Signs of Undue Influence

Techniques of Undue Influence

The following points outline some of the techniques that are used by those who seek to control or exploit individuals through methods of undue influence and, in the process, spiritually abuse those who may be vulnerable to such methods.

(1) Isolate a person from family, friends and familiar surroundings. People who have been removed from usual reference points for engaging and judging experience are, quite frequently, more inclined to accept new frameworks for engaging and interpreting reality.

(2) Involve an individual in extensive amounts of vigorous physical activity. Tired people tend to be less critically engaged in what is going on with them and around them. Moreover, people who are constantly on the move are also under a fair amount of stress, and this helps enhance a person’s vulnerability to suggestion.

(3) Feed a person a low-protein, high-carbohydrate diet … tends to affect a person’s stamina and, thereby, helps in the over-all process of rendering a person less able to resist psychological and social assaults on personality and consciousness.

(4) Invade a person’s sense of personal space by never letting the person be alone. When our sense of personal space is violated we tend to experience stress, and this helps to wear a person down … especially if the invasions are persistent.

(5) Deprive an individual of sleep. A sleep-deprived individual is less able to critically interact with the environment. In addition, a sleep-deprived individual experiences more stress and, as a result, becomes less able to cope with what is going on both within and around the individual.

(6) Expose the individual to ‘love-bombing’ in which the individual is singled out for focused attention by a small group of people and made to feel special, accepted, loved, liked, and among friends.

(7) Involve a person in small group dynamics in which the person is encouraged to speak about herself or himself in personal, revealing ways within an intimate setting. Such personal history information can be used to help abusive individuals manipulate and play upon a person’s weaknesses, fears, anxieties, desires, and hopes, Furthermore, such small group dynamics can be used to lower a person’s defenses against becoming part of something as the individual’s desire to be liked and accepted by others are exploited.

(8) Do not permit the person any down-time to process things. By constantly engaging the person in activities (e.g., lectures, dancing, sports, group discussions), the person doesn’t have the time needed to critically reflect on what is going on but, instead, the person’s attention is being constantly directed elsewhere.

(9) Create an environment in which the person’s senses are constantly engaged through the use of music, incense, lighting, and mood-altering activities. A person whose senses are constantly being engaged is an individual who is less likely to critically reflect on what is transpiring. Furthermore, the constant assault on a person’s senses also is quite stressful and, once again, accumulated stress can wear a person down and interfere with her or his ability to cope with the situation in an effective way.

(10) Use group pressure to both: (a) belittle, ridicule, marginalize, reject, discourage, or punish undesirable values, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors, while (b) praising, reinforcing, approving, and encouraging those behaviors, values, attitudes and ideas which the group, movement, or organization finds attractive.

(11) Through lectures, talks, and discussion, encourage the person to think in terms of ‘either-or’, ‘black-white’, ‘yes-no’, ‘us-them’ kinds of distinction. This undermines critical thought and induces a person to think simplistically rather than to consider the full complexities of any given situation.

(12) Do not provide an individual with many opportunities to ask questions, and if questions are asked answer the question in a manner which modifies a person’s behavior so that the person who is asking something will learn not to ask questions or they will learn to ask only those sorts of questions which give leaders the opportunity to push their own agenda.

(13) Focus on people who are in transition – leaving an old job, starting a new job, leaving home for the first time, beginning or ending a relationship, starting college, and so on. People who are transition are often more vulnerable to suggestion because of the stress, uncertainty, anxieties, fears, and ambiguities which surround such transitions in life, and, as a result, are more open to anything which appears to offer solutions which resolve such stress, uncertainty, anxieties and so on.

(14) People who already are within the group/organization may be used to induce friends and family to join or participate. Such members are used for the relationship of trust which they have with family and friends and, thereby, help to lower the natural tendency of most people to be skeptical, cautious, and resistant to something new. (if someone I trust is doing this, then, it must be okay).

(15) The process of triangulation is often implemented in which all information is channeled to the leader(s) of a group or organization, and the leader(s), then, use that information to get third parties within the group to communicate information to newcomers so that the behavior and/or beliefs of the latter individuals can be manipulated while, simultaneously, providing the leaders with plausible deniability concerning the message if problems arise as a result of that communication.

