Like Ted Patrick and so many other Americans who have taken up the fight against the cults, the Ramburs' outrage stems from personal, painful experience. In July, 1971, the Ramburs' daughter, Kay, vanished abruptly from her job as a registered nurse. A few days after her disappearance, William and Betty Rambur received a letter from their daughter informing them that she had joined a cult called the Children of God and that she had decided to devote her life to the service of Jesus Christ. Kay had always been a religious girl, but, given no further explanation, the Ramburs were baffled by her decision. After repeated attempts to find her, they finally located Kay on a Children of God farm in Texas, where they were horrified to see for themselves all the signs of the cult state. As we sat surrounded by great bins of mail in the cluttered CFF office, William Rambur, firm but mild-mannered after his many years as a high school teacher, told us what it felt like to see his daughter in that condition.
"You know how when you look at people," said Rambur, "you look them in the eye and it seems like they're looking back at you? In the case of the cult members, you look in their eyes and they're not looking back. It's a strange thing, especially when it's your own daughter, and you look in her eyes and you remember how she looked the last time you saw her, and now there's nothing, no emotion or anything left. It's just like a void, and you look in the other people's eyes who are in these cults and you see the same sort of thing. It's kind of scary."
On the COG farm, Rambur told us, he walked with his daughter in a field and convinced her to return home to Chula Vista. As they were driving away, several COG members sped up in another car and blocked them from leaving. Without a word, Kay unlocked the car door and went back with the other members. Several months later, Rambur finally managed to talk Kay into returning home for a weekend visit. Once she was free of the closed cult environment, Rambur said, he and his wife succeeded in questioning Kay and reasoning with her until they effected a crude deprogramming of sorts.
"Finally she came out of it," Rambur recalled. "She seemed like her old self again. She was happy. She said, as far as the Children of God were concerned, they could go to hell, she was out of it."
When Kay snapped out of her cult state, she gave her father some very specific instructions.
"She said, 'Dad, all of those people in there need help,'" Rambur told us. "'But we've got to help them from the outside, because nobody can help themselves from inside.' She said, 'Dad, don't ever give up fighting, because if you ever give up fighting, they'll never get out by themselves.'"
But Kay Rambur's amateur deprogramming was far from complete. For the next few days she lingered in the precarious floating state described by Ted Patrick, a twilight zone of uncertainty and vulnerability to suggestion. During that time, Kay and her father attempted to free Robert, another cult member who had been married to Kay by the cult leaders in what Rambur interpreted as an attempt to further remove her from her father's pursuit and legal jurisdiction. Rambur and his daughter telephoned Robert to invite him to spend a few days at their home. Rambur told Robert that he was welcome, and he heard his daughter say, "Robert, it's beautiful, you've got to come." Then he and his wife left the room to let Kay talk to Robert alone.
"That was our mistake," Rambur told us sadly, "but that was before anyone really knew."
While Robert and Kay were talking, Betty Rambur picked up the phone to extend her welcome to Robert. She heard him tell Kay, "If you leave the Children of God, you'll be responsible for the deaths that follow. The blood will be on your hands." Astounded by what she was hearing, Betty Rambur told Robert that he was welcome in their home, but that she wouldn't tolerate that kind of talk. Then she put down the receiver, and a few minutes later Kay emerged markedly transformed.
"When Kay came out of that back room she was just a different person," said Rambur. "She was only on the phone a couple of minutes, but when she came out she was like a zombie again."
The nightmare that followed was as incomprehensible as it was horrifying. Rambur told us that just after Kay talked to Robert, two neighbors received anonymous telephone calls warning them that if they didn't stop associating with the Ramburs they would be killed and "there wouldn't be enough bones left to bury." Children of God members lined the Ramburs' street in trucks and vans, and Kay rushed out screaming that the Devil was in the house. As Rambur and his son brought Kay back inside and tried to calm her, Kay wrestled her brother to the ground and started to choke him. Then she hit one of the Ramburs' neighbors across the neck and kicked another in the groin. Finally, the Ramburs called the police, who responded promptly, restored peace, and recommended that Kay be hospitalized. At this point, Rambur had his first confrontation with the mental health profession.
"When we got out to the hospital there was a woman doctor who we later discovered had been contacted by the Children of God," said Rambur. "They called the hospital when they found out we were coming and told her that an upset father was trying to bring his daughter in to have her committed. When we walked in there, the first thing she said to Kay was, 'You're not crazy, are you?' She refused to admit her to the hospital. She said, 'There's nothing wrong with her. I think it's the father who is upset. He's the one who needs help.'"
At the time, Rambur couldn't believe his ears. He said, "Look, if you think that's how it is, put me in, too! Put us both in here." But the admitting doctor steadfastly refused. A nurse who had been watching said, "This is the craziest thing I've ever seen. That girl needs help, and it looks like everyone on this staff is preventing you from helping your daughter."
