Counter-Cult Witnessing Induced Cognitive Dissonance Part II: Thoughts About Motive

(If you haven’t already, please read Part I HERE.)

There are many resources out there about helping people who are in aberrant religious groups, but I wanted to outline my own observations and thoughts about motive (that I’ve recently considered for my own benefit!).

Before I write anything about motive, I’d like to mention something that is of the utmost importance to me. Not everyone will share my opinion on this point, but I believe strongly that the most effective resource you have in your possession when trying to help someone out of a manipulative group is that of prayer. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he says that the words of the Bible are foolishness without the spiritual discernment of the Holy Spirit. In the same way, I believe that in addition to encouraging your friend to think for themselves again, you need to pray for them and for you. For the person in bondage, I pray that the Word will be effective and ask God to mightily show Himself faithful to His promises regarding watching over His Word to perform it, never returning to Him void. For the person to whom I am witnessing, I generally pray along the lines of Matthew, Chapter 13. For me, I pray that I will faithfully hear the Lord, faithfully speak His Word, that nothing will interfere with my hearing, and that I will be sensitive to the Holy Spirit Who I ask to guide me in all things. I don’t really like the idea of others praying my prayers or me praying theirs, but I will work on a new blog post along these lines as an encouragement for others to pray. Prayer helps you keep your motives on course while you’re working through these things with someone.

Before you get started in a counter-cult witnessing situation such as I have recently with my Mormon neighbor, you must accept the very real possibility that the person may not respond to you with an eventual rejection of their cultic or aberrant belief system. They may never respond to your message about their beliefs, and the process will be much more difficult if they do not believe that you have concern for them on a personal level.

Any motive of yours that is not healthy will make the process of witnessing and helping the spiritually abused person very difficult. If you say that you want to help someone, but the process unfolds in a way that is very different from what you want to see, that conflict will produce a great deal of dissonance for you and for the person you are trying to help. Your words will not match your actions, behaviors, expressions, etc.. This will contribute to a lack of trust in the person you are trying to help (perhaps keenly aware of what does not feel right), and it is essential that you work on fostering and building that trust. You have to create a safe place for them to heal, and you will often find that you have to abandon your expectations in order to create and protect that safe place. What is safe for you may be unsafe for them. Knowing the subculture that they are involved in will be tremendously helpful, but you must be willing to accept that the person may not meet your expectations, particularly early on in the process.

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Counter-Cult Witnessing Induced Cognitive Dissonance Part I: Introduction to Motive

Back in the seventies, it was still all the Christian rage to go “street witnessing,” much like something you will see in the old film, “The Cross and the Switchblade.” My corner of the greater Church became quite taken with street witnessing, and the practice was still encouraged as an activity for young people when I was a teenager. It still had all of the flavor of the “hippie” mentality of days quickly passing us by then. People were laid back and they were concerned about people as people, but the climate was changing then, now 30 years ago. The adults who were most effective at this were the ones who were genuine and kind to people, showing concern for their well being. (That may seem stupid to say if you’re not an Evangelical or if you’ve never been on one of these witnessing excursions yourself, but sadly, I believe that it needs to be said.)

Ray Comfort Engaging in “Street Witnessing”

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Another Example of My Own Dissonance

A few months ago, new neighbors moved into the apartment below us, and we’ve since developed an interesting friendship. I’d met the wife before, beside our cars in the parking area, and she told me that she was a licensed professional counselor.

Before I was able to have a “proper” conversation with her, I developed a general opinion of her based upon my impressions. I relied upon stereotypes that I’d developed about groups of people to build my ideas about my new neighbor, primarily related to her counseling background. As a person who has expert knowledge about human behavior, I made assumptions about her that I expected be validated when we did meet again.

When we had our second conversation, I was shocked to learn that she was a Mormon! Bam! I immediately went into a state of cognitive dissonance when she announced that she attended “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” (She was so happy to announce this, too!) I instantly became very aware of my facial expression, because I felt so disappointed! I’d not expected this at all because I’d relied upon a stereotype or a “rule of thumb.” (Cialdini talks much about this in his book.) I’d taken a mental shortcut, and in this case, it had not served to help me through the information that one has to process when one meets a new person.

All at once in that moment, I’m suddenly feeling my own shock, I’m trying to hide my facial expression of disappointment, I’m disappointed that I’d relied upon a stereotype (because I should know better), and then, I’m thinking about the impact the Mormon issue would raise for us in our friendship. The experience was both cognitive and emotional – and it was intense. The new information was very inconsistent with what I’d believed and all that I knew at that point, and I was very much off-balance. I never saw it coming.

