Autistic Insights Into The World Of Cults
Managing the Mirage
In 1999, five years before I received my autism diagnosis, I taught tennis, as this was my most marketable skill at the time. The amount of masking required of oneself as a tennis teaching professional is nothing less than donning the mask of a born extrovert while being an introverted and socially challenged autistic person.
But that’s not why I wrote this piece.
This is my story.
My Story
One day, my boss approaches me somewhat out of the blue and tells me with a certain amount of audacity that he noticed my lack of confidence.
“I think you should attend this seminar,” he says. (I am going to keep the seminar unnamed. If you’ve taken it, you can quickly determine what it is from my description.)
“I did it, and it helped with my self-confidence,” my boss says.
This comes from a guy who always seems like he’s the beau of the ball. Tall, confident, always giving lessons, and someone with a seemingly endless supply of energy, not the kind of person you would put on your shortlist as needing a seminar to gain self-confidence. This, alone, strikes me as being an oddity.
“Do you think it will help me gain more lessons?” I ask.
“Oh, absolutely. No question about it. You always walk around here like you don’t know what to say. This will transform you into a new person.”
Wow! Sounds kinda neat. What do I have to lose? I’ll attend the introductory meeting and see how I feel.
I walk into a hotel ballroom with no windows. There’s a guy at the podium with six people almost literally unable to control themselves from popping out of their chairs to give testimonials about how taking their seminar totally transformed their lives. After listening to these god-awful, sugary, and contrived testimonials that failed to move me at all, suddenly, I see the boss at my tennis club as if he is waiting for me.
“So, you’re gonna do this, right?” he asks. If someone had designed a seminar to be the worst possible setting for an autistic person imaginable, this was it.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” I say, almost as if on cue and with my self-donned mask, always eager to please. Ugh!
The seminar starts bright and early at 9:00 am at a hotel ballroom with the “leader” looking like he had just been baptized in the Jordan River. All fired up and over-the-top energy, almost as if he is trying to exude charisma. The room is very skeptical; most of us have been dragged here by people we know who recruited us.
“How many of you don’t want to be here right now?” he asks.
About half of the hands in the room go up from people who had paid hundreds of dollars to be here.
“Good! I love challenges; I was born for challenges”, our leader told us.
We are then given a set of rules that no one in the room likes or understands:
- No going to the bathroom. If we do, even once, he tells us, we can’t expect to grasp the meaning of the three-day 8 am to 9 pm seminar. In the back of the room, I notice human “monitors” who try to stop people at the door if they attempt to go.
- No talking without permission.
- No note-taking.
- No eating or drinking without permission.
But in exchange for these seemingly incomprehensible rules, we’re told that this weekend will transform our lives if we stick with it. After this weekend, nothing in our lives will ever be the same. Our relationships with other people will improve tenfold. Our material wealth will improve. Our mental health will be cured. There will be “breakthroughs” galore.
Promises, Promises, as Burt Bacharach would say.
I begin to notice a few things on day one. First, the seminar has its own vocabulary. A “racket” is an unproductive way of being with costs only to ourselves and not others. The phrase “Already Always Listening” means we never filter ideas through fresh eyes or an unfiltered perception. Ok. Makes sense. I’m not sure it’s worth the money I’ve paid to be here, but I’ll bite.
(I wish I remembered more of the terminology, but remember that no one was allowed to take any notes.)
But then, as the afternoon goes on, I notice a new phenomenon. Participants are encouraged to go to a microphone and bleed their souls inside out — this is to say, they are encouraged to tell their most intimate stories to 200 strangers. When they do so, they get a reprimand from the leader.
“No, sorry. That’s a racket. Your boss didn’t act like a jerk. You’re brought it on by your own behavior.”
No matter what this poor woman tells the “leader” of the seminar, he blames the circumstances of what she’s going through on her. And it’s not just her. Anyone who gets up in front of that microphone is humiliated similarly. I look around the room to see if people are leaving; unbelievably, they’re not. The monitors in the back of the room seem like bodyguards.
The day is also loaded with tons of group exercises. Oh great. The perfect thing for an undiagnosed autistic!
Later that day — well actually, into the night by now, the group leader wants to demonstrate the power of the mind. He asks who in the audience has a headache. Many hands shoot up. He picks someone from the audience, and they approach that dreaded old microphone.
“I’m going to cure you of your headache,” he said. “Or rather, you’re going to cure yourself.”
The interchange between the two of them seems to last forever. But since there are no clocks in the room and they don’t allow watches, it’s impossible to know precisely how long. After what feels like an eternity, the person at the microphone is finally cured of their headache using specific visualization techniques. The whole room bursts into applause. What the heck? The day started with a hostile group, but now the “leader” has them, hook, line, and sinker. What is going on here?
He gives us homework that we are to do between 9 pm and 8 am the following day. We are to call all of the people in our lives that we’ve wronged and make a full Mea Cupla. In 11 hours? When will we sleep? How can we make all these phone calls overnight?
Since I live at home (in 1999), I get home and immediately fall into my dad’s arms. “Dad, I’m so sorry I am such a bad son.”
“Nick, what are you talking about?” he asks me.
“You’ve had it rough raising me. I know I’m not the easiest child. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say that”, he says firmly. “That’s bullshit. I love you!”
