Don't Call it a Cult

by Sarah Berman

  All of this provided helpful context for someone trained in NLP to find suggestible subjects. Just like the surprise hotel restaurant bill in Brown’s made-for-TV experiment, these exercises helped proctors and coaches sort who happily accepted an unfamiliar set of rituals, who resisted, and who needed to be ejected for asking too many questions.

  Raniere’s neuro-linguistic programming background stands out most in lessons on one-to-one communication. Sessions focused on persuasion techniques and reading people, not unlike the eye-movement lesson in The Heist. “One can ascertain a tremendous amount of information about a person without them consciously transmitting it,” reads one of Raniere’s modules on building rapport.

  Rapport is a central concept in NLP and hypnosis. Matching someone’s breathing or heart rate, mirroring their movements, and watching their complexion and facial tics for signs of agreement are taught as ways to increase agreeability and trust. NXIVM students learned to “lead” a conversation by mirroring subtle movements for a while and then testing out whether the other person unconsciously mimicked them. If you took a sip of water and the person you were mirroring followed suit, you knew that person was in deep rapport.

  These skills are not-so-coincidentally described in Derren Brown’s memoir Tricks of the Mind. Brown cautions that NLP mirroring and leading doesn’t work on everybody and can actually make a person uncomfortable pretty quickly, but when done with “warmth and naturalness” it can “make you oddly attractive.”

  Hypnosis researcher Amir Raz says these mishmashed concepts are taken from a variety of sources of varying legitimacy and give medicinal hypnosis a bad name. Even Brown, a guy who made a career for himself doing magic tricks, throws considerable skepticism at the “evangelical” tone of most NLP workshops and the over-the-top claims made by some of its practitioners.

  NXIVM had its own version of the “motivated state” The Heist participants experienced when they rubbed their leg and got stoked. Coaches explained that enthusiasm and excitement made people better communicators. As on Brown’s show, students used metaphor, memory, and role play to feel that excitement in the moment, and participated in exercises aimed at accessing those states at will. In another module called “Building Desire and Motivation,” NXIVM students identified triggers that could cause a motivated state to occur. Likewise, students tried to conjure a fight-or-flight state, testing their breathing rate and posture before and after. All of this qualified as “emotional anchoring” in NLP, and would theoretically give a practitioner easy shortcuts for making a student feel scared, excited, or motivated.

  Raniere’s entry-level modules tackled big subjects like blame, leadership, pride, and responsibility. The group-discussion format set students up to disagree with each other on a series of hard-to-answer, sometimes contradictory, questions. Former coaches testified that these questions were designed to give students a sense that they didn’t understand these concepts as deeply as they thought. After discussing in small groups, coaches would read from a script that seemed to resolve part of the contradiction. This process was repeated over and over until it stuck.

  The NXIVM teachings were full of opportunities to open up about the things that scared you the most. In a module called “Honesty and Disclosure,” coaches would lead students through a discussion about whether they could have honesty without disclosure, or disclosure without honesty. “It’s almost impossible to be 100 percent honest,” asserts part of the script coaches were instructed to read after the discussion. In Raniere’s view, it was destructive to disclose “everything,” and what people disclosed to others was always layered with their own “filters” and “values” anyway.

  After learning how too much disclosure could create a mess for themselves and others, students were asked to reveal their deepest desires and fears, apparently in an effort to better understand their own “filters.” Students were then assigned homework that essentially amounted to revealing a secret about themselves. “Find someone whom you trust and want to be close to,” the assignment read. “If you’ve done the day’s exercise properly, you already have a page full of your vulnerabilities to work from.” Sharing these, Raniere said, would create “the basis for very special relationships.”

  Other sessions asked students to reveal the absolute worst thing ever done to them and then the worst thing they’d ever done to another person. Some students actually confessed to killing people during these sessions. “There’s people who have murdered next to people who are like, ‘Um, I once cheated on my taxes,’ ” one former student told me. “It doesn’t have a hold on you,” coaches were encouraged to say.

  This process appears to have had a second, less obvious purpose: to dig up as much dirt as possible on all participants, young and old. High-powered CEOs and politicians spilled about their extramarital affairs, the secret child they were still paying for, their not-quite-legal deals, their growing collection of offshore tax havens—and above all their fears of being caught and held accountable. Sarah Edmondson says coaches were instructed to take notes on the worst things new students were willing to share.

  Much like Scientology, the organization was collecting what Russians would call “kompromat” on students. This was used as leverage to encourage deeper participation, and in Daniela’s case, her undocumented status, her use of a fake ID provided by NXIVM to cross the border in 2004, and her admitted stealing were all brought up to encourage compliance. “They had something on me,” she testified. “Every time I was doing something that was not what they wanted…then it would be, ‘Well, we brought you here.’ ”

  If students made it to the upper levels, they were more likely to encounter Raniere’s version of outlaw language. In one module called “Abuse, Rights, and Injury” participants discussed child sexual abuse. “What is abuse? What does it mean to abuse someone?” the questions begin. “If someone comes from a country where adults orally stimulate children and they find out according to American culture they have been abused, have they? Who did the abusing?” (Coach notes say the answer is yes, they have been abused, and the abuser is “our society.”)

