Welcome and Introduction to the Episode

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host for today, Dr. John Dehlin. It is March 17, 2023 and we're back for day two with the world's foremost expert on cults, Dr. Stephen Hassan. Stephen, we wore you out yesterday and your voice is groggy. What's going on?

Steven Hassan [00:00:25] I just woke up with a cough, but I'm COVID negative and I'm really excited to do today the talks to thrive and our workshop on Sunday. So I'm gonna tunnel, you know, just bear down and get through it and do my best.

John Dehlin [00:00:39] I think the Mormons are wearing you out, admit it.

Steven Hassan [00:00:42] I don't think so. I just think I need to sleep and rest a little bit more.

John Dehlin [00:00:46] Okay, well, we're so honored to have you. And Samantha, we're so happy to have you back for another day.

Samantha Shelley [00:00:53] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:00:54] Samantha is the co owner of the Zelf on the Shelf YouTube channel and she also does coaching for people in transition, life coaching, spirituality, post religion kind of stuff@samanthashellycoaching.com with an EY. Is that right, Samantha? Yeah. And Stephen, really quickly, I want to begin by promoting all your amazing work. So the book that we're basically going to be drawing from most today is Combating Cult mind control by Dr. Stephen Hassan. We're going to be talking about principles found in this book. There's a second book that I consider to be kind of a companion book to the first, which is Freedom of Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling people, cults and beliefs. Your website is freedomofmind.com Yep. That's where you can find what I think is the most valuable thing to date you offer, which is a nine hour training on the foundations of cults and cult recovery.

Steven Hassan [00:01:55] Right.

John Dehlin [00:01:56] And you can find that on freedomofmind.com Yep. And you can support Stephen's work by also obtaining that workshop or seminar if you want.

Steven Hassan [00:02:06] Doing the workshop, reading the books and just trying to get the word out around the world that undue influence is real and how to recover from it, how to protect your loved ones, how to help others. Because I think it really is the number one issue right now facing the planet. Our authoritarian countries and cults that are trying to subvert human rights.

John Dehlin [00:02:31] Yeah, yeah. Okay. We are live streaming and for those of you who are joining us on the live stream, Stephen is going to be speaking at Thrive tomorrow. If you go to thrivebeyondreligion.com you can register. He's speaking at Thrive Lehigh in the morning. You can register for that or Thrive Ogden tomorrow afternoon. And there's going to be Thrive events held like in 20 different cities throughout the globe. Go to thrivebeyondreligion.com to register. And then also, if that weren't enough, Stephen and I are doing an all day workshop on recovery from Mormonism slash cults on Sunday. And we will include in the links, in the chat links and in the description. We'll include links if you want to register because there are still some seats open for that all day. And we've never done a workshop together.

Steven Hassan [00:03:24] No, we just met for the first time a couple of days ago. And I do want to say that if people want to bring copies of my books, I'd be happy to sign them when we're together in person. And if we together at Thrive or at the workshop, if they want to take some selfies with us or take pictures together, I'm happy to do that too.

Addressing the Cult Label and Mormonism

John Dehlin [00:03:45] All right, well, today people are in for a treat. And what I want to do is I want to begin by addressing the C word. And when I say the C word, I mean the cult word, because there's probably few things more offensive to Mormons than to be told that they're part of a cult. And so Even bringing you, Dr. Stephen Hasson, world cult expert, to Utah, just bringing you here some probably would interpret as offensive. And then also bringing you on the podcast would be viewed as like an attack on the Mormon Church. And then talking about Mormonism in the context of cults is just going to feel offensive to believing many, many believing Mormons. And so I think we should start by addressing that because there's two things I care about. One is effectiveness and the other is respectfulness. So I want to reach as many people as possible and help them lead healthy, happy lives. And just to go on the record, I it's not my practice to call the Mormon Church occult personally or on this podcast. And I, I feel like if somebody has full control of their life and they decide that for them, the right decision is to stay within the LDS Church, I'm fully affirming of that personally. And on the show we try and model respect for people's life decisions and this basic idea that as long as people have an internal locus of control, then we want to affirm them doing whatever they feel is best for them. And so those are some disclaimers I want to share. Stephen, do you have any opening thoughts you want to share?

Steven Hassan [00:05:30] Yeah, I really do. Thanks so much. This is a great opportunity. I want to be clear that I I care about people. I'm a human rights advocate. I really believe in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And if anyone has never heard of this document that's 75 years old, it's been signed on, I think, by 150 countries. Take it out and read through all of the criteria, because if you agree with those criteria, you will fundamentally agree with everything that I say and do. Because all I care about is affirming people's rights to their own mind, to be able to think for themselves, to not be manipulated through fear and guilt or through hypnosis or indoctrination. And if I may give feedback to you, John, we're just meeting each other, but I really love you, brother. Like someone that I've known for a lot longer than we've actually known each other. I think the way words work is they elicit associations. And in social psychology there's a notion called priming. And so if I could rewind our introduction, I would start by affirming how we are respectful and we care about people and we are operating out of a principle of compassion. So what I want to say is, is that I've been on this journey for almost 50 years now, starting with my Mooney experience, but I just keep learning and growing and want to share my perspectives and what I've learned from being an academic and a scholar now on the research. And it really is a moment in history, in the world where authoritarians want to assert a takeover of everyone else. And we who care about rule of law and human rights, women's rights, gay rights, indigenous rights, rights of other minorities, we really need to be correctly identifying the issue and knowing how to address it. And for me, the power is in knowledge and knowing the difference between a belief that is grounded in reality that can be fact checked and evidence based versus trusting some authority who may or may not have the proper credentials or background or has an actual criminal history background. So I just want to say I hope everybody receives my message. I am here to help empower people and give them more choices and not attack anybody in any way or try to impose my belief system on anybody because that's not my style, not my thing.

John Dehlin [00:08:40] So that was beautiful and powerful and I know those things are true about you and I'm going to say you didn't sort of address head on the issue of the Mormon Church and calling it a cult and the problems of discussing the Mormon Church within a cult framework that I know you would be most.

The Authoritarian Continuum Explained

Steven Hassan [00:08:58] Let me respond and if we can, you've Asked me to bring a few slides from my course that I used in our talk last night. And I have a slide that I'd like to share on my influence continuum. And I don't know if people are able to see the small words, but it's. This is on my website@freedomofmind.com in downloadable form. But what I want people to understand is, for me, the word cult is not automatically a bad thing. That people are human social beings. We're in groups, and those groups can elicit high levels of passion and commitment where people are giving a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy. But on the left side of the continuum, they have informed consent. They're not being guilt tripped or fear tripped. They can question what they're doing, the people they're involved with, and they have the freedom to leave without fear or doubt or commitment. And on the unethical, unhealthy side, the authoritarian side, I define that in terms of my bite model of authoritarian control, which is the subject of my doctoral dissertation, that it was the first model of brainwashing and mind control, thought reform and trafficking that was scientifically had a scientific study that validated the factor on a factor analysis of control. And that is any group that controls people's behavior, their information, their thoughts and emotions to make them dependent and obedient, to have an external locus of control for reality. So they're looking outside themselves to humans, to human institutions. I believe in God, so I have no problem with people turning it over to God. The problem comes with human institutions and beings saying, I speak for God or I have the truth with a capital T. But the idea here is that I want people to be true to themselves and true, if they're in a religious organization, to be true to the values of love and compassion and kindness and charity and realize that we are flawed beings. Nobody's perfect. And anyone who says they're perfect, I have an allergy to that claim, John, as you know.

John Dehlin [00:11:50] And.

Steven Hassan [00:11:51] And the bottom line, though, is I don't want to just walk around saying, this is good, this is bad. I want to give people the criteria for them to evaluate for themselves whether it fits the criteria of an authoritarian organization or not.

John Dehlin [00:12:08] So can I review that with you?

Steven Hassan [00:12:10] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:12:10] Okay.

Steven Hassan [00:12:11] Pushback.

John Dehlin [00:12:11] So. So first. Well, first of all, what I hear you saying is you're not here to call the Mormon church a cult. Is that correct?

Steven Hassan [00:12:20] Correct. Not here to call it an authoritarian cult, but any group that has a passionate involvement according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be called A cult.

John Dehlin [00:12:33] And you talked about the Cult of Mac. Do you mind talking about that really quickly?

Steven Hassan [00:12:37] Not at all.

John Dehlin [00:12:38] Yesterday?

Steven Hassan [00:12:38] Not at all. Yeah. It's a funny story. I got a call from a man who said, my editor told me I need to interview you for my book. And I said, you know, what's your book on? He said, computers. And I said, that's really weird. Never been asked to do an interview for a book about computers. What's it called? What's your book called? He said, the Cult of Mac. And I laughed and I said, I'll do the interview, but I have to first disclose that I've only been using Apple products since 1982, and I currently own several imacs, several iPads, several iPhones. And so I'm in a book called the Cult of Mac as a member, and I have sitting in front of me, my MacBook Pro, and on top of it is my iPhone 13 Max.

John Dehlin [00:13:29] And I guess what I hear you saying is, the point is. And we'll show the slide again, is that your point is that there's going to be groups of people that aggregate or congregate around a passion. And that's kind of what a cult is in a very general sense.

Steven Hassan [00:13:49] It can be a belief, it can be a passion, it can be a cause. Like, former members can be looked at as a cult. I know my former cult, the Moonies, say that I am the negative messiah leading everyone straight to hell, who follow me because they are former Moonies also. But I try to stay away from pejoratives and just say, you know, let's use words to serve us, and let's not let words control our minds in a way that it separates us and alienates us from one another.

John Dehlin [00:14:28] And so what I hear you saying is the term cult doesn't need to be offensive. Correct. It just refers to a group of people that are congregated around an idea or an ideology or a product or a rock group. I'm sure that the people who follow the Grateful Dead, you could call them a cult.

Steven Hassan [00:14:44] Oh, absolutely. If you. If, you know, fans of celebrities, some of them are just obsessed. And I'm. I don't remember who I.

John Dehlin [00:14:54] Why. Why are you talking about the Taylor Swift?

Steven Hassan [00:14:57] Yeah, I was just saying I just talked with someone who's going to hear Taylor Swift, and they got tickets and they're going to another state to hear Taylor Swift.

John Dehlin [00:15:05] So are you a Swifty?

Samantha Shelley [00:15:06] Yeah, I found out about her private jet usage, and I was like, that's fine. She can have that.

John Dehlin [00:15:12] She Gets a pass.

Steven Hassan [00:15:14] But this is normal human stuff. And I look up to people, too. And I really want to tell everybody that in my opinion, as a mental health professional, that we need to get away from these perfectionistic standards that are being thrown around like crazy on the Internet, where people are being asked not to be genuine and be themselves. I'm also a scuba diving nut. I mean, I have flown all around the world, spent endless amounts of money to go into dangerous situations, including cave diving, because I really feel awe when I'm scuba diving. I love the experience.

John Dehlin [00:16:00] Okay, so the term cult, first of all, doesn't need to be viewed as offensive. It. And then secondly, what. What this slide helps us understand is that you place all organizations and cults. And I can add, you would include businesses, governments, you know, yoga instructors, gurus, podcasters, social media celebrities.

Steven Hassan [00:16:24] Like, there's no one and one on ones. I do a lot, of course, of control cases where a man's controlling a woman or a woman's isolating them from family and friends, turning them against their own careers, their own best interests, to make them dependent and obedient. And I really want to empower human beings to say, life is precious and I want to be in control of my own mind, my own body, and make choices that are true to me and my best interest. And I'll just add one more thing. Like, I did talk with, I won't name her, but she's vaping. And I was like, why are you allowing the industry to control your mind to do something that's harming your body, where we know scientifically it's harmful to your body. If you want to relax, do some deep breathing, do some meditation, do some hand massage.

John Dehlin [00:17:20] Right? So, okay, so not all cults are harmful. All cults, we're putting on a spectrum. And what you should do is consider whatever thing you're looking at. Like, I had somebody DM me today and say they saw that I was going to have you on. And they're like, well, is it Mormon stories a cult? Aren't you a cult leader of the Mormon stories cult? And you know what I said back? I said, you know what? Look at Stephen Hassan's criteria and apply it to Mormon stories. And if I'm acting like a cult leader or if Mormon stories is having a undue negative influence, I want to hear about it and I'll make changes. And so that's just a small example of what I think your message is, which is all organizations and relationships can be put on a continuum. And what needs to be evaluated is, is how constructive and healthy are they versus how destructive and unhealthy are they. And then there's a very basic criteria that you can use to evaluate, you know, them along different criteria, the healthiness and the unhealthiness. And I think it would make sense, like we did last night, for us to go through that slide and invite our audience to envision in your minds some organization you want to evaluate or some, you know, person or podcast or whatever it is, a guru or a relationship you're in, if there's a relationship you're in that you are unsure whether it meets criteria or if it's healthy or if it's problematic. Steven's going to walk you us through an evaluation based on his model. And then when we're done, those of you who are joining us in the live stream, you can comment on how your relationship or organization did based on your own eternal evaluation. Because, Steven, what I loved yesterday last night at the Lost and Found Club, when somebody asked you whether Mormonism was a cult, you responded and said, that's for you to decide. You're not here to make that decision for people. You want to help people build their own locus of control and decision making and authority. And so you turned it back to them and said, that's for you to decide. And so that's what we want to invite our audience to do right now. Is that okay?

Steven Hassan [00:19:40] Yeah, absolutely. But I want people to understand that we're living in a world of information warfare or psychological warfare with agents that are deliberately trying to stir up different sides of any topic to polarize. And so name calling, ad hominem attacks. There's so many specific techniques of propaganda that are being launched. The only solution, as I see it, is for people to make the effort to learn and identify correctly what's happening. And I do want to say to you, you know that. DM to you, John. I get accused occasionally of being in the cult of the Libtards, that I've been brainwashed by the libtards, or I'm in the cult of Soros. To which I respond, oh, really? Tell me more. Tell me what your understanding of brainwashing is and tell me how it, you know, you believe that I've been brainwashed. And. And they don't respond because they don't know yet about brainwashing and mind control. But my hope is to try to make people curious and to help motivate them if they really believe, if they're true believers, and they really feel that they're a Good person wanting to make the world a better place to cloud. You know, kind of clear the clouds and look clearly and honestly at what is happening and then they can decide for themselves.

John Dehlin [00:21:13] Okay, so let's do it. I'm going to put the slide up.

Steven Hassan [00:21:16] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:21:17] Please. Listening and listeners and viewers, identify an organization or some type of entity that you want to evaluate a relationship. And then Steven's going to take you through a visualization or an analysis process or a framework to help you assess. So for those of you who are asking if Mormonism is a cult, as Stephen takes you through this, the. These different criteria, just think, does the church apply, qualify or not? Is that okay?

Steven Hassan [00:21:44] Yeah. But I guess my question to you is because I'm a little tired still. Would you like me to go through the influence continuum first and then the bite model, or do you want me to go right into the bite model?

John Dehlin [00:21:57] I like. I love the influence continuum. Now do you want me to read it to save your voice or Samantha, she's got a great voice.

Steven Hassan [00:22:04] What would you. Either would be great.

John Dehlin [00:22:06] Okay. Samantha, do you want to do it? You want me to do it?

Samantha Shelley [00:22:08] We can tag team it. Yeah.

Steven Hassan [00:22:10] Yeah. Why don't you start?

The Influence Continuum and Healthy vs. Destructive Groups

John Dehlin [00:22:12] All right, so here we go, everybody. So we've got this influence continuum. Left is healthy. The left side of the spectrum is healthy and the right side is destructive and unhealthy. I'll start with individuals. So a healthy organization or relationship wants to help cultivate in you and a sense of an authentic self of your own individual authenticity and power and a sense of self knowing versus an unhealthy organization or entity is going to try and develop in you a false identity that the cult or that the organization wants you to have or develops for you.

Steven Hassan [00:22:57] Right.

John Dehlin [00:22:58] So that's. That's the first one.

Steven Hassan [00:22:59] Yeah, can. I'm going to jump in if you don't mind. So I want to state that when I became a mental health professional in my training, what I came to understand is that mind control or brainwashing is a dissociative disorder. And what that means.

John Dehlin [00:23:20] Should we show that slide?

Steven Hassan [00:23:22] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:23:23] Please.

Steven Hassan [00:23:25] I can do that right there.

John Dehlin [00:23:27] Okay. So the slide.

Steven Hassan [00:23:30] Yeah. So in the diagnostic statistical manual, DSM version 5, that's the Roman numeral 5. It's listed as an unspecified dissociative disorder as a number 300.15. And I'm going to read it. Identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion. Individuals who've been subjected to intense course of persuasion, for example, brainwashing, thought reform, Indoctrination, while captive torture, long term political imprisonment, recruitment by sects or cults or by terror organizations may present with prolonged changes in or conscious questioning of their identity. So this does not have the specific criteria as other things listed in the dsm, but it is a real phenomenon that so many people have recognized for decades that has been in not only the DSM 5, but the 4 and the 3. And so it talks about the sense of your real self and a cult self or a pseudo self. And what I believe is healthy is to be in your body and to be able to separate out what you think and what you feel like your conscience versus what the ideology or what the belief system is coming at you from some external authority. And so for me, in terms, back to the chart for a second, I'm just going to switch to slide. For me, when I think about the influence continuum, I want people to understand that healthy groups give informed consent. And informed consent means, you know, upfront before you're recruited, for example, who they are, what they believe, and what they want from you once you join. And it's harder when people are born into a group because children don't have a choice. And so they're being influenced by their parents. And if their parents are in the group and have been indoctrinated to become good members, they're going to want to indoctrinate their children to be like them, which is the opposite of what we've learned is healthy parenting, where a parent views their role as seeing the infant, the baby, as a unique being or soul. I believe in the notion of a soul or a spirit, and that our job as parents is to help that spirit, that being, to grow up to be their best self. And even if that doesn't conform with our beliefs of what we want them to become or what we want them to do. And so it's referred to as authoritative parenting that's developmentally appropriate, with the goal of not telling the child what to think, feel and do, but teaching and modeling good behaviors, but empowering the child to ask questions and to explore and develop. I know I'm on a little bit of a tangent, but I want to

John Dehlin [00:26:57] say you're building a foundation.

