Depth Psychology, Cult Survivors, and the Role of the Daimon: Oppression, Agency, and Authenticity (Advances in Mental Health Research) [1 ed.] 1032547871, 9781032547879

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DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY, CULT SURVIVORS, AND THE ROLE OF THE DAIMON

This book explores the possibilities that exist for navigating out of and away from multiple levels of oppression through memoir-based research. It considers how those raised in oppressive, high-demand communities, colloquially referred to as “cults,” can emancipate themselves from controls and expectations inculcated from early childhood and examines processes surrounding the psychological reclamation of self. Exploring and metaphorically tending to an orienting psychological dynamic that the ancient Greeks related to as “the daimon” and using the perspectives of Jungian and post-Jungian depth psychology, the author investigates how subjects can reclaim agency and avoid excessive control over their thoughts, attention, and life’s intentions. They suggest that depth psychologically oriented modes can be used to this attunement and explore this notion through a study of memoirs of individuals who were raised in “cults.” Suggesting a more aligned approach to working with varying levels of psychological constraint and utilizing a phenomenological hermeneutic study, it will appeal to scholars and professionals in depth psychology and other psychological orientations, as well as individuals who are interested in more deeply understanding the psychological mechanisms involved in leaving a highdemand group or other oppressive situations. Linda R. Quennec is a writer, educator, and depth psychotherapist. She holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Depth Psychology, with specialization in Jungian and Archetypal Studies, from Pacifica Graduate Institute, USA.

Advances in Mental Health Research

Books in this series: Mental Wellbeing and Psychology The Role of Art and History in Self Discovery and Creation Sue Barker with Louise Jensen and Hamed Al Battashi Neurolinguistic Programming in Clinical Settings Theory and Evidence-Based Practice Edited by Lisa de Rijk, Richard Gray, and Frank Bourke A Study into Infant Mental Health Drawing Together Perspectives of International Research, Theory, and Practical Intervention Hazel G. Whitters Film/Video-Based Therapy and Trauma Research and Practice Joshua L. Cohen In-patient Mental Health Care from the Asylum System to the Present Day A Lived Experience of Policy and Practice Andrew Colley Depth Psychology, Cult Survivors, and the Role of the Daimon Oppression, Agency, and Authenticity Linda R. Quennec

DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY, CULT SURVIVORS, AND THE ROLE OF THE DAIMON Oppression, Agency, and Authenticity

Linda R. Quennec

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Linda R. Quennec The right of Linda R. Quennec to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Quennec, Linda, 1969- author. Title: Depth psychology, cult survivors, and the role of the daimon : oppression, agency, and authenticity / Linda R. Quennec. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Advances in mental health research | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023059300 (print) | LCCN 2023059301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032550909 (pbk) | ISBN 9781032547879 (hbk) | ISBN 9781003428978 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Jungian psychology. | Oppression (Psychology) | Cults--Psychology. Classification: LCC BF173 .Q36 2024 (print) | LCC BF173 (ebook) | DDC 362.8701/9--dc23/eng/20240225 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023059300 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023059301 ISBN: 978-1-032-54787-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-55090-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-42897-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978 Typeset Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Dedication To Madeleine and Noelle

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: A Cacophony of Voices: Inner Guidance vs. the Overculture 

1

PART I

The Perils of Psychological Colonization

11

1 A Vulnerable Kairos

13

2 Recollections of an Ancient Guide

21

3 Gaslighting the Divine: Spiritual Trauma and the Nature of a Cult

33

PART II

A Pathway Out: Attuning Inward

47

4 Imaginal Ways of Knowing: Four Modes of Daimonic Expression

49

5 Awakening Instincts: From Doubt to Insight

66

viii Contents

6 Sensing from Within: Affective and Somatic Expressions of the Daimon 7 Turning Away: Oppositional Acts

82 103

PART III

The Recovery of Authenticity: Depth Psychology and the Reclamation of the Self

123

8 The Shadow of Modern Western Culture

125

9 Nature, Nurture, and the Liminal: Parenting the Daimon

141

10 Healing the Sacred Wounds 

164

Bibliographies Index

179 192

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the editors and team at Routledge for their support in developing this work beyond its initial inception. I am also grateful to the depth psychologists and thinkers whose work continues to nourish and inspire my own; to Dr. Glen Slater, Dr. Tom Cheetham, and Dr. Honor Griffith, in particular, for your caring oversight of this research project; to Alain for your steady support and insights; and to dear friends Danielle Kershaw, Anita Lau, Dr. Stacey Shelby, Dr. Susan Kreitzberg, Billie Kunzang, Dr. Kira Celeste, Dr. Kathryn Holt, Hilary Buckwalter-Wilde, Rev. Dr. Pamela Hancock, Dr. Elijah Eckert-Smith and Dr. Deborah MacNamara for an abundance of enriching conversation, deep dream-dives, laughter, encouragement, and love. I am most especially grateful to the memoirists whose work formed the basis of my study and who generously shared their struggles and triumphs so that others may benefit from their hard-earned wisdom. As always, deep gratitude to C. G. Jung and James Hillman for their brave willingness to traverse the liminal.

INTRODUCTION A Cacophony of Voices: Inner Guidance vs. the Overculture

On Numinosity

I remember vividly the day I encountered the ferocious will of the river that flowed through the periphery of my hometown. I was invincibly sixteen years old, a proud and defiantly certain convert to a church that had all the answers to absolutely everything I questioned (and I questioned a lot). It was early summer, and while the spring runoff was complete, the river still flowed in a way that beckoned my friends and I to play, to submerge our sun-baked teenage bodies in cool water and allow ourselves to be propelled downstream at a certain velocity—so much fun. In contrast to how this scenario might appear today, there were no parents in this isolated place where at least one person drowned each year. Unusual for the church group, no chaperones either. Quite typical for the eighties, though. Insistently rushing, noisy, and without ebb, the water bent around giant boulders either to the left or right. We rode the currents downstream, scrambled up the riverbank, and ran back to our starting point, then repeated the cycle. In the current, we were pushed along by a surprising power we hadn’t initially perceived from the safety of the riverbank as we squealed for peer attention. We felt the water push against our skin, propelling us weightless, downstream. We tried to lift our legs as we were carried so that our toes would point upwards out of the water, feigning nonchalance. I didn’t anticipate that the river wouldn’t include me in its decision to bend around the biggest boulder, that it would instead deposit my body against it, pressing my back to the rock, and continuing to pound at my chest. I fought, but the river was relentless and powerful. It pummelled my body, pinning me hard DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-1

2 Introduction

against the boulder. “I claim someone like you every year,” it seemed to tell me in a very matter-of-fact way, as its force began pushing me under the curve of the boulder and I slipped, slowly, further beneath, still pinned with my back against the rock. I fought more, slipping ever downwards, panic beginning to fill my body and brain as I became quickly certain that I was no match for the river’s strength. I was about to become a statistic. I could see the grief in my parents’ eyes, my sister growing up alone. My friends, finding solace in their chosen God, a resignation eventually settling in. I cannot say for certain how much time passed during these moments of entrapment, nor can I explain fully what happened next. It wasn’t logic or my rational, problem-solving brain that kept me from drowning that day. It was a voice, clearly heard in my mind, arriving out of nowhere, that said, simply, “let go.” And so I did let go, in the sense that I stopped fighting and gave myself up to the river. As I did so, it pushed my body around the right side of the boulder and eased me along into gentler waters where I could clamber up the riverbank and continue my life. A bifurcation that day—sliding doors that came close to another possibility. I still don’t know how to describe that voice other than to say it felt as though it came from elsewhere, despite its resonance inside my head alone. No one else at the river that day heard it or claimed to have spoken those words. In fact, no one even noticed what was happening to me. Still, it wasn’t my own wisdom that saved my life, and I am not sure whose it was, but I remain grateful and endlessly intrigued. — If you are wondering why I chose to begin a book based on doctoral research with such a strange story, the rest of the book will hopefully respond to your curiosity. Let me begin by asserting that this book is oriented in a lifelong fascination with the psychological and physiological experience of what theologian and philosopher Rudolph Otto (1950) referred to as the numinous, or our human sense of the divine—what we feel when we experience awe, synchronicity, or the unexplained. I am not alone in my experience of inner guidance, and this was not the only day when I felt a clear sense of prodding from within, although it has never again been as clearly articulated as that day in the river. Later in life, my curiosity about this experience led to the discovery of C.G. Jung’s work and his explorations of the autonomous quality of certain aspects of our psychological makeup—the unconscious levels of experience that affect us in dreams, thoughts, images, and more. What feels most intriguing at this stage in life is how these forms of inner orientation can often conflict with what is handed to us as unquestionable reality in the societies in which we live, in consensus culture, or what

Introduction  3

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes Reyes refers to as the “overculture” (personal communication). In his book, The Idea of the Holy, Otto reclaimed an emphasis on the vital, affective, and experiential qualities of human experiences of the divine. He applied the Latin term numen, referring to God or divine power, to a new value category, which he termed “numinous,” a quality reflecting a sui generis, irreducible primary mental state. This is what we might otherwise refer to as divine or holy, minus any associated moral factors found within most organized religions. Otto expressed that numinous experiences denote a “living force” (p. 6) that is perhaps most closely experienced as “awe” (pp. 14–15), and we experience this most resonantly within our bodies. While Otto’s sense of the numinous indicated that it is available to all, unfortunately, a cloud has long hovered over these kinds of experiences, as humans have endeavoured endlessly to co-opt, commoditize, appropriate, exploit, and own them. In certain high-demand communities, communion with the divine is usually accessible only to a chosen one—or few—and is tightly regulated (Stein, 2017). Such beliefs and practices hearken back to a longstanding fear of, and desire to control, forces beyond our wilful authority, those that seem to originate from an “Other.” As we see in the opening story, however, this kind of communion—a connection to an inner, intuitive form of guidance that carries a sense of the numinous—can be deeply beneficial and supportive to a person’s life and can intervene in moments where course-correction is needed. Connection to the numinous need not be mediated by an institution or another person, and there are ways in which we can cultivate such a connection, in service to ourselves, others, and the world in which we live. On Influence and Oppression

Influence between people can be beneficial, but left unscrutinized, it can swiftly obscure our connection to other forms of understanding and guidance. This book investigates the interplay between influence and oppression; wide-ranging phenomena to which we are all, in varying degrees, susceptible. Books themselves are a mode of influence, utilizing the power of rhetoric to make arguments and forefront perspectives that have caught the author’s eye. Regardless of form, the thoughts and ideas of the writer and those with whom she chooses to reference and engage are privileged. By this admission, we notice how forms of influence exist all around us, many of which can be helpful to our growth and understanding as humans living and evolving in a complex world. We are born into families that influence us profoundly, from the day of our birth and onwards, for better or worse. Those who educate us influence us; those who attempt to sell us things influence us; those who wish to recruit us to a cause influence us; politicians and

4 Introduction

spiritual leaders influence us; and the list grows ever longer. There are forms of influence that are deeply collaborative and enriching and those that equate to psychological colonization. Nowadays, our connectedness to one another has brought with it a flourishing of influence. As the media we digest becomes increasingly “social” (quotation marks intended), our exposure to the wills, wishes, and perspectives of others is correspondingly intensified, and those who wish to sell us objects, ideas, and alternate realities seem acutely aware of the opportunities therein. While influence is not always a negative idea, concept, or phenomenon, the need for counterbalancing, critical thinking capacities and a strong sense of discernment has never been more acute. This book views influence in the manner that researchers in the legal disciplines suggest—as existing on a spectrum from the most nurturing forms of influence found, for example, in healthy and attuned parenting at one end, to the most horrifying and violating of human rights at the other, what is referred to in legal terms as undue influence (Scheflin, 2015). Some forms of undue influence are abundantly transparent, as we see demonstrated in the population explored in this book—those born and raised in high-demand or “cultic” communities. It is important to note, however, that while the atrocities of undue influence and oppression may be apparent to those of us outside of these communities, and the intentions of those who enact them might feel easy to identify from our outside perspective, the nature of influence is subtle and cumulative. None of us is entirely immune to undue influence; research has demonstrated that we are all, to varying degrees, susceptible to some form of it (Hassan, 2018; Stein, 2017). Contrary to what we might anticipate or assume, exploitative communities such as cults do not prey solely on peoples’ weaknesses; rather, it is in their best interests to exploit individuals’ gifts, talents, attachments, and spiritual inclinations to their own ends, thus high-functioning individuals are often drawn to the promises and opportunities a high-demand group may offer. Furthermore, along this spectrum of influence are several more subtle, yet borderline forms of influence that bear scrutiny, and the time is nigh for us to attune more closely to an inner lens that affords us clarity amid the cacophony of voices shouting at us from within the “attention economy.” The modern-day Western culture in which many of us find ourselves steeped carries with it an unfathomable number of influences, both conscious and unconscious. These influences are oceanic—in the sense that we are immersed, swimming or floating, absorbing into our very bodies, ideologies that may or may not align with our authentic selves. They are also riverlike, with currents and eddies capable of sweeping us up and carrying us to another location entirely, at times leaving us confused as to how we got there. Recent sociopolitical discourses and events indicate that we are in deep need of an antidote to the unbidden voices that pull us out of alignment, from that examined sense of connection between inner and outer that prompted Socrates to utter the advice, “know thyself.”

Introduction  5

To this end, Jungian depth psychology may offer some suggestions. With his foundational positing of an inner, orienting “Self,” Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung moved the psychology of his time in a direction more intentionally attuned to unconscious psychological phenomena by reviving some very ancient ways of relating to the psyche—through looking deeply at its metaphorical, symbolic expressions. The years since then have brought to our field rich scientific approaches and modalities that have vastly enhanced our ability to work with our conscious minds, but still, we remain porous to and unaware of unconscious influences and patterns. Growing awareness of this has prompted some individuals to seek out a more holistic path—one that involves conscious ways of working with the mind but also holds reverence and makes space for the mysteries of unconscious processes, including those situated within the body. When we become curious about unconscious processes and develop an attunement to how these might appear, there is an opportunity for a deeper and more well-rounded metabolization between oneself, others, and the phenomenal world. Jung’s (1931/1969a) idea of individuation, of becoming one’s deepest, most aligned self, identifies a teleological or purposeful aspect of the psyche. It recognizes the unconscious psyche as autonomous, influential, dynamic, and populated with archetypes (CW 8, para. 321), or universal patterns that become more fully experienced in consciousness as they are articulated by cultural and relational imagery. Jung revived the ancient idea that the unconscious is capable of generating the sense of autonomous or semi-autonomous images or figures that hold guiding potential within the process of individuation. This can take the form of intrusions that interrupt or disrupt our conscious, ego-construed intentions, conveying information that we might not otherwise have been consciously aware of. When we pay attention to deeper layers of the psyche, we may be surprised by what we uncover in terms of the vast realms of potential that are available to us, but this is a challenging endeavour, as it pits us squarely in the uncomfortable realm of tension between our need for belonging and attachment and our burgeoning need to individuate. As we consider the complexities of the human body and mind, we sometimes discover that our long-time strivings have been misdirected, that much of our life has been lived according to agendas that do not belong to us, even though we may have internalized them. This realization might carry with it tremendous grief, as we come to see ways in which we have, at times, effectively abandoned ourselves. What usually accompanies this process of uncovering, however, is also a sense of tremendous relief. As we release the agendas that never did align for us, we create space for something that is true. Along with this process, we become better acquainted with contentment, peace, excitement, and a deep sense of inner connection; our experience of life becomes somatically vivified—we literally feel these qualities in our bodies, where we may previously have only known them in a much more muted way.

6 Introduction

The High-Demand Community

Each day around the world, children are born into a vast array of circumstances and into countless family configurations. Some are welcomed into the warm embrace of abundant and immediate love and affection; others arrive quietly in a small family satellite, with extended relations at a distance. Some make first appearances amid wartime violence; others nestle safely into earthen or silk-lined cradles. Some convey news of their impending arrival to the great astonishment of their parents; others were long-yearned into being. Some linger on earth for a good, long while; others stay less than a day. Some children are born into opportunities for expansive freedom and exploration; others are, from their first moments, conscripted into strict obedience, servitude, and subjugation—even today. Among the potential environments into which a child may arrive is the particularly unique demographic referred to in some academic circles as a “closed, high-demand community, “new religious movement,” or “emerging and alternative spiritual space.” In the wider culture, however, as well as in much of the historical scholarship, these constrictive communities are mostly understood and recognized as “cults.” With recognition of the problematic nature of this term and its outright rejection by many scholars, it nevertheless feels important to include it in this work in honour of its research foundations, as well as to create a point of distinction between closed communities which are harmful and those which are not. Some new religious movements and alternative spiritual spaces can be incredibly nourishing and supportive, so by no means do I wish to point fingers at intentional communities or suggest that these are categorically unhealthy. In fact, these communities may provide refuge from a modern culture that seems at times to have lost its tethers to sanity. What has historically been referred to as a cult is in fact something very specific and oriented more to behaviour than to belief. Cults are identified not by their religious or ideological doctrines, not by the clothing that they wear, and not by their desire to live outside mainstream culture (some do not). Cults are distinguished by their use of specific and identifiable methods of control and coercion in their intent to promote, practice, and perpetuate their chosen worldview and to prevent anything that opposes it from emerging and/or challenging it (Lalich & McLaren, 2018, p. 4). High-demand groups employ deliberate and well-studied influence tactics in their efforts to manipulate and control members. Their practices comprise the roots and foundations of totalitarian movements (Stein, 2017, p. 1). At their worst, they are physically or psychologically abusive—or both. Their soul-appropriations or acts of violence can be directed either inwards at their memberships or outwards into public spheres, such as we see with Jihadist movements that enact suicide bombings (Stein, p. 6). Of the many available definitions of cult, I am taking a simplified and generalized

Introduction  7

approach here, defining it as a restrictive, high-demand community whose leadership utilizes manipulative and coercive psychological modalities and techniques in relating to its membership. Cults are located internationally, and they are proliferating (Hassan, 2018, p. 48). What also seems to be proliferating are cultic forms of influence within mainstream organizations and within the wider Western culture. Undue influence has long been seeping into the collective. Children born and/or raised in cultic communities are often referred to as the “second generation” (or third, fourth, etc.). They did not join these groups of their own accord and volition; they were raised beneath shrouds of indoctrination and were taught to believe that their upbringings were commensurate with their communities’ version of reality. They live the consequences of their parents’, grandparents’, and caregivers’ idealisms, fears, attachments, and compliances. Because of this unique positioning—with no “pre-cult” identity around which to orient—these generations require unique and attentive consideration in cultic and new religious movement studies. From a depth psychological perspective, however, regardless of circumstance, these children did not arrive alone and unaided in life, nor did they come to their people as blank slates or empty vessels to be filled with the unlived desires of those charged with their care. While palimpsests of ancestral form and proclivity—from the curl of hair to the colour of eyes or the length of a ring finger—form part of their narratives, this is a tale only partially told. The Daimon

As noted earlier, to illuminate and vivify psychological dynamics, depth psychology draws on image and metaphor. In this situation, metaphorically speaking, we could say that these nascent beings entered their worlds accompanied. Along with this mass of limbs, tears, and other forms of effluvia arrived a psychological dynamic intent on stewarding this unique being into maturity and purpose. We can imagine this impulse mythopoetically as an internal companion, an imaginal “attendant” of sorts, tasked with unfurling the parchment that contains clues as to what this young life might have to offer. In Plato’s view, this metaphorical guide was also charged with conveying these clues into a child’s awareness throughout their lifespan. According to psychologist James Hillman (1996) in his book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, this intrapsychic dynamic is at constant play in our lives and has been observed throughout history, hearkening back to what the ancient Greeks personified as the “daimon,” which Hillman interpreted as a metaphorical guide or carrier of an image that reflects character and calling and is present from birth (p. 8). Functioning separately from the ego structure that relates us to our surroundings, the persistent and

8 Introduction

powerful force we are calling the daimon carries the role of conveying into consciousness this innate image representing an individual’s life purpose— their reasons (and there are, of course, usually more than one) for being born into this world (p. 11). The working definition of daimon that I refer to in this book is: the personification of a paradoxical, intrapsychic dynamic which relates to the creative unfolding of a person’s innate, unique calling(s) and life purpose(s). The Daimon and the Cult

When a child is born and/or raised in a cult, a substantial force is placed in opposition to this inner psychological intent, which, in this depth psychological orientation, we are metaphorically representing and personifying as the daimon. Under such circumstances, it is highly unlikely that the appropriate tools, relationships, environment, and opportunities could be accessed in order to assist the life force designed to bring this person’s talents and impulses to fruition. We may then wonder, what happens to these vital impulses in such situations? How does this “daimonic” quality, so adamantly tied to character, purpose, and calling, express itself in the life of a child born into oppression? How does such an individual extricate themself from these powerful bonds? This book enquires into these ponderings, exploring the intimacies and particularities of the lives of former cult members of the second generation and beyond through the lens of this ancient metaphorical guide. This guide, through its lived expressions, offers clues as to how we all might avoid or heal from oppression and subjugation and move towards a life of alignment, authenticity, integrity, and agency. Phenomenology and Memoir

To convey the vitality of the dynamic referred to as the “daimon,” phenomenology, or lived experience, was used as a methodology in a study of twenty memoirs written by second and subsequent generation survivors of high-demand, oppressive communities. Phenomenology aims to capture vivified expressions of the psyche, in contrast to solely commenting about them. Lived experience is captured beautifully in narrative forms of memoirs that were chosen for the authors’ ability to articulate experiences well, thus offering a robust, visceral sense of these experiences. Selig (2018) explains that phenomenology retains the notion that depth is inherent within the immediate appearance of an event and that staying close to lived experience through detailed description can release its metaphorical significance. This research is also grounded in a therapist’s experience of working with clients who have experienced religious and spiritual trauma.

Introduction  9

Dismantling the “Rugged Individualist”

At this point, it feels important to note that there is a danger of interpreting an individual person’s sense of purpose, character, and calling as only in service to himself, herself, or themselves. This is erroneous. This work does not promote a “rugged individualist” mentality that excludes other people, animals, or the planet we live on. It is in fact the opposite; our individual purpose and callings relate to offering. What we are uniquely equipped to express in this world is needed by more than just ourselves. When we live in a deeply aligned manner, we bring our gifts in service to others and to our world, no matter how humble or extraordinary the offerings. We live gratifying, meaningful, and contributory lives. While there are of course individual benefits from living what the ancient Greeks called a “eudaimonic” life, this is not at all an egoic endeavour, and cannot in any way be construed as such at this point in our human history, when the situation is more precarious than ever; when we need each other to show up fully and in integrity so that we may benefit each other and this beautiful, broken world. We can also get caught up in the idea that “life purpose” equates to something grandiose, that it can be only one thing, or that it is solely oriented to one’s vocation. While some people are extraordinarily talented and drawn to work hard in one particular practice or vocation, most individuals are compelled by a number of interests that may change over the lifespan, and none of these needs to necessarily be channelled into how a person makes a living. It is, however, a worthy endeavour to scrutinize and become deeply curious about the voices of certainty in our midst, especially when they insist on specific ideas for our lives that may not be aligned with what is earnestly and authentically needed from us as we move through this world and make our contributions within it.

PART I

The Perils of Psychological Colonization

Introduction to Part I

Colonization is a term that has recently, and importantly, re-entered the forefront of collective consciousness. In Canada, we are confronted with the undeniable horrors of the effects of European colonization on First Nations children and their families. The genocide enacted upon Indigenous peoples worldwide (Celeste, 2023) as entire cultures and the lands they historically tended were appropriated and stolen by settlers is tragic, as is the fact that colonization is an ongoing dynamic, continually benefitting the colonizer. I use the word colonization tentatively in this work, knowing that there is not sufficient space for a full and respectful contextual and historical exploration and that there are Indigenous scholars and writers (Joseph, 2018; Maracle, 2017; Yunkaporta, 2020) whose expertise in this area is vital to privilege over this work. I am a white settler woman, with certain limitations to my understandings. I do want to point out, however, that the dynamics of oppression and undue influence, what I am referring to in this book as cultic dynamics, permeate all forms of colonization and that colonization is more than a physical act; it is indeed a psychological, social, and spiritual one as well. When a person is involved in a cult or high-demand community, their psyche is colonized. When children grow up in this kind of environment, specifically ordained and privileged ideas, values, priorities, and beliefs distort healthy development as they grow up in communion with their world and the people who mean the most to them. This book steps back and takes a wide-angle view of cultic dynamics in our modern Western culture, investigating the lived experience of those growing up in high-demand communities often referred to as “cults” and exploring these dynamics as they interact DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-2

12  The Perils of Psychological Colonization

with the counter-movements of an inner, orienting psychological dynamic that we have been aware of on some level since the beginnings of civilization. With the onset of our digital age, influence has risen exponentially. We do not have to look very far to see efforts at influence over our parenting, education, wellness, spirituality, special interests, marketplace, and politics. While legitimate expertise, practice, and discourse in these areas do of course exist, we cannot ignore the presence of self-appointed experts and “influencers” vying to have their say over what is best, positioning themselves as individually holding the sole keys and answers to a better way or even an ideally curated life. While some of these ideas can be beneficial, oftentimes they are appropriated from deeper wisdom traditions and established research and are shallow, reductionist, and incomplete in nature. They offer only part of the story, keeping audiences baited with ongoing promises of more as the money, power, and control of the discourse increase. As these ideas permeate consensus culture, the effect is one of disempowerment and self-doubt. Our heads increasingly fill with the noise of ubiquitous sound bytes and clever truncations of complex ideas that are ultra-distilled, decontextualized, and devoid of complexity. Part I of this book explores the phenomenon of influence in our vulnerable digital age, peering critically into its ubiquity in our current times, then moves into the historical evolution of the daimon. Part II offers insights from the lived experiences of second and subsequent-generation survivors of high-demand communities, and Part III explores the recovery of self for those who have experienced undue influence or spiritual trauma.

1 A VULNERABLE KAIROS

It was 2020, during the height of international panic regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, when I discovered the “influencer.” Disoriented, isolated, alarmed, and confused as to how to conduct myself in a world that had suddenly stopped, I decided that I would sidestep the virus by enacting my own war upon it—the war of optimal health. The influencer was, by all appearances, in great health and confident about how she arrived there. As is typical of most modern-day “health experts,” her authority had been bestowed by the school of personal experience and a job as a fitness trainer. Savvy marketing techniques wrapped this package up into something that could be sold for a not insubstantial price. She appeared on my social media feed, face close-framed in the camera. Her eyes seemed to stare directly into mine as she spoke with both relatability and certitude: I know what your struggles are, and I have the answers. Gesturing into the camera with perfectly manicured nails, she created a hypnotic effect. Because health and connections to the outside world were the things most threatened at this time, I listened—and joined. The first step was a “cleanse.” We were to flush all toxins out of our bodies and create a clean slate for the new health we were about to build. During this stage, comprised of a highly prescriptive, liquid-only diet for three days, I found myself in a perplexing state of constipation and, at one point, vomiting up as much kale as I had been shovelling into my body. When I posted my question about the vomiting on our “community” page, her response was, “oh sorry, I’ve never heard of that.” The horrendous days of cleansing were intended to kick-start our motivation. I lost about five (fluid, of course) pounds, which was enough to make me feel DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-3

14  The Perils of Psychological Colonization

on board for phase 2. During this next phase, we were to track with as much accuracy as possible how many macronutrients of fat, carbohydrates, and protein we were taking in, tweaking our diets to exclude all gluten, rice, sugar, bananas, bread, and everything else that appeared on her “no-no list.” We were to restrain ourselves to specific percentage intakes of each macronutrient—a one-size-fitsall, regardless of age, gender, or anything else related to an individual’s personal health. Every day we would post the results of our efforts in a group forum, and the influencer would respond to each person with comments like “you go, girl!” and “almost there!” along with a multitude of emojis. A motivated student, full of my own hubris about outsmarting the virus, I endeavoured for perfect results every time, checking in with my mobile health app to make sure that I was on target at the beginning and end of each day, as well as multiple times throughout. At the height of this endeavour, I wouldn’t put a thing in my mouth without first checking it to see how it might either throw off or enhance my daily progress. We were also requested to send in photos of ourselves in underwear or workout clothes that would visually demonstrate our progress. The influencer would use these to create emotionally laden “before and after” posts for her social media channels in an effort to attract more clients. Her own before and after photo was misleadingly taken during pregnancy and postpartum. I was specific in my communications with her as I sent in these photos, that these and my name were not to be publicly disclosed. The latter was disregarded. For over a year, this became my lifestyle. As time progressed, I became eligible for the influencer’s “VIP” programme, where we met to exercise online at 6:30 a.m. a few times a week (we were to work out intensely for six days a week, both together and on our own). My rather fragile ego at the time was massaged by the thought of being part of something special. In this subset of the programme, the word “community” was bandied about nonstop, but there was nothing genuinely social about this particular group of people. We did not exchange information to continue relationships outside of the group, nor did we talk about anything but our weight loss and fitness accomplishments. I did become healthier. Physical ailments began to subside, I lost weight, and it seemed as though I had found balms to soothe the challenges of loneliness and poor physical health I had acquired during years of graduate studies or to at least distract me from them. I talked about my progress nonstop to whoever would listen. In fact, I talked about little else and thought constantly about this and the kudos I would receive at my next check-in with the influencer and the other followers in the “community.” I became rather boring, to be honest, with not much else to share beyond my obsession. I was also in constant pain from the punishing workouts. On the rare occasion that I missed one, I would double up on the following day. My body ached for rest, but I ignored its complaints, encouraged by the influencer that we must push past all perceived limitations. I would feel mountains of guilt and fear that

A Vulnerable Kairos  15

all would be undone in the one workout-free day we were permitted each week. During our workouts, she would share inspirational quotes from the most current health and business gurus who were her own influencers. I began to associate my worth with my workouts—a thing to be earned, and I didn’t even see it happening at the time. Of course, I was complicit in all of this, but it had happened slowly and incrementally, in a way that almost artfully missed my scrutinizing radar. The destabilizing nature of the pandemic was also a huge fuel to my fire. Of course, none of this was sustainable. As C.G. Jung (1921/1971) noted, over time, extreme behaviours eventually result in enantiodromia (p. 426, [CW 6, para. 708]), a term originally used by Heraclitus that referred to a form of course correction and reversal towards the opposite. As the pinnacle of one extreme is reached, this instigates an abrupt swing back to the opposite end of the spectrum. My own enantiodromia took the form of a collapse into exhaustion and unignorable physical pain as well as a deep longing for the foods I had willed into denying myself for over a year. The ensuing indulgence resulted, predictably, into a slide into shame, a removal from the “community,” weight gain, and several subsequent months of grief—the loneliness and worries over health returning with an immediate and exacting vengeance. How might this have looked differently? Could I have instead come alongside myself in a kinder way, acknowledging the very real loneliness that the pandemic was creating for everyone? Could I have offered myself insight, compassion, and awareness instead of projecting these onto someone else who confidently claimed she had all the solutions? Could I have found a way to tend to my physical health that was not so extreme? Of course, the response to all of this is a resounding “yes,” but in retrospect, I see how subtly the machinations of cultic behaviours had seeped in, incrementally (though fortunately temporarily) co-opting my better capacities. I want to be clear that I am claiming full responsibility for my behaviours throughout this experience. I understand the hopefulness, vulnerability, and fear that formed a perfect storm with the climate of a pandemic and led me to sign on to what was billed as a community but was actually a high-priced commodity. Perhaps this was ignited by past successful experiences in setting fitness goals, such as marathon running, but I see the differences now: how I had overridden the better judgements that were also simultaneously rising up in me. I am a generally well-functioning adult, and while the costs of this were both financial and psychological, they were at the same time not of terrible consequence. But what of our younger generations who are seduced into social media fantasies about beauty and wellness ideals? What might they lose in the face of an ever-expanding, increasingly psychologically aware marketplace of influencers of all sorts, in the largely unregulated spaces of social media? The connection between social media use and a decline in adolescent

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mental health is now well-documented (Bhargava & Velasquez, 2020; Hamad, Eweida, Rashwan, Menessy, & Khaled, 2023; Iwanicka & Soroka, 2020). If it is difficult for many adults to resist the pull of the online world, we can imagine how much more so it is for those with brains still in the process of development. Following this experience, coupled with a deep dive into research on the dynamics of high-demand and cultic communities, I began to notice the ways in which cultic dynamics appeared to be permeating the wider culture. While far less extreme and with sometimes different agendas than those of actual cults, these dynamics are nonetheless concerning. In his widely celebrated book, The Myth of Normal, physician Dr Gabor Maté (Maté & Maté, 2023) explores and exposes the many layers of toxicity that have arisen in modern Western culture, identifying the tensions between two of our most prime needs as human beings: authenticity and attachment. Developmental science has revealed that human attachment is our most fundamental need (Neufeld & Maté, 2004); simultaneously, in order to live a life of meaning and purpose, we also require a sense of autonomy and achievement, what psychologist Bruce Alexander terms psychosocial integration (as cited in Maté, 2022, p. 288). Maté (Maté & Maté, 2023) points out how certain corporations infuse their marketing with a spiritual sensibility, offering not just a product but a sense of “meaning, identification, and an almost religious sense of belonging through association with their brand” (p. 292). I can certainly see echoes of this in the experience I related above. As we are faced with eroding cultural and spiritual rituals and communities, families scattered far apart from one another, and increasing economic stressors for most of us, these marketing campaigns appear to be filling a void that cannot actually accept substitutes. There is an intentionally exploitative quality to this, as seen in my story above, one seeking money, power, allegiance, and at times dominance over others. While most corporations may not be seeking this to anything near as extreme as high-demand communities, some are obviously very interested in money, power, brand allegiance, and dominance of the market, and the techniques that they use are at times quite similar to the ones used by cults. One important finding of this research into cults and high-demand communities is the observation that they exploit peoples’ most beautiful, fundamental needs and capacities, most especially the needs of attachment. More specifically: … belonging, relatedness, or connectedness; autonomy: a sense of control in one’s life; mastery or competence; genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others; trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life; and purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is

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overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature. (Maté, 2022, pp. 287–288) Wellness, a multi-billion-dollar industry, is one area in which cultic dynamics can be observed, but we also see this in other areas such as our politics, special interest groups, child-rearing practices, and spirituality, to name but a few. In certain circumstances, as “cults of personality” expand in followers and fellowship, social media influencers appear to have at times gained more credibility than deeply educated experts. According to a study conducted by Wiedmann and von Mettenheim (2021), the most important quality of an influencer in producing a successful marketing campaign for a company is trustworthiness, but interestingly, credibility was not found to be synonymous with trustworthiness, and the importance of expertise was found to be negligible (p. 716). This is not to say that all influencers are of ill intent or are without expertise, but it behoves us to investigate what constitutes trustworthiness, how it is cultivated, and how it might be manipulated. If influencers cultivate trustworthiness among followers by means of their ability to make people feel as though they know them personally, they can be elevated to endorse products, lifestyles, or ideas for profit or adherence to an ideology. While this is not inherently wrong if the product is helpful, useful, and not harmful, and the spokesperson genuinely believes in it and utilizes it themself, we can see how this could get complicated. According to Wiedmann and von Mettenheim’s study, social media managers seeking to implement an influencer campaign are encouraged to utilize the services of influencers who possess the following qualities, in this order: trustworthiness, followed by physical attractiveness. Expertise was not found to be of any identifiable importance. A rather alarmingly shallow result. While there are many benefits to our digital age, and exposure to creativity and a greater variety of voices can be illuminating and enriching, the velocity at which these ideas come at us has rendered us quick to respond emotionally. We all too often override our critical thinking capacities, and in increasingly polarized ways, which is most painfully evident at the time of this writing, as many vie to “stand with” what is seen as a certain “side” in the realms of politics and war, without necessarily understanding the complexities of the dynamics and often without the sort of open-mindedness and curiosity that would enable opinions to change, should we gain new information. Extremely complex historical and political nuances are cast aside for a variety of reasons as people seek to be the loudest voice in the room. A decrease in actual discourse, where we remain open and willing to consider others’ opinions, renders us vulnerable to unhealthy, unquestioning allegiances that are not unlike the ways in which followers slowly and unwittingly give up their autonomy to the leader of a cult. We need look no further than to modern-day high-demand communities such

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as NXIVM. Expansion added to find the extreme ends of these parallels. In the former, women had their skin physically branded with the group leader’s initials (Edmondson, 2019), and in the latter, important life decisions such as who one befriends, dates, and marries were dictated by the group (Miscavige-Hill, 2013). More information about these particular groups can be found in the later chapters of this book. The important point to note is that in spite of our thoughts that extreme situations found in earlier cults such as Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate are not completely behind us. We are, of course, still capable of extremism. Depth psychology attends to the mythic substrate of a culture, the archetypal images and narratives that provide a mirror for the psyche. Mythological characters and dynamics have deeper roots embedded in our psychological experience and behave according to common human patterns. From this perspective, we might wonder, what are the dominant mythologies of our current days? One such possibility was noted by psychologist Glen Slater (1998). His article, “ReSink the Titanic,” revives the hubristic nature of the mythical Titans, whose arrogance caused them to be cast into the underworld by the Olympians. Slater remarks that our seductive love of technology and willingness to rush quickly ahead without a wary eye to potential problems mirrors the Titan Prometheus’ fate. Such too was the fate of the aptly named ship, the Titanic, rushing dramatically forward in its “unsinkable” mission, despite checks and balances that may have prevented the outcome that continues to capture our fascination. Slater calls our besotted engagement with technology an “overstepping of cosmic and psychological boundaries” (p. 109). He does not suggest abandoning technology of course but recommends another form of engagement with it that he calls a “sacrificial attitude” (p. 114). This perspective, mythologically speaking, appeases the shadowy “gods” by demonstrating reverence for the unseen and unknown, an attitude that includes full awareness of the fragility of our human state. In Slater’s words, “to make sacrifice is to be in awe, to be unsettled and uncertain, ever ready to alter course” (p. 115). In yet another example, as many rush forward to embrace artificial intelligence technologies despite warnings from those who are at the forefront of their design (Rothman, 2023), we might consider this advice. Without consulting our deepest “inner authorities” and balancing psychological inflation, how might we avoid getting swept up in the current? Psyche and the Daimon

James Hillman (1975) wrote, “our lives are on loan to the psyche for awhile. During this time we are its caretakers who try to do for it what we can” (p. 180). In this light, our perspective on the daimon as a psychological dynamic considers the paradoxical notion of soulful rather than solely individual purpose, by which we are in service to soul rather than the reverse. This introduces the notion of a daimonic imperative—that we have an obligation to attend to daimonic expressions

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and desires. Such a perspective can engage and promote immediate and natural life expressions that engender soul. Soul is defined by Hillman as “a perspective rather than a substance” (p. xvi), as well as a mediator between ourselves and the events of our lives. We may envision soul as the ongoing metabolization of these life events. Soul is a perspective that does not fix itself in certainty or rigid belief but is very much a living thing—constantly incorporating, digesting, expanding, and shifting its engagement with the raw material of lived experience. The Soul’s Code, Hillman’s (1996) study of the daimon, initiated the inquiry upon which this research is scaffolded, utilizing examples of well-known individuals who Hillman refers to as “extraordinary” (p. 32) to illustrate the concept of the daimon as a carrier of individual soul purpose, the metaphorical acorn that carries within it a map of an oak tree. Although Hillman wrote that everyone possesses a daimon (also referred to by ancient Romans as a “genius”) (p. 29), he asserted that the phenomenology of the daimon is more visible within the lives of extraordinary individuals (p. 29). Hillman further argued that the only other observational category available to us in demonstrating the extraordinary capabilities of the daimon is diagnostic psychopathology (p. 32). This book builds upon Hillman’s work, adding a third observational category, which suggests that the significant power of the daimon might also be observed in the lives of ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances, in this case within restrictive and oppressive, high-demand communities. While the examples offered by Hillman (1996)—of famous and historically significant people—do demonstrate the power of this psychodynamic phenomenon well, it is perhaps possible that some readers might feel distanced by such examples, imagining these “extraordinary” individuals to be imbued with exceptional talents or abilities that they do not possess. The narratives of non-famous individuals who overcome extreme cultural conditioning and manage to extricate themselves from oppressive communities—often with few resources and supports—offer striking examples as to how powerfully the daimonic can operate in every person’s life, not only in the lives of the famous or ultra-talented. The popularity of the memoir genre supports the idea that there is a hunger for the life stories of ordinary individuals who have altered or overcome their circumstances in a manner that is in service to an inherent sense of purpose and in service to soul. While Hillman (1975) usually preferred to omit the confessional or overly personal from his own writing (p. x)—with the exception of his later conversations with Sonu Shamdasani (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013)—this study infers that paradoxically, it is within the realm of personal narrative that we are often able to uncover universal themes. The inner authority that this book revives, the daimon, is also part of the mythic substrate of our Western culture. Viewed metaphorically, daimonic propensities offer an enlivened phenomenological sense of what it feels like on multiple levels, not only intellectually and rationally, but also imaginally,

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emotionally, and physiologically, to be guided from a deeper, more aligned, purposeful, and authentic source. Extending far back into Western history, the idea of the daimon, or inner guide, has long been with us. As an orienting psychological dynamic, cultivating a relationship with this inner sensibility may provide us with a counterbalance to the increasingly loud voices and influences that surround us. As C.G. Jung (1951/1968d) observed: The more civilized, the more conscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. (pp. 20–21 [CW9ii, para 40]) As Western culture and technologies progress at rates beyond our capacity or willingness to conduct thorough examinations and deconstructions of the requisite positives and negatives, the ability to cultivate such a relationship seems to be increasingly urgent. We will return to the more widespread elements of cultic dynamics, following an exploration of the extreme end of the influence spectrum.

2 RECOLLECTIONS OF AN ANCIENT GUIDE

A Guiding Image

Working with imagery is central to depth psychology and can offer us a more embodied and experiential understanding of the psyche. C.G. Jung (1921/1971) wrote that “the image is a condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole” (p. 442 [CW 6, para. 745]). He even went as far as to say that “image is psyche” (1929/1967a, p. 50 [CW 13, para. 75]). Consider, for example, the difference between telling someone that you are depressed as opposed to saying that you feel as though every day you wake up wearing a weighted, dark cloak that envelops your entire body and that you must have this cloak around as you go about your daily doings and tasks with no relief in sight. While the former offers a clinical definition that provides a certain level of relatability, the latter gives rise to a more implicit understanding of the phenomenology—or lived experience—of depression. This example may appear obvious, but it has deeper underpinnings and implications for how we treat one another and ourselves. In depth psychology, we would call the imagistic expression an archetypal engagement, as it awakens our more embedded and collective sensibilities, inviting empathy and attunement, which are vital in relational and therapeutic contexts. From Daimon to Demon: The Ineffable and the Concrete

To enter the realm of the daimon, and the literature surrounding it, is to respond to an invitation extending deep into Western cultural history. This is well worth the travel, as it provides us with a sense of the evolution of cultural values, DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-4

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ideologies, and the evolution of psychological understanding in Western civilization. “Daimon” is a slippery concept to describe, and looking at its history, this seems intentional and true to the dynamic it represents. At times, writers’ and philosophers’ interpretations of the daimon and its expressions were in direct opposition to one another, which is apropos to the paradoxical nature of this phenomenon. As classicist John Rexine (1985) discussed in his article, “Daimon in Classical Greek Literature,” the word “daimon” defies categorization—a propensity seemingly acceptable to the ancient Greeks but one much less amenable to our modern conceptual minds (p. 361). Our current tendency to privilege the material and avoid the ineffable, born of the Enlightenment era, places subjective experience as inferior, which of course has its benefits in terms of protecting facts and figures from skewed interpretation, but there is a shadow side when we do not allow any consideration of subjective experience to be seen as having validity or insight. An example of this is how the inner voice came to be seen as something to fear or shun, as something evil. Rexine explains that in the Christian era one meaning was fixed upon the word daimon—that of “evil spirit” (pp. 335–336), or by its more commonly known title of “demon.” This determination had a profound effect on how we relate to inner guidance. Referencing the ancient nature of the daimon, Greek mythology scholar Walter Burkert (1985) wrote, “if in religion an evolution from a lower to a higher level is assumed, belief in demons must be older than belief in gods” (p. 179). Despite varying interpretations of its form and function, the daimon has been with us for a very long time. In Burkert’s view, the daimon appears alongside more malevolent forces, such as the Erinyes and other vengeful powers, but is only one force (that of “fate” in this case) amidst a multitude (p. 181) and ought not to be conflated with evil. While daimons are without appearance and, unlike the gods, have no traditional cult (p. 180)—to use the original term for groups of followers, not in the sense I am using it in this book—they are powerful motivators. Burkert described the daimon as “occult power, a force that drives man forward where no agent can be named” (p. 180). As we are beginning to see, before the Christian era, the daimon went through its own evolution prior to attempts to remove its ability to shapeshift and enter human perception in numerous forms, but until its reduction to the demon, was exclusive of any sort of solid moral or value judgements. In many cases, the daimon could be seen to benefit an individual. In an article titled “The Demonic: From Aeschylus to Tillich,” professor of philosophy and religion Wolfgang M. Zucker (1969) documents Socrates’s well-known daimon, the “protective guardian of his rational autonomy” (p. 38), which warned him against proceeding when he contemplated taking an action that might be harmful. Zucker also mentions the late eighteenth-century anti-Enlightenment movement that claimed an artist’s greatness derived from his being possessed by a “genius” (p. 41). In his discussions on Goethe’s later interpretation of the

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daimon, Zucker commented that the latter’s ideas reflect Nietzsche’s view of it as “Dionysian”—integral to life and “contradicting, though not opposing the rational order” (p. 44). Burkert (1985) made an important observation regarding our human relationship to the numinous or divine. He wrote that “philosophical coolness” tended to leave behind the ordinary human, who needed “a closeness and availability of the divine which is offered neither by the stars nor by metaphysical principles” (p. 331). This sort of intimacy, however, is not beneficial to organized religious institutions that provide intermediaries to the divine in the form of clergy, who effectively become its gatekeepers. Viewed as demon, the daimon then becomes an effective scapegoat for those wishing to fearfully circumvent an individual’s sense of intimate, personal connection to the divine, and, in this way, becomes a powerful means by which to instil control. In referencing the daimon as a guiding image or metaphor, it is helpful to return to its original sense of paradox and contradiction. As we see in the smattering of definitions above, the daimon remains an evasive phenomenon when we attempt to codify or define it. In Rexine’s (1985) words, “the word tends to slide easily from one meaning to another” (p. 337). This propensity posed challenges to the research undertaken here, which held the intent to identify daimonic behaviours and expressions, but it also reminds us that we are working with dynamic phenomena that are difficult to pin down. It seems to work best if we place the idea and image of the daimon alongside other intermediary psychological phenomena; a perspective that admits the idea of psychological multiplicity that James Hillman (1971) referred to as a polytheistic, or archetypal—one that facilitates the simultaneous expression of different facets of its nature, just as we often do. More recent psychotherapeutic modalities, such as Internal Family Systems (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020), make use of this idea. As Whitman (1998) proclaimed, we “contain multitudes.” The Evolution of the Daimon: Emergent Themes

An analysis of key literature around the phenomenology of the daimon revealed seven sometimes-overlapping themes: (1) The position of the daimon (internal, external, or liminal); (2) Good vs. evil, and creative vs. destructive aspects; (3) Spiritual or numinous expressions; (4) Expressions of fate, destiny, or the sense of a guiding guardian spirit or intermediary helping spirit; (5) Madness, possession, and irrationality; (6) Love, Eros, longing, and imagination; and (7) Personified or depersonified interpretations. Each theme arose at specific points in Greek and Western history as the image of the daimon evolved.

