Back in the 70s, the Moonies recruited 17-year old Diane Benscoter; her family managed to get her out through using the system in place at the time — deprogramming.

She went on to become a deprogrammer; but then she was arrested for kidnapping. Twenty years after this series of events, she asked herself these questions: how did this happen to me? What happened to my brain? Her book, Shoes of a Servant, explores her experience.

I have asked myself the same question, as have many of my “school” colleagues. In this TEDTalk, Benscoter explains how memes become viral, moving from brain to brain, infecting the thinking of those who are susceptible for whatever reason. She says, “… easy ideas to complex questions become very appealing when you are emotionally vulnerable.” Circular logic takes over thought process and becomes impenetrable, creating an us vs. them, good vs. evil, ethos.

When I look back on my “school days”, I recall a slew of memes: we don’t know ourselves, we are not unified, we are multiplicities; ask for help; self-remembering; self sensing; seal yourself off; school rules; what is your valuation for “school”?; a man or woman cannot do; internal considering vs. external considering; identification; 5-Week Aim; What is your AIM?”; “your AIM is your God”; “When you are working on yourself, any man or woman will do”; “As long as you are working, it doesn’t matter what you do”; etc. etc. etc.

Cult experts call the above examples loaded language — a group assigns new meanings to words, encouraging black-and-white thinking. Educating myself about cult techniques reminds me how malleable humans can be in any given moment. I see that my fellow “school” mates were simply well-intended souls, seeking meaning, who simply got caught in the “school” lexicon/matrix — including the so-called “teachers” (although I would guess that some are more culpable than others).

For, as it turns out, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While individual participants may have had the best intentions, we were unwittingly participating in the fantasy world of one woman, as highly evolved leader of a “secret esoteric school”.

Speaking of memes, “school” loves to quote Shakespeare: all the world’s a stage. All the men and women in “school” play their parts to the AIM of propping up one woman’s delusions of grandeur, retirement and properties, to the detriment of everything else. To think that, for the majority of my tenure, I barely knew that she existed, while “school” funneled the lion’s share of my $350/monthly tuition to her.

Recently another “disgruntled ex-student” recommended an episode of the radio program This American Life . It explored regrets; the segment, This is Just as Hard for Me as it is for You, tells the story of a man born & raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the Warren Jeffs reign (convicted child molester & polygamist).

It kicks off with church leaders acting paranoid, seeing threats everywhere and asking the congregation’s men to help intimidate some former members. The church instructed these men to vandalize farm equipment, etc., owned by the apostates. The church told these men, “You can’t tell your wives.” (By the way, The Witness Wore Red, by Rebecca Musser — formerly a child-wife married to “the profit” who escaped the group with her children — corroborates this account).

The secrecy rattled this man — but he didn’t question: “That wasn’t something we did,” he explained. The party line was that he “didn’t owe his wife an explanation”, “if she wants answers, she should pray harder” and “a man doesn’t need to tell his wife everything.” At times, he said, she would hide in the bathroom and “weep it out and I would turn my back on her and force myself to not feel… I drove her to a place where she was very depressed.” Eventually she left him and their five children.

Other bizarre edicts followed including the decree that kids weren’t allowed to have toys and play. He could not abide this; so he turned to the church for help. Like his wife, the church told him: you just need to pray more, get over it. Like his wife, he became dangerously depressed. His kids were his lifeline; determined to give them a real childhood, he drove away one day, kids in the car, never to return.

The escape yielded mixed results; eventually, he lost his entire family. But he fulfilled his intention — to free his kids, who now live with adopted families and are able to play and learn like kids should.

Perhaps some of the cultic hallmarks and tactics sound familiar? Paranoia; secrecy; dismissal of “only life things”; pat and canned responses to legitimate concerns and questions, i.e. one-dimensional “help”; the dismissal of his wife as a person, their relationship as incidental, his struggle as insignificant; the required surrendering of everything to the higher cause; the victim blame, etc. etc. etc. Some readers may have had the visceral experience of losing everything.

At this point, I’ve talked to many ex-members of various high-demand groups; these groups all use the same tactics, exactly like “school”. Each one has its specific nomenclature, but the gears grinding the wheels are exactly the same.

Admittedly depressing, it is also empowering to awaken to the widespread disease called cults.  Educating myself freed me of the magical thinking that assigned mystical power to the group. “School” is just one more sleazy cult, misusing philosophical ideas for selfish gain.