"We just didn't know what to do," Rambur admitted, reliving the scene. "This whole episode had gone on for close to a week, and most of us had had no sleep during that time and we were getting pretty distraught. There was no place else we could turn. We'd reached the end of the line, so I told my daughter, 'Look, you think I'm persecuting you? I'll not persecute you. I will not try to find you, but I want you to remember this: If you ever need me, I'll come. Now I'm going to leave, I'm going to walk out because I don't know what else to do.'"
They left her there, got into their car, and drove home and went to sleep. After about an hour, however, William and Betty Rambur woke up and said to each other, "Why are we doing this? How could we abandon her?" Desperate, they called the hospital and talked to the chief of staff, who told them a psychiatrist had examined Kay, found nothing wrong, and released her.
"That was six years ago," said William Rambur, looking over to his wife, then back to us, "and no one has seen her since."
In the years that have followed, police in twenty-seven countries have been unable to trace Kay Rambur's whereabouts. William Rambur has remembered his daughter's plea, however, and travels around the United States to help other parents find their children and free them from cult control. Time after time, Rambur has appealed to the mental health community, but the strange new disorder he has brought to their attention poses a peculiar dilemma for their expertise.
"I phoned many psychologists and psychiatrists and asked if they would help; if we could get a youth to come to them, would they give us some insight into the situation?" Rambur remembered. "Several said that they would try. Once, after getting the youth there, the psychiatrist called me and said, 'Look, we're wasting our time. That person has to admit that he has a problem' " -- which is something few cult members are prone to do under any circumstances.
Since then, Rambur has taken his plea to other areas of the mental health field, only to meet with a similar lack of comprehension.
"I spoke to a group of sociologists and explained to them what was happening," he told us, exasperated. "They could follow me up to a point; then we got to this threshold that I couldn't make them go beyond. They wouldn't believe this is something new that they should study. They said, 'Why don't you parents go home and relax, and after a certain period your children will come back to you and everything will be fine.' They wouldn't entertain the possibility that what is going on is very different."
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Rambur did not dismiss the many traditional responses he has received from psychiatrists and psychologists. As a teacher, he was among the first to admit that parental upbringing and social pressures may be major factors in cult conversion. But too often, he felt, these simplistic explanations beg a larger and more immediate question concerning the cults' conversion techniques.
"Psychologists and psychiatrists who are not aware of what is happening will try to base their opinions on past behavior," said Rambur, "and they lose sight of the fact that there is a new element here that they know nothing about."
Rambur paused; we agreed, and he asked us to convey a message to the mental health profession.
"We've reached the threshold of something new and different," he repeated. "Now we have to add to what we knew before and go beyond that into a new area of study of the mind."
He speaks eloquently but he knows, like Ted Patrick, that without proper credentials no one will listen. After six years, William Rambur's voice of experience has grown hoarse.
"They've studied cases in their textbooks," he said with a measure of resignation, "but I've studied the real thing. You would think that psychiatrists and psychologists would sit down and talk to me."
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We talked with dozens of parents around the country who, like William Rambur, have sought in vain to find professional help for children who had become unwitting victims of America's cults. They told similar stories of being pacified and sent home by psychiatrists and psychologists who advised them not to worry or become unduly upset, that their children were just "going through a phase" and that they should not "overreact." Many mental health professionals charged that parents' stories were exaggerations. Others refused to believe them altogether. In some cases, they even examined cult members and, as with Kay Rambur, could find nothing wrong. Several other parents who are very active in the anticult fight confirmed William Rambur's impassioned complaints. They described their own attempts to bring the cults to the attention of countless local and national psychological associations. But because they were the parents of the individuals involved and because they lacked professional credentials, their cries fell on deaf ears.
As frustrated as parents are who have been unable to secure help for their children, the situation is immeasurably harder for cult members who have, themselves, desperately sought professional guidance. We spoke with one, a young man we call Paul Davis who is a rare figure among America's growing fraternity of ex-cult members. In 1976, after nearly two years in the Unification Church, Davis left the Moonies on his own, first choosing to visit his family for a weekend, then simply deciding not to return to his life in the church. Davis never underwent deprogramming, however, and he never snapped out of his cult state. For three months after he left the cult, he endured an excruciating emotional ordeal accompanied by severe physical side effects. His encounter with a psychiatrist was typical of the quality of professional help described to us by victims of religious cults.
"I had an uncomfortable feeling in my head," Davis recalled the day we met, his voice still shaky. "I was unable to focus my consciousness or my thoughts. I couldn't differentiate between what was true and what was not. It was a very emotional thing, like what might happen to you in a disaster where your whole family was killed. I was almost in a state of shock. I was unable to relax, always spaced out. My pupils were dilated, I couldn't focus on anything or talk to anybody in a normal way. So I went to a psychiatrist and told him I was in very bad trouble. He couldn't comprehend it. He said someone had planted unconscious things in my mind."