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The Archaic/Mythological Daimon

As we extend ourselves back to ancient Greece and its mythologies, we also trace the beginnings of psychological thought. Here we meet the daimon in its ineffable form, as an indefinable intermediary between humans and the Olympian gods. In classical literature, we see references to the daimon in Homer, usually as an unnamed spirit or lesser god that provided external guidance to a human en route to his or her pre-ordained destiny, yet the daimon is distinguished from the Olympian gods via its anonymity (Wilson, 2018). One example of this can be found in book eighteen of The Odyssey, when Telemachus speaks out against his mother’s suitors, exclaiming, “Most noble lords! This is insanity. Perhaps you dined too well, or else some god is stirring you” (p. 422). To contrast, in other parts of the story, Olympian gods are named explicitly, such as in book eleven, where Heracles specified that he “brought the Dog [Cerberus] up out of Hades, with the help of Hermes, and flashing-eyed Athena” (Wilson, 2018, p. 299). It appears that there is thus a definitive way in which the Olympian gods are referred to by name, character, or physical description, as opposed to the spirit/daimonic realm, which is repeatedly referenced by such words as “some spirit” or “some god” (Wilson, 2018). While the gods in The Odyssey at times disguise themselves from humans— and enable humans to disguise themselves from one another—they are equally capable of creating other, embodied spirits to do their bidding. One such moment occurs in book four, when Athena fashions a “phantom looking like a woman” (Wilson, 2018, p. 177), which she sends to console Penelope, informing her she should not worry so much about Telemachus and that he had not offended the gods, as she had thought. In this situation, the “phantom” functions as an intermediary between the gods and humans, a propensity here associated psychologically with the daimonic, which traverses the territory between the unconscious (archetypal) and conscious realms. True to the mythological/archaic era in Greek history, these examples demonstrate how gods and daimons were conceived as external forces with wills beyond those of the humans they influence. At later points in history, during the late archaic, Presocratic period for example, we see that over time daimonic phenomena became internalized (Darcus, 1974), leading eventually to our modern notion of the daimon as an intrapsychic phenomenon. The earliest forms of projection might also be seen during the archaic era. Ancient Greek philosopher F.A. Wilford (1965) equated the daimon in Homer to a projection of the unconscious, so the problem of envisioning it as internal or external is explained in this way: forces perceived to be external are, in Wilford’s view, projected from the internal lives of those encountering them. From Wilford’s perspective, the poet known as Homer took, in his work, aspects of the undifferentiated numinous and labelled them with the names of gods.

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Whatever was left over was referred to using the old name of “daimon” (p. 219). While the idea of the daimon taking the form of projected gods is disputable, Wilford’s insistence that it ought to be differentiated from theos—or, in depth psychological terms, from the archetypes—is of fundamental importance to this work. According to Jung, the “gods” as archetypes inhabit the deepest parts of the unconscious and can never be fully understood, only alluded to and perhaps “assisted” by more perceivable phenomena such as the daimon, which inhabit the liminal space between unconscious and conscious realms of awareness. Non-Rational vs. Irrational

While we might commonly understand Greek literature and culture as being heavily scaffolded by rational thought, classical scholar E.R. Dodds (1951) pointed out the influence of “supernatural” or external forces on the human will that could be traced back to Homer. Dodds identifies many examples of what he termed “psychic intervention” occurring amongst the characters who populate the epics. To Dodds, the notion of the daimonic was commonly accepted knowledge among the people of early Greece, although it was Plato who eventually claimed Empedocles’s term “daimon” to refer to this “occult self” (p. 213). Nevertheless, in Dodds’s view, the rational mind was, to Plato, still far superior to anything daimonic. This distinction, in a sense, demarcates the beginnings of Western thought and the privileging of the rational and material. One of the distinguishing aspects of depth psychology is that, similar to many cultural understandings and practices, it makes space for non-rational ways of knowing. It is important to note here that non-rational does not equate to “irrational.” The former describes phenomena that cannot be fully explained by rational explanation and logic, whereas the latter carries judgemental implications that negate the value of anything extending beyond or lying outside rational explanation. Of course, the daimon is a non-rational phenomenon, as it cannot be pinned down or scientifically dissected. It is a metaphor that stands for something experienced psychologically. In his body of work, C.G. Jung was committed to science, but he also created space for the insights offered by areas of thought such as the humanities—which prior to the Enlightenment era, were not siloed off from other areas of study, nor were they viewed as hierarchically inferior to the sciences. The early recordings of psychic interventions that appear to come from a source outside the individual offer a parallel in terms of how we perceive such dynamics within depth psychology today—as influential phenomena that originate elsewhere in the psyche than the ego, the ego being understood as the centre of our conscious awareness, according to Jung (1960). In Western culture, which is focused heavily on the rational, we nevertheless still hear of “temporary insanity” or express ourselves commonly using such idioms as

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“I don’t know what came over me.” Some of our best ideas or insights might in fact come to us from a more intuitive or unexpected source, even or especially during scientific explorations. While we tend to imbue ideas about unconscious processes with a sense of mystery and perhaps fantasy, depth psychology invites us to create relationships with some of their offerings and to include our conscious processes in doing so. This feels more like a relational rather than exclusionary model between the disciplines. It is not only intellectual but also experiential. Fear, Magic, and Evil

While the historical daimon tends to be amoral, as in “outside the confines of morality” and paradoxical, it has always evoked a certain amount of fear. According to classics professor Georg Luck (1985), daimonic beings seem to have originated in Mesopotamia (p. 165). The Babylonians too had several different categories of daimons, depending on where they were located (graveyard, field, etc.). These were known to be the cause of illness via possession and could be exorcised if one wished (p. 165). Luck emphasized that the fact that exorcisms have been practiced by Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians demonstrates both a longstanding fear of the daimon and its apparent power over human will. Relatedly, the line between beliefs and practices perceived to be magic and those proclaimed to fall under the aegis of religion is problematic on many levels, for deciding what is defined as magic and what is defined as religion, as well as deciding what is allowed to be practiced are colonizing acts. Kate Blair-Dixon’s (2001) essay on the Iroquois conversation offers a good example of this. She explains that when Jesuit priests were unsuccessful in changing the practices of the Iroquois into those of Christianity, the priests created new definitional categories for the Iroquois’ sacred practices of dance and dream interpretation, designating these as “magic” and “evil,” a reframed and colonizing perspective that carried devastating effects for the Iroquois. In ancient times, daimons were invoked in prayer, along with the gods and goddesses, and were requested to assist in carrying out acts of binding and restraint (Faraone & Obbink, 1991). Because Socrates’ daimon counselled him beneficially when he was about to make a mistake, it could not be simply seen as an evil entity, although those who tried and convicted him saw such communications as sorcery (Luck, 1985, p. 186), and this ultimately led to his death. This is a sobering consideration when we apply such views of the daimon to high-demand communities. Those born and raised under deep oppression face intense suffering when they are unable to “turn off” daimonic influences and comply fully with the wishes of their oppressors—particularly if the daimonic is immediately interpreted by the latter as demonic.

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From External to Internal: Ongoing Evolutions

The late archaic and Presocratic eras of Greek history moved the daimon from its external positioning to an internal one, according to some scholars. In this conversation, interpretations of Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus’ comments on the daimon in Fragments B119 and B79 differ. Classics professor Shirley Darcus (1974) pointed out that earlier theorists’ understanding of these fragments is open to dispute. Darcus refuted the most common interpretation of fragment B119, which reads: Noos anthropos daimon (Haxton, 2001, p. 83). This passage is often interpreted as Heraclitus’ assertion that a man, through his own character, is solely responsible for his own destiny (p. 390), implying that he need not worry about any daimonic influences. Darcus, however, observed that in Heraclitus’s writings, daimon refers to both a person’s destiny as well as the force, or “agency” (p. 399) that assigns it. They are one and the same. She argued that while in earlier writings such as Homer and Hesiod, the daimon was conceived as an external entity, in Heraclitus, we see that it has been internalized, that the idea of destiny originates from within. According to this view, daimonic influences have not been eradicated in Heraclitus, as had been widely understood, but rather, these influences have been internalized in the form of inner guidance. The daimon did not disappear; it was merely relocated.

The Daimon and Free Will

From a depth psychological perspective, this internalization does not negate the daimon’s autonomy as a phenomenon that is related to the unconscious and is outside of conscious control. An important aspect of Darcus’s (1974) observations is that humans are not “puppets” of daimonic impulses, but rather that we are empowered to act of our own accord. At the same time, there is a force—the daimon—that exerts influence on our actions (p. 400). Darcus wrote that “human capabilities are extended and enlarged by the power within” (p. 406), not eradicated by it. Seen in this light, innate human capacity can be strengthened and furthered by the assistance of daimonic phenomena, but we also have free will. There is a complementary relationship between our conscious, rational capacities, and the processes of the unconscious. The daimon is seen as an enhancer, cultivator, or promoter of the seeds of inherent human capacity. In Darcus’ view, it is through the daimon that humans can apprehend aspects of the divine. The divine in its entirety is of course ultimately beyond our reach (p. 407), and we can only connect with snippets of it. This connection to the divine hearkens back to Otto’s (1950) observations of the daimon’s numinous aspects, as noted above.

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The Platonic Daimon

The idea of a personal daimon that presents itself as a guiding spirit with the intention of assisting an individual in the actualization of their fate was added by Plato, although his interpretations vary from dialogue to dialogue. In the Phaedrus, Socrates allegedly mentioned “something welling up in my heart” (Hamilton & Cairns, 1989, p. 483), something that originated from outside his own mind, and which he, as a vessel, received. Plato continued in this work to record Socrates’s expositions on poetry as a “form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source” (p. 492). In the Republic, Socrates turned his attention via a recounting of the Myth of Er, to the casting of lots, asserting that it is not a deity that chooses a person’s destiny but rather the person chooses his own, for better or worse, and must by necessity live out this irreversible decision during his lifetime, with the assistance of the daimon. The daimon is also propelled by love. Plato’s Symposium recounts Diotima’s dissertation on Eros/Love, who, “as the son of Resource and Need,” is “a very powerful spirit … halfway between god and man” (Hamilton & Cairns, 1989, p. 155). Eros acts as both interpreter and messenger between the human and divine worlds, and is the force of yearning that compels and enables a human to partake of the latter, “for the divine will not mingle directly with the human” (p. 555). Perhaps this particular intermediary, this daimon known as Eros, is the most important of all, as, according to this text, it constitutes the creative power that brings all life, and all art, into being. Luck’s (1985) observations attest that in the Platonist tradition, the daimon was seen as something between a god and a mortal (p. 164). There is rich substance to be found in the in-between spaces.

The Daimon after Plato

By the Hellenistic period, daimon/“divine being” had fully morphed into daimon/“evil spirit.” As mentioned earlier, in Greek religious culture, distinctions between daimon and theos were clear (p. 163), and these distinctions remain today in our modern conception of the demon, not as assistant to theos, but rather, its antithesis. The council of 869 at Nicea decreed that humans were composed of only two parts: body and spirit. As daimons were said to reside in the “intermediate world between the physical and spiritual, partaking of both” (Harpur, 2003, p. 34), the removal of the intermediary realm of soul attempted to do away with daimons and any unmediated communications between humans and the divine. From this moment, the binary was decisively in place. In City of God, Augustine spoke of the pagan “daimones” as “driven by the passions” and “wholly evil” (Blair-Dixon, p. 49). By evoking a sense of manipulative, apocalyptic fear, referred to by Alexandra Stein (2017) as one of the main tactics of a totalitarian dynamic, Augustine suggested that Christianity was the

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sole protector against these “deceitful” (p. 49) demonic forces. The devaluing of practices such as dream interpretation, so fundamental to Indigenous cultures, aligns with a demoting of the daimon, as dreams are seen to be an important vehicle of daimonic intervention. The practice of working with dreams is also an important element of Jungian and archetypal psychology. Recognizing, acknowledging, and incorporating daimonic images constitutes an affirmation and reclamation of individual autonomy and can be seen as a decolonizing act. Alongside religious interpretations of this time, other views of the daimonic were seen in the works of Plotinus and Marsilio Ficino. For Plotinus, the soul’s daimonic nature lay internally, “between the intellect and the senses” (Corrias, 2013, p. 446), but for Ficino, this nature was twofold: both internal and external (p. 450). Ficino, whose work deeply influenced James Hillman, viewed the imagination—not reason or intellect—as the “gateway” to different levels of reality. Through the imagination, the higher intelligences may enter, transforming these “external bodies into inner representations” (p. 451). Both Plotinus and Ficino envisioned the daimon “in line with the Neoplatonic view of the unity of consciousness” (p. 459). Imagination has great therapeutic potential and was a significant phenomenological category in this study, influencing second-­ generation former cult members in finding ways to leave their communities. Romantic writers such as Goethe and William Butler Yeats reclaimed the non-binary, morally ambiguous aspects of the daimon. Yeats’ Mythologies (1959) offers an immersive foray into a world of imaginal beings such as demons, ghosts, and the downcast angels known as the sidhe. This compilation of myths and essays assigns imaginal vivacity and lucid personification to daimonic, intermediary forces. Yeats’ attentiveness to the unseen is commensurate with the paradoxical view of the daimon held by the ancient Greeks and those writing about the daimon prior to Christian influence. For Yeats, it is the ability to imagine such entities that empowers our human senses and perceptions. In his words, “the imagination is the man himself” (p. 139). Interestingly, in Yeats’ view, the will of the daimon is antithetical to that of the human. Yeats expressed that this opposing, daimonic impulse is what ultimately brings beauty, form, and meaning to our otherwise unsatisfied desires (p. 362). This observation offers provocative illumination to the idea of the daimon under oppression and to the struggle, in the Jungian sense, for supremacy between ego and Self during the process of individuation as well as the role of imagination in engaging the daimon. Living with the Daimon

From the 1950s onwards, theologian Paul Tillich, his protegé, psychologist Rollo May, and May’s student, forensic psychologist Stephen A. Diamond (1996) continued expanding the idea of the daimon. Tillich (1951) decried the dualistic

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split in religion because of the Nicene Creed, as it eradicated the ambiguity inherent in the holy (p. 225), which had, until then, acknowledged and included the creative and destructive nature of the divine. May (1969) privileged the daimon as an impersonal force of nature and defined it as “the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself” (p. 123). Examples given are the forces of sex, eros, anger, rage, and power cravings. May warned that extreme oppressive practices will block the daimonic urge, creating the opportunities and contexts for daimonic possession and an ultimate “explosion” (p. 163). This is another phenomenon that we will see in the second-generation survivors’ experience. May argued that Hellenistic Greek and later Christian faiths did the daimonic a disservice by separating it into “good” and “evil,” or “devils” and “angels,” for these are false binaries and are, in fact, integral aspects of the daimonic—they must not be separated if one wishes to experience a life that is fully, richly, and authentically lived. As May expressed, “these urges do not sleep” (p. 163) and, if repressed, will likely be projected onto whomever is considered the “enemy.” Diamond (1996) agreed with May, promoting the idea of living with our “demons,” as they are integral aspects of our human nature and thus, as Rilke rightly observed, cannot be exorcised without removing the fullness of our humanity. Our efforts at such removal, in fact, result in greater societal problems than if we were to find a more integrative path forward. For this, we need creativity (p. 286). In Diamond’s view, access to our “angels” only results from our willingness to “meet our devils and demons head on” (p. 292). Jung would likely agree with this stance, in light of his theory regarding the importance of confrontations with one’s shadow. Depth Psychology and the Daimon

As we return from our time-travel through the history of the daimon, we place our feet in more recent times, where the daimon begins to take on a more integrative form in the realm of depth psychology. Throughout his writings over the many years of his career, Jung made several references to the daimon, and engaged personally and directly with what might be considered to be daimonic figures. In his co-authored autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1961) observed the vital influence of daimonic forces over his own experiences, expressing that throughout the course of his personal life and work, he had been in service to an imposed inner law, which left him without freedom of choice (p. 357). Importantly, though—because in reality he did have ultimate freedom of choice, and as humans do not lead lives devoid of inconsistency— Jung did not always choose to obey this force. This emphasizes three important aspects of the daimon as it appears in depth psychology: the dialectical nature of the phenomenon, its fundamental role in an individual’s life, and the retention of agency. That Jung was writing about the powerful force and significant role of

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the daimon towards his later years is testimony to the power that this phenomenon held over his life and his psychology. The Daimon in Jung’s Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche

Jungian depth psychology is premised on the idea of what Jung (1954/1968e) referred to alternately as the objective psyche or the collective unconscious— a dynamic, objective repository of all patterns of inherited human experience from its beginnings and throughout history—to discuss his understanding of archetypes, as supported by their Platonic underpinnings. Through this lens, archetypes are recognized as meaningful universal forms that over time have given rise to common, yet powerful images within the human psyche, images such as ancient gods, goddesses, and demons, for example. While these images vary from culture to culture, the originating archetypal form represents something more universal to human experience. To elaborate, Jung (1931/1969a) distinguished between the archetype as such/per se, residing in the collective unconscious, and the archetypal image which, unlike the former, is perceivable to consciousness. Jung (1936/1970a) at one time defined this deepest level of the psyche, the archetype per se, as “inherited, instinctive modes of behaviour” (p. 439 [CW 10, para. 830]). He described them as similar to dry riverbeds through which the waters of more specific imagery (influenced by culture, history, and experience) can flow (p. 189 [para. 395]). It is in this way that we experience the phenomenology of the daimon. In our dreams, reveries, fantasies, and active imagination, archetypal images convey some, but not all, of the archetype’s nature into consciousness. If an image is indeed archetypal, it will usually have an arresting, sometimes “divine” effect. This is true of daimonic phenomena, and if we pay sufficient attention to them on a regular basis, cultivating a relationship with them, we have a better opportunity to apprehend and interpret that which is moving us from these deeper realms of experience, even if we have been told that the divine does not exist within. Central to Jung’s psychology is the individuation process, by which a person becomes his, her, or their own unique, whole, distinct, and authentic being in the world (CW 9, para. 489–491), and we do this by differentiating between the voices that truly belong to us (originating in what he called the capital-s Self) from those that belong to others (teachers, priests, influential others), and which we may have internalized over time. During the individuation process, we get to sort through and decide which ideas, values, thoughts, and plans are worth keeping and which of these need to be discarded or deprioritized. The daimon plays a role in this by acting as a sort of “archetypal assistant” to the intentional psyche. Carrying with it an affective, somatic intensity, the daimonic serves as a conduit for unconscious imagery as it is conveyed into

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consciousness. As Jung believed that archetypes have teleological (intentional) purpose, the daimon can be construed as the metaphorical means to convey such purpose to a person’s conscious mind. Metaphorically amplified, daimons can be considered liminal “beings,” personifications of purpose and calling that function in service to the movement of archetypal imagery between unconscious and conscious levels of perception. If you are picking up on a sense of autonomy to this metaphorical being, that is accurate, as Jung did ascribe a sense of autonomy to the collective unconscious, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the dream images that visit us when our consciousness is resting. This brings us again to the notion of free will. If the archetypal unconscious has an autonomous quality, how does this relate to our ability to choose for ourselves? In Collected Works, Volume Nine, part two, Aion, Jung (1951/1968d) defined daimon and the daimonic as “a determining power which comes upon [humans] from outside, like providence or fate, though the ethical decision is left to [humans]” (p. 27, para. 51). My interpretation of Jung’s use of “outside” in this passage is not the literal, physical outside, but rather “outside the ego.” Something arises from within our deeper psychological self, but we decide what to do with it. Despite the forceful nature of this phenomenon, the daimonic is not to be seen as that which determines all, in its entirety. James Hillman (1996) expressed this succinctly when he described human life as “foreordained yet not foretold” (p. 210). As we grapple with conscious and unconscious aspects of our psychological life, we get a sense of how strong and enduring daimonic forces can be, and we decide whether or not to attend to their proddings. In relation to the oppressive forces described in this book, however, daimonic phenomenology can take on quite different forms. This will be the terrain of the next three chapters.

3 GASLIGHTING THE DIVINE Spiritual Trauma and the Nature of a Cult

A little girl walked up the small hill in the field adjoining her home. It was summer, and the warm breezes lifted her flaxen hair gently. She’d recently graduated from Kindergarten, and the construction paper mortarboard she’d worn for the ceremony still rested on the coffee table, unbothered by the orange tabby now sitting in the window of her home. She climbed the hill slowly—she had things on her mind, things usually too heavy for a five-year-old to carry, but nonetheless, the thoughts persisted. There were puffed clouds in the deep blue sky that day, and more than a few fervent, buzzing insects led her way to the summit. When she arrived, her bluegreen eyes followed a bird that dipped and floated on invisible currents. For some reason, she figured that there were answers at the top of that hill, and that when she got there, she would have to close her eyes to find them. “Where was I before I was here?” she asked the quiet, but of course there was no one to answer. Somehow, though, she felt a warmth begin to spread throughout her body, something that let her know that there was goodness to be found in asking her question, something that felt not unlike her father’s hug. It was the first time she’d looked that deeply inside, and she found comfort and a sense of contentedness stirring within. When she later asked her parents these questions, they told her what they thought, and encouraged her to keep asking and to tell them what she found out. Meanwhile, another child was given the answers to this question before she had even asked them. They were baked into the family recipes and served alongside the foods that were placed on her table as she sat next to her brothers and sisters, a warm breeze entering their home through the open window. She was DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-5

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told that there were only certain people who could teach her about the meaning of life and that she would only be safe with their replies. She was told that people in the world outside her community would deceive her, that she needed to stick close to only the people she knows, and to be afraid of the evils that waited beyond her front door. Both children carried the questions inside of them. Both children eventually found their way to the answers that nourished them, although the second child would take longer and would endure suffering and heartbreak as she inevitably let her family down. Both children swam in familial seas that felt as natural to them as the beds they slept in, the friends they saw, the schools they attended, and the siblings who shared their homes. They had no reason to think that in other places, in other families, things might be vastly different from what they knew. It is this way as we grow up, whether in connection with the wider world or in a high-demand community. We do not question, at least not overtly or explicitly in the beginning, the rhythms by which our families move. Existential certainty can make a child feel safe, if it is offered by those she loves and trusts the most, even if it comes with high levels of control and punishing ideologies—at least for a time. The day-to-day family scenes in some high-demand communities might even look somewhat normal to the outside eye, but simultaneously, invisible currents of fear and control wend their way into the nervous systems of the growing child, sowing seeds of inner distress, dissonance, and an ever-present fear and vigilance. While dancing in orange robes, chanting hypnotically, and other forms of observable “culty” behaviour are what usually stand out to us and garner our attention and fascination, these are not necessarily the problematic parts. As noted earlier, it is not always the ideology, doctrines, or beliefs of a group that bear focus, as strange as these may appear to those unindoctrinated. It is, rather, the harmful behaviours of leaders and the effects of these behaviours on children and their families that need to be brought out of shadow and dismantled in the interest of psychological healing and reclamation of individuality; what I am calling daimonic reclamation. If we wish to dive more deeply into what I refer to as “cultic” dynamics in the wider Western culture, it is important to first explore the landscape and phenomenology of a cult. When we enter this world in such a way, through the lens of lived experience, we gain a vivid, multi-sensory understanding of a force acting in monumental opposition to the authentic callings and life purposes of individuals who are born as we all are, with interests, talents, and personalities that deserve space to unfold in ways that contribute to ourselves and to our world. As we notice these opposing forces and how people respond to them in highly oppressive communities, we gain knowledge and understanding that can be applied to the contexts of our own lives as we evaluate our personal engagement with the world, even if it’s much

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less extreme. The gifts of insight and understanding offered by second-generation former members of cultic communities are not to be taken lightly. For some, the cost has been very high. Tim Guest (2004), former member of the community organized by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (The “Rajneeshis”), alludes to the weight carried by the second generation and beyond in the following passage: They danced in orange, pressed themselves together in crowds, sang their songs about heat and love and the sun. It was up to the younger ones, who couldn’t help it, to live out the cooler end of the spectrum, the silvers and the solitary blues. (p. 239) Because I am also concerned with the ways in which cultic behaviours and practices have seeped into the mainstream culture, I want to look at cults in a broader way in terms of their root structures and influence patterns. This is why I have selected a broader definition of what I’m referring to as a cult, although there are several more specific definitions available. If we can gain an understanding of the mechanics of coercive tactics and indoctrination in actual cults, we might then be able to cultivate awareness and a more critical eye when we see elements of these in other contexts. In so doing, we might be persuaded to loosen our fixation on that group of women dancing naked in the forest and perhaps turn a more scrutinizing eye towards the oversolicitous gentleman in the suit. Cultic Studies: An Overview The Word “Cult”

The term “cult” has, over time, become a somewhat undesirable, even pejorative term to many academics—some of whom reject its use outright (Woody, 2009). I have chosen to use this word interchangeably with “high demand community” in this book because this was the term used within much of the original and historical research on the phenomenon (Lalich & Tobias, 2006), and despite its problematic nature, it remains the most widely identifiable and evocative term for many. The preferred term “new religious movement” or NRM in sociological circles feels too limiting, in that not all groups I’m referring to as cults are overtly religious in orientation, philosophy, and lifestyle, and many new religious movements do not enact cultic behaviours in terms of coercive control and undue influence. Religion may in fact not even be part of the picture. Cults, as I am defining them, are expressly harmful or abusive, either psychologically or physically, and nowhere is this more concerning than when we turn our attention

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to the second generation and beyond—those born and/or raised under high levels of indoctrination and coercive control. Main Characteristics of a Cult: Foundational Research

Before we look more closely at manipulative forms of indoctrination and efforts at psychological control, it is important to note the commonly observed structural and ideological signifiers of a high-demand community that have been identified in cultic studies literature. The International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) identifies several markers of what is considered to be a cult. These are: (1) The expectation of members to be extremely zealous in their community engagements; (2) The full acceptance of leaders’ identities and leadership roles; (3) The manipulation and exploitation of members; and (4) Harm, or threat of harm towards members. Sociologist Janja Lalich (Lalich & Tobias, 2006) created her “bounded choice” identity model based on four main characteristics of cults: (1) A transcendent belief system (not necessarily religious); (2) Charismatic authority; (3) Systems of control; and (4) Systems of influence. Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton (1989) derived his summation of a cultic or totalist organization from his work with Chinese Communist reform groups who demonstrated three characteristics: (1) A charismatic leader who is elevated in status and sometimes worshipped; (2) Patterns of thought reform; and (3) Manipulation of idealistic lower members from above, with a great deal of exploitation (sexual, economic, or other). In 2019, he revisited this criteria through further research into specific cultic groups, highlighting that such groups were concerned with the ownership of reality itself. His revised criteria are as follows: (1) A shift from the worship of broad spiritual ideas to the worship of a charismatic guru; (2) An active, thought-reform like process that encourages a sort of merging with the guru; and (3) Extensive exploitation from above, by the guru or high-ranking disciples. In the nascent years of psychology, Sigmund Freud (1922) contributed his thoughts about the “social instinct,” and group psychology in contrast with individual instincts, and noted the presence of heightened emotional states in the former. Clinician and cult expert Steven Hassan (2018) produced his “BITE” model to determine cult status, noting the presence of (1) Behavioural control; (2) Information control; (3) Thought control; and (4) Emotional control. Psychologist Margaret Singer identified six cultic imperatives as follows: (1) Keep recruits unaware of a controlling agenda; (2) Control time and the physical environment; (3) Create a sense of powerlessness and dependency; (4) Suppress former behaviours and attitudes; (5) Instil new behaviours and attitudes; and (6) Introduce a “closed system of logic.” The work of researchers from other fields on the topic of oppression is also foundationally important to this work. Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire

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(1970) explored the dynamics of oppressors and the oppressed, noting the dehumanization and fear inherent within these dynamics that causes both sides to suffer. He defined an oppressor as one who deliberately interferes with an individual’s “ontological and historical vocation to be fully human” (p. 55). To Freire, liberation from these shackles must occur through the oppressed peoples’ acknowledgement of the dehumanizing situation, followed by an invested effort to overcome and eliminate the dynamics of oppressor/oppressed (p. 68). For children growing up in a cult, this sort of awakening and rise to action takes a very long time. This is a brief, broad, and sweeping overview of a highly complex body of work in identifying cults; most of it focused on the first generation of “recruits” to high-demand communities, and on the behavioural aspects of cult dynamics. As noted by Ward (2011), however, what is of lesser prominence in the literature is an exploration of the subjective, phenomenological (lived experiences) that engendered spiritual trauma for those who were involved as members of these kinds of groups. While there are some studies involving the second generation and beyond, much more knowledge and understanding are needed. This research gap formed part of my basis of choosing to look at the memoirs of second-generation survivors to get a glimpse into this lived experience from those who willingly and bravely chose to share it and to develop a more vivid understanding of what it is like to be born and/or raised in a high-demand community—and what it looks like to leave. Undue Influence and Coercive Control

Cultic behaviour becomes demystified when we notice its manifestations in areas other than cults. Lalich and McLaren express that “the behaviours, social pressures, and controlling structures that create cults exist (to some degree) in every human relationship and every human group” (p. 1). We can find elements of cultic behaviour almost everywhere in society, existing on a continuum from mildly influential to suffocatingly oppressive. What is more challenging, however, is to figure out at what point along this continuum are boundaries crossed and human rights violated. Sociologists Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins (1992) argue the need for a line to be drawn along the continuum of influence where indoctrination becomes incapacitating or where and how involuntariness is involved in situations surrounding cultic influence (p. 5). They assert that this information should be used to determine which groups are more pernicious than others (pp. 5–6). A vital highlight of their study is the observation that extreme regulation of high-demand groups endangers society with another form of orthodoxy (p. 26)—we do not want to condemn using the tools of the oppressor. While this is of extreme importance to consider, unbalanced privilege given to freedom of speech and religion

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carries the inherent potential for us to turn a blind eye to abusive practices in closed, high-demand communities, and, most importantly, fails to make space specifically for the human rights of children who are growing up under indoctrination and whose developmental processes have been coloured by coercion and manipulation. The colloquial term “brainwashing” became at one point sensationalized in the media due to high-profile coverage of the more extreme cults. However, the use of such vernacular fails to delineate the levels of detail and sophistication in the techniques employed in a cultic milieu. Law professor Alan Scheflin (2015) noted the term’s ineffectiveness in court. There are no laws that recognize brainwashing or coercive control as a crime, so Scheflin’s solution was to turn instead to the long-established legal concept of undue influence, which has been legitimized in law courts as protection for those victimized by confidence men and women for more than 500 years (p. 72). Undue influence claims were initially invoked to protect people from financial abuse, often in cases of contested wills, but over the years have been applied to instances where control and influence techniques were proven to have been utilized in order to “change ideas, to implant beliefs, and to alter the identity of the person influenced, all to serve the best interests of a cunning and manipulative influencer” (Scheflin, 2015, p. 73). Regardless of how sound we are of mind and body, we are unlikely to be immune to the seduction of undue influence if the influencer deploys sufficiently sophisticated and powerful techniques, according to Scheflin. Still, it is not easy to formally identify undue influence, as courts favour constitutionally protected free will and individual autonomy. The right to religious freedom creates a problematic relationship with undue influence, as the law does not typically like to intrude in matters of religion (p. 75)—but as mentioned earlier, prioritizing religious freedom can leave children largely unprotected. To address this, Scheflin also emphasizes that specific beliefs of the groups or individuals involved should not be the focus, but rather the behaviours of said individuals. The separation of belief from behaviour is important in keeping the focus away from distracting or irrelevant ideological arguments (or orange robes) and instead situates the concern around psychological, emotional, and physical abuse. I want to add that the phenomenology, the lived experience of religious and spiritual trauma, must also be included alongside the behaviours of high-demand group leaders and their followers. The dearth of research into the second generation (and beyond) of cult survivors is especially concerning. Kaplan (2001), an American contributor to the book Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field, expressed that the humanitarian rights of children raised in controlled communities supersede any First Amendment constitutional rights defending religious freedoms (p. 497), and this book is in strong alignment.

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Modes of Influence in a Cult

Many of us have seen movies that sensationalize the idea of coercive control. We might imagine a dimly-lit scene of a war prisoner or hostage strapped to a chair by a menacing, controlling figure, being force-fed propaganda as they are beaten physically and threatened emotionally. We might see the victim’s eyes glazing over as their body weakens and their mind begins to submit to threats and questioning. Or we might recall another scenario, of someone being “love-bombed” by an attractive person who invites them to spend time with their group, with a feigned presentation of special feelings of attractiveness towards the recruit, as they are seduced gradually into making decisions skewed by more biological than intellectual influences. While these dramatized scenarios are not necessarily inaccurate, they tend to play to the more sensational aspects of cults that fascinate or titillate our curiosities. What doesn’t really make for dramatic viewing is, as we see in most cases, the slow and incremental nature of the processes of undue influence. For the second generation and beyond, these processes are baked into the most critical and crucial years of human development, amid mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, friends, and all others who gather in homes, gardens, churches, and community spaces. As we grow, we all need at least one warm, nurturing, responsible, emotionally stable, and loving adult to guide our unfolding into independent, resilient, resourceful, social, adaptive, and emotionally responsible people (MacNamara, 2023, p. 20). As I have already mentioned, developmental psychologists, therapists, and physicians (Bowlby, Erikson, Neufeld & Maté, Seigel) note the preeminent human need of attachment for survival. Dr. Gordon Neufeld (Neufeld & Maté, 2004) asserts, in fact, that attachment is the number one priority of living beings (p. 116). He cautions that our instincts to grow and develop cannot function properly unless our attachment needs are met (p. 17). In many cultic groups, parents are often unavailable to their children, their lives taken up with the activities that sustain and prioritize the group, not children and families. In these situations, children are either left to their own devices, as we will see in Tim Guest’s (2004) experience within the Rajneeshi group; to other, randomly assigned and often rotating adults, as we observe in Jayanti Tamm’s (2009) formative years in the Sri Chinmoy community; or to one another, as in Brent Jeffs’s (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) and Debbie Palmer’s (Palmer & Perrin, 2004) lives within the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint (FLDS) groups. In communal cults where children are essentially raising each other and are at risk of becoming peer-attached, normal hierarchies between adults and children are subverted. According to Neufeld, this leaves an intolerable attachment void. Peers lack maturity and offer fickle emotional support, leaving children’s instinctive attachment needs unfulfilled. As with other forms of neglect and abuse, children

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can then become defended against vulnerability and arrested in their maturation process (p. 99). In high-demand groups, dependency on leadership (in multiple forms, such as financial, emotional, or existential if the group insists their leader is the “mouth of God” or holds divine authority) is usually encouraged, and as a result, adults often experience a regression to earlier developmental stages (Cartwright & Kent, 1992; Ward, 2011). In some situations, parents’ roles are subsumed under the group leadership’s directives, to the extent that many important and even mundane decisions are not made by the child’s biological parents but by the leader, who usurps parental authority and directs the lives of the children in the community (Whitsett & Kent, 2003). Sociologists Robert Cartwright and Stephen Kent (1992) connect such practices to those recorded in family violence research. As people are isolated and controlled, and community or partner demands engulf them in a fog of never-ending tasks and expectations, life narrows and contracts, and so do perspectives and opportunities to leave. Social psychologist Alexandra Stein (2017) identifies three main, ongoing manipulative tactics at work within cults: isolation, engulfment, and fear inculcation (pp. 64–70). Cult leaders seek to isolate members from outside influence, both physically and emotionally, discouraging contact with people outside the community, lest such outsiders instil doubt or challenge a person’s faith. Simultaneously, members’ lives are filled to bursting with activities that support and sustain group activity and interest—sometimes to the extent that they subsume a person’s vocation. Eventually, life becomes fully in service and devotion to the philosophies and intentions of the organization. The icing on the cake is fear. This can be done via apocalyptic warnings, or “intense levels of stimulus and arousal through fatigue, noise, hunger, or by forcing people to review real or imagined traumas in their past” (p. 70). The effect of such fearmongering arouses a sense of threat that becomes unresolvable. The cultivation of disorganized attachment, where caregivers or leaders become simultaneously the source of fear and comfort for their dependents, cements the abusive control that characterizes cultic organizations, manipulating members into remaining within what is perceived to be a “safe haven” (p. 32), but is in fact the complete opposite. Other coercive tactics documented in the literature are: control of information (Hassan, 2018; Lifton, 1989; Singer, 2003; West, 1993); the demand for purity and loading the language (creating a vernacular comprised of euphemisms and catchphrases used only in the group) (Lifton, 1989); leadership representing God (Lifton, 1989; Schein, Scheier, & Barker, 1961; Ward, 2011); the suppression of former behaviours and encouragement of new ones (Singer, 2003), and a closed sense of logic (Lifton, 1989; Singer, 2003). We will delve more deeply into the phenomenology of these tactics and how they met with the deeper dynamics of the daimon for second-generation and beyond survivors in the upcoming chapters.

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Spiritual Trauma in the Born and Raised

How does being raised in a cult or community of indoctrination affect a child developmentally? To share an anecdote, when I think back to my own experience of spending several significant developmental years in a high-demand community, my mind lands heavily upon the word “worthy.” In my community, we heard this word often. Worthiness was something earned, something you had to work hard to attain. Interviews were frequently conducted to ascertain this worthiness, and the smallest slippage would exclude a member from participating in important church activities. Infractions against worthiness might include any premarital sexual thought or conduct (including masturbation) or drinking coffee. At the time, worthiness interviews discussing such details were attended by clergy and a young person alone, and without parental involvement. As I grew into late adolescence, certain messages were made explicit to me that I was already too far behind, that I could never be fully worthy, simply because I was a convert to that religion. While I do believe that I was loved and genuinely cared for by some members of this community, I was told by others that I could not expect to find a partner who was firm in his faith and who came from a good family because I myself was doomed to never see mine again in the afterlife unless I could convince them to also convert, a task at which I had been, not surprisingly, unsuccessful. I was also told quite plainly that I would not be eligible to date just anyone in the community—there would be limitations due to my inherently inferior status as a convert. Thus, I began my teenage dating years with these value-laded messages firmly implanted. A sense of inherent unworthiness took root as a baseline form of self-negation that I grew over time to no longer question. This implicit undermining sensibility unsurprisingly gave rise to some problematic experiences in relationships and took years to extract from my system. Even today, more than thirty years after leaving the group, I still feel an inner tug when I hear the word “worthy,” regardless of the context, as if any other human could claim to be the arbitrator of another person’s inherent worth. As a therapist, my priority is helping clients find their own definitions of their value to themselves and to others, as well as their own way back to their intrinsic, deeper, orienting Selves. This worthiness is without question and belongs to all of us because we were born whole, innocent, and connected to the numinous. I believe—and depth psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and clinical psychology (Fosha, 2021; Hillman, 1996; Jung, 1968a; Lifton, 2019) support this—that when lost or misplaced, a sense of inner strength and goodness can be reclaimed. This is a hopeful light in spaces that may at times feel so very dark. Psychiatrist and pioneering trauma researcher Judith Herman (1992) illuminates the distinction between abuse experienced in adult life and that experienced

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in childhood, an important piece of understanding for second and subsequentgeneration survivors of abusive cults: Repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of the personality already formed, but repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses. The pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development of extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. (p. 96) As we will see in the anecdotes provided by second generation and beyond survivors of cults, the creative capacities cultivated in these communities can indeed be extraordinary—and life-saving. It might even be argued that the extreme circumstances of an abusive cult can force an early and powerful release of the daimonic. Extraordinary capacities are certainly required if one wishes to leave a high-demand community within which they were raised, and it is unfortunately not a guarantee that those capacities will be creative or constructive. When we awaken the daimon, we awaken its dual capacities for both. A Depth Psychological, Developmental Perspective

I wish to situate my perspective on child development and trauma in the areas of depth psychology and developmental science, in contradistinction to a behavioural paradigm, which removes its focus from emotional and unconscious forms of understanding. Both developmental science and depth psychology acknowledge an innate telos, or intentional, organizing aspect of the developing psyche, and neuroscience identifies a motivational system of innate emotions, impulses, and instincts (Neufeld & Maté, 2004; Siegel, 2012). This is all encapsulated metaphorically in the daimon. A developmental perspective privileges emotions and relationships as keys to unlocking this intentionality, as opposed to the inculcation of behavioural strategies from an outside source. These are also the keys to the healing and reclamation of one’s authentic self after developmental harm has occurred (Fosha, 2021; Hillman, 1996; Jung, 1969a). There is a paradoxical nature within the process of raising a child to eventually become a well-functioning, independent member of society. To cultivate

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independence in the child, the conditions of attachment must be met in hierarchical relationship with a caring and stable adult. It is not by pushing our kids out into the world that they develop independence. Neufeld and Maté’s (2004) studies show that in order to cultivate independence, we are best advised to hold on to our kids. This means creating a safe and consistent base from which the child may explore and to which the child may return. When we push our children and teens into the care of their peers, they face so much risk to their developing personalities. Peers do not have the developmental capacity to offer a parent’s “… unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, and the willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other” (Neufeld & Maté, 2004, p. 11). While some spiritual communities can beautifully complement these parental qualities, like peers, cults, and high-demand communities are a far cry from this, which renders the child vulnerable to developmental impairment. This is but one part of the picture, because cultic communities also usually carry the agendas of high control, indoctrination of specific beliefs, expansion of the group, and adherence to an ideology and/or a charismatic leader that disseminates this ideology (Lalich & McLaren, 2018). In my case, I fortunately had life and relational experiences before joining the group I was involved in, and (much to my agonizing chagrin during my church years), a family who remained outside of its indoctrinated walls and with whom I could be assured an unwavering and unconditional acceptance at my return. This is not so for the second and subsequent generations. Kendall (2016) pointed out that, unlike their caregivers, children who are born and raised within cults have no previous non-cult environment with which to compare their experiences (p. 41). This can make it difficult or impossible for children growing up in a high-demand community to discern when they are being misinformed or maltreated. Young children are not aware when they are receiving poisonous ideology alongside their breakfast cereal, and their attachments to those upon whom they depend take natural priority. Kendall also pointed out that while children’s developmental needs are usually in conflict with the structure and culture of a high-demand group (p. 44), there is no option to leave when they are very young unless their families instigate such a move. Adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, as they are referred to in the psychological literature ensue (Herman, 1992), along with a tremendous amount of existential threat, particularly in religious cults. In a study by McCormick, Carroll, Sims, and Currier (2018), positive relationships were found between ACES and all types of religious and spiritual struggles, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). What is spiritual trauma, as opposed to other forms of trauma? Of course, there is significant overlap. It can be argued that all forms of trauma are spiritual because trauma inherently affects one’s spiritual outlook and self-concept

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(McBride, 2023). Yet there are unique specifics to religious and spiritual trauma that require an understanding of the dynamics of coercive control and spiritual harm. It is a particular experience of devastation when one is existentially wounded by what is supposed to be the source of solace, comfort, inspiration, and meaning. As Panchuk (2018) puts it, quoting Matthew 7:9–10, when people “come to God seeking bread from the hand of religious communities and have had stones hurled at them instead” (p. 527). This is the ideal laboratory for the cultivation of disorganized attachment. Psychologist Marlene Winell (2011) originated the term “religious trauma syndrome,” outlining its symptomatology in a series of three articles. While this term is not an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition, Winell points out the need for understanding the potential damage inherent within authoritarian forms of religion. Leaving such a religion uproots an individual’s base sense of reality, including not only one’s deepest spiritual beliefs but also their relationships, vocations, and future plans. Winell articulates the challenges for helping professionals in accurately understanding the core nature of these issues because clients’ “symptoms” are easily confused with other diagnosable psychological conditions such as: depression, schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, paranoia, and borderline and bipolar disorders. It is thus important for clinicians or anyone working with spiritual trauma survivors, particularly those born and raised in restrictive, high-demand communities, to explore the details of a client or patient’s upbringing in such a community, to have a deeper understanding of the elements and contexts at play, and to assist the client in identifying and accessing what was missing from childhood that needs to be reclaimed. These are often unusual to most peoples’ upbringings, with educational, social, and environmental influences that differ widely. A vital perspective explored in this book is that it is in understanding the phenomenology of a cultic environment that we uncover keys to its undoing and deconstruction. With this understanding in place, a journey to healing from spiritual trauma can be undertaken along a much less cluttered pathway and trauma studies form an important partnership in offering suggestions for healing. David J. Ward (2011) identified six core themes in participants’ lived experiences of spiritual trauma. These are: (1) Leadership representing God/powerful symbolic authority; (2) Spiritual bullying/manipulative behaviour of the leadership; (3) Acceptance via performance/approval of the leadership/group through obedience; (4) Spiritual neglect/detrimental acts of omission by the leadership; (5) The expanding internal/external tension/dissonance between one’s inner and outer world; and (6) Manifestation of inner states/the bio/psycho/spiritual repercussions of the abuse (p. 903). This phenomenology is similar to the results of my memoir study and is of great use to a clinician, friend, clergy, or medical

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professional in coming to understand the source of a person’s suffering. Without knowledge of this lived experience, we may, for example, misinterpret an individual’s high standards as an inherent virtue or mere perfectionism rather than an indoctrinated requirement that, if deviated from, was gravely punished in childhood. Spiritual trauma, while connected to other forms of trauma, has its own specific flavour, as does war trauma and other forms of psychological suffering that derive from particular sources of wounding. We will dive into these particularities in the next few chapters, and in so doing, we will gain a clearer view of the extrication process in its widely varying forms.

