Have you ever tried a new yoga class, checked out a new-to-you church, or signed up for a retreat — after someone you already know and trust encouraged you to do so?

That’s leveraged trust in action. I was intrigued by this term, which I don’t remember coming across before in my readings on coercive persuasion. It popped up in the just-out book A Little Bit Culty: Navigating Cults, Control and Coercion by Sarah Edmondson and Nippy Ames. Edmondson & Ames host the A Little Bit Culty podcast and are themselves survivors — and whistleblowers — of the NXIVM self-help group.

As they explain, “leveraged trust itself isn’t inherently bad — it simply means using existing trust, credibility, or authority to influence others.” I’ve been influenced positively through leveraged trust many times, including by the friend who introduced me to the tradition that has been my spiritual home for three decades.

But when such credibility is borrowed and exploited deceptively for control or profit, that’s when leveraged trust morphs into a means of manipulation. 

Indeed, people who stay on the outer perimeter of a high control group may get nothing but genuine benefits.

Though I had just met Linda, as I got to know her, she lent credibility to this meditation teacher. She was (is) an accomplished person who came across as grounded, generous, and caring. She espoused progressive social ideals, like me. A generation older than me, she was from cosmopolitan San Francisco and made a career in Silicon Valley. She volunteered with the SF-based non-profit that put together our program in Kerala, serving as their representative on the trip.

While my acquaintance with Linda never got that deep, the connection between her meditation teacher and Gandhi continued to be prominent in the story of his work — and it continued to be a hook for idealistic young me. A few years later I would lead a book study group in my church using the biography on Gandhi put out by the meditation group’s press.

And my first close connection with the meditation center was a scholar of Gandhi who was one of the teacher’s students going back to the 60s. He led the regional meditation retreats in Chicago — the first retreats I went to — and had written on Gandhian nonviolence and its relevance to solving contemporary social problems. I brought the study of that book to my local community, too.

​Linda and Gandhi were just the beginning. There was a whole sea of legitimization for the meditation teacher, supplied by people and traditions that engendered trust.

The teacher’s books had blurbs on the back from the likes of Huston Smith, renowned scholar and premier teacher of world religions, and Henri Nouwen, mainstream religious leader and prolific spiritual writer. I admired Smith’s work, which I had read during college; his support encouraged me to regard this meditation teacher as an authentic one.

NXIVM’s Keith Raniere didn’t publish books, that I know of, but he managed a similar feat. Raniere and his worker bees engineered a visit to their headquarters in Albany, NY, by the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Raniere elicited a positive exchange with His Holiness, burnishing his own image as trustworthy by association.

In my old group, the teacher’s books, articles and talks (which in time I saw via DVDs) draw from scriptures of all the world’s religions, and from mystics and interpreters of every major tradition too. The mantrams he promoted draw from hallowed traditions East and West. As do the passages suggested for use in his method of meditation. Implicitly that meditation center builds on the legitimacy of all those established traditions and voices.

As I got onto the meditation center’s mailing list, I received periodic journals and newsletters that featured not only words of the meditation teacher, but stories of everyday people following the program of spiritual practices his center promoted. They always testified to meaningful benefits resulting from those efforts.

Later I started going to retreats at the center, in the Bay Area. Then I met more of the teacher’s long-time students. The teacher died in 1999, the year before I encountered his work. So I knew him only through these other people, and what they and their press shared of him.

I worked my way through the many, many books that press had put out over the decades, while establishing a regular meditation practice, and in time, trying meditation retreats. The Gandhi scholar was not the only student of the teacher to write on adjacent topics. Several ashram dwellers had written a bestselling vegetarian cookbook, which I happily added to my kitchen shelf.

Another of the long-timers took a particular interest in women mystics; her books piqued my curiosity too. She tussled with questions around women in religion, with the sensibilities of a hippie-era S.F.-area woman. Many of the other women who lived at the ashram worked there too, and played more traditional female roles, providing administrative support for the center, and preparing food for the residents. Among the women of the group, it was the writer’s support of the teacher that lent a veneer of feminist credibility.

