But as the person reflects on her time in the cult,
more and more of the experience comes back to her, and eventually she is able to come up
with a specific sequence of events. This exercise serves at least four functions: (1) it gives
substance to what is often literally a “mush” in the woman‟s brain about what went on, (2)
it exposes manipulative patterns of behavior on the part of the cult leadership, (3) it
demystifies the woman‟s experiences and the power of the cult leader, and (4) it keeps the
person focused.
I also ask recovering cult members to do some reading to help orient our discussions and
their growing understanding of what happened to them. In addition to whatever might be
available on the particular group, select chapters from or summaries of the work of Robert
Jay Lifton, Edgar Schein, and Margaret Thaler Singer are the most helpful. Lifton, Schein,
and Singer are the early researchers who studied the type of psychological influence found
in cultic, or thought-reform environments.
Lifton‟s (1961) book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, based on his study of
brainwashing in Communist China, outlines eight psychological themes identified by him as
crucial to the creation of a totalist environment. These themes are milieu control, mystical
manipulation, demand for purity, the cult of confession, the “sacred science,” loading the
language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence.
Schein (Schein, Schneier, &Barker, 1961) wrote about coercive persuasion, using a model
of three stages: unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. According to Schein, the goal of the
group process is to reshape attitudes and behavior by destabilizing a person‟s sense of self