PART II

A Pathway Out Attuning Inward

Part II introduces the twelve phenomenological categories that arose out of my study of memoirs written by second- and subsequent-generation survivors of cults and high-demand communities. These chapters highlight what I have interpreted to be “daimonic” impulses and expressions that may have contributed to individuals’ decisions to leave their communities. The categories are: (1) image, metaphor, and archetype; (2) imagination and reverie; (3) narrative; (4) dreams and synchronicities; (5) doubt/confusion/dissonance; (6) instinct and intuition; (7) realization/insight; (8) affect/emotion; (9) somatic expression; (10) longing and curiosity; (11) rebellion; and (12) behavioural patterns. As we will come to see, there are a wide variety of daimonic counter-influences to undue influence and coercive control. While these do not create or constitute a specific, delineated pathway out of a high-demand community or cult, their emergence and intermingling intensified over time into uniquely subjective attunements to inner guidance that oriented individuals to the best steps forward for themselves. While there is no “one size fits all” for discovering freedom from oppression, there are certainly themes that may act as guideposts.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-6

4 IMAGINAL WAYS OF KNOWING Four Modes of Daimonic Expression

Rightfully so, much of the current cultural discourse encourages people to return to their inner knowing or intuition as a means of finding a more authentic and aligned way forward for their lives. But how do we go about doing this? This chapter illuminates four ways in which we see second- and subsequent-generation cult survivors demonstrate their own connections to inner, daimonic awareness. As we explore the phenomenology of growing up in a cult, we glimpse an ebb and flow of the metaphorical daimon’s emergence and retreat in peoples’ lives. It takes many years to leave a high-demand community, particularly if it has been all a person has known from the earliest beginnings. Understandably, therefore, it was common to see signs of the daimon rising up from time to time, only for it to be quashed or threatened by an overbearing person or the community as a whole. At times, when it was safe to do so, the daimon was even related to in secret. We have already begun to talk about the importance of image to a depth psychological perspective. This chapter is dedicated to four modes of daimonic expression that are related to the imaginal and demonstrates what are seen to be daimonic responses to oppression. These are: (1) image, metaphor, and archetype; (2) imagination and reverie; (3) narrative; and (4) dreams and synchronicities. Image, Metaphor, and Archetype: Winds on the Wine-Dark Sea

The written format of a published memoir lends itself readily to imagistic expression, as authors take pains to render their experiences accurately and evocatively. It is perhaps partially for this reason, along with the depth psychological DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-7

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lens of my study, that the image/metaphor/archetype category yielded the highest number of excerpts identified as relating to daimonic phenomena. In depth psychology, “image” has a wider definition; images are not solely visual but can arise from any of the senses (Hillman, 1977). Images offer us glimpses of the archetypal, deeper layers of the psyche that have relevance to our conscious lives. In the spirit of phenomenology, if we were to summon imagery to evoke the movements of the daimon within our lived experience, we might look to an image of the wind as it stirs and agitates the motions of the sea. The title of this section references the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s Odyssey (Wilson, 2018), where we see some of the earliest appearances of the daimon. In its traditional symbolic evocations, the sea or ocean is known as the “primordial waters” (Cooper, 1978, p. 121), the life source and container of potentials, the great mother—the archetypal unconscious. Winds are said to be “messengers of the gods” (Cooper, p. 192); they perturb, tease, and enliven the latent sea of potentials. They also have their source in the sea’s depths, which, when heated by the warmth of the sun, are thrust into action—as when consciousness meets irruptions from the depths. Daimonic winds can then be seen as both sourced from the unconscious seas, as well as acting in service to them, through the conduit of the human life buoyed at its surface. The liminal zone where wind meets sea is a rich domain of unpredictable, vitalized interactions. Wind is often correlated with spirit, or the “vital breath of the universe; the power of the spirit in sustaining life and holding it together” (Cooper, p. 192). Wind is invisible, purposeful, and forceful, like the daimon. It is strongly perceived through our senses, attesting to the visceral or somatic quality of archetypal material, and it both produces and carries our voice. Also, like the daimon, winds can be disruptive, unpredictable, and elusive. They alter their expressions—from the soft caress of a gentle breeze to the uprooting assaults of a hurricane—and so too does the daimon alter its engagement with us, depending on the pressure systems at work in our lives. In some high-demand communities, oceanic pressure systems are intensified to the extent that engulfing or capsizing swells may very likely occur. Vocal/auditory Imagery

The literal voices that surround us throughout life can act as threads, weaving extensive tapestries of perspective and belief. These voices may soothe, haunt, or disturb, but in the memoir study, several cult survivors were deeply affected by the vocal images of important figures in their childhood; in fact, this was the most prominent type of image expressed across the memoirs. This finding is rendered particularly poignant by the fact that the daimon often draws us towards our calling, our vocation, which is etymologically rooted in the Latin “vox,” meaning “voice.” Depth-oriented clinician Honor Griffith

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reflects that we use our voices to “call.” The voices that surround us are powerful and may lead us towards or away from our more inner callings (personal communication). The Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint (FLDS) church is a highly patriarchal offshoot of the mainstream Latter-Day Saint religion (colloquially known as the “Mormon” church, although it has recently parted ways with this term). FLDS communities formed after the mainstream LDS church relinquished its practice of polygamy in 1890 to enable Utah to incorporate as a state (Brodie, 1995). The FLDS hold polygamy as a central tenet of their faith and a prerequisite to enter the highest level of their three-tiered heaven, known as the celestial kingdom. A minimum of three wives for each male member is generally the price of admission to this realm, though men of higher priesthood ranking often had a great deal more than three wives (Brodie, 1995; Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009; Jessop, 2007), along with vast numbers of children. Members of the FLDS usually live communally in highly restrictive, often rural compounds in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and British Columbia, Canada. Their most recent prophet, recognized by many (but not all) FLDS members in the United States, is Warren Jeffs, who is currently incarcerated, serving a life sentence plus twenty years following a conviction of two felony counts of child sexual assault. In his memoir, Jeffs’ nephew Brent Jeffs claims that his uncle sexually abused him and other children, including at least one of his brothers, who later died by suicide, when the children were around the age of five. Warren Jeffs is reported to have married between seventy and eighty-seven wives, many of whom were previously married to his father, Rulon Jeffs, and “assigned” to Warren following Rulon’s death. There have also been reports of marriage to underage girls by Jeffs and others in the community. Both Caroline Jessop (2007) and Brent Jeffs wrote about the hypnotic, trance-like quality of Warren Jeffs’ voice, the latter referring to it as “… calming, almost narcotic [with a] lulling kind of rhythm that was hard to avoid being entrained to, with an almost maternal quality, like he was trying to soothe a baby to sleep, like a relaxation tape” (p. 61). While we might imagine cult leaders speaking in loud, pulpit-pounding excoriations, it is interesting to note Warren’s light, melodic cadences that seemed to soothe people into an altered state. Debbie Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004), who lived in the FLDS community of Bountiful, British Columbia, reflected that she felt more terrified of her community leader’s mesmerizing voice than she did of another member’s yelling. In his study of cult-related phenomena, psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West (1993) references research on the power of hypnosis and its ability to profoundly suppress involuntary autonomic nervous system functions such as the galvanic skin response (GSR) (p. 3). He also notes that hypnotic suggestion can create “distortion of values, viewpoints, or perceptions of reality, sufficient to induce, in some subjects, extraordinary behaviours—even including

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criminal acts—that would be otherwise unacceptable to them” (p. 4). Cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan (2018) echoes this research, pointing out the capacity of hypnotic discourses and modes of communication to override critical faculties (p. 112). Lifton (1989) refers to this when he discusses the cultic technique of “loading the language.” One means to do this is what Lifton (1989) calls the “thought-terminating cliché” (p. 429)—also a favourite among certain social media and other types of marketing influencers. The strength of words and voice were noted by several other second-generation survivors in the study. Here, Tim Guest, former member of the community led by Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, describes the latter’s speaking style: “[Rajneesh] spoke in a low, hypnotic purr, trailing the end of every sentence out into the faintest hiss” (p. 8). Jerald Walker, former member of the Worldwide Church of God, a white supremacist “doomsday” cult wrote, “we got whippings that raised welts on our bottoms, but that was better than hearing the minister’s words, which have a way of coming back to you when it’s time for bed” (p. 15). Such auditory forms of inculcation suggest that words may at times be more impactful than physical control. As Walker notes, words linger long past the moment they are spoken—a means by which leaders can indoctrinate even when they are not physically present. Amber Scorah (2019), a third-generation former Jehovah’s Witness, remarked in her memoir that during her baptism ceremony the “old, male speakers” (p. 96) carried on monotonously for hours. From time to time, however, the congregation was given an occasional break from these vocal dirges when the subject of Armageddon would suddenly pitch the orators’ voices into fervent, climactic expressions. Who wouldn’t be riveted by tales of destruction and gore? Given the memoirists’ vivid and detailed memories of this vocal imagery, might there be something daimonic here? Could it be possible that even in their revulsion and fear, these individuals sensed some ingredient or quality in their leaders’ voices and manners of speech that was discordant with their inner worlds, whether or not they were able to articulate or tease apart the seeds of this discordance at the time? Might it be possible for the daimonic to appear through a person’s negative response to a voice that speaks untruths to his soul? Along with voices that felt repellent to the memoirists, there were also voices that compelled. Lilia Tarawa (2017), former member of a Christian-based New Zealand group called Gloriavale, was able to obtain forbidden recordings by popular singer Beyoncé, whose vocal expressions provided a startling contrast to the droning voices of Tarawa’s church leaders. Tarawa wrote that Beyoncé’s music “captured [her] inner goddess” (p. 235). Tara Westover (2018), raised in the Idaho mountains by a survivalist, homeschooling LDS family, was inspired by the voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to unearth her own innate musical voice and talent. This literal connection to voice catalyzed an internal directive so powerful to Westover that it even had the effect of eliciting pride and

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support from her father, who would not normally have permitted his daughter to perform or to spend extensive periods of time with “outsiders” to the family during rehearsals, as she did. This began to lay the paving stones of a pathway out of the restrictive environment in which Westover was raised by placing her in an environment where she was able to hear voices other than the ones she was accustomed to. Seen in this light, vocal imagery and its effects demonstrate that this method of cultic indoctrination can equally serve in an opposing way; it can light the way out of the fog of imposed ideas and ideals. In the context of a healthy personal or therapeutic relationship, verbal interpersonal suggestions can be a means to healing (West, 1993, p. 4). When an attuned attachment figure listens actively and reflects their observations to a client, friend, or relative in a safe and nurturing environment, and when that person collaborates with the client, friend, or relative to ensure that their observation is accurate to the listener, an individual is honoured and respected, corrective attachment experiences can occur (Fosha, 2021), and there is greater opportunity to gain clarity regarding their situation. The Ubiquitous Guru: Photographic Imagery

Following in this photographic vein, several former members recalled the omnipresence of their guru’s portraits in their homes, classrooms, and other environmental spaces. In the following excerpt, Tim Guest (2004) of the Rajneeshi group writes of the sudden appearance of their guru’s photographs, which began to populate their home after his mother returned from her initial trip to Rajneesh’s ashram in India: I watched Bhagwan erupt wildly through our house. My mother put photos of him up in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the bathroom, on the slanted wall above my bed. Now, when I opened my eyes each morning, the first thing I saw was Bhagwan. (p. 26) Many cults (and other groups) display photographs of their leadership, ostensibly to inspire, but the former members in this study generally regarded these as reminders of their leaders’ dominance and constant scrutiny over their lives. Photographs also engendered a sense of omnipotence for a leader who couldn’t be physically present. Jenna Miscavige-Hill (2013), the niece of Scientology leader David Miscavige, reported that at the “Sea Org,” Scientology’s Clearwater, Florida headquarters, “It didn’t matter what room we were in; there was a portrait of [deceased founder L. Ron Hubbard] in every one, including every dormitory. This felt weird, as if he was watching me wherever I went” (p. 72).

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In the Exclusive Brethren community, Rebecca Stott (2017) reported that there were framed photographs of founder John Nelson Darby on the walls of most sitting rooms. Her impression was that he was always “glowering out from behind the glass door of the cabinet, like the kind of man who’d shout at you if he opened his mouth” (p. 39). Debbie Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004), former FLDS member, recalled her perceptions of the founding prophet’s photograph. She wrote, “I stared at the picture of the prophet, Joseph Smith, on the wall; I could feel his accusing eyes glaring down on us” (p. 65). In Claire Hoffman’s (2016) Transcendental Meditation (TM) community, leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi would lecture from remote locations, his image projected onto a screen in their gathering space. As Hoffman expressed, “wasn’t he basically a hologram now, hovering over us on projection screens, giggling and giving benedictions?” (pp. 102–103). Through these insertions of photographs and videos, the “hologram” of the leader becomes ubiquitous and unforgettable, a constant reinforcement of devotees’ responsibility to uphold his or her standards, wishes, and rules above their own. The literal image is symbolic of much deeper, archetypal levels of influence. Should any daimonic phenomena enter members’ experience, it would soon be met with this outer, visual mode of discouragement—a consistent and abiding admonition that their attentiveness and obedience were to be applied solely to the group and its causes, all embodied in the constant, scrutinizing gaze of the leader. Vignettes of Trauma

Jayanti Tamm (2009) was born and raised in New York, in Indian guru Sri Chinmoy’s community. She describes her home in this way: “Our house felt like a guru museum, replete with photo gallery—pictures of Guru occupied every single free space upon the wall—Guru with his hands folded, Guru laughing, Guru sniffing a gardenia, Guru sipping juice” (p. 13). As the guru’s “chosen one,” she recalls a childhood where the face of her guru was her “focal point” (p. 138). Almost every decision regarding Tamm’s life was made by Chinmoy—not her parents—and even when her desire was to go to university, allegiance to the unsupportive guru won out—at least initially. To Deborah Feldman (2012), born and raised in the ultra-orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jewish community in New York City, photographs were a solemn reminder of her family’s extensive losses to murder in the Holocaust. She wrote, I’ve seen the photos, all of them. Black-and-white portraits of Bubby’s sisters and brothers, her parents, her grandparents; all of them are dead. I keep them wrapped in a paper towel in my top drawer and pull them out when I’m feeling strong enough. (p. 57)

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These images, along with the practice of naming children after dead family members, serve as potent, consistent reminders that in the Satmar community, a woman’s life is to be devoted to replenishing these murdered populations. Women in this community are under-educated and must marry young—into an arranged marriage—and as mentioned, are subsequently expected to produce as many children as possible. The sorrow of this inexplicable and horrifying communal loss becomes a heavy deterrent to a woman’s desire to pursue education or any other non-communal options in life. Who could possibly overcome the guilt of pursuing her own passions and purpose in the face of such deep suffering and trauma? The foundations of this community’s practices are perhaps more understandable than others, despite the oppression that they paradoxically engender for females. The sense of wider cultural, generational, historical, and religious responsibility exerts a powerful layer of influence over an individual’s calling and purpose in life. The shadow of neglect and abandonment is poignantly portrayed in Tim Guest’s (2004) musings on a family photo taken before his parents separated and his mother joined the Rajneeshi cult: There we are, the three of us, crammed into a photo booth not long after I was born. I’m looking off to one side, checking out something to the right of the frame. My mother is staring up to the left: her eyes are already moving away. My father is looking straight at the camera so that now, across the whole of my lifetime, I can look him in the eye. Martin’s not yet in the frame. He has not yet heard of my mother, nor felt the blow of my young foot against his shin. Still, he’s almost there: an imminence, about to catch my mother’s wandering gaze. The thing that strikes me now about the photo is that no one is looking at anyone else. We’ve already started on our own particular journeys. We are together, but already alone. (p. 301) While Guest too is responding to a literal photograph, he can see through to its archetypal layers: his mother’s search for meaning, which landed upon the guru; her emotional abandonment of her son; his father’s neglect—all present in a nutshell, from the outset of his life. Early expressions of daimonic presence are often best perceived when afforded the opportunity to read life backwards. In discussing the retrospective gaze a person takes towards his or her life, Hillman (1996) wrote that we are all in search of a biography that feels adequate and coherent, one that enables us to uncover the fundamental plot of our unique story (pp. 4–5). This is a daimonic move and perspective, one that is driven by that very innate image.

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Photo-balms

These memoirists’ scrutiny and reflections on photographs of themselves, as well as important figures in their lives (both negative and positive), appear to have also served somewhat of a healing purpose. In Guest’s (2004) circumstance, the gaze is analytical, attentive to the subjects’ eyes, reading into what they now know about their life situation at the moment the aperture closed, only from an adult’s perspective. In their discussion on therapeutic issues with former cult members, Lalich and Tobias (2006) discuss the healing benefits of an individual’s coming to terms with the specifics regarding the reality of a childhood spent in a cult that may continue to bear influence on their emotions and relationships, even if they have not consciously made this connection before (pp. 289–304). This sort of investigation into the connections between cultic and present-day experience enables former members to view their communities through new eyes, to situate themselves outside of the cult, and to assuage any sense of guilt regarding their own behaviour under coercion. In this manner, photographic images can comprise symbolic portals to that healing. Animal Imagery

“I suddenly felt as if a giant spider were tangling me in her web as a feast for her children,” wrote Debbie Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004, p. 380) of the FLDS. Palmer was describing her struggles with ongoing conflicts between her and her sister-wives. Amber Scorah (2019) described that her proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness life in China with her husband felt like being “animals in a zoo … We were here in this cage so the elders could walk by and make sure we were keeping our vows” (p. 179). Not surprisingly, the types of animal imagery, or as Jung (1951/1968d) referred to it, theriomorphic imagery referenced by these two memoirists, are those which either engage in trapping or are ensnared by forces from without. Animal imagery was also used to describe a looming sense of threat. Westover (2018) described her brothers as being like “a pack of wolves” (p. 43), and former FLDS member Caroline Jessop felt, during preparations for her arranged wedding ceremony, as though she were being prepared for ritual sacrifice, as “the proverbial lamb dressed and trussed, readied for slaughter” (p. 78). When Claire Hoffman’s (2016) family structure was dismantling prior to her parents’ separation and her mother’s subsequent relocation of the family in proximity to the TM community, Hoffman recorded the following experience: One night after all the lights were out, I lay wide awake, certain there was a tiger in my closet. Every once in a while he seemed to appear, glimmering and orange, his fur vibrating with a hallucinatory aliveness. (p. 30)

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Here, the imagery takes on a threatening yet vibrant cast, in the form of a predatory animal in hiding who quietly watches and waits—a certain numinous vitality to its vigil. As with the vocal and visual forms of imagery mentioned, animal images also demonstrated a connection to freedom or the possibility of it. Rebecca Stott (2017) used the image of a soaring bird to describe the rare moments of liberation she experienced during her time in the Exclusive Brethren, and Walker (2016), of the Worldwide Church of God, evoked the image of a camel to express his yearnings for peace. He wrote, “I close my eyes and picture my family in a caravan of camels, moving sluggishly across moonlit dunes” (p. 71). Whether the animal image was cautionary or if it offered an experiential sense of a better life, to the second-generation cult survivor, they may have had the potential to provide either preliminary daimonic, psychological “escapes” from oppression, or visceral motivation to eventually resist and release the confines of their respective “cages.” Some of the memoirists’ animal/theriomorphic images produced physiological responses, which could be as terrifying or threatening as Hoffman’s tiger, or as liberating and joyful as Stott’s bird. Jung (1951/1968d) wrote that theriomorphic symbols represent content that is as removed from human consciousness as is an animal’s (p. 186, [CW9ii, para. 291]). In Jung’s view, animal images were seen to be related to instincts, and each animal was correlated to a specific instinct (Hannah, 2006, p. 3). From this perspective, instinct and archetype can be seen as connected ends of a pole, coupling the physiological and the psychological, while still distinguishing between the different aspects of the two: the body/matter instinctual end and the spiritual/archetypal end (Jung, 1954/1969g, p. 180 [CW 8, para. 374]). The archetypal image awakens something physical and numinous, something instinctual that may serve us in moments when we vitally need such connection with our deeper offerings. Hillman (2013a) observed that “an archetypal image is animated like an animal” (p. 23). There is a visceral liveliness to animal images when they arrive and we may notice that there is a particular intensity to dreams of animals. Hillman (2015) suggested elsewhere that instead of reducing an animal to a symbol, we ought to “see the animal with an animal eye” (kindle location 432), to let our instinctual aspect attune to an image’s particular emergence so that we might be awakened to what it is communicating to us from realms outside of consciousness and egoic control. Zombies, Robots, and Ghosts

Dissociation is a very common experience among cult members and former members, as it is among much of the wider population who have sustained other forms of trauma. Van Der Kolk (2014) highlighted the prevalence of dissociation in traumatized individuals, referring to dissociation as “the essence of

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trauma” (p. 66). He describes dissociation as a split-off, fragmented experience of overwhelming physical sensations, sounds, images, thoughts, and emotions related to an initial trauma or repeated traumas. As the past intrudes upon the present, traumatic memories are relived as though they are occurring in present time, and the individual is unable to fully and accurately experience what is actually going on at that moment in her life. When symptoms overwhelm, trauma survivors sometimes gravitate towards numbing devices such as drugs, alcohol, excessive exercise, or other compulsions to will dissociation and remove pain (pp. 66–67). Drug and alcohol use became prevalent among the FLDS “lost boys” such as Brent Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) and his friends and brothers, who were exiled from their community in rising numbers as leaders and priesthood holders began marrying ever-increasing numbers of young women—ridding themselves of competition for young brides. Sometimes, these boys were dropped off at the side of the road in the middle of the countryside, abandoned to a world that had been described to them their entire lives as “dangerous” and “evil” (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009, p. 191). To be suddenly and wholly rejected and cast out into a world seen in this way is highly traumatizing. One symptom of dissociation is depersonalization, which can manifest in such behaviours as absent-mindedness and blank stares (Van der Kolk, 2014, p. 72). We see this exemplified in the dissociative images and metaphors that arose in several memoirists’ recountings. Images of zombies, robots, ice, and ghosts colour these recollections. For example, when Brent Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) returned to the FLDS community several years following his departure to attend his grandfather’s funeral, he observed, “the church members around us looked like zombies. I couldn’t see any individuality left, even among the kids” (p. 165). Trauma was widespread throughout the community. In another situation, fearing his father’s beatings as retribution for his misbehaviour, Walker (2016) wrote, “At school I’m a prayer zombie, drifting through the day’s lessons” (p. 40), and in describing her rigorous training as a Scientology auditor, Jenna Miscavige-Hill (2013) explained that the organization’s stated intention was to create smooth, undistracted communicators. However, “the result was that it made all of us more robotic” (p. 183). As authentic emotion becomes identified by cult members as threatening (which it is, as it threatens the status quo), it is also demonized by the leadership. It may thus be possible to construe that recovery for survivors rests within the “daimonizing” of their oncedemonized emotional life. During her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, Stott (2017) described experiences of auditory and visual hallucination that would propel her into fits of screaming and overwhelm: “I don’t remember what scared me about the carpet fluff, but I do remember the voices and the monsters I saw on the curtains in my bedroom. I can still see them very clearly” (p. 164), she recounted. When Kristina Jones (Jones, Jones, & Buhring, 2007) finally saw her sister Celeste,

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still a member of the sexually abusive group, the Children of God, after Kristina had left years prior, she described Celeste’s behaviour as that of “a ghost” (p. 266), and when Deborah Layton (1998) looked back on her time in Jim Jones’s infamous organization, both in California and Guyana, she reflected: “my life had been on ice for nearly a decade” (p. 285). Narrative

This next area of lived experience in a cult orients around the stories that second-generation and beyond survivors told themselves and others, as well as how the stories shifted over time. Narratives can reflect either those of the group or of the individual, and there are narratives that are common to many high-demand groups. What is vital to persons leaving a restrictive, high-demand community is the reclamation of a narrative that, over time, resonates with the truth of their experience as they themselves come to understand and take ownership of it. The Evil Outsider

A common theme that emerged from this memoir study is the idea that outsiders to a cult were seen as either incapable of understanding the group’s philosophies and practices or that these outsiders harboured evil or persecutive intentions. Relationships with outsiders were generally highly discouraged or, in some cases, forbidden by cult leadership and/or families. Kristina Jones (Jones et al., 2007) conveyed that in the Children of God, “the adults were suspicious of everyone and security measures were extreme, bordering on paranoia” (p. 184). Deborah Layton (1998), former member of Jim Jones’ notorious Peoples’ Temple group, admitted that when she lived in Jonestown, Guyana, she believed that anyone on the outside was the enemy and admitted that she too would have tried to shoot someone to defend her comrades. U.S. Congressman Ryan was shot and killed in Guyana by a group member during an investigation. Amber Scorah (2019) reported that in the Jehovah’s Witnesses church, your friends were other congregation members, never those outside of the religion. The Worldwide Church of God created grisly, detailed narratives about what would happen to the unconverted in the apocalypse. Member Jerald Walker (2016) reported that he was told they would “writhe in the streets, their bodies covered with the boils illustrated in one of [the leader’s] booklets …” (p. 25). Along with being told to avoid or distrust outsiders to their communities, some survivors were also given the narrative that they were “chosen” or “elect;” that they possessed special wisdom or esoteric knowledge, or were simply given a superior birthright. This narrative resulted in some members harbouring a sense of exceptionalism that influenced how they viewed others outside the group. For example, Caroline Jessop (2007) of the FLDS wrote that her sense of

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being “of the elite” enabled her to withstand the scrutiny of others when she was out in public wearing the pastel-coloured pioneer clothing required of women by the group. She wrote, “I looked down on the people who thought I looked strange. They were wicked and less evolved” (p. 174). This kind of exceptionalism or “inflation,” in Jungian terms, can be concerning, even dangerous, in that it can provide justification for treating others poorly—or worse. There were times, however, when the cultic groups’ narratives did not sink in and form enduring beliefs. For many of the memoirists in this study, the doctrine of exceptionalism had an opposite effect—a persistent sense of feeling unworthy or subpar, at least with respect to how they were measuring up to their communities’ expectations. As Joanna Brooks (2012) lamented, “for years I told myself that if I were a better Mormon, if I had milder thoughts, a tamer spirit—if I were just better, God would turn it all around and reward me with a good Mormon husband” (p. 134). Describing her failing marriage in the ultra-Orthodox Satmar community, Feldman (2012) wrote, “If I can make this [marriage] work, all my shame can be erased. No one will be able to criticize my family when I am a successful, obedient housewife” (p. 161). The pressure in certain communities to live in highly controlled ways seemed to create a discordance within some members that often resulted in shame. Scorah (2019) expressed this inner struggle when observing the Bible student she was tutoring: “What other life were we capable of? There seemed to be two sides to [my student], the side formed by what he was born into, and the side that seeped out …” (pp. 72–73). What is seeping out in this instance? Perhaps it is something related to that person’s daimon. Some memoirists recognized the value of story in this way. Feldman referred to trusting “some long-lost inner voice” (p. 254), and in reflecting on her Sufi commune years, Toko-Pa Turner (2017) expressed that if we can “draw that story into the open for others and for ourselves, there is a chance that we can begin to live in alignment with our deepest contributive nature” (p. 197). Retrospective Narratives

People look back on their years in high-demand communities in different ways. Tim Guest (2004) noted that some people were nostalgic about growing up in the Rajneeshi communes, where he had felt neglected and desperately lonely while his mother was usually away doing work for the group and his father was living in California. After leaving Gloriavale, Tarawa (2017) struggled mightily in undoing her indoctrinated beliefs. In her words, “My brain fought desperately to release harmful beliefs so I could be healed. I was so traumatized because I’d lost control after a lifetime where everything had been so perfectly controlled. Extracting the lies was nightmarish” (p. 292). For those who lived in tightly controlled communities, it was often excruciating to be thrust into a world without the protective barrier of the group or without skills to navigate modern life.

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Winell (1993) has practical suggestions for former second- and subsequent-generation members who are trying to adjust to the outside world. These include writing a letter of welcome to oneself, introducing oneself to new physical surroundings and landscapes, and finding ways in which to begin to incorporate fun and pleasure into one’s life (pp. 234–243). The practice of narrative therapy, which aims to uncover alternate, perhaps unconscious narratives as a therapeutic modality, is another potential option. Clients can also feel empowered as they work to create new narratives for themselves, ones that privilege their inherent strengths and natural capacities and talents, for it is no small matter to leave everything and everyone you have always known, along with the stories they have told you about who you are. Imagination and Reverie

One of the most hopeful and protective capacities of second generation and beyond survivors was the ability to cultivate imagination. While our modern Western culture privileges the intellect and rationalism, there are other, nonrational (not irrational) means to the formation of knowledge and understanding than this—an insight of many Indigenous cultures (Kimmerer, 2013; Yunkaporta, 2020). Jungian and archetypal psychology acknowledge and celebrate the imagination as a way of developing intimacy with our psychological lives. Cultivation of knowledge and understanding via the imagination is, of course, well-acknowledged and engaged by visual artists, creative writers, musicians, and others who create meaning through artistic work. Perhaps it is this daimonic imaginal capacity that offers some of the greatest hope to a survivor of a highdemand community. To the extent that they can imagine better possibilities for their futures, or an alternate one when escape is impossible, survivors have a means to overcome or at least manage their respective traumas (Van der Kolk, 2014, p. 17). During their cult years, most memoirists recorded imaginings and reveries about what it would be like to live in the outside world. While living in Florida, Jenna Miscavige-Hill (2013) imagined a parallel life to her actual one, complete with a closet full of princess dresses, if, like her cousin, her family had remained public Scientologists and not joined the “Sea Org” (p. 113). Tarawa (2017) was enticed by her friend, a later convert’s, stories about life outside Gloriavale. She wrote of her imaginal, fantastical journeys about falling in love with someone she chose herself, about driving a car, wearing trousers, or drinking a beer (pp. 94–95). Both during and after leaving the cult, memoirists imagined frightening things or experienced flashbacks of their former lives. Walker’s (2016) imaginings were filled with apocalyptic imagery. He wrote about living in dark caves, sleeping on cold beds of stone, and “floating downstream in the lake of fire to the waiting hands of Satan” (p. 104). Jayanti Tamm wrote the following

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about how she was haunted in her childhood as she tried to fall asleep by a bust of Guru Sri Chinmoy that her parents had installed in their garden: I imagined that the Guru bust hunted me, sprouting arms, tentacle-like appendages that expanded from its base. They slowly snaked down the stones, across the grass, up the shingles, through the window into my room, extending, writhing to my pillow and strangling me, airless and smothered. (p. 28)

Imaginal Refuge and the Secret Creative Self

When things were particularly challenging in their communities, survivors imagined alternate realities. Feldman (2012) spent classroom hours daydreaming about decorating castles and losing herself in “the opulent labyrinth of my mind” (p. 91), and Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004) “lost herself” in the fields and forests of the FLDS compound, imagining fairy kingdoms (p. 138). These moments seemed to lessen individuals’ suffering and oppression, even in minor ways. Boeri and Pressley (2010) reference William James’ identification of two components of the self: the “I” as knower/subject, and the “me” as known/ object. They expressed that the “I” is sometimes referred to as the creative self and the “me” as the self-concept that is arrived upon via seeing oneself through others’ perspectives (p. 175). Drawing on these concepts, Boeri and Pressley propose that the juncture between the “I” and the “me”—when the individual reacts to his or her perceptions of others’ judgements—is a zone within which a “secret creative self” (sCS) may be developed within an oppressive environment. In this instance, cult members become aware of their leaders’ negative judgements of them, and thus intuitively do not expose their imaginative capacities. Their creativity can then be nurtured in protective secrecy. Beyond survival, Boeri and Pressley’s research implies that the sCS can also, if there is sufficient time and space in which to do so, enable the practice of activities that strengthen the individual and cultivate skills and abilities that extend beyond the cult. These can eventually be utilized in service to one’s own life “on the outside.” Dreams and Synchronicities

C.G. Jung wrote extensively about dreams and dream analysis, which formed a key dynamic of his psychotherapeutic practice. Dreams are viewed with reverence in Jungian depth psychology, and the images that arise in dreams can be tended in ways that may offer insights into a dreamer’s current psychological state. Given many communities’ focus on preparing for the end times, it is not surprising that the most common themes to emerge

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from memoirists who recorded dreams were those of violence, injury, death, or the apocalypse. Former Children of God member Celeste (Jones et al., 2007) had nightmares about being killed as a martyr (p. 101), and Rebecca Stott (2017), former member of the Exclusive Brethren, wrote, “Because I knew I’d be left behind [in the Rapture], I spent much of my childhood preparing for the Tribulation. My dreams were full of floods and lightning and earthquakes” (p. 46). As a young Latter-Day Saint, Joanna Brooks (2012) dreamed of hills turning red with fire and dissolving into great pools of oil. In her dream, she said to her father, “… in great relief, ‘isn’t it wonderful that what is going on outside finally matches what is taking place inside the human heart?’” (pp. 42–43). Satmar Orthodox survivor Deborah Feldman (2012) dreamed that she was being slowly cooked by her relatives in a large stockpot. Survivors also dreamed of pursuit and escape. After Deborah Layton (1998) escaped from Jonestown, she reported having many haunting dreams about her escape. In one of them, she was running away from Jonestown with “hundreds of people hanging by their hands from my outstretched arms and Mama and Mary holding onto my neck” (p. 273). Tara Westover (2018) dreamed of a maze, built by her father, on the mountain where her survivalist family’s home stood. She wrote that “the walls were ten feet high and made of supplies from his root cellar—sacks of ammunition, drums of honey” (p. 306). In this dream, she was pursued by her father, who was sealing the exits with sacks of grain. During her early adolescence in the TM community, Hoffman (2016) dreamed about being chased by school administrators in pastel suits while running through “the dark maze of hallways of the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment” (p. 223). Former Children of God member Juliana Buhring (Jones et al., 2007) dreamed of being chased by giant dogs and lions during her years in the group. Dreams of family were also prevalent. Some found solace with family members showing up in comforting ways in their dreams and offering a compensatory sense of safety and respite from their challenging situations. Interestingly, some members’ dreams demonstrated altered perspectives on reality. After Layton (1998) had observed the superior living conditions enjoyed by Jim Jones and his family, in comparison to the rest of the group, she dreamed of beautiful flowers winding their way through the community pavilion and thought that life was working its way back into the deadened space. Regarding Jones’ chair, however, she noticed something different: “My eyes were fixed on Father’s armchair and tears streamed down my cheeks. There were no flowers there. Not a single plant had risked attaching its tendrils to Father’s poisonous chair” (p. 196). The unconscious may have been communicating with Layton using potent and fitting imagery to the devastating and tragic way in which this community ended on November 18, 1978, when more than nine hundred (exact numbers conflict) Jonestown members, many of them children, died of cyanide poisoning. Dreams

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can ask us to pay attention using striking imagery that is viscerally moving and incredibly accurate in its metaphorical dissemination. Synchronicities

Stott’s (2017) memoir about being raised in the Exclusive Brethren was partially inspired by her father’s insistence that she complete his unfinished biography—he was dying and knew he could not finish it himself. For many years, however, Stott was reluctant to write, having previously been made aware of the powerful and litigious nature of the Brethren. After her father’s death, she decided to shelve the project, but two close-occurring incidents involving wasps led her to believe she ought to reconsider. The first occurrence was a month after her father’s funeral. She had gone to help her ill stepmother with mowing the grass when “a black cloud rose up and hummed low and close, smoke-dark against the white of the birch trunks” (p. 21). She counted twentyone stings and wondered, disturbed, whether they had been sent from her father, whether “a dead man could conjure wasps.” Still, she did not pursue the writing project. Four years later, at a writer’s retreat at a castle in Edinburgh, she was walking the grounds when she thought that she heard her father’s voice. Consoling herself that these were “aural grief hallucinations” (p. 24), she continued an unsuccessful attempt at writing a novel instead of working on her father’s requested memoir. Later, during another walk, she once again disturbed a wasp’s nest and was badly stung. This time she ended up in the hospital, struggling to breathe, and in a semi-coma for twenty-four hours. She wrote: The doctor had counted up the hard lumps on my scalp and neck. Twentyfive stings. Enough to kill someone with an allergy, almost enough to kill someone who’d been stung before in an empty garden when a smoky swarm rose like a ghost from a hole in the ground. Not enough to kill, I thought, but enough to make a point. (p. 25) It wasn’t until six years after her father’s death that the writing process would begin, however, when Stott’s daughter discovered his boxes. Mere days before she was about to leave her Orthodox community, Feldman (2012) was involved in a car accident that she felt she should have died in, given the state of her car. “How extraordinary it is, to be alive when one should be dead” (p. 243), she wrote. She also observed the following: The accident happened as the clock struck midnight, when the date changed to 09/09/09. Nine, that’s what the Kabbalist told me; nine, the number of

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death and rebirth, endings and beginnings, is the sign I was supposed to look out for. I may always look back on this day as the one that divided my life in two. (p. 243) In this remarkable synchronicity, Feldman had been given a number “to look out for” by a Kabbalist long before her accident. In the immediate moments following the accident, she was confused about the significance of its timing and whether this indicated she should in fact not leave the Satmar community. When she recalled the Kabbalist’s words, however, and recognized the significance of the number nine, she realized that perhaps the “sign from God” meant a clean break with her past; a distinct delineation between who she had been and who she was to become (p. 243). The following day, her doubts and confusion were erased, and she signed the contract to write her memoir. In this instance, the synchronicity seemed to support Feldman’s decision to begin a new life for herself—to follow her daimon. In their evocation of the numinous, synchronicities can be highly motivating. As we see in the lives of these survivors, imaginal ways of knowing can be foundational in orienting us to our surroundings and circumstances. Jung referred to synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle” (Samuels et al., 1986, p. 146), where there was a meaningful coincidence occurring between the psychic and material worlds. Inner and outer realities intersect for an individual, leaving her with a physical sense of resonance and importance. Synchronicities provide us with another form of non-rational understanding and insight that relate to daimonic influence and, as we see in these examples, can be quite uncanny.

5 AWAKENING INSTINCTS From Doubt to Insight

Doubt, Confusion, and Dissonance

When a person is raised under indoctrination, there is often a point at which the inculcated teachings and values bump up against the developing and individuating person. The result of this is usually an extreme sense of confusion, sometimes resulting in what is referred to as cognitive dissonance, where the psychological toll of mitigating contradictory information regarding thoughts, values, behaviours, feelings, and environmental cues becomes intolerable and unsustainable. In the memoir study, many second-generation cult survivors understandably experienced doubt, confusion, or a sense of cognitive dissonance during their time within the community. Conflict between a person’s inner sense of reality and the dogmatic ideals enforced from the outside often resulted in feelings of rootlessness, or a generalized dark, inner sensation indicating all was not well in survivors’ surroundings, despite what they were being told. As an internal mode of discernment and possibly motivation, the phenomenological category of doubt/confusion/dissonance might thus be viewed as another indicator of the daimonic. Recognizing and coming to terms with one’s inner sense of discordance can catalyze a powerful mode of guidance and discernment, both during life within a high-demand community as well as after leaving it. These can aid a person in moving forwards in life in a way that affords them the potential to recognize and perhaps resist any new forms of attempted coercion. Doubting the Doctrine

Memoirists’ doubts and confusion manifested in a few different areas of their cultic lives. Many wrote about doubting the spiritual doctrine that they were DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-8

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taught, as did Megan Phelps-Roper (2019), former member of the Westboro Baptist Church. This church taught its members that they held the only true interpretation of God’s word and that the rest of the world was accountable to this interpretation, while Westboro was accountable to no one else’s (p. 63). The community regularly prayed for God to enact violence against others and took pleasure in tragedies suffered by outsiders, particularly during the Iraq war, when the group began a new practice of picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers. During this period, Phelps-Roper’s doubts began to grow especially frequent. As she describes: Watching my family track the rising body count with glee, I felt mournful … The truth was that I had started to feel sad in response to tragedies even when C.G. [an online friend] wasn’t there to prompt me … a small part of me began to wonder if there was something wrong with Westboro. (p. 119) For this third-generation memoirist, her church’s practice of schadenfreude did not sit well internally, despite her family’s dogmatic defences and scripturally referenced justifications. While she went along with what was expected for a time, another, deeper element was resisting this behaviour. Lilia Tarawa (2017) wondered what would happen to children who hadn’t yet reached the Gloriavale baptism age, such as herself. Something within her felt confused by the idea of these children being sent to hell, as she had been told would happen to all unbaptized people (p. 72), and Celeste Jones (Jones, Jones, & Buhring, 2007) could not accept Children of God leader Mo David’s assertion that there needed to be a sexual component to their worship (p. 46). LDS member Brooks (2012) was not inspired by her understanding that if she worked hard enough to get to heaven, her reward would be “eternal pregnancy in the company of plural pregnant wives” (p. 97), and Feldman (2012) could not understand the existence and endurance of Satan if God was the creator of everything (p. 95). Claire Hoffman (2016) was confused by the spirit of competition she observed in her usually benevolent Transcendental Meditation community when members attempted to levitate in a practice called “Yogic Flying” (p. 117), and Jerald Walker (2016) became so confused by responses to his self-described status as a “chosen one” to people outside of his religion that he began to tell his teachers that he was Jewish, as the response to this usually involved acceptance and no further questioning (p. 62). The ability of these young people to question things they had been taught for most of their lives by those to whom they were most deeply attached is a testament to the power of curiosity and inner, orienting capacities capable of overcoming toxic messages offered by parents, caregivers, and community leaders. Beyond the influences of nature and nurture emerges something larger, beautifully encapsulated in the metaphor of the daimon. As a

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psychological mediating factor and an important part of individuation, Jung called the process that arises out of the tension between opposites the transcendent function (CW 7, para. 121). This function often results in a symbol or metaphor that has the capacity to relate to both sides of an oppositional pair. As for nature and nurture, the daimon becomes the mediator, suggesting that there is more to be understood in the space between the two.

The Perplexing Outside World

It was often difficult and disconcerting for memoirists to come to terms with the fact that they found certain people outside of their community to be likeable, following a lifetime of warnings against them. Phelps-Roper (2019) experienced this when she began to engage with people who critiqued Westboro on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. One of these was a friend that she referred to as an “enemy of Christ” (p. 258) and whom she was certain had the wrong understanding of the Bible, but despite this, she realized that she liked him, along with others on the site, regardless of these perceived “flaws.” Tarawa (2017) loved spending time with cousins outside Gloriavale, who were “so full of life, so happy and loving” (p. 219), but at the same time was nagged by guilt for betraying her church. Jung (1950/1976a) noted that guilt is often a result when collective ideals collide with the individuation process. He wrote, “Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt” (p. 452 [CW 18, para. 1099]). When he first left the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) and attended a public school full of “outsiders,” Brent Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) was terrified. He wrote that “the sermons I’d heard about how evil and corrupt outsiders were and how apostates like me would burn in hell were running through my mind yet again” (p. 135). When she moved to New York City, Scorah (2019) felt like a foreigner, even though she spoke the same language as everyone else. She had in mind that “worldly people would chew you up and spit you out” (p. 239). When Caroline Jessop (2007) received kind and professional care for her child who had health complications in clinics and hospitals outside of her community, she could no longer retain the beliefs she had been taught about the world beyond the FLDS gates.

Confusion Regarding Cultic Activity

Not only did beliefs and ideologies become confusing over time, but so did cultic activities. Tarawa (2017) could not understand why God had supposedly willed two community members who didn’t like each other to get married in

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her church (p. 52), Scorah (2019) did not understand why things did not feel right when she was “living the best life: courtship, marriage, chastity” (p. 62), and Remini (2015) began to question how her extensive donations to Scientology were being spent. Miscavige-Hill (2013) felt “used” (p. 315) after giving personal information to the Scientology institution as collateral that could be utilized against her, and Layton (1998) expressed a “nagging unease” when she discovered that letters from family members sent to the Jonestown community were being censored (p. 149). While Feldman (2012) was able to understand the fear and loneliness that led to the origins of her Satmar Orthodox community, she could not understand why she was beholden to their rules when she had not been part of the original agreement that dictated the community had to be isolated and that women could not read English books or wear the colour red, among other practices (pp. 60–61). Some of these doubts reflect a child’s concrete and literal understanding of his world, as with Walker (2016), who genuinely could not comprehend how all of the righteous members of his community would be able to fit onto the planes that, as promised, would spirit the group away at the advent of the apocalypse (p. 104), or for that matter, how they would be able to find food, water, and beds to sleep in during this much-anticipated event. Critical Thinking vs. Faith and Certainty

The dynamics of coercive control and undue influence of course deliberately suppress critical thought. In Westboro, members were taught that questioning the existence of God and the veracity of the Bible as God’s word were “the questions of fools” (p. 215), which eventually left Phelps-Roper (2019) feeling like a fool for not asking these things earlier in life, though it would likely not have been safe for her to do so. Scorah (2019) described an inner tension that led her eventually into a “constant, distracted state of questioning,” but this questioning took place within “a mind that had been trained not to” (p. 162), which she described as “highly uncomfortable.” Psychologist and cult expert Margaret Singer (2003) observed that years of restricted thought can result in difficulty with focus and concentration, challenges with memory, and attentional difficulties (p. 309). Kendall (2016) asserted that leaving a high-demand group and entering mainstream society is tantamount to a crosscultural move (p. 194). Perhaps if this has happened to you, a sense of self-compassion and patience may be supportive. It is extremely difficult to leave an environment of oppressive conditioning, and it is often helpful to talk through the feelings of confusion that arise in order to differentiate what belongs to one’s deeper, authentic Self and what might have been inculcated during developmental periods. Individuation can be a one-step forwards or one-step backwards process in reckoning with conditioned thought, but it can also be the most gratifying and meaningful

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work, one that leads to a sense of inner peace and connectedness to oneself and to others. Unquestioned faith in authority is often part of growing up in a high-demand community. In Brent Jeffs’ FLDS community, leadership taught that a man had never landed on the moon, along with other falsehoods that went unchallenged until Jeffs entered public school. Over the years in his community, he wondered, “How can this little church be the only true one” (p. 75) when he imagined that there were so many other good people in the world. Some churches create the illusion of free thinking by asking members with questions to “pray and ask God for yourself,” but at the same time they insist that their doctrine is correct and that God would be sure to let them know this. If this answer wasn’t forthcoming, members would need to then examine the purity of their intentions or simply pray harder. For Westover (2018), who was told that school is evil, confusion arose when she noted how deeply her brother, the “least evil” person she knew, loved school (p. 60). Doubts became heightened when members were told that terrible things would happen to those who left the group. When family members left and were referred to as “apostates” or other damning and insulting terms, it was excruciating and at times impossible for memoirists to believe or accept these condemnations, given what they knew themselves to be true about the characters of their loved ones. Doubting the Leadership

At some point in their lives, memoirists in this study began to see through the veneers of perfection or Godliness in their group leaders. This too created deep confusion. Celeste Jones (Jones et al., 2007) began to wonder during her cult years, whether she was submitting to God or to the whims of her leaders (pp. 77–78), and Layton (1998) overrode her doubts about Jim Jones because she couldn’t believe a man she knew to be a “healer, socialist, and important civic leader” (p. 69) could possibly engage in lying, blackmailing, and abusive behaviours. In many high-demand communities, leaders are considered to be parent-like figures or extended family, so the risk of attachment wounding is significant. Instinct and Intuition

Instincts and intuitions relate profoundly to the daimonic. Due to their often intense physiological manifestations, they also relate phenomenologically to the somatic category in this study. For second- and subsequent-generation memoirists, instincts and intuitions often emerged in response to the certainty and assuredness with which community leaders delivered their messages. As Hassan (2018) noted, cultic leaders take advantage of the mind’s responsiveness

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to certainty (as cited in Couric, 2021). Below are Megan Phelps-Roper’s observations on the presence of zealous certainty in her Westboro community: By visceral instinct more than conscious deliberation, I understood that no force silences doubt as effectively as zeal—a passionate clinging to familiar and reliable truths that quiets dissonance and snuffs out uncertainty in an avalanche of action. (p. 147) Here, Phelps-Roper instinctively comprehended that the underlying effectiveness of the leadership’s actions was to dismiss its members’ doubts by overcompensating with confidently asserted proclamations. This is an influence tactic with widespread use. Charisma, confidence, and illusions of certainty combine to form a powerful sales strategy that many in our Western culture and marketplace are keenly aware of. In a cultic group, instincts can be co-opted or drowned out by the loud voices and fervent intentions promoted in the environment. They can also become distanced from perception over time. Turner (2017) used the term “wounded instincts” (p. 92) to describe the experience of self-distrust that she experienced for several years after leaving her Sufi commune. She explains that in her group she was never taught skills that would protect her from harm, but instead learned to distrust her own emotions, boundaries, and reactions. For her and for many others, the result of this prolonged overriding of one’s natural responses resulted in an inability to recognize violations and intrusions. This practice also cultivated delayed reactions to poor behaviour for those who were taught to be ultra-accommodating to others’ needs. Former Amish memoirist Ruth Garrett (Garrett & Farrant, 2003) noticed the lingering after-effects of psychological oppression as she reported that long after she had left the community she “was still being guided by Amish instincts” (p. 79). She described her inner world as “haunted” by worries that she had damaged her reputation. Feldman (2012) wrote that after her years of austerity while living with her Orthodox grandparents, she instinctively understood the spurious nature of the expensive gifts she was receiving from her future in-laws, but nonetheless “acknowledge[d] the thrill that comes with finally being lavished with care and attention” (p. 125), and Remini (2015) continued her involvement in Scientology for some time after she had initially intuited how extreme the organization was (p. 114). At the same time, however, while she knew that she was expected to recruit new people into the church, her instinct was to do the opposite. Despite the teachings and demands of her Children of God community, Celeste Jones experienced what she referred to as a deep-seated “inner spark of morality” telling her that her church’s practice of forcing young girls to have

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sexual relations with much older men was wrong (p. 65). It is both heartening and inspiring to see the persistence of such “inner voices” in someone who was raised within such a tragic form of indoctrination. Powered by the Self, these instincts cannot be irrevocably overridden. Still, as we see in these examples, attempts to corrupt them can cause tremendous and extensive harm, and the loss of opportunities and time, sometimes for many years. Unfortunately, under oppression and indoctrination, the voices of the daimon can be conflated with internalized voices of oppressors and the parts of an individual that are acting in response to trauma. This highlights the vital necessity to explore and cultivate a relationship with our inner wisdom, but also informs us that this is a path of discernment and is one that will take time. Attachment and Belonging

