That, according to Patrick, is all there is to deprogramming. Yet since Patrick first began deprogramming cult members, both the man and his procedure have taken on monstrous proportions in the public eye. The first and most obvious reason for this is that, by nearly all current standards, deprogramming should be wholly illegal in the United States. It would seem to be a flagrant violation of individual freedom to hold a person captive in what, on the surface, can only be construed as an attempt to change his religious beliefs.
There is also the volatile question of physical force. Patrick's legendary kidnappings (a tactic he employs only as a last resort) often bring him into physical confrontation with cult members who have been warned that Black Lightning is an agent of Satan who will subject them to unimaginable tortures to get them to renounce their expressed beliefs. An individual in a cult state of mind may object violently and vehemently to having even a simple conversation with a deprogrammer, and in the course of his efforts, Patrick said, he has been slugged, kicked, spat at, and threatened with kitchen knives. Primarily out of self-defense but also to establish his authority, Patrick generally meets force, when he encounters it, with force. On occasion, Patrick told us, he may thrust a battling cult member into a chair or against a wall, not to harm the individual, he insisted, but simply to demonstrate his capacity to match his opponent's strength and determination. During deprogramming, however, Patrick has no qualms about employing a variety of shock tactics designed to jar his subjects out of their otherwise impenetrable bliss. In order to evoke an emotional response from a cult member who is attempting to "tune him out," Patrick may tear up photographs of the individual's cult leader before his eyes. And with the permission of the subject's parents (who in almost every case are present at the deprogramming), Patrick may remove a cult member's ritual beads or even, in the case of some male members of the Hare Krishna cult, cut off the ponytails many preserve on their otherwise clean-shaven heads. In some cases, the boldness of Patrick's moves alone may be enough to shake a cult member out of his unthinking state. In others, however, it only serves to further outrage him.
In the eyes of the law, of course, such strong-arm tactics can only be interpreted as assault. In fact, several cult members who managed to escape their parents and Patrick before being deprogrammed have run to the media with horror stories about the procedure. One young woman charged on national television that Patrick had ripped her clothes off and chased her nude body across the neighbors' lawns. Other active cult members claim to have been brutally beaten by Patrick. Yet no parent, ex-cult member, or other reliable witness we talked to ever substantiated any of those charges.
In truth, Patrick told us (and others later confirmed), many of the exaggerations and distortions that have been disseminated about deprogramming are part of a heavily financed and wen-coordinated campaign by several cults to discredit his methods. Yet in the end, he declared, the propaganda only works to his advantage.
"The cults tell them that I rape the women and beat them. They say I lock them in closets and stuff bones down their throats." Patrick laughed. "What they don't know is that they're making my job easier. They come in here frightened to death of me, and then, because of all the stuff they've been told, I can just sit there and look at them and I'll deprogram them just like that. They'll be thinking, 'What the hell is he going to do now?' They're waiting for me to slap them or beat them, and already their minds are working. The more they say about me in the cults, the quicker I can deprogram them."
The heart of Patrick's deprogramming technique, however, has nothing to do with fear, coercion, or intimidation, nor does it consist of simply pleading with the individual -- as a parent might -- to give up his odd or irrational beliefs. If deprogramming were that simple, anyone could do it; yet in many cases Patrick alone has succeeded where parents, long-time family friends, clergymen, and even psychiatrists have failed. What makes Patrick so special? In our opinion, it is the wealth of personal experience he has acquired and the extraordinary understanding and sensitivity he brings to his task. In the beginning, Patrick admitted to us, he had to develop his method by trial and error, attempting to reason with cult members and learning each particular cult's rituals and beliefs until he cracked the code. In the process, he read everything that has been written on brainwashing and related subjects. Then he proceeded from those textbook cases to the new forms of conversion he had encountered. Refining his procedures with each new case, Patrick came to understand exactly what was needed to pierce the individual's unique mental shield. Almost like a diamond cutter, he had to probe with his questions the rough surface of speech and behavior until he found the exact spot, the key point of contention, at the center of each member's beliefs. Once he found that point, Patrick hit it head on, until the cult member's entire programmed state of mind gave way, revealing the personality that had become trapped inside.
As Patrick began to loosen up, his spirit and confidence came through more freely. We asked him, first, if he would explain his manner of beginning the deprogramming process and, second, how he knew when a person had been deprogrammed; that is, when he could say for sure that he had done his job.
"The first time I lay eyes on a person," he said, staring at us intently, "I can tell if his mind is working or not. Then, as I begin to question him, I can determine exactly how he has been programmed. From then on, it's all a matter of language. It's talking and knowing what to talk about. I start challenging every statement the person makes. I start moving his mind, slowly, pushing it with questions, and I watch every move that mind makes. I know everything it is going to do, and when I hit on that one certain point that strikes home, I push it. I stay with that question -- whether it's about God, the devil, or that person's having rejected his parents. I keep pushing and pushing. I don't let him get around it with the lies he's been told. Then there'll be a minute, a second, when the mind snaps , when the person realizes he's been lied to by the cult and he just snaps out of it. It's like turning on the light in a dark room. They're in an almost unconscious state of mind, and then I switch the mind from unconsciousness to consciousness and it snaps, just like that."