​Meeting long-time students of the teacher in person, at their retreat center in Marin County, provided a more human, firsthand impression than one can get from books. At the time of my involvement in the early 2000s, the retreat presenters were all long-time students who lived at the ashram. Other residents would sometimes join us at mealtime, when more informal stories might be shared of life with the teacher.

The warm fellowship of mealtimes at retreats was conducive to trust-building. The long-time students functioned as character witnesses. They testified to not only the promise of the spiritual practices they taught, but the authenticity of the teacher.

Edmondson & Ames describe the function of the inner circle of devotees in several ways. They “amplify and reinforce the leader’s authority and agenda.” They are “trained to sing the leader’s praises and affirm the leader’s words and actions, creating an echo chamber that amplifies the leader’s authority.” Additionally, they act “as intermediaries between the leader and regular members, controlling access and information flow; this enhances the leader’s mystique.”

By the time I turned up at the retreat house and ashram, the mystique was being transferred to the teacher’s wife, who was his named successor in leadership. Access to her was controlled, bestowed as an honor on retreat-goers — though nothing seemed particularly special about her, on the face of it. I think group photos may have been a longstanding practice; those became in no small part about getting a photo of the group with the cherished mother-figure.

And let’s not forget the most mythical mother-figure of this group, the teacher’s grandmother. Said to be a spontaneously illumined figure in their village, she is quoted as beseeching her grandson to become like a character from Indian scripture — to become enlightened and inspire others. I don’t doubt there was a Granny, and some of the stories about her are probably true. Whether she purposely planted the seeds for her grandson to become a guru is (conveniently) unverifiable.

Granny also fits into the story-line that the group’s teacher not only grew up in “Gandhi’s India” (c’mon, he only met Gandhi like once?, probably among a huge throng) — but that his society was a matriarchal one. The teacher’s students use that language, matriarchal. But as a trained social scientist and one who learned specifically about Kerala, it’s actually matrilineal — tracing ancestry through the mother-line — which is not precisely the same thing. (People hear matriarchy and think it’s the opposite of patriarchy, with women in a superior position and men in an inferior position, power-wise; but that’s incorrect.)

In Kerala, matrilineal practices were ended by the British starting in 1925, and likely began eroding culturally far earlier than that, with the arrival of Christian missionaries (who came quite early to Kerala… the tour Linda and I went on included time in Cochin, which St. Thomas is said to have visited). Increased contact with other, patriarchal parts of India would also have diluted the egalitarian aspects of Kerala culture prior to colonization.

​Stories I heard about Granny, the head of the guru’s elite family, have her spending her time sweeping the veranda, cooking, and caring for the family; she comes off as content to toil in relative obscurity, despite being a supposedly illumined person, while her grandson’s destiny was to become a spiritual teacher touching untold lives. To me the way the teacher was pitched as coming from a matriarchal society — and implicitly, above the sexism and objectification of women present in our own, Western culture — was never terribly convincing.

There was a special subset of books put out by the group’s press that were about the teacher, rather than the teachings. I don’t think I acquired any of them until I had worked my way through most of the dozens of spiritual books ostensibly by the meditation teacher.

Through this hagiography, the meditation center could tell the story of the teacher and group in the best possible light, controlling the narrative: including what they wanted to include, omitting what they preferred to omit, and crafting it to serve their goals. These were the books I came to last.
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Close associates of a teacher of this sort typically play not only a proactive role, but a defensive one. As Edmondson & Ames put it,

I look back in hindsight, and see how they got ahead of information that might have led newer meditators to question the teacher’s legitimacy. This may account in part for the emphasis on the “matriarchal” society, explaining away the wife and child(ren?) abandoned in India. (I believe it’s true that in Kerala of old, the role of uncle, not husband, would be the more important one. But not the Kerala of the mid- to late 1900s… and almost certainly not the parts of India the teacher went to after he finished his education and became a university professor in a different region of India. The University of Nagpur, for example, is in an area that was long patrilineal.)