Perhaps one of the worst human violations to occur within high-demand groups is the exploitation of human attachment. As noted earlier, psychologist and researcher Dr Gordon Neufeld (Neufeld & Maté, 2004) identified attachment as our most fundamental need. This becomes complicated within high-demand groups, which usually cultivate competing attachments between parents, children, and the leadership. What came up in the memoir study was that attachment was both the most difficult thing for cults to dismantle and, in some instances, also became a deterrent to leaving. In the Sri Chinmoy community, Jayanti Tamm (2009) was very attached to the guru, who referred to her as his “chosen one.” Despite the privileges that came with her status, this attachment had a shadow side for Tamm, as she secretly harboured thoughts that her purported exceptionality was “all a sham” (p. 222). When Phelps-Roper (2019) was faced with the extreme restrictions and punitive actions placed on Westboro members—most especially her immediate family—by new, self-appointed “elders,” she eventually found herself at an intense sort of breaking point, which she described as “a singular urge to run” (p. 196). Of course, when we talk about attachment, we are talking about love, and the dynamics of the daimon can be understood to be equal in power to the force of love in all its forms. Hillman (1996) used the act of falling in love as one example of the phenomenology of the daimon and its callings (p. 144). In the possessive, wonderful/terrible state of initial romantic love, we become capable of acts we might not ever otherwise consider; we are driven by forces that seem outside our control, and in the resultant torment and/or torpor that colours this experience, we find ourselves in the immediate presence of the daimon’s erotic (as in, Eros-inspired) creative/destructive capacities. We sense the autonomy of this dynamic, as the thoughts and sensations of new love seem to descend upon us from elsewhere and at times quite suddenly. Consequently, Hillman noted

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that when we are in this state, we become capable of acting out of the source of our most true selves (p. 146). As we seek genuine connection with another, the vulnerability that is exposed in the initial stages of romantic love allows us greater access to how we are meant to live. The act of falling in love ignites the imagination and prompts us to magnify initial love images and sensations so that we are drawn ever more deeply into “the venture” (p. 147). We can fall in love with any number of phenomena; our world presents us with a banquet of delectable-looking ideologies, lifestyles, spiritual paths, and gurus. Any one of these, given the right conditions, could ignite the erotic flame. Cult as Family: The Dependency Dream

In the powerful realm of love and attachment, we see that the child born into a nurturing, loving, well-attached family is fortunate indeed. Sometimes, as parents and caregivers, however, our best intentions go awry, and forms of oppression— whether intentional or not—colour the landscape of our children’s upbringing. As Gehart (2018) expressed, “all cultures are by their very nature oppressive, because—by definition—they must identify certain behaviours as acceptable and others as unacceptable” (p. 57). We have seen that oppression can be mild, extreme, or somewhere in the middle. We cannot expect to eradicate it completely, nor would we want to, but it is useful to examine its presence in our lives and in the lives of our children in order to better manage it whenever possible. To be loved and nurtured is both biological and archetypal. While we generally accept that adults require emotional support, affection, validation, and acceptance, at the same time we also tend to believe that they should be autonomous and self-sustaining. Psychiatrist Arthur J. Deikman (1990) identified that our fundamental human wishes to be cared for by another loving and mature being—our dependency or attachment drive—while accepted socially in childhood, often comes to be viewed as a sort of embarrassment for adults. The drive is still present, but now in a covert form. Deikman saw that because of our hidden wishes to be loved, admired, and sheltered, a powerful fantasy is generated, one that is capable of transforming a cult leader into “a strong, wise, protective parent and a group into a close, accepting family” (p. 9). He referred to this as “the dependency dream” and argued for the acknowledgement of its existence not only in children but also in adults. Despite its fundamental nurturing roots, dependency constitutes a dangerous dream for adults because it makes us vulnerable to “exploitation, regression, and even violence” (p. 9)—favourable conditions for generating cults. Dependency on a leader can be interwoven with behaviours such as group compliance, devaluing outsiders to the group, and avoiding dissent, according to Deikman (p. 52). This can either draw new members into a community or serve to keep existing members involved. As these behaviours intertwine, members grow increasingly dependent on the cult as refuge, “family,” and place

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of belonging in a challenging world. So many of us feel archetypally orphaned by our families of origin, societies, and cultures, and in seeking solace for this sense of abandonment, a cult or high-demand group can appear to be a warm and welcoming respite, a place of belonging, care, and even love. Realization and Insight

The phenomenological category of realization and insight provided a window for the research into the evolving, potentially daimonic thought processes that led to a memoirist’s eventual departure from the cultic community. Insights and realizations revealed potential glimpses into various ways in which a person raised under indoctrination might be able to begin to extricate himself or herself psychologically before eventually taking the actions required to physically leave the cult. They represent perspectival shifts, epiphanies, and hard-won pieces of wisdom which offer specific examples of the undoing of indoctrination. Realizations Regarding Attachment and Emotional Connection

As we have noted, attachment is a vital, innate neurological, and developmental organization system. Attachment motivates an infant both to seek proximity to a caregiver to ensure survival and to organize its immature brain through relationships with a mature one (Siegel, 2012, p. 91). Attachment provides protection from harm, starvation, outside attack, and separation from the group. Depending on the caregiver’s response, specific implicit memories (memories held in the body) and schemata (organized neurological understandings) develop around attachment and impact the developing personality. According to research, the major environmental factors that shape brain development during its maximal growth period are attachment relationships (p. 112). Secure attachment is, once again, our most significant primary growth requirement as human beings. Attachment is classified broadly, according to Siegel (2012), as either secure or insecure. Secure attachments form when the caregiver is perceptive, emotionally available, and responsive to a child’s proximity-seeking behaviours (p. 100). Insecure attachments are classified by Siegel into three categories: (1) avoidant, (2) resistant or ambivalent, and (3) disorganized/disoriented. All three categories are observed as resulting from consistent neglect, abuse, or trauma causing psychological harm to children during their upbringing. The category of disorganized attachment is the most extreme of the three and occurs when caregiver behaviour is frightened, frightening, or disoriented in its communications during the first years of a child’s life (pp. 101–102). According to Stein (2017), in this situation, the caregiver becomes both the source of pain as well as the source of comfort. The child paradoxically wants to run to the caregiver for support and soothing, and at the same time is motivated to flee from suffering. In most

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cases, the desire for proximity overrides, resulting in confusion and dissociation as the child attempts to numb the overwhelming pain of a persistent and fundamental betrayal. Over time, this maladaptive strategy results in an anxious form of dependence within the child. Stein noted the prevalence of this form of attachment within totalist groups, on both interpersonal and group levels. Accordingly, disorganized attachment becomes a primary mode and method for cults to control their membership (p. 35). The cult is both the source of comfort and fear, simultaneously. While a person’s attachment status is malleable and can later be re-formed within the context of caring relationships (p. 36), this is an incredibly complicated and excruciatingly painful situation to correct. Neuroplasticity is a hopeful discovery for adults suffering from the effects of disorganized attachment, but our best option is prevention (Siegel, p. 114). Studies revealing the sufferings of the second generation and beyond may give pause to those considering involvement in a particular high-demand spiritual or organizational path for their families. The more we can recognize cultic, coercive behaviour, the more harm reduction is available to us. Developing trust in others, not to mention in oneself, becomes an immense challenge for cult survivors, as I have noted above. This dynamic is further intensified if the former member was told by her family that the outside world is an evil place—which was true for many of the memoirists in this study. Disorganized attachment is also seen as a predictor of dissociative and personality disorder symptoms (Siegel, 2012, p. 114). Psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West (1993) notes dissociation ranks high in his overview of cult-related phenomena. Whether or not cults explicitly understand the mechanisms of attachment, many take measures through their dynamics to actively subvert or dismantle it— redirecting allegiances towards the group and its leaders and away from families and other members who may compete with loyalties towards them (Whitsett & Kent, 2003, p. 492). This is accomplished through the use of tactics such as housing children in dormitories where they are supervised (not necessarily raised or nurtured) by adults who are not their parents; keeping adult members busy with cultic activities for most of their waking hours so that they have no time for family; moving parents or children to other locations/cult headquarters or even different countries; not allowing marriage or romantic connections between those who wish to choose their own partners; insisting on celibacy; and forbidding members to have children and/or “encouraging” abortion among those who do get pregnant. In some cases, the heartbreak and ongoing agony of damaged family attachments were important catalysts in leading the memoirist away from the cult (Guest, 2004; Jones et al., 2007; Miscavige-Hill, 2013; Tamm, 2009). Attachment voids were experienced by these individuals for prolonged periods of time until they eventually became unbearable. In other situations, family and other attachments kept members inside the cult for long periods of time despite doubts,

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misgivings, and burgeoning disagreements with cultic dogma (Palmer & Perrin, 2004; Phelps-Roper, 2019; Tarawa, 2017). One can only imagine the tremendous challenge of forming attachment bonds in the polygamist FLDS community. Jeffs’s (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) father had three wives, each of whom had several of her own biological children. He describes their family dynamic below: The real power struggle was between us and Felicia’s kids. Though we didn’t make a linguistic distinction between “full brothers” and “half-­brothers” and “full sisters” and “half-sisters” among ourselves, we all knew who their blood mom was. Without ever being explicit, we came to see ourselves as foot soldiers in the moms’ battles with each other for Dad’s attention and affection. (p. 81) In the three FLDS accounts this study considered (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009; Jessop, 2007; Palmer & Perrin, 2004), alongside the patriarchal nature of the community and its beliefs, families were also sub-structured into hierarchical rankings between wives and their children, some wives and their offspring receiving greater privilege and even superior living standards. Children were allocated chores and responsibilities, forms of discipline, demonstrations of affection, and material benefits according to their mother’s status—which could easily shift, even prior to Warren Jeffs’s decision to intervene and restructure families, ordering wives to leave their husbands and join other families. Caroline Jessop understood all of this, and having realized her opportunity for finding love within the group was unlikely, had the insight that having her own children might afford her the sole opportunity to develop a sense of love and belonging in her life. She wrote, “I knew all I would ever have in my life that mattered to me would be my children” (p. 186). In a completely opposing scenario, the guru Sri Chinmoy insisted that followers within his meditation community remain celibate. When Jayanti Tamm’s (2009) parents failed to fulfil this request, Chinmoy justified the result by declaring he had made a divine exception in their case, having willed a special being to be born, and proclaiming that Tamm was his “Chosen One” (pp. 7–8). Tamm herself was not permitted to have a boyfriend, but when she did begin a relationship with a young man in adolescence, the guru abruptly sent her away from her New York home to work overseas in his European congregations. Before leaving, Tamm made the following realization about human connection, following a date with this man, who was outside her community: I understood why out of the billions of people on the planet, only a few thousand had been able to resist these exquisite pleasures. Even Guru’s divinity

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might not be able to compete. To have experienced having true companionship and then be told for the rest of one’s life it was forbidden might be too great a sacrifice. It seemed to me then that Guru’s relentless railings against the evils of human attachment was a misguided enemy. As I clutched Oscar’s hands, Guru’s blockade against human relationships felt absurd and utterly incorrect. How was this un-divine when it felt absolutely celestial? (pp. 160–161) This idea can be symbolically illuminated through Socrates’s dialogue with Diotima in The Symposium, where Eros, the Greek god of love, is a guiding “celestial” archetype and, indeed, one of the most important in metaphorical relation to the psyche. The force that Eros represents carries all life, all creativity into existence. In reference to Eros, Diotima said that he is “a very powerful spirit, Socrates, and spirits, you know, are half-way between god and man” (Hamilton & Cairns, 1989, p. 555). Diotima continued to explain that such spirits are mediators, or “envoys and interpreters” between humans and a God that will not mingle directly with them. This is the realm of the daimons—metaphorically illuminated to represent the carriers of unconscious psychic material into consciousness, and a means to human encounters with the divine. Jungian analyst James Hollis (1998) explained that Eros was the oldest god in the pantheon (p. 33). Whether god or daimon, Eros’s inherent proclivities of directedness, goal orientation, yearning, love, desire, and connection are themselves daimonic propensities in that they are forward-moving, conveying purpose and vital intention to an individual’s life. In the above passage, we also see Tamm (2009) coming to experience this and forming a natural conclusion about the overall importance of human connection, despite having been indoctrinated against its “evils” all her life. Biology and chemistry fall into play here, of course, but in her memoir, Tamm’s connection to Oscar also seemed to pry open a door to ponderings about other levels of relationship—both their power and importance—one of her initial realizations that led, over time, to a continued questioning of the relationships in her life and an unpicking of the deliberately woven threads of her upbringing. Raised by Peers

Raised in dormitories and away from his parents most of the time he was involved in the Rajneeshi community, Tim Guest (2004) only later came to fully realize the depths of his loneliness. In the following excerpt, he expresses his adult reflections about himself as a fourteen-year-old newly emerged from cult life: I would walk around the playground with my head bent forward, eyes scanning the ground. I told the other kids I was looking for loose change. I didn’t

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know what I was looking for. I do now. I was looking for the ground beneath my feet. I was looking for my family. (p. 263) In the Rajneeshi community, a more liberated relationship with sexuality meant that sterilizations and abortions became routine (p. 32). The nuclear family was, in Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s opinion, traumatically confining (p. 93). To Rajneesh, the ashram community should serve as a child’s family, with as many “parents” providing guidance as possible. Despite this ostensible extended nurturance, however, Guest lived out most of his childhood in an untended state. As focus was placed on the community and not the individual, his belongings— books and cherished toys his father had given him during visits to California— were taken away and placed in communal service. When Guest almost drowned during an excursion to a local river, he later took comfort in the arms of teenage girls in the commune, who provided substitute solace for the love and support of his cult-occupied mother and physically absent father. Cultic structures incorporate complicated webs of deceit and manipulation, and many second-generation memoirists in this study arrived at realizations and insights that unearthed the hypocrisies underscoring doctrine vs. practice, truth and lies, deceit and manipulation in a cult. Once exposed, such realities became difficult—impossible for some—to turn away from. When a highly controlling group of “elders” rose to power and began to rein in personal freedoms and increase scrutiny over members of the Westboro congregation, Phelps-Roper (2019) began to realize that the central tenets of their rather young religion had been capriciously determined and were not absolutes, as she had previously understood. In discussing the elders’ assumption of Westboro’s role as “ultimate arbiter of divine truth” (p. 158), Phelps-Roper had the following— rather abrupt—insight: in a moment of horrifying clarity, I finally saw what had eluded me for so long: We had all been behaving in the exact same way toward outsiders. It was as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others—for over twenty years … What if we’re wrong? What if this isn’t The Place led by God Himself? What if we’re just people? And I felt sure that it was all true. (pp. 158–159) Coming to understand that one’s entire upbringing has been founded on a bedrock of deceit, manipulation, and hypocrisy is a considerably destabilizing experience. For a teenaged Phelps-Roper, this initial realization was

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painfully irrevocable and created momentum that led to more awakenings that would eventually tip the scale towards leaving Westboro. However, it would still take about ten more years after this realization before she could depart physically. Celeste Jones (Jones et al., 2007) also came to a lightning-bolt moment of realization when she was told to “be yielded to” the church leaders, who were led by God. She describes her realization like a light bulb turning on, like an epiphany, suddenly aware that she had not been following God, as she had been told all her life, but had instead been following “the whims of a leader who played with her devoted followers like pawns on a chessboard” (pp. 328–329). The daimonic move here serves as a clarifying one, a removal of obfuscations that had been sophisticatedly and incrementally structured and implemented. This move also serves as a deep realization of a competing internal value system, along with a growing willingness to be receptive to the voice of one’s own conscience and less to the voices of the oppressive group. Another of Robert Lifton’s (2019) techniques utilized by totalist groups is described as “the demand for purity” (p. 73). This involves dividing everything in the experiential world into binaries such as “good vs. evil,” “pure vs. impure,” and “truth vs. lies.” The group and its leadership, of course, then determine what falls into each category. Westover’s (2018) survivalist Mormon father taught her that regarding any subject, there is either truth or lies—no space for nuance or for the coexistence of two reasonable yet differing opinions on one topic (p. 133). Westover recognized that this paradigm could not coexist with her vision of the person she felt she was becoming, as she became more closely aligned with her daimonic drive for higher education, deemed “impure” by her father. Accordingly, she then perceived her situation as being forced with the decision to either remain a perpetual child—if she wished to preserve her relationship with her father—or to lose him. Lifton identified the manipulative aspect of defining the criteria of purity, arguing that declaring war on impurity (as the cult defines it) instigates reactions of guilt and shame in followers. Self-judgements arise when internal ideals conflict. A cult leader can keep a follower in line, however, by “forgiving” that member—at his or her own discretion (pp. 74–75). When a cult is comprised of members of a family, this form of manipulation becomes even more powerful. Despite being shouldered with incredible expectations of self-control that are difficult even for mature individuals, group members are simultaneously infantilized and treated as children well into adulthood. In their auditing sessions, Scientologists utilize a machine called an “E-­Meter” to ostensibly ascertain the accuracy of a member’s responses to specific questions. If the machine indicates that an interviewee knew the answer to a question, yet this person did not disclose it, a form of relentless interrogation

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then ensues, which could go on for hours or even days. In the following passage, Miscavige-Hill (2013) points out the disorienting effects that this form of auditing created within her. She wrote: While this questioning itself was stressful, the real impact was something much more deeply psychological and unsettling: the repeated nature of the questions made you doubt yourself in ways that were hard to describe, especially when the E-Meter indicated that you did have an answer to the question. (p. 186) The repetition of a question in this manner serves to slowly dismantle any beliefs that tether a person to reality, inserting doubt into understandings regarding their own experience and sense of reality, through a form of “gaslighting.” A term that originated from a play titled “Gaslight,” the technique of gaslighting is an epistemic or manipulative psychological tactic in which a person attempts to make another see their beliefs, memories, and plausible perceptions as groundless (Stark, 2019, p. 221). It is another tactic for groups to effectively destabilize individuals and take ownership of reality. As we have seen, the ownership of “truth” rests with the cult and its leaders, and individuality fades as the member is unable to gain a clear perspective regarding the dynamics they are enmeshed in, as well as of reality itself. Thankfully, this was not a permanent fading in Miscavige-Hill’s (2013) case. At a certain point, when the leaders in her midst began calling her “bad,” “evil,” and “criminal,” Miscavige-Hill felt forced to honestly examine her feelings, intentions, and perceptions of truth, and to ask herself, “Am I truly evil?” While she grappled with this agonizingly over time, in the end, she could not ultimately accept such harsh and erroneous judgements of her fundamental being. This led her to an eventual intrinsic and stable sense of self, where she came to understand her character as ultimately trustworthy and good. Even as she acknowledged her human flaws, she could not accept an overriding definition of herself as wholeheartedly evil (p. 237). This realization only arose, however, after her deepest sense of self and reality had been threatened—dangerous and vulnerable territory for a person to endure. Stein (2017) draws our attention to the pervasive experience of loneliness and isolation within cults, identifying three levels of isolation experienced within these groups. Not only are followers isolated from the outside world, but they are also isolated from authentic relationships with others within the cult, and at the deepest levels of indoctrination, they become isolated from themselves (pp. 21–22). Engulfed in busy-ness and a life dedicated to the group and its leader(s), these progressive and encompassing stages of loneliness threaten the soul until, as Miscavige-Hill experienced, this becomes unbearable.

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Like a pressure cooker, cultic communities, and the dynamics and competing attachments they form, instigate an opposing response from the psyche in the second and subsequent generations. As pressures to believe and conform in highly specified ways continue, something contradictory bubbles up from within as a child grows into adolescence and adulthood. It is offensive to the psyche, to the soul, and to the Self to negate and oppose daimonic expression. Jung saw the psyche as compensatory. When there is too much oppression, something must give. Some live their lives in this way, remaining in highdemand communities for many years, even if they do experience doubt and confusion, realizations and insights, or messages from their instincts and intuitions, but for others, there is no option to carry on living amid such agonizing psychological polarities.

6 SENSING FROM WITHIN Affective and Somatic Expressions of the Daimon

Affect/Emotion

The emotional landscape of a born-and-raised high-demand community member can be highly complex and can vary dramatically between groups. Many of the group leaders and community members in this study held strong opinions about what emotions meant, what they should and shouldn’t look like, and how they should be dealt with. Most of these relationships with emotion usually reflected some form of control. As Jung wrote below, in the quote that opens this chapter, however, emotions hold incredible importance, as the instigators of change and of consciousness itself. Affective neuroscience also informs us that emotions are purposive and oriented to our capacities for surviving and thriving. Diana Fosha (2021), the originator of Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) expressed, “emotions make us feel alive and authentic and give meaning to our lives” (p. 218). Emotions give us information about a change (good, bad, or neutral) in our situation that requires us to adapt and reorient. From a Jungian perspective, emotions are also seen as purposive and informational, connecting to an archetypal level of experience that makes sense when we look more closely at a person’s family and relational experience. As Jung (1936/1954c) expressed: On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-9

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There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. (CW 9i, para. 179) Uncomfortably Numb

As mentioned earlier, dissociation, or emotional numbing, showed up in many survivors’ experiences (80 percent of the memoirists in this study) and has been noted by several researchers in spiritual and religious trauma to be a prevalent phenomenon related to this particular form of trauma. Brent Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) disclosed that for a long time after his tragic abuse by Warren Jeffs, he lost his ability to experience both so-called negative and positive emotions. He describes his experience poignantly: “Mercifully, I left my body. I was never the same after that. At some point, everything went away—my feelings, but also all sensitivity, any sense that the world was a good place. I just went numb” (p. 67). Dissociation is a protective mechanism when things are too much to bear; Herman (1992) explained that victims of child abuse tend to wall off their abusive experiences from consciousness and memory, protecting themselves from unbearable despair (pp. 101–102). As an adolescent, Jeffs sought alcohol as an aid in suppressing any emotions that did manage to surface. This too is not uncommon, but we cannot selectively numb our emotions (Van der Kolk, 2014), and gradually the numbness permeates the whole of our being, leaving us with a sense of being only partially alive. Toko-Pa Turner (2017) describes it in this way: There is a deadening that can set into the heart that has borne too much pain. When a situation becomes too shocking or painful to bear, we may develop a chronic sarcasm or minimizing attitude that says, “Oh yeah, that’s nothing new.” But over time, this protected way of being can have a sterilizing effect on the entirety of one’s feeling alive. (p. 176) Emotions are our vitality, our life force. In the quote above Jung recognizes emotion as having the capacity to bring all things into being—the genesis of our lived experience, so to speak. Soul-making too requires emotional engagement. In high-demand communities, attempts to discount or eradicate a person’s emotions can be seen as efforts towards what Shengold (1989) termed “soul murder … the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person” (p. 2). Attempted eradication of emotion, of identity, coupled with Lifton’s insight about cults’ attempts to own reality itself are powerful disruptors to an individual’s daimon. Children learn in

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relation to emotional expression; they come to understand which responses are acceptable to those upon whom they depend for survival, and will quickly learn to mute unacceptable emotions and behaviours, and conform to their environments. In so doing, a persona develops that masks the true character of the child and thwarts the expression and development of daimonic capacities. It bears repeating in this lights, that no rights to religious freedom supersede a child’s inherent, fundamental human rights, as outlined by the United Nations (U.N. General Assembly, 1989). This includes the right to grow, develop, and express one’s thoughts, emotions, and needs in a healthy manner. Both within certain high-demand communities as well as within the wider culture itself, there is a perspective that controlling one’s emotions is desirable, even admirable. This was flippantly conveyed in Westboro by one of the picket signs carried by the group, which read: “God hates your feelings” (PhelpsRoper, 2019, p. 34). In the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint (FLDS) community, the term “keep sweet” reminds members to keep the spirit of God present at all times by controlling or sacrificing their emotions (Palmer & Perrin, 2004, p. 64). Caroline Jessop expressed what it was like to live with the constant inner battle between experiencing her emotions and suppressing them, as she had been forced to do: “For thirteen years I suppressed every emotion I had ever felt. I tried to be at peace even when I knew everything around me was spinning apart” (p. 263). In Scientology, members were also instructed to always be in control of their emotions, according to Jenna Miscavige-Hill (2013), “even if that meant burying those emotions inside me” (p. 71). This dissociative practice had the effect of preventing her from feeling anything at all when she found out that her mother was having an affair (p. 171). The propensity to numb may have erected a protective fortress around these survivors, but this came at a cost to their overall ability to experience the fullness of a whole, emotional, expressive life. As an unconscious defence mechanism, numbing reflects the impacts of insecure attachment, particularly in its avoidant form, as the brain organizes itself for survival (Siegel, 2012), and sometimes survival is the absolute priority. Anger

The experience of intense and intrusive feelings of anger, both inside their groups as well as in their post-cult lives, was the most highly recorded emotion among memoirists. In Rebecca Stott’s (2017) experience growing up in the Exclusive Brethren, rage and anger were transmitted generationally. She wrote: Rage was in my father’s blood too, but although he wrote about his father’s temper in his memoir, he did not describe his own. We, his children, grew up under its shadow, the marks of it on the walls and doors. (pp. 86–87)

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Phelps-Roper (2019) also recorded the generational transmission of anger in the Westboro community, from her grandfather to her mother, and finally on to her. This cultivated responses of cowering and fear in her—a constant worry about what might provoke a parent’s or grandparent’s fury (p. 58). Celeste Jones’ (Jones, Jones, & Buhring, 2007) outrage reached a visceral point when her thirteen-year-old friend returned from a “marriage ceremony” during which she had been forced into sexual relations with the group leader (p. 80). For Tarawa (2017) and Jessop (2007), witnessing the suffering of others also evoked anger, revealing perhaps an empathic component of the daimonic. Anger may result from repression of the daimon, which tends towards “explosion” at some point (May, 1969, p. 123). This anger can be tremendously productive, as Diamond (1996) noted—a form of violence engendered by prolonged and intolerable violations (p. 19). Any violence that is cultivated in response to such violation can be seen, according to Diamond, as not motivated by revenge, but by the daimonic “will to freedom and self-determination” (p. 19), as well as an innate sense of justice found within all individuals, if it has not been completely distorted. For Guest (2004) and Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009), intense anger arose most predominantly during the initial post-cult period. Guest was fourteen when he finally left the Rajneeshi community, and his mother would leave shortly thereafter. He wrote of the confusing interplay between his anger and the need he felt to suppress it, lest he experience the blow of abandonment again: “I began to realize that I was furious with my mother but afraid to say it. I was afraid to get angry in case I lost her again” (p. 290). Eventually, the anger won out, erupting in verbal and physical outbursts towards his mother and stepfather. Similarly, the dam on Brent Jeffs’ anger burst after years of suppressing it in the FLDS. As his anger was given permission to be expressed during therapy, he said that it was “uncontainable” (p. 200). It came out in the form of punching walls and yelling at his mother and everyone around him. He expressed that he was “at the mercy of my temper—and I had years of rage stored up in it.” For Feldman (2012), fear morphed into anger when her orthodox mother-in-law interfered in matters of intimacy between her and her husband. For Westover, kindness from others catalyzed anger after leaving her survivalist Mormon family. She described it as such: “I became paranoid. I surrendered to rages, venting all my savage anger, every fearful resentment I’d ever felt toward Dad or Shawn at him, this bewildered bystander who’d only ever helped me” (p. 190). Psychologist Rollo May (1969) wrote that in oppressive homes that encourage daimonic repression, conditions are then lain for daimonic possession to be experienced later in life (p. 163), and we can see this in so many second-generation survivors. We are reminded of the nature of the daimon as both creative and destructive, and when one of these channels is blocked, the other is activated. As May expressed, “these [daimonic] urges do not sleep;

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and, if they cannot be expressed positively, they explode or are projected on whoever is the enemy of the person or group” (p. 163). This can also be applied, as in Westover’s case, to a bystander or friend who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. This might also make sense from an attachment perspective, where perhaps within the container of a (finally) safe relationship, a person can express emotions with the implicit understanding that the other will be able to make space for them and will continue to accept them (Neufeld & Maté, 2004, pp. 117–118). When a person who has not been allowed safe expression of their emotions over a long period of time finally encounters the opportunity to do so, these emotions may be released in a torrent. Sometimes We Smiled

Lest we come to believe that all is darkness and suffering within these individuals’ lives, memoirists also expressed moments of relief, hope, joy, and happiness. For Ruth Garrett (Garrett & Farrant, 2003), this sense of joy came by way of glimpses of a potential for fulfilment during her teenage years, when her future husband (a man outside the Amish community) would periodically visit their austere household (p. 46). This was during a time before they had even considered one another romantically, but the kindness and happy energy embodied in this outsider created a stark contrast to the heavy and sombre family life that Garrett normally experienced and became something that she sought from the moment of meeting this person. Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) also expressed moments of happiness during childhood fishing trips with his father, playing outdoors with his siblings, and the growing relief that had descended upon him after he had left the FLDS, when his therapy had progressed to the point where his anger’s intensity had subsided (p. 198). For Tamm (2009), Guru Sri Chinmoy was a source of support to cling to while she was a child, asserting clear expectations that gave her security when her parents were unable to lead her (p. 139)—however misguided these expectations were. For Amber Scorah (2019), leaving her husband and the Jehovah’s Witnesses enabled her to experience a profound sense of relief, which eventually flourished into greater confidence in trusting her intuition. She expresses this interplay of emotion in the following excerpt: One of the last times I saw my husband, when he dropped off a handful of things I had forgotten in the pink house, I felt relief. People underestimate the power of this emotion. Though there existed inside me no small doses of shame, guilt, and self-condemnation, they were held at bay by the deep pleasure of shedding a terrible burden. It was only physics, really. And I felt

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exhilarated. I was scared of who I was, of what I had in me to do. But I felt so much better now. (pp. 198–199) Tara Westover (2018) also discussed the unexpected balm of relief she experienced when she contemplated her abusive brother’s grave condition following an accident. She wrote, “I imagined Shawn on a white gurney, the life leaking out of him. I felt such a wave of loss that my knees nearly buckled, but in the next moment I felt something else. Relief” (p. 127). Hope and possibility were present for Westover (2018) when she witnessed her father’s increased humility after he had been badly burned in an accident (p. 223), and Phelps-Roper (2019) wrote of her feelings of possibility when, as a teenager, she met an interesting boy outside of her community (p. 111). Happiness and satisfaction had arisen for Jessop (2007) when the charter school she had been creating was approved (before Warren Jeffs was able to sabotage it) and when she achieved financial success and a sense of peace and agency in managing her husband’s hotel while living with her children apart from the FLDS community. These confidence-building experiences expanded over time into profound hope, joy, and relief after Jessop was finally free from her plural marriage and the FLDS (p. 377). All of these instances reflect the complicated nature of growing up in a high-demand group and how, when working with former second-generation members, it is important to honour the varied emotional landscapes of their growing-up years and not to assume that these individuals are completely happy about giving up their oppressive communities or that everything was grim and horrible at all times. Any happiness or relief experienced after leaving a high-demand group can be offset by a profound sense of loss and grief, especially during the initial post-cult years. Survivors will also have to contend with guilt, shame, and self-condemnation, which generally arise as they confront their own daimonic paths and acknowledge the need to reject their parents’ and communities’ values. It is natural to assume that the cult survivor is relieved to have finally claimed her freedom; however, the silent losses experienced by those who will never again be allowed to see their families, with whom they may also have had some positive and nurturing experiences, must also be acknowledged and grieved (Lalich & McLaren, 2018, p. 107). Saying Farewell

Extrication from a cult or high-demand community in which one was raised since childhood is an incredibly complicated and daunting task. For most second-generation individuals, it is also highly emotional, especially when they are forced to leave their families forever and understand that they will be ostracized

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from their communities and perhaps even vilified. Phelps-Roper writes about her mother’s response when she was leaving Westboro and her family home: What will you do, Meg? You’ve loved these doctrines. You were a little girl, walking around the park—[her mother’s] voice broke and her face twisted in despair. Gage Park. Our earliest pickets, back when I was five. She finished the sentence in tears. “—and you were so happy.” She turned to go, and all I could do was weep. I had no idea what I was going to do. I just knew that I would never be free of the pain of causing her pain. Of all the dreadful things I had ever done or ever would do, nothing—nothing—would be worse than this. (p. 202) While there can be excitement mixed with sadness at the prospect of leaving a cult, for a second-generation member, it is important to keep in mind that there is nothing to “return to,” as a first-generation person might experience, having lived a pre-cult life (Lalich & Tobias, 2006, p. 257). This is an important distinction between first- and second-generation former members. For those raised in a cult, there is a significant lacuna, a gap of experience, understanding, and connection to the world so significant that they may have difficulty imagining how to function within it—depending on their previous exposures—and they may fear this greatly. Sometimes a cult will threaten those who attempt to defect, such as Layton (1998) records about the Peoples’ Temple: Jim informed us of his plans for retribution if any members from the inner circle were to leave or betray the cause. There were veiled threats and innuendoes that some of the members who had questioned him or tried to leave had been “taken care of.” There were disappearances and even deadly accidents. One longtime member and father of three who had talked about leaving the church was mysteriously crushed between two railroad cars. Another member was killed driving her car because, Father [Jones] explained, she was thinking negative thoughts. Families and individuals who were caught before they could leave were publicly beaten and put on “observation” until they had been reeducated … I was afraid for myself and troubled, but Father reminded me that punishments were deserved. The Cause demanded adherence to strict rules. “Sacrifice was the robe of the chosen few,” he told us again and again. “The end justifies the means.” (p. 61) While the Peoples’ Temple falls at the extreme end of the spectrum of coercive influence and abuse experienced in cults, for most former members of the

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second generation, the most profound threat is that of losing their family. Many groups will disown children who fall away from the family faith—even groups exerting less control—leaving their children to rebuild their lives entirely, in a world that is largely foreign to them, and with little to no support. Lalich and McLaren (2018) refer to this experience as “landing on Mars” (p. 105). After Westover (2018) left her survivalist Mormon family and went to the United Kingdom to study, she continued to experience conflicting emotions as she compared her new home to the one in which she had been raised. In her words: Although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak. That feeling became a physical part of me, something I could taste on my tongue or smell on my own breath. (pp. 280–281) For those forced to leave their families behind, regardless of how dysfunctional or abusive the relationships were, individuals still suffered the loss of these bonds, and in the case of the memoirists studied here, were left also with a sense of lingering betrayal and other complicating emotions. For second-generation members who are fortunate enough to have family support when they leave, there seems to be much more of a sense of peace, understandably, at facing a new life. Even though Celeste Jones (Jones et al., 2007) had been separated from her mother, brother, and sister (who had earlier left the Children of God) since early childhood, and had even been barred from communicating with them while living in another country with her father, their reunion following Jones’s departure from the cult was a deeply fulfilling experience: Dad was pushed from my mind completely when I saw Kristina, David, and Mum waiting at the station to greet me. It was the strangest feeling being reunited with them. Although we hardly knew each other, we hugged and kissed like long-lost friends. The final piece of the puzzle that was missing in my heart had finally been put into place. For the first time I knew I was going in the right direction, and the feeling was incomparable. It was the best decision I ever made. (pp. 354–355) Before this moment, however, Jones expressed great fear at leaving the only life she had ever known—losing her friends and causing disappointment for her father or being rejected by him (p. 350). She was fortunate in having the support of family members who had already trod the path of defection and were able to empathize with this unique experience. For Tarawa (2017), leaving Gloriavale

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meant a reunion with the paternal grandmother she had never known and a connection with her Māori heritage. Still, the voices from her past were deeply ingrained and continued to haunt, even amid the love and affection her family offered. She wrote: The hollowness in my soul began filling with something far more expansive and nourishing. What was this feeling? As Taua’s [her grandmother’s] affirmations flooded into my soul I wanted to cry, but caught myself. Don’t cry. Your grandfather would tell you off for that kind of weakness. (p. 223) It is important to realize that time is required for embedded voices and cultic teachings that have been programmed into everyday experience from childhood on to fade. There will be triggers in the environment that can create a sense of immediacy in events and emotions long past (Van der Kolk, 2014). Cult survivors who experienced abuse may suffer from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (Lalich & McLaren, 2018, p. 127)—a response to prolonged or repeated trauma. The path to recovery from cult involvement is highly complicated and quite non-linear for former members of the second generation and beyond. Interestingly, however, Lalich & McLaren found in their study involving sixty-five second-generation research participants that only one person considered going back to the cult (p. 123). Even during the darkest, most challenging moments of their recovery, the pain experienced in the outside world was still preferable to that suffered within the cult. Cults and Complexes

Related to the emotional phenomenology of the daimon, complexes play a role in cults in several different ways. Shalit (2002) described a complex as a network of associated images, ideas, memories, and thoughts that gather around an archetypal core and that are bound by a common emotional resonance (p. 32). Jung (1948/1969d) identified the aetiology of a complex as originating in trauma or emotional shock that splits off a piece of the psyche. In relation to the daimon, a common cause of this is moral conflict, when it becomes impossible to affirm “the whole of one’s nature” (p. 98, [CW 8, para 204]). Former cult members of the second generation and beyond can suffer deep moral conflicts as the daimon increasingly opposes cult norms and beliefs during their developmental years. As we have seen, some also experience trauma on either physical or psychological levels (or both). The resulting complexes—if properly worked with therapeutically to release some of their energy—can potentially be integrated and channelled into psychological development (Corbett, 2018). In working with a former second-generation cult member, the emotional component of a complex

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can be gently investigated to provide insightful exploratory paths for members raised under oppression and those who work with them during their post-cult healing process. For those in the process of healing cultic wounds, becoming familiar with emotions as they are activated, naming them and noting where they are located in the body can create a language of emotional empowerment and a reclamation of parts of the Self that may have needed to go into hiding over the years of growing up in a high-demand community. With cult members who have experienced trauma, there is reason to believe that there may be many complexes to address. Despite their unpleasantness, however, there is significant value in complexes; as their living components, they provide our only access route to the unconscious. They are the originators of dreams and symptoms—Jung (1948/1969d) referred to complexes as the via regia to the unconscious, in contradistinction to Freud, who had stated this about dreams (p. 101, [CW 8, para 210]). While we cannot get rid of them, it is advantageous to work with the emotional and somatic phenomenology of complexes to lessen their ability to overtake us or cause us to act impulsively. Jung (1954/1968e) asserted that if we want to overcome the power that a complex holds over us, we ought to live it out in full, to move towards rather than away from it, and to “drink down to the very dregs” (p. 98, [CW 9i, para. 184]) what we have previously resisted. This often requires support of some nature—from a therapist, close friend or relative, or often, in the case of cult survivors, from other former members of their communities who understand the circumstances in detail and depth, empathizing with much of what has been experienced (Lalich & Tobias, 2006). A former member with some time and distance from the cult may prove to be a valuable mentor and source of support for a newly emerging escapee. In Jungian psychotherapy or analysis, integration of complexes would begin with remembrances of childhood, a time when the child was in greater proximity to the Self (Shalit, 2002, p. 40). Cultural Complexes

Cultic dynamics—the energies that draw individuals into cultic communities—may relate to the wider cultural movements discussed in Jungian cultural complex theory. Just as intense archetypal content can overtake an individual, so can it affect an entire community. A cult may even have its foundations in cultural complexes—intense emotional movements that affect and mobilize a group. In his essay, “Wotan,” Jung (1936/1970a) mythologically amplified the archetypal possession of post-1914 German people as the reawakening of Wotan, “the god of rage and frenzy” (p. 188 [CW 10, para 393]), who represents instincts and emotions. Jung observed that prior to this historical period, the events of war would have been inconceivable to a “rational, internationally organized world” (p. 179 [para 371]). Jung did

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not originally connect his nascent insights about mass cultural movements from this essay to complex theory, however. Jungian analysts Thomas Singer and Samuel L. Kimbles (2004) applied the dynamics of individual complexes to group pathologies, arriving at what is now known as cultural complex theory. Cultural complex theory extends the notion of complexes as “emotionally charged aggregates” (Singer, 2006, p. 199) from the individual to the collective. At this level, complexes are shared by individuals within a defined group— they populate the personal and collective unconscious, thus operating psychodynamically on two levels. This lens allows space for the fact that individuals experience aspects of the individuation (and soul-making) process while living in groups and in relation to others, not as a solely solitary undertaking. Such dynamics may explain, in part, the energies that draw people into cultic communities, along with what keeps them there—which relate to the second generation and beyond. Cultural complexes are understood to be formed during interactions between both the collective and personal unconscious as well as the wider world—in schools, work and religious communities, media, and other forms of organized life (Singer, 2006, pp. 202–203). In these types of groups, as well as in highdemand communities, cultural complexes might be viewed as important to the formation, consolidation, and intensification of the group dynamic. The emotional and physiological fervour that is cultivated and constellated by cultural complexes powerfully fortifies the sense of dedication and purpose that highdemand groups wish to foster on multiple levels of experience. Also, the group itself can become a living entity—not just a programme, school of thought, or church body, but a system of integrated complex dynamics that serves to embed and strengthen members’ heightened feelings of commitment and protectiveness. Dedication takes place on the levels of body, soul, spirit, and intellect simultaneously—a powerful, complex, multifaceted, and embodied system of conscious and unconscious dynamics that can lend significant energy to a group’s proselytizing efforts, thus expanding and proliferating its causes. Referencing Lifton’s (2019) observations, in Western cultures, such cloistering dynamics that pull groups away from society may occur as a response or reaction to a growing cultural proteanism. While this depth psychological lens brings an important level of insight to the study of mass group movements, totalitarianism, and cult dynamics, it works particularly well in concert with a multidisciplinary approach incorporating history and philosophy (Lu, 2013, p. 392). While none of these perspectives can be seen on their own to encompass a complete and comprehensive discussion of group dynamics, a psychological lens that considers how emotions take hold of groups is an essential component of a wider comprehension. The deeper the understanding and the more lenses applied to its attainment, the better we can

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assist those who have been raised within cults and high-demand communities in their varied and particular needs. Kendall (2016) expressed that it may take many years for a second-­generation former cult member to recover from their experiences and that often there are residual psychological (and sometimes physical) scars that persist throughout these people’s lives. Recovery from cultic involvement varies widely and depends on a number of internal and external factors (p. 288). As we see in the subjective experiences of the memoirists in this study, challenges and traumas were experienced on a wide spectrum. In terms of recent departure from a cult, Stott (2017) expresses below some survivors’ inability to articulate their suffering: When you see interviews with people who have recently left cults, they describe feeling bewildered and frightened; their eyes dart around, searching for points of reference, metaphors that will get somewhere close to describing the feeling of being lost, not at home, without walls. No one, of course, shrugs off years of indoctrination in one go. (p. 226) To engage in a healthy re-acquaintance with one’s emotional landscape following cult involvement, time, patience, and support are paramount. But emotions do hold one key—a vital one—to unlocking and releasing the daimonic from its constraints. It is essential for cult members to engage and process their emotions, or they will continue to be heavily influenced by their complexes and disconnected from their inherent purpose. Hopefully, this energy can be steered away from the destructive and aimed in the direction of the creative. Somatic Experience

Daimonic oppression does not sit well within the body, which is the site of our felt emotional experience. For members of high-demand communities, one’s relationship with the body can be a complicated and fraught experience. Tim Guest (2004) astutely observed, “I have my body, the physical custodian of my history” (p. 297). Our modern consciousness, since the Enlightenment however, has held a one-sided focus on rational/intellectual life, to the detriment of instinctual, corporeal levels of being and knowing. At the same time, spiritual traditions too often neglect the rooted, instinctual levels of psyche that are also necessary to a balanced existence (L. Corbett, 2018). In a cult, and particularly in ultra-religious groups, the body and its needs and desires were predictably seen as impediments to the group’s cause. While divisions between body and mind are embedded in the wider society and can also be seen in other religions, they are certainly intensified within many cultic groups.