(If I had kids, it would have been an excellent opportunity for them to ask me if they could play with knives and fire in the middle of the living room! I likely would have agreed to anything in that moment because of how intensely distracted I was by this powerful experience. Everything shuts down for just a moment. In this moment, we all are highly vulnerable.)

This is cognitive dissonance. The experience itself is neither good nor bad, but what triggers it and how one responds to it can very well be.

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Memories of My Own Cognitive Dissonance: Gothard's Doctrine of Grace as an Example

In so many words (!), I’ve already shared what cognitive dissonance felt like after some exit counseling and realizing that not everything I’d believed had been true. 

I’d like to discuss a bit more about the process that facilitated my acceptance of Gothard’s take on grace (and other ideas introduced at the Institute of Basic Life Principles conference I attended). I only briefly mentioned it in this post. 

Cognitive dissonance was easy to ignore for me when I first accepted his views, but when I revised my understanding after I left the spiritually abusive system; I had no other option but to let the process work in me. I loved and wanted the truth more than my own comfort, so I honored the process. Because I’m not a masochist, I did not really want to submit myself to the pain of realizing that I’d been duped, but I saw no other way around it. In the process, I started to learn how to accept life as it is, and not as I would have it. Life is what it is, and it takes maturity to accept life’s reality when it is unpleasant. I am learning how to accept this and cope with life’s unfairness, right along with everyone else.

Here is the saga of my dissonance regarding IBLP.

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Feedback Regarding Recent Posts

I just wanted to thank you for this series. Not only did I find a link I needed to see concerning possible issues with one of my kids, but I found encouragement for myself as well.

~~~~~

I've seen the No Longer Quivering blog, where many women have completely lost their faith over patriarchy, and I so grieve over this (and feel rage over the cause). I even began wondering, as those women did, what exactly was "real", and what was a head game. But my faith is rooted in the fact of the Resurrection, the fulfilled prophecies of scripture, esp. the return of Israel to her homeland, and the fact that the Bible would never have been produced by mere human beings, and that no other religious book in history has had as much scrutiny or opposition. Feelings cannot go that deep and thus survive the onslaught of doubt and suffering; but indisputable facts are an anchor that nothing can shake.

~~~~~

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Cognitive Dissonance and Bible Study Following Spiritual Abuse: Part V of V

How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?

Summary of Thoughts to Consider Related to Bible Study as You Heal From Spiritual Abuse

• What you’re experiencing is perfectly normal, given your experience.

• You have been deceived by subtle teachings that you failed to identify as problematic because you were manipulated through a very complex, gradual and subtle process of exploitation. Either by intent or by way of their own earnest belief, teachers passed off false doctrine to you as legitimate doctrine.

• Expecting that knowledge of the Bible, intellect, pure motive, and the Holy Spirit will make you impervious to the social, psychological and spiritual manipulation of a cultic church or thought reform program is naïve. These systems use crafty and subtle needs that exploit human tendencies and emotions, usually by offering a very desirable solution to a complex problem. We are especially vulnerable after major life changes such as a new job, a profound disappointment like the death of a loved one, or a move to a new place which makes access to your previous support systems more difficult.

• This experience shakes your confidence on a very deep level. If you are experiencing doubts about your own ability to discern what Scripture means, remind and encourage yourself that this is a very healthy and very self-protective response. Your brain is doing exactly what God designed it to do: survive and heal. This process of recovery takes time, usually about two years at a minimum. Remind yourself of this.

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Cognitive Dissonance and Bible Study Following Spiritual Abuse: An Unplanned Addendum to Part IV!

How Do You Study the Bible
After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?

I’ve received a surprising amount of feedback about these posts, and I have concerns (as I stated in the first Bible study post) that it may come across that I am encouraging people not to read the Bible or that I was avoiding the sorting out of my own understanding of doctrine. Actually, I did little else. At this time in life, while waiting for the babies to come that never did, I worked doing temp jobs in nursing in Texas (where we lived at the time). I could make much better money, it was generally part-time work, and I felt that it would not require me to ever choose between a job and a baby. When I was not busy with this, I was basically working through these doctrines. I would like to take this opportunity to explain this a bit more, as I seem to improperly given some the impression that I may have avoided this work, when I was actually consumed by it.

