Snapping
1995
Flo Conway and Joe Siegelman
IN ALL THE WORLD, there is nothing quite so impenetrable as a human mind snapped shut
with bliss. No call to reason, no emotional appeal can get through its armor of
self-proclaimed joy.
We talked with dozens of individuals in this state of mind: cult members, group therapy
graduates, born-again Christians, some Transcendental Meditators. After a while, it seemed
very much like dancing to a broken record. We would ask a question, and the individual
would spin round and round in a circle of dogma. If we tried to interrupt, he or she would
simply pick right up again or go back to the beginning and start over.
Soon we began to realize that what we were watching went much deeper. These people were
not simply incapable of carrying on a genuine conversation, they were completely mired in
their unthinking, unfeeling, uncomprehending states. Whether cloistered in cults or
passing blindly through the world, they were impervious to the pain of parents, spouses,
friends and lovers. How do you reach such people? Can they be made to think and feel
again? Is there any way to reunite them with their former personalities and the world
around them?
A man named Ted Patrick developed the first remedy. A controversial figure dubbed by
the cult world Black Lightning, Patrick was the first to point out publicly what the cults
were doing to America's youth. He investigated the ploys by which many converts were
ensnared and delved into the methods many cults used to manipulate the mind.
He was also the first to take action. In the early seventies, Patrick began a one-man
campaign against the cults. His fight started in Southern California, on the Pacific
beaches where, in the beginning, organizations such as the Hare Krishna and the Children
of God recruited among the vacationing students and carefree dropouts who covered the
sands in summer and roamed the bustling beach communities year round. The Children of God
approached Patrick's son there one day and nearly made off with him. Patrick investigated,
was horrified at what he found, and immediately set out on a course of direct action. His
first-hand experiences with cult techniques and their effects led him to develop an
antidote he named "deprogramming," a remarkably simple and-when properly
used-nearly foolproof process for helping cult members regain their freedom of thought.
Before long, Ted Patrick was in action all over the country on behalf of desperate
parents. Through the seventies, he made front page headlines in the east for his daring
daylight kidnappings of Ivy League cult members. He made network news for his interstate
car chases in the Pacific Northwest to elude both cult leaders and state troopers. And
eventually he made American legal history. In his ultimate defense of the U.S.
Constitution, Patrick challenged the confusion of First Amendment rights surrounding the
cult controversy and drew an important distinction between Americans' guaranteed national
freedoms of speech and religion and their more fundamental human right to freedom of
thought. In precedent-setting cases, U.S. courts confirmed Patrick's argument that, by
"artful and deceiving" means, the new cults were in fact robbing people of their
natural capacity to think and choose. To that time, it was never considered possible that
a human being could be stripped of this basic endowment.
In many courtrooms, however, Ted Patrick lost his case for freedom of thought,
gathering a stack of convictions for kidnapping and unlawful detention. In unsuccessful
attempts to free cult members from their invisible prisons, Patrick was repeatedly thrown
into real ones, in New York, California and Colorado. In July 1976, during a time when
Americans were celebrating their two hundredth year of freedom, Patrick was sentenced to
serve a year in prison for a cult kidnapping he did not in fact perform.
Patrick confirmed our own perspective when he described the method of control used by
many cults, beginning with the moment the recruiter hooks his listener.
"They have the ability to come up to you and talk about anything they feel you're
interested in, anything," he said. "Their technique is to get your attention,
then your trust. The minute they get your trust, just like that they can put you in the
cult."
It was in 1971 that Patrick infiltrated the Children of God, the cult that had tried to
recruit his son, Michael, one Fourth of July on Mission Beach in San Diego. His initial
concern over the cults was personal but it also had a public side. Worried parents had
already appealed to him for help in his official capacity as head community relations for
California's San Diego and Imperial counties. Patrick had moved to the area years earlier
and became active in local politics working against discrimination in employment. During
the Watts riots is Los Angeles in 1965, he helped calm racial unrest in San Diego. His
public service caught the attention of then California's Republican governor, Ronald
Reagan, who appointed Patrick, an active Democrat, to the community relations post.