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Many second-generation (and beyond) memoirists recorded their physical responses to events, incidents, and interactions they encountered during their years within a cult. When Feldman’s (2012) mother-in-law confronted her about her and her husband’s inability to consummate their marriage, Feldman described her physical sensations as follows: “My body feels hard on the outside but mushy in the center. If the shell collapses, the filling will just spill out, I think, as I look down at the untouched chocolate bonbons on the table” (p. 170). When Layton (1998) was in the process of trying to escape from Jonestown and was attempting to conceal her intentions from Jim Jones and other cult leaders, she wrote, “My hands were shaking so severely I folded my arms. I was afraid my body’s involuntary reactions would be the death of me” (p. 240). Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004) described her knotted stomach when her father’s abusive FLDS second wife was close in proximity, along with the numbing sensations and dissociation she began to experience as she got older: “When she [the second wife] was there yelling at me or hitting me or pinching my arms, it was as if a switch turned off somewhere deep inside my brain” (p. 138). During the years that the Exclusive Brethren began turning on one another and issuing mass excommunications, Rebecca Stott (2017) wrote that “it was beginning to look like some kind of collective psychosis … The intense and small-minded sectarianism of these people turned my stomach like the crab juice stains on the pages of my book” (p. 66). In the TM community, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi credited the dismantling of the Berlin Wall to their group’s daily practice of meditation. Hoffman (2016) had a physical reaction to this grandiose proclamation: Inside my shoe, I wiggled my toe in the hole of my worn white tights. I felt an unfamiliar cutting sensation in my stomach. I looked over at my friend Orpita but she was beaming up at Bevan like everyone else. Some girls from my class hugged each other and let out little cheers. Teachers gasped and laughed. This was the news we had all been waiting for—but I felt strangely outside it all. (pp. 153–154) In this situation, Hoffman describes her body’s confusion, or its refusal to go along with the community’s mandated excitement about unrelated events in the world that they felt they had some sort of control over. During her first year of university, Westover (2018) was unsupported financially by her family and found herself without enough money to purchase textbooks. When she was told by her LDS church bishop to apply for a grant, she wrote that her “opposition was beyond rational, it was visceral” (p. 204). Having been raised in a family that cut itself off from any government assistance, not only did she feel an ingrained intellectual resistance to the idea of support, but

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this repulsion was also experienced on a physical level. As a pre-adolescent, Brooks (2012) expressed thoughts regarding her physical self as an LDS woman in response to reading Marie Osmond’s Guide to Beauty, Health, and Style in the paragraph below: You and me, Marie, wrestling the dark energies of childhood depressions and nascent eating disorders. You and me, with visions of self-harm, dark impulses we could only describe as religious. These wars with our own bodies, how did we understand them but as a battle against the traitorous flesh that stood between us and our holiest inner selves, that stood between us and God? What to do with our bodies? If they were not instruments of priesthood power, and not yet instruments of eternal procreation, what was our purpose? (p. 64) While the body offers information in the form of its responses, it becomes complicated by religious doctrines that connect it to shame, as was the case in the Christian-based communities studied here. In the LDS church, young girls are taught to look forward to the day they will become mothers and are cautioned repeatedly regarding threats against “worthiness” and thwarting the opportunity for a temple marriage. We see in Brooks’ passage that this perspective placed an awesome sense of responsibility and self-scrutiny upon the shoulders of young girls who were trying to make sense of their changing physical selves—even beyond what is normally experienced in the wider Western culture, which is massively problematic itself. At times, certain situations evoked powerful physiological responses from the memoirists. When Jenna Miscavige-Hill (2013) was accused of receiving too light a punishment for attempting to run away from the ranch compound where she lived as a child (because she was the Scientology leader’s niece), she described sensations of shame and anxiety that elicited a bout of projectile vomiting (p. 87). A few years after leaving the FLDS, Caroline Jessop (2007) recalled the first time she saw prophet Warren Jeffs on television during his trial. His mere appearance, even at a distance, was traumatically activating, causing her heart to race and her breathing to shallow. She wrote, “I hadn’t realized how much of a hold he had on me and how even just the sight of him could send fear streaming through my body again” (p. 409). Jeffs’ denial of Jessop’s husband’s abuse and his insistence on her obedience likely compounded the trauma in Jessop’s body, by gaslighting the truth of her experience. In discussions regarding somatic trauma, Levine (1997) observed the biological differences between animal and human behaviours, with particular reference to the “freeze” response to traumatic events. When an animal “freezes” during a threat to its life, it later readjusts itself to normal functioning and mobility by trembling and shaking its body. This recalibrates the animal’s nervous system. Humans,

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however, are less adept at recalibration, and as a result, the energy constellated by the traumatic event can become “stuck” in our bodies, creating an unresolved and undischarged residue of frozen energy. This is the origin of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—the unresolved energy can resurface when we encounter certain stimuli that activate the felt sense (including emotions, images, and physical sensations) of the original trauma (pp. 18–21), as Warren Jeffs’ television appearance did for Caroline Jessop. We have already mentioned that leaving a cult in which one was raised is a monumentally difficult task. Second-generation members are faced with losing the support of friends and family, being excommunicated from their groups, and having very little in the form of resources with which to build a new life. Some leave with only the clothing on their backs. On an emotional and psychological level, there are often also lingering fears regarding their eternal selves and what might happen to them in the afterlife or if the promised apocalypse occurs. “What if they were right?” is a common question that haunts the lives of many second-­generation survivors (Winell, 1993, p. 87), despite reassurances they may receive from others, along with logical thought processes that would prove otherwise to them. Emotional realities differ greatly from intellectual truths in these situations. Here too, the body plays a role. Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) described his visceral sense of retrospective fear after leaving the FLDS: Part of me liked [having freedom], but the other part was filled with fear. That old fear of eternal hellfire, endless pain, and damnation, the fear that I had turned my back on God. It sat there in the pit of my stomach, not going anywhere. Leaving home had brought it back again—just like starting ninth grade. (p. 143) While we might assume a sense of relief at leaving a cult, as Jeffs articulates, this endeavour is much more complex on material, psychological, emotional, and physiological levels. Singer (2003) observed through her experience in counselling ex-cult members that recovery time after leaving a cult to normal functioning of an individual’s talents and abilities ranged anywhere from six to twenty-four months. She observed, however, that inner struggles with adjustment to the outer world often continued well beyond the two-year point (pp. 299–300). Shortly, after she and her sister left Westboro and their family, Phelps-Roper (2019), then in her twenties, described her physical experiences: Outside of Westboro’s rigid system, fear and uncertainty now consumed me, a physical weight that I felt from the first morning I awoke in my cousin Libby’s house and every day thereafter: a boulder sitting on my chest, crushing my lungs, blocking any attempt to see around it. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t

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move. I was terrified of making a decision that would land my sister and me in some horrific situation. Homeless. Friendless. Penniless. (p. 205) For Westover (2018), leaving her survivalist Mormon family and gaining a high level of education overseas left her in a heightened state of confusion, which manifested in a complex of physical symptoms, including sleepwalking. She wrote: The distance—physical and mental—that had been traversed in the last decade nearly stopped my breath, and I wondered if perhaps I had changed too much. All my studying, reading, thinking, travelling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere? … My first week back in Cambridge, I awoke nearly every night in the street, having run there shouting, asleep. I developed headaches that lasted for days. My dentist said I was grinding my teeth. My skin broke out so severely that twice perfect strangers stopped me in the street and asked if I was having an allergic reaction. No, I said, I always look like this. (p. 313) As Westover describes here, many second-generation former cult members are faced with a sense of no longer belonging anywhere. Social skills and behaviours that are developed in a cult do not necessarily translate into the outside world, and there is a wealth of new knowledge and skill that these people will need to acquire (Kendall, 2016, p. 120). In Westover’s case, while the changes she underwent separated her from her family, she had not at this point in her experience “landed” in her new surroundings. Foreboding and Fear

For many second-generation members, sensations of foreboding and fear were present in the body long before leaving the cult. Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004) recalled her reactions as a child to hearing an apostle exclaim during a church meeting that young women should feel grateful if a much older FLDS man was chosen for them to marry: For the first time, I was truly afraid of one of our apostles. I wouldn’t want to ever be in a room alone with this man and have him touch my body, my hair, or my precious hope-chest things. For a moment I feared I would vomit right there in the middle of the sacred meeting. I forced the bile down in my throat and held the edges of my seat with all my strength to keep from crying. Panic was rising in my body, and I didn’t know why. (p. 203)

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For Palmer, the somatic daimon was speaking loudly and in response to something incredibly discordant with her soul and values, but as a child, there was no way to make sense of this because the apostle was speaking to the values of the community, which were supposed to be her values too. In a similar example, while growing up as an African American child in a white supremacist cult (the Worldwide Church of God), Walker (2016) was taught that segregation was a positive thing. Watching the television series based on the novel Roots, however, awakened physical sensations that contradicted this and other proclamations of his community: I tried not to let it affect me, and for the most part it didn’t. And yet there were moments when I felt the pressure on my wrists as slaves had theirs bound, and the burn on my back when whips bore into their flesh, and the ache in my gut when families, families that looked like mine, were torn apart and sent to distant lands, never to see each other again. (p. 139) Indoctrinated Physicality

Somatic experiences are not always easy to interpret, and when experienced in the context of high-demand communities, they sometimes compelled members either to deepen their belief in or devotion to their cult leaders or to feel rewarded when they were compliant with cultic demands. Tamm (2009) wrote about Sri Chinmoy’s charisma and how his energy affected her: “Being in his presence created a tangible change in me,” she wrote, “it made me holy, better” (p. 138). While these sensations would dissipate over time, in this moment they had the ability to override thought. The charismatic pull of some leaders can be extremely powerful, and as we are all complex beings, not solely “good” or “bad,” there is some authenticity to their ability to reach, as Layton (1998) elucidates: His firm voice was consoling. It called out to me to trust him. His eyes told me he had waited almost his entire life to meet me. He leaned over and kissed my forehead. I felt weak, swooning in his intense and wholly focused attention. (p. 42) During her Satmar orthodox years, Feldman (2012) experienced her family’s excitement viscerally, after she had performed well in school and was offered a teaching job, thus increasing her opportunity for an “advantageous marriage” (p. 120). While this was being arranged, however, she was not informed of any details (including who her intended was), yet she described that “the excitement suddenly swirling around me is palpable” (p. 120). It is easy for members to become caught up in these moments of intense physical positivity and power,

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making them feel as though they are in the right place, doing the right things. Heightened physical fervour, however, must be investigated in quieter moments for any information that it may be withholding or ignoring. After years of oppression and/or abuse, some memoirists—as with those in other forms of abusive relationships—tended to cling to these highs, given their ability to provide dramatic contrast to, or a sense of relief from, their otherwise torturous experiences. Silent Sensations

Could it be that the quieter or more subtle positive physical sensations are perhaps more accurate indicators of the creative aspects of the daimonic? Tarawa (2017) described a sensation of tingling in her fingers as she ran them across the spines of books at the library. “This journey could take me anywhere” (p. 98), she wrote. Sensations described as “delight” or “contentment” might fall into the category of subtle, yet positive physical indicators of the daimonic. While still in the FLDS, Jessop (2007) wrote of a singular opportunity to ride in a convertible and the sensation of wind against her skin. She wrote, “I loved feeling that there was nothing separating me from the outside. It was sensual and elemental—an unusual but delightful feeling for me” (p. 184). Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004) and Westover (2018) wrote of their connections to music, the former expressing that “the music got inside me; I could capture the twang, and it was fun to sing” (p. 199), and the latter expressed that while singing, she “treasured the moment, taking pleasure in the lightness I felt to have music once again floating up from my chest” (p. 281). All of these somatic sensations were in response to the memoirists’ personal interests, the individual talents and proclivities that arose in them and created delight. These are not sensations of euphoria, or heady, disorienting levels of emotion, yet they are powerful, and proved to be more enduring and consistent throughout the memoirists’ recorded lives, again a strong indicator of the loyal and persistent presence of the daimon. Disease, Illness, and Injury

At the extreme end of second-generation memoirists’ somatic experiences lies disease, illness, and injury. While the aetiology of these cannot of course be determined within the constraints of this study, a depth psychological perspective considers Jung’s (1929/1967a) claim in his Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower that “the gods have become diseases” (p. 37 [CW 13, para. 54]). This can be understood as Jung’s observation that we are still influenced by the archetypal unconscious, despite our belief that our reason determines our full reality. While Jung was referring to psychological diseases in this paragraph, we can extend this to the body. Both Miscavige-Hill (2013, p. 324) and Juliana Buhring (Jones et al., 2007, pp. 390–391) wrote of their experiences with anorexia, with Buhring

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describing her emotions in this condition as “a deep, suffocating sadness” (p. 391) that eventually led her to contemplate suicide. For ex-Sufi member Turner (2017) and ex-Gloriavale member Lilia Tarawa (2017), illnesses arose during the post-cult healing process, when these women were reckoning with their conflicting thoughts and emotions following departure. Toko-Pa Turner writes below of her diagnosis and her speculations regarding its origins: My physical pain, it took some years to discover, was finally diagnosed as a degenerative autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis … Just like my compromised immune system, which treats itself as a threat, I spent a lifetime under the constant oppression of contrition and self-punishment. Pain is the appropriate response to persecution, so my body produced it in scores. (p. 71) In this passage, Turner reveals yet another layer of complication for secondgeneration cult members who leave their communities. After years of control and the oppressive regulation of their lives, individuals in this situation also tended to acquire the habit of regulating themselves, using cult-imposed, internalized, indoctrinated criteria. These require close scrutiny if a full physical and psychological departure from the cult is to occur. It can take years to sift through the imposed dogma and required behaviours of a high-demand community to ascertain what is innate, logical, and aligned for a person. Herman (1992) pointed out that if survivors can recognize explicitly that their psychological difficulties originated in their abusive environments, not in themselves, they can be freed from thoughts of being inherently defective (p. 127). Following this realization, new meaning and a “new, unstigmatized identity” (p. 127) can emerge. In the meantime, the body finds its own ways to communicate. Even though Lilia Tarawa (2017) described herself as having begun her healing journey after leaving Gloriavale, she still experienced lethargy and difficulty sleeping, along with severe stomach pains for some time. Eventually, she underwent surgery to remove growths in her stomach, but shortly thereafter she developed an infection in her bowel, which kept recurring despite treatment with antibiotics (pp. 296–297). We cannot ignore the connections between mind and body, of treating the physical ailment, but not attending to the psychological underpinnings that may accompany it. Both Guest (2004) and Turner (2017) described experiences of pain and immobility in their feet. Turner describes her exile from a new spiritual community that she had attempted to join as an adult, long after she had left her Sufi family. She wrote, “not long after my fateful exile from that spiritual community, I woke up one day with sharp, stabbing pains in both of my feet. Every step I took was like walking on shards of glass” (p. 131). For Guest, standing on tiptoes was a habit that followed him for a lifetime, having developed this propensity in childhood of

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standing on his toes to try and catch a glimpse of his mother in the crowds at the Rajneeshi ashram and on their ranch in rural Oregon. During a holiday in adulthood—his cult years long behind him—Guest’s feet began to tingle, and shortly thereafter his toes went numb. A chiropodist eventually told him that over the years, his toes had bent progressively upwards, pushing up the bones in his feet and exerting pressure on his nerves. She diagnosed him with a dropped metatarsal and declared that she had never seen such an advanced state in a young person before (p. 297). The groundedness of an attachment with a loving caregiver may have prevented such literal departures from the ground beneath his feet. Healing

Fortunately, the body also heals. Some second-generation memoirists described the physical mendings that accompanied their psychological healing. Guest (2004) wrote: These days I spend less time on tiptoes. Now the bones in my feet are shifting back into place. When I remember, I do the exercises the chiropodist recommended. My heels are on their way back down to earth. We’re on our way back down to earth. (p. 300) Brooks (2012) repeatedly expressed having the sensation of a cinder block pressing down on her chest when she encountered aspects of her Mormon religion that did not align with her inner sense of purpose. As a result of having unburdened herself by writing her memoir, however, she expressed: “the cinder block lifts, and my heart comes up off the ground” (p. 180). Following her nearfatal car accident, Feldman (2012) wrote: I look down at my body and marvel at its ability to survive something so frightening, and I gaze lingeringly at my limbs as if there were magic blood coursing in my veins. How extraordinary it is, to be alive when one should be dead. (p. 243) Perhaps it is moments such as these—moments of respite from cult life while still living within it—that enable a member to survive growing up under oppression. Such soul-making moments might indicate to a young person that there are aspects of joy that are still attainable and that can remain protected, untouched, and uninfluenced by those who seek to control. Tamm’s dance took the form of a physical casting off of her cult. She describes this below: I stepped onto the empty dance floor and, for the first time ever, I danced. Without caring about who was watching my spastic jerks and flails,

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I soaked up the entire space, thrusting my arms and legs in all directions. I shook violently, casting away the frigid lockdown on my body. If this was the vital life, the invigorating movement of the body, I was engaged in it. I rolled my neck, letting my long hair drag behind. Inside I was waking and stirring. (p. 247) After a lifetime of being told by Sri Chinmoy that the “vital life,” or a life oriented to the body and its needs, was evil, Tamm delighted at this point in breaking free and indulging it. Perhaps in the shaking and jerking of this moment, she was experiencing the regulation of her nervous system as discussed by Levine (1997) and releasing some of the trauma of her previously negated life. It can be relieving and invigorating to lose one’s dogmatic fetters and to experience new awakenings of consciousness that affirm through the body the untruths and wrongful nature of oppressive forces. Somatic experiences can create a visceral liberation from cultic shackles as well as instigate a deep and vital movement into authentic understanding and connection. Dennis (2001) expressed that as the image conveyed by daimonic energy is established in consciousness, it endeavours to unite with the body (p. 25). The physical sensations and emotions that manifest as tightness in the chest, neck, or shoulders, or an experience of lightness and joy in the heart, are not secondary; they play an important role in the experiential landscape of the daimon. Like our emotions, however, which are connected to our physiology (Morris et al., 2019), the body too can be deceiving for a person raised in a high-demand community. Years of training to subvert, deny, or mistrust emotions and instincts through negation of the body’s wisdom can result in confusion, dissonance, and harmful decision-making. Developing an understanding of the cultic dynamics that one has experienced is a vital step in deconstructing and undoing indoctrination. Dismantling judgements and beliefs that are not in service to soul can help a cult survivor learn to differentiate authentic inner voices and physical sensations from those that were imposed (Lalich & Tobias, 2006). Learning that they are separate beings from the cult and its leaders, and that the oppression and/or abuse that was inflicted upon them was not their fault, clears the path for healing and soulmaking, and removes obstructions from their view of the daimon. Attentiveness to the bodily sensations that accompany daimonic messages can assist one in sifting through confusion and conflict, as such messages are often clear and direct. In this way, somatic phenomenology is among the most powerful of all twelve.

7 TURNING AWAY Oppositional Acts

Patterns of Thought and Behaviour

The habitual behaviours and patterns arising in cult members’ experiences may offer some clues that are indicative of daimonic inclinations and urgings. At the very least, this category affords rare glimpses into daily life within a cult; its regular goings-on and the day-to-day activities of its members, including the beliefs and practices that render a particular cult unique. High-demand groups have strong and specific expectations around the behavioural patterns of their members, and it is difficult to tease apart patterns based on expectation from those that might have a more organic source. Some members exhibited patterns of behaviour that clearly reflected their cultural indoctrination, while others demonstrated behaviours that defied expectation—or a little of both. Thus, this section takes into simultaneous consideration two levels of pattern: individual or unique patterns of behaviour that seem to have arisen independently and those which arose as patterns espoused by the community and its practices, teachings, and expectations. A Day in the Life

Daily tasks and habits within cults varied quite significantly, but most memoirists recalled spending extensive hours in meetings or meditation sessions. Stott (2017) recounted her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren as follows: “I remember my childhood as a sequence of dimly lit meetings interspersed with short bursts of noise and light, when we rode tricycles or scrambled over jungle gyms with other children in the bright green of Brethren gardens” (p. 171). DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-10

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She calculated having spent a total of three thousand hours in meetings before she was even six years old. In Sri Chinmoy’s community, Tamm (2009) wrote that “every weekend, like every evening, was spent in Queens with Guru” (p. 133). For Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009), many hours of his Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint (FLDS) after school and weekend life, from approximately the age of twelve onwards, were spent doing construction work (p. 43). Tarawa (2017) also spent long hours in Gloriavale doing physical labour such as cooking and cleaning, until she was old enough to teach herself website coding and design. This gave her some satisfaction by enabling her to escape manual tasks as well as to utilize her skills and talents (p. 124), even if it was in service to the group. Garrett (Garrett & Farrant, 2003) wrote of her Amish life: … my life was a mundane routine of work and sleep. I’d help Mom with the gardening, the canning, the mowing, laundry, and sewing. During hay season, I’d drive the tractor with the bailer behind it and the men would stack the flaxen stalks. (p. 45) Life in Scientology was also full of hard physical labour for Jenna Miscavige-Hill (2013), who described her childhood daily routines using military metaphors in the following excerpt: The Cadet Org became a lot like a military boot camp, with grueling drills, endless musters, exhaustive inspections, and arduous physical labor that no child should have to do. From the moment we woke up to the time we went to bed, there was little downtime; the only real break we’d get was seeing our parents Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. Between drills, chores, duties, posts, and studies, we were scheduled to the minute. (p. 49) Miscavige-Hill’s and others’ routines align with what Stein (2017) refers to as “engulfment” (p. 51), when a member’s life becomes entirely wrapped up in the activities of the cult, so that there is no time or energy left over for individual pursuits or relationships outside the group. This can be an effective suppressor of daimonic impulses, not to mention its interference with a child’s developmental need for play (Neufeld & Maté, 2004). For Tim Guest (2004), quite the opposite was true, at least during his initial years in the Rajneeshi ashram when he and the other children ran free. In his words: When we weren’t outside, most of our time was spent in the low two-storey building that had been the old manor stables, which we now called the Kids’

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Hut. The Kids’ Hut was our domain. We slept upstairs, in the dormitories (early on we could choose where we wanted to sleep, but later, when we were preparing for the school inspectors, life became more organized). (p. 83) Guest described many hours spent unsupervised exploring the surrounding areas of the ashram during early childhood. In later years, however, when Rajneesh’s disciple Ma Anand Sheela attained greater power and influence within the group, children were expected to spend increased time in meditation (p. 227), and their free time came to an end. Preparing for the End Times

Other groups invested large amounts of time and resources in preparing for the apocalypse. Jerald Walker succinctly explained his community’s preoccupation with the apocalypse, which was believed to be immanent: “We’re being prepared for the Great Tribulation,” he wrote. “In thirteen months, it will begin” (p. 3). In terms of everyone’s duties in the preparations, roles were clear: “Mr. Armstrong’s [the leader’s] job is to pave the way for Jesus’s return by spreading God’s message all over the world. Our job is to pay for the spreading” (p. 33). In the Children of God, leader David Berg also informed his community that “the Final Battle of Armageddon was only a short time away” (p. 12). Through these preoccupations, the purpose or daimon of each person in the entire community is hijacked and channelled towards this great archetypal event, in which members can see themselves as enacting roles of historical significance. Personal goals and desires were willingly set aside in deference to this greater, overwhelming responsibility. For Latter-day Saints (LDS) member Brooks (2012), preparations for the apocalypse were routine and integrated into the rest of life. Brooks wrote about the stocked cupboards in her family’s garage, “with a year’s supply of food for us all: giant drums of hard red wheat kernels, textured vegetable protein, powdered milk, potato pearls, pinto beans, dried apples, and cooking oil” (p. 31). She explained that the family remained in a state of constant readiness to abandon everything, “to take our small backpacks of bottled water, freeze-dried food, first-aid kits, and candles, and simply walk away, walk as far as Missouri if we had to, if that was where the New Jerusalem would be built” (p. 43). In Westover’s survivalist LDS family, these preparations were taken to yet another level, with stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, gas, food, and clothing hidden away in underground bunkers and fortified with local folk tales of persecution. The following quote describes the seasonal patterns of her early life: I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling

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peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. (p. xiv) Rules and Expectations

Along with regular practices and routines, rules and expectations also dominated high-demand group members’ lives. During Brooks’s (2012) formative years, the rules and expectations for LDS were as follows: No playing with face cards. No masks, even on Hallowe’en. No two-piece bathing suits. No dating a non-Mormon; no dating before age sixteen. No Rrated movies. For Mormon women: no working outside the home. No work, sports, shopping, swimming, or television on Sunday. Keep a personal journal. Grow a vegetable garden. Keep a year’s supply of food in your garage. Hold special family worship meetings every Monday night. Read the scriptures every day. Pray morning and night. Pray always. (p. 16) Brooks observed that the established and accepted roles for men and women were clear and without deviation: “priesthood belonged to men, and motherhood to women” (p. 97), and this was expected to continue throughout the afterlife, where righteous men and women who were admitted to the highest level of heaven would continue to perpetuate their families and eventually be given their own worlds to rule. In the FLDS, young women were required to sew their wedding dresses long before the ceremony, as they might be given as little as two hours’ notice before their arranged marriage was to take place (p. 75), and women were to turn over any money they earned to their husbands (p. 149). Rules were also extensive for members of the Peoples’ Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, as Deborah Layton (1998) explained: The rules were endless; besides having no privacy at home, we were not allowed to leave the house unless we were with at least one other person. It was impossible to ever be alone. We all slept together on the floors or wherever we could find space and there was always someone awake. (p. 225) The extensive vigilance of Jim Jones and his leadership made it very difficult for members to envision bending or breaking the rules, as there was always someone among them who could provide reminders or report deviance

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to authorities. Jones’s voice was even broadcast over loudspeakers throughout Jonestown twenty-four hours a day. Stott (2017) and Walker (2016) were not permitted to socialize outside of their respective Exclusive Brethren and Worldwide Church of God communities. Stott writes below about the regulations she lived under: We weren’t allowed to talk to the other children at school, I’d say. They told us that everyone outside the Brethren was part of Satan’s army and they were all out to get us. If you didn’t do exactly what they said, they’d expel you, and then your family wouldn’t be allowed to speak to you ever again. People committed suicide. People went mad. Yes, this was Brighton. Yes, this was Brighton in the sixties. Yes, during flower power. In the suburbs. During the sexual revolution. Yes. It’s hard to explain. (p. 17) In this paragraph, Stott recollects some of the tragic results of these restrictions on people’s lives, including psychological distress and suicide. She also expresses the struggles she has encountered in accurately conveying the extremes of her upbringing to others. It is not easy to make outsiders understand why people continue to live in such a manner, and for the second generation and beyond, it takes tremendous effort to make sense out of how, exactly and specifically, indoctrination functioned in their lives.

Relationship Patterns

Relationships between people within cults varied depending on the group. In her Satmar Orthodox community, Deborah Feldman (2012) experienced meaningful relationships with only one half of her family, claiming that “only the ones with problems will talk to me” (p. 14), and Guest (2004) only found out much later, years after he had left the Rajneeshis, that he had been repeatedly bullied throughout his childhood years. Another former member told him this was because he was “young, scrawny, and detached” (p. 283). Many families in the Exclusive Brethren were financially dependent on higher-ups in the group, Stott (2017) reported. As time went by and the rules became increasingly strict, members were not permitted to join unions or professional associations or to even eat lunch with non-Brethren colleagues in their respective workplaces. As a result, many people lost their jobs and were forced to depend increasingly on the community (p. 160). This is another demonstration of Lifton’s (1989) milieu control, in which communities attempt to make members’ lives as devoted as possible to the groups’ interests.

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Patterns of Spiritual Practice

Cult members also differed greatly in their responses to spirituality. While Guest (2004) and other children at the Rajneeshi ashram were drawn to the “noisy” forms of meditation (p. 62) practiced in the group, he was not personally compelled by any of the ideologies. Despite the oppressive and punitive nature of her Amish upbringing, Garrett (Garrett & Farrant, 2003) was very much drawn to spirituality—which continued throughout her post-Amish life. She wrote, “The God I knew was kind, considerate, and forgiving. And I was praying to him still—at home and in church” (p. 112). It is noteworthy that Garrett was able to conjure her own god-image and wholly and confidently reject the Amish God. In Westboro, Phelps-Roper (2019) wrote about the “saturation” of her daily indoctrination: “each day I had the privilege of being saturated in our doctrines and these questions of eternal significance” (p. 77). As a six-yearold child, Miscavige-Hill (2013) felt eager to sign her Scientology “billion-year contract” to join the Sea Org and “to commit myself to the cause that was so dear to my parents” (p. 2). For Debbie Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004) in the FLDS, her childhood pattern of spiritual understanding centred around suffering. Following her mother’s death during her childhood, Palmer believed that she “needed to be reminded constantly that the only way [she] would ever get to be with Mother and with Christ was to suffer” (p. 318). Unfortunately, this convoluted pattern of understanding would aid and abet years of reinforcing physical and psychological abuse from her stepmother, husband, and others in the community. For the memoirists considered in this study, the effectiveness of indoctrination appeared to be connected to the depth of the attachment bond to parents or family. Those with stronger attachment bonds (Palmer & Perrin, 2004; Phelps-Roper, 2019; Tarawa, 2017; Walker, 2016) were highly committed to their groups’ ideologies, at least in childhood, while those whose attachment bonds were insecure or threatened (Feldman, 2012; Guest, 2004; Jones, Jones, & Buhring, 2007; Tamm, 2009) struggled more with accepting the ideologies of their groups. Leisure Time

We now look at the ways in which second-generation cult members spent their free time, if they had access to any. Several memoirists reported being compelled by the natural world. Below, Guest describes his mini-escapes from the Rajneeshi ashram: We were already spending more and more of our time away from the adults, in the forests around the edges of the grounds where we knew we would be

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alone. We went out in the forest to be among the plants, the oak, the silver birch, the single lilac, the nettles, the avenue of cherry trees. (p. 124) Also left to her own devices much of the time, Celeste Jones (Jones et al., 2007) offered a similar vignette of her early childhood in the Children of God: During the day I would run free, playing with the children within the camp’s grounds and along the beach. There were big, coloured pebbles to collect, and dead starfish, shells and sea urchins. There was so much to see and do I never stopped playing from dawn to dusk. My hair would go unbrushed for days. (p. 17) Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) too describes the delights of a childhood spent in nature with an abundance of playmates on the FLDS compound: I had dozens of brothers and sisters and cousins to play with—in a huge yard surrounded by mountains, with lots of trees, hidden vistas, streams, fresh air, and places to explore … we took full advantage of our frosty playground. (p. 50) As for Walker (2016), he wrote that he and his brother “like[d] sitting on the retaining wall near the water to watch the seagulls hover above the waves” (p. 90). In Lilia Tarawa’s (2017) and Amber Scorah’s (2019) cases, free time in Gloriavale and the Jehovah’s Witnesses was spent bonding with a close friend. Scorah had begun an online relationship with a man in California while living and working in China (p. 166). Both women were able to transcend the milieu control within their environments and found ways to form bonds that cultivated discussion and critical thinking, thus challenging cult ideologies. These discussions would eventually lead to the development of new perspectives regarding beliefs that they had never before confronted. The formation of these outsider bonds was in complete contradistinction to the rules and practices of their communities, but members could be resourceful in finding momentary escape. In noting what was helpful to recovery for the second generation and beyond, Lalich and McLaren (2018) listed: therapy, friendships, schooling, and finding a job (p. 117). The most advantageous initial strategies, however, were finding websites, discussion boards, and blogs dedicated to former cult members and, in particular, those geared towards members of their own communities. This was helpful both on emotional and psychological levels, as well as practical levels (finding work, resources, clothing, and helpful organizations) (p. 117).

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Compelling Objects and Activities

Patterns of daimonic appearances were reflected in the objects and hobbies that intrigued the memoirists, both during and after their cult involvement. In her Satmar Orthodox Jewish community, Deborah Feldman (2012) would sneak forbidden books home from the library and hide them under her bed. As a result, she became a proficient reader in comparison to her classmates, who did not read on their own and performed several grades below average. At school, this became a point of pride and satisfaction for Feldman. As she shared, “[The class loves] it when I read, because my loud, lively reading and expressive interpretation of the story actually make the session fun” (p. 92). Garrett (Garrett & Farrant, 2003) expressed a similar literary proclivity while she was living amongst her Amish family. “My private study,” she wrote, “—absorbing any outside reading material I could get my hands on—gave me an intellectual edge that kept others off guard” (p. 150). For Guest (2004), small objects he could collect and keep near at hand drew his attention: the green visor that had fallen off the helmet of one of my Lego spacemen. A piece of blue glass I found on the pavement. I held on to what I could, and what I could hold on to was what fitted in my pockets. (p. 221) Perhaps this hobby evolved out of his inability to keep his toys safe from other children in the commune; small objects that fit into pockets stood a better chance of retention in a community where all was shared. In all, tiny glimpses of objects and activities that lit a small fire within these memoirists tended to have lasting resonance. Objects and Activities that Repelled

There were also objects and activities that instigated an opposing reaction and were repellent to second-generation survivors. During her years in the Transcendental Meditation community, Claire Hoffman (2016) expressed disdain for several aspects of her personal and cultic life: “I didn’t like my mom’s boyfriend or her newfound interest in cheesy financial self-help, or the Movement’s emphasis on wealth as a sign of spiritual success. I didn’t like being poor” (p. 141). For Amber Scorah (2019), even after she was disfellowshipped from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, she still rejected the outside world out of a long-instilled fear, even though she had nothing else left of her community to cling to (p. 57). In the Satmar Orthodox community, Feldman (2012) expressed being tired of “all the staring and judging, the endless gossiping of the neighbors, the impossibility of

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keeping anything private” (p. 189). The push and pull of attraction and repulsion might be considered as related to the creative and destructive sides of the daimonic—how this internal force either motivated members or did the complete opposite. Accordingly, they also seem to relate to nascent or formative manifestations of daimonic awareness. Rebellion

The phenomenological category of rebellion revealed that apart from the four memoirists in this study who engaged in alcohol and drug use (Guest, 2004; Hoffman, 2016; Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009; Walker, 2016), most of the forms of rebellion seen among these second-generation cult members would appear to be comparatively benign—from the standards and perspectives of mainstream Western culture. What is different here is how severely the behaviours were looked upon within highly restrictive communities, as well as how they were punished. Indeed, given their contexts, some of these rebellions may be considered extremely brave. Rebelling in Search of Fun and Personal Interest

Most forms of second-generation rebellion appear aligned with the regularly occurring resistances and struggles against boundaries associated with adolescence, although rebellion within cults did not always wait for adolescence. Within this phenomenological category, the most prevalent motive for rebellion was a search for fun and entertainment, or to assuage curiosity around personal interests. Among those who would sneak out of their confines in search of fun were Tim Guest (2004) in the Rajneeshi ashram, Jessop (2007), and Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) in the FLDS. For Guest, when the rules of the ashram began to tighten, he and a few others were still able to engage in some “forbidden fun” (p. 231). He describes their temporary escapes below: We strapped ourselves into the new rope-pulley fire escape—the one we had been told explicitly never to touch, not unless the whole place was definitely burning down—then jumped out the window and drifted gently down to the ground. (p. 231) For Jessop (2007) and her friends, forays outside of their permitted boundaries at age thirteen took place during Sunday night theology lessons. After a large-group meeting, instead of showing up for their breakout classes, several teens would run to the bathroom and jump out the window. Jessop wrote that “The boys did exactly the same thing from their bathroom” (p. 49). They would

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then flee to the local reservoir, where they were “home free”—according to Jessop. “This was the first time ever in our lives that we could socialize with the opposite sex in an unsupervised way” (p. 49). They would sit and talk, watching the time carefully so that they could return to be collected from the school by their parents, and the class was large enough that the teacher did not notice their absence for a time. When he was younger, Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) would sneak with his brothers to the Cottonwood River in the summer, where they would “dare each other to jump in and see who could withstand the freeze the longest” (pp. 78–79). As he got older, these outings would transform into teen parties in the surrounding mountains, complete with alcohol that Jeffs smuggled in. While some memoirists were sneaking out of their allotted confines, others were sneaking into forbidden places. Feldman (2012) would take the bus to a library located a half hour away from her Orthodox home in Brooklyn, even though there was one located closer to home. In doing so, she was less likely to be caught borrowing English books (p. 26). Stott (2017) also visited the library, which was forbidden to members of the Exclusive Brethren. The internal monologue below demonstrates the justifications and mental gymnastics that enabled her to go through with the activity: The Lord had not said it was all right for me to go into the school library, but he hadn’t exactly said it wasn’t either. Usually he sent a sign. I was good at looking for signs—a bird flying one way or another, the wind blowing toward me or away from me, even car license plates could be signs. He hadn’t sent a sign this time. The library door was open. That, I persuaded myself, probably meant that it was all right, the Lord must be showing me the way. (p. 188) In other forms of interest-seeking rebellion, Westover’s (2018) desire for a forbidden education led her to one day approach her father and bravely blurt out the words, “I want to go to school” (p. 66)—a proclamation that was not well received. Scorah (2019) was not supposed to work outside of her illegal proselytizing for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in China. However, she soon found herself running a cultural and language instruction podcast for foreigners living in the country. Here she describes her excitement at reaching out to the public and receiving its feedback: “When the episode aired, I listened and scoured the comments section for people’s thoughts on it. Even though it might have been an activity I could have gotten in trouble for, I was still very interested” (p. 111). As mentioned earlier, music was a big draw for several memoirists. Feldman wrote, “I lie awake for hours at night with my headphones on, listening to foreign, promiscuous tunes I never knew existed. I like electronic and trance music” (p. 115). The only instrument allowed in

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Garrett’s Amish community was the harmonica, so at age twenty-one, she covertly purchased one. As she expressed, “my motivations for buying the mouth organ were unequivocal. I loved music, and I was lashing out at my lack of freedoms” (p. 50). During her years in the Transcendental Meditation private school, a time she spent mostly sneering and rolling her eyes at her teachers, Hoffman (2016) took refuge in writing. She wrote, “ultraviolet miniature fantasy-horror stories. Little children being swooped up by dark beings, husbands and wives assaulting each other” (p. 184). As her rebellion, she chose a form of erasure, deciding not to challenge the Maharishi’s knowledge directly but “enjoyed writing about a world where it didn’t exist” (p. 184). Tamm (2009) wanted to become a journalist but was not permitted by her guru, Sri Chinmoy, to attend university. Instead, she wrote an article glorifying the guru’s artwork, which he loved and published as required reading for the community. This led to receiving the guru’s permission to hone her journalistic skills, which pleased her greatly. She wrote, “I was empowered by my own manipulative magic, and it reminded me of the times as a little girl I had charmed Guru into bending the rules for me” (p. 228). Speaking Up

The next most prevalent form of rebellion was speaking up against or verbally opposing authority. When Brooks (2012) became disenchanted with her (LatterDay Saint/Mormon) religion’s behaviour towards opposing LGBTQ individuals, she took up the position of actively supporting the latter, engaging in student protests, strikes, and sit-ins, and even allowing herself to be arrested. She wrote, “I graduated from BYU, without a husband, returned my diploma in protest, and left Utah for a PhD program in Los Angeles” (p. 130). During a period when her Scientology community was attempting to prevent her from getting married, Miscavige-Hill (2013) was forced to undergo extensive “security checking.” At a certain point, she got up and walked out of these sessions without permission. In her Orthodox community, Feldman (2012) felt “an unexplained duty to the truth” (p. 21) and was branded “a mechitsef, an insolent one” for repeatedly commenting on her teachers’ misquotations or grammatical errors. When Hoffman (2016) asked her TM teachers for “evidence that the Age of Enlightenment was dawning” (pp. 143–144), or challenged them in several other ways, she was deflected with cautionary reminders that she was fortunate to have been offered a scholarship to their private school. Westover (2018) defied her parents’ rules and demands more than once, driving her injured brother to the hospital when hospitals were forbidden in her family (p. 146), finding an inner conviction never to be a plural wife (p. 246), and telling her father, “You will not,” when he threatened to issue rebukes to her professors at her university

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graduation (p. 250). Finally, Jessop (2007) said the following to Warren Jeffs, prophet of the FLDS: If my reward in the afterlife is being with Merril Jessop, then I’m not so sure going to hell is such a bad thing … Maybe in hell I won’t have to deal with as much abuse as I would in heaven living with Merril. (p. 297) Rebellious Appearances

Some second-generation memoirists rebelled against codes dictating manners of dress and appearance. In Gloriavale, Tarawa (2017) was told not to be a “stumbling block for [her] brothers in Christ” (pp. 165–166) by tying her cardigan around her waist—as this would allegedly accentuate her hips. When community members moved her belt to a different position on her waist and tightened it there, she would “angrily” loosen it again as soon as their backs were turned. Despite feelings of guilt, Tarawa also gravitated towards worldly clothing and make-up (p. 178) instead of the required uniform of an ankle-length blue dress, smock, and white headdress. In deciding to shave her legs, she committed “a naughty act” (p. 217). Juliana Buhring (Jones et al., 2007) called her tattoo her “secret rebellion” (p. 368), and Brooks (2012) was given a pearl necklace by her Mormon bishop—meant to symbolize her virtue—and refused to wear it (p. 102). Miscavige-Hill (2013) pierced her belly button and lied to a superior about having it done (p. 268). In the FLDS, Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004) became enamoured with a taffeta evening gown and was “determined to have a night in this dress” (pp. 209–210)—unfortunately, this wish remained unfulfilled, although she did go as far as to try it on. Westover (2018) rolled up her sleeves to let her skin breathe during hot weather, and in spite of her father yanking them down and telling her, “This ain’t a whorehouse,” (p. 136), repeatedly rolled them back up again. Finally, Jessop (2007) reported selling five thousand dollars’ worth of cosmetics to FLDS women, “in a community where makeup was strictly forbidden” (p. 209).

Sacred Rebellion

Some memoirists went against or sabotaged activities that were deemed sacred in their communities. During a vow ceremony in the Rajneeshi community, when he was supposed to be chanting, Guest (2004) reported that he and his friends changed the words to the chants. He wrote: “We made up different words and droned them under our breath so the adults couldn’t hear: ‘Buddham Dongalong Bart-faaaaarty’” (p. 228). Feldman (2012) stopped going to the mikvah

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(a ritual purification bath). While she was supposed to be there, she confessed, “sometimes I just park the car in front of the Starbucks on Route 59 and watch the modern Orthodox girls study for exams” (p. 219). In the TM community, where “positivity was paramount” (p. 130), Hoffman’s (2016) brother was accused of being negative. She wrote, “One day, Mom got a call from one of Stacey’s teachers, reporting that he had been drawing monsters in art class. Monsters were not part of Bliss Consciousness” (p. 130). Westover (2018) reported a defining moment in her Mormon life when she refused a blessing from her father (priesthood authority to give blessings is held solely by men in this religion) that would have enabled her to maintain her relationship with the family. She describes this below: This was the moment: if I accepted the blessing, he would cleanse me. He would lay his hands on my head and cast out the evil thing that had made me say what I had said, that had made me unwelcome in my own family. All I had to do was yield, and in five minutes it would be over. I heard myself say no. (p. 302) Some members sabotaged their group’s or another member’s cause on a more impactful scale. When the LDS church decided to support anti-gay legislature, Brooks (2012) stole and destroyed voter information data that she found at the church (p. 166). Instead of praising her abusive cousin to a prospective marriage partner as was expected in her ultra-Orthodox community, Feldman (2012) defied the tradition and told his intended that he was “a bad apple, a crazy, a schlechter” (p. 71). When Jessop (2007) began to realize that she would not be able to refute a sister-wife’s accusations, she began to spend time away from the family, refusing to contribute to cooking and cleaning wherever possible. She wrote: I stopped coming home and trying to help Ruth clean house. I continued to lock my bedroom door. It improved my life immensely … It was all about power and domination. I opted out, which was seen as outright rebellion. Now Barbara could go to Merril with further proof of my unworthiness as a wife. For her it was a win no matter what I did. When I realized that, I just did what was going to be best for me. (p. 104) At this point of resignation, Jessop realized that no matter what she did, her actions would inspire negative judgements, and so she decided to act in selfhonouring ways. Along with these forms of rebellion, other types involved stealing food or other items from their communities, seeking independence,

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using alcohol and/or drugs, pursuing love or romance, running away from home, meeting outsiders, and rebellions against gender oppression and subjugation. Punishment

Punishments for rebellion varied from community to community. In the Children of God, “retraining centres” were established for teenagers and rebellious adults, and “corrections” were given to rule-breakers in the form of physical punishments and ostracism from the community. During a one-month period of isolation, during which she was not allowed to speak to anyone, Children of God member Celeste Jones (Jones et al., 2007) was forced to read “Mo Letters” and write reactions to them on the subjects of “rebellion, yieldedness, submission and demon possession” (p. 88). Senior Scientologists also employed methods of separation that Miscavige-Hill (2013) deliberately avoided as a child. As an adult, she described her reasons for not having rebelled at a younger age, demonstrating an insightful understanding of the punitive dynamics in her community and the futility of acting out: I would have been separated from the group, not allowed to talk to my friends, forced to make up for my behavior, not allowed to have libs [freedoms] or attend special ceremonies and events. The only place to go from not following rules was back to following rules. (pp. 63–64) In the FLDS, punishments were meted out by male “priesthood heads” and husbands or sister-wives with more power in the family. For Jessop (2007), this involved having her children physically beaten by other wives, her husband, or his adult children when she was not present (p. 182), and her husband declaring that all sister-wives would be present in the delivery room when Jessop gave birth, despite her stated wish for privacy (p. 190). Jonestown/The Peoples’ Temple enacted the most horrifying punishments of all. Kent (2010) documented that children in this community were beaten with boards, made to eat their own vomit, and forced to eat hot peppers or have them inserted into their rectums. Knowing this, it is incomprehensible how anyone could defend a group’s religious rights and freedoms and turn a blind eye to such suffering among innocents. Yearning/Longing and Curiosity

Memoirists expressed deep longings for and curiosity towards certain things that they did not possess or experience in their lives. Hillman (2013c) expressed

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that the things we long for inform us about deeper aspects of our character and identity. Our yearnings are meant to move us forward in life, not necessarily to be fulfilled, but to keep us from remaining stagnant. Longings for Community, Family, and Belonging

Fourteen of the twenty memoirists expressed a longing for family, friendship, support, and community. They yearned for connection, restitution regarding conflicts, and a sense of belonging. In the Rajneeshi community, even though he was constantly surrounded by potential playmates, Tim Guest (2004) claimed, “We had our soft toys, and our cornflakes, and each other, and it was nearly enough. But I wanted my mum” (p. 74). The lateral attachments that Guest formed with other children could not take the place of a stable parental bond. In this light, we recall Neufeld and Maté’s (2004) observation of inherently insecure connections between immature beings—how these fickle connections never allow a child respite from the unrelenting pursuit of love, significance, and approval, as would the unconditional love of a mature parent or caregiver (p. 119). During her years in Scientology, Remini (2015) was frustrated that her mom “was hardly ever home because she was at the church” (p. 12). PhelpsRoper (2019) expressed great love and high regard for her Westboro parents, along with a need for their approval, but this yearning was frustrated by the seemingly impossible nature of its fulfilment, considering her mother’s high expectations. She wrote: The expectation of total obedience may have been the same in every Westboro family, but no one exacted it as vigorously, tenaciously, or continuously as my mother. I harbored few desires stronger than the one for her approval, but her standards seemed always to be shifting, tightening like a noose until I felt choked with the futility of my own rage. (p. 24) Both Phelps-Roper’s longing for her mother’s approval and her mother’s refusal to offer it created a consistent state of unfulfillment that, over time, gave rise to a persistent and painful longing. The state of continual, unassuaged longing was related to fundamental absences from their lives. Archetypal yearnings served to connect cult survivors to these integral and pressing needs through the pain that this dynamic engendered. Even though Lilia Tarawa’s (2017) parents had left the Gloriavale community prior to her departure, giving her a somewhat soft place to land (emotionally—the family still struggled financially) in engaging with the outside world, the whole family experienced a sense of rootlessness in the absence of a spiritual community. As Tarawa expressed, “Even though I’d left Gloriavale behind me,

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in my heart I was still a Christian. My family searched for a church to join. I longed for the friends and community a church would give me” (p. 266). As a child, Brooks (2012) looked forward to the second coming, when she would ostensibly be able to live among people capable of understanding her, instead of as a misunderstood Mormon amid a larger population of Evangelists in California. She expressed that these imagined individuals would form a community, “to whom I would have to explain nothing, with whom I could wordlessly share knowing looks over mint chocolate-chip milkshakes in the very bosom of Zion” (p. 116). This image was enough to cultivate optimism in the young LDS girl, who was fully engaged in her faith until adolescence. For Juliana Buhring (Jones et al., 2007), living with the Children of God in India meant spending a great deal of time away from her parents. Her yearning for family connections eventually reached such a desperate apex that when a local family mistook the Children of God school for an orphanage and inquired about adopting one of the children, Buhring wanted to go along with them. As she expressed, “They were a family wanting a child—I was a child without a family. I nearly jumped out and shouted, ‘Take me!’ Dad did not even feature in the picture” (pp. 152–153). For Feldman (2012), the decision to leave her grandparents, who had raised her, and the Satmar Orthodox Jewish community was fraught with fear. In a doubtful moment, she pondered, “can you ever really leave the place you came from? Isn’t it best to stay where you belong, rather than risk trying to insert yourself somewhere else and failing?” (p. 81). Eventually, though, Feldman was able to confront those fears as her yearnings for independence and freedom intensified over the years. Neglected by her Sufi family, Turner (2017) “developed a fierce independence” (p. 136) and was unable to trust that anyone could either lead or protect her. Later, she recognized that “underneath that show of invulnerability was this collapsing waiting to happen: exhaustion, grief, and the deep longing to receive support” (p. 136). Overall, a desperate sense of loneliness and a longing for comfort were predominant features colouring the experiences of many second-generation memoirists—a reflection of deep isolation. From a Jungian perspective, we see the archetype of wholeness demonstrated here in a projective sense, in the form of family and community; to yearn for this is to yearn for what makes us whole. Longing for Freedom and Independence

Paradoxically—despite expressing a yearning for family and community connections—seven of the twenty memoirists simultaneously longed for freedom and independence. As an adult in her early twenties who had been raised in the Children of God, Celeste Jones (Jones et al., 2007) “yearned for air and light and freedom” (p. 336). Miscavige-Hill (2013) expressed the futility of wishing

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to be her authentic self after spending time with a friend who she believed appreciated her for who she was and did not require her to be a role model. “I just wanted freedom to be myself,” she wrote, “but I knew how impossible that was” (p. 218). In a cultic community, the persona of “member,” “devotee,” or “follower” supersedes that of being a unique individual, and understandably, many second-generation members found it difficult to acknowledge any sort of independence, even as they yearned for it. Lifton (2019) named the concept of “doctrine over person” as one of his eight forms of pressure against individual expression in totalist groups (p. 83). This is an overtly anti-daimonic approach, aiming to reshape character and identity to fit “the rigid contours of the doctrinal mold” (p. 85) by avoiding any alignment with an individual’s inherent potential or inner qualities. Using this technique, cult leaders rewrite history to claim a false logic that replaces individual experience (p. 84). Truths are blurred, and communal doctrines are elevated above individual concerns. The individual becomes of little to no importance. When we meet a person who has endured this experience, yet has uncovered the strength to assert their own will to live authentically against such daunting odds, rather than judging them as weak for having “fallen for” the deceits of cultic indoctrination, we might more accurately view them as people who can teach us to find clues regarding our own inner strengths in our own restrictive contexts. Leaving an oppressive community that you have been raised in since childhood requires tremendous strength and a great deal of effort and bravery. Second-generation cult survivors who leave their communities demonstrate the human capacity for resilience, which Lalich and McLaren (2018) define as an individual’s ability to “confront, manage, and heal from stressful and traumatic events” (p. 126). According to these authors, we hold the potential to transmute our suffering into empathy, insight, and compassion. Steven Hassan (2018) observed that while not all cult members leave, many do, even those who have lived their entire lives inside of a high-demand group. An individual’s desire to experience freedom to be who they truly are can override the extraordinary powers of a cult and its leaders (p. 49), and our second-generation survivors certainly exemplify this capacity. Singer (2003) also noted at the time of her writing that more individuals than ever before are joining cults, but more are also leaving (p. xvii). While a search for meaning initially drew their parents and caregivers into a cult, that very same appetite led their children out of it. The search for meaning is integral to our human lives. As a result of this dynamic, supports for individuals leaving cults are as necessary as in previous years—if not more so—as cults become increasingly sophisticated and as modern technology creates a means for indoctrination to perpetuate and travel more swiftly and widely. In the following passage, the burgeoning tension between Feldman’s (2012) desire to individuate within her

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ultra-Orthodox community—while continuing the charade of devotion—is almost palpable: On the outside, I keep kosher and dress modestly and pretend to care deeply about being a devout Hasidic woman. On the inside, I yearn to break free of every mold, to tear down every barrier ever erected to stop me from seeing, from knowing, from experiencing. (p. 233) Jessop (2007) had wanted freedom to go to school and obtain an education from a very young age, but her desire to do so was thwarted by her knowledge that leaving the FLDS would result in banishment from her family, not only for this lifetime but also for all of eternity. She expressed these conflicting emotions while watching her sister leave the community: Linda’s escape was worse than death. She would never be part of our lives on earth again, nor would we see her in the afterlife. I hated the thought of letting her go, but as I watched her disappear into the night, secretly I envied her. (p. 56) Over time, these strong yearnings for independence would win out, as Jessop was able to find fulfilling work located far from her husband and sister-wives while still in the FLDS (until they eventually dismantled her employment). It was after one too many cycles of sabotage—of tasting a small amount of freedom and personal fulfilment and then having it taken away—that Jessop would finally flee the FLDS, concluding that it would be better to be sent to hell than to continue to live the rest of her life in the “heavenly” realm of abuse and oppression (p. 297). Yearnings for Knowledge

Thirteen of the twenty memoirists expressed a yearning for both specific and general forms of knowledge, and at times this was directed towards a particular vocation. As an Amish child, Garrett (Garrett & Farrant, 2003) “was forever going to the dictionary to see what words meant.” She wrote that she “was determined not to be a third party to anything” (p. 19) nor to simply accept the lessons she was given as fact. As a Jehovah’s Witness, Scorah (2019) was also interested in language, but not her native English. She wrote about her dreams of working for a small company that taught Mandarin by podcast when she moved to Shanghai, instead of teaching English as most foreigners did. As she expressed, “I was much more interested in Mandarin than … my mother tongue” (p. 108). As noted above, Feldman (2012), too, was a voracious reader. Even though girls’

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education was very basic and ended early in the Satmar community, she became “determined to get that coveted A” (p. 113) when a teacher communicated to her and her classmates that it was pointless, given their predetermined futures as young wives and mothers to throngs of children. Despite being told that Charles Darwin had been “sent to earth by Satan,” young Rebecca Stott (2017) felt that the theory of evolution “had always seemed a strange and beautiful idea to me, one I couldn’t cast off” (p. 244), and intense curiosity had led Kristina Jones’s (Jones, Jones & Buhring, 2007) mother to seek out a book she was drawn to, written by David Berg’s daughter and exposing many secret practices of the Children of God. Before she could read it, however, she had to overcome the threatening sensation that a lightning bolt might potentially strike her dead (p. 204). Jessop (2007) dreamed of becoming a paediatrician, reasoning that she might be permitted by FLDS authorities to become a doctor if she worked only with children (p. 63). Remini (2015) “could hardly wait to start fulfilling [her] dreams of being an actress” (p. 40)—a goal that was supported by Scientology, and which she achieved. Tamm (2009) longed to go to college, like her high school classmates, but knew that a request to do so would be denied by her guru and that her parents would acquiesce to his decision (p. 141). Sometimes the desire for knowledge took the form of magical thinking for these memoirists—a longing for special powers, a personal witnessing of esoteric mysteries, or forms of knowledge not yet made available at memoirists’ specific levels within the cult. As a devout member of the Worldwide Church of God, Walker (2016) envisioned his post-apocalyptic role as a god who would stand in judgement of others. “I won’t abuse my superpowers,” he wrote, “no matter how great they are. I hope to be able to fly and see through walls, but what I really want is a Captain America shield or a lightning bolt, like Captain Marvel’s” (p. 19). For Miscavige-Hill (2013), it was the mystery-shrouded “OT levels” in Scientology that compelled. She wrote, “I couldn’t wait to climb the Bridge and find out what the OT Levels were. I figured they had something to do with how we all came to exist, which was something I often wondered about” (p. 210). In Sri Chinmoy’s community, a group of disciples was at one point chosen to help the guru look up literary metaphors that he could insert into his writings, and Tamm (2009) deeply desired entrée into this cohort. She wrote, “Though Guru openly disapproved of intellectuals and academic pursuits, this group was as close to a sanctioned band of academic elite as there was in the Center, and I had wanted entry in the worst way” (p. 116). Longings for “Normalcy”

At the same time, second-generation members also expressed a desire for normalcy or a sense of groundedness in contrast to their “flighty” or unstable environments. When Jeffs (Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009) began dating his first girlfriend

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after leaving the FLDS, he described her as a “calming presence” and “an anchor for me, creating real stability for the first time since I had left the church. I really wanted a normal life” (p. 175). Years later, when looking back on her years in the Jehovah’s Witnesses group after her infant son’s death, Scorah (2019) expressed: I want to try out a different path, a different cult/culture, and see if it will lead to less anguish, because certainly no other path could have led to worse than this. I want to come back as a woman with good parents, who goes to college, who is allowed to love whomever she loves, has children who live, work she enjoys, and a home with family and friends who laugh about the old days. (p. 272) What many individuals take for granted was, for Scorah and others who abandoned their cults and the attachments that went with them, the subject of deep yearning and unfulfilled desires and hopes. For Stott (2017), this took the form of a yearning for literal truths and stabilities. She wrote, “I grew tired of the foggy, upside-down, vertigo dream world I’d lived in since Aberdeen. I began to crave facts, certainties, and meanings, walls that didn’t crumble and give way when I pressed against them” (p. 265). In the following moment from his childhood, Walker (2016) also vocalized his desire for a more regular sort of existence: Tonight, after brushing my teeth, I stare into the mirror again, only this time I dare to voice the thought that crept into my mind during recess and frightened me even more than our ministers’ sermons. “I wish I hadn’t been chosen,” I whisper. “I wish I was just a normal boy.” (p. 78) Other categories of yearning were also observed, to a lesser degree. These were yearnings for justice, improved gender roles, material possessions, affection, travel, role models/idols, legacy/heritage, and time in nature. As we see in these examples, yearning can be a powerful form of motivation in our lives, regardless of whether or not those yearnings are fulfilled. Yearning keeps us in a dynamic state and can help move us out of a sense of “stuckness.” Because of their attendant intensity, it is likely that states of yearning are closely related to the daimonic.