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  MOST CLASSES DIDN’T dig into such dark and predatory themes; students usually found the sessions practical and uplifting. I thought I understood the basic mechanics on paper, but I was missing the long days, the evangelical energy of breakout groups, the immersive experience of the intensives. These modules were designed to deliver earth-shattering personal epiphanies, and I wanted to feel one firsthand. So in July 2018, four months after Raniere was arrested and almost a year before his trial, I enlisted Sarah Edmondson and her husband, Anthony Ames, to coach me through one of her favorite modules.

  As I sat down at Edmondson’s kitchen table in her Vancouver condo, Ames turned to his laptop, where an exercise from Raniere’s “Nature of Emotions” module was already open. This was something students initially encountered at the end of their first day, Ames said. Then he began reading to me about tracing anger to fear. “I’m going to throw a lot at you now,” he warned.

  “There are certain hardwired basic emotions,” he read from the blurb on the screen. “People can’t experience emotions without viscera, without feelings; they’re hardwired into us.” All emotions were “triggered,” he told me, by a direct stimulus, or by a “recognition” or thought. “Like you could be driving in the car and think of something, and you react to it,” he added.

  Ames said emotions come from the difference between where we are and where we’d like to be. This didn’t compute for me until much later, but I think he was basically saying that positive emotions come from reality exceeding expectations, and negative emotions come from reality not meeting expectations.

  “Emotions are related to the fight-or-flight or satiation mechanism—satiation being I just want to feel good,” he continued, double-checking to see whether I was following. A subtext of much of Raniere’s curriculu
m was that this concept of constant “satiation” was a bad thing that weak people fixated on.

  Even as Ames narrated the exercise description, he began shaking his head at what used to be his genuinely held understanding of human nature. “Anger is always about protecting our self-image. When we perceive our self-image is threatened, we believe we must change the world, or be shown to be less-than or not enough.”

  In the same breath, Ames broke out of his coaching voice and said he was no longer convinced of this. “I’m pissed my wife got branded—there’s no self-image conflict going on with me there.”

  It was clear that Edmondson and Ames were still processing their experiences inside NXIVM, slowly calculating which parts were harmful, which parts were relatively benign, and which parts still had some value they could continue to apply in their lives. As someone who’d spent more than a decade immersed in this community, Edmondson seemed to have some difficulty rejecting the whole thing. There were essential parts of herself, her most assertive and world-savvy parts, that seemingly came to exist only because of her role in an alleged cult.

  The three of us agreed that there were different reasons to be angry outside protecting a self-image, and that Edmondson’s and Ames’s anger over the abuses within NXIVM were justified. Still, we continued with the exercise, because it was one that had produced life-changing shifts for them. They instructed me to think of a time when I was angry, and break down what I thought I was fighting against.

  As I vented to Edmondson about Twitter trolls and other journalistic irritants, I could see how the exercise was meant to chip away at my “reactionary” mind. Instead of letting anger get the best of me, I could choose to analyze the source of my discomfort and why it was manifesting in an aggressive way. This was how you became what NXIVM called an “integrated” person—to be in complete control of your emotions and not be unduly swayed by past traumas and misperceptions.

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  PART OF WHAT made an integration so appealing was the honest, self-assured dispositions of the people in class who said they’d had them. NXIVM’s higher ranks, who often participated in these breakout sessions, never made excuses or blamed others for their problems. Ames and Edmondson did their best to recreate the atmosphere of an intensive, but without the group dynamic, I didn’t, in the end, have any kind of “aha” moment.

  Ames told me that some days he’d wished the program could end for students after the first week, but as coaches they were strongly encouraged to get people signed up for more classes. Coaches would often find a way to underline students’ flaws, even when they weren’t the issues they came in with, and upsell them on the next course. “Me saying after a five-day course, ‘Your issue of wanting to be seen as a smart journalist is preventing you from being a good journalist…. If you want to be a really good journalist you need to finish the (sixteen-day) intensive.’ That’s the abuse, I think.”

  Many former students described this never-ending treadmill dynamic. Whatever insecurity or problem you identified in the class, the long-term solution was always more coursework. And the way to afford more coursework was to sell more classes. This is a familiar dilemma to anyone who has tried to succeed in multi-level marketing; for the vast majority of NXIVM students, the economic rewards never materialized.

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  AMES, AN ACTOR like his wife, has a knack for reproducing Raniere’s taxing speaking style. He showed me how Raniere would stir up attention in a room with extended pauses and roving eye contact. “On my way over here I was thinking about what I would talk about,” Ames, playing Raniere, said, delivering the NXIVM leader’s good-natured schoolboy nods and shrugs. His pace accelerated as he suggested that his peculiar way of thinking had led him to a revelation about astronauts, the Apollo landing, and a walnut.

