In the previous post, I discussed what my husband and I dubbed “The
Star Chamber,” the interrogation and intimidation sessions that our
former cultic church elders regularly adjudicated in the pastor's
study when they wanted to address what they saw as serious behavioral
non-compliance in members. Though the elders had their star chamber
meetings, the thought conversion exercises were not limited to those
more formal sessions. Though their manipulation was certainly not
limited to only the formal sessions, the confrontations with the
group of elders was quite powerful. Manipulation in informal
settings can be just as effective, but star chamber sessions could
affect much emotional, psychological, and spiritual harm, a special
practice that involved a higher level of manipulation and force
because of the ritual and the fact that a person was outnumbered by
eight authority figures (the number of elders and pastors we had at
the time of my attendance).
Interrogation isolates a person and
disorients them, and the trauma of the experience pushes people into
dissociation, a process discussed in greater length in a previous
post. We remember the iconic picture from early films about
gangsters of the spartan, dark, windowless room with a single,
uncomfortable chair in it, an occasional table, but always with a
ceiling lamp with a bare lightbulb hanging above the chair. This not
only puts the subject of interrogation on display for those in the
room to scrutinize, the bright, undiffused light prevents the subject
from seeing much of anything but his own body and cannot see much of
anything else in the environment. This naturally induces literal
disorientation, because a person cannot see their surroundings.
When bent on shaming a parishioner into
submission, a local church may not use the light bulb in a dark room
to enhance the torture session, they do use other factors to
psychologically disarm those who are “under their authority” and
have challenged it. This previous post discusses what
happens to consciousness when a person dissociates (a
physiologic feature of PTSD), and as also noted in a
series of posts on this topic, this kind of technique does alter
memory by fracturing the self through the use of interrogation.
People will believe fantasy to be fact after psychological and
physical torture, just as a way of surviving in order to maintain a
functional sense of self (because they do lose there sense of
identity when they are required to conform to that which is untrue).
For the Christian, manipulators can further enhance this effect by
claiming that non-conformity and resistance will result in eternal
damnation in a place of eternal, unfathomable torture – a special
kind of emotional and spiritual blackmail which proves highly
effective. Robert Lifton called this fallacious distortion the
technique of the Dispensing
of Existence, what some evangelical groups call a “spiritual
covering,” and what Gothard defines as the “umbrella
of authority.” Only the group or the cultic leader can
determine your status, and they claim to be able to be able to
prognosticate easily, determining your eternal status through a divine
insight that only they possess.
The Hot Seat at Ole Anthony's Trinity
Foundation
Wendy and Doug Duncan who were once
members of the cultic/spiritually abusive Trinity Foundation inDallas describe their formal process of interrogation created Ole
Anthony – sessions that the group called “the hot seat.”
Known to reduce some grown adults to fetal position and drive others
into psychotic episodes, Ole's hot seat sessions would extend for
hours and took place in front of the entire group of followers.
Information elucidated in such sessions through this enhanced torture
technique would then haunt group members for years thereafter, levers
of control that would be remembered and used by everyone in the group
to maintain conformity and compliance of others through threatened
shame. Ole believed that to free a person from shame, he was called
to induce shame by making them fully experience a sense of their
total depravity until that person became so broken that they would
essentially become entirely desensitized to shame. That was his
premise, anyway.
He believed that harsh, degrading
sessions of shame induction were the best way to augment a person's
sanctification and were absolutely necessary to make a person into an
effective Christian. He also just so happened to believe that he was
put on earth to purify people himself in order to make them truly fit
for service to God in ways that only he could elicit. I find it
fascinating that these types of sessions always start out with
specific infractions and always degrade into deeply personal and
mean-spirited criticisms which do little else but facilitate
unquestioned obedience to the group and its leaders. (We find the
same type of beliefs about breaking a child in larger and expanding
sectors of Evangelicalism today. Here's a great new review article about this troubling trend.)
Wendy graciously shares with us some
excerpts from her book pertaining to the practice of breaking the
spirit within the Trinity Foundation.