PART III

The Recovery of Authenticity Depth Psychology and the Reclamation of the Self As we leave behind the specificity of the high-demand worlds in which the memoirists lived, the final three chapters return us to some of the ways in which cultic dynamics can appear in the wider cultural spheres, offering ways in which we might see through and deconstruct undue influence and coercive control. Chapter 8 discusses the shadow elements of our current modern Western culture, chapter 9 brings attention to undue influence and daimonic relevance in the realm of raising children, and the final chapter orients us towards a healing path that may aid individuals and helping professionals in recovery from what has been lost to oppression and subjugation of the Self.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-11

8 THE SHADOW OF MODERN WESTERN CULTURE

Our Blind Spots

We are a brilliant and impatient species, capable of incredible feats of creativity and innovation, and many such innovations have ostensibly improved the quality of life for a privileged population. Our modern society encourages us to gravitate towards new ideas at an astonishing speed, and one that far outpaces our natural human capacities in many ways. We have developed the propensity to embrace and quickly utilize technologies that enter the consumer marketplace before they have been fully tested for their psychological and physiological effects on us and the systems we live in over time. But it is not useful to think of technology in binary terms of good or bad. They are so much more than this, are a part of the world we now live in, and as we hold this tension, we might ask ourselves: what images might arise that would suggest a positive way forward, in service to ourselves and to the collective? Thanks to our technological advances, many of us were able to stay in touch with family and friends using videoconferencing technology during the COVID-19 pandemic, which staved off loneliness for many. Students were also able to access online learning during a time when they were unable to attend school physically, and some of us were also able to work from home, an opportunity that has continued beyond the pandemic, which has the added benefit of less environmental impact—reducing commuter traffic congestion and CO2 emissions as well as conserving resources such as time and money, and enabling better support for working caregivers. Information-wise, research is at our fingertips. We can become acquainted with parts of the world we might not otherwise see, by way of audiovisual explorations, and become privy to thoughts and DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-12

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ideas that we may not otherwise have had access to. Importantly, technological adaptations have vastly improved the lives of neurodivergent and differently abled individuals. Few would want to part with any of these innovations. As with all innovations, however, the fervour over early adoption and onesided enthusiasm causes blind spots in our consciousness. Jung (1968d) wrote extensively about the importance of addressing our personal shadow, of bringing to consciousness what we do not wish to look at or accept, including aspects of our personality, actions we have taken, our propensities and tendencies, and so forth. He expressed that this is “an essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge” (CW 9ii, para. 14) and to expect “considerable resistance” when we do this kind of work. There is growth and promise in this kind of engagement, however, as Jung (1970d/1963) encouraged, “When there is a light in the darkness which comprehends the darkness, darkness no longer prevails” (p. 255 [CW 14, para. 345]). Without such explorations, however, we risk being blindsided by the elements that have built up in the shadow. This occurs not only on individual levels but also in the realm of the collective. We saw this earlier as we explored Slater’s (1998) insights regarding the Titanic and the ways in which the archetype of Titanism constellates a massive shadow in our collective that as history demonstrates, propels us towards breakdown, destruction, and unseen obstacles that we would be well-advised to bring into our awareness. No matter how wonderful the idea, all things have a shadow side, and if we can balance our inflated psychological consciousness with a sense of humility, peppered also with smidges of slowing down and cautious consideration, we stand a better chance of avoiding such a fate as the one that befell the Titanic. The following may seem like hyperbole, given the extremes of trauma enacted by cults and high-demand communities that do not typically relate to our day-to-day lives, but certain aspects of our modern society share uneasy similarities to those of cults. We are a social species with a need for attachment, but at times we lose sight of the idea that we are called upon to contribute in ways that we cannot access if we are too attuned to the collective noise. When our brains get crowded with external input, there is very little space for deep listening and inner attunement. As we noticed in the study, the daimon can convey messages quite softly and quietly. Connection to one’s individual wisdom requires a certain amount of silence, reverence, and a willingness to test ideas against the inner landscape. This does not mean shutting out the world, but rather inviting ideas inward to witness their interplay with what is occurring within our inner systems. This interplay is happening all the time, but it is much more interesting and fruitful to slow it down and notice the subtleties, to listen actively, and to consider and metabolize new ideas instead of preparing a notfully-digested response. We ourselves are parts of a series of complex relationships between interconnected systems (Yunkaporta, 2020) —not closed systems of rugged individuals standing in opposition to one another. When we develop

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our relationship to daimonic phenomena in our own lives, we are not entering a solipsistic realm of self-determination and individualism. Our gifts and unique talents must be cultivated, but they are not only for us. In their attempts to be closed systems, cults attempt to deny fundamental human rights and responsibilities to participate in the undeniable realities and scientific truths of interacting systems, as systems theory informs us (Gehart, 2018). But this is an impossible task, a false and hubristic assumption that we can actually separate in such a definitive manner. As we see in the lives of second-generation memoirists—in the doubts, dissonance, rebellions, dreams, images, and synchronicities—something deeper within us cannot abide such a severance. Our inner dynamics propel us towards that piece of information that stands in stark contrast to everything we have been taught in the cult; that physiological response that something is discordant. Cult leaders and those with a vested interest in coercive influence understand that individuals who enter a space of true contemplation and open-mindedness are dangerous to their cause. Acts to control and curb leakage from the system are intentional and pointed in cults; their prime efforts are directed towards the maintenance of a closed system that does not admit the messiness of dissent or uncertainty. Cultic Dynamics in Modern Western Culture

In his most recent work, Losing Reality, Robert Lifton (2019) reflected on his long study of the psychology of control and influence, observing that “cultlike behaviour is affected by context, and by large social and historical issues” (p. 99). Recent years have brought us some undeniably complex social issues and incredibly rapid shifts in Western society—from the onset of the digital age to climate change, wars, racial inequity, and a global pandemic. Hassan (2019) highlighted that when a society is amid rapid change, and when trust between major institutions is breaking down, cults proliferate (p. 65). I want to suggest, following Lifton and Hassan’s insights, that some of what we might refer to as cultic behaviours also proliferate, even outside of what we might normally consider to be a cult. Coercive persuasion and modes of oppression in the wider culture may not look exactly as they do within a cult, and may have different intentions embedded within them, but there are chilling similarities that bear scrutiny. In times of confusion, there is a potential to project our yearnings for safety, meaning, and value onto charismatic persons, formulaic groups, or ideologies. Unfortunately, many of those charismatic individuals possess narcissistic traits (not necessarily narcissistic personality disorder, but traits related to self-absorption and a lack of empathy and/or compassion for others). Believing that we are not vulnerable to this dynamic can create another seemingly paradoxical layer of vulnerability, as we may not be consciously looking out

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for patterns of harm. Most of us are aware of the more notorious cults—we read or hear of Jonestown, Waco, the Rajneeshis, Heaven’s Gate, NXIVM, and all of these situations seem so extreme, so bizarre, and so far removed from everyday reality that we shake our heads and wonder not how these communities came to be, incrementally, but rather what might be “wrong” with the people who became involved in something that represents such a radical departure from the norm. We make judgements about former cult members and stigmatize them as weaker in character or somehow flawed in ways that have made it difficult for them to relate to the “real world.” We fall prey to the fundamental attribution error, a psychological bias that causes us to interpret others’ behaviours as the result of disposition rather than environmental and social influences (Hassan, 2019, p. 71), or, I would add, a highly complex metabolization of both. While we may not end up in a cult per se, we are certainly not immune to other forms of coercive influence. Our current cultural climate opens a portal through which cultic forms of oppression may slip in, and these may lie at various points along the spectrum of oppression; anywhere from mild intrusions to stifling manipulations. All of this forms a murky river of confusion and dissonance, and it is not difficult to see why and how some of us slip off the banks and get caught in various types of cultic currents. Con artists, narcissistic cult leaders, and manipulators of all sorts exploit our yearnings for a sense of meaning and purpose, our attachments, sense of scarcity, and feelings of anxiety engendered during vulnerable moments in the wider culture by presenting alleged solutions to problems and balms for both physiological and psychological ailments. The memoirists in this study are all intelligent individuals with abundant gifts and talents who overcame the most incredible odds and endured great grief and loss in order to assert their rights to express those gifts and live lives of their choosing. Studying their narratives offers rich insights and considerations for our own explorations—they have much to teach us about the multifaceted ways in which soul speaks under oppression, regardless of the form or intensity of that oppression. Our vulnerability to coercive control comes from a number of sources, not, as we might assume, from character flaws, weaknesses, or faulty upbringing—yet this remains the stereotype. Those who utilize cultic techniques are masterful exploiters of some of our most admirable, beautiful, and redemptive human qualities—most especially our idealism, adaptability, and attachments to one another. It is the opposite of deficiency or disposition that leads people to cults in many cases. And of course, the second generation and beyond unfairly pay the price of their parents’ and caregivers’ choices through loss of agency and their groups’ pushback against daimonic expression. It is often timing, along with life and social circumstances, that has a great deal to do with the recruiting success of cultic endeavours, and our current historical moment demonstrates this most profoundly.

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Isolation

While we might look enviously at the apparent sense of community and camaraderie that we envision are experienced by people unified in ideology and interest, most cult members experience profound isolation. Stein (2017) broke this into three forms of isolation that occur within oppressive communities: isolation from the outside world; isolation from authentic relationships with other group members (due to controls placed around behaviour and modes of communication); and isolation from oneself (due to the discouragement of critical thinking and the resultant dissociation often connected to cultic dynamics). While it is straightforward to see these phenomena in a closed, high-demand community (from the outside), what does isolation look like in the wider culture? For this, we can look to the epidemic of loneliness now experienced by so many. Loneliness has been identified as a paradoxical hallmark of the digital age, a time when we have supposedly never been more “connected.” The form of connection currently experienced, however, is incomplete and results in a constant effort to reach out and feel seen and heard. We can be temporarily soothed by a sense of belonging in the company of others online, but our hunger for three dimensional levels of connection remains unsatiated. There is no doubt that smartphones have dramatically changed our way of life; most of us are now carrying a highly sophisticated computer in our pockets and handbags, offering us convenience, safety, and efficiency. The shadow side of this, however, has been observed in recent studies conducted with children and youth, although this shadow affects us all. Even though we are mostly aware that social media companies intentionally design their programmes to be addictive, the problem of excessive Internet use continues to rise globally (Bhargava & Velasquez, 2020), to the extent that the World Health Organization has identified it as a growing health concern. Advertisers make use of this addiction to promote their products and services to captive audiences in the attention economy. The results of Internet and social media addiction lead to multitudes of other problems, including: excessive focus on physical appearance, which can lead to disordered eating and health concerns, especially in youth (Iwanicka & Soroka, 2020); “phubbing”—ignoring people in one’s physical presence in favour of attuning to one’s phone (Talan, Dogan, & Kalinkara, 2023); bullying; radicalizing; loneliness (Hamad, Eweida, Rashwan, Menessy, & Khaled, 2023); the exertion of undue influence on geopolitical events (2016 U.S. election), and the polarizing of social groups (Bhargava & Velasquez, 2020), to name a few. The cultic influence that is apparent in this list mixes coercive persuasion and isolation in a toxic cocktail that has serious consequences for a person’s (and culture’s) health and well-being. To return to Stein’s (2017) observations of the three levels of isolation that occur under undue influence, addiction isolates us from the outside world, phubbing renders us isolated from authentic relationships, and because

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we are so surrounded in this state by the constant noise of thought, opinion, and influence, we become isolated from ourselves. In one study on compulsive digital use (CDU) and loneliness in children with a population of 300 participants (Hamad et al., 2023), results showed that 21.7% of school-age children demonstrated pathological addictive levels of CDU, 74% of that population were at sub-threshold levels of CDU, and only 4.3% were at a non-problematic level. Many reported feelings of loneliness in their lives—a sensation that people were near them but not with them. This seems to be an accurate societal snapshot. We are in proximity to one another, but not necessarily together. While we can argue that social media apps and businesses are not attempting to recruit people into cults as we typically conceive of them, the cultic practice of isolation from the wider society (in terms of one’s surroundings and the people in them), authentic relationships, and ourselves is wildly at play, and the constellating of power and influence, as well as the desire to separate people from their money, seem to be the prime motivators. In my own experience with the wellness influencer, the mechanisms of attachment were brought in to create the illusion of community at a time when gathering was impossible. But this is all smoke and mirrors, as there was no real community; everyone disappeared when I stopped making payments, revealing this to be more commodity than community. More time spent on devices equates to less time spent in nature, with each other, and in the company of the deeper, unconscious aspects of our individuating selves. The voice of the daimon is muffled and dismissed in favour of the “languageloaded” voices of certainty and persuasion that never cease when an individual has been seduced into hours spent online and are all beginning to sound very alike to one another in vernacular and expression, to use Lifton’s (2019) words, the air is filled with “thought-terminating clichés.” In a lecture given in May of 1996, James Hillman (2016) identified that aspects of our current age of globalism and hyper-communication reflect what he termed “Hermetic intoxication” (p. 257), presided over by the archetypal qualities of Hermes/Mercury, messenger of the gods and trickster daimon. The dynamic of our current age, according to Hillman, relates to the superficial nature of rampant, shallow forms of communication without attunement to deeper messagings. This involves a loss of ambiguity that leaves individuals with a residual sense of anxiety and “diffuse identity” (p. 255). As a reaction to this state of diffusion and loss of inner connection, we retreat to definitively demarcated spheres such as separatist movements or cults (p. 256). In an expansive, global-oriented society, there is a reactionary propensity to become defensively insular as we search for a sense of rootedness and relatedness. This has of course increased exponentially since Hillman made his observations. Cult leaders and other types of “undue influencers” take advantage of this cultural instability and enact combined forms of physiological and psychological persuasion techniques. These techniques are subtle and produce incremental behavioural changes (Singer, 2003). One such technique we have already seen

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is hypnosis. In the memoir study, we saw hypnosis enacted through the use of repetition—through chanting, slogans, or use of certain vocal tones. Similarly, online and in the wider culture, we can be lulled into vulnerable yet informal hypnotic or altered states by imagery, rhythmic slogans or chants (especially in politically charged environments such as rallies), and repetitive behaviours or stated beliefs (p. 152). Singer gives another example of cultural influence in the technique of universality. Phrases such as “Who among us has not stood on a hillside, looking out over a valley … and felt some mysterious emotion welling up in our heart?” (p. 155) can have a powerful galvanizing effect and can solicit cooperation. A well-cultivated veneer of universality and camaraderie can constellate a person’s need to belong, making them highly amenable to—or even excited by—whatever is being offered (a political perspective, a “VIP” sales package, an ideology, a therapeutic group, to name just a few examples). Engulfment

In a cultic group, engulfment in the community’s activities works in concert with isolation to create a sense of constant occupation (and preoccupation) that is engrossing enough to separate a person from outside people and interests (Stein, 2017). In the wider culture, this dynamic can be seen in an influencer or leader’s clamouring for attention. Because attention has become a lucrative commodity in the digital age, the rewards for garnering it can be plentiful. This can be done online by frequent social media posts and can also turn up in corporate environments. One study outlined its concerns about the “explosive” growth of interest in “transformational leadership” in business management (Tourish & Pinnington, 2002), remarking that due in part to its top-down structure of communicating values, this form of leadership has the potential to encourage authoritarianism, conformity, and the suppression of dissent (p. 167). They point out that this is in tension with employees’ rights “to retain a sense of identity, place, and purpose beyond their employer’s orbit” (p. 167). They suggest alternative leadership structures that enable the retention of the latter while encouraging processes of negotiation, conflict resolution, debate, and free speech, indicating that there is often a need to cross the line dividing leadership and followership; that these two systems are not closed and in fact benefit from the shared offerings of perspectives and insights. At the extreme end of corporate cultism is what is known as “large group awareness trainings,” or LGATs. These originated largely in the 1970s, during the Human Potential Movement. Lockwood (2011) used the term “corporate religion” in her investigation of the Landmark Education programme. She noted that despite their secular claims, the types of existential and ontological inquiry undertaken within this type of group constitute a form of “religiousity” (p. 229). The use of specialized language, claims of miraculous healings, and the sacred

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and transcendental subject matter feel like religion in modern guise, which may well be true if we consider the shifting nature of religion and spirituality in the context of modern consumer culture (p. 248). A Jungian perspective posits that our spiritual inclinations are instinctual and appear to need somewhere to land. Interdisciplinary scholar David Tacey (2020) calls the current psychological and cultural state of Western societies a “postsecular” era. He argued that in our collective, many people are experiencing a state of disorientation in the wake of past historical phases that were respectively defined first by naïve faith and later by reductive rationality. Tacey sees the current cultural phase as one of reorientation, in which we are attempting to recalibrate our relationship between these two. Such a phase is historically typified by first a collapse of belief, followed by a subsequent earnest search for “new ways of experiencing the world, self, and ultimate reality” (p. 1). An example of this can be seen in burgeoning movements towards spirituality that are not connected to traditional institutions. Tacey notes that this phenomenon of existential recalibration constellates the child archetype, the need for psychological rebirth into another incarnation of spiritual connectivity. It exemplifies a collective return to the desire for intimacy with the sacred or divine (numinous), not the mediated variety favoured by many religious institutions. This postsecular era, according to Tacey, is also a response to the suppressive nature of secularism, which has endeavoured to tamp down much of the fundamental nature of the human condition (p. 2), including our religious or spiritual instincts and inclinations. Jung (1936/1954c) explored in depth in what he termed the “religious function” (not affiliated with any particular faith but as related to spiritual instincts) of the psyche. Indeed, some of the current literature criticizing alternative spiritualities and New Age groups fails to consider the legitimate psychological and spiritual yearning that rests beneath their formation. There is a mythological—archetypal—dynamic stirring beneath these movements, a real yearning that arises out of a cultural and spiritual void. Langone (2021) noted that people experience psychological disequilibrium when their normal human requirements for meaning, purpose, and to be considered special are not met, and this too makes us vulnerable to cults, and cultish organizations. There is a need for us to acknowledge and tend to genuine psychological and emotional yearnings and inclinations rather than negating them by way of reason and logic or attempting to push them back into the shadow, which only strengthens their resistance. LGATs represent one example of the co-opting and channelling of this natural spiritual hunger. By creating (often expensive) culminating programmes that can only be experienced after a certain number of prerequisite courses have been taken, an aura of mystery piques and excites the religious/spiritual function. For example, the peak programme offered by Landmark, called “The Forum” is not described in any detail to outsiders or newcomers to the community at the

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outset, which renders it enigmatic, even sacred (p. 243). Before one can ascend to this level, however, there is much work to be done. After participating in the programme, Lockwood discussed its primary concept of “rackets,” which were defined as a person’s “fixed way of being, plus a personal complaint” (p. 244). This is reminiscent of a disease model, serving to instil the idea that a person’s usual mode of being is inherently flawed and that one must take full responsibility for one’s problems and stop complaining if they wish to change (which they must). Deemed undesirable, “rackets” become a fixation for participants, who are told that they must be gotten rid of in order to attain their highest purpose. Lockwood witnessed Forum instructors often yelling at participants, refusing them bathroom breaks, snacks, and pain relief such as Tylenol or Advil. One instructor explained defensively that she was not shouting at a person but at their “disgusting rackets” (p. 244). Rackets may be seen as something an individual has, but they are also, in this context, intertwined with a sense of fundamental deficiency. Lockwood mused that such experiences may leave some with the sense that there is something inauthentic or evil lurking within them—something requiring immediate exorcism; such an exorcism would, of course, constitute an exorcism of the daimon. We will always have shadow elements, and a more reasonable approach is to bear witness to this and develop a relationship with them. Resistance only cultivates their growth, according to Jung (1969c) [CW 11, para. 130]) Our spiritual yearnings often lead us towards the desire for transformation; something feels inadequate or incomplete in our lives, and we become seekers, in search of a “home” within which our spirits may land and rest awhile. Unfortunately, the soul gets left behind in this venture as we are carried away by the miraculous promises of metamorphosis and life-changing experiences offered by these kinds of groups. A characteristic facet of groups such as Landmark and other LGATs is what Lockwood (2011) described as “the promise of salvation offered through personal transformation” (p. 245), where renewal and rebirth are promised, as one is delivered (for a price) from the ordinary and mundane into a realm of high personal achievement and a transcendence of mediocrity. This might be seen as a sort of pseudo-ritual, without the archetypal underpinnings. Landmark’s specific focus on “the true nature of Self as ultimate creator” (p. 246) holds echoes of Jungian psychology without any depth of exploration regarding psychodynamics, and it distinctly rejects the shadow. Their curriculum is also mingled at times with purloined aspects of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and other Eastern philosophies—bits and pieces extracted from established wisdom traditions and philosophies, altered and rebranded to suit the aims of the group and, most importantly, the heroic ego and narcissistic supply needs of the leaders. When pondering what groups such as this desire from their participants, we find loyalty, admiration, willingness to be shaped or formed, and a willingness to pay the price for all of this, literally. This is accomplished through the sequential

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offering of courses and programmes to keep involvement continuous long after the initial encounter ends. There will always be a higher level to attain, with the carrot of enlightenment or self-improvement continuously dangled. Some organizations also require extensive volunteer hours, engulfing members of the group in service to the group’s end. While many people claim to have benefited from the Landmark programme (and from Scientology, out of which this group arose), others who invested more time and money seem to have suffered more in the long term. In recent years, a more insidious LGAT called NXIVM rose to recent prominence in the media for its use of shockingly harmful techniques and strategies—harmful enough to send its founder, Keith Raniere, to prison for 120 years for sex trafficking and other crimes (Hong & Piccoli, 2020). Former NXIVM cult member Sarah Edmondson (2019) wrote a memoir titled Scarred describing her years inside this group, which had been promoted as a self-help coaching programme (p. 20). While the organization claimed to cultivate leaders via its tiered, incremental progression of low-paid service and coursework, Edmondson asserted that the eventual intention was actually to create followers of Raniere by establishing a “dangerous psychological hierarchy” (pp. 24–25) among women who had been organized into “master-slave” relationships in a secret society within the organization. Edmondson, along with several other women, was physically branded in her groin area with Raniere’s initials. Edmondson’s memoir chronicles the thoughts and experiences of an idealistic, intelligent young woman whose talents and energies were incrementally channelled towards the aims of the cult, and especially Raniere himself, through a series of self-flagellating activities derived from overriding strategies designed to break down existing self-conceptions and replace them with the cult’s notion of the ideal. At a time of increasing historical removal from the events of Jonestown and other extreme cults in public awareness, NXIVM serves as a reminder that without awareness of cultic dynamics and undue influence, there is no reason to believe that such events could not recur and that we have not moved beyond the possibility for the innocuous or idealistic to morph into the extreme. Edmondson described aspects of the cult that will by now sound familiar: her sense of being “special,” (p. 47), the “love-bombing” that occurred during her rise in the NXIVM ranks (p. 53), and the cultivation of a sense of inner deficiency, which led members such as her to believe that they needed to “evolve” (p. 124). These are all strategies that continue to be employed, to greater or lesser degrees, in various influential areas of our wider culture. Seeker beware. Fear Arousal

Fear arousal and incitement is the third overarching cultic dynamic identified in Stein’s (2017) work on cults and attachment. We have seen this in apocalypse groups, but it can also be an effective means, for example, to garner votes during

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an election or to inspire insecurity regarding ageing and death, and to sell products that promise to stave it off. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is reported as a widespread phenomenon of the digital age, and fear of deeper emotions such as grief can keep us scrolling in an effort to anaesthetize pain rather than experience it. QAnon

While not a cult by definition, over the past few years, a loosely formed movement known as QAnon spread its influence over the Internet, attracting individuals who tend to be prone to conspiracy theories by offering them a greater sense of purpose as well as special insight and knowledge. This movement seems to have begun with a series of posts on the anonymous discussion forum “8chan” by an individual (or potentially more than one person) claiming to possess highlevel “Q” military clearance during the Trump administration. One of the conspiracy theories put forward by the person referred to as “Q” is that Donald Trump has been designated to save the world from a Satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals (Langone, 2021). What is particularly noteworthy about the formation of this cult-like phenomenon founded on “a loosely connected system of conspiracy theories and unfounded beliefs” (Langone, 2021) is that it was able to form exclusively over the Internet, via ubiquitous, rapid-fire, “Mercurial” communications lacking in psychological substance and depth. Hassan (2019) asserted that with the increased and widespread use of technology, we can expect more movements such as this to arise. Rather than approaching potential recruits on streets or in schools, conspiracy theorists and individuals that Lifton (2019) refers to as “mental predators” (p. 95) can now exploit people in the sanctity of their own homes and use cultic techniques and strategies to influence them, in seemingly much more efficient ways, via Hermetic intoxication. QAnon’s ideology is not new. According to research professor and founding chair and president of Genocide Watch, Gregory Stanton (2020), it rests on historical foundations. QAnon purports the following beliefs as its “platform:” A secret Satan-worshipping cabal is taking over the world. Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. The cabal held the American presidency under the Clintons and Obama, nearly took power again in 2016, and lurks in a “Deep State” financed by Jews, including George Soros, and in Jews who control the media. (Stanton, 2020) While the absurdity and extremity of these claims is horrifying and dismissible to most of us, Stanton points out that these are not new ideas, that they hearken back to content found within what he called the most influential

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anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time, titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written by Russian anti-propagandists around 1902. The Protocols promoted the narrative that Jews were plotting to take over the world. Stanton (2020) describes the beliefs put forward in this pamphlet in a familiar-sounding manner: A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power. As we can see, little is different between these two conspiracy theories. One might dismiss QAnon’s ideologies as ludicrous and benign—who could fall for this sort of nonsense? However, Stanton, who has studied and worked in genocide prevention for forty years, cautions that their hateful suspicions are early warning signs of genocidal violence. He refers to QAnon as “a Nazi cult, rebranded,” claiming that their conspiracy theory is a modernized version of The Protocols, a version of which had also been published as a children’s book that was required in the curriculum of every primary school in Germany during the time of Nazi rule. It is unlikely, however, that many QAnon advocates would recognize this connection. In 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation determined that QAnon posed a domestic terrorist threat (Greenspan & Landsverk, 2020). Cult expert and director of the International Cultic Studies Association, Michael Langone (2021), explained that the allure of QAnon is connected to a widespread lack of criticalthinking skills. Critical thinking and analysis of cultic techniques and modalities have long been advocated by cult researchers as an antidote or resistance to cult tactics, which is why awareness to them is of tremendous importance. In QAnon, one can observe elements of Lifton’s (2019) “mystical manipulation” tactic, where proponents imbue their beliefs and actions with a sense of higher purpose. Present too is the “sacred science” perspective, which promotes an ideology as “an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence” (p. 79), as seen above in comparisons to The Protocols. We also observe “language loading” via catchy slogans, clichés, and reductive and incorrect political statements. Again, while QAnon cannot be defined completely as a cult, it appears to represent a new evolution in the realm of cultic behaviour, one that, while exploitive and manipulative, also enables advocates to feel an—albeit false— sense of agency and exceptionalism. Langone observed that QAnon is not like prototypical cults, which are structured in hierarchies and in which the leader holds all power. In the case of QAnon, participation and leadership in activism are invited, and deep-believing adherents to the ideology are empowered to take action. When we underestimate online phenomena such as QAnon to be silly,

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harmless, “out there,” or believe that we are immune to influences of this sort, we contribute to their ability to thrive and proliferate, unchecked. Familiarity with dynamics such as this, as well as the forms of yearning and vulnerability that ignite them, allows us to engage greater consciousness and imagination in how we respond to cultic manoeuvres in the wider culture. Our archetypal propensity for narrative enters the spotlight here. Dickenson (2021) draws from political science professor J. Eric Oliver’s explanation that conspiracy theories serve a purpose: they can assist in combatting anxiety by providing explanatory narratives that soothe and serve as “answers” to unknowns. If people feel that they have an idea or understanding about what is threatening them, they can feel a sense of control over defeating it. As we have noted within cults, there is also a sense of exceptionalism wrapped up in having secret and special knowledge that others do not possess, and as we see here, this also relates to the current cultural dynamic (Dickenson, 2021) of loneliness and isolation. Despite the common conception that adherence to conspiracy theories indicates a neurosis, there is also evidence to the contrary. Dickenson (2021) cites public policy professor Ethan Zuckerman’s assertion that conspiracy theories do not equate to psychological imbalance but rather reflect a very orderly mind—one that is attempting to create order out of disorder, especially in times of distress. An otherwise stable mind searching for a safe place to land during times of stress and struggle creates a state of vulnerability to cultic ideologies and tactics. This supports the earlier assertion that cults exploit not only weaknesses but strengths—in this case, the strength of the problem-solving, narrative-oriented mind. Relatedly, an interesting complication arose here with regard to intuitive phenomenology. Research uncovered correlations between openness to conspiracy theories and intuitive thinking styles (as cited in Dickenson, 2021). Those who typically made gut decisions and placed “disproportionate weight on symbolic costs” were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. While this may appear to be a warning against following one’s intuition, it seems, on the other hand, to further indicate the benefit of Hillman’s polytheistic approach to working with the psyche and the necessity of attuning to multiple forms of daimonic expression, not only one. The daimon shows itself through a number of phenomenological manifestations, as we have seen. To tether oneself only to intuition would be to ignore or negate the importance of accompanying imaginal, emotional, somatic, and other phenomenology, whose prevalence also demonstrates the presence of the daimon and which indicates effective ways in which one might act or make decisions. These can be investigated and metabolized by our rational thoughts and knowledge in order for a fuller picture to emerge. From a depth perspective, Hillman (1996) quoted Jung’s assertion that relying solely on the intuitive function without use of the other three (thinking, feeling, sensing) is misguided. As convincing as intuitions may seem, they can also sometimes

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miss the mark or may not actually be authentic intuitions at all—they may be intrusions from other coercive sources, as we have already noted, and so better accuracy is achieved by placing them with their “brother and sister functions” (p. 99). High reliance on intuition, coupled with lack of critical thinking, facilitates the adoption of conspiracy theories. While this does not equate necessarily to neurosis, we still see in this the presence of one-sided thinking and a modicum of psychological imbalance. A recent Netflix documentary titled “Escaping Twin Flames” (Peck, 2023) explores yet another exploitation of the human instinct towards love and attachment in our Internet-driven era of Titanism and Hermetic intoxication. The online group, which expanded to in-person events prior to and following the pandemic, promises on their website to “illuminate the path home to eternal love” through their uniquely branded formula of finding one’s “twin flame,” the “perfect person” that will bring completion to one’s life. In what might be seen as a perversion and misappropriation of Jung’s idea of projection, the founding couple created something called a “mirror exercise,” touted as “the only tool you’ll ever need” to solve one’s problem in life. This exercise entails turning all negative thoughts about the world and others inward towards oneself by first identifying the upset in a statement and then changing all of the nouns and pronouns in that statement. For example, “I am upset with Bob because he is rejecting me” becomes “I am upset with myself because I am rejecting myself.” The third step is to ask oneself “is this true?” and the answer is always “yes.” Finally, participants are asked to “love themselves” through a connection to their inner child or other part. Following these steps, participants are assured that the situation will either no longer occur or will no longer be upsetting to them. While this exercise makes use of some established psychological insights and techniques, it does so superficially and in a decontextualized, “one size fits all” manner. From a psychological perspective, it is oversimplified and reductive. Projection is indeed a significant psychological idea, and Jung (1970b/1956) expressed that taking back one’s projections can create a path forward with certain problems in life (CW 14, para. 706), but as with everything, there is nuance and complexity, and a considered process of sorting through whether or not something is indeed a projection is a vital first step. It is erroneous and potentially harmful to think that all problems are due to projections, and by asking their participants to continually point the finger back at themselves as the originators of their problems, the leaders perfectly position themselves to be blameless for their own shortfalls or mistakes in their own relationships with group members. Shockingly, the male leader of the group at one point identified himself to be the next incarnation of Christ, moving this group out of the “cultish” category into an explicitly definitive cult, complete with its charismatic guru. He personally insulted and degraded those who worked for him as coaches and administrators (for little to no pay), engulfed their lives with the cult’s imperatives,

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assigned people to one another as “twin flames” regardless of their expressed and preferred gender and sexuality, and enhanced and inflated his own lifestyle in a multi-level marketing scheme that created wealth for him and his spouse, and the group continues, purchasing property and moving towards gathering its members physically to live in a closed community. As happens with most closed, high-demand communities, those who left the Twin Flames group were shunned and criticized. Fortunately, as members became aware of cultic techniques (ironically through an “assignment” given by this leader to his coaches, to study Keith Raniere and NXIVM in order to prove the group to not be a cult), people connected with their critical thinking capacities and daimonic desires to live their lives as they personally wished to, and identified that this group is indeed a cult. By this time the stakes were much higher though, as these members had lost relationships outside the group and, when they left it, lost their sole sources of income, community, and assumed connections to meaning and purpose. An agonizing reckoning and recalibration ensued, during which these members were forced to confront the perpetrations of undue influence and control that they were seduced into enacting on each other, despite inner stirrings of discomfort and discordance that they were required to dismiss for their own survival within the group, which they had poured years of their lives’ energies into sustaining. The narratives and trajectories of cultic groups are historically predictable, but what is new is the element of online life and its spectrum of influences. There is a constant bombardment of very intentional modes of influence that are designed to capture our attention and keep it. There are now influencers operating businesses that teach others how to influence, which is not necessarily problematic when there are genuine, hardworking, and creative individuals with valid expertise who wish to share their offerings in a crowded marketplace and could use guidance in how to get the word out. However, there are also influencers who purloin bits of wisdom and the ideas of others to rebrand and sell programmes based on quickly slappedtogether knowledge that is incomplete at best and harmful at worst. While not everything that has elements of “cultishness” is pernicious in nature and intent, it is wise to keep an eye on the evolution of the widespread, Hermetic movements of thoughts, ideas, influence, and enterprises, with curiosity and a critical eye at the forefront—not to mention a well-established relationship with one’s daimon. As we have seen so far, the three realms of depth psychology, cults, and the daimon interact in interesting ways. If we can bring these into awareness, depth psychology and the idea of the daimon can act as counterbalances to the phenomena of cults and cultic dynamics. The idea is to release enough steam from the cultural pressure cooker to reduce the size and potency of the looming shadow of our digital age and its increasing

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propensity for psychological colonization. This is shadow work, and it will require humility and a willingness to sit in discomfort, but it is within the uncomfortable places that we will experience growth. Fortunately, compensatory opposition to the abundance of undue influence is already in place, as caring educators and creators bring their work to the digital sphere. May we find and attune to the voices that truly resonate with our own, and avoid the confusion and cost of trusting those who do not deserve our time, attention, and resources.

9 NATURE, NURTURE, AND THE LIMINAL Parenting the Daimon

The Nature/Nurture Debate, the Soul’s Code, and Parenting the Daimon Nature, Nurture, and the Liminal

The discussion in this book has been concerned with imbalances between inner knowing and external influence, but the spaces between these, while full of discomfort, are also rich and fruitful. This is the liminal space of reckoning, of metabolizing our learning with the inner landscape of psychological life. When we investigate various influences in our lives, it is worth revisiting one of the most famous debates regarding human development, which pits the idea that we are mostly products of our upbringing, environment, and the influences of those who raised us (nurture) against the idea that we are born as we are and that our fates are tied mainly to biology and genetics (nature). With regard to this argument, James Hillman (1996) proposed that we confront our habitual pattern of thinking in terms of such opposites, suggesting that our uniqueness and singularity relate to something beyond their confines (p. 129). He cites identical twin research to demonstrate that despite genetic identicalities and their external manifestations, differences in personality and vulnerability to specific illnesses such as schizophrenia still exist (pp. 131–132). As for creativity, intelligence, and traditionalism, Hillman emphasized that in spite of our desire to plot genetic influences pertaining to these on a bell curve, they are in fact “intensely complex and varied” (p. 135). This continues to be documented in recent scientific literature. For example, according to physician W. Thomas Boyce (2019), monozygotic twins carry only a 50 percent chance of concordance for schizophrenia, DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-13

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and the same is true for autism (p. 92). This opens the door to further inquiry as to what makes up the not-insignificant difference. As far as environmental influences are concerned, Hillman (1996) asks us to reflect upon the interconnectedness between all beings and the planet we inhabit, to take note of the fact that the earth is “a living, breathing, and self-regulating organism” (p. 153), an anima mundi. This means that influences appearing to exert themselves on us from external sources are in fact not separate but “inextricably meshed with us” (p. 153). Since its historical beginnings, the daimon has confounded the boundaries between inner and outer and challenged the binaries we tend to gravitate towards. In this light, we move beyond the idea of “nature” as pertaining to the biological or as concerns psychology, brain functioning, and “nurture” as surroundings we perceive to be “external” to us, Hillman asserted. In this broader view, which is similar to some Indigenous and systemic perspectives, everything around and within us interacts with, nourishes, and feeds our experience and imagination. Our surroundings are ensouled, animated, and fundamentally part of us (p. 153). Several memoirists seemed to recognize this at a certain level, as they explored and responded to their natural surroundings in a participatory manner (Guest, 2004; Palmer & Perrin, 2004). We are complexly bound up within the elements of our world, and as we come to see delineations between internal and external as less distinct, so too do we perceive the nature/ nurture argument as less of a schism. Rather than forces of opposition, we see instead an interplay of integrated systems. Boundaries between ourselves and what surrounds us are more porous than they appear. We are “mothered” by everything in our midst, from the people who care for us to the clothing we wear, to the beds we sleep in, and to the objects and implements we use as we explore our world—and we alchemize those presences with our biology. Orchids and Dandelions

While Hillman was critical of scientific reductions of the human psyche to brain and behaviour functions, longitudinal research on human sensitivity by Boyce (2019) appears to somewhat support Hillman’s hypothesis of a third influencing factor in the liminal spaces between nature and nurture. In his book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, Boyce explored the differences between highly sensitive children (termed “orchids”) and their apparently more resilient “dandelion” counterparts. He expressed that understanding how children and adults become orchid-like or dandelion-like is “found in the space between nurture and nature” (p. 90). In a departure from other scientific perspectives, Boyce criticized the propensity to divide developmental forces into binaries. He wrote: To fully understand the human condition, we need to dispense with the tendency humans have to perceive—and simplify—the forces that form us as

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clear-cut dichotomies. Such oversimplistic, binary views in fact run counter to the often profound complexities of our true character. (p. 91) Boyce’s work also has implications for our understanding of children who are raised in cults or other oppressive environments. He proposed that “orchid” children who are raised in environments where threat and predation are continuous might also be protected by their vigilance and keen attentiveness (pp. 98–99). This relates to imaginative capacities—children demonstrating high sensitivity may be more inclined to engage their imaginations, as at least a temporary form of escape or protection from harsh realities, or, as discussed earlier, through cultivating a “secret creative self” (Boeri & Pressley, 2010). An example of this can be observed in Children of God survivor Juliana Buhring’s (Jones, Jones, & Buhring, 2007) recountings: Despite the endless attempts to try and turn me into that perfect little Family girl, they had never been able to get into my head, the place I frequently retreated to, the hiding place I had stumbled upon as a child where no one could touch me. I secreted away the innocent child in me and kept her hidden indefinitely, safe from the beatings, the humiliation, and loneliness. (p. 379) An interesting paradox then takes shape: while we would ordinarily consider “dandelion” children to be resilient and more capable of enduring hardship, perhaps the orchid child also has a strong chance of surviving a cultic upbringing and remaining connected to his or her daimonic capacities. This may be owing to their ingenious ability to come up with highly creative and protective survival strategies during childhood and early adulthood, as well as their ability to intuitively perceive and avoid that which is discordant and, to a certain extent, mitigate harm. Further, there may be a potential connection between resilience and introversion. As Jung (1921/1971) observed, the preferences of an introverted individual are towards the subjective inner life (p. 373, [CW 6, para. 620]). Perhaps the ability to cultivate a fertile and abundant inner life also constitutes a source of protective resilience. While it is beyond the scope of this book, an interesting extension would be to investigate these observations in light of Jungian typology. Of course, labelling a child as “orchid” or “dandelion” might also be viewed as a binary act, but as Boyce (2019) noted, these qualities occur along a spectrum (p. 39). An alternate, more reactionary perspective invokes the daimonic, suggesting its involvement here, where the cultivation of orchid or dandelion tendencies, the movement from one end of the spectrum to another, might be viewed as being, in part, a response to daimonic oppression—a combination of inner and outer influences. While this can only be speculative, it may seem

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that, despite how things appear, higher sensitivity does not necessarily equate to a lack of resilience or the potential to be destroyed by a traumatic childhood. Of course, there are deep impacts caused by adverse childhood experiences, and there might also be capacities for healing related to these orchid or dandelion preferences. Our minds and bodies possess extremely sophisticated survival and adaptation capabilities. In support of this idea, epigenetic research has observed cellular adaptation to impactful childhood experiences, as indicated below: The body of a child encountering a major early life stressor, like maltreatment, might automatically adjust the functioning of many different cell types in order to adapt as well as possible to the experience of being abused or neglected. Adrenal gland cells might be called upon to produce more cortisol (part of the tune that adrenal cells play); nerve cells could activate the fight-or-flight system (the tune certain neurons play); white blood cells could respond to any physical injuries; and brain cells might dampen the child’s emotional responses. And these would be only four of the adjustments in cell functions, among probably hundreds that would be occurring, all at the same time. (Boyce, 2019, p. 105) To demonstrate these observations, Boyce used the example of artwork produced by children following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a 6.9 Richter scale event that took place in San Francisco. As he worked with children who lived through this experience, he observed that those who produced “the most dire, distressed illustrations of the earthquake” (p. 225) remained physically healthy in subsequent weeks following the disaster, whereas the children who did not engage these darker images, who produced optimistically themed images such as rainbows and sunshine, experienced “substantially more respiratory infections and illnesses” (p. 225). This observation supports the beneficial nature of a depathologized approach to the human psyche, even on a biological level—admitting and engaging brutal and destructive images enabled these children to diminish their potentially overwhelming power, whereas the group that repressed or ignored them demonstrated greater physical (and likely emotional) vulnerabilities. This creates an argument supporting the inclusion of shadow explorations as well as for moving through, not bypassing, difficult emotions. Perhaps the quality of being a highly sensitive “canary in the coal mine,” while frightening and threatening for a child and assuredly not without consequence, may at the same time give rise to insights and imaginal coping strategies. These orchid children would likely find life in the cult more intolerable than their dandelion counterparts do and may, as a result, be more motivated to leave. While it is not possible to analyse the twenty memoirists whose experiences