Steven Hassan [00:26:58] I want to set the foundation exactly so for people who are born into a group, because I've worked with people who are in the Jehovah's Witnesses extensively, for example, people born in the Children of God, people born in the Moonies, Scientology, they don't know what's normal. Like, so when they may be disillusioned with the group now in their 20s, 30s, 50s, whatever, they haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to a healthy environment with healthy parents that were really devoted to them, kept them safe where they felt love, where they could develop a secure attachment and a healthy sense of self. So what I see happening in the world right now is a lot of confusion, a lot of hurt, a lot of nihilism and a lot of hedonism, a lot of, you know, like on Randian cult, objectivism, that's a cult. In my destructive cult, where she says selfishness is good and altruism is evil, that's the ideology. If you're operating on that, then that's. That's inculcating a belief system that it's fine to be a predator. You know, you want sex with somebody, they don't want to take it, and that's treating a person like an object and just putting your needs over someone else's. I don't think that that's civilization. I don't think that's society. I don't think anybody who has a heart or has compassion could say this is healthy in any stretch of imagination. Okay, so back to the influence continuum. Informed consent is critical, and I want to just shift to the bite model for one second and just say that the things on the destructive end are behavior, information thought, and emotional control. And with information control, if a group doesn't tell you the truth about the history of the founder, for example, if there's criminal history that's documented, if there are other, you know, very concerning things that have been covered up, for me, it's big red flags around, huh? Because for me, my notion, especially with religious groups, is that my understanding is that it's about truth and about love and about goodness and not about lies and covering up criminal behavior.

John Dehlin [00:29:39] Okay, so if you want to jump to the bite byte model discussion quickly, let's do that on your slide just to give people a visual.

Steven Hassan [00:29:45] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:29:46] For any. And remember, we were trying to save your voice. So let's go ahead and discuss the bite model, and then we'll come back, and Samantha and I will take people through the influence continuum.

The BITE Model of Mind Control

Steven Hassan [00:29:58] Okay, great.

John Dehlin [00:29:59] So the bite model. Tell us about it.

Steven Hassan [00:30:01] So when I first came up with this model, I first wrote about it, but in my 1985 master's thesis and later I did my first edition of Combating. I didn't have it in this order. And I thank Buddy Martin, a Church of Christ minister, for suggesting that I reorder it so people could remember it easily. But I basically, when I read Leon Festinger's book When prophecies Fail about a UFO culture, and he came up with this very important construct called cognitive dissonance theory, which says we have thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and humans like to have congruency between those three things and such in relationship to the UFO alien spaceship not showing up at the designated time. According to the cult leader, what was surprising to many was that people believed more when it didn't show up, as opposed to, you know, walk away and say, well, she was wrong. So this notion of why if somebody can get people to do extreme behaviors, they'll start to rationalize it and to feel good about it seemed incredibly important to my work with Coming out of the Moonies. So I took thoughts, feelings, behaviors, by the way. That's the root of all cognitive behavioral therapy approaches too, by the way. And I took Robert Lifton's Eight Criteria of Mind Control from his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Later, Margaret Singer, army psychologist who studied Chinese communist brainwashing, came up with a six condition model. I reviewed all their models, Edgar Schein's models. I thought about how to integrate that in a more easy to understand paradigm. So if you can organize a groups that were evaluating in terms of their behaviors, how they train people to think, and how they emotionally manipulate people, and you add in information, then you have a formula that you can apply to anything to evaluate where it would fall on the influence continuum. I want to state categorically that

John Dehlin [00:32:43] we're

Steven Hassan [00:32:43] in a state of growth in humanity, of incredible levels of understanding, and therefore we need to have a way to kind of come back to practical reality too, and think about values like social media, for example, is addictive. We know that for a fact. People are on their phones 10, 11 hours a day, and often with companies, they don't even know what the agendas are. The people who own the companies and maybe their state actors, for example, gathering our personal data with the goal to manipulate us, we need to be thinking on that level. Forgive me, I'm digressing a little bit. So what I do want to say is I really believe in the scientific method that says we have a hypothesis and we do tests to validate or disprove a hypothesis. But science is an organically evolving thing where we learn more and more. If we're open to changing the hypothesis. Where we get into trouble is with groups that say we know the truth with a capital T. It's static. Only one person is the author of that truth. And they wrote it down in a book or whatever, several books. In the case of Hubbard, there were many, many books. But I can see the patterns of all or nothing, black and white, us versus them, good versus evil, simplistic, almost childlike level of analysis where if it doesn't match the indoctrinational beliefs, you disregard the evidence. You disregard people if they find evidence. And so life becomes increasingly narrowing and people ultimately will learn less and less as they go on. Versus what I'm advocating, along with many of my colleagues and peers, let's be open minded. Let's be prepared to change our minds if there's new evidence. Let's enter into other perspectives and try them on and test them out and see if there's some veracity, some legitimacy, and if so, I'll change my mind on any topic.

John Dehlin [00:35:20] Okay? And so to bring it back to the bite model, unhealthy organizations are highly controlling around behavior. So you can think, and I'm trying to save your voice here, so let us help you out. Okay? So high controls around dress, around what you eat, what you drink, sexual activity, what you wear, what you don't wear, dress, you know, you sleep with, who you don't, how much time you spend in a day, what words you can and can't say. The list is almost endless for ways that your behavior can be controlled. But a high demand religion or cult is definitely going to have lots of behavioral controls that aren't necessarily for your benefit, but that in some ways usually. And that can include demands on your money and time. Oftentimes those types of behavioral controls accrue to the benefit of the organization, sometimes at the expense of the individual. Is that fair to say?

Behavior, Information, and Thought Control

Steven Hassan [00:36:21] It's definitely right on. What I do want to say is that the goal of behavior control is, is dependency and obedience on the group or the ideology versus you, making choices, having free will and such. So within that paradigm of the bite model and I include what pimps and traffickers and what authoritarian regimes do,

John Dehlin [00:36:52] there

Steven Hassan [00:36:53] are rigid rules and regulations that if you violate them, there are punishments, psychological, physical punishments. So. But every society needs rules and regulations. We need laws.

John Dehlin [00:37:09] Yeah, perfect. Okay, so that's the B. Behavioral control. The I. Samantha, do you want to describe the eye? You want me to do it?

Samantha Shelley [00:37:17] You. You guys.

John Dehlin [00:37:18] Okay, so the I, as I understand it, is information control, meaning that you don't have informed consent like you discussed when you joined the Moonies. That, that. Or when you were investigating the Moonies. Just like when Mormon missionaries go out and are teaching about Mormonism There's a ton of really important information that's withheld from people who are investigating the organization. And even once people join, it's oftentimes years or even decades before they learn other really important pieces of information.

Steven Hassan [00:37:51] Right.

John Dehlin [00:37:51] And the the organization works really hard to discourage or even punish members from learning information about the organization that in any way would impact the T, which is the potential thoughts that the organization might be problematic. And so if you find your organization or your church or your cult saying, don't read certain books, stay away from apostates. Apostates are evil. Stay away from certain podcasts, stay away from certain TikTok or YouTube channels like only read approved materials, Only read books published by us, Only Watch media endorsed by us. The more that they're trying to control the information, that's a huge red flag.

Steven Hassan [00:38:40] Yeah. That controlling thoughts. I really want to share an example from the Jehovah's way.

John Dehlin [00:38:46] Are we moving to the T?

Steven Hassan [00:38:47] No, I want to just with information, if I may, John. So with the Jehovah's Witnesses, they spend a lot of time telling members to go publish, which means witness or recruit door to door. They have a very systematized formula. So they knock on people's door and they ask them if they want to study the Bible. But what they don't disclose is that their version of the Bible, which is called the A New World translation, is not respected or accepted by any Jewish or Christian theologian as legitimate translation, but it aligns with their ideology. And so people who don't understand the difference between different translations and they think they're just studying the Bible, don't know unless they made their efforts to research. So that is a biggie for me. If you're going to say we're studying the Bible with you, you need to disclose this is not a translation that's respected by any Jewish or Christian theologians. The people who put it together for our organization have no credentials going to seminary and studying theology. But who would ever join? Right. So they don't do that. But that's what I think they would need to say. By the way, before we study the Bible, we think that blood transfusions is a sin and if you have a car accident, you're going to bleed to death. Because that's what we believe, that blood transfusions are immoral and you'll never be saved. No one's ever going to join a group like that. And if you think that that's okay that they are allowed to do that, in my opinion, you have to then Go back to, is it okay to, you know, buy a cereal that has destructive chemicals in it that's going to cause cancer? And buyer beware. And a lot of people are trying to sell things that are really destructive. And that's why we need governments and regulatory agencies to protect the common good.

John Dehlin [00:41:03] Right.

Steven Hassan [00:41:03] From predators.

John Dehlin [00:41:04] Right. You know, and we're all familiar with like Scientology. And when the south park episode, you know, revealed some of the higher level doctrines of Scientology that are kept not just from the world, but are kept from core members pay a crud ton of money, right, to get up the levels of advancement, to then learn about thetans and Zeon and Xenu and the

Steven Hassan [00:41:29] galactic dictatorship from 75 million years ago, flew millions of beings to the planet Tigiak, now known as Earth, and dropped them in volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs. And all of these aliens are now attached to our bodies. And we need Scientology to liberate us so that we can be gods.

John Dehlin [00:41:52] Yeah, huh.

Steven Hassan [00:41:53] Who would ever buy that crap, right?

John Dehlin [00:41:56] But it's, it's silly at face value. But what's pernicious is that information's held from the world and from even the core membership. And you could say within Mormonism, it'd be the temple ceremonies that for many, many years were violent and creepy and corrupt, and some still find them that way. But you don't really get to experience the cultish, creepy, violent temple rituals until you advance in levels. And that's the withholding of information. One other really quick Mormon example of withholding information that I think is crucial is the fact that, you know, historically we were a little bit less interested in this. But the church, when it would proselytite to Africans or African Americans, of course, missionaries would never mention to them when teaching them that not only is the church did Joseph Smith incorporate the curse of Cain doctrine or the, you know, Lamanite curse of dark skin doctrine into every scripture. Joseph Smith produced Book of Abraham, Book of Moses, Doctrine and Covenants, Book of Mormon. Joseph explicitly incorporated racist dark skin as a curse doctrine into all those scriptures, there wasn't a scripture that Joseph Smith didn't insert the curse of Cain or the Lamanite dark skin curse into. Not one. And yet when the church, for years, for decades, maybe for a century and a half, has proselyte proselyted to people of color, they would conveniently never mention the fact that the church has core racist teachings as not only as doctrine, but that the church withheld full status and membership from Africans or African Americans, Americans for over a century and a half. Until they join, until they get looped into the social connections, until they're really invested. And then they learn years later, sometimes decades later, what, the church was super racist. Nobody told me that when I was investigating. And we had, you know, we've had some. We've had some recent African Americans on Mormon stories, just talking about that withholding of information that I think people of color deserve to know before they get baptized versus after.

Steven Hassan [00:44:16] Right. And I guess I want to state, you know, my point of view is that because we talked yesterday on Mormon stories about Judaism and such, religions need to adapt and change as there's new knowledge and information and say, yep, we used to teach that, like in Deuteronomy, there's, yeah, go kill all the Gentiles. Like, go in and wipe them all out. In my temple, my community, we think that's horrible. We don't think that that's okay. And we don't think of a God that would ever consider doing that. Furthermore, I read a book called who Wrote the Bible? By Friedman. Have you ever heard of that book? There are four distinct voices in the Torah. In the Old Testament, it wasn't written by one voice. So either God has four different personalities with four different agendas, or there was a human document attempting to memorialize some of the teachings that were passed on orally for centuries. But the whole prayer, thank you, God, for not making me a woman. Like, we're like, that sucks. Like, no, that's not Judaism that I can relate to.

John Dehlin [00:45:38] Right.

Steven Hassan [00:45:39] So the point that I'm trying to say is organizations, religions can evolve and become functional and much more egalitarian, but they have to acknowledge the crap and say, that was bad, that was wrong. We don't subscribe to that, trying to ignore it, or just shut up. Anyone who's trying to show, say, wait a minute, it's a problem.

John Dehlin [00:46:06] Right. Samantha, did you want to get something in here?

Samantha Shelley [00:46:09] Well, it's just so tough because by the. Usually by the time you find, you know, information that's critical of the high control group that you're in, you're already psychologically dependent on it. So you're not going to evaluate. You're not going to be able to evaluate the information. And the way you would, you know, let's say when I first started investigating Mormonism, if I would have learned about Joseph's polygamy and race in the priesthood and all those things, my brain would be far more capable of evaluating it without bias. But I've. I've lost that ability over five years of getting you know, increasingly converted to this group. My entire life being dependent on it, my social circle, my sense of identity. So even, even when information does become available, as obviously we see constantly, your brain doesn't have the same capacity to evaluate it.

Steven Hassan [00:46:57] Honestly, that's a critical point, Samantha, because, you know, and that's where I also am concerned about young people being influenced on social media. But they don't have the maturity and the capacity for critical analytic thinking and are often more emotionally driven or influenced by their peers that they're identifying with. So we need the internal capacity, but also the information to then make sense of it. And one other point I want to share, if I may. I'm part of a forensic think tank at Harvard Medical School called the Program in Psychiatry and the Law. Pardon my froggy voice. And these psychiatrists, psychologists and attorneys are constantly trying to improve the connection between mental health and the legal system. And their position is informed consent isn't a single incident where you're given a paper at a doctor's office to sign. But it has to continually be ongoing because people learn more, have different experiences, and therefore they need that new information, especially as it's unfolding, to be healthy. And I want to state categorically, anyone in the healthcare professions, mental health or physical health, do no harm is the ideology. Absolutely do no harm. And I'll add, if I may quote Hillel, a Jewish sage who was asked to describe the teachings of the Torah on one leg. He said, don't do to others what you don't want done to you. You right, that summarizes the Torah according to sage.

John Dehlin [00:48:44] Love it. Okay, so we're reviewing the bite model, Stephen Hassan's by it model. We've talked about behavior and information. I'm just summarizing what I heard you say.

Steven Hassan [00:48:52] Please.

John Dehlin [00:48:53] The T stands for thoughts. And I, I don't know if I got this from you or I probably did, but it's almost like information is the food for thoughts. Because once you have information, then you can have thoughts. And so by when, when unhealthy organizations control the information, a huge part of that is to prevent you from having thoughts that they don't want you to have. That may make you less loyal, less obedient, more self empowered, less useful to the organization. But also, in addition to withholding information with the intent of controlling your thoughts, then oftentimes the organization will employ thought topping, thought stopping techniques. Yes, Ways to control and manipulate, manipulate your thoughts. You know, such as things like within Mormonism, it's doubt your doubts within Mormonism is. It can be, you know, ex Mormons, they can leave the church, but they can't leave it alone. What can you think of other thoughts stopping cliches within Mormonism, Samantha?

Samantha Shelley [00:49:52] I mean, what's coming to mind is in Mormon apologetics, anytime they reference any source that they have to bring up to address, you know, information that's critical of the church, they'll phrase the person giving it as like church critic blank or, you know, like, yeah. So then the person is immediately reading that of like, oh, well, that's not a reliable source. So I don't actually need to be too worried about this. So they've just frame it all constantly.

John Dehlin [00:50:16] And if any of our viewers right now want to put in the, in the comments any thought stopping cliches that, that they know of, we'd love to read those on air really quick.

Steven Hassan [00:50:26] But and if I may, that there's a behavior modification technique called thought stopping that can be used ethically by a therapist trying to help a client with depression, for example, versus thought stopping techniques by the Moonies. I'll just tell you the Moonies one. If we had any doubt enter our mind, we would immediately chant, crush Satan. Crush Satan. Glory to heaven. Peace on earth. Glory to heaven. Peace on earth. True parents, two parents, Moon and his wife to block out the thought. The ethical use of thought stopping would be where if there's no reason for the person to be depressed, being in a toxic relationship or illness or grief of a death of a loved one, whatever, if it's just they're having these chronically negative thoughts, a therapist will teach them how to control their minds with an internal locus of control. So instead of saying I'm stupid, what would be a better thought to put in its place? Instead of saying I'm stupid, say, I'm learning and growing every day. And it can be very mechanical at first, but changing the belief intentionally changes your emotional state and your behavior.

John Dehlin [00:51:46] Yeah, yeah, that's super helpful and it's good to know that that can be used in, in healthy ways. We have received several comments from our viewers and listeners about unhealthy thought stopping cliches that they've heard. I'll read a couple. Laurie writes, doubt your doubts. Boyd writes, when the prophet speaks, the thinking is done. That's definitely something.

Steven Hassan [00:52:11] Warning, warning, warning.

John Dehlin [00:52:12] Yep. Yep. Warning one. One huge one is all the stereotypes, the negative stereotypes that the church likes to associate with people who have lost their faith or left. So it's they were offend, they left because they were offended. They left because they never had a testimony. They left because they wanted to sin. You know, they wanted to, you know, they left because they looked at pornography. Like there's all sorts of ways that the church tries to discredit credible apostates or defectors so that they won't have credibility amongst those who remain.