Days two and three are more blurred, but two things stick out.
The group leader has us partake in the most bizarre exercise I’ve ever seen. We close our eyes and visualize that everyone in the world hates us. Anyone who has ever come into contact with us sees right through us as phonies, no-gooders, worthless people. Many in the room begin to audibly sob loudly. My alexithymia kicks in big time. This is so friggin bizarre, and I don’t know what to feel right now. I go numb.
“Now,” the leader says after minutes and minutes of this sobbing. “Let’s turn it around. Picture in your mind’s eye when you encounter people right now; you are the one who sees through them. Their phoniness, their mendacity, their hypocrisies.”
Suddenly, I hear a couple of people laughing. Then several, and then by God, it suddenly sounds like most of the room is laughing. People are laughing hysterically and without any self-restraint. I am sitting here, totally paralyzed. It feels like I am part of a Salvador Dali painting, surreal beyond description. And this exercise doesn’t seem to be working for me. What’s wrong with me? It’s working for everyone else. I am not laughing. I am uncomfortable. Am I defective?
During days two and three, a significant push starts to recruit others to come to an introductory session to learn about the seminar. There’s intense pressure on everyone to recruit people. If we don’t recruit people, we are told we didn’t understand what we were there to learn in the first place. People faithfully promise to do it.
I bring my dad for the finale on day three, where we introduce new people to the seminar. At this point, I don’t know what to believe. It seems like everyone’s point of view has shifted or “transformed” in only three days, but I feel guilt for being a bad person and bewilderment. But because I am under the leader’s charismatic control, I tell my dad I really want him to do the seminar. That way, we can both talk about it.
He comes on night three. He is whisked off to a room where he is being sold the bullshit with the sugary, unpersuasive testimonials. He comes out. “Let’s not talk about this now. Let’s wait until we get to the car.”
At the car, he says…“Nick, this isn’t for me. It felt strange to me. And I would be careful. I don’t want to tell you what to do in the future with this group because I respect your autonomy, but this didn’t feel right. At least for me.”
Well, that’s that. I trust my dad more than I trust this group.
Autism and Cults
I know I would have gone down a rabbit hole if I continued with this group, and I am forever thankful that my dad was there to be the net that caught me. Not everyone has such a person in their lives. Many people get whisked into cults by people they know, love, and trust.
Everything about this, in hindsight, screams of it being a cult. A charismatic leader who imposed isolation on a group (a ballroom, bright lights, little time to sleep afterward), exclusive beliefs with their own set of terminology, huge promises, exploitation of those vulnerable enough to share their stories, controlling the flow of information (no going to the bathroom or note-taking), a demand for obedience and a high cost of leaving. It was clear afterward that the more one becomes emotionally invested in this organization, the harder it becomes for them to go. Leaving it would have become extraordinarily difficult had I not gotten out at the initial phases of my involvement.
And talk about this being a nightmare for an autistic person: I felt keenly nauseous throughout most of my three days there. The food was horrible; I was forced into discussions with strangers about our personal lives whom I did not want to talk to; the ballroom was brightly lit with no natural light, and the emotional intensity of it was unbearable for someone like myself, who is extremely sensitive. There was too much raw emotion for me to be able to digest, and I felt like I couldn’t leave because of the downright frightening brainwashing skills of this charismatic leader.
If you know anything about autism, it’s not hard to understand why I would have a concern about autistic people joining cults. We are an easy group of people to prey on. We’re marginalized, looking for friends, desperate to find our way in this world, and along comes a group of people who are open, welcoming, accepting, and take you in as one of their own. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter what the cult is all about; only the acceptance that comes with it matters to the person. If the neurotypicals were falling for this, how much more of a risk are these cults to an autistic’s well-being?
Let’s face it; many of us are not the most skilled individuals in reading social cues, taking in novel settings or environments, or pushing back on the cult leader who uses tactics such as isolation, authoritarianism, and instilling a new set of beliefs into a people en masse. Even I was under the leader’s spell because my alexithymia had “frozen me” or locked me into a shutdown spell for the three days I was present. Though I wasn’t experiencing what the other participants were regarding their “transformations,” I believed everything the leader said at the time as if it were gospel. It was me who had the problem, not the leader!
Summārium
Understanding the risks and dynamics of cults is crucial in today’s world, where the sophistication of scammers and manipulative groups has significantly evolved. Our unique traits, which include a deep sense of justice, a longing for belonging, and often a straightforward way of seeing the world, can unfortunately make us more vulnerable in certain situations.
Hold on to your authenticity and cherish your unique perspective. This authenticity lights up your path and guides you through the social labyrinth of the modern world. When faced with promises of transformation or an all-encompassing ideology, as I was faced with, remember that your individuality is not a shortfall but a tapestry of who you are that cannot be changed in three days or thirty days or even forty days in the wilderness.
Embrace your curiosity and continue to seek knowledge, but let this quest be tempered with a discerning eye. Remember, not all that glitters is gold, and true transformation comes from within, not from the echoing halls of a seminar room or a hustling politician.
And most importantly, never underestimate the strength that lies in reaching out. In moments of doubt or confusion, turn to those you trust — family, friends, and anyone else in your circle. Their perspectives can be the grounding force, a reminder that you are not alone.
