How do the pros get someone to leave a cult?
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thoughtful
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culture
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cult psychology
social influence
exit strategies
The post asks how professionals help individuals leave cults, sparking interest in the strategies and methods used to support cult exit.
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11/19/2025, 12:31:54 PM
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(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.)
Ha, they even have their "Website of the year" award linked on their top banner
https://web.archive.org/web/20080704050905/http://theguardia...
> 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
.. but you can also see a lot of slightly less intense grassroots health marketing or MLMs that also look very culty. Health in particular is a fertile ground for microcults.
1. Fast on water for a week 2. Drink a cup of olive oil, straight 3. Multiple enemas several times a week 4. Maintain a raw vegan diet in between
Throw in the occasional ayahuasca weekend (another cleaning ritual involving a rather extreme amount of, uh, purging). And for good measure dose yourself on some kind of poisonous frog venom for more of the same.
If I didn't know any better I would say there was some cult mentality going on, the gateway to manipulation being past childhood trauma and a borderline eating disorder. None of it seemed particularly healthy.
Although with 40+ enemas a day I don't know how you'd have time to do anything else.
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.
It's kind of hard to articulate but the thing with cult and cult-like movements, and also somewhat cons & scams, is the "vulnerability" they exploit is the raw material of human connection.
A person who is immune to cult recruitment is a person who never feels isolation, desire, loneliness, grief, hope, fear of loss or lack of control, a person who never wants a hug or someone to talk to, who feels nothing at a smile from a stranger or the giggle of a baby.
Is that a person worth trying to be? I don't think so. To the degree you're open to human connection you're proportionally vulnerable to malicious connection too. Everyone, no matter how resilient, will go through periods of relative need, want, and weakness and at those times they are vulnerable. There are risk factors for getting involved, just like with say addiction, but no one is completely immune. If the wrong person is around you at the wrong time in your life you're in danger.
Is it? Surely you can feel all those things and also be cynical enough to think no group can really provide a satisfying alternative.
You're describing a cult leader BTW. I've met one. Scary person underneath that mask he was wearing.
Also I now know what a degree in business management is good for.
A person immune to a cult is not someone who doesn’t feel those things, but rather a person who can tell when someone is pushing those buttons/feelings in a context that is not in their best interests - and has the strength to remove themselves or fight back.
Arguably, the ones who are most sensitive to cults are those who have the biggest buttons for these things AND refuse to/are unable to acknowledge when those buttons are being pressed (because they ‘don’t feel it’ - but they do, and either don’t have the tools, or have been trained to not use them, to stop them from being pressed.
This comes up really frequently for unhealed past trauma, because that is basically what PTSD or bad childhoods do to you. Make it so you can’t see what’s happening clearly, or use the wrong tools to deal with what is happening, because you’ve either been overwhelmed with those emotions in the past to the point you’re relatively numb to them, or you’ve been raised/trained to not respond in a healthy way to them.
Notably, there is a very high correlation with unhealed trauma and PTSD with a lot of the conservative voting base (but certainly not all!).
I recently read the book "Combatting Cult Mind Control" by Steven Hassan, a professional who also helps people leave cults. His approach isn't as much of a "long game" as Ryan and Kelly's approach. One thing that Hassan explains is that MLMs are often very similar to cults, and he also explains the difference between cults and religion.
Another book to read is The Running Grave by Robert Galabraith (pen name for J.K. Rownling.) One of the detectives joins a cult to try and get someone out. The book is well researched and gives an insider's view of a cult.
The Man Who Saves You from Yourself (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903938 - June 2014 (139 comments)
Now --
What counts as a cult?
One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children.
But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes.
What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.)
Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record.
And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.)
One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god.
I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations.
I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto.
One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.
cult (noun): A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader -- American Heritage Dictionary
I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition.
So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.
Well, yes, if you remove the thing that distinguishes a cult from those other things, then it is hard to distinguish them.