For the next few months, Davis said, he continued to flounder in alternating states of fear, confusion, and despair. He tried to resume a semblance of a normal life, taking up residence on his own and seeking part-time employment to provide an income while he completed his education; but his torturous emotions refused to subside. Another psychologist he went to provided some slight comfort and reassurance, but very little of the understanding he so urgently sought. Finally, he admitted, he tried to cover up his inner torment to the best of his ability. When we spoke, the passage of time alone had served to diminish the effects of his years in the Unification Church. But he couldn't comprehend what had happened to his mind and was still having difficulty making his way in the outside world.
"Unconscious things," Davis was told. We could virtually catalog the number of professional interpretations of "the cult syndrome" that have been passed along to us by parents and ex-cult members. According to various representatives of America's mental health establishment, the sudden personality changes that take place in the cults are caused by "serious failures in family life," "underlying anxieties," and "guilt-ridden insecurities." They are the product of "ego conflicts," "masochistic reactions," and "emotional immaturity." They can be traced to "environmental factors," "antecedent conditions," or "deep-seated subconscious needs."
In recent years, a small number of psychiatrists and psychologists around the country have begun deprogramming efforts of their own, supplementing Ted Patrick's basic deprogramming model with various psychiatric and psychological tools. In some cases this added background has proved helpful, providing professional deprogrammers with additional keys to unlock captive minds. Yet in many instances the professional concepts and jargon have served only to obscure the primary goal of deprogrammlng, which is to help the cult member regain his natural ability to think for himself. Instead, many professionals pour irrelevant issues and worn-out notions into their subjects' already confused and chaotic minds. The net result is often a deprogramming that is intellectually cluttered and emotionally unclear.
On our way back east, we spoke with one young woman who, months later, was still struggling to understand the changes of mind she had experienced. Unlike Paul Davis, Mary Troy (not her real name) didn't leave the Unification Church on her own. After nearly a year in the service of Reverend Moon, she was kidnapped by her parents and a psychologist from the Midwest newly active in the lucrative business of professional deprogramming. In the style of Ted Patrick, she was abducted and taken to a motel. In contrast to Patrick's seasoned method, however, the psychologist's deprogramming technique was one of inept confrontation, mere badgering, and transparent psychological ploys.
"At first they tried to get me to feel anger," Mary Troy recalled, "but they didn't succeed. So they started digging into my childhood which wasn't exactly ideal. They brought up something very personal from my past, and I said, 'I can see what you're trying to do, but I don't want to go along with your games.' "
Eventually, after several days in the motel room, her parents and the deprogrammer hit upon a past trauma that managed to loosen her captive thought processes. Unlike the characteristic distinct moment of deprogramming common to other ex-cult members we spoke with, the psychological approach Mary Troy's deprogramming took, as she described it, resulted in a slow and fuzzy reemergence.
"At the end, it wasn't like fireworks going off," she said. "I just realized, 'Well, everyone seems to think I'm normal again. I guess this is that moment.' "
In the months that followed, Mary Troy returned to the psychologist for regular sessions of long-term therapy. There she was given reasons for why she had joined the cult and a basic understanding of the techniques of "mind control." But the psychologist did not succeed in helping her understand the feeling that she had entered a new state of being since her deprogramming, a sense of self quite different from the one she knew before she joined the cult.
"The first few weeks out of the cult I had no idea who I was," she said. "Yet I wasn't uneasy about it, I looked on it as kind of exciting. But whoever I was before the cult, I'm not anymore. I'm a different person now; a lot of things have happened to my mind."
In marked contrast to some of Patrick's former clients, Mary Troy did not appear to us to have been reunited with her former self. The difficulty seemed to stem from the purely intellectual content of her psychological treatment. What was missing in this profe
ssional approach with its efficient explanations was some sign of the feeling and mutual respect between deprogrammer and subject which Patrick's clients conveyed to us. Without these vital components, her professional deprogramming had merely replaced Mary Troy's religious answers with a new set of psychological ones. It never managed to rekindle the spark of her own individuality.
We interviewed the psychologist who deprogrammed Mary Troy. He told us what the recognized authorities on brainwashing, mind control, and "coercive persuasion" had to say, but he refused to take a professional stand on behalf of Patrick's deprogramming technique, which, he implied, was not a properly scientific procedure. His own method of deprogramming called for detailed probing into the individual's childhood and upbringing and usually required several months of expensive follow-up therapy. Yet to our amazement, despite the numerous cult victims he had treated, he equivocated on the cult controversy.
"Some people are better off in cults," he informed us, adding, "As a psychologist, I'd rather not comment until some sort of statistics are derived on what kind of people become cult members."
William Rambur's frustration and anger at the response of the mental health community is understandable. Among the professionals we contacted from New England to California, we encountered many of the same attitudes Rambur found in relation to the cults. Like so many parents, we sat quietly while professional people told us that "there wouldn't be any kids in cults if we had better reading programs in our schools" and that "involvement in clans and secret societies is a normal part of growing up." The majority of professionals, however, refused even to discuss the problem, fearing involvement in religious controversy or some threat to their stature among their colleagues. One world-renowned expert on the mind told us flatly, "I'll have nothing to say about the cults." Another gave us some leads to pursue, saying, "Don't forget, you never heard of me."
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