Cults and apologists like to claim that members can walk away from an abusive cult at any time. They also equate cults with relationships when they compare apostates with divorced spouses to dismiss their accounts. Turning that equate back at them, here's an example of how twisted someone can get in an abusive relationship: Dustin Paxton guilty of brutal assaults upon Calgary roommate http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/...ilty-of-brutal-assaults-upon-calgary-roommate (Don't read the full story if you're squeamish.) The guy was being tortured, sexually assaulted, starved .. and then he'd go off to work, and come back again at the end of the day to more of the same.
If you showed that to an apologist or OSA PR person; they would just ignore it and answer only the questions and arguments that they considered easy to answer.
Yeah, or they'd say that abuse and torture couldn't possibly have happened because people are free to go, or they even came back of their own free will.
I thought the same thing DH when the Paxton decision came down. The case highlights the difficulty in getting a conviction on forcible confinement. Thanks for posting.
I was under the impression that cults typically use the same type of emotional manipulation as domestic abusers.
Yes it is, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of the people in the Hole are so psychologically abused that if you took them and dropped them alone on the sidewalk outside HGB in LA that they'd walk right in rather than escape. Look at the number of people who completely escaped but were convinced to come back. And when a team barges into their home to convince them, no one ever seems to think of calling the police to remove trespassers.
Seriously complex, the majority of people have no idea of how difficult it can be to leave an abusive relationship. And even more difficult to understand why some people keep repeating a pattern of forming another abusive relationship. Often people in a relationship with a psychopath will never believe the truth about their abuser. Different modals of psychotherapy have different answers for the above. An interesting way of looking at it could be to understand the Karpman Drama Triangle where the roles of Rescuer, Victim and Persecutor are played out in an ever changing game. The victim may return for all sorts of complicated reasons, They are so damaged that they cannot make a valid judgement, The desire to return to the "safety" of the family/cult/abuser is to them the only way however warped of dealing with impossibility of living in the "real" world. Their reality is what other people consider to be abusive, but without it their sense of self doesn't exist. There is also a strong sense of guilt, the victim may believe that it was all their fault. Family (either real blood connections or the sense of family that a group provides) is a often a main reason for returning and the fear that if they don't they will be abandoning others to their fate, or disconected from contact. It is impossible for anyone who has not been in that situation to fully understand the horror of leaving the familiar however hostile it might be. This is why the majority of people do not comprehend the way that cults operate and the hold that they have on people.
SHIT I am on a roll with this. Hubbard used the Karpman Drama Triangle to max efficiency. If you can understand the Persecutor, Rescuer Victim thing it explains a hell of a lot about what you see it everytime you look at comments posts on a Scn article Scientology is the persecutor, scientologists believe they are the rescuers and victims In any comments thread Scientologists play victim, turning rescuers into persecutors, until the whole argument becomes derailed. You have to step outside of the argument in order to refocus on your original aim which was to help people understand. Fairgaming is where the rescuer becomes the victim. Scientology is always the persecutor!!!
And the victim has, at least some of the time, been an abuser. Scientology builds organizations out of abuser/abused like a psychotic LEGO set.
Oh DeathHamster you got me started thats why I made the long post above, Yes I agree "the abuser/cult has isolated them from support". I was reading an article about abusive relationships and it touched a real raw nerve. How do you explain to people that an abuser/cult is presenting a benign, charming, friendly front....whilst at the same time being dangerous. God I am so frustrated with the fact that those who say "well I would never get into that situation/relationship or the cult would never recruit me", have already fallen for the first lie, that people are free to join and free to leave. They are already under the spell that says its a logical choice. So to answer the question that is true. Abusers/cults are basically psychopaths, or as they like to call them nowadays the anti-social personality. They defy logical understanding. Unless you have first hand experience it may be impossible to explain this to anyone else. Scientology started by a psychopath, run by a psychopath, a psychopathic money making corporation.
