How Cults and "Life Coaching" Rewire the Mind

1. Cut off the outside world, build an isolated society

Brainwashing courses and cults usually share one thing in common: they work hard to sever your ties with the outside world, immersing you entirely in the circle of the course. Sessions routinely run into the small hours, sometimes for more than 12 hours at a stretch, and these long bouts of "class" not only leave people mentally exhausted — the instructor will also have students switch off their phones. The aim of both measures is to engineer an Enmeshed Society: a tightly connected yet sealed-off community among the members. Those running it can't physically lock students inside, of course, but they can at least drag the sessions out for as long as possible, so that within just a dozen or so hours, students are left feeling there is no escape. While the course is in session, the instructor and the other students are the only people they can interact with.

Many people assume they aren't easily swayed by others. In reality, though, humans are social animals, and everyone carries a psychological need to be recognised and approved of by the group they belong to. Research has even found that the brain's response to social rejection rivals physical pain. Within this isolated society led by the instructor, the only way students can be accepted is to bend to the instructor's will, and the instructor will further enlist the other students to ostracise anyone who refuses to follow instructions. All of this serves to stoke the human craving for social approval. When the only society in front of you is the society of the brainwashing course, a person's ordinary character and social common sense get clouded over — and that, ultimately, is simply human nature.

Students who have been brainwashed tend to share one trait: they do things that look very strange to society at large yet are praised within their small circle — for instance, parading through MTR carriages dressed in a Playboy bunny outfit. Recruiting more students from among those around you after you "graduate" may be thoroughly off-putting, but inside the circle it is the very benchmark of success. These phenomena show that, under the force of the enmeshed society, their personal self-esteem and their standards of social behaviour have gradually been supplanted by the values of the small circle. When they do strange things, there is often a kind of defiance — "Others laugh at me for being mad; I laugh at them for not seeing clearly" — which only deepens the vicious cycle of immersing themselves further in the circle while cutting off ties with the outside: because when they do things society won't sanction, they are ostracised by society, and so they have no choice but to return to the circle for comfort and refuge, while the way to win the circle's approval is simply to do yet more absurd things. If you have a friend you care about caught in this trap, showing them Unconditional Love may be a better course than criticising their behaviour: that is, not passing judgement on what they do, but letting them know that no matter what, you will always be there to support them. Your support may be their only anchor outside the circle, the thing that reminds them there is still a whole wide world beyond it.

2. Tear down personal self-worth, replace it with group pride

Some people have told me that brainwashing courses do have their redeeming points and their logic. Indeed they do! No one pays money hoping to be brainwashed, so if you don't give them something useful, how would you ever lure them in? When you go fishing, the bait you use is real, genuine food too, isn't it? One technique brainwashing courses commonly use is to have you imagine another student is your parent or someone important to you, and pour out the unspoken words in your heart. I have found this strikingly similar to the Empty Chair Technique used in Emotional-Focused Therapy.

The Empty Chair Technique has the client face an empty chair and imagine an important person there, voicing the feelings they never dared to say. Applied appropriately, this technique can draw out suppressed emotions and help re-process a relationship. Of course, a brainwashing course isn't trying to help you work through your emotions; it merely triggers the fears or knots buried inside you, and then exploits them to attack you without restraint. Once you begin to doubt yourself, your psychological need to be accepted by others climbs higher and higher. If this manoeuvre fails to stir up your emotions, they will accuse you of not committing enough, because if you don't lower your defences they can hardly implant their values in you. So the enmeshed society described in the first point is built not only through confiscated phones and marathon sessions, but also with the help of psychological therapy techniques. In short, a brainwashing course sets out to dismantle your worldview, then reappears in the guise of a saviour. At that point you no longer question whether there's anything wrong with the course's worth, and the group's fervent emotions become a lifebuoy, leaving you to believe that all the regrets of the past can be washed away the moment you join them.

If you ever run into a similar situation, trusting your own willpower to lay your heart bare is not a wise move, because recounting one's own experiences inevitably stirs up emotions. So what should you do if you don't want to be brainwashed? Imagine you're a master dramatist! Put on a performance of the saddest story you've ever heard — though pulling this off while holding back your laughter does take a certain skill.

3. Make wilful, unreasonable demands to trigger cognitive dissonance

Forcing students to do absurd things or hand over large tuition fees has yet another use: it activates the psychological mechanism of Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive dissonance refers to how, when a person's behaviour is at odds with their thinking, they tend to adjust their thinking to match their behaviour. Take an example: a "bunny girl" might at first think nothing of the brainwashing group, but for all the reasons above, swept along by the social atmosphere, she half reluctantly, half willingly ends up putting on a farce in the MTR. Once the farce is over, the problem arrives — surely most people with normal social common sense would consider this an absurd thing to do, so how does one explain having behaved so absurdly? No one wants to admit that they are absurd, that they desperately crave social approval, that they cannot resist peer pressure, and so another explanation is needed. One alternative explanation is to genuinely believe that this behaviour helps one grow, and that the group one is going along with isn't a sketchy group after all. That way, the inconsistency between behaviour and thinking can be resolved.

The same phenomenon can also explain Stockholm Syndrome: certain people who have been coerced end up, astonishingly, falling in love with their captor. Interpreted through cognitive dissonance, it is excruciatingly painful to believe you are being coerced for no reason; but if you adjust your thinking a little and decide you have truly fallen in love with your captor, the whole interpretation becomes far less unbearable.

Members of brainwashing groups will use the Foot in the Door Technique to get people to comply with unreasonable demands: first a small, absurd request, and once you go along with it, a bigger one follows. This lets cognitive dissonance operate in a gradual, step-by-step fashion, so that before you know it you've come to endorse their values. If you find yourself in a similar situation, you must decisively refuse any unreasonable demand, whether the demand is large or small, because the small request is the stepping stone to an even greater absurdity.