INTRODUCTION
This training prepares a person to understand and help those affected by destructive cult groups. It also prepares professionals to work more effectively with the cult involved. The education will allow students to avoid costly mistakes and years of ineffective work by providing essential information and practical guidance. Psychotherapists and other mental health professionals can learn how to treat the increasing number of clients being adversely affected by cult involvements. This section will discuss the importance of anti-cult education and what each of you hopes to gain from the training provided. A destructive cult is a pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime with a person or group of people who have control. It uses deception in recruiting new members and in the day-to-day management of the group. The cult will use manipulation to gain psychological control over members and will harm them. This may be emotionally, physically, or financially. This training will explain how cults can harm people and influence case outcomes. This is a one-time-only explanation of the effects of cults. The student will learn about the features of cult victim clients in a later section.
Purpose of the Training
It introduces cultism, cultists, and its nature. It elaborates on the fact that it is a social activity, which means that there are people who are a part of or partake in such activities within our society. This demonstrates that they are not living in some secluded underground hideout. It shows that they are often involved in the communities, jobs, and schools in which we and our families are involved. As a result, our families are susceptible to this activity. We need to understand that cultism is not an occult practice, mystic activity, or something believed in by only insane or mentally incompetent people. Cultism is simply an offbeat or different belief or practice, which indicates that most of us are cultists at some level. This may not be an easy thing to admit and can be a bit daunting, but it is a fact that will become more apparent as we go through this training program.
Importance of Anti-Cultism Education
In a time when man’s capacity to destroy has become almost limitless when sophisticated and rationalized techniques like propaganda are slowly being spread to all forms of human intercourse, and when a man is in ever-closer touch with various folk cultures and ideologies foreign to his own, it becomes increasingly necessary for educators to train an awareness of these matters. Awareness is essential to man’s continued freedom of thought and action throughout his life.
Successful thought reform builds and maintains cults. If we understand the processes and patterns of environments and influences that seek to exploit and manipulate us, we can blunt the force of thought reform or form preventive barriers. Since free choice and self-understanding are essential to human dignity and the survival of personality, preserving and furthering these values is a task of considerable importance.
It is difficult for us to realize how deep the possibility of being influenced in ways we do not understand or to learn the degree to which our thoughts, feelings, and actions are but a responsive patterning to powerful external forces. Most of us will not admit that our pattern of living is other than a result of our own decisions, an exercise of our own free will, and an expression of our personality. The strenuously independent North America is no exception, but it is at a grave disadvantage regarding this self-understanding.