How I Dealt with the Aberrant Doctrine:
More Clarification

I received this note today:

“I have read through your latest series and am just amazed. Our experiences were just the opposite! Because there was so little bible study [in my church], there was more proof texting and topical stuff which is so easy to twist that I went into deep study to find out what a Christian was supposed to look like from the Word. I had no idea...because my paradigm had been warped based on what I saw supposedly godly people in power do…

I look back and realize I was a zombie. But a zombie that just immersed myself in the Word. What it did was clean out the wrong teaching and replace it with truth.”

I would argue that I was absolutely not doing the opposite but that I was doing it in a different setting. For me, as one who was already immersed in the Word, this context became unsafe. I had to go to a different setting and context. I did that from within the safety of understanding the behavioral aspects of what happened to me because of my own intense self-doubt. (Here follows the bulk of the response that I wrote to her, though I've filled in some details.)

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Cognitive Dissonance and Bible Study Following Spiritual Abuse: Part III of V

How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?


Grieving, Mourning and Sifting Through the Rubble to Pick Up My Scattered Pearls

Before I walked out of my cultic church for the last time, my daily study started either with translation of three verses of the NT from the Greek Majority Text. I then usually had something that I wanted to look up in the OT. (I varied my reading habits, and this is what I was doing at this particular time when I left the cultic church.) I incorporated music and prayer into this time, too. Well… Everything but prayer became difficult in a way that I’d never experienced before. I tried to replace this lack of study with sermons on tape, but I quickly realized that this was part of why I was in so much trouble. I’d meditated on someone else’s teaching of the Word, hearing their twists on it before going before the Lord myself. So much of my problem involved my past acquiescence to someone else. Rather than putting the Word myself into my heart and mouth, I’d allowed so many others to go up into heaven to bring it down for me. This became instantly unsafe.

Though very difficult, I started singing a chorus from the cultic church that echoed the words of David’s Psalm every time I tried to study:

I find that this is a problem for others as well. Some of the leaders in the patriarchy movement boast excellent credentials and demonstrate excellent skill in expository teaching. If someone with a couple of PhDs cannot properly exegete the Word, and if these well-trained and knowledgeable leaders had fallen into error, teaching falsehood, what chance did I stand? How could I discern anything if I’d failed to discern the falsehoods in their teachings before? Here was a wolf that I couldn’t spot to save my own life, and I was fairly good at spotting them, I thought. For all of my diligence and study, I felt as if I knew nothing. Everything felt altogether unsafe, and it hurt right down through into my bones. If I had been beguiled by these teachings, how could I trust anything?

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Cognitive Dissonance and Bible Study Following Spiritual Abuse: Part II of V

How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?

See Part I HERE.

Feeling Alienated from My Connection to God through the Bible

After studying a year of Greek, I was very disappointed. I found no theophany. A year of Greek taught me how to use the Bible Study tools properly and key terms frequently used in basic doctrine, not much more. This was a disappointment, as it did strip away some of the mystique that I felt about Bible teachers. It introduced a new element of uncertainty, so the outcome of study did the opposite of what I had hoped. I wish that I’d understood something that I failed to grasp then, partly because I was still looking at the Gospel like a formula. (“Do A, B and C and you will get D, the higher life and anointing.” In homeschooling, you get perfect kids and eternal families.) I wish that I understood and appreciated the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer in concert with the study of the Word. The Spirit illuminates our study. But I was still working these things out in my own mind as I shifted from the vicarious faith that my mother gave me into a faith of my own on my own terms with God. Bible study was still, partially, a means to an end for me.

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Cognitive Dissonance and Bible Study Following Spiritual Abuse: Part IV of V

How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It?



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Facing Reality

Eight or nine years after I’d left my abusive church, I started to feel comfortable and looked forward to reading and even studying the Bible. I’d kept at it, though I look back and wish that it had been easier much sooner.

Unlike the person who comes out of patriarchy, I found that I could not identify the cultic shepherding church as the single root source of my problems. When I “went back to my roots,” I also found serious flaws and painful problems in this doctrine of Word of Faith as well. Spiritual abuse forced me to come to terms with the anti-intellectualism. I had to come to terms with the doctrines I’d accepted because I was told to accept them.

For those who were in healthy churches with completely sound doctrine, their process will likely be easier.

I also learned that much of my zeal was motivated by my selfish desires to be noticed by those in the church. I was looking for something outside of my own heart to satisfy me.