 It is no different than Scientology, except smaller, more hidden, less successful and perhaps not quite as extreme. But …then again… who knows. You can read this book and determine for yourself.

If you’re interested in the latest in legal, the blog Clever Sincerity has a couple of updates:

1) Additional URLs to Access Clever Sincerity: Last spring, the New York court system served me papers; specifically an order to disclose the identity of  “sleepwalker”, the creator of Clever Sincerity. The papers claimed this:

“The Respondent is the only individual in possession of the ip address, email address and other information relating to the Unknown Defendant. By Respondent’s own admissions, she has engaged in conversations with the Unknown Defendant. The Petitioners are unable to pursue their claim anonymously against the owner of the subject website, and therefore must use the information solely within the Respondent’s possession to learn the owner’s identity.”

The Petitioners were/are seeking to sue this person and remove a dossier from the blog. The truth is I have no idea who Sleepwalker is — but that story is for another post. For now I’ll just say, I gave them the information “solely within my possession”: two anonymous emails (one of which was included in the “order to disclose” that they served to me), a screen shot of the “offending comment” (I guess this was my admitted “conversation“), and an IP address located in Germany. It appears that the petitioners are now trying to remove the blog.

2) Joseph Stilwell undergoing SEC investigation: I know of at least two law suits filed by Stilwell against “disgruntled ex-students”. Apparently, Stilwell is now also suing the SEC: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/01/us-sec-stilwell-idUSKCN0HQ4V920141001

I am pleased to announce “school”- the-musical-to-be’s first song, Starry-Eyed Believers (although, if I pay the composer of The Oh.So.Good. Song. enough royalties, maybe that song will be on the sound track, too)

Thank you, Oh, Fellow “Disgruntled”, for recording, engineering & producing.

Starry-Eyed Believers

The starry-eyed believers
Seek any kind face
You, the deceiver,
Sensed a trace
The delicious longing of those so insecure
Makes for perfect fish to lure

The starry-eyed believers
Seek any kind word
You, the deceiver
Saw and heard
The hollow voice … and the pleading look
Grabbed your fishing pole and slipped the bait on the hook

So the siren song begins
Sweet and full of lies
Such a seductive melody
Such a pretty disguise

Lost souls float aimlessly
Waiting on you to set them free
Mouths agape and biting for the bait
Custom-made for you to captivate

Let the feeding frenzy begin
Don that devout disguise
You’re ready for the bait and switch
You got a lotta’ fish to fry

Bottom Feeders, parasites
Sharks on the hunt, vultures in flight
Even Bernie Madoff’s got nothing on you
Get your cauldron out you’ve got some guppies to stew

 On becoming “school’s” entitled and unemployable Jewish-American Princess…

In August, 2006, “school” extended its “free” five-week experiment to me. I accepted. After five weeks, I had the big talk with Robert: did I want to continue? He thought I was doing “very well”. I was happy! Yes, I wanted to continue! “Tuition”, he then informed me, would be $350 a month. My temp job paid me $15/hour. Despite this, in my “school” stupor, I said I would find a way to pay for it. He looked pleased. Good! he responded.

Needless to say, my on-going struggles with money and employment came screaming to the surface shortly there after. Conveniently, “school’s” version of cult identity theft begins with pin pointing a “chief weakness”. I wore my area of weakness like Nathanial Hawthorne’s Hester Pryne wore her scarlet letter and “school’s” guidance and tutelege revolved around the big U (unemployable) evolving me, over time into the oh, so flattering entitled and unemployable Jewish-American princess character.

During my tenure I scrambled through a number of frantic “school”-sponsored job searches. My initial efforts led to better paying jobs — ah, SUCCESS! Through them I verified for myself this: without “school” I would still be temping at pitiful hourly rates; with “school”, I was earning a grown up salary, for the very first time, making it possible to pay “school” $350 a month.

But as I dutifully followed the “any job will do” protocol and dismissed my natural proclivities as “pictures of myself”, I increasingly found myself in positions that I hated. The longer “school” instructed me, the more I believed that my desire for meaningful and creative work was selfish and to be dismissed, even impossible; after all “school” policy was ...as long as you are working. Of course, this ideology led to predictable failure. And, of course, the failure was always my fault and not due to “school’s” skewering of my sense of self.

