CCChat-Magazine Cults-Coercion - Flipbook - Page 30
and if they do, the rest of the group will turn on
them. It’s very difficult and gets more difficult
along the way, if it doesn’t happen. Gaslighting,
in a situation like that becomes almost a group
task or group project, because every single
person there is invested in whatever nonsense
they're hearing being true.
M: I've certainly been in many situations where
I wanted to speak up but didn’t.
C: You may remember that on the talk that I
gave, that you were referring to earlier, that one
of the ways of controlling somebody's internal
reality is to alter their state of consciousness.
It's most common with things like certain kinds
of guided visualisations and meditations and
the use of indirect hypnosis and things like that.
They are telling you that the real essence of all
your problems is x and the real solution to all
your problems is y. That may sound like hokum
until somebody does something to you, which
makes you feel great. You feel great and why
do you feel great? I feel great, because this
person came at me and said your problem is x
my solution is y and look at me, I feel great
everything's solved so it must be true and that
acts as a confirmation it manipulates and
exploits, what we think we need. It causes us to
reinterpret what we've just heard and how we
fit into what we've just heard, and it shifts us
away from our previous point of view, to say,
Gosh, there must be more to this, and look all
these other people are experiencing something
too.
"Gaslighting, in a situation like that becomes almost a group task
or group project, because every single person there is invested in
whatever nonsense they're hearing being true."
You can also create what I call an inflated crisis
which is then followed by an easy resolution,
which gives you this amazing rush of being
competent, of being healed, of being sorted out
and of being okay again. And all of this comes
to a head in the person.
M: I’ve definitely experienced that. Being in a
group where you’ve been asked to think about
something that you find really upsetting and
then whoever it is tries to ‘fix’ it with some kind
of meditation or chanting to remove the
memory or the trauma or whatever they are
trying to heal you from.
C: All of this comes to a head in the person as
they experience an adrenaline rush and they’re
also getting serotonin, all the good things are
happening in the body and you think “Wow, I
feel great.” And that sense of feeling great acts
as a confirmation that the setting in which you
were made to feel great is telling you the truth.
So that's further confirmation I'm not only
experiencing it myself and I'm seeing all these
other people having an experience just like me.
There was one derivation from Scientology that
used to do this much more simply, they were
just called weekend seminars and at one of
their seminars they had people lay on the floor
and visualise what they were most frightened of
and they would induce terror in them. Then
they would bring them around to realise that
however terrified they were, everybody else is
terrified too, and therefore there is no terror
because everybody else is tiptoeing around
everything else and so and so they induce this
false sense that there's nothing to be afraid of.
The exhilaration of feeling fearless was
sufficient for many people to confirm, for them,
that this really worked, this stuff really really
worked and I’m going to get all my friends and
family into this.
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