(16) Staged ‘mysterious’ events (e.g., the apparent ability to read minds through the use of trickery and misdirection) are employed to induce people to believe that they are in the presence of exceptional individuals who have extraordinary knowledge and capabilities.

(17) Charismatic techniques (e.g., fame, power, wealth, authority, talent, attractiveness, charm, rhetorical skill) are used to mesmerize people quite independently of the truth or validity of what is being said.

(18) Various methods (e.g., music, hypnosis, speech patterns) may be used to induce mind-altering trances that render a person very susceptible to propaganda, dogma, indoctrination and being manipulated by group dynamics.

(19) Fill talk with ambiguous, paradoxical, and amorphous ideas, stories, or puzzles. Not only does this tend to create stress in the individual who is trying to figure out what is actually being said, but it tends to tie up a person’s critical faculties and, therefore, often leaves such an individual unable to reflect on, or think about, other things which are going on within the group. Moreover, the use of ambiguity tends to force an individual to seek consensual validation concerning the meaning of what is going on, and this need for consensual validation can be manipulated when the people from whom consensual validation is sought are group members who will lead the new comer down certain paths of belief, behavior, and values.

(20) Sometimes a group or organization will plant moles within an audience to fake dramatic conversions, healings, and/or testimonials. Such events help prime the pump for newcomers to get emotionally and psychologically caught up in the process and join the group/organization.

(21) If newcomers have doubts about something that is going on, whatever is going on is ‘re-framed’ by the leaders and members of the group to make it seem to be something other than it is. For example, if someone is caught in a lie, the lie will be re-reframed as, say, a moral act because – or so the explanation goes -- it is done to help people and, as such, serves the greater good.

(22) Employ various kinds of meditation techniques to induce people to stop using their capacity for logic, critical thinking, asking questions, and the like. Meditation is not necessarily a bad thing, but abusive people will use it to dumb people down and make them suggestible rather than as a possible means to liberation and understanding.

(23) Seek to induce a sense of guilt and/or shame within an individual. People who feel guilty or ashamed about something are often more compliant and susceptible to suggestions about how to resolve such guilt and/or shame.

(24) Generate a certain amount of paranoia in newcomers with respect to the idea that only certain individuals can be trusted and, then, seek to make the newcomers dependent on those people for information about life, purpose, meaning, identity, behavior, and so on.

(25) Attack a person’s sense of identity or self-esteem. A person with a negative self-image is often an easier person to manipulate and is often more willing to be compliant than is a person with a strong sense of identity.

(26) Take away a person’s independence by getting them to become dependent on the group or organization for food, a place to live, friendship, and information (for example, get people to quit their jobs and work for the group, or induce people to turn over their financial resources to the group, or encourage people to move into the group’s living quarters by making such commitment a sign of sincere faith). People who are dependent on others are much more malleable and compliant than are independent individuals.

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When a combination of the foregoing techniques are brought to bear on an individual, many people enter a psychological/emotional condition known as ‘snapping’ in which they undergo a sudden transformation in personality, attitudes, commitments, ideas, and understandings relative to the way they were prior to the point of snapping. Depending on the skill of the individuals who are manipulating an individual, and depending on a number of other situational and personal variables, this snapping process can take place in as little as a few hours, days or weeks.

Even when some degree of success is achieved in assisting a person to break free of an abusive individual and/or group, the abused person tends to stay in a condition of floating (a state in which a person lingers between, on the one hand, a desire to return to the abusive individual and/or group, and, on the other hand, a desire to free oneself from such abuse). This process of floating may last from a few days, to weeks and months, and during this period of floating, such an individual is at great risk of being induced to return to an abusive individual and/or group.

The prognosis for full, healthy recovery by individuals who are extricated from a cult-like group is much worse for those who do not seek assistance than for those who are able to receive the assistance of a compassionate witness (someone who will help one re-construct events in a non-judgmental, supportive, warm environment) to help debrief the freed individual, as well as to help the latter individual to properly process the many emotional, social, spiritual and psychological problems which are left in the wake of this sort of experience – and one of the biggest issues with which such a person will have to grapple is the way in which trust in oneself, others, God, and life has been severely (and in some cases irreparably) damaged.