The extremism is an integral part of what makes folks regard something a cult. Would anyone have cared that NXIVM was running dodgy self-improvement seminars upstate, if they hadn't also been coercing and branding women?
> I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones
Various sects within the various organised religions certainly qualify as cults. I think a fair case could be made for many of the milder ones as well, on the basis of how they tend to treat women/children/etc (restrictive rules about clothing/education/personal-freedom/etc)
Jonestown was, in several ways, a cult with non-extreme beliefs. They did have a charismatic and dangerously mentally ill leader (who did not start out by any means as an awful person).
But they collectively isolated themselves, rather than cutting off ties. And they did initially because of quite radical small-L liberal beliefs as well as politically socialist beliefs. Things that non-cult people think now.
It did not become truly coercive as a power structure until quite late on, mostly when they had isolated themselves and in many cases become physically ill, and in part it was still a collective delusion.
Even then, in many ways, Jonestown beliefs were not particularly extreme in a broad evangelical sense (rather than a US white evangelical sense, which is now a culture that could be defined largely non-religiously) if you specifically put aside their individually extreme devotion to Jones.
I generally agree. The divide between religion and cult is just a distinction between what's deemed acceptable behavior by society. Obsessing over a person who died thousands of years ago? Totally "normal." Obsessing over a single living person? Totally a cult.
This is misconception. It's not about the extremism of the belief. It's about the mechanism of control.
Take the "cults" of the moment: Qanon/MAGA, for example, operate like a personality cult in many identifiable ways, but are not actually cults, because you can leave without much difficulty if you set your mind to it.
On the fringes US politics encourages ostracising family members who do not agree, but these movements do not have a mechanism of control (financial control combined with a commitment to cutting off family members).
There may be cult sects within MAGA/QAnon that get close, perhaps (just as there are at the fringes of all strange and mainstream religious beliefs)
The primary characteristic of a cult is that adherents find it difficult to leave, not because of the specific beliefs of the religion (e.g. Islam) but because of the mechanism of control.
"Unconventional manner" doesn't really cut it.
The key definition of a contemporary cult from the perspective of someone who has seen people join one is that the cult turns people inward to the cult and encourages them to cut off not just friends who question their belief but ultimately all non-cult friends and family.
In fact you could argue that the primary quality of a mainstream religion is that it points itself outwards towards non-believers and does not condition receiving its care on belief itself.
For example, the Unification Church is on a slow trajectory towards mainstream religion. The University Bible Fellowship, absolutely a cult and quite a scary one, is not on that trajectory.
Minor thing, but I prefer ‘cultish’ to ‘cultic’ for your usage. In academia, ‘cultic’ means anything to do with worship and lacks the association with cults as discussed in this thread, whereas ‘cultish’ is how I usually see people adjectivize ‘cult’ in the way you are doing.
For example, cults have a tendency to make members feel safer as members of the cult, which can be done by making "outsiders" seem hostile and "insiders" seem safe: see for example Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses sending people out to bother people door to door, which results in them getting yelled at by non Mormons.
Cults often require one's entire social circle to be cult members. This comes with the threat of total social isolation from friends and loved ones if you fall out of the cult and are made incommunicado. Thus while I like to cheekily refer to religions as cults, most major religions these days don't fall into this category in this highly diversified world.
HN:
- asks you to self-assign a new name upon joining
- has a leader
- has a hierarchy (rating system)
- esteemed texts which promise by adopting a strange method (Lisp) that you can achieve higher levels of wealth and self actualization
should I be worried?
No, you can (ok, I admit: try) to leave any time.
/etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
I don't run mine on 127.0.0.1 but that address is a very popular default
> Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals.
HN is definitely a social group with unusual and often extreme philosophical beliefs that often aren't mainstream. (And that's why I keep coming back!)
If you read Hackers and Painters without realizing you're getting conned, yes. Very much so.
Interesting space. I'm glad I don't have any personal reason to be involved.
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