How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?
34 comments
·November 19, 2025pjc50
Some pull quotes, since people seem to be struggling with page loading:
> his client, a woman who had recently finished her master’s at a prestigious university, had been drawn into a scam job. It was essentially a pyramid scheme built around a health regimen. Before you could sell it, you had to try it, so you knew what you were selling.
> The regimen? Multiple enemas a day. “It escalated to 40 to 60 enemas a day,”
> All groups have a rhythm, like a pulse across the calendar year. We have holidays, and we have tax season. There are highs and lows.
> Furthermore, Kelly and Ryan urge their clients not to speak with the media. The firmest “no” I ever got was when I asked Ryan if I could speak to a former client.
> One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. [NB: do you have any idea how little that narrows it down]
> the girl’s uncle, their client, had a very difficult time finding anything positive about the group or the leader who had allegedly raped his niece
> What Kelly and Ryan mean when they say these groups are “offering something” to people, it is exactly that. There is a hole a group fills: alienation from community, family, sexuality; pressure to follow a certain life plan, addiction, unrealized spirituality, economic catastrophe – all reasons to join a group
dzink
Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
actionfromafar
Worked fine in Firefox incognito.
munchler
Reader mode. No ads, just text.
HeinzStuckeIt
The Guardian from a desktop browser started confronting me with a paywall about two weeks ago. Can’t even see the front page, and uBlock Origin doesn’t help. Far from encouraging me to subscribe, I think this might actually finally cure my news addiction.
esseph
I'm not seeing page refreshes on chrome. It's just a lot of fixed sized ad boxes.
JKCalhoun
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads.
(Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
dap
I’d strongly recommend the documentary “Behind the Curve”. The close look at people in (not quite a cult) gave me a visceral appreciation for what draws people to it (it provides acceptance for people who sorely lack it) and why it can be so hard to leave (one’s identity becomes so tied up in it).
meken
Fascinating. I would totally watch a TV series on this.
null
null
internet_points
So that works if it's possible to actually reach the person and the family agrees that they need help to get out. What if the family is part of the problem or is tricked? (I recently read https://elan.school/ about this unimaginably horrible Kids for Cash-like scheme/cult. The only thing I can think of to prevent such things would be to get parents, teachers, lawmakers and social workers to read those stories too.)
nine_zeros
[dead]
postflopclarity
[flagged]
conartist6
Well, you should!
This could also be a guide for how to win elections. But it's a huge undertaking. Learning their mythology and being dispassionately conversant in it is not easy. To completely erase your ego and work only in pursuit of manipulation... Well, it's no surprise to me that it's a job, and that they aren't trying to do it on their own families. It's not clear you should try to do that to your own family.
But to win elections, we do have to reach across to people who are conditioned a certain way, and to do that you'll need to know yourself very well, especially your relationship to the forces that condition you
komali2
I would be curious how these conversations with maga families would go if one truly adopted the methodology of the men mentioned in the article.
I liked they philosophy of basically engaging in deep, true good faith understanding of the person's view and group, as well as for the deprogrammer, leaving as much of your personal beliefs at the door, and accepting that you can't really know truth, that truth is more a feeling.
For the MAGA folks, there are many things about their ideology that are easy to agree with in isolation, and easy to understand if you comprehend their misunderstanding of reality. Suspicion of government? Makes sense! Desire for greater affordability? Of course! Nationalism, anti-globalism? Once you strip away the antisemitic tropes of anti globalism and the racist tropes of nationalism, it's perfectly understandable to ask why billions of your tax dollars are being spent in other countries on things that don't affect you in the slightest.
What I wonder moreso though is the ability of the somewhat neutered American liberal to check their own beliefs at the door. American liberalism seems hyper focused on aesthetics and strongly opposed to practical leftism, or really anything that challenges neoliberal dogma around Statism or Capitalism. I see American liberals shoot themselves in the foot with this all the time, and I fear they don't have the strength to make it through the first five seconds of the weird bits of a Trump supporter's beliefs without immediately fighting on aesthetic grounds.
I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?" At least to some extent. I fear "vote blue no matter who" ideology has short circuited the ability of American liberals to have genuine conversations with oppositional points of view.
pjc50
> I'm by no means an expert in this and in fact I hunger for these conversations so I can learn more about how to bridge the gap, so I can dig to the material conditions issues underlying the vast majority of most Trump supporter's concerns. The whole "drain the swamp thing," I mean, was it wrong? The entire government seems to have been cozied up with Israel at best and Epstein at worst! So how do you get to talking about that with them to where you get them to understand that their favorite republican politicians fall right into that pool, without first acknowledging the reality that the same is true for politicians "on your side?"
Something I've noticed is that a lot of conspiracy theory is "exactly wrong": people will identify something which does have a real true problem to it, usually to do with elite unaccountability or widespread public lying, and then - without evidence, or using one extremely flimsy link - attach it to someone who least represents that problem. Thereby effectively covering up for all the other crimes.
ghhyff
[dead]
0xdada
I don't really try with family Fidesz members (Hungarian MAGA). I know why my relative believes what he does and I can't change that. I'm there for him as a friend, will share my conflicting views carefully but avoid getting dragged into a full on argument with emotions.
jumpman_miya
[dead]
aaaskkggdddd
[flagged]
considering223
No matter the topic, some people always circle back to Trump/MAGA.
In the words of Oscar Wilde, you are one of the tedious unfortunates.
postflopclarity
forgive me if the rise of autocracy and death of civil liberties in my country occupies my thoughts nowadays.
blitz_skull
[flagged]
komali2
Does MAGA not strike you as a little cultish? The hats, the flags, the self victimization and combatitive behavior to enforce ingroup comfort vs outgroup discomfort?
NickC25
I'm not even left or right but just pointing out that MAGA, who worships hypermasculinity and claims to be the party of God, seems to rile some folks up who can't come to terms with reality.
They make a demigod out of a fat lifelong Democrat in makeup who wrote in a book that if he ever ran for office he'd run as a Republican because they lack independent thought and effectively fall in line. They literally worshipped and prayed to a golden statue of him, which makes the whole story about the golden calf somewhat ironic.
adornKey
The corresponding anti-movements aren't any better. Best is to agree with both camps 50 times...
ghhyff
[dead]
NickC25
You shame someone for talking about a cult....in a thread about people in a cult.
Interesting read. Framing things as a "cultic relationship" makes a lot of sense to me. The part about using your experience as a basis of truth determination being flawed and a source of vulnerability also was pretty insightful.
I'm a little surprised by mention of pushback and accusations of being cult apologists, only because what they're describing as their method is pretty similar in principle to some widespread and empirically validated therapies for more common things. It's just much more invasive, to understate things. I guess at some point there are probably basic immediate safety issues that arise, where taking time has its own risks.
The piece left me thinking that the reasons people become involved with and attached to cults might not be different at some fundamental level from a lot of other psychological problems they get themselves in — just a matter of degree or pervasiveness.