Steven Hassan [00:52:49] Right. That's within the silo of the group. But I would just generalize the pattern that in a mind control, authoritarian group, there's never a legitimate reason to leave. It's all your problem. You're not faithful enough, you're not praying enough, you're not committed enough, you're a bit karma. You had a bad past life versus they lied to me, they're abusing me, they're hypocrites, they raped me or whatever. So I would assert that there are legitimate reasons to leave, including, I'm not happy here, this is not fulfilling me. Or I found a better church or a better place where I'd rather spend my time and my money. That's a legitimate reason to leave. But not in an authoritarian cult. Is never a legitimate reason to leave.

John Dehlin [00:53:41] Yeah, and I'm gonna have to say, in Mormonism, there is zero legitimate reason to leave the church. In fact, I had a friend.

Steven Hassan [00:53:49] I disagree. You left for a good reason and you left Samantha for a good reason.

John Dehlin [00:53:53] Yeah, but that's not how it's understood within the church.

Steven Hassan [00:53:57] Right. That's their frame.

John Dehlin [00:53:58] That's what I'm saying.

Steven Hassan [00:53:59] But I'm saying now that we're out, we need to start framing things in a way based on that we are legitimate in being out.

John Dehlin [00:54:09] Yes, but right now I'm just trying to analyze the church based on this criteria. And I had a friend once tell me that a cult is any organization that won't let you leave with your dignity intact. And in Mormonism, you can't retain your dignity for orthodox believing Mormons and leave the church. You're an apostate. You must be sinning. You fell away, you lost your faith. You're, you know, you're a bad person.

Samantha Shelley [00:54:34] But.

Steven Hassan [00:54:34] So that's. So this is a learning experience for me to be out here in Utah and to spend time with you and Samantha and Kara and others. So I'm just wanting to be honest and react and then throw it out and get a response from, you know. But it seems to me like I'm hearing way too much repetition of the cultic perspective versus a focus on healthy beliefs and healthy things to let people decide. You want that or do you want that? Do you know what I mean, well, I do, except.

John Dehlin [00:55:23] And by the way, you know, we. We have an entire series on Mormon stories called Thrive Stories where we focus on the healing and growth part. Today we're just trying to communicate your bite model and your influence continuum to a bunch of people that have never heard it before and allow them to analyze and assess whether the framework that they come out of meets criteria. So I understand Seligman, I understand positive psychology. I understand the need for all of us coming out of any unhealthy organization to focus on positive thoughts and healing and growth. I'm just saying in this episode today, I don't want to get lost the. The assessment of Mormonism and any MLM or business or educational or, or workshop or guru or podcast that our viewers and listeners are currently evaluating. I want to give. I want to use today to give them a chance to evaluate based on your criteria. That's why.

Steven Hassan [00:56:22] No, I hear you loud and clear and I appreciate the opportunity for sure.

John Dehlin [00:56:27] Yeah, well, I appreciate what you are nudging us towards is the healing and growth part, which is the main reason, like, if you're going to leave a cold and just swill in negativity, then you've kind of lost the opportunity. On the other hand, on the other hand, if you know, one of the great opportunities of leaving a culture high demand religion is to create a beautiful big new life. And I appreciate that that's what you're trying to nudge us towards and we definitely need that. But sometimes deconstruction needs to come before reconstruction or they need to happen in parallel.

Steven Hassan [00:57:03] What do you think I'm learning? I don't know. So I would ask you, are most of the people listening to this already decided they've exited and they understand why they have and they're fully clear about that or their primary listenership still on the fence and they're dipping their toes in to hear what other former members and people like me are saying. And I guess I have a natural inclination to steer my focus on people who are still in but are questioning or people who are fully in and want to listen to me and to just diss me and find reasons to disagree with me. And I'd like to try to message to those folks that, you know, I'm a good person and I'm willing to be convinced to become a Mormon. Let's talk. And I'm open to a conversation if you're willing to change your mind. I'm willing to change my mind. And so to ask things in a way that provokes questioning and curiosity. To me that's more my angle and my style.

Samantha Shelley [00:58:21] I don't feel like you two are at all. Well, not at all. I don't think each of you is different in your approaches. I think you're like this, this exchange that's happening. I don't think either of you.

Steven Hassan [00:58:34] No, I, I feel very warmly and I think we're doing well.

Samantha Shelley [00:58:38] You're on the same page.

Steven Hassan [00:58:40] Great.

John Dehlin [00:58:40] Okay. So cool.

Steven Hassan [00:58:43] Cool.

John Dehlin [00:58:44] I appreciate that feedback and that, that direction. Coming back to the thought, the T in the bite model, we were talking about thought stopping cliches in ways, ways that within the Mormon context, Mormons are discouraged from ever letting any information or any act of other believing members exiting the church affect their beliefs or perspective.

Steven Hassan [00:59:10] Right.

John Dehlin [00:59:11] Is there anything else we should say about the thoughts before we move on to the E? Samantha?

Samantha Shelley [00:59:15] What's just coming into my mind is, you know that Buddhist story of how the Buddha apparently held up a flower and gave a silent sermon. And the message was sort of the, that when we label something flower, we think we understand it and we, we kind of switch off our ability to perceive it in its entirety. And I feel like all of these thought terminating cliches in Mormonism or any high control group, it, they're like this excessive categorization that then obviously limit our ability to see the holistic picture of things. So it's, it's just again going back to that simple black and white thinking. It's just getting us to put everything in a box and then we think we understand it, we call it.

Steven Hassan [00:59:55] It's very wise and then we know. I really agree with that. And I think in general it's really good to be aware that words should serve us, but they also can be traps and we want to step back and be able to perceive our experiences of things without labeling it in words or thoughts.

Emotional Control and Phobia Indoctrination

Samantha Shelley [01:00:18] That is also why I really appreciate your focus on mind, body connection and connecting to your body. Cause feels like such a big piece of that that is just on the back burner or not even present at all in Mormonism.

Steven Hassan [01:00:29] Yeah. And in recent years I'm getting more and more convinced that we have not only emotional part of us and a cerebral thinking part of us, but we have a heart mind and a gut mind. So a lot of people, when I've asked them, when you first met the Moonies, what did you. How did you react? They'll often say I thought it was a cult or I had this sinking feeling in my gut or I felt in my heart there was Some danger, but then they suppressed what their body was telling them. And I really, more and more think that we need to be holistically embodied minds where we're really listening to our bodies because our bodies have a lot of wisdom too.

Samantha Shelley [01:01:19] Too.

John Dehlin [01:01:20] That's great. Yeah. I love this idea that thoughts are us analyzing, tuning into our bodies, tuning into the present moment, tuning into our consciences, our values, using our brains to do analysis of. Of the information that's available, both in terms of feelings, thoughts, emotions, values, and information externally, and then synthesizing that into decisions that are going to be optimum for us. Us.

Steven Hassan [01:01:46] Right.

John Dehlin [01:01:47] And. And attempts at stopping thoughts or controlling thoughts just hampers that entire experience.

Samantha Shelley [01:01:53] Yeah. And obviously thoughts can be helpful or unhelpful. And I love thinking, but I also just think being too. They're just ascribing too much meaning to thoughts generally can be bad. And, you know, obviously in Mormonism, every thought is from God or from Satan, and you're always, like, neurotically analyzing your own thoughts and that. And again, that, like, disconnects you from your body and.

Steven Hassan [01:02:17] Yeah, well said.

John Dehlin [01:02:18] I love it. So let's then go to the E in the BITE model, which is emotion.

Steven Hassan [01:02:23] Yeah, emotions are very important, John. And I, if in my next evolution of the E of the BITE model, I will be incorporating Yuval Laor's important theory and. And he has a book coming out about emotions because I think fundamentally we're emotional beings who rationalize more than we're thinking beings who have emotions. And he describes states of awe as being the primary mover for much of what we decide to do with our lives. And we can experience awe in many, many ways. I just read a great book about awe that I highly recommend. I'm not remembering the author, but it just came out, and it's this connection to something greater than ourselves, whether it's nature or art or music or spirituality. And it just makes us feel bigger and more connected to the environment and others that are important to us. So what I want to say is I often hear people labeling me when they hear I was in the Moonies. Oh, were you weak? Were you stupid? Were you needing a group to be part of? And I was like, no, I didn't need a group. And I wasn't stupid or lonely or whatever. But I do want to say that often the appeal initially was with me was women flirting with me and making me feel like they may want to be my girlfriends, where they deliberately lied, saying that they weren't in a religious group. They weren't part of any. They even said they were students when they weren't. But this emotional thing that is really, really important and realizing in terms of the influence continuum and the emotional component, real love is based on beingness. In my experience, even if you don't agree with what a person's doing or what they believe or whatever, you still love them, you still care about them. Whereas in a mind control cult, the love is conditional upon you conforming and obeying and being dependent, and it will be withdrawn. We won't love you anymore if you exit the Moonies or Scientology or whatever said group. And that's not love. And when people ask me who've left a group they were born into and their family's still in, it's like if you really love your parents and they're still in, you can still love them, and you can still convey your love for them and not enter into a situation where you feel like they're being combative or trying to control you back in. But you can say, I love you no matter what. And yes, I do want to explain why I've left. And yes, I do wish that we could spend more time together and I could explain how I've arrived at where I am. But if you're not open to it now, that's okay. But let's be in each other's lives. I'm there. And let the group say, no, you shouldn't associate with your daughter, your son, or your. Your. Your. Your loved ones.

John Dehlin [01:06:01] Yeah.

Steven Hassan [01:06:02] And I. And I said that a lot with xjws. It's like you've been shunned, you've been excommunicated. They call it disfellowshipping. But what's to stop you from standing outside of your children's home with a sign, I love you, I miss you, I want to hug you. You like, no one's gonna stop. That's not illegal. Your kid's gonna see it. You could be making a blog where you're uploading photos, you're writing poems to your kids, to your. Your family members in the group, and just be generative, doing what's within your power to do.

John Dehlin [01:06:40] Love it and show love. Yeah.

Steven Hassan [01:06:42] Because love is huge and it's so important.

John Dehlin [01:06:45] Yeah. So reflecting on what I just heard is that unhealthy organizations or cults oftentimes use love bombing or flirt to convert as a way to emotionally manipulate people into joining. They also use the threat of withdrawal of love or unconditional love to keep people from changing their relationship with the Organization once they're in. If I had to add some of the emotions that I'm familiar with that are used to manipulate within a Mormon context. And, Samantha, I'd love to hear you add, you know, music. We talked about music being used as a way to manipulate positive emotion, to seal you and bind you in your commitment to the Church. I always said my testimony in the music within Mormonism was one of the strongest parts of my testimony of the church, because the Mormon type of choir and the songs and the hymns sung at church elicited such positive emotion in me that I was taught and conditioned to associate that with the Holy Ghost or the Spirit testifying to me that. That. That the church was true. And so music. Not to say that it's intentionally pernicious per se, but music is a highly effective way to stimulate emotion, to bind people to the church.

Steven Hassan [01:08:00] Yeah. And create states. Oh, yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:08:04] And then I'm also going to add, for me, and I hope I'm not taking some of yours away, Samantha. Fear and shame and guilt are like, core to the. What I call the Mormon business model in making sure that you feel bad about yourself. And this goes back to the. This is a really sensitive issue, but just Christianity in general, that the idea that we're all fallen, that we're all broken, that we're all bad, that we should feel bad about our sin. Sins and what we do. So we need a savior to. To make it all right, that we need to then have allegiance to. And so we should feel guilt and shame about our fallenness. And then we need the church to make us better. And if we masturbate or if we touch someone in the private part, that we shouldn't touch them or even have a bad thought. We should feel guilt and shame. And then we need the second sacrament and we need the temple and we need the bishop to purify our thoughts because of all this awful guilt and shame.

Steven Hassan [01:09:01] Right.

John Dehlin [01:09:01] That we're almost guaranteed to repeat. That's the shame, guilt, shame cycle of. Of feeling awful that binds us to feel like we need the church, which is the dependency model.

Steven Hassan [01:09:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:14] That you talk about. That's another way emotions are used to bind people's devotion and commitment.

Steven Hassan [01:09:19] Well said. Yeah. No, the whole. The whole. The thing about guilt is it is an emotion that in healthy contexts lets you know that you violated a value, a compassion, that if you were in the other person's shoes, you wouldn't have wanted that to happen. To move you to apologize, to make compensation, to not do it again. It's a correct directive based on values versus a tool of mind control and manipulation. One of the things Lifton wrote about in his 61 book about Chinese communist brainwashing is what he called one of the eight criteria was demand for purity. And what he was really talking about was perfectionism. That the cult would define a level of perfectionism that wasn't possible, unobtainable by any human. So by definition it was establishing a relationship of shame and guilt because you can never achieve it. So you're always one down, needing the group to, you know, exist and, and such and. Did you want to say something, Sam?

Samantha Shelley [01:10:39] No, not right now.

Steven Hassan [01:10:40] Well, okay, yes, but, but, but. So the whole notion of that we're not biological organisms is absurd because we are and we're storytelling animals. That's what has made us as a species so phenomenally successful in the sense of being the apex predators of the entire planet to the point where we're extinguishing the very habitat that we need to sustain us. And I lost my train of thought.

John Dehlin [01:11:17] That's okay. So. So back to emotional manipulation. Samantha.

Fear, Manipulation, and Leaving the Church

Steven Hassan [01:11:22] So I want to, I would do. I want to just come back to the fear stuff. So a very important component of my work helping people to get out is to distinguish what's a legitimate fear and what's a phobia. As a legitimate fear is for survival, to keep us safe. So if we're going in a railway station, it says, do not touch this rail. You'll be electrocuted, you should be afraid and you shouldn't touch the rail. However, what mind control cults all do, the universal mind control technique is this installation of irrational fears that terrible things will happen to you if you question the leader, the doctrine or the policy or leave. So that in the mind of someone in that pseudo identity that's been so programmed, they can't imagine leaving and being happy and fulfilled. It's out of their possibility. So the fear keeps them locked in. But I've developed a three step intervention to explain the difference between a real fear and a phobia. How to cure a phobia, how other cults put phobias to control people. Right. Because it's always easy to see it in a different group than the one that you were in. Explain it so the person really gets it that this is a doable policy for the purposes of dependency and obedience. Control. Right. And then have questions on the third step of what do you think? Do you think it's possible to leave your group and still be in a relationship with God? Or be a good Christian or happy and fulfilled? And then if they say no, well, what about being open to talking with somebody, to interact? Because then you could maybe have some information and experience that may help you decide that you're not in one of those groups that installed phobias intentionally to control people.

John Dehlin [01:13:28] And is this something you talk more about in. In your course?

Steven Hassan [01:13:31] I do. I. It's in my book, Freedom of mind, chapter 10, explicitly Freedom of mind. But it's an absolutely vital thing because so many people everywhere are walking around anxious, fearful and depressed.

John Dehlin [01:13:49] Right.

Steven Hassan [01:13:50] And they need to understand. It's your mind you need to identify. You're having these powerful emotional states, and are they serving you, or is it. Are they directing you to change your behavior? Or, you know, is there something that's fixable in these things? And it is fixable.

John Dehlin [01:14:10] Totally. Okay. And you just. In. Samantha, I want to come to you in terms of your analysis of emotional manipulation of Mormonism, but you reminded me, Stephen, of what I. Another really powerful emotional manipulation the church had offered me, which was fear that I couldn't raise healthy, happy, moral children without the church. Because once I had stopped believing and thought, I don't know. You know, I don't. I don't really believe this anymore, I still felt like, number one, if I left Mormonism, I couldn't be faithful to Margi, and I couldn't be a moral husband and father. And then, most importantly, anyone out there raising children in this world today, they're going to be raising inferior children to the children that are raised within the Mormon Church. And I couldn't come up with any framework in my mind at the time of any possible way to raise moral, healthy, happy kids without the church? And I think that was fear that was conditioned into me.

Steven Hassan [01:15:07] Absolutely, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:08] So, Samantha, any other emotion, any other example of emotional manipulation within Mormonism that come to your mind?

Samantha Shelley [01:15:16] No, not right now. But I really loved your point about standing outside with the sign saying I love you, because something I think about a lot is how high control groups want you to see your identity as that. As those beliefs. And when we as former members of these groups withdraw our love from believers because we're so frustrated, and then we're kind of reinforcing that idea. And if you treat people like their beliefs are their identity, they cling to their beliefs like they are their identity, or they're more likely to. So I just really like that point.

John Dehlin [01:15:47] Are you kind of saying if you. If you've lost faith and. Or left a church, treat them like you Want to be treated with unconditional

Samantha Shelley [01:15:56] love and loving them for their beingness and just, just for the fact that they're them, you know, outside of what they believe.

John Dehlin [01:16:04] Which is why trying to, like, take their beliefs away from them or insult them about. How can you believe I thought you were smart, that that's probably counterproductive.

Samantha Shelley [01:16:13] Well, I mean, I think, you know, be smart about the way. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to introduce, you know, new ways of thinking if, if you think your family members are in a high control group. But just like, be smart about it, use nonviolent communication, use strategies that are effective.

John Dehlin [01:16:30] Because if you're using emotional manipulation or coercion or you're insulting them or using guilt, fear and shame.

Samantha Shelley [01:16:36] Right.

John Dehlin [01:16:36] That's probably not effective.

Steven Hassan [01:16:38] Right?

Samantha Shelley [01:16:38] Yeah.