"Thinking to a cult member is like being stabbed in the heart with a dagger,"
said Patrick. "It's very painful because they've been told that the mind is Satan and
thinking is the machinery of the Devil."
Having gained personal insight into the manner in which that machinery may be brought
to a halt, Patrick developed his controversial deprogramming procedure, the essence of
which, he explained, was simply to get the individual thinking again.
"When you deprogram people," he emphasized, "you force them to think.
The only thing I do is shoot them challenging questions. I hit them with things that they
haven't been programmed to respond to. I know what the cults do and how they do it, so I
shoot them the right questions; and they get frustrated when they can't answer. They think
they have the answer, they've been given answers to everything. But I keep them off
balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets
to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they've been programmed to
believe. They realize that they've been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start
working again."
That, according to Patrick, was all there was to deprogramming. Yet since Patrick began
deprogramming cult members, both the man and his procedure had taken on monstrous
proportions in the public eye. Patrick's legendary kidnappings, a tactic he employed only
as a last resort, often brought him into physical confrontation with cult members who had
been warned that Black Lightning was an agent of Satan who would subject them to
unimaginable tortures to get them to renounce their beliefs. Cult members who managed to
escape their parents and Patrick before being deprogrammed frequently ran to the media
with horror stories about the procedure. One young woman charged on national television
that Patrick had ripped her clothes off and chased her nude body across the neighbors'
lawns. Other active cult members claimed to have been brutally beaten by Patrick, yet no
parent, ex-cult member or other reliable witness we talked to ever substantiated any of
those charges. In truth, Patrick told us, and others later confirmed, many of the
distortions that had been disseminated about deprogramming were part of a coordinated
campaign by several cults to discredit his methods. In the end, he said, the propaganda
only worked to his advantage.
"The cults tell them that I rape the women and beat them. They say I lock them in
closets and stuff bones done their throats." Patrick laughed. "What they don't
know is that they're making my job easier. They come in here frightened to death of me,
and then because of all the stuff they've been told, I can just sit there and look at them
and I'll deprogram them just like that. They'll be thinking, What the hell is he going
to do now? They're waiting for me to slap them or beat them and already their minds
are working."
In the beginning, Patrick admitted, he developed his method by trial and error,
attempting to reason with cult members and learning each cult's rituals and beliefs until
he cracked the code. Refining his procedure with each case, he came to understand exactly
what was needed to pierce the cult's mental shield. Like a diamond cutter, he probed with
his questions the rough surface of speech and behavior until he found the key point of
contention at the center of each cult member's encapsulated beliefs. Once he found that
point, Patrick hit it head on, until the entire programmed state of mind gave way,
revealing the cult member's original identity and true personality that had become trapped
inside.
We asked him to describe a typical deprogramming from the beginning and, then, how he
knew when a person had been deprogrammed, that is when he could say for sure that he had
done his job.
"The first time I lay eyes on a person," he said, staring at us intently,
"I can tell if his mind is working or not. Then, as I begin to question him, I can
determine exactly how he has been programmed. From then on, it's all a matter of language.
It's talking and knowing what to talk about. I start moving his mind, slowly, pushing it
with questions, and I watch every move that mind makes. I know everything it is going to
do, and when I hit on that one certain point that strikes home, I push it. I stay with
that questionwhether it's about God, the Devil or that person's having rejected his
parents. I keep pushing and pushing. I don't let him get around it with the lies he's been
told. Then there'll be a minute, a second, when the mind snaps, when the person
realizes he's been lied to by the cult and he just snaps out of it. It's like turning on
the light in a dark room. They're in an almost unconscious state of mind, and then I
switch the mind from unconsciousness to consciousness and it snaps, just like
that."