The inner circle folks in my group were also ready for questions about the long-time student whose criminal behavior could undermine the credibility of the group or its teacher. He did not follow the teacher’s example or teachings, they assured us. He was a bad apple. Naturally, he was ejected from the ashram, never to return — distancing the community and teacher from his tainted reputation, and the damage he might do by association.

In recent years, multiple allegations have resurfaced of sexual abuse of females, both adults and minors, at the ashram, by the teacher himself. (The allegations are not new, though I didn’t know about them previously — as by design few later meditators did.) Blanket denial and spiritual bypassing have loomed large in the official response.

​For me, this broken trust can never be repaired. For the teacher is not who he said he was. And the group is not the safe haven it presents itself to be. Which explains why they need a sea of legitimization to buoy them up.

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Here I explore the first two of five reasons a person involved in a high control group (aka cult) does not comprehend who the leader/group really is — and what is happening to them — as they are pulled in.
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But first, let’s set the scene.

A Conflicted Experience

“A cultic experience is almost always a conflicted experience.” So says Janja Lalich, sociologist, cult survivor, and my favorite general writer on high control groups (in Take Back Your Life). She writes this in reference to all the reasons it is hard for someone to leave a group in which they have become deeply involved — even when they have negative experiences.
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The benefits of involvement with one’s group are crystal clear. One is constantly sold on those benefits, and experiences them (the real ones, anyway) directly.
The difficulties encountered with a high control group, at least in my experience, emerge more slowly — and are much more slippery.

It is tough to recognize and name what is happening, while in the midst of a subtly coercive group. Most people leave controlling groups on their own. They often find it hard to put their finger on what they were involved in and why they needed to leave. (TBYL)

It is only now, nearly twenty years after I left a high control group — prompted by new (to me) and shattering stories emerging about the founder — that I have pieced together a clearer picture.

A keen intellect does not protect one. On the contrary, intelligent, educated people are more likely to be drawn into high control groups. I have two graduate degrees. I once learned that based on test scores, I qualify for Mensa membership. I have the cognitive functions (INFJ) that give me all the advantages a person can have in understanding people in all their complexity (and am a 5w4 to boot). Yet, after four years of increasing involvement, when I decided to move cross-country to work for my group, I had little understanding of what I had gotten myself into.
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Perhaps the above helped me, eventually, to pull on the thread and find my way to the truth, more easily than I otherwise would have. But it didn’t keep me from being taken in in the first place. And the same goes for so many bright, caring, idealistic people who were drawn to the same community as I was, and to other groups with soaring ideals and a glow of deep meaning.

​Why is it so hard to see what’s really going on? Why is the most important information the last to be discovered? Why does the gestalt reality of the group not “pop” early on — if it ever does? Let’s get into those dynamics.

Unseen Levers of Influence

The process of recruitment and indoctrination into a high control group typically draws upon some or all of the techniques of persuasion to which humans are almost inevitably vulnerable. I draw here from Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (new and expanded, 2021).

Consider the fixed-action patterns used by animals. A mother turkey will nurture and protect an animal that goes “cheep cheep” just like a turkey chick, for example — even if it’s not a turkey chick. Like when a researcher substitutes, for an actual chick, a stuffed polecat emitting a turkey-like cheep cheep noise. The turkey’s mothering program, and similar automatic behaviors exhibited by a variety of animals, serve their survival most of the time.
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People display such shortcut behaviors too. In the hundreds of judgments and decisions we make each day, we can often save time and energy by following unconscious rules of thumb. If certain “trigger features” are present, we move into automatic mode.