Steven Hassan [01:16:39] Well, what I've experienced, if I can add in, Samantha, is that when people are born in a group and they leave, if they haven't done their healing work, they're going to use the cultic mindset, the black and white, all or nothing, us versus them thinking in reverse against the group, which reinforces not what we're talking about here, being in a healthy, psychological, emotional environment for yourself or other people. So I always say help yourself first, then help others. And it's counter, counter indicated in cults like the Moonies and maybe the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses were, where you're taught to put others first and not be selfish. But it took me a while, Samantha, to realize it wouldn't be selfish for me to want to go back to college that I was told to drop out from because it will improve me as a person so that I can participate and contribute more to society. But it took me a while to realize that's not a selfish desire to go back to finish my college education. So being able to, you know, get these perspectives and, and step out of them and also think about a healthy future self, like, where are you headed? How do you want to be in a year, in five years, in 10 years? And I want to come back to you, John, if I may, about the parenting model, because, you know, I'm a parent and I had all of these beliefs around what a good parent was supposed to do and how they were supposed to act and how they're supposed to protect their, their kids and stuff. And, and I had to, with my, with my wife, get professional counseling and coaching to remind us that being a human is messy and kids need to mess up and you can't protect them. In fact, there's a very good book.

Samantha Shelley [01:18:43] Book.

Steven Hassan [01:18:44] Something like. What's the name of the book? Something like the Blessing of the Skinned Knee by, I think, a developmental psychologist. She said, so you're a parent and your kids walking down the hall, there's a banana peel on the floor. Do you rush over and pick up the banana peel? Do you say, watch out for the banana peel or do you just sit and watch and maybe your kid will walk around it, Maybe your kid will slip and skin their knee. But her thesis is the best parent would let the kid slip and skin their knee and learn to watch where they're walking.

John Dehlin [01:19:29] Right. Yeah.

Steven Hassan [01:19:30] To help them individuate.

John Dehlin [01:19:32] Yeah.

Steven Hassan [01:19:32] Instead of, oh, Mommy's going to protect me or Daddy's going to protect me, me, etc. Etc. And I'll say one more thought if I may, John, and just that because I've heard from former members of so many groups who want to help their children, I'm like, if you help yourself, you're going to be helping your children because the most powerful messaging is from your kids are going to watch you and, and, and if you're happy and if you're working things out, if you lose your temper and then apologize, that's really healthy. So that they see they're not expected to be perfect, that mom and dad are doing the best that they can and that they're open to feedback.

John Dehlin [01:20:14] Yeah, that's great, you know. So, Steven, I want to give you a chance to take a quick break. Please go ahead and do that. If you'll put the slide back on the influence continuum. Happily, Samantha and I maybe are going to go through that while you're taking a quick break. What I want to quickly do is just thank Jen Carmichael for her super chat. Jen writes, after hearing John quote and refer to Dr. Hassan's teachings for so long, it is so dang cool to listen to this conversation. Thank you, John, Dr. Hasson and Samantha. And thank you, Jen, both for that thoughtful comment and for your super chat. For those of you who are on YouTube, please know that you can donate to support the expenses that all involve bringing Dr. Hasson here, having Samantha here on staff, me and Maven helping out, and all the different ways your donations make all this really possible. And you can always on YouTube, if you're watching on YouTube, you can click in the comment little button there, there's a dollar sign. You can click on that and donate to support Mormon stories in the Yoruba Stories Foundation. Thank you, Jen, for the super chat. You can also use the Stars feature on Facebook to support us. Or you can always just become a monthly donor@mormonstories.org I will also say that subscribing, if you're on Facebook or YouTube or wherever you consume our content, subscribing, clicking the subscribe button, becoming a monthly, becoming a regular subscriber really helps build our viewer count, which helps us with the algorithms and it also helps us get better guests to come on because they know it's a popular program. And while you're at it, while you're subscribing to Mormon stories, subscribe to Self on the Shelf. Do you agree, Samantha, or do you definitely agree?

Samantha Shelley [01:21:59] We recently did a video unpacking false narratives about ex Mormons which was relevant to this decision.

John Dehlin [01:22:05] Okay.

Samantha Shelley [01:22:05] It's a devastating takedown. So what's it called again, the video? I'm not sure. Approximately Debunking false narratives by ex Mormons. Humans.

John Dehlin [01:22:14] Okay, so we'll, we'll have Maven maybe include that in the show notes. All right, so I think. Yeah. So, Stephen, now that we've kind of covered the bite model, so, you know, it's for all of you to decide, is the organization or relationship you're analyzing highly controlling in behavior to create dependence? And yeah, you know, with a lot, you know that that's one with information. Do they seek to withhold information from you or do they seek to share information with you? And, you know, do they operate under the idea of informed consent versus the opposite, which is to withhold information from you and have you fully engaging and committed to the organization while intentionally withholding information from you? That's the I, the t is, do they encourage independent, free thought or do they try to control your thoughts in ways to manipulate you to your own detriment or to the benefit of the organization? And then finally, do they, do they use emotion to manipulate you or coerce you in harmful ways versus, you know, facilitate in you healthy emotional management in a way that's going to be to your benefit? So that's, that's, that's the overview of the bite model. Now what Samantha and I are going to do is we're going to go back to the influence continuum.

Samantha Shelley [01:23:41] Let's go.

John Dehlin [01:23:42] And we are going to have you again, do like an audit and we're going to have you sort of analyze whatever organization or relationship that is, you know, topical for you that's relevant or interesting for you. You. We're going to use Dr. Stephen Hasson's influence continuum to have you evaluate that relationship organization. And we'll basically be describing sort of a polarity. And the polarity is between, you know, the left side of the continuum, which is a constructive or a healthy organization, and then the right side of the continuum is a destructive or an unhealthy, you know, side of the continuum. So is that all right? And Steven's back.

Steven Hassan [01:24:30] So let me just say I really want to encourage people to think of it not in polarities, but as a continuum, because most groups are in the middle, to the left of the healthy side, or a little bit to the right. And people, if I, I don't know if I have this other slide that people need to be true to their own experience. And people will experience the bite model within an organization very differently if they're a fringe member or if they're a core member or if they're a leader. And so what I've tried to do in my work is to offer the information and then ask, Ask people to apply what fits for them. So for some people coming out of Scientology, learning about the Jehovah's Witnesses really helped them a lot to have the perspective on their own experience. But they need to find someone in the Watchtower who is close in experience level within that pyramid.

John Dehlin [01:25:40] Right. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. But I think it's a useful exercise for people to try and analyze, you know, try and practice using this model. So I'm inviting people to pick whatever organization or relationship they want.

Steven Hassan [01:25:54] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:25:54] And analyze it based on your framework. Is that okay?

Steven Hassan [01:25:57] No, I think it's a wonderful thing.

John Dehlin [01:25:59] Really quickly.

Samantha Shelley [01:26:00] Oh, well, obviously within Mormonism there, since, was it the 70s or whatever, there has been so much. What's it called? Is it correlation where they, where all the materials that are given out are very, very similar. So it is, you know, it's not too hard to sort of analyze what the church itself is teaching. And obviously, as someone said in the comments, they teach that if, if kids leave the church, it's the parents fault. So the church really tries to instill in families, you know, that their, the, their ways that they are. They want families to be operating that same way. Obviously all families are different within the church, but it's kind of the ideal that they're teaching that you should be like.

Steven Hassan [01:26:40] But that's very interesting and important for me for what you just said that maybe parents who are still in and their children have left, they're feeling from their indoctrination like they failed, it's their fault and therefore they need to get the child back. Otherwise, you know, they totally failed. That's really important. I need to think a little bit more how to address that.

Samantha Shelley [01:27:10] Their child's relationship with the church is tied up with their own perceived identity.

John Dehlin [01:27:15] Yeah.

Samantha Shelley [01:27:16] Which leads to like parents shunning, obviously.

John Dehlin [01:27:19] Yeah, we could talk about that in our workshop on Sunday. But one of the biggest reveals that happens in the retreats that I do with people who are questioning or leaving Mormonism is the parents are super upset at their kids choosing to leave, but almost their kids eternal status, if the parent is really reflective, is secondary to their feeling of having failed as a parent and having not done a good job. And so while they direct their frustration and sadness and fear at the child, what's really under all of that is a sense of fear of having failed as a parent. And I don't want to get off track because we're trying to analyze the continuum model, but this is all super fertile ground to be discussing really quickly. Again, I want to thank those some super chats are coming in. C. Pain writes. Thanks, John, for everything you do. Tell people, work through their life change changing faith transitions. Thanks, C. Pain. Thanks, Michael Jordan. Doug Vincent writes another awesome guest. Thank you, Doug, for that super chat and Elizabeth Brown as well. Okay, so Steven, in an attempt to, number one, really illustrate your continuum model and to save your voice and to help our viewers and listeners do an exercise.

Steven Hassan [01:28:45] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:28:45] So this is more participatory.

Steven Hassan [01:28:47] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:28:47] Versus just didactic.

Steven Hassan [01:28:48] I love it.

John Dehlin [01:28:49] Let's go through it. Do we want to rotate every bullet? We take turns to save your voice.

Steven Hassan [01:28:55] I'm fine to keep talking if you want, but if you want to do a rotation.

John Dehlin [01:29:00] How's your voice? I'm checking in.

Steven Hassan [01:29:01] My voice is okay.

John Dehlin [01:29:02] Okay, so we'll start with you, and if your voice starts failing, then great. But what I'm gonna ask you to do is we're gonna just go through the continuum. You're gonna read the. The different, different sides of the continuum for each object.

Steven Hassan [01:29:15] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:29:16] And we're going to ask our viewers and listeners to do a self assessment of whatever organizational relationship that they want to evaluate. And it's going to be a participatory exercise. Is that okay?

Steven Hassan [01:29:27] Sure.

Samantha Shelley [01:29:28] John, are we going to be talking about our Mormon experiences and how they align with this?

John Dehlin [01:29:33] Maybe, maybe, maybe we'll stop after each major section. So this continuum has individuals, leaders and organizations. So we'll allow each sort of section to clear before maybe, Samantha, you and I provide some analysis. Is that okay?

Samantha Shelley [01:29:49] Also, people want you to keep the. The slide on the screen for longer.

John Dehlin [01:29:54] I will.

Steven Hassan [01:29:54] I would like to invite people to go to freedomofmind.com, learn about undo influence, click on the influence continuum, and they can download the slide, include a link to it, and they'll, you know, print it out if they.

John Dehlin [01:30:07] But right now we're trying to provide an introduction to it.

Steven Hassan [01:30:10] Okey doke.

John Dehlin [01:30:10] Okay, so let's go for it, Steven.

Steven Hassan [01:30:12] So let's start with individuals. So essentially, we'll start with individuals. And there are many more qualities that I could add to. To both sides of this continuum. But I'll just state that the healthiest side of the influence continuum is where people have authentic selves. They're healthy, they're in their body. They have unconditional love of their family and friends, and they have unconditional love for themselves and their friends and their family. They feel a sense of compassion. They are in touch with their conscience, that if their conscience. Conscience is pinging them, they want to go, what's that about? And do I need to do a corrective that I do make a mistake or did I hurt someone's feelings or whatever? Conscience is a valuable thing. And what else? Creativity and I'm having trouble, actually, Steven,

John Dehlin [01:31:17] can we do it a slightly different way?

Steven Hassan [01:31:18] Sure, of course.

John Dehlin [01:31:19] So read. Read the positive and then the negative.

Steven Hassan [01:31:22] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:31:23] And then have them do an assessment of each dimension.

Steven Hassan [01:31:26] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:31:27] Or I can do it if. If this is.

Steven Hassan [01:31:31] You want to go for it.

John Dehlin [01:31:32] Okay. Let me tell you what I'm thinking.

Steven Hassan [01:31:34] So, yeah. Because you know your mind better than I know your mind.

Live Evaluation of an Organization on the Continuum

John Dehlin [01:31:38] All right, so viewers and listeners, we're inviting you to do an evaluation of a church or an organization or a business or relationship across the influence continuum. So for individuals, ask yourselves, is this organization a relationship trying to get you to cultivate your most authentic self, or is it trying to develop in you an identity that the organization or the relationship imposes on you? That's the first one.

Samantha Shelley [01:32:10] And it seems like a good because. Because while I was in Mormonism, I would have said, yeah, this is my authentic self. I. I chose to convert to this thing. So it feels. It can feel authentic. And I imagine if you have been raised in it your whole life, it can feel very authentic. And you know, how many times do we do Mormon stories interview where the person says, you know, I had no doubts. It really felt like I was thriving and everything was amazing. But I feel like the, The. A good test is when you have an opinion or something you want to do that is contrary to what the group is teaching is right. It is. Are you able to express that or you know, play that out.

John Dehlin [01:32:45] Love it.

Steven Hassan [01:32:46] Yeah, that's very important.

Samantha Shelley [01:32:47] I think something that is probably challenging for believers when analyzing this continuum generally is those things on the left. When I was in Mormonism, I would have said to you, of course I have compassion and unconditional love. You know, I would have thought that I was on that healthy side because I didn't, I didn't have a. The full. You don't know what you don't know and you don't also don't know, you know, if you've experienced compassion to this level. You don't know that compassion of this level is possible. You don't know what it might feel like to widen your circle of compassion or. You know what I mean? So that, that seems tough.

John Dehlin [01:33:24] Sure. And so not everyone's going to be in a state where they can very clearly analyze this. Having said that, I still think there's a value in, in assessing going through the framework.

Authentic Self vs. False Cult Identity

Steven Hassan [01:33:34] But I would add if I may, John, we were talking at breakfast this morning and you talked about several instances in your life experience where you experienced something that you felt was wrong or that you didn't agree with, but you stuffed it. And so anyone listening to this, I want to invite them to think back. If they were born and raised, were there moments, were there experiences where you felt like something was you were being told or you felt the guilt thing or whatever, that it really didn't feel right in your bones, but you suppressed it? Because I would argue that's your authentic self. That's your going, hello, something's wrong here.

John Dehlin [01:34:19] That's great. Thank you. Okay, so authentic self versus false cult identity. The second dimension for individuals is does the organization or relationship operate under sort of a framework of unconditional love or do they operate under a framework of conditional love where you have to sort of obey and perform to be able to feel the love and the approval of the organization. That's the second dimension for individuals, right?

Steven Hassan [01:34:50] Yep. And I would add, if I may, because this is a learning experience for me too, talking about families who, where the child is left and the parents are in, the parents are feeling guilt tripped from the group about the kids and all that. I would urge the children to think about their parents best selves or authentic selves versus their group self and tune into a feeling of unconditional love for their mother or father or for their siblings who are still in to love their authentic self and to be able to feel at comfort to express that, that, you know, I really love you and I miss you beautiful Beautiful.

Samantha Shelley [01:35:39] Samantha, it also seems useful to think about how you love, because I know in Mormonism, for example, there's often a big focus on. I mean, Tana talks about this a lot on our YouTube channel. I know it's prevalent on missions. It's like you're loving people with the goal of getting them to convert to your way of thinking. And that, to me, isn't a true kind of love, but it may feel like it while you're in the group. And also, how many of the ways that you're intolerant or judgmental or. Or lacking in compassion do you like, falsely frame as being loving? Like, a good example of this is like people being homophobic to people and. But then in their minds, that's the most loving thing they can do because love is almost like a conceptual reality to them rather than like a real heart centered. You know what I would consider like true love.

John Dehlin [01:36:33] Beautiful.

Samantha Shelley [01:36:34] That is tolerant, non judgmental.

John Dehlin [01:36:36] Beautiful.

Steven Hassan [01:36:37] Well said.

John Dehlin [01:36:37] Beautiful. All right, the next dimension is does, you know, does the organization encourage a sense of compassion for self and for others versus. Versus sort of engender or foster or foment hate? And this is a really tricky one in Mormonism. When I've toyed with the idea of writing a memoir or writing a book, one of the I. One of the titles I thought of is Nice Cult because Mormon leaders generally value acting nice in terms of like, the demeanor, the language, politeness, the diction kind of politeness.

Samantha Shelley [01:37:15] Yeah, but which is not compassion.

John Dehlin [01:37:17] Right. So. But Stephen, you. You mentioned last night in your workshop that you can be nice but actually be saying or doing very hateful things. Is that right?

Steven Hassan [01:37:27] Oh, absolutely. Again, Samantha talked about the conceptual thing, and it may come from a group or from within. It's a very different thing. But the actual effect of your posture, of your communication is what I would urge people to consider. The effect.

John Dehlin [01:37:48] The results.

Steven Hassan [01:37:49] Yeah, the results. So when Mooney's meet me and they call me names and they say bad things about me, I remember when I was in the group and how I would have said the very same things. But I also keep in mind there's an authentic self in there, even if they were born in the cult. And that if I can model a higher level of love and compassion, I think it's gonna make the world a better place. And I certainly feel better about myself that I don't come down to a tit for tat or, you know, Right. Wrong. Us versus them mentality.

John Dehlin [01:38:29] Right. And when I think about this idea of hate within a Mormon Context. If you ask the average Mormon or the average Mormon leader about how they feel about LGBT people, I'll say, oh, we love gay people. We love the LGBTQ community. Right? That's what they'll say. And the leaders will say, you're welcome. You're welcome to be lgbtq. Lgbtq, come sit in our pews. We respect and value and we want you. But if you fight same sex marriage, if you condemn same sex sexuality as evil, if you tell them they can't know love in this life, if you spend your money and your power fighting the rights of LGBTQ people to get married, and if you provide no place, no theological or doctrinal place for LGBTQ members to be members in good standing, and if you teach them to loathe who they are and you teach them to get conversion therapy, to try to pray away their authentic selves, and if you create an environment that's so hostile that they want to die by. Forgive me for the frank language trigger warning, you create a hostile environment where they want to die by suicide just by being a member of the organization, then, yes, your words are, I love you, but your actions are lethal. And I don't know if it's unfair to say that's hateful, but. But I don't know how else to describe it.