In 2010, the height of The Great Recession, I was laid off. All my subsequent “school”-sponsored job search efforts proved fruitless, verifying the “school” mantra known intimately by all  “school” doobies: I must not be trying hard enough. When a coffee shop hired me, I took the job — desperate to fulfill “school’s” requirement of “any job”. I had “made an aim” to get one, after all! And “school” repeatedly reminded its charges, YOUR AIM IS YOUR GOD. Part of that aim was to apply for everything and anything (I did secretly draw the line at McDonald’s).

It was soon painfully clear that customer service at a foodie joint was not my best choice. And in reality I already knew this about myself having had — more than once — failed as a waitress in the past. But my “school” stupor told me that my previous waitress-ing failures were due to living a “school-less” existence. With its “help” I could become a barista extraordinaire.

If “school’s” experiment policy was a legitimate practice of garnering self-knowledge, I might have tried this job in that spirit; and upon realizing that “aim setting” and “school-sponsored help” weren’t going to change my basic spacey nature, I would have said, “I’m sorry! I made a mistake. Thank you for the opportunity, but I’d best be on my way.”

“School” would have welcomed the wake up call; it would have supported my insight and subsequent action. It would have congratulated me for seeing my pattern of setting myself up for employment failure. The institution would have validated the insight I gleaned about the wear and tear on my emotional well-being. It would have asked me why I sabotaged myself this way; why I couldn’t simply honor my basic nature.

But that process requires slowing down, looking inward, taking quiet time and space for one’s self to reflect on a pattern of behavior.  As a destructive cult, “school” had to reflect back, encourage and fortify my inner self-saboteur; after all, an unemployable princess needs “help” and “school” is “the source” of all “real help”! An entitled JAP needs to learn how to pay for her arising (at $350 a month); taking time and space is not part of “school” protocol. Allowing emotional awareness  is — in fact — dangerous to a cult and its unstated aim of mo’ “students”, mo’ money.

I realized my mental health was unraveling. After three shifts, I committed the worst of “school” sins and quit, discarding “any job” and “NOT MAKING my 5-week aim”.  Horrors. At “aim report” time, I confessed to all that I had thrown away my $9/hour coffee shop job because I sucked at it. The “higher being” lording over “class” that night looked incredulous: “Who are you to walk away from a job?“, she admonished me. She then went on to tell me who I was with this rhetorical question: “You are a bit of a princess, aren’t you?” (at another heart-warming moment, this “teacher” had once said to me, “Maybe you’ll never be able to hold down a job.”)

A princess in her right mind would have flipped the “teacher” an entitled middle finger and floated out the door, leaving the “classroom” forever. In my “school” stupor, I accepted the humiliation and my cult-assigned identity as “help”; the “teacher” was revealing my weakness, “shedding light on it”, enabling me to “fight against pictures of myself” and evolve into a “real woman”; thus illustrating typical dysfunctional, twisted and ironic cult thinking. Within the hallowed halls, hurt becomes “help”. She then admonished my “aim partner”, a fellow “classmate” who was suppose to support me through the aim-making process. I felt responsible for, and guilty about, the verbal beating inflicted on my “classmate”.

Now that I’m three years free from “school” ideology, this scene looks ridiculous: I had made an adult decision based on living in this body/psyche for 40 plus years. That decision triggered the beginning of the end of my “school” days. “School” spun it as “entitled” and tried to solidify my one-dimensional cult identity, or caricature with it. Thankfully, I didn’t swallowed the whole pill. My inner rebels boiled up and soon after departed the ranks of the “evolving”; even so it still took my husband’s confrontation sounding alarms that my marriage was dangerously close to unraveling.

Today the irony smacks me in the face: I had been unemployable because I’d bought “school’s” dismissal of my natural proclivities and strengths. The more I bought into my “school” identity, the more depressed I became. The worse I felt about myself, the harder it was to convince an employer to hire me.  Ironically, my employment woes ended after I left the evolving ranks and re-joined the caterpillars.

“School” protocol is exactly the same as any other cult; as one of its “students” my true identity, my strengths, or person-hood, became irrelevant, inconsequential, to be dismissed along with my feelings, experiences and perceptions. I was evolving into another “school” cog who took “any job” (as long as you are working), married “any man” (because “any man will do if you are working on yourself”), paid my tuition and followed instruction (especially if the instruction involved “making new friends” … cough).

Thanks to “school” I learned the following lesson: never let an external source override your internal voice and moral compass. When you trust your inner guide, you truly do begin to know thyself.