​Humans can acquire fixed action patterns through social learning, as well as instinct. In fact, life today makes it likely we will use these shortcuts more often. There is so much stimulation, so many decisions, so much information overload, that we would suffer analysis paralysis otherwise.

“The form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics,” writes Cialdini. Thus “we depend increasingly on our shortcuts to handle them all.”

Cialdini drew from experimental research, and supplemented that with his own direct experience as a participant observer among what he calls “compliance professionals”: people who sell things, raise money, market products or services, recruit people, or otherwise influence people’s behavior in a particular direction.
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Cialdini describes seven of the shortcuts that are common in human social life. When a persuader is in relationship-building mode, the favored strategies include reciprocation, liking, and unity. When the persuader needs to reduce uncertainty in a prospect, social proof and authority are highly effective. And when it comes to motivating their prospect to action, a compliance professional most often leans on the principles of consistency and scarcity.

​Hayley Lewis’ sketchnote, above, nicely summarizes Cialdini’s original six levers of influence. The more recently added one is unity. It refers to the experience of shared identity with others, which ties in with feelings of mutual belonging, regard for one another’s welfare, and increased likelihood of shared endeavors.

If we do not understand how such automatic behavior patterns work, we will be more vulnerable to those who do.

Cialdini draws upon the martial art of jujitsu to illustrate how this works. A practitioner of jujitsu can make the most of gravity, inertia, leverage and momentum to conserve her own energy. These invisible forces can enable the martial artist to defeat even a physically stronger rival. Likewise, a compliance professional — or a savvy con artist — can quietly, systematically use the ordinary levers of influence that people usually respond to unthinkingly.

As Cialdini observes, this gives the persuader “the ability to manipulate without the appearance of manipulation. Even the victims themselves tend to see their compliance as a result of the action of natural forces” — and their own free choice — “rather than the designs of the person who profits from the compliance.”

These principles help me understand why my experience in a high control group felt similar to other experiences with groups of people — largely positive experiences — and why I did not recognize that such social principles were being used in cumulatively coercive ways.

Cialdini regards high control groups as a long-term influence situation. When the levers of influence are used over time in a cultic setting, the social pressures exerted are extreme.

It helps me to be reminded that it is human nature to be vulnerable to such pressures. Cialdini told cult survivors and experts (as quoted in Lalich, Take Back Your Life): “We can be fooled, but we are not fools. We can be duped, but we are not dupes.”

Dissonance Dissolved

Another category of proscribed awareness relates to what we may initially see, but sooner or later suppress or settle.

Lalich observes that a “high level of cognitive dissonance … may be present in a cult.” For someone who sticks around long-term, this is most often resolved through “a dramatic change of identity.” (Take Back Your Time)

Like the dissonance in music — where two or more adjacent notes rub against each other — dissonance within a person occurs when the ideas they hold in their mind do not hang together harmoniously. Or, the ideas may be at odds with the person’s emotions or actions.
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It is natural to want to fix that discord. Consider how satisfying it is to the ear and emotions when a musical suspension or dissonant chord resolves into major harmony. Ah, that’s better. Cognitive dissonance similarly nags at a person until it ceases.
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​I remember that nagging experience, viscerally. When I wrote about my journey seven years after I left the ashram vicinity, I put it this way:

“All along with [the spiritual disciplines], with retreats, I found I had an inner tussle between what ‘they’ taught and hearing my own inner voice. I felt a reaction to certain teachings and authority role and always had to go back home and let things settle out to feel what was right for me and trust that.”

I can recall some of the things that bothered me in my early years of affiliation, when I was just a retreat-goer. Some examples follow.

One concern was about the teaching that all people need to reduce their own egos and focus on meeting others’ needs; this seemed like a problematic over-generalization to me, especially given my past training and work at a domestic violence shelter and rape crisis center. Doesn’t this vary from person to person, I asked? Women, for example, are socialized to accommodate others and often need to learn to value their own needs and to set healthy boundaries.