It was Patrick's term this time -- we hadn't said the word -- for what happens in deprogramming. And in almost every case, according to Patrick, it comes about just that suddenly. When deprogramming has been accomplished, the cult member's appearance undergoes a sharp, drastic change. He comes out of his trancelike state, and his ability to think for himself is restored.
"It's like seeing a person change from a werewolf into a man," said Patrick. "It's a beautiful thing; the whole personality changes, the eyes, the voice. Where they had hate and a blank expression, you can see feeling again ."
Snapping, a word Ted Patrick uses often, is a phenomenon that appears to have extreme moments at both ends. A moment of sudden, intense change may occur when a person enters a cult, during lectures, rituals, and physical ordeals. Another change may take place with equal -- or even greater -- abruptness when the subject is deprogrammed and made to think again. Once this breakthrough is achieved, however, the person is not just "snapped out" and home free. Patrick's method always requires a period of rehabilitation to counteract an interim condition he calls "floating." To ensure that the cult member does not return to his cult state of mind, Patrick told us, he recommends that his subjects spend some time living in the home of a fully rehabilitated deprogrammee. He feels that the best way to keep a person from "backsliding," as he calls it, is to return him to everyday life and normal social relationships as quickly as possible. In that environment, the individual must then actively work to rebuild the fundamental capacities of thought and feeling that have been systematically destroyed.
"Deprogramming is like taking a car out of the garage that hasn't been driven for a year," he said. "The battery has gone down, and in order to start it up you've got to put jumper cables on it. It will start up then, but if you turn the key off right away, it will go dead again. So you keep the motor runni
ng until it builds up its own power. This is what rehabilitation is. Once we get the mind working, we keep it working long enough so that the person gets in the habit of thinking and making decisions again."
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Patrick's deprogramming procedure adds a whole new dimension to the already complex mystery of snapping. In one sense, deprogramming confirms that some drastic change takes place in the workings of the cult member's mind in the course of his cult experience, for only through deprogramming does it become apparent to everyone, including the cult member, that his actions, and even his expression, speech, and appearance, have not been under his own control. In another sense, deprogramming is itself a form of sudden personality change. Because it appears to be a genuinely broadening, expanding personal change, it would seem to bear closer resemblance to a true moment of enlightenment and understanding, to the natural process of growth and newfound awareness, than to the narrowing, traumatic changes brought about by cult rituals or artificially induced group ordeals.
What is it like to experience the sudden snap of a deprogramming? As a result of Ted Patrick's untiring efforts, there are now thousands of answers to the question. Patrick himself claims to have deprogrammed fifteen hundred cult members, and there are numerous others who have been deprogrammed by his former clients. In the course of our travels, we spoke with dozens of ex-cult members around the country, many of whom had been personally deprogrammed by Ted Patrick. In every instance they praised the process and its inventor. As far as we could see, Patrick's clients showed no scars, either physical or mental, from their deprogramming experience. Almost without exception, they seemed to be healthy, happy, fully rehabilitated, and completely free of the effects of cult life.
In contrast to the many tales of cult conversion that we heard, which after a while began to sound virtually identical, each story of deprogramming was its own spellbinding adventure, rich with intrigue and carefully planned to the last detail. The first step in the process is almost always to remove the cult member from the cult, which may be accomplished by abduction, legal custodianship, or, as Patrick seems to prefer, simply a clever subterfuge. One of the more suspenseful examples of this tactic was told to us by a young woman we will call Lynn Marshall, a former member of the Love Family, also known as Love Israel and the Church of Armageddon, a small, arcane Christian cult in the Pacific Northwest. She described her shanghaiing by Patrick and her family.
"I was kidnapped at the prompting of my parents," she told us. "My mother invited me to have lunch with her, but you weren't supposed to go anyplace by yourself in Love Israel -- especially not with somebody from the outside world -- so a guy went with me, the one we all called Logic, who in real life is the son of Steve Allen from television. We went out with my mother and had lunch. She was with a man she said was a friend of the family. They had a rented car and were going to drive us back, and when we got in the car they had me sit in the back seat with my mother while Logic sat in the front seat with her friend. We headed off in the wrong direction, and Logic said, 'We're going in the wrong direction,' and my mother's friend said, 'Well, I have a friend to visit.' He started to get on the freeway, and he stopped to pick up this guy who was hitchhiking. I thought to myself, 'He's going to pick up a hitchhiker with my mother in the car?' They made Logic get out because they said they wanted the hitchhiker to sit in the middle. Then when Logic got out they closed the door and left him standing there on the on-ramp. I thought my mother had gone crazy, but we sped off and my mother said, 'We're taking you home.' The hitchhiker was Ted Patrick."