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form our data for the presence of orchid or dandelion qualities, the simple fact that these people were driven to express their experiences in an artistic form such as a memoir leads one to suspect the strong presence of the orchid and, in turn, the perception and engagement of the daimon—a move in the direction of deeper imagination and healing. The Great Mother Archetype

Turning next to the realm of parenting, as mentioned above, we might take note of the archetypal presences that are “parenting” us, as well as the children in our care. Parenting, and arguments over how to do it correctly, has been a fundamental topic in certain pockets of North American societal discourse and, of course, internationally. This invokes the archetypal presence of the great mother. While profoundly and universally significant, there is perhaps no more beleaguered or fraught archetype than that of the mother, yet her symbolic presence has risen to prominence in numerous cultures throughout history. Representations of the mother archetype in image and symbol are overwhelmingly prevalent in our human history. These range from images of fertility, abundance, and generosity to Kali-esque representations of destruction and gore. She is perhaps the most representative archetype of the creative/destructive element we see mirrored in the daimon. Neumann (1955) observed that primordial archetypes such as the mother often combine both their positive and negative attributes, as well as groups of attributes (p. 12). On a personal level then, the word “mother” may evoke either light or dark imagery, or a combination of both. From a depth psychological perspective, it is important to differentiate and come to familiarity with both the personal mother as well as the archetypal. To engage this capacity, we may ask at given points in our lives what forces are “mothering” (or influencing) us, on both personal and larger, cultural scales of experience. Neumann (1955) pointed out that due to a child’s mythological perceptions of the world, she first experiences her personal mother as the archetypal great mother, a numinous being who provides all and upon whom she is completely dependent. During later years, however, when ego and consciousness are more developed, the child then becomes better able to relate to her mother as a unique individual—her personal, idiosyncratic mother (p. 15). This understanding of the dynamics between the personal and archetypal mother originated in Jung’s (1952/1967c) pioneering work in Symbols of Transformation, where his discussions regarding the mother “imago” constituted one aspect of his departure from Freud’s theories. What happens within the interstices of archetypal and personal has enormous repercussions for the child’s life. The great mother archetype—seen as life source—often finds itself represented in the image of the vessel, in forms such as the chalice, grail, bowl, or goblet (Neumann, 1955, p. 47). Such womblike structures offer literal protection,

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nourishment, warmth, and containment and also convey the symbolic and numinous aspects of these qualities (p. 43). Neumann suggested that vessel images are comparable to the unconscious itself (p. 40). Relating to the vessel’s significance, Rich (1986) underscored the universality of vessel imagery in the following passage: “All human life on the planet is born of woman,” she wrote. “The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men [and those who identify otherwise] is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body” (p. 11). This universality, expressed via image as the interplay of literal and figurative containment, is a key component of the great mother archetype. No one is exempt from its central influence. Neumann (1955) expressed this universal, matriarchal stage of human development in the following concise formula: “Woman=body=vessel=world” (p. 43). Archetypally contextualized, the great mother wraps her either loving or suffocating arms around all. As mother nature, she is the fundamental creator and destroyer. For any individual, literal mother [or parent], these archetypal and cultural images represent elephantine pressures, associations, and expectations. Even before her child’s conception, a mother has held an embodied awareness of historical and cultural layers of expectation to protect, nourish, and provide everything for her present or future children. As we have already noted, the attachment that is expected to occur (ideally) following birth is of indisputable significance, and this research aligns with Alexandra Stein’s (2017) in advocating for an understanding of the importance of attachment in the lives of cult survivors. Pearce (1977) described bonding as a non-verbal “intuitive rapport” (p. 51), which transcends rational, linear thought and perception, but attachment extends beyond infant bonding, as we know. Attachment theorists attest that the first years of life are key to the development of this vital connection (Neufeld & Maté, 2004, pp. 16–19; Siegel, 2012; Stein, 2017, pp. 29–36). While some parents might be brought to vertiginous heights of anxiety upon receipt of this information, a necessary and relieving component of it is that, as the above researchers also note, these processes are guided by nature, by the archetypal great mother herself, so to speak, in her most primordial form. Seen in this light, we understand that it is not for parents to create or impose a developmental schedule onto a child but rather to provide the safe space and opportunities for its inherent unfolding to occur. As MacNamara (2016) wrote, “there is a natural development plan that drives growth, and parents are the key providers when it comes to creating the conditions to unlock it” (p. 16). From this perspective, parents take on the role of steward or facilitator rather than director or coordinator. Using the language of this book’s metaphorical lens, we might also say that as parents and caregivers, we have been given the opportunity to attune to the whisperings of the daimon, of our own and our children’s. To do this, however, we must become silent enough to hear these whisperings and far enough removed from undue influences and oppressive forces—those exerted upon

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ourselves as well as upon our children—if we wish to receive them. We must also be willing to recognize our (both internally and externally derived) fears and anxieties involving our children, without compulsively acting upon them. For both parent and child, it is advantageous to invite faith, curiosity, and receptivity to the banquet celebrating nature’s plan—a potentially more feminine approach to raising children than we see in the currently dominant, linear, patriarchal, and goal-driven culture (this reference to “feminine” is not gender-specific). Yes, we still need to guide, care for, and provide for our children, but from an archetypal, developmental, and daimonic perspective, we acknowledge that we are assisted in these provisions. Of importance, while I discuss the archetypal mother, it is necessary to point out that I am not referencing a gendered role; the spirit of the great mother archetype influences all parents and caregivers, regardless of gender or biological identity or relationship. It is present among teachers, social workers, and counsellors—anyone involved in the unfolding and support of another person’s life. As Hillman (1960) asserted, “the archetypes transcend both men and women and their biological differences and social roles” (p. 50). It is in this spirit that I reference the great mother archetype. Re-visioning Parenting

In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman (1975) wrote that the psyche, or soul, is more than human, that it extends beyond our human understandings. He argued that our lives are on loan to psyche and that we are its caretakers who try to do what we can for it (p. 180). Perhaps we can also say this about parenting—we are our children’s caretakers who try to do for them what we can while they are “on loan” to us during their years of maturation. This shift in perspective raises the distinction between parenting the child and parenting the daimon. In the former, the child is viewed in the “tabula rasa” or blank slate sense, as offspring (and sometimes even an extension) of the parents. In North American middle-class culture, parents are often viewed as being in control of most aspects (social, emotional, physical, and intellectual) of a child’s development (Tummala-Narra, 2009), sometimes even as the child grows well past an age of dependency. While of course parents must seek opportunities for their children’s flourishing, if those opportunities reflect parents’ unrealized wishes and hopes and are not taken with the child’s daimon in mind, this will likely block, delay, or oppress their more natural evolution and the course of the metaphorical acorn’s expression, as well as the expression of the psyche itself. In this situation, the child adopts an implicit sense of duty, with roles to fulfil which may actually reflect unfulfilled goals and desires of the parent. In a “daimonic parenting” construct, however, parents view their children as cherished dependents but also as having a unique life purpose that may in fact be dramatically different from their own or others’ in the family. This is part of the reason why Hillman (1996) insisted that parents

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become acquainted with their own daimons (p. 85). If parents and caregivers make the effort to differentiate their own paths from those of their dependents, if they are curious about the small beings who have been “loaned” to them by their daimons, they walk a much less hubristic or coercive path. So often too, those in our care offer clues to help guide us—information and insights that can assist us in meeting their needs—provided we are listening. In parenting the daimon, the actions are those of a curious, observant, and attentive guide and role model; the parent becomes aware of the child’s everchanging need to explore her surroundings in varying ways and attunes herself to signs of the child’s readiness before introducing new skills (Pearce, 1977, p. 32). In doing so, a parent or caregiver can avoid the temptation to coerce or force skills that are not individually or developmentally appropriate, that may in fact be originating in an external source, such as a fear-driven community of ambitious and competitive parents, for example. Signs of readiness as pertaining to the daimon might be witnessed in a child’s emotional response to a situation, in their patterns of behaviour leading up to a potential new challenge, in their expressed yearnings and curiosities, in the images they create, in the stories they tell, their imaginings, their bodily inclinations, rebellions, and dreams—in short, many of the phenomenological manifestations witnessed in this study may serve as clues to developmental readiness as well as daimonic will and purpose. We can, for example, place objects or tools (musical instruments, for example) in a child’s path and observe their responses to and interactions with these items before explaining to them how they operate. Such acts frontload curiosity, somatic experience, imaginings, and instincts/intuitions, as well as a sense of discovery and enjoyment. This is the opposite of the blank slate approach; here we watch for signs of curiosity and nascent capacity that we might draw out from the child, rather than attempting to fill them up with our own desired elements. Of course, we can then augment these discoveries with helpful knowledge and pertinent facts as we understand them. Those who choose to parent the daimon understand that every life is unique and that their children may be similar to, or grow very different from, themselves and their communities. Sometimes those differences are challenging to accept. Jungian Psychoanalyst and scholar Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes (1992) discussed children who do not fit the dominant paradigm of the family or surrounding culture in her “Mistaken Zygote” tale, involving people who experienced a sense of “torture” (p. 191) by their families’ opposition to their natural desires and propensities. For a time, these children moulded themselves to fit a prescribed identity at great cost, only to later realize that they needed to situate themselves in their lives quite differently than they had been instructed to do. Extrication from a wholly ego-contrived life not in service to the daimon can be incredibly painful, even if an individual possesses the strength to fully undergo such an upheaval. This pain was shared among the memoirists who disclosed

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details about leaving their groups, along with the immediate aftermath (Brooks, 2012; Hoffman, 2016; Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009; Jessop, 2007; Tarawa, 2017). The daimonic parenting approach invites less judgement and greater curiosity, insight, and delight—a constant attempt to understand the unfolding life that a parent has been charged with stewarding into adulthood, while at the same time guiding the child from the source of one’s own knowledge, wisdom, and intuition and providing appropriate and safe boundaries and education. This is not a “stepping back” by any understanding—conversely, it is a thoughtful, responsible, highly attuned, and responsive state that requires much more than feeding information into a brain, which is a gravely erroneous paradigm. In many North American families, within a culture that assumes a patriarchal, oppressive dominance over nature, greater emphasis seems to be placed on parenting or “moulding” the child instead of parenting the daimon, when perhaps a shift in perspective might enable us to become more aligned with nature’s intent and more accommodating to its unfolding. Failure to parent the daimon can exert monumental and unnecessary pressures on parents and children, especially if they do not appreciate what their child’s daimon is expressing. When reliance on one’s instincts is handed over to others, such as we saw with some parents under the influence of their groups’ leadership demands (Guest, 2004; Tamm, 2009), this can result in a loss of bearing so significant that it may adversely affect all parties involved. In North American culture, there are both implicit and explicit expectations surrounding parenting. Many of these expectations and standards can constellate a “cultic” sensibility, characterized by judgement and even ostracism of those who do not comply. These expectations are not consistent either cross-culturally or historically (Porter, 2010, p. 12), and they may or may not be accompanied by support from the wider community. Warner (2012) observed that in the late twentieth century, a form of mothering took root that demanded extreme self-sacrifice, total child-centredness, and timeintensive performance (p. 49). Along with the multitude of benefits that arose from child development research, a shadow too had arisen in the guise of cautionary tales of the devastating effects of failed parenting. These narratives had the effect of heightening many women’s anxieties (TummalaNarra, 2009), as much blame was placed upon women at the outset of this research. Tummala-Narra noted that the repetitive exposure to information arriving at this time added to the reification of “the myth of the perfect mother.” How do we balance what we know of the importance of effective parenting without becoming completely fear-driven? Traditional psychological models are lacking in explanations regarding forms of inner guidance, and so the depth psychological idea of the daimon and the individual acorn addresses this gap. As parents and caregivers, we can intentionally choose to relate to both conscious and unconscious levels of understanding in order to resist attempts to map out our children’s lives before we fully know who

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they are as individual beings. We benefit by shifting our perspectives so that we deliberately attune to messages regarding the processes and intentions that the deeper psyche has long been honing. This is a dynamic and engaged process, not one that we can perfectly orchestrate. Berry (1982) asserted that “if there is any concept that we in psychology have overused, it is that of the Mother. And we have blamed her extensively” (p. 9). This blame occurs on personal, cultural, and archetypal levels and is deep, enduring, and problematic. In unpacking the mother complex, Hillman (2013b) argued that mothers are often expected to become like goddesses, supporting their children’s survival without themselves receiving support (p. 128). The strongly nurture-aligned side of the aforementioned debate has at times also generated some damning and damaging effects on both mothers and children. For a time, the mothers of children diagnosed with schizophrenia and autism were blamed as malfunctioning parents who had caused their children’s disorders, while fathers were exonerated from any culpability (Boyce, 2019, pp. 87–90). While we are aware of the devastating results of abuse and neglect, my focus in this section is on regular parenting outside of those more tragic circumstances that hold their own forms of oppression and harm. Porter (2010) proposed that women acquaint themselves with their mother line on all three levels—personal, cultural, and archetypal (p. 6). Looking directly at how one has been influenced or “mothered” by her personal mother, her culture, and the overshadowing images of the great mother archetype could offer insight and a better perspective from which to enact decisionmaking. Perhaps it is in this deep, considered, and layered knowing—psychologizing, as Hillman would define it—that parents and caregivers might see through or imagine into alternate paths to the dominant narrative and return to trusting their own intuitive and daimonic capacities when it comes to their children’s upbringing. Perhaps, along with the education and support we receive about childrearing, we can also explore the wisdom conveyed via the daimon through images/metaphors/archetypes, realizations/insights, affects, patterns, yearnings and curiosities, narratives, doubts and confusions, rebellions, somatic experiences, imaginings and reveries, instincts and intuitions, and dreams and synchronicities—both ours as well as our children’s. We can both observe these as well as cultivate them. We must be aware that some of these dynamics may speak more loudly than others, given everyone’s individual character and the circumstances in play at a given time in one’s life. Exploring more than one at a time offers us a more accurate, informative, and polytheistic picture. We can also engage Hillman’s (1975) four streams of personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing, and dehumanizing as daimonic lenses through which to parent our children, the details of which will be explored next.

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Parenting and Personifying

One of the four cornerstones (or “movements”) of Hillman’s archetypal psychology is personifying. Personifying in this context is not applying human characteristics to nonhuman things, as we might normally understand the act of “personification.” It is, rather, a way of experiencing the world as alive and interactive, and as an extension of this, psychic images are perceived to be autonomous. Despite what the word personifying might seem to suggest to our usual understanding, this mode of psychological engagement as Hillman describes it actually takes us out of the personal and into something larger. Through personifying, we engage with “spontaneous experiencing” and depart from human will and ego. Where personification involves projection, personifying has little to do with the person conducting it, apart from assuming a perceiving and receptive stance. As follows, in this archetypal psychology view, the forces imaged in gods, daimons, and other mythic beings have “autonomous, substantial reality” to the psyche (Hillman, 1975, p. 12). Personifying is a bottom-up process that is more an exercise of recognition than of application—an endeavour that I am suggesting has applications to child-raising. Of course, children are well acquainted with this sort of personifying, often spending much of their time within imaginal realms of being and amid imaginal creatures as they play and relate to their surroundings. We saw many examples of this in our memoirists’ descriptions of childhood, particularly with those who connected strongly to the natural world (Guest, 2004; Jeffs & Szalavitz, 2009; Palmer & Perrin, 2004; Turner, 2017), where the vibrant and inherent qualities of trees, flowers, animals, stones, dolls, and more were vividly engaged with. As predominantly rational, literal-minded adults who become worried about children “falling behind” in more structured activities, however, we often feel that at some point children ought to abandon this sort of engagement in favour of increasingly abstract intellectual operations, introduced at increasingly earlier ages (Pearce, 1977, p. 12). Through our fears and anxieties, parents can enact the very damage they are attempting to avoid by pushing children into sophisticated modalities of skill before they are biologically prepared to enter and engage with them. Acquiring skills does not equate to a maturation of emotional or daimonic capacities. Pearce warned that nature’s biological plan is disrupted when it is met with the intentions of anxiety-driven parents and an anxietydriven culture, instead of with reactions, interactions, and opportunities that are appropriate to the developmental process (p. 23). He suggested putting aside such intelligence-crippling anxieties and employing faith in the plans of nature that are present in both the child and parent (and, I would add, the daimon). He stated that we ought to “rekindle our knowing of a personal power that can flow with the power of all things and never be exhausted” (p. 23)—an alignment rather than a struggle. Of course, parents will not be able to avoid challenges or

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errors, but if the intention of daimonic alignment is in place, we are provided with a context that can be used for guidance and consultation when we fall or when we require assistance. I am suggesting that we re-empower what the overculture has disempowered and reclaim our connections to our children and to what is naturally developing within them. Personifying necessitates that we consider the connections between individuals and the soul of the world/anima mundi. When it comes to parenting, this shifts us out of an egoic stance, wherein we see ourselves as the prime orchestrators of the unfolding of a child’s potential. Now we move into the receptive mode of parenting the daimon, wherein we become deeply engaged, intuitive guides and facilitators. Through personifying, we drop into a sensory field of apprehension wherein we may be more adequately attuned to perceive a child’s readiness to move into higher levels of understanding the world and operating within it, and to provide the appropriate resources with which to do so. Here we bravely set aside our ego-oriented desires for a child (or, at the very least, acknowledge them as such), and enter a metaphorical means through which we might more accurately communicate with and provide for/enhance what is emerging from the child. For example, children often wish for us to engage in play with them, giving us the opportunity to enter their space—the space of the imaginal—and to know them more deeply, as we cultivate a deeper relationship with their unique, developing characters. This space often offers surprise and rich opportunities for soul-making within the parent-child relational realm. In this way, the archetypal vessel of the great mother protects the imaginal. The metaphors arising in our dreams and in the dreams of the children in our care can also be highly beneficial to this process. To use a personal example, I have sometimes found it difficult to decode my adolescent daughters’ communications and to understand when they are seeking closeness or wish for greater independence. Once, I had been assuming the latter for some time when my fifteen-year-old daughter woke up one day in tears, having dreamed that I had asked her to pack her bags and leave the house forever. After spending some time with her discussing the images that arose in her dream and how they made her feel, she and I interpreted these, along with her distress in response to this dream, to be indicators that I had been too emotionally and perhaps also physically distant from her. I had assumed her (typically adolescent) paradoxical communications (eyeball rolling and stiffening her body when I had attempted to hug her) were indications that I ought to keep my distance. Course-correcting behaviours on my part in the weeks to follow seemed to support this interpretation. As I tuned in a little more closely to opportunities and openings for connection, and persisted with my affections in spite of behaviours that on the surface seemed to indicate it was not wanted, my daughter seemed to become more settled and calm. I credit the daimon and the dream images that it produced for guiding us both towards a healthier relationship during the maelstrom of

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adolescence. Dropping down into personifying levels of engagement with this dream imagery and not dismissing it as unrelated to reality ultimately assisted both of us in finding a better rhythm. On an experiential level, I can attest that parenting the daimon can seem to conflict with what many typical middle-class North American (and other) parents may suggest, particularly those favouring a “tiger mother” approach (Chua, 2011). Just as we can push our children outside the boundaries of biological readiness, though, so can we hold them back, if we are not sensitive to their daimonic impulses. I will share another anecdote: one of my daughters has been extremely introverted for most of her life, and when she informed me at age eleven that she wanted to audition for her school’s musical theatre production, my first reaction was to protect her from potentially embarrassing herself and being derided by others, as she had often cowered behind my legs as a younger child, preferring to stay far out of any spotlight. Fortunately, she insisted, though, and as I was able to perceive something familiarly pointed, even relentless about her insistence, I put aside my own fears and encouraged her to audition. She ended up being chosen for a lead role in the production. She soon revealed to us that she has a beautiful singing voice, which she had hidden from her family by practicing in the shower and other places where she could not be heard. On stage, she carries herself in an entirely different manner than she does in her everyday life. I am grateful to her daimon for showing up so insistently and for letting us know that this is an important part of her path in life. The beauty in raising children can be in how astonishingly they surprise us in their unfolding lives. Parenting and Pathologizing

As we grow up, aspects of our unique and individual personalities begin to appear. During this process, a child may resist the influences of her socialization, depending on a number of factors. Perhaps this resistance comes to be seen by others as an eccentricity, or even a pathology, yet definitions of the pathological vary over time and from culture to culture (Hillman, 1975, p. 79). What might appear on the surface to be pathological in a child constellates—in true daimonic style—elements of the archetypal trickster. Jung (1954/1968e) discussed typical trickster motifs such as dualism, fondness for jokes and pranks, shapeshifting, and approximations to the “saviour” figure, and he compared these to the “daemonic being” Mercurius (p. 255, [CW9i, para 456]). The trickster does not contort itself to fit into civilized society but rather disrupts it with its “uncivilized” behaviours. It acts in unpredictable ways often unsuited to the classroom or other public forums. Children whose behaviours fall into this category to the extent that they are unmanageable cultivate thoughts of pathology in their caregivers. But Hillman asserts that the psyche naturally engages in “pathologizing.”

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While research into psychopathology is of course valuable and important, Hillman (1975) argued that since the twentieth century, we have come to take its applications a little too far (p. 57) and that we jump to a medical model of focusing on “symptoms” and devising ways in which to eradicate them before we spend sufficient time wondering what the origins of those symptoms might be. Jung (1954/1968e) instructed that “there are a number of pathological phenomena which only give up their meaning when we inquire into their purpose” (p. 260, [CW 9ii, para. 465]). Inquiring into purpose is a different act than inquiring into cause, as it assumes that pathologies arise in order to tell us something. If we consider pathologizing in this sense to be among other natural processes of the psyche, we may gain more information about a child’s individual character. We might be more open to opportunities that could benefit the child than if we were to condemn or attempt to eradicate all differences that appear pathological in favour of fitting the child into the dominant profile. Asking ourselves, “what god is at play here?” (what archetypes or themes are present?) or “how is psyche attempting to communicate with us?” (what might be the purpose of this behaviour?) when we are concerned about a child may offer us better nuanced phenomenological insight into what the imaginal psyche is attempting to convey on a deeper, archetypal level (pp. 74–75) and accordingly, what the child may need. The mythical/metaphorical approach often provides a more precise, detailed, and often visceral form of understanding than what our intellects can ascertain on their own. This may be a more fruitful place to begin our engagements than by immediately assuming that behaviours outside the norm are pathological. They may on occasion be so, but the child is better served if we first investigate other possibilities. We cannot assume that all “abnormalities” and odd or peculiar behaviours are pathological. The daimon will often erupt into our lives in “disturbing” ways—it can be illuminating to take a closer look. Much of the time, we are uncomfortable with the psyche’s tendency to pathologize because it places us outside the norms of our cultural or social milieu, which poses a direct threat to our sense of belonging and survival. Individuation does not equate to “culturally adapted,” however, nor does soul-making. I wish to highlight in particular Hillman’s (1975) criticism of transcendence, a method of denial wherein perspectives found in orientations such as humanistic psychology advocate brushing aside our less palatable, seemingly pathological qualities in favour of a way of being and knowing that allows only positivity, employing words such as “health, hope, courage, love, maturity, warmth, and wholeness” (p. 65) in one-sided ways that negate the whole picture of a person’s experience. In doing this, the focus is on spirit, to the exclusion of soul, and the attempt is to “rise above,” rather than to open the doors of our afflictions and imagine into what our soul might be attempting to communicate as to its needs (p. 67). According to Hillman, behaving in such an unnatural, exclusionary way is itself a form of psychopathology, and this has become rampant in our “good

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vibes only,” spiritually bypassing North American culture. In rejecting our afflictions, we deny a huge portion of what makes us human and even interesting (p. 64). This appears to be what Adrienne Rich (1986) was grappling with in coming to know herself authentically as a mother. She wrote: I was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is “unconditional”; and by the visual and literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren’t those parts then abnormal, monstrous? (p. 23) As we observe and mine children’s “abnormalities” for their deeper meanings, so might we benefit from doing the same for ourselves. There are as many different styles of parenting as there are individual humans. Aspects of our parenting selves that are non-conforming may be of greater benefit to those in our care because they are uniquely tailored to our original life experiences and particular relationships—as idiosyncratic, authentic, flawed, inadequate, and nuanced as every individual and every relationship that exists. We must consider also that life has other ways of provisioning us outside of our parents’ and caregivers’ offerings. Part of our lived experience is dancing with what arises in the space between the archetypal and the actual, or between the metaphorical and the literal. If we deem a child’s behaviour to be “pathological” without first considering how it might relate to what this child is feeling or experiencing at the time, in the particular context of the experience as well as the wider sociocultural context, we will likely employ as many methods as possible to attempt to “fix” the situation or even the child. Our assumptions might even be universal; that this is a “broken” (or a diagnostically designated) individual, and our desire might be to get rid of the affliction as quickly as possible. This is most certainly not to argue for the removal of diagnosis, which can be beneficial at times and can open access to resources for those who need them. It is to encourage care, however, when applying such designations. To share a classroom anecdote, I often reflect on a child that I taught in a fourth-grade class who seemed—like many boys his age—to be incapable of sitting still for the length of time required to work effectively in a classroom. His behaviour was a little more extreme than others, and he was creating many disruptions as he went from desk to desk, visiting other children. At night, I dreamed that as I was teaching a lesson, this boy was flying around the room above our heads, and the rest of the classroom activity continued as normal. I later told him of this dream, which seemed to delight him. His ability to fly didn’t feel abnormal in my dream life; in fact, everyone in the room was engaged and on task, even with this atypical adaptation, and so he and I discussed ways in which we might make things work in a similar manner within

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our actual classroom. Over time, we came up with the idea that there would be different “stations” in the classroom that he would be allowed to bring his work to when he became frustrated with where his body was currently located, and he agreed to do this quietly. For the rest of the year, we settled into a routine where he would seamlessly move himself to different locations when needed, and as he and others got used to this, he was able to complete his work without distracting them (or himself). I believe that he had a deeper sense as to what would work for him and perceived some receptivity to his ideas in his teacher. These two factors appeared to combine and eventually create an environment that was conducive to the strong needs of this child’s daimon, while respecting the others in the room. In retrospect, I only wish that I had trusted myself as an educator in more circumstances than this one. I was not surprised but deeply saddened to learn the following academic year that, after only a couple of months into the term, this boy had received a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and was medicated. When I saw him in the hallways, the vibrant spirit that usually accompanied him had diminished. I do not place blame on the other teacher; it is tremendously difficult to manage a classroom, but this boy left an indelible mark on my ideas about how we educate those who diverge from typical paths within the constraints of the system. I also want to be clear that in some instances medication can be incredibly supportive and necessary. The point is to highlight the unique nuances of this very particular child, teacher, and class that deserve individual, not generalizable, consideration. This is also not a suggestion that my actions should be seen as a “technique” for all teachers to follow in terms of how to manage disruptive behaviours. My intention is to encourage listening, deep attunement in the areas of personifying and pathologizing, and to cultivate an understanding that it is acceptable for us not to have the answers but that we are capable of uncovering greater wisdom and empathic capacity through the process of tending to daimonic phenomenology and what it has to communicate. Of course, we must take into consideration whether or not a child’s behaviour is harmful to himself or to others when making our assessments, while also not responding too quickly and in connection to conscious realities that exclude unconscious communications. If we are embarrassed or blindly following established cultural norms for acceptable behaviours—“cultic” or oppressive beliefs that children must behave and express themselves in specific ways or demonstrate specific qualities—we run the risk of ignoring and disparaging the soul. We also risk archetypal inflation (Hillman, 1975, p. 66) if we ignore what the “gods” or complexes are attempting to tell us, messages that may be valuable not only to the child but to the situation surrounding them. In so doing, we dismiss the daimon and its potential messages, brandishing our scalpels as though they could be surgically excised. Hillman (2016) argued that norms that exclude pathologizing from their images are repressive and that “the normalcy fantasy

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becomes itself a distortion of the way things actually are” (p. 62). We have seen in our second-generation memoirists the futility of attempted daimonic exorcism—that it only serves to strengthen the resolve of a life longing to be lived according to its own unique, authentic, and contributive purpose. It is better for all concerned to find a way for its expression, not its repression. Psychoanalytic traditions, and object relations theory in particular, inform us that it is important to consider in our parenting how we mirror our children (Winnicott, 1971) and how we convey to them through facial and bodily expression that we understand and validate their unique selves. According to Winnicott, appropriate and predictable mirroring in infancy suggests that when a baby looks at its [parent’s] face, the baby sees himself, herself, or themself, and this leads eventually to meaningful interactions with the external world. Instances in which this does not occur due to unresponsive or unpredictable parent behaviour can result in the atrophying of the child’s creative capacity (p. 151). If we parent according to an ideology that is not aligned with our instincts, our mirroring capacities are likely to be “off.” In the memoir study, despair and confusion were experienced by children whose parents did not provide appropriate mirroring, mainly due to the intrusions of the cultic ideologies informing their behaviours, such as not “spoiling” children or reinforcing only sanctioned behaviours. Beyond cults, however, misaligned and overwhelming parenting advice and ideologies in the wider culture can also contribute to a parent’s failure to mirror their child’s authentic self, by suppressing or distorting this natural instinct. The result of failed mirroring is, according to Winnicott, a form of narcissistic wounding resulting from a child’s doubt regarding his parents’ love and care (p. 152). The child whose daimon wasn’t recognized by his parents may grow up to be vulnerable to undue influence. If the daimon’s expressions are considered pathological, this affects the ego-Self connection, and the Self (or the divine inner being) is thus projected more urgently upon external phenomena. The child then goes out into the world searching for things that can supply her with this missing and unfulfilled sense of meaning. Appropriate interventions at this point would invite pathologizing into the healing sphere, inquiring into the purpose of its phenomenology and attuning to what is absent in the ego-Self relationship and ways in which this might be addressed and tended to. Hillman (1975) pointed out that the hermeneutic, meaning-making nature of pathologizing, “leads events into meaning” by a means of dismantling. He wrote, “Only when things fall apart do they open up into new meanings” (p. 111). It has been suggested that our approach to pathologizing ought to be tending rather than fixing (G. Slater, personal communication, November 9, 2017). Hillman (2013a) pointed out that it is the pathologizing itself, not the “heroic efforts to overcome it,” that holds value (p. 124). There may be wisdom in some of our apparent psychological illnesses, and we would be well served by strengthening our resolve to get curious about them. Could we yet again put aside our fears

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and anxieties, or our focus on outward opinion, so that we may listen closely and utilize our own intelligence and intuition when investigating what appears on the surface to be a pathology? If we cultivate the ability to attune to our own daimonic expressions by getting curious about their phenomenology, then we might be better able to perceive and make space for the daimons of others, and perhaps begin to differentiate daimonic expression from pathology. We can provide clear, accurate mirroring instead of distorting reality in response to fear. This becomes even more complex, however, when we engage the question in a school or daycare environment, where a certain amount of control must be kept in order to avoid chaos—a daunting but important task for any educator. Still, there may be significant reward in asking ourselves to what extent we are able to make time and space for eccentricity—either our children’s or our own. Parenting and Psychologizing

As noted in the previous chapter, many societies are now rife with distraction. Advances in seductive technology have enabled both adults and children to “numb out” or disconnect from engagement with their immediate surroundings and with deeper levels of thought. While computers can be excellent creative tools if used as a source of information or an adjunct to imagination, some argue that addictive social media is engendering a shallow, narcissistic culture (Slater, 2008, pp. 358–359) and that excessive time spent on devices is sabotaging our health and relationships (Morris, 2018). In archetypal psychology, Psychologizing is a process that invites the opposite of this and is about “going deeper, about seeing through the literal to the psychological” (G. Slater, personal communication, November 10, 2017). As with all four of Hillman’s (1975) movements, psychologizing highlights a metaphorical level of understanding, which we have noted to be deeper and more authentic to the communications of the psyche. It places focus on perspective and the ideas we hold about psychological material. Psychologizing scrutinizes psychological ideas themselves in terms of archetypes (Hillman, 1975, p. 127). When we psychologize, we examine what lies beneath surface appearances. Psychologizing asks us to acknowledge and understand the perspective that we are currently operating from. If we become aware of the lens, including the written or unwritten “rules” by which we parent, we might more accurately make space for the child instead of being blinded by our own projections. We can also question the philosophies or ideologies that may be influencing us in ways we are not consciously aware of. If we carefully examine our parenting and what forces are influencing it, we can better differentiate what feels appropriate to the particularities of our situation and to the unique children in our care. We can gain a better view of potential oppressions and release them where appropriate. To this end, employing a mythic perspective, one that, via metaphor, enables the presence of ambiguity in order to “see through” less nuanced, literal interpretations of phenomena, is helpful. Hillman noted that myths and

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metaphors “talk to psyche in its own language; they speak emotionally, dramatically, sensuously, fantastically” (p. 154). Myth and metaphor can be seen as the language of psyche herself, and becoming curious about the metaphors arising in our dreams, imagination, and paradigms regarding our parenting can be a worthwhile endeavour. As an adjunct to pathologizing, the process of psychologizing can help us to investigate deeper levels of what is going on with a child in times of trouble or challenge, as well as what is going on with ourselves as caregivers when we fall into depressions or frustrations induced by phenomena such as the “perfect mother myth” (Porter, 2010, p. 7). Psychologizing can assist us in unpacking some of the greater themes and paradigms giving rise to our current situation, helping us to realize, for example, the unrealistic, in fact, non-existent nature of said “perfect mother.” We can instead be satisfied with the status of “good enough” parent (Winnicott, 1971). Cultivating a consistent awareness of the perspectives, philosophies, or ideas we are using when raising children and not leaving these unexamined lessens their opportunity to unconsciously influence us in ways that are not necessarily aligned. The mythological antidote to the perfect mother myth might involve a few lessons from the Greek goddess Artemis. This may seem strange to suggest at first, as Artemis has no children and no spouse. She is, however, a nature dweller dedicated to the natural world, instincts, and consequently, the daimonic. She was also patroness of childbirth, and from an “Artemis-informed” perspective, we “birth” our children more than once as they learn and grow. Regarding this birthing function, psychologist Ginette Paris (1986) wrote, “At this moment, more than at any other, Artemis must teach one to submit to the powerful working of nature and to forget fancy upbringing” (p. 133). Deeply instinctive, Artemis has the ability to instil confidence in parents and caregivers to follow their instinctual levels of knowing (p. 134); she can take us into the forest, so to speak, where we are led by wiser guides. Following her lead constitutes an animated prayer to nature, to the daimonic protectors of a parent and child’s inherent contract. Beneficially, an invocation of the Artemis archetype recalls a woman to origin, to what she was before the world consigned her feminine value to the realm of partnership and parenthood (p. 129). Artemis is the archetypal counterbalance to the intense mother who religiously follows sociocultural or other mainstream parenting dictates, to the detriment of her own instinctive mothering soul. Psychologizing invites the practice of narrative, of storytelling into our parenting journeys, where a child’s natural empathic capacities are nurtured through a wide range of images, allowing a learning situation to be viewed through multiple perspectives which, when combined, create a deeper understanding and engagement than a reduction to “the problem.” In the narrative therapy approach, we can see the benefit of externalizing perceived problems and challenges from our essential nature, especially for vulnerable children and adolescents whose self-esteem is nascent. This approach may be highly amenable as therapeutic work with young children and adolescents, as it does not point threatening

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fingers at an individual’s core being or make assumptions about “original sin.” For children (and adults), who naturally gravitate towards storytelling, reading about another, even fictional, person who is struggling in a similar manner to theirs can remind them that they are not alone, that they are part of this wider human experience, and that they are deeply bolstered and supported and do not need to rely exclusively on conscious will or “grit” in order to get through the difficult parts of life. The exploration of multiple narratives can together cultivate greater accuracy and intimacy with whatever we are struggling to understand. Psychologizing is like turning an object over in your hand to examine it from all sides and angles—opening up rather than closing down, as one would under oppression. Stories with universal resonance relate to archetypal values; they assist us in the discovery of more accurate and applicable images and forms of understanding and remove the constraints of the individual subjective. Because of my own personal appreciation for storytelling, on a number of occasions I have turned deliberately to parallel myths, narratives, and fairy tales when confronted with my children’s struggles. Hillman believed that in order to solve a problem, psychologizing does not resolve it but rather dissolves it into the fantasy that has become “congealed” into a “problem” (p. 135). It integrates into our whole selves, without rejecting, but rather “tending and befriending.” Using the word “problem” and focusing on a problem/solution dynamic (rather than one of curiosity and investigation) awakens what Hillman (1975) referred to as “hero-based and ego-centered consciousness” (p. 135). Dealing with discomfort on an imaginal level is quite different, and some might say, more powerful or transformative, as it engages a greater number of senses, igniting insights that we may never be able to anticipate. The somatic aspect of daimonic expression is a vital key to this. Hillman discerned that problems call for willpower, but fantasies evoke the power of imagination (p. 135). Through imagination, we depotentiate “problems.” The potential insights that narrative offers, for example, are polysemic, enriching, and apparently endless. They may or may not “solve” a problem, but they will most likely cultivate soul-making and enrich our experience, perspective, and presence in our own lives. We can teach children not to fear their problems when we come alongside and assist them in seeing what else is there, what hides within the “problem” that might offer clues as to what is needed from us in a particular life situation. Also relevant to psychologizing and parenting is ritual. As with storytelling, ritual approaches the psyche from the realm of fantasy. Hillman (1975) observed that ritual distinguishes between concrete and literal. “The ritual of theatre, of religion, of loving, and of play,” he wrote, “require concrete actions which are never only what they literally seem to be” (p. 137). When we place ourselves within a ritual space, we move the metaphors to the fore and explore their multiple meanings, wisdoms, and applications to our life experiences; we “make soul.” The challenge nowadays, though, seems to lie in how to create

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ritual when many of our ritual traditions have been cut off and are now markedly absent from modern culture. How do we assist our young people during major transitional periods such as adolescence, and how do we protect them from spontaneous pseudo-rituals that have damaging potentials, those that erupt in response to unacknowledged or appropriated archetypes? Uncovering authentic rituals that speak to the soul may result in fewer instances of spontaneous false rituals such as sports hazing or dangerous and humiliating fraternity/sorority initiations. At the very least, they may alleviate the impacts upon those who have found themselves facing such pseudo-rituals. If we can see through these inauthentic imposters of ritual, identifying them as false and archetypally appropriative, such experiences may become easier for an adolescent to avoid or, at the very least, less weighty to endure. As the support of a community is essential, we may look to ways in which to evoke those supportive archetypal energies for children in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood through close observation of what is emerging in them; those elements that excite and ignite their curiosities, as well as what frightens and challenges them. An example of this is a friend’s project of creating an album to commemorate her daughter’s sixteenth birthday. Comprising this album were photos of cherished memories as well as letters of support and loving advice from important adults in her life, something she can turn to in moments when times are challenging. Another idea is to again invoke the power of Artemis through literal explorations in nature, the setting for many traditional forms of ritual. Time spent away from the façade of mechanistic, materialistic focuses in life and their assumed primacy is a reminder and an assurance of our wider sense of being and becoming in tune with nature’s rhythms. Music and creative expression in the form of a community arts “salon” may also prove to be soul-making containers at this time of wondrous, imaginal burgeoning. Parenting and Dehumanizing

In archetypal psychology, we are interested in a more than human perspective, and this means making attempts to remove humans from a central role, what Hillman (1975) terms “dehumanizing.” Again, this is a different use of the term than we are accustomed to and does not mean reducing someone’s humanity, but rather looking at our world from a wider perspective, one that acknowledges the interplay of all elements of an environment, including the non-human. Archetypal psychology is interested in “the survival of the soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. 170), but the soul/psyche is not confined to the human. Psyche, in its autonomous nature, requires us to act in its service. Soul-making through dehumanizing does not focus on what is advantageous for the individual; rather, it involves taking the individual out of the centre of the equation. We dehumanize in order to quiet the discursive chatter of our distracted mind and world and to come

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closer to a sense of what is needed in a wider sense, by more than just the humans involved. This engages the terrain of imagination, which Hillman (1975) confirms invokes the powers of numinosity. Awareness of “ritual, sacrifice, and creedal teachings” (p. 226) through an engagement with numinous images and experiences prevents us from searching for these things outside of ourselves—a potential inoculation against vulnerability to cults. A psychology that engages these elements of soul, in balance with other perspectives, has wider benefit to those in search of wholeness. If psyche is seen from its etymological roots as “soul,” and if soul extends beyond the human experience, we might then extrapolate that what is good for psyche is good for the earth, the child, and the collective culture. We might see through the “cults” or subcultures that have arisen within it, that cloud our view of psychic reality. The daimon carries the intentions of the soul, based on what needs to be born into, grown into, and cultivated within our world. We cannot assume that we humans are wiser than this. When we are parenting the daimon, we do not parent only a child, as in one singular human, we parent archetypally, in response to wisdom and callings that are often far greater than what we can perceive phenomenally. Multiple “gods” or archetypes inform our experience as well as our children’s. As Hillman (1975) expressed, this “both widens and differentiates the scope of our discerning” (p. 227). Focusing in on cultivating and fortifying a unified, singular ego based on one or only a few images (for ourselves, our children, or both) prevents us from opening to the infinite possibilities presented by our diverse influences. We are likely capable of more than we can envision. Pearce (1977) stated that if we can learn to take our cues for action from the child and make a corresponding response—and also learn to attend to the primary process within ourselves (p. 223)—we too evolve. It seems that this is a lifelong endeavour, but psyche does not leave us without clues or guidance. Our intuitions, somatic experiences, dreams, rebellions, narratives, etc. can serve as guides. Attentiveness to a child’s daimon lifts the fog imposed by hyper-literalized, over-anaesthetized, and unimaginative aspects of our modern culture; it encourages attentiveness to what needs to be born, both metaphorically and literally, into existence, from places beyond human construct. This constitutes a sacred act. Dehumanizing enables us to think critically and question the demands of oppressive or cultic thought and expectation. If we can find wisdom and numinosity within ourselves, we do not search for it in outside places that have the potential to mislead, exploit, or stunt our own or our children’s psychological and emotional growth and maturation. Dehumanizing is empowering in its departure from persona-oriented levels of being, placing parents in the joyful position of witnessing and stewarding an authentic life into being—in all of its messy glory. Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a fascinating and counter-cultural lens to apply to how we raise our children. It asks us to put faith in nature and in our

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animated, wise world—more so than we tend to do in our modern society—and to balance external influences with other ways of gaining knowledge. It also asks us to step outside of our tendency to view aspects of our lived experience in binaries, privileging one side over another, or even assuming that we are separate entities rather than integrated parts of systems that cross-pollenate. This is by no means an easy exercise—it’s far easier to do what everyone else is doing when it comes to parenting (and many other things), and in some situations, depending on where we live and what impacts us societally, it might not even be safe to engage in this manner. When we are true to our individuation paths, however, and to allowing the individuation paths of our children and others to actualize without opposition or oppression, we open up opportunities to live lives of integrity, which is of ultimate benefit.

10 HEALING THE SACRED WOUNDS

“Healing” is a popular buzzword nowadays, and the promise of healing is abundantly widespread. The danger in this is that we might assume that healing requires an intervention from something outside of ourselves (which is sometimes but not always true), or that it means there is a point of “arrival,” when we are absolved from all suffering. This is, of course, impossible, and most often, our integrated wounds constitute what is most beautiful about us. As the poet Andrea Gibson (2021) wrote, “What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole? There are holes in every inch of the fabric that makes me who I am” (p. 30). While it can be beneficial, even life-changing, to work with another or others towards transforming and integrating the wounds imposed by spiritual or religious trauma, transformational change can only occur if it is in concert with the daimon, that is, if it aligns with what is authentically true and in keeping with a person’s innate character and calling. Healing might be better seen as a collaborative act where individual shadow material, wisdom, and insight are identified, explored, and integrated. Our daimons are indestructible, and attunement to the twelve phenomenological realms discussed here can be sites of exploration. After a lifetime of working in the area of oppression, coercive control, and cultic studies, Lifton (2019) concluded that coercive control can never be permanent, and while we may lose a great deal of time to cultic involvement, we will always orient away from it at some point. So we can extend what we mean by “healing” to be inclusive of both light and shadow aspects of our experience, to move more towards soul-making or wholeness, not perfection or absolution. Optimistically, healing and a return to the individuation path are obtainable for those who have suffered under cultic influence or religious trauma. DOI: 10.4324/9781003428978-14

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Though this book has explored a wide range of cultic influences within highdemand groups and the larger society and has advocated for an awareness of the tactics of undue influence as a preventative measure, there will likely still be moments when we become susceptible. Recognizing our states of vulnerability and establishing protective boundaries around them is important, but if we or a loved one become harmed as a result of undue influence, we must then look to healing paths that assist us in reclaiming agency over our lives and our choices. Cult expert Marlene Winell (2021) prefers to refer to former cult members and those who have fallen prey to cultic influence not as survivors but as “reclaimers.” While her focus is on individuals who have left more extreme cults, most of us usually arrive at a place in our lives where we sense that we have been pulled too far into the overculture and its myriad distractions and enticements and feel a need to return to our more aligned selves. This can be seen as a practice of reclamation. As the daimon is loyal, persistent, and ever-present, we can always inquire into what it may be offering us as healing salve through the phenomenological expressions explored here and elsewhere. The Orphan Archetype

An archetypal image that may help us in recovery from spiritual abuse and trauma is the orphan archetype. One does not need to be a literal orphan for the orphan archetype to be activated, and while the complexes of guilt, unworthiness, and dependency are usually present in this archetype, Punnett (2014) observed that at the same time, the orphan archetype also constellates qualities of deep intuitiveness and alertness. Unfortunately, yearnings for love and belonging can cause a person to override her intuition when these seem to be proffered—thus rendering her vulnerable to manipulation. Such vulnerability can incite a cult leader to mould a “follower” who would readily abandon individuality to assuage her loneliness and pain. A former cult member would benefit from coming to understand the orphan archetype as a means to create awareness of vulnerable dynamics and propensities, as well as protection from being lured into yet another high-demand group. The profound significance of the orphan archetype was recorded by the ancient alchemists, who studied the art of physical and psychological transformation, and whose work deeply influenced Jung’s later investigations. The alchemists termed their philosopher’s stone “the orphan.” Rothenberg (2017) explained that the orphan stone is representative of the totality, corresponding to “the psychological idea of the Self” (p. 104). Related also to the divine child archetype, the orphan stone is said to be simultaneously worthless and precious, and we can say this too about the archetypal nature of the orphan. Cast out and deemed “worthless” or irrelevant to their groups, former members may then

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become acquainted with the precious nature of their intrinsic self. Considering the teleological nature of the Self, we see the yearning for wholeness that is inherent in the abandoned. Once the influence of the orphan archetype has been identified in one’s life, it is important to differentiate oneself from it, and this can be accomplished through engagement with the daimon. Rothenberg (2017) recounted the intentions of alchemical philosopher Paracelsus to honour “the authenticity of one’s own experience of nature against the authority of tradition” (p. 111). Paracelsus identified an inner mentoring spirit, which he referred to as the light of nature, or lumen naturae (Rothenberg, 2017). Acknowledging this inner spirit as separate from the orphaned part creates access to the daimon and fully experiencing the grief and emotions associated with orphan-type losses releases expectations of dependency and generates greater responsibility for oneself. According to Rothenberg, this can be engaged through writing poems, working with artistic media, and doing active imagination with personified inner beings who are a source of comfort (p. 111). I would add that external offerings of comfort are also necessary, and that the therapeutic container or contact with other former cult members may provide a safe respite from intrusions of the destructive elements of the orphan archetype. This is vulnerable work that must be approached with care.