Steven Hassan [01:39:52] Well, my reaction to that is I believe it's an. Under information control, what I call insider doctrine versus outsider doctrine, where you say things for PR purposes, you know, to make. To present yourself in the best possible light. But the insider doctrine says you suck and we'll never accept you the way you are. And that's hypocritical, period. And duplicitous. And if you're trying to say we are special, we have a superior church and religious organization, you have to demonstrate it from the inside to the outside. It's not. You can't put a. I think it was a judge with a TM case. You can't put a sign on a horse and say it's a cow and believe that it's a cow. Maybe I'm reversing it in the judge's comments, but you have to look at the totality and the congruency of the policies and the teachings, and otherwise it's, you know, duplicitous. Hypocritical. Right.

John Dehlin [01:41:07] Yeah. Were you gonna say something, Samantha?

Samantha Shelley [01:41:09] Well, I also think the word hate, obviously that's at the extreme end of this continuum, but it's a strong word, and it's easy for people to almost conjure up A caricature of what that might look like. But we know even from Nazi Germany that a lot of the people that were doing these evil things were relatively like, quote unquote, nice, normal, more people who had just bought into this really dangerous ideology. You know, there's that famous photo of. It's like a bunch of like prisoner of war, like wardens or Nazi wardens or something, and that you. They just all look like normal people, like, laughing with each other. And, you know, you don't get a sense of them being these big, bad, evil people. So the thing I think about with this one is just like, what, first of all, what, what groups of people is it threatening for you to fully empathize with? Like, ex Mormons in Mormonism being like one of the more obvious examples where, you know, people's family members will leave the group and they won't even ask them about their experience. They were. And I think, like, curiosity is an important part of love and compassion. You know, like wanting to understand someone's experience, but they won't even go there because. Because it's too threatening to understand that person's experience too much. So, yeah, I suppose the rhetorical question in my mind is just who or what is it too threatening for you to fully feel compassion for? Does that make sense?

Steven Hassan [01:42:37] Well, I want to separate, if I may, hating a behavior that is appalling, like how pimps treat human beings and enslave them and beat them and brand them. I hate that. But to say I hate the pimp. I don't know the pimp. I don't know the pimp story. I don't know if they were sexually abused, if they were mind controlled, if they're part of a cartel, criminal cartel, that has said, if you don't do this, we're going to kill your family. So I try to hold back on judgments. And then I just want to comment that Robert Lifton, my mentor who changed my life, who wrote the Chinese Communist brainwashing model, went on to write a book called the Nazi Doctors with the theme of how can doctors sworn to do no harm do these horrible experiments at Auschwitz and other terrible concentration camps, come home and be good family men, good husbands and parents, and live a life. And he, at that time, this was after we met and talked, he called the process doubling, which for me is the dual identity model, what I call John, John, John, cult member. He called it doubling and the pseudo self. Being a good Nazi. I see the Nazis as a political mind control, authoritarian cult.

John Dehlin [01:44:07] Yeah. And I think, period, I Mean, I think along this conversation, the Stanley Milgram Obedience to Authority book and experiment really explains just how it. Sometimes it takes a religion or. Or undue influence to make good people do bad things. And.

Steven Hassan [01:44:23] Well, I want to.

John Dehlin [01:44:23] Stanley Milgram experience experiments are a great example of. It was trying to explain Nazi. You know, we're getting off track here, but we're trying to.

Steven Hassan [01:44:32] No, he was a child of a Holocaust survivor, brilliant man. My mentor, Philip Zimbardo, who did the prison experiment, has gone on to really delve deeply into what he called the Lucifer effect, when good people do bad things. And he basically, you know, the thesis is we are organisms that are social. And as much as we'd like to believe we're making our own decisions and our own choices, et cetera, in fact, we're hardwired to fit in with the people we identify with unless we understand social psychology. And we're hardwired to follow authority figures we perceive to be legitimate authority figures. And Milgram created this phony shock machine. And in the space of an hour, people with good intentions were electrocuting another human being.

John Dehlin [01:45:27] As far as they knew.

Steven Hassan [01:45:27] As far as they knew, they heard a tape recording, a pain. No one was getting shocked, but they believed they were giving shocks because a high school teacher who was moonlighting was telling them, you made a commitment. It's a science. You must continue. You have no choice. But people have a choice always ways, get up and leave. You made your covenant and leave.

John Dehlin [01:45:51] Yeah, you made your covenants. That's good. Really quickly, the. The love the sinner, hate the sin thing is problematic. You talked about, you know, loving the pimp, hating the pimp's behavior. That turns back problematic within a Christian framework because oftentimes about LGBT people, which was the topic for kind of as an example to this point about hate, Mormons will often say, you know, love this, love the sinner, hate the sin. And that's where that becomes problematic again, because really, if you're telling somebody you can't know love in this life, you. You don't have to call that hate. But the. But the effects of that teaching.

Steven Hassan [01:46:30] Right?

Samantha Shelley [01:46:31] And then that isn't loving the sinner, like. Right, that's. That's. Again, that's that, like, delusional false concept of love, but, like, actual love, in that scenario, I would obviously be accepting a gay person.

John Dehlin [01:46:45] So I don't want to get too far off track because we're trying to make apologize.

Steven Hassan [01:46:49] Doing the best they can.

John Dehlin [01:46:50] No, no, no, no, don't apologize. I'm also just playing my role to kind of keep us on course. Really quickly, thank you to Southern Boz Lady. She writes it's so sad when a business organization, institution, et cetera, has your salvation or soul in their hands. Thanks to Mormons Church podcast for helping us get gain wisdom, knowledge and insight on their tactics. XJW Solidarity. So we do have thank you Southern Bows Lady. We do have many members of ex members of other high demand religions or cults that that tune in to Mormon Stories podcast and we're grateful for them and we welcome them today. Also Nuance Mormon Bishop says this would be an amazing fifth Sunday discussion. So he wishes he could have these conversations at church. All right, so going back to the continuum model, we're still on individuals. We talked about compassion versus hate. The next item is if you're analyzing your organizational relationship, is there more of an emphasis on developing within you a sense of conscience versus an emphasis on what the doctrine of the organization is and having you be obedient to and controlled by the doctrine versus by your own conscience. Anything you want to add about that Steven

Steven Hassan [01:48:14] Well, I just hope as you're inviting people to do a self audit or to audit a situation maybe years ago they were in a multi level marketing group or maybe they were in a controlling marriage or in a corporation to it's it's always easier to first apply it to things that you're not involved with at the moment because once that analysis starts to, you know, click into place and it's easier to reality test in the here and now.

John Dehlin [01:48:46] Okay, well people can choose whatever organization they want to do this analysis with.

Steven Hassan [01:48:51] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:48:51] But that is clearly I I've learned more from cult documentaries like Going Clear Wild, Wild Country, Holy Hell. I've learned more about my experience in Mormonism through those documentaries sometimes than I have through just trying to do my own analysis. So thank you for that reminder, Stephen. Okay, so a couple other final dimensions around individuals would be would be in, you know, a healthy organization in terms of individuals encourages creativity and humor on the part of the individual versus a focus on solemnity, fear and guilt and seriousness. And you know, no evil speaking or loud laughter. That's a term that comes from Mormonism. And then finally in terms of individuals, a healthy organization is going to be focusing more on free will and critical thinking, whereas an unhealthy organization is going to be focusing on dependency and obedience over free will and critical thinking. So that's the first section. We've got two more to go, but any comments on that?

Steven Hassan [01:50:13] And I just want to say there are many, many more that I could add to both sides of the continuum. So this is just a model, people. And I'm hoping everyone will improve this model. So I want to invite people to challenge it, add other things that they think should be on the ethical, healthy side, because we're smarter together. And it's not about Steven Hasson's model in my mind. It's about trying to educate everybody to help each other, to raise consciousness so that we're not devolving, but we're evolving.

John Dehlin [01:50:54] Love it. Okay, so now that, Stephen, now that you have a sense for kind of how we're taking people, trying to take people through this exercise, do you want to kind of. Do you want to kind of go through leaders and talk about healthy leadership versus unhealthy leadership across your own continue?

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Leadership Traits

Steven Hassan [01:51:10] Sure. Well, I think I want to start on the unhealthy side, John, and just talk about malignant narcissism, which is the combination of narcissism and psychopathology. So not just the notion that a narcissist. Narcissism is on a continuum too, by the way, and that narcissists are really coming out of a place of deep insecurity. So they're trying to emphasize in their own mind that they're important, that they're valuable. They're thinking of what's best for them at the expense of everyone else. They feel entitled. Everything's transactional, but they have a very underwhelming sense of empathy for others. So they treat others as objects more than trying to put themselves in other people's shoes and imagine how they would feel. The psychopathological piece is things like people who think they're above the law, people who are pathological liars. Like, how can you ever trust someone who's a liar? That was the thing that woke me up from the Moon. Each trance cult was realized realizing Moon was a liar. And in fact, I had heard him lie so many times in the two and a half years. But because of thought stopping, because of my indoctrination, because of sleep deprivation, I couldn't apply my critical thinking and my reality testing. And I was isolated from family and friends and other sources of influence that might have helped speed up that process. So I want to state that, in my opinion, if you go to freedom of Mind, download the whole list of malignant narcissism, share this with your family and friends, you will protect yourself from 80 to 90% of all predators or predatory organizations. And I'm saying this also for Ex members who are already out of one thing, but they're afraid to navigate or make commitments to things in the future. If you have that list and you're using that as a checklist and you're experiencing somebody displaying these behaviors, you can test it and stay away from them. You're going to save yourself a lot of heartache and pain and money. Healthy people, healthy leaders are psychologically healthy, which means that they don't think they're perfect. Don't say that they know better than everyone else. They know they have weaknesses. They have teams of people that they are enhancing their vision, their hopes, their organizational goals by relying on others who have strengths that they don't have. They're accountable. I'm having trouble seeing things now. Their limits, they're trustworthy, they're accountable. If they screw up, Healthy leaders go, I screwed up, please forgive me and don't blame the victim. Don't, you know, try to dismiss or minimize what they did in error and are accountable. Yeah, you want to be with people that you can trust, that are reliable, that are good and life's short, why not hang out with people or be involved with leaders that you go, this person is really representing my interests. They're not working off of donors and what they want, but they're really representing what they say they want to represent. And unfortunately our political system is so corrupted at this moment, it's disheartening that so many people are not honoring their own oaths of the Constitution. Etc. So. Yeah, go ahead.

Malignant Narcissism in Mormon Leadership

John Dehlin [01:55:14] So, so as I analyze this within a Mormon perspective and Samantha, I invite you to, to share as well. If you look at Mormon church leaders today, there's definitely a sense of elitism where, you know, just generally speaking, like with all high demand religions, Mormons kind of feel like they, they're the best, they're the most righteous, the one true church, etc. And of course, you know, the prophets here and revelators that run the Mormon Church, the First Presidency, the Quorum of the twelve, they claim to be special witnesses of Jesus Christ. They try to give us the impression that they speak directly with God and Jesus and in that sense they are the ultimate authorities on the earth for everything that really, truly matters. They definitely care about power and, and money. They're definitely secretive and they're definitely deceptive in terms of, you know, 200 plus years of hiding information from the membership. And they do claim absolute authority because they claim to be God's, literally God's chosen prophets on the earth and special witnesses of Christ and Then if you flip that and look at the positive elements, accountability is, is not their strong suit. One of our top leaders down H. Oaks is recently quoted as saying, we neither seek nor offer apologies.

Steven Hassan [01:56:37] He's also said, that's pretty blatant.

John Dehlin [01:56:39] Yeah, and he said it very directly. He's the number two man in charge in the church. The other thing that he said is it's wrong to criticize the church leaders, even if the criticism is accurate.

Steven Hassan [01:56:50] Oh, my goodness.

John Dehlin [01:56:51] Yeah.

Steven Hassan [01:56:51] Oh, my goodness. Warning, warning, warning.

John Dehlin [01:56:56] And then if you add to that that in the Mormon temples, Mormons for 200 years have covenanted to never speak ill of the Lord's anointed. So, I mean, imagine raising your arm to the square, Stephen Hassan, and saying, I, before God, angels and these witnesses, covenant to never speak ill of the Lord's anointed. And if I do and then you're, you know, slitting your throat, I'll suffer my life to be taken. Those sorts of death oaths and covenants made, you know, in a Mormon temple make it very, very serious for you to ever fear. For you to fear ever criticizing the church leaders. Then you add to that the fact that they excommunicate critics and dissidents, which is like social murder, basically social homicide. I, I'm going to say that, that the church leaders, and of course they don't empower. They're not out, you know, to power individuals and to, you know, encourage psychological health. They're more out to, like you say, Stephen Hassan, to encourage psychological dependence. Samantha, anything you want to say about Mormon leadership in this regard, in your experience?

Samantha Shelley [01:58:07] No, I don't think so.

John Dehlin [01:58:09] Okay, cool.

Samantha Shelley [01:58:11] But I do think obviously, like, different archetypes exist within Mormon leadership. So you will have the ones that come across more, you know, humorous and loving and, and that may be like a genuine thread that runs through them, but they're still acting in the service of this system that is kind of fundamentally grandiose and superiority complexy and. Are you talking like, like dofus who came to mind? Yeah, he did get demoted. So just something to think about.

John Dehlin [01:58:43] But also Holland in the past was viewed as the nicer, kinder guy maybe.

Samantha Shelley [01:58:47] Oh like eye ring crying, you know, a poor woman or something. So. But yeah, so it's not, you know, when I think of like Brigham Young or Joseph Smith, I'm like, surely malignant narcissists. And maybe everyone in church leadership isn't like that today. But again, they're still in the service of, of these things that can ask an ignorant question.

Steven Hassan [01:59:10] Please so as you were describing some of these teachings of the leadership of the Mormon Church, I wanted to know what do they think about the New Testament and Jesus and Paul's teachings? Like, do they say that it's true and it's real or they ignore it or what?

John Dehlin [01:59:30] Yeah, the official Mormon life is that the Bible is true as far as it is translated correctly. But generally speaking, Mormon Church leaders would say they believe in Jesus and Jesus is the center of our church and Jesus is the most important figure who's ever lived and that we should follow Jesus teachings.

Steven Hassan [01:59:48] Would they acknowledge Jesus was a Jew? Yes, they would. So question, what would happen if former members had a sign with First Corinthians 13 about love and had it on a sign, how would they respond to Paul's words?

John Dehlin [02:00:14] They would ignore the sign.

Samantha Shelley [02:00:16] They might have the sign. There probably are people that have that sign. But it's just a lot of double think, isn't it? It's like they also believe in eating meat sparing, but they don't do that.

John Dehlin [02:00:24] Yeah, you know, what does that quote say, that scripture that you're representing?

Steven Hassan [02:00:28] I'm Jewish, but it's like love is patient and kind. It's not boastful. It's. There's like a whole beautiful, like everything. I subscribe to a description of love.

Samantha Shelley [02:00:40] I feel like their perception is like, yeah, that's true. And then back to our thing, you know?

John Dehlin [02:00:44] Exactly.

Samantha Shelley [02:00:45] It's like, in theory, they stand behind that, but it's not computing in a way that is. I mean, with some members, I believe it is more so than others.

John Dehlin [02:00:53] Yeah. So you're totally right. And I, I agree. Samantha, What I was trying to say is there's so much hubris. There's. It's like Bill Gates and Steven Ballmer back in the 90s. Like, there's such a belief in ultimate power and authority that their first reaction would be, you shouldn't be standing there with the poster. So you're a dissident. I'm ignoring what you have to say. Now, having said that, that if you were to ask them, do you believe in this passage in the Bible about what love is like? Samantha said they would say, oh, absolutely. Now get back to obeying what we tell you to do.

Samantha Shelley [02:01:28] Because in their mind, it's also loving to be obedient and to encouraging people to be obedient is the most loving thing you can do.

Steven Hassan [02:01:36] Right. But I don't think that's in the New Testament. I don't believe so I'm just trying to. To Think about possible, you know, avenues of communication to people who are still in the church that might empower them to reevaluate if they really believe that Jesus was a valued being and teacher, that this is the Latter Day Saint, Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint. I don't know, know, just wondering.

John Dehlin [02:02:10] In practice, Mormon church leaders have a. Have a real problem with, with Jesus. Like if you there for decades, ex Mormons would like attend a sacrament meeting and like count how many times the name Joseph Smith was mentioned versus the times that Jesus was mentioned.

Steven Hassan [02:02:27] Really?

John Dehlin [02:02:27] Oh yeah. Joseph Smith would just dominate Jesus to

Samantha Shelley [02:02:30] the point where it would sometimes be a little bit of a yellow flag if someone started getting, getting too into Jesus even though they claim that Jesus is the main thing. Like me and Tanner read an 80s Mormon fiction book on our YouTube channel. And in the book the main character starts focusing on Jesus more and the narrator, the guy writing the book, the line is something like, it didn't make me any less faith obedient to the Lord's prophets or something like he felt the need to call that out because it was almost like a stereotype. I feel like historically if someone started getting too into Jesus, there may be at risk of not following the prophets anymore. That was actually what kicked off my faith crisis, was learning more things about what Jesus was actually probably maybe like

Steven Hassan [02:03:16] the Mooney is the same. Like Jesus was really important if you're a Christian and they're bringing you in, but once you're in, Jesus was a failure. And Moon, moon, moon. True parents. True, true parents and just Jesus was a failure.

John Dehlin [02:03:30] Yeah. The official Mormon PR line would be that Jesus is at the center of our church and is the most important thing. The, the way that the church is run is the most sacred thing in Mormonism is obedience to authority a thousand percent.

Samantha Shelley [02:03:45] Jesus loves guns in America.

John Dehlin [02:03:47] Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Hassan [02:03:48] Oh, that's a Mooney line. I think that's. They like the Mooney gun factor in Pennsylvania.