Not all of Patrick's legendary kidnappings go off like clockwork, however. Another ex-cult member we spoke with, Tom Koppelman (not his real name), a former "devotee" of the Hare Krishna, recalled the advance warning he had received about deprogramming. He told us about his abduction; then he went on to describe the deprogramming process itself.
"They didn't talk about the deprogrammers much in Krishna," Koppelman said, "but I remember this one devotee was about to leave once with his parents, and this guy mentioned that you had to be careful because there are people parents hire called deprogrammers and they beat you up and make you eat meat and parade prostitutes in front of you and put ice on the back of your neck to keep you awake."
With those fears instilled along with other fears of the outside world, Koppelman did not go gently into his own intricately planned kidnapping several months later.
"I guess my father had the idea to tell the Krishnas that they were going to take me to the dentist to get my teeth checked," he recalled. "So my mother picked me up and I went alone because my cult leader said I could. He said we had to keep my teeth in shape for Krishna. So we were driving the right way to the dentist, and suddenly my mother pulled behind this car and I asked, 'Why are you stopping?' and I looked up and these big guys got out of this Pontiac. They scared the hell out of me because I knew what was going on. They lifted me right out of the front seat into the back seat. I was scared to death. I was sure I was going to get taken to a motel and beaten up. So I started kicking and shouting and chanting 'Hare Krishna' in the back seat."
When a cult member first realizes that he has been abducted, some kind of extreme reaction usually follows. He may chant or pray or struggle until he sees the futility of his efforts. Then he may reverse his approach, but even cooperation does not mean that the cult member has come out of his cult state of mind. Koppelman's response was typical of many others we heard.
"I stopped shouting when they said they weren't going to do anything to me," he remembered. "They said they were only going to talk to me and that was all. Then I relaxed completely. I said to myself, 'Boy, here's my chance. I'm going to convert all these people.' I also remember thinking, 'This is sure going to make a great story when I get back to the temple.'"
From the moment of abduction, the deprogramming process is under way. At the outset, the cult member may faithfully defend his cult, but just by listening to the deprogrammer and observing other people and the world outside, he may start to sense the strangeness and alienation of his cult state of mind. For Koppelman, this was the first inkling of doubt after months as an unwavering devotee.
"First I felt very strong," he explained. "Then they got me to the house and I started to feel very small, very unimportant, sort of like a withdrawing feeling. I felt like I was starting to blend in with the wallpaper. I thought about trying to escape. I remember looking at the window and somebody mentioned, 'No, it's nailed shut.'"
Surprisingly, to deprogram this ascetic follower of Krishna, a Hindu God, Patrick used the same tool he might use on a Moonie or a Jesus Freak: the Bible.
"Patrick knew a great deal about religion and I respected that," said Koppelman. "He started pulling out verse after verse from the Bible that really cut down the Krishna movement. I think the last one was 1 Timothy 4, which said, essentially, 'There will be those who depart from the faith and with consciences as if seared by a hot iron will command not to marry and forbid the eating of meats, which God hath put us on this earth to be taken with Thanksgiving' -- something like that. That really got to me; it blew the groundwork out of the whole vegetarian business."
Here, as Patrick himself had described to us earlier, he determined from his initial questions that the core of Koppelman's bond to Krishna was the cult's argument against killing and eating animals, a belief that was intricately tied to the Hindu cult's doctrine of reincarnation. Patrick pressed this sensitive issue until he broke through Koppelman's main line of defense.
"Then something happened in my mind," Koppelman said. "I was sitting there and it was like there was this tremendous chasm that went way down; it looked like it was endless. Here I was on one side, and I knew this side wasn't right. Things were just going around in my brain. I was still on the Krishna side at this point, but I could feel myself rushing toward this edge which I was crossing over. I was scared. I really wanted to say, Well, who do I follow now? But suddenly, bang, I was on the other side. In my mind, I
could actually see myself leaping over this chasm. It was very vivid. There was a dark mist and this deep chasm. I moved toward it and hesitated at the edge; then I sort of went over. It's like in a dream when you jump and everything is in slow motion and then suddenly you wake up. I just snapped out of it completely and immediately got my sense of being human back. Instantly. Bingo!"
For Patrick, it was a familiar moment of confirmation. He noticed the change immediately, as did Koppelman's parents, who were present throughout the deprogramming. For everyone assembled, final proof came seconds later.
"The first thing I said was, 'Where are the prostitutes? I'm disappointed.' That was the first time I'd cracked a joke in six months."
As we listened to Koppelman's story, it became clear to us that he certainly had not been asleep all those months, nor had he been unconscious. Yet his state of mind was a deep "chasm" apart from our usual notion of human awareness. He was conscious the whole time, but not thinking; as Patrick says, he had been robbed of his freedom of thought. Immersed in a fantasy world, Koppelman was cut off from that vital quality we in the West used to refer to as free will. Without it, he was a different person altogether, blank and humorless, until Patrick's deprogramming procedure broke through the shell of his less than fully human existence.
Snapping Page 9