I was told this teaching did not mean we should all be doormats. Stories of tender firmness, when called for, were shared to underscore the point. In time I stopped pressing on this, accepting that the group’s message was a corrective for the average me-centered American; I could interpret it appropriately for myself, or so I supposed.

I was intrigued by many Hindu concepts, and found value in some. But I felt I had been misled as, over time, it became clear that the teacher and his program were not just inter-spiritual or syncretic, honoring wisdom from many sources. Rather, at root, the teachings remained firmly grounded in the founder’s native Hindu perspective.
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While saints and scriptures from the West were liberally quoted too, the underlying worldview was Eastern. Reincarnation was assumed in the teacher’s talks and writings, for example. The issue came up only occasionally, abstractly. So I decided I could just remain agnostic about that question, and set it aside. In other words, this dissonance felt modest enough to tolerate.

​What was more emphasized in the teachings was the idea that the goal of life is Self-Realization or Illumination. Which means, dissolving the small-s self to merge with the large-S Self. I never bought into full-blown God-Realization as MY goal. It wasn’t what motivated me to start meditating, nor did I see it as my personal purpose in life, which was more about making a difference. (And anyway, wouldn’t focusing on MY illumination be self-focused? Which we weren’t supposed to be?)

But I did come to absorb, to some extent, the group’s beliefs about what illumination means — that this is an attainable state for any human determined enough to pursue it wholeheartedly (likely with some grace); that an illumined person has overcome the foibles and temptations that snag most of us mere mortals, and so is a model for others; that an illumined person will be a gift to the world, benefiting those around them and perhaps our human collective in some way. If other people felt drawn to that goal, I felt, fine for them. Different strokes and all that.

I also struggled intermittently with how the inner circle of the community related to the teacher. As my relationship with the group grew, the supposed benefits of us newbies doing likewise were subtly communicated. Experimentation was encouraged so that one might “discover for oneself” if those benefits accrued.

Whether or not one consciously adopted the founder as teacher in a personal way, like a traditional sadhak, the desired behaviors and attitudes were built into regular practices: reading the teacher’s writings before bed, watching his video talks in our local meditation group weekly, getting plenty of video darshan at retreats, and so on. If you continued to participate, you would do those things.

A few years after I came and went from working at the ashram, I tried to explain how continuous immersion in the group milieu shifted things for me. I wrote:

“[I] had experienced an inner dynamic of testing the boundary between others’ teaching and what I take as true for myself. Before I got close, this was fine; I could have my inner rebellions during a retreat, and scribble in my journal, challenge a point or raise a question and hear the facilitators’ response; and then go home to my safe space and listen for what my heart, mind and experience told me about whatever. The lessons were more explicit then — they were verbalized and discussed, were designed as curricula.

But when I was chronically close, the struggle was more ongoing, and confusing. Much teaching was then not so much consciously spoken and heard through the ear, as transmitted through ways of being and absorbed through culture. Not quite visible, but powerfully felt.”

​Either consciously or quietly, cognitive dissonance has a way of resolving. People “tend to reduce the uncomfortable feeling caused by the dissonance by bringing their attitude in line with their behavior rather than changing the behavior” (Bounded Choice by Janja Lalich).

And so, though I don’t remember choosing the teacher as My Guru, whom I trusted as a personal guide, as I continued the disciplines taught by the group — and absorbed their attitudes — gradually I did come to feel more grateful and reverential toward him. (There were artful ways of slipping that in, too. Including the surprise ritual I described here.)

By adopting the group’s program — practicing the behaviors that were taught and modeled — my thoughts and feelings gradually shifted to match those actions. That resolved the most significant of the internal inconsistencies. Even if I hadn’t intended that outcome. And even if I didn’t notice the changes in myself.

In the next installment, I unpack a few more factors that keep the workings of a culty group opaque: Surprises, Blinders and Lies.


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