John Dehlin [02:03:54] I mean, I don't know that the leaders encourage.

Samantha Shelley [02:03:56] No, I know they have. The Mormon culture is very much, you know, recreated Jesus in their own image.

John Dehlin [02:04:03] Yeah.

Samantha Shelley [02:04:04] Of being this like, Republican.

John Dehlin [02:04:06] But the leaders, they want you to do what they say. Yeah, that's what, that's what.

Steven Hassan [02:04:12] Yeah, that's the, that's what I would say is a warning sign that if you're in any environment, culture or society where you are, you know, there's no validation for a different perspective or a different point of view and there's no free press where people can challenge unethical behavior. Or leadership. You have an authoritarian situation.

John Dehlin [02:04:36] Yeah, totally.

Samantha Shelley [02:04:37] Joseph Smith bound down a printing press.

John Dehlin [02:04:39] Yeah, yeah. Really quickly.

Steven Hassan [02:04:41] I'm learning a lot.

John Dehlin [02:04:43] Yeah. Thanks to Aaron. Okay. Wilkeson for his super chat. These super chats are coming in and we really appreciate it. Okay. So Stephen, one thing that came out of our workshop last night that I want to reintroduce here, that there was some confusion when you talked about this part of the continuum. Let me explain why, and we've teased this out already in today's discussion, but I want to make it explicit. Sure. There's a huge difference between the narcissism. I mean clearly Joseph Smith would qualify as a malignant narcissist if an objective group of 100 psychologists were to sort of analyze his life. And Joseph Smith would fit up there with Jim Jones and David Koresh and you know, Keith Ranieri, you know, Warren Jeffs. Pick your top 10 favorite cult leaders. Joseph Smith, you know, belongs in that. But what's different is what it take. The personality that it takes to start a successful cult is different than 200 years later once it's become literally a multi, almost a trillion dollar corporation. The behavioral traits that it takes to become a safe, a perceived safe, obedient company man to then rise up in the ranks.

Steven Hassan [02:06:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:06:04] And so when somebody is thinking about Russell M. Nelson, who's the current president of the church, or Dallin H. Oaks, who's the number two in charge or people down the line like Henry Eyring or Jeffrey Holland. These are all people I know, you don't know. Or David Bednar.

Steven Hassan [02:06:19] Are they all over 60 years of age and white?

John Dehlin [02:06:23] Most of these people are over 80 years of old and or 90 years old. The top two leaders of the church are in their late 90s. But anyway way what I'm saying is changes are coming. Yeah.

Steven Hassan [02:06:36] Time is against them.

John Dehlin [02:06:37] Yeah. Yeah. The 80 year olds are waiting to take over for the 90 year old. So you're right. Change is coming anyway when it comes to, when it comes to this slide about leaders and narcissists, there's a lot of Mormons that are like, I don't perceive Russell M. Nelson as a malignant narcissist. I don't perceive, you know, Dieter Uchtdorf or Jeffrey Holland or Bednar as a malignant narcissist racist. They're sort of like out of touch elderly, good natured old men who are just kind of passing the torch down that was handed to them. Now Samantha, I want to hear if you disagree with that and then I want to give Steven a chance to answer.

Samantha Shelley [02:07:19] I. I don't, but I. I guess my question is, does it really matter? Because again, if they're in the service of a system that is harmful and grandiose and all these things, then whether they're just, you know, so psychologically dependent on Mormonism and church broke versus being, it doesn't really seem to matter at that point because it's sort of the same outcome.

John Dehlin [02:07:40] Yeah. Okay. Steven, anything you want to add?

Steven Hassan [02:07:42] I think that a lot of people are on automatic pilots, especially when they get elderly. And I guess my first reaction as you were asking the question is it would really depend on the people, people in the inner circle who live with these people day to day and go to meetings with them and who have direct experience, like I had direct experience with Moon, that he was not a healthy person. I just couldn't evaluate it. I didn't have the freedom of mind to be in my real self because my pseudo identity, it was like a computer virus gets into your operating system and takes over your operating system. My operating system of my authentic self was not able to work under those conditions. And so I really am curious with even elderly people, who's in their environment, what information are they listening to and responding to? Are they learning anything that's outside of just. Just the same old, same old church business things? If they aren't, then they're going to just be on automatic pilot with their indoctrination.

Samantha Shelley [02:09:02] Also, whether or not the leaders possess the ability to empathize, like at a neurological level, the system rewards obedience. When there's a conflict between obedience and empathy, obedience is what's gonna have you rise up the ranks. So the empathy is so diminished at that point, you know, that they're only ever really going to allow themselves to feel empathy when it is in line with what the system wants. So then it feels like their empathy is at least dialed way down no matter what.

John Dehlin [02:09:36] Right.

Samantha Shelley [02:09:37] Because it's limited. It's like their circle of compassion is.

John Dehlin [02:09:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a real disadvantage in Mormonism to the Gerontocracy because it limits, it limits so much possible potential growth within the church to have octogenarians and nonagenarians.

Samantha Shelley [02:09:52] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:09:53] Leading this church.

Steven Hassan [02:09:54] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:09:55] Do you know why? Do you know why the leaders are so old? Steven Hassan?

Steven Hassan [02:09:58] Nope.

John Dehlin [02:09:59] When Joseph Smith was killed, there was a succession crisis and nobody knew. Joseph Smith had told his son that his son would succeed him. He had told other leaders close to him, several people, and his. His wife, his surviving wife, you know, also Wanted to. To lead. Sounds like the Moonies. Right. And so there was a succession crisis. Well, Brigham Young emerged as the one most successful at taking the largest group with him to Utah, although there are a bunch of schisms that emerged. But the succession process that came out of Brigham Young's succession was he was the senior leader of the Quorum of the twelve Apostles when Joseph Smith died. And so what came out of that was from Brigham Young on the successor, the leader of the church, the prophet and president of the church would be the longest serving member of the quorum of the 20th 12 apostles. So as soon as you join the Quorum of the twelve Apostles, your clock starts ticking. Then when the prophet or the president dies, whoever's been in the quorum of the 12 the longest immediately becomes the next prophet. Which is ironic because Mormons are taught that the prophet is called by God. But now we know that the prophet is actually called by a system of seniority. And what it leads to is you're almost guaranteed that a non ogenarian is going to be leading your, you know, $250 billion corporation.

Steven Hassan [02:11:39] Well, my immediate reaction is the church is doomed because an organization, unless it's capable of transforming and growing, if it's just on automatic pilot, it's just missing all of the knowledge and growth and changes that are happening on the planet, they need to rely on younger people to say, hello, there's a problem. And obviously something has broken through. If they're even publicly starting to say, oh, we like gay people now, at least there's some leakage into that hierarchy. But you know, it's going to die out, in my opinion, unless they can come up with a livable philosophy.

John Dehlin [02:12:31] Yeah. Okay. Well, we still have one major section of the influence continuum to go, and that is for the organization itself and relationships. Do you want to take us through this, Steven?

Comparing Healthy and Unhealthy Organizations

Steven Hassan [02:12:47] You know, my eyes are starting to get blurry, so do you want me to read it? If you don't mind.

John Dehlin [02:12:51] Okay, so for. If you're analyzing your church, your cult, your organization, your relationships, etc, here's some dimensions upon which you can evaluate it. A healthy organization or relationship is egalitarian, which means that, that there's as much equality as possible amongst the leaders and the participants. There are checks and balances in terms of the power that is wielded, which means accountability for the leaders. There's informed consent, which means that the leaders, that the members and the participants and the investigators are informed about what they're engaging in. There's a healthy respect for Individuality and diversity. Diversity within the organization. We have a recent comment about that quote that we can share that'll blow your mind in just a second. Stephen Hasson. There is a. There's a sense that the means create the end instead of the ends justify the means. Growth is in, growth is encouraged. And when I say growth, I don't mean growth in the stocks and the bonds and the real estate assets. Growth is encouraged in terms of individual growth within the members. And people are always free to leave. That's going to be a healthy organization. That should be contrasted with the dimensions that you add for an unhealthy organization or relationships where there's elitism and authoritarian. And I'm going to add patriarchal structure that dominates the system. There's deceptiveness and manipulation of the. The people. The. The people are kind of clones, where they're encouraged to look alike, to think alike, to speak alike, to act alike. There's a sense of the ends justifies the means by any means necessary. The power is often focused on being preserved. And there's never any legitimate reason to leave. So that's kind of an analysis of healthy versus unhealthy. Do you want to add anything to that before Samantha and I analyze Mormonism based on that perspective?

Steven Hassan [02:15:01] Well, you know, in the Moonies, we were taught to justify lying because once we take over, we'll make the ideal world and then everything will be truthful. But I started thinking about, you know, if the means are using deception, that means the ends are deception. And so this, you know, the ends justify the means ideology is really dangerous and counter to any type of healthiness. And we already chatted about no legitimate reasons to leave. There's always legitimate reasons to leave. Including, this isn't working for me anymore. That's a legitimate reason to leave. The leader lied or the leader had sex with underage girls. That's a legitimate reason to leave. Finding another group or another belief system that resonates more fully with your identity, that's a legitimate reason to leave. But I think it's a critical thing I want to say for your listeners, if you're former members, is I really encourage you to stop using the group as your reference point for your identity and your reality and think more about the present you and the healthy future you that you want to grow to become and use that more as your center of gravity rather than reacting to the past. That said, some people at the beginning of their journey, they need to get to the place where they really leave and say to themselves, okay, I Can't be this in this anymore. But getting out or realizing I can't be here anymore is just the beginning of the healing journey to healthy identity.

John Dehlin [02:17:00] Yeah. And I want to really, after we finish clearing this slide, I want to talk about the healing and growth part. I really appreciate you calling our attention to that because that's what it really is all about. Really quickly, as we go back, Samantha, to analyzing healthy versus unhealthy organizations, is there anything you want to comment in terms of your understanding of. Of Mormonism as a healthier and unhealthy organization?

Samantha Shelley [02:17:27] I mean, it definitely falls towards the unhealthy end. And they're not even. They're open about their authoritarian and patriarchal structure. They print it in the ensign as a triangle. Like Michael Scott when he's trying to get people in the office to sign up for his pyramid scheme. And he's just drawing this pyramid.

John Dehlin [02:17:44] Yeah, yeah.

Samantha Shelley [02:17:44] No awareness.

John Dehlin [02:17:45] So there's definitely a patriarchal and an authoritarian structure.

Steven Hassan [02:17:49] Yeah.

Samantha Shelley [02:17:49] And they. It's celebrated, really, isn't it?

John Dehlin [02:17:51] Yeah, yeah, it's. It's a feature, not a bug. Yeah. Any other. Any other quick thoughts? See in this slide?

Samantha Shelley [02:18:00] Well, the individuality versus clones people is interesting because I think Mormons are known for being quite a homogenous people, even though they obviously they are a global religion. There are Mormons that exist all around the world. But it's no coincidence that people talk about how when you live in an area that is predominantly Mormon, things get weird. And even Mormons will acknowledge that, you know, if you live in a very densely Mormon settlement place, even Mormons themselves will sort of make jokes about that or criticize how weird it gets when everyone's living the doctrine, the culture, the rules, whatever, because everyone is so similar. And it just. Yeah, so.

John Dehlin [02:18:43] And Stephen, we had this discussion. You're like, you're from back east where things are a little more formal, and you're like, should I bring a, you know, tie? Should I wear a tie? Should I wear a suit? And I'm like. And I was like, to you, I just said, you know, know, white shirt and tie and suit is. Is the uniform of the oppressor for people like us. Right. And it's not just a buttoned up, nice suit shirt. Within Mormonism, Steven, I was telling you, a pink shirt or a green shirt, anything that isn't white is considered a red flag to disobedience. Facial hair, beards, and mustaches are discouraged. At byu, Brigham Young University, the church's university. You're not allowed to have facial hair. Unless you have a beard card from your doctor saying that the doctor requires you to have facial hair for some sort of skin sensitivity.

Steven Hassan [02:19:34] Wow.

John Dehlin [02:19:36] There was a huge, huge movement just like five, six years ago called, you know, wearing pants to church, where women, as an act of radical expression of, I don't know, feminism, they wore pants to church. And it was like a national story that Mormon women were wearing nice business like dress pants to church because women wear skirts and they don't ever show their shoulders. And so this idea of conformity, like if you don't wear a tie to church, it's your flag, it's, it's side eye. Right.

Samantha Shelley [02:20:13] You're saying something, making some kind of

Steven Hassan [02:20:15] statement uniform is what you're saying. By the way, when I was a Mooney, I was wearing a three piece suit with a tie and short hair, no facial hair, similar things like that. I did want to comment because you talked about it being global. And in the last several years I've done a deep dive to the ability that I had time to do into colonization of indigenous people around the world. I was motivated and invited by the Canadian First Nations Caring Society. Cindy Blackstock, the social work professor and CEO of this non profit, said, I've been trying to think about how to decolonize my people's minds. And now that I've been exposed to your models, I realize this is a very important piece that I can use to help to explain to my people. And then you shared with me how much colonization of other countries, of people, indigenous people in other countries, the Mormons did, which I was completely unaware of.

Cultural Homogeneity and Financial Exploitation

John Dehlin [02:21:28] Yeah, we go into like these beautiful South American or African countries where they have this beautiful native of dress and we say leave that home on Sunday, wear the Lord's uniform, which is if you're a young man or a man, white shirt and tie. If you're a woman, it's American looking. Dress and blouse. Really quickly, Stephen Hassan, if we go back to, you know, your, your influence continuum, one of the really interesting things, again, talking about individuality and diversity just a few weeks ago, again, our number two man in charge, down ho folks, gave a talk where he said, in front of a diverse audience, he said, Jesus did not say be ye therefore diverse. Jesus said be ye therefore one. And it was an actual overt denunciation of diversity within the church because the church has been so battered recently with it being racist, sexist, homophobic and patriarchal that, that it's starting to really, I'm sure, wear on the patience of the GERONTOCRACY leadership. And so they're actually explicitly denouncing diversity within Mormonism in 2023.

Steven Hassan [02:22:45] Thoughts on that worries, worries me. You know, it comes to mind for your listeners and whoever is interested. A Baptist minister at Harvard Divinity School, Harvey Cox, wrote a book called Common Prayers. And it was a book for Christians to understand Judaism with the perspective that if you really want to be a good Christian, you should know about Judaism and understand what Jesus was written, raised to believe because. And as a Jew reading the book, I learned a lot about my own religion. But I really think any religious organization that uses Jesus ever, they should like make the effort to learn about Jesus and learn about Judaism and read the New Testament and become educated about it.

John Dehlin [02:23:44] Yeah, absolutely. A couple other things from the slide and Samantha, you may, you may have more when I see those words. Deceptive and manipulative. I don't know if you heard this, but just a few weeks ago, the Mormon Church was fined by the securities and Exchange Commission for creating 13 shell companies that were intentionally created to hide the amount of wealth that the Mormon Church had amassed in stocks, bonds, real estate, mutual funds, cash, etc. And the SEC did an unforthinkable act which is to punish and find a religion in the United States, a wealthy, powerful church, find the church in effect $5 million and explicitly called the church out for intentional knowing deception of the SEC of its members. And, and it was noted in the settlement document that the church was fearful that if the members knew how much wealth the church had. Guess what? Can you fill out the sentence?

Steven Hassan [02:24:54] Yeah. They would wonder why they're being pressured to give 10% when the group has so much money and especially in Africa and other poor countries to demand people to tithe. When you taught me that, I was like, what? It's so disgusting. It's so egregious. And it's really about, you know, and this was something that I should have said last night because during the saying goodbye part where people came up to me, he said, what's the motivation of the leadership of cults, of destructive cults? And I say power, money and sex. Not always sex, but always power and money. And power, money, sex. Do you want to be part of a religion that the number one criteria is power and the number two criteria is money? Like where's love? Where's, where's truth? Where's being better people?

John Dehlin [02:25:54] Yeah.

Steven Hassan [02:25:55] So it's hypocritical. I think it's great that they find them. They should have fined them, you know, a billion or two. Dollars. If they really want to change behavior like they did, a little slap on the wrist, which was good that they did it. But I just think that if we're going to change the corruption and all these corporations, we need to hold the executives accountable. Accountable personally. And then things will start to change really fast.

John Dehlin [02:26:25] Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And of course, just to finish clearing out this slide, we've already talked about how within Mormonism, there's no legitimate reason to leave. The church very much works to preserve its power. And it's a very patriarchal, authoritative structure that. That does not provide informed consent, that encourages homogeneity and by any means necessary, really. Okay, so now that we have successfully sort of helped our viewers and listeners analyze the influence continuum, I want to tell you why I felt like that was so important to do.

Steven Hassan [02:27:06] Please, Steven, It.

John Dehlin [02:27:08] I love that you are so focused on healing and growth, and I. I am as well. And I. I've worked hard to try and balance criticism and deconstruction on Mormon stories with. With stuff about healing your growth. But here's why I see deconstruction is so important. And we had to talk about this at breakfast this morning because I told you how long it took me to feel comfortable not wearing my garments. You said to me, well, it should just, you know, whatever brainwashing or mind control you've experienced. And I'm not quoting you precisely, but I'm conveying a general sense of what I heard. What I heard from you is it shouldn't take more than a year for you to sort of deprogram any programming that you've been programmed with within Mormonism. And that makes sense in my view, if you're talking about people that have been. That were raised in a totally different mindset or framework, that then joined a cult as an adult, were in it for a few years, and then they've woken up to it.

Samantha Shelley [02:28:07] It.

John Dehlin [02:28:08] Yes, I can see it taking a matter of a year to fully deprogram. Within Mormonism, what we're dealing with is people who have been conditioned for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, sometimes even 80 years of conditioning.