It was Patrick's term this timewe hadn't said the wordfor what happens in
deprogramming. And in almost every case, according to Patrick, it came about just that
suddenly. When deprogramming has been accomplished, the cult member's appearance undergoes
a sharp, drastic change. He comes out of his trancelike state and his ability to think for
himself is restored.
"It's like seeing a person change from a werewolf into a man," said Patrick.
"It's a beautiful thing. The whole personality changes, the eyes, the voice. Where
they had hate and a blank expression, you can see feeling again."
Snapping, a word Ted Patrick used often, is a phenomenon that appears to have extreme
moments at both ends. A moment of sudden, intense change may occur when a person enters a
cult, during lectures, rituals and physical ordeals. Another change may take place with
equal, or even greater, abruptness when the subject is deprogrammed and made to think
again. Once this breakthrough is achieved, however, the person is not just "snapped
out" and home free. Deprogramming always requires a period of rehabilitation to
counteract an interim condition Patrick called "floating Patrick told us, he
recommended that his subjects return him to everyday life and normal social relationships
as quickly as possible. In that environment, the individual, must then actively work to
rebuild the fundamental capacities of thought and feeling that have been systematically
destroyed.
"Deprogramming is like taking a car out of the garage that hasn't been driven for
a year," he said. "The battery has gone down, and in order to start it up you've
got to put jumper cables on it. It will go dead again. So you keep the motor running until
it builds up its own power. This is what rehabilitation is. Once we get the mind working,
we keep it working long enough so that the person gets in the habit of thinking and making
decisions again."
Deprogramming added a whole new dimension to the already complex mystery of snapping.
In one sense, deprogramming confirms that some drastic change takes place in the workings
of the mind in the course of a cult member's experience, for only through deprogramming
does it become apparent to everyone, including the cult member, that his actions,
expressions and even his physical appearance have not been under his own control. In
another sense, deprogramming is itself a form of sudden personality change. Because it
appears to be a genuinely broadening, expanding personal change, it would seem to bear
closer resemblance to a true moment of enlightenment, to the natural process of personal
growth and newfound awareness and understanding, than to the narrowing changes brought
about by cult rituals and artificially induced group ordeals.
What is it like to experience the sudden snap of a deprogramming? As a result of Ted
Patrick's efforts, and others, there are now thousands of answers to the question. Patrick
claims to have personally deprogrammed more than two thousand cult members; thousands more
have been deprogrammed by other deprogrammers and professional "exit counselors"
who have since entered this fledgling field. In our first round of cross-country travels,
we spoke with dozens of ex-cult members, many of whom had been deprogrammed by Patrick. As
far as we could see, his clients showed no scars, either physical of mental, from their
deprogramming experience. Most seemed to be healthy, happy, fully rehabilitated and
completely free of the effects of cult life.
In contrast to the many tales of cult conversion that we heard, which after a while
began to sound virtually identical, each story of a Patrick deprogramming was its own
spellbinding adventure, rich with intrigue and planned in minute detail. The first step in
the process was almost always to remove the member from the cult, which might be
accomplished by abduction, legal custodianship or, as Patrick seemed to prefer, simply a
clever subterfuge.
One puzzle of snapping that the deprogramming process illuminates is the enormous
amount of mental activity that takes place in the unthinking, unfeeling state many cult
members are drawn into. Ironically, most people we spoke with fought desperately to
preserve their blissed-out states, although they often were saturated with fear, guilt,
hatred and exhaustion. In the beginning this seemed to present a disturbing contradiction:
How could an individual whose mind has apparently been shut off, who has been robbed of
his freedom of thought, display such cunning and initiative? What the deprogramming
process demonstrated is that cult members do not simply snap from a normal conscious state
into one of complete unconsciousness (and vice versa during deprogramming). Rather, most
pass from one frame of waking awareness into a second, entirely separate, frame of
awareness in which they may be equally active and perceptive.
