Unhealthy charismatic authority figures can create a destructive and entrapping social world that is overwhelmingly focused on their own beliefs, desires, and delusions. Though these toxic leaders can essentially imprison people, the stories of our narrators show that people can escape, even if they were born into a cult and raised by the leader personally. If you are now or have ever been involved with a charismatic and narcissistic authority figure, it’s important to know that you can break free, rebuild your life, and heal—though you will likely have to do some rebuilding of your sense of self as you reestablish your own life again. It’s also important to know that healthy charismatic leaders and groups do exist; the checklists below can help you learn how to identify them.
Evaluating Charismatic Authorities in Your Own Life
The following checklists can help you identify whether a charismatic leader or group is healthy and uses its authority appropriately—or if the charisma has decayed into toxic narcissism, self-absorption, and the need to utterly control others. These checklists can also help you identify any toxic or narcissistic people in your everyday life.
Healthy charismatic leadership involves being willing to learn from others, instituting checks and balances, maintaining a sense of humor and a sense of humility, being responsive to complaints and corrections, and treating people well and respectfully. Unhealthy charismatic leadership treats others as means to an end and requires unquestioning devotion to the leader’s (or group’s) beliefs, desires, and demands.
If you’re involved with any charismatic leaders or groups, you can use this checklist to gauge the health of the situation. Place a check mark by any of the following statements that are true.
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The leader or group has an inflated sense of importance and connection to greatness.
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Members must idealize and revere the leader and the ranking leadership.
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The leader claims special powers, knowledge, and lineage—or may claim to be divine.
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Members are often publicly shamed or berated for not living up to the ideals of the leader or group, or for not meeting the needs and/or demands of the leader or group perfectly enough.
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The leader’s needs, ideas, and desires are overriding; they delegitimize and erase the needs, ideas, and desires of group members.
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Some members are granted access to an inner circle with special privileges and special access, and often, these individuals (or, at least, the chosen ones) can break the group’s rules without punishment.
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The leader can do or say almost anything without repercussions; there are no checks or balances on his or her behavior.
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Members are expected to dedicate every part of their lives to the leader or the group, and not doing so has grave consequences.
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The leader has complete control over the group’s belief system, rules, and norms—none of which can be questioned.
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The leader belittles all other belief systems and any other leaders who may be functioning in the leader’s realm (e.g., other New Age leaders if the leader has a New Age philosophy).
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Members must display complete obedience and devotion to the leader or the group.
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The leader takes credit for anything good that happens, and blames members for anything bad that happens.
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The leader treats questions and challenges as threats, and he or she may see enemies everywhere—inside and outside the cult.
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Members who challenge the authority of the leader or leadership group are punished, publicly humiliated, shunned, or kicked out, and may be portrayed as enemy traitors.
If you checked yes to one or more of these statements, you or your group may be under the influence of a toxic charismatic authority figure. However, this doesn’t mean that this person is dangerous, and it doesn’t mean that his or her group is a cult. Your group would need to have all four dimensions of bounded choice active (this includes a transcendent belief system, systems of control, and systems of influence) before it could be considered a cultic group. However, if this person’s behaviors are concerning you (even if the other dimensions of bounded choice aren’t present), you may be able to suggest changes and see if your leader or group can—or is even willing to try to—alter these troubling behaviors.
You can also share the features of healthy charismatic authority below to help the leader or the group understand the specific ways in which they are veering toward trouble. If they can’t or won’t change, you can use these pointers to find a charismatic leader or group that offers hope without idolizing one person (or one idea) at the expense of everyone and everything else.
Signs of a Healthy Charismatic Leader or Group
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The leader or group has behavioral checks and balances in place.
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Members are treated as valuable individuals; they are not disciples, servants, or pawns.
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The leader has a sense of humor and a humane leadership style.
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Members retain their identities, family relationships and responsibilities, and private lives.
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The leader or group values and promotes members’ ideas and beliefs.
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Members have the right to question, doubt, and challenge the charismatic authority.
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The leader or group deals responsibly with conflicts and challenges; there is no belittling, punishing, or shunning.
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Members have the freedom to come and go as they please.
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The leader or group considers and promotes other ideas, other beliefs, and other groups.
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The leader encourages critical thinking and intellectual pursuits.
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The group is open to the outside world and to nonbelievers.