Steven Hassan [02:28:25] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:28:25] And one of the biggest, most powerful forms of conditioning that the church lays on its. Its, you know, born in the Covenant members is this. This, you know, notion of you can't be happy without it, it's the one true church to leave it as evil. And even once you've psychologically and intellectually extricated yourself, even after you no longer believe and you're 100% certain you don't believe and even after you're 100% certain you want to leave it, you're haunted by the conditioning that you're doing something evil, that you've made a mistake. What if I'm wrong? What if the church is true? What if I go to. What if I die and go to heaven and I am not with my family? And even five, 10 years after, you can still be constantly harangued by this conditioning. And one of the reasons why I continue to do long form interviews on Mormon Stories podcast is because. Because one of the biggest benefits people get from watching these exit stories for multiple hours, over 1800 hours now of Mormon Stories interviews is because for them, watching people tell their stories about leaving is a part of helping reprogram their brains, right? It helps them feel like they're not crazy. It helps them feel like they're not alone. So here's my question to you. When you're dealing with people in a cult for 40, 50, 60 years, right, they've got this conditioning that's worn. Talk about neuroplasticity. It's worn so deeply into the brains that one year of. And with as much respect as I have, and maybe it's because I don't understand your methods. And I'm sure that's why we want people to watch and view your course, so they can understand it with as much deep conditioning that a lifelong Mormon will have gained through their participation. You know, I'm a little bit skeptical that one year of consulting with you, even if on a daily basis, is going to be enough to reprogram those decades of conditioning. So my question to you is, if we talk about healing and growth, the first step is dealing with the mind control conditioning that's. That's so intensely worn into the Mormon experience. So what can you share with my viewers and listeners about how to reprogram their minds from. Away from the conditioning that's so deeply woven?

The Healing Journey After Leaving Mormonism

Steven Hassan [02:31:07] I think the healing journey will be different for each person. And so when I said. I think you had said it, it took you 10 years to stop hearing the voice in your head around the garments. Am I misremembering?

John Dehlin [02:31:24] It took me. It. It took me. Well, I left the church in two. I lost my faith in 2001. I kept wearing my garments until 2014. So that's 13 years. I wore my garments when I no longer believed. And then after I stopped wearing them, when I was excommunicated, it took me two to three years to feel comfortable not having them on.

Steven Hassan [02:31:43] Okay, okay.

Samantha Shelley [02:31:45] Might as well get that Started sooner rather than later, though. You know, I feel like with the. The tangible things, you know, like action items, like getting new underwear. I'm not the expert, but it seems like, you know, in coaching, when you're wanna. When you're wanting to transform a mindset into a different one, you anchor it in action to. So it seems like you might as well get the ball rolling. No, Absolutely no.

Steven Hassan [02:32:10] So I want to. I want to share that what I. And my approach has evolved dramatically over 47 years. And where I am at now is really a very strong belief in teaching people how to control their own minds, to understand how the mind works, how learning can be facilitated, how social psychology works. I think, as you mentioned, that there's a great value in learning about other groups because it shines a light, it creates a perspective that is very healing to see that your group wasn't that special. And other people are having very powerful. All kinds of controls and manipulations and abuses. But I am. I don't want people to believe that it will take 10 years or 20 years to stop the voice in their head. You know, I had a voice in my head for a year when I thought about having sex with a woman, you know, and then when I finally had intercourse with a woman, I still had the voice in my head, but I was like, damn it, I want to do this. But. And then the more I did it, then the less the voice happened. But I didn't need to wait the year. If I could go back in time to the Steven and counsel myself out of the Moonies, I think my recovery would have happened way faster. And so my whole approach. And I don't want to misrepresent my course. My course is really a foundational educational paradigm. I created it essentially for clinicians, for coaches, for parents, for others who want to help others. A lot of former members are taking it now and finding great value. I have more to develop in terms of the healing and recovery and such. So I don't want people to sign up for the course thinking it's going to teach them what I'm about to share with you. But I have done many other interviews and talks where I've talked about this methodology, where I say, you need to be in your body in the here and now, meaning you have to overcome the dissociative disorder. You need to overcome the dissociative disorder. Understanding there's a real you and a cult you, and really empower the real you and deliberately rewire your neuronal synapses to the way you want to be today based on a future you that's healthy. And so doing things to bring an internal locus of control versus versus looking for some coach or therapist to tell you what to believe or what to do versus becoming your own best friend, becoming your own best therapist. And looking at this series of techniques and strategies and try them out. And certainly I do some zoom sessions with people and I plan to do some more workshops and such we're doing on Sunday. We can apply it. But to go back to the technique that I find is most effective is once the psychoeducation, the basic understanding of what is a mind control cult, what is healthy, once you understand the bite model, once you understand what's wrong with the group, etc. And you're really made a fully informed decision that you are gone. You never want to go back. 11 should go back in time to critical moments in your history. Even if you were born in a group. But you can identify even when in your earliest memory that you were being told to do something that you thought was stupid or silly or didn't make sense. And take the you of 2023, go back to that child. At first. You can even have a conversation. Hi, I'm from your future. Let me tell you what's going on. That reaction is right on. You're in an environment, it wasn't your choice, but your parents have been indoctrinated, you're being corporally punished or whatever. You didn't deserve it. Healthy parenting doesn't do this, this. And the idea is to take the resources of today and plug it into your cult identity formation and training and rewrite your personal history, knowing it's not going to change the historical facts of what actually happened, but changing your interior experience of who you are. So you shared in the, at the breakfast this morning that you were on a mission in Guatemala, that people were being baptized, they had no clue about what the Mormons were or whatever. You complained to the mission head and you were, I guess you just were dismissed. But it didn't.

John Dehlin [02:37:44] Cause he yelled at me and punished me.

Steven Hassan [02:37:47] He yelled at you and punished you. So I asked you to do this, this technique and I said, john, if you could go back to that moment, knowing what you know, now you're in that room with this guy, he's yelling at you and chastising you. What would you say and do differently? Yeah, and I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but I can give you my version of a scene like that. And it was in the moonies where Moon talked about taking over the country and basically committing mass genocide for everyone who didn't obey the orders of the church around sexuality. I had. I revisualized that scene. Instead of saying, yes, Father, I said, you're a nut. You're crazy. You're gonna kill people. I want nothing to do with you. You're a cult leader. You're like Hitler. Come on, everybody, let's leave now. I didn't do that in real time, but when I imagined that scene, it was so liberating to the real, real me, having been educated about the Holocaust. So it's this kind of using your mind's power to heal itself to say the real me would never have said okay to lying to recruit people by flirting with them and going back to all of those experiences, identifying them and reprogramming that. And if you. For people like yourself and me, we were recruited in, so we had some life experience prior. What I would say is, you bookend how you got in. You change. You never get recruited in the first place because you know too much about the Mormons. You bookend how you left, how you would have wanted to leave if you knew then what you know now, and three major crises or things that happened in your experience that should have made you want to leave but didn't. But you plug in the resources and the rest is just filling in the gaps. The key is not having a split of the indoctrinated cult self. That's still an automatic pilot, saying, chapter two, Satan raped Eve, it's happening again. It's like, what? That's bs. He even stole that ideology. So anyway, what do you think?

Samantha Shelley [02:40:17] Well, I think ex Mormons learning how to feel their feelings in their bodies and create, you know, that bodily connection beyond just analyzing their feelings and thoughts is still relatively new in this community. Like, we're very good at the mental deconstruction, but that is still kind of like largely the focus I feel in ex Woman content a lot of the time. Because, you know, it's. I mean, me and Tana were one of the first sort of x woman YouTube channels. So it's. It just shows how new, you know, even doing the mental deconstruction publicly is. So I'd like to think. And. And now I do feel like, you know, mind, body, connection, whatever you want to call it, learning to how to feel your feelings beyond the analyzing is becoming more of a focus. And so I'd like to think, as we keep emphasizing that there can be faster healing times for the community because you know there's more resources, we know more, there's more people who have walked the path. So maybe something that took you a really, really long time to feel able to do, people will be able to do in less time.

John Dehlin [02:41:28] And Samantha, when Steven was talking, talking about what I call child work or reparenting work, you were nodding.

Steven Hassan [02:41:35] And so it's not child work and it's not repairing. That's another part of what is in the toolbox.

John Dehlin [02:41:41] What is that called? Where you go back to your earlier time in your life and you try and kind of re experience and kind of update that.

Steven Hassan [02:41:50] I don't have a term for it, but for me it is reclaiming your authentic self. It is putting the resources. And this is a part of my work as a therapist. And I first was exposed to this in the early 80s when I was learning about hypnotherapy, the idea of parts, and that somebody may be afraid to be confident in a public setting, but then when you analyze it, you find out they're confident playing basketball and they're confident working with children or with puppies, but they have the feeling of confidence. And that you can take that feeling and put it into the context that you want and it will minimize the fear and the stress and the lack of trust in your ability to do so. It's really about mind control, but it's controlling your own mind. It's like you want to control your own thoughts, feelings and behaviors and not be controlled by a thought that says you can't heal. It's going to take you 10 years. What if you adopt a belief? It's going to take as long as it's going to take. But let me do everything in my power in the here and now, every single day. Every time I have a negative trigger, I neutralize the trigger because it speeds up the healing process. Now, having said that, the complicating factor is if you're married to an ex member, you have children in the group, your family's still in the group, you're tied to the group. So to the extent that you're hearing and getting reinforcing messaging from the cult, unless you've really rock solid in understanding this stuff, it's going to keep exerting a negative force on your positive healing.

John Dehlin [02:43:52] Got it. Samantha, as you were nodding as he was talking about me going back to my experience with my mission president and kind of envisioning a new interaction, I was. I was watching you nodding. What, what do you like about the idea of that exercise from your coaching experience? Or that type of exercise.

Samantha Shelley [02:44:10] Well, I mean, it's not it. To me it seems similar to reparenting except in instead of, you know, going back as the wise adult and sort of comforting your. You're putting yourself into that role of yourself in that past situation and then reimagining how you would have acted had you been maybe more in tune. I do have a question though with. Because you use the framework of like the authentic self versus the cult self, which I understand and I think I'm on board with. But I. But also neuroscientists say that there's no sort of. Of core self. And I just wonder whether. Well, you would know, I suppose, but whether everyone does feel like they. There was this authentic self there all along.

Steven Hassan [02:44:54] It's just the model and there's no scientific basis to it. It's a life experience. The real me, you know, was loved to read, loved to learn, loved to write poetry, enjoyed traveling all. And so it's just. I want people to understand I'm not a guru. I don't know it all. I'm on this journey and I keep learning and growing. But it's a. So far it's proven to be a highly useful model to help people, you know, to re evaluate and move forward in their lives. So I would like to take a moment and say that for me, reparenting is more attachment repair. Where my teacher, Dan Brown, who wrote a whole textbook on attachment and repair in adults that I want to cite, he had a technique that he developed where people who were traumatized in very unhealthy family environments where he would ask them to go back in time to a traumatic incident and imagine if they had the ideal mother and the ideal father uniquely suited to their personality, what they would have wanted them to say or do. And people are like, yeah, but my mother was an alcoholic and my father beat me. It's like, no, this is an imaginary exercise. And the point is that by creating healthy introjects, what's called introjects, a healthy mother and a healthy father that loves you unconditionally, keeps you safe, is always giving you positive, encouraging messaging, is never guilt tripping you, never, never saying you're not good enough or whatever, hugging you, et cetera, when one develops, develops that internally within oneself in the here and now, actually there's evidence that it changes personality disorders, which mental health professionals have previously been told are unfixable. You can actually fix a narcissistic personality disorder. However, the problem with narcissists is getting them to agree that they need some change and finding the motivational strategy that would enable them to do a couple of years of very directed therapy with a therapist. It's not with people with personality disorders. It's not something you can do by yourself in its entirety because you just can't get that external perspective. And there's a need to bond with a real adult who is safe and unconditionally loving and listens to you and, you know, is putting your best interest first.

John Dehlin [02:48:00] Yeah, beautiful. All right, well, we're kind of coming up on the time limit that we kind of agreed to. There were a few slides you showed at the end of your presentation last night. I think there were five total that really kind of lay out a framework for healing. And I'm wondering if it's. If maybe an effective way to close on an up note would be for you to kind of, maybe just quickly kind of go through those slides and at least provide an introduction to the types of material that, that they will see when they buy your course and, and they consume.

Therapeutic Approaches for Cult Recovery

Steven Hassan [02:48:36] Right. And maybe come to our workshop on Sunday. So my course was originally designed to be for clinicians and coaches. And what I wanted them to understand is that when people come to the office, they're often not saying, hey, I'm leaving a cult help. They'll often present a variety of symptoms and it's up to the clinician if they, if they have this frame in their consciousness, they will ask personal history questions. Were you corporally punished? Were you in a high demand religion? Or what was it like to be a child in your family of origin, etc. Because you don't want to miss this huge population of people who had experienced undue influence. So I have a number of slides and there are techniques and strategies that I help to teach clinicians how to deal with it. But number one, we saw the slide in the DSM5 that mind control, coercion, being involved with a destructive cult causes an identity disturbance. So when people who are born in a cult come out, they say, steve, I don't know who I am. Like, who am I like? I thought that everything was the truth in the group. And so the beginning is figuring out, well, if you're a clinician and you don't know anything about the Mormons, you better get help from an ex Mormon or you better get supervision or you need to do a referral, because that's going to be a really important piece to deconstructing that there is a legitimate reason to exist, exit and to find out who's still in and what are your relationships etc. It's going to be really, really important. And I show in the course a video of a woman who is in International Churches of Christ cult who had been in 13 years and she left and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for 11 years on 19 different medications medications she was making suicide attempts and, and self harming and other things because they didn't do their homework. They could have said, they could have put in Google International Churches of Christ in quotes plus cult plus brainwashing plus ex members and found all this ex members sites and my sites and they could be like, like oh this is the group she is leaving. This is very important to her psychology. Right. But they didn't even know to do that. And she begged me to come and speak at a course for clinicians. We, we disguised her identity at her request. But she said during her treatment period of 11 years people would say why don't you call up your church friends and get some support hurt and like with such harm being caused out of good intentions. But that because of their ignorance. So understanding if someone was recruited in the cult getting them back before their identity. A lot of people had a horrible identity experience growing up before a cult. So that's really important. But maybe they were like I was where I had a pretty good experience growing up and a healthy sense of identity. Getting me back to who I was prior would be a very good therapeutic move to my therapy going forward. And when people say to me I don't know what to believe and I don't know who I am, I say to them and this was from Dan Brown also he said try asking them when, when do they feel the most? When do you feel the most? You and wait and let them think. And they may say I don't know. And then you can say well what was the first thing that came to your mind? And oh, I'm playing music, I am teaching English at an inner, inner city school, I'm dancing, I'm writing poetry, whatever. So you start with a strength that they self identify with and you use that as a building block. And if they really are clueless you ask them have they read any books or watch any TV or movies, who do they admire? And try to help them identify some role models that they can use temporarily to start saying well I like this aspect of that person's identity and I like that that aspect because I say you need to be in your body, in the here and now, it's your life, you should control it. You get to choose who you want, who, who you want to be and what you want to believe. So there's a whole, you know, therapeutic process, but moving on. Dissociative states and triggering is a crucial thing. I. I'll talk and then the next one about unwanted triggers. So we were talking about that last night. And I'll just briefly say that we learn as humans by association. And all words are triggers. They create associations in our minds and in our experiences. I'm not worried about healthy associations. I'm worried about where you're being triggered into your cult identity or into a past trauma up. And I say if the trauma happened 10 years ago, it didn't happen today. But if you don't understand, there's a capacity that we have to recode our memories and we can change an associated memory to a dissociated memory intentionally meaning. And I used the example of my van crash when I fell asleep and I woke up up just as I was getting smashed and almost died if I couldn't see the younger me, like there was a video camera from the outside of me in the van crashing and see it from the outside. If I couldn't reframe and re pattern that memory, I'd never be able to drive near a truck again. I'd be afraid. And so what you want to do with all past traumas is you want to understand it happened in the past, therefore it happened to the younger you. You may not have had the tools, the safety that you needed then to protect yourself, but you're safe now. And this often is the case with child sexual assault where they were helpless, they didn't know how to protect themselves, but now they can learn how to punch somebody in the throat or call 911 or with whatever. There's so many more resources in any way. The point is that we can rewire our minds to not default to an associated memory and get re traumatized, but we can make as the default the dissociated memory. So that, yeah, that really sucked to younger Steven, and it has no impact other than I'm remembering it. And every time an ex cult member gets triggered by a cult song or, you know, a phrase or, you know, seeing some pamphlet or whatever, I say to ex members, it's an opportunity to heal yourself, but you have to first recognize I just was negatively triggered by this cue, by this, this phenomenon, and then ask yourself, how do you want to react to that cue or that phenomenon? And I'll give a quick example. I was counseling a young man who was in A drug rehab cult. And in the cult, he fell in love and got married. And he and his wife were very into the Grateful Dead, and she wound up leaving him. And he left the cult, she left the culture. But he said, I'm never going to be able to listen to my favorite band again. And I said, you know, why not? Oh, because that's what we played at our wedding. And so I said, okay, I want you to get the song on your phone right now. We were in my office, and I want you to play. Play the song. Really? And I'm like, yeah. And then. So he started playing the song. And I held up the Freedom of Mind book, which is in front of you, John on the table. And I was like. And he's like. And then he started laughing because I was making a new association with the song to me and being free. And it was like, damn, that really worked. And I'm like, yeah, we can learn really fast if we understand the technique of how to reprogram our reactions based on the here and now. And so I really want to encourage your listeners to really think about what. And I should say the typical reaction that people have to negative triggers is to avoid the stimulus. So the typical survival reaction is never go into a church again, never pick up a bible again, never go to a yoga session again, or smell incense or have vegetarian food, whatever their negative experience was. And I'm like, yeah, but you know, you can control your own mind and experience based on what works for you now. And if you want to be traumatized and avoid things, no, you're making a conscious choice, but you don't need to be that way. And the fastest way to undo a lot of the cult identity is by transferring the knowledge of the you of today back in time and redoing personal history. And my fantasy of that scene where the guy's yelling at you, you is you yell back and tell them all you've done a ton of research on what's wrong with this group. You can let them have it full barrel in your mind. And I believe it will change. You can go back to the first time you got a garment and what they said about it, and you can comment and go, that's a lot of crap. The bite model. Oh, uniform. Oh, no, I don't want to. I don't like that. Right. But if you. You do it a few times, you'll see your people's reactions. They don't need to have the automatic programming coming back anymore. Try it. It works.