We talked with an ex-member of the Church of Scientology, one the oldest and cagiest of
America's cults, who took steps to preserve his cult frame of mind during his
deprogramming, until Patrick's adept conversational skills caught his attention and he
snapped out.
"I tried to pretend that I was listening," this former Scientologist told us,
"but I also tried to stay spaced out and not really pay attention. Occasionally,
something would go pop and I would suddenly be listening to him. From his
continuously talking like that, he just snapped me out of the spaced-out state I was in.
All of a sudden I felt a little flushed. I could feel the blood rushing through my
face."
Through two decades of legal battles and repeated periods of imprisonment and
probation, few people spoke up in defense of Ted Patrick or the pioneering work he was
doing, ultimately, at his own great personal and financial expense. No mainstream mental
health organization or established social institution has yet taken a stand on behalf of
his concept of freedom of thought. Part of the problem, especially in those years, was
attributed to Patrick's manner of action. In his single-minded focus on rescuing cult
members, he minced no words and wasted little time on social niceties. As a result, he
often irked and alienated those parents, clinicians and law enforcement officials who
might otherwise be his natural allies.
Yet, regardless of his style, the grave questions Patrick first flamboyantly brought to
public attention are not the ones we can choose to like or dislikenor will they simply go
away if we ignore them. Is an individual free to give up his freedom of thought? May a
religion, popular therapy, political movement or any other enterprise systematically
attack human thought and feeling in the name of God, the pursuit of happiness, personal
growth or spiritual fulfillment? These are questions that Americans, perhaps more than
others, are not prepared to deal with, because they challenge long-standing constitutional
principles and cultural assumptions about the nature of the mind, personality and human
freedom itself.
In the months after out trip to the Orange county Jail we spoke with many people about
Ted Patrick: parents, ex-cult members, attorneys, mental health professionals and others
who, at the time, were only dimly aware of the building controversy over some alleged
forms of religion in America. Some denounced him as a villain and a fascist, others hailed
him as a folk hero and dark prophet of what lay ahead for America. Yet Patrick himself
showed little concern for titles or media images.
Through the eighties, Black Lightning remained a lightning rod, a target for aggressive
counterattacks and disinformation campaigns waged against deprogramming by major cults and
more mainstream fundamentalist Christian sects. By the mid-nineties, he was widely
presumed to be out of commission, but Patrick was still active, working mostly on
voluntary deprogrammings and rehabilitation counseling. In the interim, swayed by a
changing religious, political and social climate, courts across the country grew cold to
deprogramming. Another pioneering deprogrammer, New York cult counselor and private
detective Galen Kelly, was prosecuted on criminal charges in two separate cases but was
convicted and spent more than a year in prison on the second before an appeals court
overturned his conviction.
Those cases and others brought a global chill. In the new climate, judges were deaf to
the pleas of the parents and families of cult members, and the precarious deprogramming
profession was largely eclipsed by the efforts of the new generation of cult "exit
counselors." Exit counselors we talked with, many of them one-time sect members
themselves who had gone on to acquire clinical training and credentials, were testing a
wide range of eclectic approaches, some more successful, some less so. Many were
generalists, counseling cultists and families across America and, increasingly, in other
countries. Some specialized in counseling ex-Moonies, members of Eastern cults, of
controlling charismatic groups and extreme fundamentalist sects.
Most confirmed a pattern we, too, had noted: the new methods of voluntary deprogramming
and exit counseling, while far less controversial and much safer from a legal standpoint,
prompted fewer cult members to experience a sudden "snapping out" of their
controlled states of mind. Instead, most experienced a slower process of emergence, or as
Rick Ross, an exit counselor from Arizona, called it, a gradual "unfolding" from
the cults' ingrained altered states. Afterwards, many required additional counseling,
specialized rehabilitation and, for some, ongoing psychotherapy to recover their
personalities and regain full control over their impaired powers of mind.
But, two decades later, public understanding and professional support were still in
short supply.
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