When the charisma of a person or group is healthy, people are drawn to it and invigorated by it. When it’s not, their choices get tangled up with the leader’s need for total devotion and control.
Janja’s bounded choice model helps us see that people who are under the sway of a charismatic authority figure are being manipulated, certainly. But in most cases, they are also finding a sense of purpose, meaning, and pride as they work diligently to demonstrate their perfect devotion. Diligence and devotion are worthy attributes; however, when they are directed at the bottomless pit of an unhealthy person’s needs, both attributes only serve to ensnare followers in the web of a toxic narcissist. Breaking away from toxic charismatic authority is hard work, but it can be done, and people can learn how to identify—and support—healthy authority and healthy groups.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at the ways that a group’s systems of control work to change the everyday behaviors of group members, turn them into perfectly obedient followers, and bind them tightly to the group and the leader.
Notes
1.
Max Weber, “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196–252; The Sociology of Religion, trans. E. Bischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947/1968); “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization,” in Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building, Ed. S.N. Eisenstadt, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48–65.
2.
Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 3.
3.
Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority,” 48–49.
4.
Ibid., 51.
5.
Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 29.
6.
Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority,” 48.
7.
In sociology, we would understand
this as an example of the fundamental attribution error, where individual behavior and personality are treated as more important while the social situation is mistakenly treated as less important. See, for example, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert B. Cialdini, “Illusions of Influence,” in Power and Influence in Organizations, Eds., R. M. Kramer and M. A. Neale, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 1–20.
8.
Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority,” 49.
9.
Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 29.
10.
See also Len Oakes, Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997).
11.
See, for example, Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); and Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven: CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
12.
See, for example, Dennis Tourish, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective (East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 2013).
13.
See Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left (New York: Sharpe, 2000); and Janja Lalich, “The Cadre Ideal: Origins and Development of a Political Cult,” Cultic Studies Journal 9, no. 1 (1992): 1–77. This last entry is a lengthy analysis of the cult that coauthor Janja Lalich was a member of for more than ten years. It is also a focus of her book, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
14.
Lalich, Bounded Choice, 20–21.
15.
Berg communicated with his followers around the world by sending written communications, called “Mo Letters.” See, for example, Miriam Williams, Heaven’s Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (New York: Morrow, 1998).
16.
Alexandra Stein, Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems (East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 2016).
17.
John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. I: Attachment, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1982). The first edition was published in 1969.
18.
A. Stein, personal communication, October 1, 2016. See also, Alexandra Stein and Mary Russell, “Attachment Theory and Post-Cult Recovery,” Therapy Today (September 2016): 18–21.
19.
Alexandra Stein, “Mothers in Cults: The Influence of Cults on the Relationship of Mothers to Their Children,” Cultic Studies Journal 14, no. 1 (1997): 40–57.
20.
Ibid., 47.
21.
Janja’s study revealed that more than one-third of the sixty-five cult survivors she interviewed still harbored anger and resentment toward their parents, especially their mothers: 37 percent said they either had hostile relations with their mother, didn’t want anything to do with her, or she didn’t want anything to do with them; and 34 percent said the same about their fathers. Another 26 percent said their relationship with their mothers was “neutral”; and 28 percent said the same about their fathers.
22.
Gopi is a Sanskrit word for female cowherds, lovers of Krishna with whom he dances at the time of the autumn moon. It is used here as a term for devotees.
23.
See, for example, Marci A. Hamilton, God vs. The Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Janet Heimlich, Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment (New York: Prometheus Books, 2011); Innaiah Narisetti, Forced into Faith: How Religion Abuses Children’s Rights (New York: Prometheus Books, 2009); Kristina, Celeste and Juliana, Not Without My Sister (London: Harper Element, 2007); Ashley Allen, “Impact on Children of Being Born into/Raised in a Cultic Group,” ICSA Today 7, no. 1 (2016): 17–21; Charlene L. Edge, “Why I Had to Escape a Fundamentalist Cult,” ICSA Today 7, no. 2 (2016): 15–17.
24.
For a sociological analysis of Heaven’s Gate, see Lalich, Bounded Choice.
25.
For a sociological analysis, see John R. Hall, Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987). For a personal account, see Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple (New York: Anchor Books, 1998).
26.
For a unique and compassionate approach to the treatment of NPD and other personality disorders, see Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (New York: Guilford, 2011).
27.