Changing the Metaphors

The memoirists in this study were all encouraged to focus on transcending earthiness; soul was never to be found in the soils upon which they walked, but we know that the path of the daimon, or eudaimonic path, involves connecting also to the organic world, of which we are a part. Healing from a place of cultic disconnection then involves changing the metaphors to foster a return to connection and purpose. Excluding soul from the natural elements of the planet causes humans to see them as “natural resources” which erroneously and tragically renders their purpose to be solely for the benefit of human use and exploitation. If humans perceive themselves to be the leaders or proprietors of a de-souled world, then it becomes far too easy to justify having little to no accountability for its inherent needs and health. There is also a sense that this world is a “throwaway,”—or as Rebecca Stott (2017) described, “a waiting room for the next”—that the “saved” will have opportunities to start anew, free from the pollution supposedly generated by unclean or damned souls. The essential worth and value of the earth’s natural environment and all other non-human beings who share the planet become irrelevant in this view, and humans are freed to pillage and plunder without humility, gratitude, or reciprocity.

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The psyche speaks through metaphor, and so the metaphors we use in reference to the natural world are of deep importance. Davis (2012) illuminates this in the following paragraph: A child who is raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will think and act differently than a youth who is brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock that is ready to be mined. (p. 288) Instead of metaphors that bind nature to suit human purposes, a eudaimonic approach considers nature’s inherent purpose through sitting with her, investing time in her presence, and perhaps being open to receiving an image that would better serve her—one that we do not impose but that comes from a deeper place of attunement. This was a natural tendency for memoirists such as Tim Guest (2004), Debbie Palmer (Palmer & Perrin, 2004), Jerald Walker (2016), and Tara Westover (2018), who wrote of the close connections they felt to their natural surroundings, despite the lack of encouragement from their communities to cultivate such connections. Damery (2018) wrote about the Schumann Resonance, which is “the lowest frequency—and highest intensity—of the earth’s global electromagnetic field spectrum” (p. 25). By entering this frequency, she noted, we are “in resonance with the earth.” This is a relaxed, creative, experiential mode that places our brain’s frequency between alpha and theta brain waves. Perhaps this frequency can also be viewed as an observable manifestation of the liminal, daimonic realm of soul, and a way forward out of the more damaging, one-sided perspectives and practices that attempt to divide humans from their rightful place as interwoven with the rest of the world. Many Indigenous cultures recognize the immense damage and destruction that de-souled, separatist, and extractive narratives and metaphors cultivate. Through thousands of years of relating to the natural world and attending closely to its wisdom, some First Nations people developed practices of acknowledging non-human inhabitants as individual “persons” worthy of their own inherent needs, concerns, and purposes. As we have seen, this is what Hillman (1975) later referred to as personifying. In Indigenous practice, nothing must be taken or extracted from another being without permission or consideration for its needs, as well as the needs of those in relation to it. Potowatomi Nation citizen and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) wrote that “traditional harvesters recognize the individuality of each tree as a person, a nonhuman forest person. Trees are not taken, but requested” (p. 144). She also described the “layers upon layers of reciprocity” (p. 134) in the traditional combined planting of the “three sister” crops of beans, corn, and squash. She explained that while each plant does what it needs to improve its own opportunities for growth, these three plants possess special relationships in that they nourish and provide shade for

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one another in particular ways. This might be the most well-suited way in which to explain the duties and actions of the daimon, which metaphorically represents an individual’s need to “improve its own opportunities for growth,” but this is not accomplished in a vacuum; it is done respectfully and in relation to those sharing the systems that sustain all, and in a reciprocal manner. An individual’s unique gifts are best shared within the collective. So it is for all beings, human or other. Salmón (2000) also spoke to the benefits of this “kincentric” view in an article about the Rarámuri people of Mexico. This cultural group has tended to their ancestral lands—considered to be family or “kin”—for at least two thousand years, and as a result, the land is extremely biologically diverse (p. 1328). Kincentric and ensouled perspectives can be extended metaphorically to the ways in which we perceive our relationships to one another and to the world, via the daimon—layers and layers of reciprocity and connection that extend beyond our current scientific knowledge. This is of mutual benefit, writ large. Hillman’s (1996) work is in concert with these metaphors. He wrote that the acorn is not embedded within our bodies, like a pacemaker; instead, we are embedded in a much larger reality, and the acorn represents just a small portion of this (p. 97). The gifts that accompany us into this world may be seen as not solely for our own benefit, but due to their origins beyond our individual lives, they express needs that exist in our surroundings and that can be beneficial to others, as others’ gifts can in turn benefit and sustain us. Perhaps the daimon’s message reflects the call of the anima mundi. To oppress, co-opt, or prevent the emergence of daimonic material can in this light be seen as an assault against nature herself, and oppressive or cultic activity and behaviour are witnessed as unnatural and violating. As Harpur (2003) noted, the concept of the ensouled world serves as the root metaphor of the Gaia hypothesis, which also imagines the world as a whole, living organism (p. 47), and which sciences such as quantum physics increasingly support (Bohm, 2003; Capra, 2010). All of this places the idea of daimonic expression in a much larger, highly important context. In his explorations of Henri Corbin’s work—of great influence on Hillman— interdisciplinary scholar Tom Cheetham (2015) illuminated the wider perspective of the anima mundi as a means by which we may escape the “alienated, isolated modern ego” (p. 42), where we re-establish the foundational connections between the human soul and the soul of the world (p. 43). While heeding the inner voice that directs us to take specific actions in the world, perhaps we are simultaneously acting in service to the evolving needs of an integrative system. Perhaps our individual call has less to do with ourselves and more to do with larger systems of necessity. As Cheetham expressed, our creative acts are “continuous with the creative power of the world” (p. 45). Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta (2020) references the first law of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed. It only changes and moves between systems that

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are “infinitely interconnected, self-organizing, and self-renewing” (p. 51). It is our false views of all beings as separate, closed systems bumping up solidly against one another that invite the second law of entropy, or destruction, according to Yunkaporta. If we do what we are authentically called to do, we benefit ourselves and the collective. If we do influence one another, let it be for the good of all. Kimmerer concurs, acknowledging that “when the individuals flourish, so does the whole” (p. 134). She goes on to say: The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others. (p. 134) Our move in cultivating soul through the daimon is thus not a self-serving promotion of the “rugged individual,” it is a reciprocal act reconnecting the individual with the collective, in reverence to the anima mundi, within which we are embedded. We seem to be at a point in our history where the necessity to unearth and re-examine these ancient ideas is of utmost importance. Decolonizing the oppressive perspectives that have mechanized the world and divorced us from the flow of its vitality and our daimonic whisperings is a psychological move whose time is nigh. Psychological and physical colonization and exploitation have brought us to a place where soils are depleted, sea levels are rising, and atmospheric carbon has long ago surpassed the safe upper limits (Damery, 2018, p. 18). What we do to others, we do to ourselves, and so on. As Akomolafe (2021) expressed, “if you kneel on my neck, you too will break.” Cults and highdemand communities inform their membership that the divine is only accessible via designated teachings and the individuals who disseminate them, which is blatantly untrue and has harmful repercussions that diminish our inherent and necessary connection to the numinous. The divine is omnipresent, communicative, alive, and accessible to all. It is, in essence, our means to recovery. Healing Insights

Depth psychology is one of the few areas outside the arts and religion in which psychopathology is investigated for its potentially communicative purposes. This perspective may prove to be affirming or even life-saving for former cult members suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other trauma responses who otherwise may be treated in ways that do not create space for what psyche is attempting to convey phenomenologically. Clinical depth psychologist Robin Robertson (2013), who works with patients suffering from dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder),

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proposed that inner figures arising in consciousness might be viewed as suggesting possibilities for change (p. 289). He notes the rise in prevalence of this disorder, usually originating in childhood trauma, where the child dissociates from conscious presence to what is happening and permits an alternate personality—a stronger one—to deal with the reality. This suggestion is echoed in the practice of Internal Family Systems therapy (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020), which is also, like its predecessor archetypal psychology, premised on a model of psychological multiplicity. If we wish to assist cult survivors of the second generation and beyond who have experienced trauma, it is, according to Herman (1992), vital to empower the individual and allow her to be “the author and arbiter of her own recovery” (p. 133). Hillman’s (1994) notion of healing fiction and the practice of narrative therapy both support this endeavour. Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) therapy, which combines attachment theory, neuroscience, and emotion theory, also aligns well with a depth approach (Fosha, 2021). The psyche wishes to heal, and the friend, family member, or therapist’s role is to facilitate that natural propensity, not to assert control and direction over it, particularly where trauma survivors are concerned (p. 134), and especially with those whose trauma involved coercive control and oppression. As previously discussed, religious or spiritual trauma has its own qualities and particularities that require empathic understanding by those who wish to assist former members of high-demand communities. The unique woundings of a person’s existential foundations and spiritual instincts require a different kind of tending. Pasquale (2015) refers to these as “sacred wounds” (p. 61). Some of the defining qualities of religious or spiritual trauma involve making a person feel sinful, unworthy, or that they do not belong, in fundamental ways (p. 65). This deep and existential wounding creates a destructive narrative that must be deconstructed and reformulated during the healing process. Pasquale presents her own healing path from spiritual trauma as an eleven-step process involving: recognition of hurt, wrongdoing, or inconsistencies in the community; questioning; seeking outside input; leaving the community; spending time in the “spiritual desert”; entering stages of anger, grief, and loss; exploring other beliefs and ideas; reintegrating meaning and value; beginning to trust in others and in other communities; moving away from absolutes; and “enlightenment” (pp. 128–131). These steps all seem to echo those found within studies of rites of passage. While I am not a proponent of specific, linear processes or “one size fits all” approaches, it can certainly be helpful, for one newly estranged from a high-demand community, to witness another’s process and to benefit from the wisdom she has to offer. Pasquale notes that this is even more effective if you can connect with a person from your own community who has greater distance from the experience. Counselling clinician Cyndi H. Matthews (2012) suggested that secondgeneration cult survivors can reclaim their sense of personal agency by being

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reminded of the coping and survival strategies that they used during their cult years (p. 46). Strengths that were cultivated during this period will have applications in adjusting to the world outside of a high-demand community. Matthews expressed this in a manner that evokes images of the daimon: “Despite all of the pressure and subjugation they experienced in their former cult, their true selves took root and helped them leave and start new lives” (p. 46). We can help former cult members to envision their daimon as a loyal life companion in service to their needs, whose presence has always been and will always continue to be constant. We can invoke this imagery regardless of how extreme or mild the influence was. Matthews utilized the foundations of grounded constructivist theory in her work with second-generation survivors, which is also the ontological foundation of narrative therapy. Her work thus provides further support for the promotion of narrative therapy as an appropriate and potentially effective therapeutic method for former cult members of the second generation and beyond. Jungian psychology also contributes to the idea of a narrative approach, in the form of what Jung (1961) referred to as his “personal myth” (p. 3), although its foundations are teleological, not constructivist. Exit Counselling

What was formerly referred to as “deprogramming” from a cult is now termed “exit counselling” (Langone, 1993, p. 233). The two techniques differ in that the former was usually arranged by family members and involved extracting a person from a cult against their will, sometimes even kidnapping them—yet another form of coercion and manipulation. This practice has been deemed unethical and is now discontinued. Exit counselling is a process of informed consent where a client explores the particularities of her beliefs, practices, and assumptions during their years in the cult (Hassan, 2018). This practice has been shown to be effective in assisting with cult aftereffects. Those who come to understand the machinations of their cult experience are usually in a better position to move forward than those who leave cults on their own and are unsupported in coming to this understanding. Therapist Lorna Goldberg (1993) emphasized the need for those who counsel former cult or high-demand group members to understand the particular manipulative and coercive elements of cult life and to be careful not to exclude this understanding by means of reducing a cult survivor’s symptoms to early life experiences such as family of origin issues (p. 233). As we have seen, family structures within cults can be quite unconventional, and the cult itself sometimes represents a pseudo or secondary family. Thus, it is vital for those in helping professions to know something about how undue influence works in order to be of valid assistance to someone who has survived life in a high-demand community, particularly if they have been raised in this community. Of course, communities are all different, thus a keen therapeutic ear is

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needed in coming to understand the particularities of a group and the ways in which they influence a client’s life. An important step for the therapist working with religious or spiritual trauma survivors in the beginning is to decode the loaded language of the group in order to communicate clearly with the client, particularly in the initial months of counselling. According to Goldberg (1993), often the language, attitudes, and character traits that relate to the cult will persist in the first two to three months after an individual has left (pp. 233–234). Goldberg notes that deconstructing loaded language can be a long and confusing process, but that it is essential to help a survivor learn how to speak clearly and concretely (p. 235), so that they may relate to the outer world. I would suggest co-creating narratives that incorporate the client’s language—words that the client may wish to reclaim from their cultic associations. Nowadays, former cult members do not present themselves as being dramatically different from the outside world, as former members who left cults in the 1970s did, according to Goldberg. This is due to the fact that modern cults are often less isolating (in the physical sense) than their predecessors. Working with an ex-QAnon adherent around loaded language might involve deconstructing social media hashtags and catchphrases such as “deep state,” and “the storm” (used to organize and plan for the attempted coup at the White House in January of 2021) and investigating what these ideas mean—how divergent from reality they are, as well as how they relate to the destructive historical references noted earlier in this book. As emotional manipulation is a key factor in cultic experience, exit counsellors and therapists must also help an individual develop an understanding as to how, specifically, they were manipulated. What personal qualities and characteristics, either positive or negative, were exploited by leaders? Finding ways in which to see these qualities in a positive light, without casting shame, is vital. It may be the case that these were the qualities that enabled an individual’s survival in the cult. Following cult involvement, these qualities can be reclaimed, celebrated, and directed towards building a new life. Recognizing the specific forms of emotional manipulation used—a form of psychologizing or “seeing through,” can assist a former member in separating herself from guilt or shame that was inculcated in a religious-based group and in dealing with the oft-associated response of depression, for example. Goldberg (1993) pointed out (and this study also observed) that some cults promote the suppression of emotions, while others overwhelm members with affect (p. 238). It is therefore important to differentiate how emotions were addressed and dealt with in the community of relevance. From personal experience, I recall that for years after my departure from a high-demand religious community, I was haunted by thoughts of “what if they were right?” and at times even felt the heavy hand of damnation figuratively bearing down upon my head when I spoke unfavourably about my experience in the group. A continued critical

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investigation of these responses was required in order to move forward in life, and this did not happen overnight. Many new age, mass therapy, or similar groups that consistently violate people’s boundaries generally result in emotional overwhelm among former members (Goldberg, 1993, p. 238). If an individual shows readiness and capacity, however, these emotions can be safely invited into the therapeutic container through depathologizing approaches such as narrative therapy and/or AEDP. As mentioned by several former members of high-demand communities, it is important to let the individual retain agency over her own narrative (Pratezina, 2021) in our efforts to promote healing and to privilege the aspects of community life that they may wish to retain and take with them into their lives going forward. Given the wide variety of groups and the unique individuals who comprise them, it is important not to make assumptions and to take the time to investigate the details of each unique circumstance. This too is in service to the daimon. Therapists and helpers working with former cult members will often be confronted with their clients’ extensive suffering from loneliness. Many survivors report having experienced a sense of belonging in their communities—even if this was “false belonging” (Turner, 2017)—that is suddenly absent following their departure from the group. As we have seen in the memoirists’ experience, because relationships in cults and high-demand communities exist on the condition that members are loyal to the group and its leader(s), a former member can find himself or herself suddenly on the outside, without any friends or family in their lives. Goldberg (1993) suggests involvement in therapeutic groups of former cultists for such individuals, both for the group’s ability to assuage loneliness and to tease out an understanding of the specific coercive tactics that were employed in the cult (p. 238). This may assist in building new, authentic, and aligned attachments. If an in-person group feels too overwhelming to an individual, they may feel more comfortable with an online support group, and there are many such groups for former members. Depending on what stage in an individual’s life they left the group, they may need to discuss missed opportunities that occurred during their developmental years. These could be experiences such as attending school, developing relationships, having children, or cultivating a career or other skills (p. 239). Margaret Singer asserted that until the therapist and ex-member have developed knowledge about cultic control processes, and those specifically utilized by the cult in question, the actual therapeutic process cannot begin. As she expressed it, “Therapy cannot begin until education ends” (as cited in Goldberg, 1993, p. 240). Learning about the specific nuances, beliefs, and patterns of a high-demand community is required by both therapist and client. From this point on, a person’s particular vulnerabilities to cults and coercive control can be explored (p. 241), which is important as they move into a world that is filled

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with varying levels of coercion and oppression. Going forward, the ability of a person to be aware of the vulnerability inherent in liminal or transitional periods in life can alert them to their potential susceptibility to coercion. It should also be pointed out that this is a risk present to all; emphasizing this repeatedly to a client may prevent shame from becoming an additional complication to healing. Goldberg (1993) pointed out that undue influence in the realm of high-demand communities has evolved over time: while past practices of coercive control, such as communist thought reform, were focused on the political self, more modern cults focus on the intrapsychic self, having refined the original techniques in attempts to break through and change a person’s defence mechanisms and coping strategies (p. 244). Hassan (2019) cites Edgar Schein’s description of the “unfreezing, changing, and refreezing” (pp. 73–78) stages involved in the indoctrination process. The unfreezing stage involves disorientation, an undermining of a person’s sense of reality, which is often accomplished through sensory modes such as sleep deprivation and overwhelm, dietary alterations, and hypnotic techniques. In a disoriented state, a person will usually suspend individual judgement and adapt to the behaviours and practices of a group (p. 74). The next stage of “changing” involves the reconstruction of identity, and this is strategized through the use of role models (leaders as representatives of God), repetition and rhythm, and the introduction of new ideas, thoughts, and behaviours. New members are encouraged to release their “old selves,” which are purportedly preventing their progress (p. 76). The “refreezing” stage is when the new identity must be solidified. This is achieved by offering a new life purpose and new activities designed to suppress the old identity and raise the new one to prominence. It is a manipulation of the narrative. Higher-level members model new expected behaviours, behaving as surrogate parents (regardless of the member’s age), while promoting the group as the recruit’s “new” or “true” family (pp. 77–78). In exit counselling, the “ice” of this new persona must once again be unfrozen. Herman’s (1992) three-step process to recovery from trauma is remarkably similar in structure to Schein’s, but is of course applied to reversing the indoctrination and liberating the individual from aspects of trauma that prevent life from being fully lived. In Herman’s first step, the healing or integration process, a new sense of self begins to take shape; in the second, plans can begin to be made for a future that is in alignment with the individual’s needs, proclivities, and desires; and in the third, healthy relationships can be built to support these new life directions (pp. 133–196). Research in neuroplasticity affirms that we are never “frozen forever” and that we may continue throughout our lives to develop new neural pathways and break free from oppressive psychological tethers (Fosha, 2021; LePera, 2021, pp. 32–33). According to Goldberg (1993), silence, which is sometimes used as a therapeutic technique, is not recommended in dealing with former cult members (p. 246).

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Silence can come to serve as a “blank screen” for projections of paranoia that were induced by the cult, or it could induce trance for individuals who are prone to dissociation. Therapists working with this population must also refrain from making any promises of cure or offering a sense of hope for a quick, dramatic transformation. Such promises are typically made by cult leaders (p. 247) and, while they can be compelling and motivating to survivors, are unrealistic. Finally, once again, therapists must also allow former members to claim the positive experiences of their cult lives and not assume that everything was negative (p. 248). We cannot negate aspects of a person’s life, but we can help them to decide what they would like to promote and carry forward into their new lives and what they would like to leave behind, which is an aspect of the externalizing practice of narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990). Looking back to the memoir study, we are reminded of the many examples of humorous, connective, and skill-building experiences and interactions that occurred within the lives of these former members of high-demand communities. These experiences were part of the formation of individuals’ characters, and along with shadow aspects, can be mined for the gold they may offer in their new lives. Psychologist and expressive arts therapist Cathy Malchiodi (2020) attests to the effectiveness of pairing narrative therapy with expressive arts (p. 329). Both methods focus on separating and externalizing the problem from the individual, and both are highly focused on the individual’s right to author and re-author the ways in which they tell stories about their lives. Expressive arts therapy offers extended support to those who may have difficulty finding words to express their experiences and can be utilized as a preliminary method of eventually getting to the words. Expressive arts modalities and media can be chosen to fit the comfort and ability levels of the individual (pp. 328–329). Malchiodi has found that dramatic enactment and visual art are particularly well suited to storytelling (p. 330). I would add that Jungian sandplay can also perform this function (Doyle & Magor-Blatch, 2017). Malchiodi gave the example of an activity called the “tree of life,” which embodies Herman’s (1992) three stages of recovery from trauma, as mentioned above. The tree metaphor, she pointed out, stimulates attunement first to the past, through the image of roots, then to the present, through the images of the trunk and branches, and finally to the future, through the image of what is growing and changing (p. 331). Individuals, couples, or families can place images on specific parts of the tree, a three-dimensional sculpture created out of paper bags and any other materials that are available. Individuals can be prompted to think about the “roots” of their families or selves in terms of who and what gives them strength, and they can be asked about things they have accomplished or legacies they will leave behind for others, as well as what new things are growing in their lives and how those might be represented in images (p. 331). The image-oriented aspect of activities such as this relates to a depth and archetypal approach, engaging psyche, soma, and the imagination.

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Concluding Thoughts

A wise teacher once told me that there is nothing more beautiful and fascinating than an ordinary human life. This insight returned to me many times as I walked through the pages of the memoirs so generously provided by those who traversed the dangerous and threatening terrain of life in a cult or high-demand group, from their earliest beginnings—those who undertook the sometimes-excruciating journey out of oppression and into the light of their own daimonic purpose. This study cannot do justice to the beauty and inspiration evoked by these individuals’ expressions of their experience; I would therefore highly recommend that the best way to gain intimacy with what it is like to grow up in a cult is to read these and other related memoirs. The psychological insights offered by those who grew up in highly oppressive groups can benefit us at a time when we observe increasingly multiple layers, complexities, and intensities of oppression in our culture. This phenomenological hermeneutic study began with the research question, “How might the depth psychological dynamics of the daimon be observed and understood through the narratives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation former cult members who leave their communities?” In response, twelve phenomenological categories of daimonic expression emerged out of the reading of twenty memoirs of survivors of the second generation and beyond. Through coded examples of memoirists’ experiences, we came to see that a multitude of daimonic expressions and engagements led to the multifaceted ways in which memoirists told the stories of their lives within and eventual departures from their cult or high-demand community, beginning with images and metaphors, then continuing with realizations and insights, affects/emotions, patterns of behaviour, yearnings and curiosities, narratives, doubts and confusions, rebellions, somatic experiences, imaginings and reveries, instincts and intuitions, and finally dreams and synchronicities. These expressions attune to the often disregarded or even maligned subjective aspects of cult experience and extrication, offering an alternate, yet in-depth, view of the tremendous challenges faced by those born and raised in restrictive communities. For our memoirists, each category of daimonic phenomenology posed a unique contribution to the individual’s reunification with his or her sense of meaning and purpose, offering a variety of portals into comprehending the daimon’s phenomenology under oppression. We discovered that in order to leave a cult, it is of particular importance to engage more than one of these expressions, as communications with the daimon are complicated and can be sabotaged or confused by those growing up in such communities, where daimonic expression is often hijacked and channelled towards gains for the group, and repetitious dogma and undue influence comprise powerful resistances to the daimonic. Depth psychology offers a phenomenological and dynamic understanding of the daimon under oppression. C.G. Jung’s understanding of the structure and dynamics

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of the psyche leads us to witness how the destructive capacities of the daimon can be awakened in instances of shadow repressions. We also come to understand how the idea of following one’s inner voice is complicated by the paradoxical aspects of the unconscious psyche, the need to discern the origin of the “voice,” and the fragile moral and ethical terrain that can be traversed in relation to free will. Complex theory, and in particular cultural complex theory, provided insight into the psychological underpinnings of mass cultural movements that complement the studies of sociology, history, and political science. James Hillman and other post-Jungian scholars expand upon Jung’s original explorations of mythopoetic engagements with daimonic phenomena. The four pillars of archetypal psychology can be effectively and therapeutically utilized in terms of formulating beneficial ways in which to relate to common life events and practices, such as parenting. Cultic studies research indicates points of vulnerability to undue influence and coercive control, noting that in times of crisis such as we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to experience through widespread racial and economic tensions, as well as climate change and political unrest, heightens this vulnerability. It is therefore paramount that we become aware of techniques, tactics, and modalities that may be utilized to remove our agency and co-opt our talents, capabilities, idealisms, attachments, and goodwill for purposes that do not serve us or the greater good in productive ways. “Undue influencers” can channel our capacities towards their own gains, be they psychological, physical, social, spiritual, or financial, and an understanding of the mechanisms of this influence can be part of an antidote to its efficacy. If we pair this awareness with the process of becoming acquainted with our own daimons through their phenomenological expressions, we create a premeditated and pre-emptive form of resistance that is honouring and protective of ourselves, others, and perhaps the anima mundi itself. We can also be aware of how manipulative propensities may abide within ourselves and make deliberate efforts to avoid causing harm. As we note the unsettling predominance of cultic dynamics in the wider culture, we can connect this to Jung’s identification of the religious/spiritual function of the psyche and how our current era reflects a postsecular dynamic that is characterized by a combination of authentic spiritual yearning and a widespread turning away from the extremes of religious dogma and control, as well as wholly secular or mechanistic explanations of numinous phenomena and experience. These propensities reflect the state of collective spiritual evolution that characterizes modern-day spiritual yearnings. In our seeking journeys, this unfortunately also leaves us vulnerable to cultic exploitation and undue influence. Awareness and discernment are key. We cannot only cast light on the dangers of cults and oppressive leaders, however, without taking into consideration the vital influences of our natural spiritual yearnings, the postsecular age, and how these are co-opted or channelled to promote damaging ideologies, beliefs, conspiracy theories, and dangerous or exploitative individuals and organizations.

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Phenomenologically, we can apprehend the presence of the daimon in several ways, some of which are highlighted by the twelve categories in this study, oriented to depth psychology’s understanding of the structure and dynamics of the psyche. To extend this, it might be proposed that a well-rounded and deliberately cultivated relationship with such phenomenological expressions as dreams, images, synchronicities, yearnings, patterns, narratives, etc. can be of benefit to an individual in search of meaning or connection to authentic purpose or a way to move forward despite their oppressive circumstances. To evoke the daimon, we can ask ourselves questions such as, “what do I currently yearn for?” or “what stories am I holding about this situation?” We can draw or animate dreams and waking images if it feels safe to do so (Johnson, 1986). These are not light or unchallenging suggestions, however. A depth psychological path involves a significant amount of courage and a willingness to let go of many aspects of an ego-identified life, in favour of one given over to the expressions of an unknowable dynamic, with original and unpredictable offerings. Orientation towards the daimonic may even pull us away from the comforts of a socio-culturally validated life, although Rozuel (2013) insisted that despite the risks involved and the inherent challenges to culturally accepted norms, this is “the moral imperative of honest psychological work” (p. 211). By engaging a daimonically oriented life, we move away from our usual concerns with fitting ourselves into moulds imposed by the dominant cultural narrative, towards functioning without the safe assuredness of a script. We are reminded that this is a search for one’s authentic self, not a quest to cultivate a persona, and the result may not resemble at all what has been suggested or determined for us by those responsible for our upbringing or for those with whom we share culture and social connection. A depth psychological perspective complements the existing cultic studies literature, offering psychodynamic insight that deepens our understanding of the effects of undue influence upon individuals and in the wider culture. During our lives, we will likely come to re-experience the need for a reclamation of our daimon on more than one occasion. The insights of our second-generation (and beyond) memoirists demonstrate how to attune to signs of deceit in our lives. The more deeply we can engage with the daimon, the more opportunity we are afforded to move in the direction of our soul’s path. We all need to make ourselves vulnerable in order to experience the fullness of life, soul, and spirit, despite the attendant risks. Fortunately, though, we have an inner ally in the form of the daimon and can cultivate over time a deep relationship with its multifold phenomenological expressions and how they might inform and enrich us. If we look deeply and with curiosity at our symptoms in particular, we might see the creative side of their apparent destructive capacities. In so doing, we “daimonize” what has been demonized and move towards a genuine, rich, full, and soulful engagement with life.

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INDEX

abusive cults 42; see also cults acausal connecting principle 65 accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) therapy 82, 170 addiction 129 advantageous marriage 98 adverse childhood experiences (ACES) 43 affect/emotion 82–83 Aion (Jung) 32 Akomolafe, B. 169 Alexander, Bruce 16 anger 84–86 animal imagery 56–57 anima mundi 142, 152, 168–169, 177 Anthony, Dick 37 archaic/mythological daimon 24–25 archetypal assistant 31 archetypal image 31–32 archetypal psychology 29 archetypal unconscious 50 attachments: damaged family 75; disorganized 74, 75; and emotional connection 74–77; insecure 74; mechanisms of 75; relationships 74; secure 74 attention economy 4 Augustine 28 behavioural control 36 Berry, P. 150 Beyoncé 52

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (The “Rajneeshis”) 35, 52, 53, 55, 77–78, 85, 107 Blair-Dixon, K. 26 Boeri, M. W. 62 bonding 146 Boyce, W. Thomas 141–144 brainwashing 38 Brooks, J. 60, 63, 67, 95, 101, 105, 106, 113, 114–115, 118 Buhring, J. 99, 114, 118, 143 Burkert, W. 22–23 Cadet Org 104 calming presence 122 Carroll, T. D. 43 Cartwright, Robert 40 charismatic authority 36 Cheetham, Tom 168 Christianity 26, 28–29 City of God (Augustine) 28 cleanse 13–14 closed communities 6 closed system of logic 36 coercive control 37–38 collective consciousness 11; see also conscious/consciousness collective unconscious 31; see also unconscious colonization: European 11; physical 169; see also psychological colonization

Index  193

Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower (Jung) 99 communal cults 39 communion 3 communities: closed 6; exploitative 4; highdemand/cultic 4; version of reality 7; see also high-demand communities compulsive digital use (CDU) 130 concrete 21–23 confusion 127; regarding cultic activity 68–69 conscious/consciousness: awareness 25; collective 11; control 27; hero-based/ego-centered 160; human 57; influences 4; minds 5; modern 93; perception 32; psychological 156; realms 24 consensus culture 2–3 considerable resistance 126 Corbin, Henri 168 corporate religion 131 COVID-19 pandemic 125 critical thinking capacities 4 critical thinking vs. certainty 69–70 critical thinking vs. faith 69–70 cultic behaviours 34, 35, 37 cultic dynamics 91 cultishness 139 cults 6–7, 11–12; abusive 42; characteristics of 36–37; charismatic authority 36; coercive control 37–38; communal 39; and complexes 90–91; and daimon 8; depth psychology 42–45; as family 73–74; modes of influence in 39–41; nature of 33–45; overview 35–36; of personality 17; spiritual trauma 41–42; systems of control 36; systems of influence 36; transcendent belief system 36; undue influence 37–38 cultural complexes 91–93 cultural values: evolution of 21 curiosity 17 Currier, J. 43 daily tasks and habits 103–105 daimon 7–9; archaic/mythological 24–25; and cult 8; defined 8, 22, 32; to demon 21–23; and depth psychology 30–32; emotional phenomenology 90; evil 26; evolution of 23–30; from external to internal 27; extraordinary capabilities

of 19; fear 26; and free will 27; magic 26; and memoir 8; non-rational phenomenon 25; non-rational vs. irrational 25–26; numinous aspects 27; and phenomenology 8, 18–20; Plato about 28–29; realm of 21; rugged individualist 9 daimon/“divine being” 28 daimon/“evil spirit” 28 daimonic expression: animal imagery 56–57; dreams and synchronicities 62–64; four modes of 49–65; image/metaphor/archetype 49–59; imagination and reverie 61–62; narrative 59–65; photo-balms 56; photographic imagery 53–54; vignettes of trauma 54–55; vocal/auditory imagery 50–53 daimonic intervention 29 daimonic reclamation 34 “Daimon in Classical Greek Literature” (Rexine) 22 damaged family attachments 75 Damery, P. 167 dangerous psychological hierarchy 134 Darby, John Nelson 54 Darcus, Shirley 27 Darwin, Charles 121 Davis, W. 167 Days of Abomination 105 dehumanizing 161–163 Deikman, A. J. 73 “The Demonic: From Aeschylus to Tillich” (Zucker) 22 Dennis, S. L. 102 dependency dream 73–74 depersonalization 58 depression 21, 43, 44, 95, 159 depth psychology 5, 18, 21, 26; and daimon 30–32; and developmental perspective 42–45; images in 50 developmental science 16, 42 diagnosable psychological conditions 44 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition 44 Diamond, S. A. 29, 30, 85 Dickenson, T. 137 dionysian 23 Diotima 28, 77 disease/illness/injury 99–101 disgusting rackets 133 disorganized attachment 74, 75

194 Index

dissociation 57–59 divine: communion with 3; human experiences of 3; human sense of 2 Dodds, E. R. 25 doubt/doubting: and confusion 66–81; critical thinking vs. faith and certainty 69–70; and dissonance 66–81; doctrine 66–68; leadership 70; outsiders 68 dreams 62–64; unconscious in 2 Edmondson, Sarah 134 ego-Self connection 157 E-Meter 79–80 emotional control 36 emotional expression 84 emotional phenomenology 90 emotions 83; in high-demand communities 83; negative and positive 83 Empedocles 25 enantiodromia 15 engulfment 40, 104, 131–134 Eros/Love 28 “Escaping Twin Flames” 138 eudaimonic life 9 European colonization 11 evil 26 evil spirit 22 Exclusive Brethren community 54, 57, 58, 64, 84, 107, 112 existential certainty 34 exit counselling 171–175 exploitative communities 4 fear 26 fear arousal 134–135 fear of missing out (FOMO) 135 Feldman, Deborah 54, 60, 62–65, 67, 69, 71, 85, 94, 98, 101, 107, 110, 112–115, 118–120 Ficino, Marsilio 29 foreboding and fear 97–98 Fosha, Diana 82 free will 27 Freire, Paulo 36, 37 Freud, Sigmund 36, 91 Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint (FLDS) 39, 51, 68, 70, 76, 84, 87, 104, 106, 109, 114, 116 Gaia hypothesis 168 galvanic skin response (GSR) 51

Garrett, R. 71, 86, 104, 108, 110, 113, 120 gaslighting 80 Gehart, D. 73 genocide 11, 136 Gibson, Andrea 164 global-oriented society 130 Gloriavale 52, 109 Gloriavale community 117 Goethe 22, 29 Goldberg, Lorna 171–174 great mother archetype 145–147 grief 5 Griffith, Honor 50 Guest, Tim 35, 39, 52, 53, 55–56, 77, 78, 85, 93, 100–101, 104–105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 117, 167 guidance 21–32 Guru Sri Chinmoy 62, 86 Harpur, P. 168 Hassan, S. 36, 52, 70, 119, 127, 135, 174 healing 101–102, 164–178; exit counselling 171–175; insights 169–171; metaphors 166–169; orphan archetype 165–166; overview 164–165 health experts 13 Hellenistic period 28 Heraclitus 15, 27 Herman, J. 41, 83, 100, 170, 174, 175 Hermetic intoxication 130 hero-based/ego-centered consciousness 160 Hesiod 27 high-demand communities 4, 6–7, 16–19, 26, 34, 35–38, 44, 49, 83, 139; oceanic pressure systems in 50 high-demand group 4 Hillman, J. 7, 18–19, 23, 29, 32, 55, 57, 72, 116, 130, 137, 141–142, 147, 150– 151, 153–154, 156–158, 160–162, 167–168, 170 Hoffman, Claire 54, 56, 63, 67, 94, 110, 113, 115 Hollis, James 77 Homer 24, 25, 27, 50 human attachment 16, 72, 77 human beings: needs 16 human experiences of divine 3 humanities 25 Human Potential Movement 131 human sense of divine 2 hypnotic effect 13

Index  195

The Idea of the Holy (Otto) 3 images 49–50; in depth psychology 50; unconscious in 2 imaginal “attendant” of sorts 7 imaginal refuge 62 imaginal ways of knowing 49–65; see also daimonic expression imagination 29 imagination and reverie 61–62 Indigenous cultures 29 individuation 5 individuation process 31 indoctrinated physicality 98–99 ineffable 21–23 influencers 12, 13–15, 17; marketing 52; social media 17 influences 3–5; conscious 4; forms of 3–4; oceanic 4; over parenting 12; unconscious 4, 5; undue 4 information control 36 inherent human capacity 27 inherited human experience 31 innate human capacity 27 inner guidance 3 insecure attachments 74 insights: healing 169–171; realization and 74–81 instincts: attachment and belonging 72–73; cult as family 73–74; and intuitions 70–74; wounded 71 Internal Family Systems 23, 170 International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) 36, 136 Internet addiction 129 involuntariness 37 isolation 129–131 James, William 62 Jeffs, Brent 39, 51, 58, 68, 70, 76, 83, 85, 104, 109, 111, 121 Jeffs, Rulon 51 Jeffs, Warren 51, 76, 96, 114 Jehovah 109 Jessop, Caroline 51, 59, 68, 76, 84, 85, 87, 95, 99, 111–112, 114–115, 120–121 Jihadist movements 6 Jones, Celeste 67, 70, 79, 85, 89, 109, 116, 118 Jones, Jim 106 Jones, Kristina 58, 59, 121

Jung, C. G. 2, 5, 15, 20, 21, 25, 29–32, 56–57, 62, 65, 68, 81, 90–92, 126, 132–133, 138, 143, 153–154, 171; about emotion 82; depth psychology 5; idea of individuation 5 Kaplan, J. 38 Kendall, L. 43, 69, 93 Kent, S. 40, 116 Kimbles, S. L. 92 Kimmerer, Robin Wall 167, 169 Lalich, J. 37, 56, 89–90, 109, 119 Landmark Education programme 131 Langone, Michael 132, 136 language loading 136 large group awareness trainings (LGAT) 131–134 Latter-day Saints (LDS) 105, 106 Layton, Deborah 59, 63, 69–70, 88, 94, 98, 106 leadership 36, 149; acceptance via performance/approval of 44; cult 59; dependency on 40; doubting 70; highdemand groups, dependency on 40; representing God/powerful symbolic authority 44; spiritual bullying/ manipulative behaviour of 44; spiritual neglect/detrimental acts of omission by 44; transformational 131 leisure time 108–109 Levine, P. A. 95, 102 Lifton, R. 36, 52, 79, 83, 92, 107, 119, 127, 130, 135–136, 164 lived experience 8 living force 3 Lockwood, R. 131, 133 loneliness 15, 129 longing 116–122; for community, family, and belonging 117–118; for freedom and independence 118–120; for normalcy 121–122 Losing Reality (Lifton) 127 Luck, Georg 26, 28 MacNamara, D. 146 magic 26 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 54, 94 Malchiodi, Cathy 175 marketing influencers 52 master-slave relationships 134 Maté, Gabor 16, 43, 117

196 Index

Matthews, Cyndi H. 170–171 May, Rollo 29, 30, 85 McCormick, W. H. 43 McLaren, K. 37, 89–90, 109, 119 memoir: and daimon 8 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung) 30 mental health 16 mental predators 135 metaphors 166–169 mirror exercise 138 Miscavige, David 53 Miscavige-Hill, J. 53, 58, 61, 69, 80, 84, 95, 99, 104, 108, 113, 114, 116, 118, 121 Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field (Kaplan) 38 modern Western culture 4, 16, 125– 140; cultic dynamics in 127–140; engulfment 131–134; fear arousal 134–135; isolation 129–131; QAnon 135–140 mystical manipulation 136 The Myth of Normal (Maté) 16 Mythologies (Yeats) 29 narrative 59–65; dreams 62–64; imaginal refuge 62; imagination and reverie 61–62; outsiders 59–60; retrospective 60–61; secret creative self (sCS) 62; synchronicities 64–65 narrative therapy 61, 159, 170, 171, 173, 175 negative and positive emotions 83 Neufeld, Gordon 39, 43, 72, 117 Neumann, E. 145, 146 neuroplasticity 75 new religious movements (NRM) 6, 35 Nicene Creed 30 Nietzsche, F. 23 non-rational phenomenon 25 normalcy 121–122 numinous/numinosity 1–3, 24, 57; aspects 146; being 145; expressions 23; human relationship to 23; powers of 162; secular/mechanistic explanations of 177; sense of 3 objects and activities 110–111; repelled 110–111 The Odyssey (Homer) 24, 50 Oliver, J. Eric 137

open-mindedness 17 oppositional acts 103–122; curiosity 116– 122; patterns of thought and behaviour 103–111; rebellion 111–116; yearning/ longing 116–122 oppression 3–5 oppressive communities 19 The Orchid and the Dandelion (Boyce) 142 orphan archetype 165–166 Otto, R. 2, 27 outsiders 59–60 overculture 3, 152, 165 Palmer, Debbie 39, 51, 54, 56, 62, 94, 97–99, 108, 114, 167 Panchuk, M. 44 parent-child relational realm 152 parenting 141–163; dandelions 142–145; and dehumanizing 161–163; great mother archetype 145–147; liminal 141–142; nature/nurture 141–142; orchids 142–145; and pathologizing 153–158; and personifying 151–153; and psychologizing 158–161; revisioning 147–150 Paris, Ginette 159 Pasquale, T. B. 170 pathologizing 153–158 patterns of thought and behaviour 103–111; compelling objects and activities 110–111; daily tasks and habits 103–105; leisure time 108–109; preparing for apocalypse 105–106; relationship patterns 107; rules and expectations 106–107; spiritual practice 108 Pearce, J. C. 146, 151, 162 personifying 151–153 Phaedrus (Plato) 28 phantom functions 24 Phelps-Roper, M. 67–69, 71–72, 78, 85, 87–88, 96, 108, 117 phenomenology: and daimon 8, 18–20 philosophical coolness 23 photo-balms 56 photographic imagery 53–54 phubbing 129 Pinkola-Estés, C. 3, 148 Plato 7, 25, 28–29 Plotinus 29 Porter, M. 150

Index  197

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 96, 169 pre-cult identity 7 preparing for apocalypse 105–106 Pressley, K. 62 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 136 psyche 5, 11, 18, 21; as compensatory 81; structure and dynamics of 31–32 psychic intervention 25 psychological colonization 4, 11–12, 140 psychological disequilibrium 132 psychologizing 158–161 psychosocial integration 16 punishments 116 Punnett, A. 165 QAnon 135–140 Raniere, Keith 134 rational mind 25 rational thought 25 realization: and insight 74–81; raised by peers 77–81; regarding attachment and emotional connection 74–77 rebellion 111–116; appearances 114; punishments for 116; sacred 114–116; in search of fun and personal interest 111–113; speaking up 113–114 relationship patterns 107 religion, dualistic split in 29–30 religious freedoms 38 religious function 132 religious interpretations 29 religiousity 131 religious/spiritual function 132 religious trauma 164 religious trauma syndrome 44 Remini, L. 69, 71, 117, 121 Republic (Plato) 28 “Re-Sink the Titanic” (Slater) 18 retrospective narrative 60–61 re-visioning parenting 147–150 Re-Visioning Psychology (Hillman) 147 Rexine, J. 22, 23 Rich, A. 146, 155 Rilke 30 Robbins, Thomas 37 Robertson, Robin 169 Rothenberg, R. E. 165, 166 rugged individualist 9

sacred rebellion 114–116 sacred science 136 sacrificial attitude 18 Salmón, E. 168 Satmar community 55 Satmar Hasidic Jewish community 54 Satmar Orthodox community 69 scaffolded 25 Scarred (Edmondson) 134 Scheflin, Alan 38 Schein, Edgar 174 Schumann Resonance (Damery) 167 Scientology 18, 53, 104 Scorah, A. 52, 56, 59, 60, 68, 69, 86, 109–110, 112, 120, 122 secret creative self (sCS) 62 secure attachment 74 Selig, J. 8 semi-autonomous images/figures 5 sense 82–102; affect/emotion 82–83; anger 84–86; cults and complexes 90–91; cultural complexes 91–93; disease/illness/injury 99–101; farewell 87–90; foreboding and fear 97–98; healing 101–102; indoctrinated physicality 98–99; moments of happiness 86–87; silent sensations 99; somatic experience 93–97; uncomfortably numb 83–84 Shalit, E. 90 Shamdasani, Sonu 19 Sheela, Ma Anand 105 Shengold, L. 83 sidhe 29 Siegel, D. J. 74 silent sensations 99 Sims, B. M. 43 Singer, Margaret 36, 69, 96, 119, 131, 173 Singer, T. 92 Slater, Glen 18, 126 Smith, Joseph 54 social instinct 36 social media addiction 129 social media influencers 17 sociopolitical discourses 4 Socrates 4, 22, 26, 28, 77 somatic experience 93–97 soul 19 The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (Hillman) 7, 19 spiritual practice 108 spiritual space 6

198 Index

spiritual trauma 41–42, 43–44; lived experiences of 44–45 spiritual yearnings 133 Sri Chinmoy community 39, 54, 72, 76, 102, 104, 121 Stanton, G. 135–136 Stein, Alexandra 28, 40, 74, 75, 80, 104, 129, 134, 146 Stott, Rebecca 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 84, 93, 94, 107, 112, 121–122, 166 Symbols of Transformation (Jung) 145 Symposium (Plato) 28 The Symposium (Plato) 77 synchronicities 64–65 systems of control 36 systems of influence 36 Tacey, David 132 Tamm, Jayanti 39, 54, 61, 72, 76, 77, 86, 98, 104, 113, 121 Taoism 133 Tarawa, L. 52, 61, 67, 68, 85, 89, 99, 100, 104, 109, 114, 117 temporary insanity 25 theos 25, 28 theriomorphic imagery 56 thoughts: control 36; unconscious in 2 thought-terminating cliché 52, 130 Tillich, Paul 29 Tobias, M. 56 Transcendental Meditation (TM) community 54, 67 transcendent belief system 36 transcendent function 68 transformational leadership 131 trauma: religious 164; vignettes of 54–55 Trump, Donald 135 trustworthiness 17 Tummala-Narra, P. 149 Turner, Toko-Pa 60, 71, 83, 100, 118 ultra-Orthodox community 115, 120 uncomfortably numb 83–84 unconscious 63, 91; archetypal 50; collective 31, 92; communications 156; in dreams 2; embodied system 92; forms of understanding 42, 149; in images 2; influences 4, 5; personal 92; processes 5, 26; psychic material 77;

psychological phenomena 5; realms 24; in thoughts 2 unconscious control 27 unconscious perception 32 undue influence 4, 7, 37–38 undue influencers 130 unquestionable reality 2 Van der Kolk, B. 57 vignettes of trauma 54–55 vocal/auditory imagery 50–53 von Mettenheim, W. 17 Walker, J. 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 67, 69, 98, 105, 107, 109, 121–122, 167 Ward, David J. 37, 44 Warner, J. 149 wellness 17 West, Louis Jolyon 51, 75 Westboro community 67–69, 71–72, 78, 79, 84, 85, 88, 96, 108, 117 Western civilization: psychological understanding in 22 Western culture 4, 7; cultic dynamics 34; history 21; on rational 25; and technologies 20 Westover, T. 52–53, 56, 63, 70, 79, 85–87, 89, 94, 97, 99, 105, 112, 113, 114, 115, 167 Whitman, W. 23 Wiedmann, K. 17 Wilford, F. A. 24 Winell, M. 44, 165 Winnicott, D. W. 157 World Health Organization 129 Worldwide Church of God communities 107 worthiness 41 wounded instincts 71 yearnings 116–122; for knowledge 120– 121; spiritual 133 Yeats, William Butler 29 Yogic Flying 67 Yunkaporta, Tyson 168 Zen Buddhism 133 Zucker, Wolfgang M. 22–23 Zuckerman, Ethan 137