  “You have this rocket ship, and all these great minds go into this huge rocket booster,” Ames said, tracing the launchpad with his hands. “They burst off and land on the moon, just so this little man can have an experience of the moon. His experience is the size of a walnut about two inches inside his skull.” At this abrupt transition, Ames pointed behind his own eye, eliciting a quiet laugh from Edmondson. “And that’s consciousness,” he said, leaving space again for an epiphany, “and that’s what brings us here today.”

  Ames’s performance was partly a parody, but it also illustrated a possible covert use of NLP hypnosis. NLP teaches several “confusion techniques” based on the assumption that the conscious mind can hold only about seven chunks of information at a time, give or take a couple. A simple way to leave suggestions in someone’s unconscious mind is to overload them with information and hope that some of it unconsciously sticks. This got me thinking about Raniere’s maze-like sermons, and his long walks spent in deep rapport with young women. (Barbara Bouchey, who studied NLP for years before she took her first NXIVM class, told me that this more insidious type of hypnosis hadn’t been part of her experience.)

  This overload concept seems to be supported at least in part by scientific literature. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes about the difference between “system one,” our associative brain, and “system two,” our skeptical processing brain. Research tells us that the first system is quick and freely associating and linked to believing in a statement. The second system is a slower, more critical process “in charge of doubting and unbelieving.”

  One study by psychologist Daniel Gilbert found that participants made to hold a set of digits in their head while reading a series of nonsensical statements like “Whitefish eat candy” were more likely to think false sentences were true. “The moral is significant: when system two is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything,” Kahneman writes. “Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted.”

  If Daniela did fall into a trap, it was a slippery one, involving exhaustion, group conformity, conditioning, selection, leveraged secrets, and a whole lot of pseudoscience.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  What the Bleep

  Mark Vicente never trusted the white establishment he was born into in 1965 in his hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa. His parents supported the country’s oppressive apartheid-era government, but from a young age Vicente oriented himself as an ally of revolutionary causes.

  “I felt as a young child that something needed to happen,” he said on the witness stand at Raniere’s trial. “I had no idea what I would do.”

  It was the 1977 release of the movie Star Wars that helped Vicente’s worldview snap into place. Like many kids of his generation, the twelve-year-old Vicente was smitten with the splashy sci-fi action adventure. It appealed to his budding political consciousness and inspired him to take up filmmaking as a career.

  “I decided that this was the method I would try and use to express what I wanted to express, which is basically I didn’t think it was necessary for people to be killing each other,” he told a Brooklyn courtroom. “I hoped to make films that could affect people deeply enough that they would behave in such a way that they would make the world a better place.”

  Vicente is a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and narrow rectangular glasses. He speaks from the heart, with a tendency to generalize about good and evil. He saw himself joining a rebel force for “anti-apartheid, humanitarian” good, just like in the movies. And he wanted to do it with his own camera in hand.

  In 1994, then in his late twenties, this impulse carried him to the Pacific Northwest to attend a weekend retreat at a ranch in Yelm, Washington. There, at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, a woman named J.Z. Knight taught people how to discover their own spirituality and find their purpose in life. Though Vicente would travel the world extensively over the next decade, the ranch became a place he’d return to in search of direction, purpose, and a sen
se of creating good in the world.

  Vicente says he was never short of work, but it wasn’t until much later in his career, in 2004, that he gained international recognition for his filmmaking. He’d picked up credits on commercials and feature films, but it was his indie documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!?—released on the heels of Super Size Me with the help of the same distributor—that hit a nerve with audiences.

  Vicente’s documentary provides a strong clue as to why the filmmaker was attracted to the intellectual atmosphere cultivated by NXIVM. “It was about pseudo quantum mechanics, neurobiology, the biology of emotions. It had to do with a certain amount of science and also we did a lot of cartoon animation about what happens in the brain and body,” Vicente recalled before an unimpressed judge. The doc is heavy on jargon and janky graphics of space tunnels and neurons. Many of the scientists who appear in the film have been discredited as “quantum mystics”—theorists who became popular in the 1970s for making tenuous connections between quantum theory and parapsychological phenomena like telepathy, reincarnation, and out-of-body experiences.

  The documentary featured soundbites from Judy “J.Z.” Knight, a woman who claims to channel a thirty-five-thousand-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha, and who founded Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment in 1980. Students practice archery and running full speed, both while blindfolded, in the service of exploring a belief that we create the reality around us. Vicente had worked his way into Knight’s inner circle and was eager to find scientific studies that supported this view of the world. The three codirectors of What the Bleep were all students of Ramtha’s School at the time, as were some of the documentary subjects. These Ramtha connections weren’t clearly disclosed in the film, despite Knight’s appearing for an interview.