From Chapter 6 entitled “Breaking
Spirits” in Wendy
Duncan's book, I
Can't Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult (pp. 87-109):
In the spring of
1985, Trinity Foundation members embarked on the first of what would
be dozens of rounds of psycho-torture sessions known as the hot
seats. The “hot seat era” lasted through the early 1990s, and
during that period, the hot seats became a daily part of life for the
members. The group would go away for long weekends and have marathon
sessions. People would curse and scream and cry – eventually
arriving at the “orgiastic sense of oneness” described
by Lifton. . .
The hot seats
were gruesome, tortuous events, both for the person on the hot seat
as well as the other participants. The stated purpose was to free
you from your past, free you from the things that were hindering you
from entering the kingdom of God. In practice, however, they had the
effect of changing the participant's perception of himself,
reinterpreting his life history, and transforming his worldview by
replacing it with Ole's. No one challenged Ole's insights. Though
others would pile on and point out the contradictions and faults of
the person being hot-seated, Ole kept tight control of the sessions
and was the sole arbitrator and judicator of which insights were
genuine, who had permission to speak, and, ultimately, when the
person being hot-seated was sufficiently broken. . .
It was Ole's role
to discern the true meaning of any event described during each
prison's hot seat, and it was always stated in a way to make that
person realize his or her total depravity. He would tell people that
the Holy Spirit could not have anything to do with them because they
were too evil, and they had no hope of being saved. His favorite
technique was to force one of his disciples into a state of despair
so that he or she thought there was no possibility of salvation, and
then, when Ole felt that the person was sufficiently broken, he would
turn it around. God had returned, and the person was safe, and he
was part of the Kingdom after all. . .
There must be
some truth to Ole's premise here, but the problem was that the
programming, which people received from their parents and from
society – some of it no doubt was destructive – was replaced not
with God's programming, but with Ole's. . .
[Quoting
'Mark.'] “[A]t the time, there was a strong belief that we
were doing the right thing. None of us could see the damage. Ole
convinced us that the shameful events in our past were the things
that defined us now – defined our false worship. . . We believed
that we were in a spiritual, life-and-death struggle for the soul of
the individual who was on the hot seat. If each of us did not
repent, we would be forever banished to hell. We were engaged in
this spiritual warfare. There was a grand fight going on between God
and Satan, a battle for our souls.” . . .
[Quoting
'Paula'] “Ole drilled into each of our heads that we were
each the chief of sinners. So I always thought that whatever
accusation Ole made against me, he must be right. I am guilty. The
hot seats tore you down to where you were nothing but a mass of
jelly. If you had any confidence or self-esteem when you began the
hot seats, you sure weren't going to have any when it ended. . . I
know it sounds odd that I would allow someone to abuse me that way,
but I was convinced that unless I went through the hot seat, I would
never be able to see what was keeping me from being real, keeping me
from fellowship, keeping me from being who I was supposed to be in
Christ. You submit to those things because there are things about
yoruself that you believe that you don't perceive accurately.” . .
.
It did not matter
what you had done or what you wrote down on your list, Ole was going
to make it about something else. . .
After the ordeal
of a hot seat, people would report a type of dissociation – a
feeling of numbness that lasted for three or four days. If
brokenness was the ultimate good, the best one can do is to break
people – and that's what Ole believed he was called by God to do. .
.
Read more about the “hot seat” and
much more in Wendy
Duncan's book, I
Can't Hear God Anymore, which details her experiences and the
experiences of former members of the Trinity
Foundation, a spiritually abusive organization founded and still
operated by “Ole” Anthony in Dallas, Texas. Also, visit the
DallasCult.com website to
learn more about their experiences and to find lists of resources for
help and healing.
Additional posts about the dynamics of
altering memory through psychological pressure and thought reform
techniques (geared toward the experience of the survivors of
Hephzibah
House):
- Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast and the Ingram Family (Family who creates, accepts and believes an alternate version of reality under the pressure of thought reform and interrogation)
- Transformed Memory in a POW Camp (a way of coping with mind control)
- Reaffirming the Myth (how and why victims change their memories and believe falsehood as a coping response to mind control)
- Changing Memory to Gain an Abuser's Approval (Martin on mind control)
- Altered States of Consciousness Contribute to Altered Memory (how mind control adversely affects a person's ability to think and their mental development)
- The
Role of Trauma/PTSD
in Altered Memory (trauma as a physical process; nouthetic
counseling can inhibit healing from PTSD)