John Dehlin [03:00:02] Love it. And our. Our viewers and listeners are commenting that they're loving this. So let's keep it going.

Steven Hassan [03:00:09] Yeah. So. Oh, yeah. Oh, there's four more slides. I forgot. Yeah. Panic and. And anxiety attacks. So panic attacks.

John Dehlin [03:00:17] I mean, I don't know if we have time for you to go into each one. I want to.

Steven Hassan [03:00:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:00:21] Sensitive to your voice.

Steven Hassan [03:00:22] I'd rather not.

John Dehlin [03:00:23] So do you want to just maybe just go through these slides just as at a high level and just describe.

Steven Hassan [03:00:28] I read them off.

John Dehlin [03:00:30] And people. People will be able to at least. If, if. Let me, Let me just frame it this way. If being in a high demand religion or culture qualifies many people for a complex PTSD diagnosis or what's the other diagnosis that you.

Steven Hassan [03:00:48] Dissociative disorder, unspecified. 300.15.

John Dehlin [03:00:52] And then if that leaves people needing to heal, then what people need to do is to be able to identify the symptoms of their disorders or traumas. So reading these slides, first of all, I would love to spend three days going through you talking about, I told

Steven Hassan [03:01:10] you, invite me back to Utah.

John Dehlin [03:01:12] I will.

Steven Hassan [03:01:12] We'll do a longer workshop and we'll videotape it. But what I want to say to everybody listening, if you've been with a therapist or a coach for a while and you're not getting these kinds of instructions or guidance or paradigms, tell them to take the course. If you want to pay them to keep working with you, and if they don't want to spend the money, fire them. Because in the world of. This is one of the first things I learned in 1985. John, I'm sure you did in your training also is if you, if someone comes in with an addiction disorder and you're not trained to work with an addiction disorder, you are ethically bound to recognize, refer, or get supervision and explain to the person. You have no training, but you want to help them. And so it is unethical for a therapist to work with a former cult member and not know what they're working with.

John Dehlin [03:02:09] Thousand percent. The way that, you know, I was trained a little bit more recently, you were too, in some ways. But the way it was framed to me was also cultural competence. There's specialization and cultural competence. Evidence. Yeah, you know what, what business might I have? You know, certainly I'm not going to treat PTSD the way I like to say it is. An eye doctor isn't going to perform heart surgery.

Steven Hassan [03:02:33] Right.

John Dehlin [03:02:33] You want a specialist. But also, if I know nothing about the. Let's just say the African American experience, you know, is it better for me to be being a counselor or therapist to an African American second, or someone who has either lived that experience or has been trained in living that experience and helping people who have lived that experience. Is it better for them? And so what I'm doing right now is I'm sharing your course again in the comments and we also have it attached to the description. But what I would love would be to have you come back, bring all the coaches and therapists that we know of in Utah together and have you do a one or two day training of coaches and therapists where they can pay a couple hundred bucks, but we've got a large enough group to where

Steven Hassan [03:03:22] that's, you know, honestly, I do my best teaching when I have live subjects and people can observe and then we can deconstruct. Why did I do this? You know, strategically then versus something else? Yeah, because so much, to be honest. Honest, I've been doing this for so many decades, I'm on automatic. I rarely think about what is my game plan with a person. I'm with them, I'm listening to them and I'm tracking with them. And I surprise myself sometimes with stories that hadn't thought about in decades, but just turns out to be appropriate to really help that person. And I do want to comment on the psychosomatic symptoms because so many cults, especially religious cults, teach a mind body split and that your body is evil, that Satan is in your body and that you have, you know, things in your body, et cetera. And so there's an extraordinary amount of autoimmune diseases with former members, all kinds of body going, help, there's something wrong here. But there's a disconnection because of the dissociation. And so I'm a big believer in full body massages with a trauma informed massage person, with the instruction for my clients that they should pay attention to what their body is feeling when the therapist is touching a certain area and if things are coming up to be able to talk about it. But the goal, especially for trauma victims is you want to love to be in your body and you want to listen to your body. And so a lot of things that are getting medicalized, take this pill, do this inhale or do this surgery. The underlying etiology, the underlying cause is that they were in a mind control cult and they weren't paying attention. So love it. So, okay.

John Dehlin [03:05:42] And just to give people a sense for other symptoms, they should seek to identify in themselves to help help give them direction for the type of therapy or coaching that they should seek let's go through some of these other slides.

Phobia Indoctrination and Overcoming Panic

Steven Hassan [03:05:57] Yeah. So I want to say the phobia indoctrination is a Keith problem that needs to get addressed because a lot of ex members have panic attacks and panic disorders and they don't understand the root of where they were taught about that specific stuff. I tell my clients, think of your emotions as your friends. You want to listen to them, but you don't want to be controlled by them. But you really want to listen to them. And there are no bad emotions. You may have been in a cult that said, oh, anger is bad, you should always forgive. And I say no. I think anger is a very valuable emotion. If you've been treated unfairly or unjustly, you want to have anger. And with people coming out in an abusive, traumatic cult experience, I see it as a valuable, important roadmap sign that people are progressing when they are able to express anger at how they were treated or how the leader operated for their own better interest and how much abuse they took. So guilt and shame. We talked about the perfectionism earlier and rewiring that to like, we're human, we're not perfect. Let's start with the baseline. We're not intellectual beings, we're emotional beings who rationalize things like that. And a lot of people didn't get education that they could or should have gotten. A lot of people come out feeling like they're stupid when they're not. They're really intelligent, but they haven't had an enriched client centered kind of focus of education. And when I first got out of the Moonies, it took me months to get my psychological power back. And I'll add that despite my fears about doing a doctoral program in my 60s, I overcame my fear because I was that motivated to want to change the law. And I got small, smarter, and my concentration improved, my memory improved, and my sense of self identity was dramatically changed to I'm now a doctor and now I'm a scholar instead of just being an ex Mooney with a master's degree who's written a bunch of books, now I get to be called Dr. Steven. And I earned it, I worked hard. So I want to encourage people. If you think you're 50 years old and you're too old to get an education and you're not too old, trust me. 60, 70 sleep disorders, we need seven to nine hours sleep. If you're not getting seven to nine hours of quality sleep, you are sleep deprived. You are undercutting your immune system's ability to heal itself. You're undercutting your ability to remember and to process and to learn and grow. So I recommend Matthew Walker's book why We Sleep. Sleep Heavily as a podcast too, I believe. Eating disorders, sexual dysfunction. So I in a Mooney's, you know, sex was evil. I didn't masturbate for the entire time, even though I was 19 to 22. And I had a lot of trouble feeling okay about sexuality until like a year later. And then I went crazy. I admit. I went to college and just wanted to go to bed with every woman that wanted to go to bed with me. Have safe sex, people. But this acting out because of deprivation is also a very common feature for former members. Money issues, fear of commitment, intimacy is huge. And it's about building a toolbox for how to reality test. And I encourage people to develop. Harassment and threats. That doesn't always happen with cults where you're excommunicated and then people make up stories and attack you. That's real. In the world of countercult work, all kinds of BS charges are made up to try to. So if you look up Scientology's pages on me, they would tell you I'm a religious bigot who beats and tortures and kidnaps people to deprogram them so that you can see ugly pictures of yours truly. But that's part of being in this space to dare to speak out against authoritarian cults.

John Dehlin [03:10:39] Scientology calls it fair gaming.

Steven Hassan [03:10:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:10:42] More and more Mormonism. I've been smeared mercilessly on the Internet. It's just part of the deal.

Steven Hassan [03:10:47] Yeah. And it shows you're doing something that's effective and they want to try to blur the good work that you're doing that I'm doing. And that's not to say that people don't make mistakes and whatever. So be open to criticism, but ask where's the evidence? And, you know, where's the evidence that Steven's anti religious? Or where's the evidence that he kidnaps or beats and tortures anyone ever? It doesn't exist. They made it up.

John Dehlin [03:11:18] I think one piece of evidence that you're not anti religious is that you attend synagogue weekly.

Steven Hassan [03:11:24] Yeah, for the last 25 years. But even before that, I was not anti religious ever. And I never beaten, tortured. And what family would hire me to help someone get out of Moonies and allow me to beat and torture their child? Like, think about that logically. Like, that doesn't make any sense. But again, they're trying to stir up fears, delusions, paranoia, lots of implanted ideas from the cults and habits can, can be on automatic pilot that need to get identified and neutralized and phobias. You really want to be in control of your mind and body. And if you are phobic of dogs because you were bitten by a dog when you were five years old, you need to learn how to identify and discriminate dangerous dogs that you know, that are salivating, you know, that are predatory dogs and everybody else. Or, or if you see a dog behind a ten foot fence, you shouldn't be afraid the dog's going to attack you. That's an irrational fear or a picture of a dog, much less. But people need to learn how to dephobatize their emotional and psychological reactions. Ptsd. Oh, and that's my slide on an approach I've developed to ethically empower people to reality test. And you know, if I had a fantasy John, it would be to have 10,000 people who are former members who are on the Internet understanding the principles of how to ask questions in a respectful way and engage with cult members for the purposes of helping to empower them to think for themselves. Because I think it would make the world, world a better place.

John Dehlin [03:13:20] I love it. Okay, well, how do you feel, Stephen Hassan? We, we did a little over three hours today.

Steven Hassan [03:13:29] I am tired but I am grateful for your willingness to do this and I hope I made sense to everybody and I thank you Samantha and John and I want to learn more and, but everyone, I want to state, everyone, everybody has to take responsibility for their own healing journey. And I really want you, John, to not feel like I'm pressuring you to do something that isn't your choice of what you want to do for your own growth and healing. Use me as a friend and a colleague who's got some toolboxes that you may not be aware of.

John Dehlin [03:14:11] Yeah, I love it. All right, so just to kind of summarize, the first book you should buy right now on Amazon is Combating Cult Mind Control by Stephen Hasson. This is where he's going to talk about the bite model and the influence continuum.

Steven Hassan [03:14:26] It's on audio too. All my books are. Yep.

John Dehlin [03:14:30] Second book is Freedom of Mind by Stephen Hasson. Helping loved ones leave controlling people, cults and, and beliefs. There's a third book called the Cult of Trump where if you want to learn about how Stephen has applied this model to Donald Trump and the Trump administration, this is something he's very passionately about. We try and stay away from partisan politic discussions on Mormon stories when we can to not get off course. But check out his book, the Cult of Trump, if it's something that might be interesting to you.

Steven Hassan [03:15:03] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:15:04] And. And then of course we've shared many times already in the chats and in the description, a link to the course. Stephen said that if he can just get 20 people a month to buy his course, it's 40, 40amonth. Then you'll be able to what I

Steven Hassan [03:15:22] can afford to pay everybody and keep my work going and then I can develop the next course and the next course and the next course. But I really believe that anyone who is a therapist who cares should educate themselves. And there are a lot of other people in this work, anti cult work. But check out their credentials because if they're mental health professionals who are former members who have decades of experience of field work, learn from them. But there's not a lot of other people who've been doing what I've been doing for the length of time. I do want to do a shout out to Bill and Lorna Goldberg, who I did an interview in my blog with because Lorna's brother was in the Moonies and when I was deprogrammed in 76, they helped me in the beginning of my journey and they're still at it and I love them and they're great people. They're both social workers and they're in New Jersey.

Finding Culturally Competent Therapists and Coaches

John Dehlin [03:16:22] All right, I will also just repeat what we said previously. Insist that your therapist or coach, if you're coming out of a high demand religion or cult, you're seeking support, insist that you choose. It's one of the reasons I like to refer people to Samantha. I think Samantha carries a heavy dose of cultural competence and personal experience and wisdom with what she does.

Samantha Shelley [03:16:46] Does.

John Dehlin [03:16:47] But insist on having a culturally competent coach or therapist. Natasha Helfer at Symmetry Solutions does a good job with this. I would say Tiffany Rowe brings a lot of cultural confidence. Julie. Julie Hanks, my wife Margi. There are a lot of really solid coaches and therapists out there. But insist that your coaches and therapists have cultural competence because coming out of a culture high demand religion is a specialty and it deserves a specialist with expertise and cultural competence. So insist that your coaches and therapists check out Steven's course and they can get CE credits for it, which then helps, you know, because they're gonna have to do that anyway. So please refer your this course to your coaches and therapists also. We've already mentioned this, but for those in the live stream or listening in the next day or two, Stephen will be Speaking at Thrive Thrive Unite Lehigh tomorrow morning and at Thrive Unite Ogden tomorrow afternoon. Find out more about that@thrivebeyondreligion.com you can enroll. There's still seats available for thrive@thrivebeyondreligion.com There you can see Steven speak tomorrow. You can sign books if you want to bring books and, and Steven, Steven will sign them. And then, then finally we have a workshop, live all day 8 hour workshop that Stephen and I are conducting going into much more depth about how to, how to heal and recover and grow after being in Mormonism and or a cult or a high demand religion. You can go to the description right now in on YouTube and get the link to purchase the tickets to attend in Alpine on Sunday. In this workshop that we're going to record hopefully high quality.

Steven Hassan [03:18:39] We just decided this morning we're going to do a video and so we hope you'll come in person but if not we hope to have a good quality recording of it that we can share. Yep.

Closing Reflections and Farewell

John Dehlin [03:18:50] Well, Stephen Hasson, it's been a dream to bring you to Mormon Story Studios. If you didn't watch watched Stephen's three hour story yesterday, please go watch that. We got Stephen to cry at least

Steven Hassan [03:19:03] twice but more importantly got me.

John Dehlin [03:19:05] It was a, it was a powerful and effective and a heart wrenching and truly informative story. So check that out. But Stephen, it's been a dream to have you here. Mormon Story Studios. Thanks for caring about our people. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and truth and knowledge with our people. All we're excited for tomorrow, the next day and not only do we hope to have you back to Salt Lake, I hope that Mormon Stories, me, Samantha, Kara, others and all our providers and you can have an ongoing fruitful partnership and collaboration.

Steven Hassan [03:19:40] Yeah, I'll plug Kara sat down with Kyle when I first arrived and so they, they we did a thing that I think she releasing Monday.

John Dehlin [03:19:49] So Nuance Ho. So subscribe to Nuance ho YouTube and Patreon Zel on the shelf YouTube and Patreon and while you're here please subscribe on YouTube or on Facebook to Mormon Stories Podcast and throw us your support. So throw Steven your support and support anyone out there doing good work.

Steven Hassan [03:20:11] Great.

John Dehlin [03:20:11] All right.

Steven Hassan [03:20:12] So much.

John Dehlin [03:20:13] All right. Thanks Stephen Hassan and the website again

Steven Hassan [03:20:15] is freedomofmind.com and I do a a weekly podcast called the Influence Continuum and then we have a blog and a video version of the interview that's on my website really quickly.

John Dehlin [03:20:30] Huge thanks to Forest Clay for his super chat. Forrest wrote this episode, really helped me Better understand some of the things I struggle with. Thank you, Dr. Hasson. Thank you. Thank you, John. And I'll say, Samantha, for having him on the show. Thank you for Clay, for the super Chat. You guys can always donate through the YouTube Super Chat feature to help finance these episodes. So we're always grateful for those who throw their financial support behind us. Finally, I'm just going to say Samantha's an amazing Coach. Go to SamanthaShellyCoaching.com that's Shelley with an eye. If you want to hire Samantha to be your transitions, faith transition, or just life enlightenment coach. And also check her and Tanner out on Zelp on the shelf. Any final thoughts, Samantha?

Samantha Shelley [03:21:20] No. This has been amazing.

John Dehlin [03:21:21] Yeah.

Samantha Shelley [03:21:22] Steven's been such a big part of the ex Mormon community for so long, even before this. So it's just cool to bring it

John Dehlin [03:21:28] all together, you know, and it's great to have you. Thanks for riding shotgun yesterday.

Samantha Shelley [03:21:32] Yeah, thanks for having me. Having me. It's been an honor.

John Dehlin [03:21:34] Yeah. I really appreciate it. All right, and then just to kind of close, thanks for joining us. And if you want to see Mormon Stories podcast and the Open Stories foundation, continue, please go to MormonStories.org click on the Donate button. Become a monthly donor, and we'll keep providing this content for as long as you want it and need it. All right, everybody. Be kind to each other. Be good to each other. Love each other. Love transcends.

Steven Hassan [03:22:00] Love is stronger than mind control. Is my.

John Dehlin [03:22:03] Love is stronger than mind control. That's our parting thought.

Steven Hassan [03:22:06] And love yourself, and then you have more to love others with.

John Dehlin [03:22:10] Love yourself, and you have more to love others with. We say these things. In the name of Dr. Steven Hasson. Amen.

Samantha Shelley [03:22:16] He loved that.

John Dehlin [03:22:19] No, I blessed it and sanctified it. Take care, everybody, and we'll see you all again soon. On another episode.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.