(NewsNation) — What many have called “extremist” cult-like beliefs held by Lori Vallow and her husband, Chad Daybell, have been a centerpiece her trial, where she’s accused of killing her two youngest children.
Daybell followed a forum called “Preparing a People,” whose mission was to “prepare people on Earth for a second coming of Christ.” Daybell, though, reportedly took their teachings to an extreme. He would talk about “zombies,” souls leaving bodies and told his followers that the world was going to end on July 22, 2020.
As cult experts point out, there are a number of organizations that try to influence and control people — and everyday people are more susceptible to these groups than they might think.
‘Fear and uncertainty make people more vulnerable….’
One reason some people may be attracted to these organizations is that listening to people in positions of authority is a lesson children are taught from a young age, Rachel Bernstein, a therapist, cult specialist and educator, said.
“We are all trained to a certain degree to be malleable, to be able to be coerced, unfortunately, by someone in a position of authority…who makes very strong points and strong statements,” Bernstein said.
Dr. Steven Hassan, a cult expert who founded the Freedom of Mind Resource Center after leaving the Unification Church, says the key thing people need to understand is that our conscious minds get overloaded very easily.
“Ideas can be implanted subliminally, as well as overtly,” Hassan said.
There are a set of conditions that can make a person more vulnerable to this approach: situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, or economic distress, the death of a loved one, losing a job, going through a divorce.
“Fear and uncertainty make people more vulnerable to somebody who claims a higher authority to know the truth, to have hope, to give direction,” Hassan said.
Often the reason people join a cult-like organization depends on when they were approached by a group, and what they were going through at the time, Bernstein said, especially if there was unrest in their lives, or in the world in general.
“They were looking for something that felt solid and sure, with a formula to follow. It felt very calming and relieving,” Bernstein said.
At first, when people get involved in a cultic group, they don’t even know it is one, Bernstein said. Instead, what group leaders promote are all the “bells and whistles” of whatever program they’re peddling. For instance, in the sex cult NXIVM, leaders were promoting executive success programs and coaching.
Sarah Edmonson, a NXIVM survivor, told NewsNation that in any cult, “(it) starts out as something that’s really good, and it ends up something tragic.”
She described being isolated, feeling special, and having a “righteous connection” to the mission of the group, which led to an “us-versus-them mentality … and believing insane, I mean out-of-this-world, beliefs.”
“It’s amazing to really get the scope of what your entire belief system can accept when you’re in a cult,” Edmondson said on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
Once they’re in, Bernstein said, cult organization leaders gently guide new recruits through programs while the group slowly pressures the new member into missing events with their families in favor of the organization’s activities.
“It’s a whole other way of rationalizing and disconnecting people from their loved ones and disconnecting people from their sensitivity from their conscience and from their emotions,” Bernstein said.
Eventually, in a cult-like organization, Bernstein said, people start to think the people in the group are their only true family or friends.
How can people leave cult-like groups?
There are a lot of factors that are intertwined with whether people decide to leave or to stay, Bernstein said, and they depend on the person’s allegiance to the organization.
One predominant factor is if there are people “on the outside” of the group the person can go to.
“If you think the law is against you, if the media is against you, if you don’t think you have a family to go to where you’ll be safe, you have to keep going along this track. You don’t have a way out,” Bernstein said.
A big error people make with family members or friends who have gone into a manipulative group or situation, whether it be a religious cult, multilevel marketing program, or abusive significant other, is that they try to argue their loved ones out of it with facts, Hassan said. This is when the cult member usually gets confrontative.
“Then they get tired, and then they cut off contact,” Hassan said. “This propels them deeper into the mind controllers’ hands.”
What Hassan recommends is to stay warm and stay respectful.
“Say you care about them, you want to understand, let’s talk about it,” Hassan said. “There are methods so that people can actually help their loved ones to start reality testing for themselves. And I say over and over again, love is stronger than mind control.”
People in a cult know the group will turn on them if they start questioning elements in it. But a sister, brother, mother, etc. showing the person they’ll always be there for them, no matter what, will help them out, Hassan said.
He knows this from personal experience. During Hassan’s experience as a “Moonie,” he nearly died in a van crash because of sleep deprivation and ended up in a hospital. Once there, he reached out to the only person from his past who wasn’t convinced he was brainwashed or crazy: his sister.
Instead, Hassan said, his sister always told him, “I love you, I miss you.”
“That was the person I reached out to,” Hassan said. “That led to a formal deprogramming, that started involuntarily at first, and then, I wanted to prove that I wasn’t brainwashed, and I wasn’t in a cult.”