Daniel Shaw, “The Insanity of Narcissism,” The Huffington Post (August 15, 2016). Accessed November 12, 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-insanity-of-narcissism_us_57b25a19e4b0567d4f12b90b.
28.
Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a German social psychologist who escaped Nazi Germany and focused his work on political psychology, freedom, human character, and the eight basic needs of human beings. His most notable work is Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1941).
29.
Daniel Shaw, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (New York: Routledge, 2014), 49–50.
30.
In “Cults: A Natural Disaster—Looking at Cult Involvement Through a Trauma Lens,” relational psychotherapist Shelly Rosen wrote: “People who are born and raised in these groups [controlled by narcissistic leaders] are likely also to experience lags in the development of or dissociation from their own agency, identity, and core selfattributes, characteristics of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD),” International Cultic Studies Journal, no. 5 (2014): 12.
4
SYSTEMS OF CONTROL
Official Rules, Formal Structures, and Webs of Authority
Never a public school, absolutely not. We might actually learn something that contradicted the beliefs of The Family, so that was absolutely not allowed. There was absolutely no talking to anyone who was not in the group. There was no reading anything at all that had not come from the group. There was especially never, ever listening to any music or radio or talk shows or watching any television. Utterly forbidden. I mean you could get in so-o-o-o much trouble for doing anything like that.
Jessica
There was a dress code, but it’s not like what you see in the current FLDS. What we’re seeing now is a little bit better. We all had to wear dresses and we could mix up the colors a little bit, but we couldn’t wear anything like bright red or strong colors. It was just lighter colors, but we could wear brown or black. The dresses had to be below the knees—it didn’t have to be ankle length, but it had to be below the knees for the girls and the sleeves were supposed to be down to the wrist, but we inched them up to the elbows. So half-length sleeves were not acceptable, but were tolerated. The neckline had to be up to the collarbone. Nothing too tight. Hair had to be braided. My dad actually threatened to cut my hair off with a pocket knife once because I didn’t have it braided in the early morning.
Samantha
It is worth noting that all Exclusive Brethren children were forbidden to attend certain classes and activities at school—religious education (including comparative religion), sex education and evolution in Biology, and computer studies. Texts in English literature were studied by parents and elders in the Brethren to ensure that the texts contained nothing that the Brethren considered unsuitable. And some subjects were not considered suitable for study beyond a certain age, for example, Dance, Drama, or Art. Reading novels was generally forbidden except where necessary for school. Swim-ming lessons were also forbidden in senior school because of the clothing (or lack of it) that we were expected to wear. So it could be said that the indoctrination program was a negative program, rather than a positive one, in that it was largely a case of ensuring that certain information did not reach us.
Joseph
In Chapters 2 and 3, we described the first two aspects of the bounded choice framework: a charismatic leader who promotes a transcendent belief system with a program of required personal transformation. The remaining two aspects—systems of control and systems of influence—are essential to bringing about that personal transformation in cult members.
What Are Systems of Control?
Successful groups create systems and rules that help them organize themselves, build a sense of group identity, and distinguish themselves from other groups. In healthy groups, these systems of control tend to be flexible, and they often provide a consistent and reliable structure for group members. For instance, a singing group might have specific times to meet, assigned parts for each person, and an expectation that people will learn their parts, warm up their voices, and show up on time. This is a simple example, but without these rules, a singing group would not be able to create music worth listening to. Healthy and successful groups create reasonable rules, attainable expectations, and systems of control that help them function as a team and develop a unified sense of group identity.
High-demand groups and cults, on the other hand, create harsh and unbending systems of control that are carried out by rigid authority figures who enclose members inside a tightly constricted universe. These stern systems consist of the recognizable rules, regulations, and procedures (including discipline and punishment) that guide the smooth functioning of the group and control each member’s behavior and thinking. The desired outcome is compliance and, better yet, total obedience.
In some cultic groups, every aspect of life is controlled, such that communication, education, diet, exercise, dress, personal hygiene, sexual habits, health care, family planning, child-rearing, social life, and interpersonal relationships are intricately managed. As a result, the group becomes completely self-sealed and closed off from any outside influences. In many cultic groups, hierarchical authority, endless rules, and strict discipline and punishments create a sealed and bounded world that is nearly impossible to break away from. Absolutely every area of life—personal, financial, and social—is regulated by or connected to the group’s systems of control. This powerful control system becomes even more effective when it is intertwined with cultic systems of influence, which is the focus of Chapter 5.
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