I desired to find acceptance that I so longed for in my flesh. I’d been looking for something that would heal my very broken heart so that I could be that integrated person and incredibly effective Christian that I’d always dreamed I would become. I had to reject the burning zeal that I thought was coming from my desire for God but was quite often my own willfulness to somehow make God do what I wanted Him to do. I thought that true zeal involved extremes, something that paralleled the drama that I always felt in my home and in my church.

Along with the realization and repentance for my desire to serve the church, a desire that eclipsed my desire to serve Jesus, I had to come to terms with my true motives. The Word does work in our hearts and minds, but it is not the panacea of a magic pill to make me more spiritual. The Word is not part of a static formula, and I had to wait and grow. There was no fast-track to higher living. Maturity in Christ comes about by discipline and perseverance. Jesus was not the “cosmic bellhop.” If I lived my life and never saw divine healing and remained ill the rest of my life myself, I’d have to accept this and rejoice in the Lord, either way. I would have to love the Word all the more, without expectation. I could not go sit on God’s lap like a small child who sits on daddy’s lap only to get the candy that they know is waiting in his pocket.

Why You Can’t “Just Snap Out of It!”

I would later learn something that gave me much comfort. In Bessel Van der Kolk’s lecture entitled “The Body Keeps Score” that he presented in 2007, I heard him explain what happens to the brain when a person experiences the ongoing process of PTSD. Through advances in brain imaging that are now available, we have learned that the PTSD brain floods certain areas of the brain with large amounts of blood and increases metabolism there while other areas shut down.

In the PTSD brain, encouragement and exhortation have a very different affect than they do in the normal brain. When the normal person hears encouragement, several different areas become very active. The pre-frontal cortex (the problem solving area) becomes active, and the part of the brain that says “This applies to me; They are talking about me” floods with blood, indicating high metabolism in that area where those processes are located in the brain. In the PTSD brain, something very different happens.

In PTSD and the depression that results, encouragement and praise affect the brain in a very different way. First, the anxiety centers become very active, and the encouragement is not trusted. Rather than feeling more at ease, the brain of the person with PTSD goes into survival mode. For some, areas of the brain that activate during antagonism flood with blood. The depression has already caused a dulled response in the critical thinking area of the pre-frontal cortex. But most interesting, the area of the brain that activates when a person realizes that information applies to them remains completely inactive. Someone could tell a person with PTSD that they are a new creation in Christ, that they are precious to God and are seated in high places with Jesus. But the part of the brain that says “This applies to me!” never activates. The brain cannot realize what is really being said. Physiologically, the brain cannot comprehend personal encouragement when it is stuck in a loop of the survival response.

This indicates that some significant healing must take place before the encouragement can be received. Spiritual healing comes about in stages. They don’t happen quickly or overnight. Physical activity, mindful walking which activates the medial pre-frontal cortex which helps to naturally heal the basal ganglia, and therapies like EMDR all help heal the mind and brain, correcting these metabolic problems without drugs. As Daniel Amen explains it, the brain is the hardware of the soul. Healing the brain helps the mind and the soul physically recover from trauma. Taking this into consideration can help those in recovery and those ministering to them understand that there are physical miracles taking place as well as the healing of the soul and spirit.

More to come....

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How Do You Study the Bible After Someone Has Bludgeoned You With It? Cognitive Dissonance and Bible Study Following Spiritual Abuse Part I

I had not planned to write this post, but the subject has come up in conversations and correspondence with others many times since I started this blog, and I realized that I never actually blogged about it before. This previous post touched on Bible study after spiritual abuse, and I found that I had quite a bit more to say about the subject from a personal perspective.
I’ve been reluctant to share my personal experience, as I have concern that many readers will interpret what I did as a standard of sorts. For the Christian, the path to wholeness comes through knowing Jesus, and the primary way we know Him comes through reading His Word. Jesus is the Living Word. I want the reader to read, hear, and know well that I would have done anything to be able to read and study like I had before the crushing blow of realization of spiritual abuse knocked me flat. I had to develop an entirely new relationship with the Word and Bible Study (based upon purer motives), and this did not come easily or quickly for me.


Why the Bible Meant What It Did To Me
Personally, as a very troubled little girl with intense school phobia and other painful issues early in childhood, church became my refuge. I learned at a young age that if I wanted to improve my state, the best thing that I could do was study and memorize the Bible so as to best know Jesus and be “rooted and grounded” in Him. So it was easy to study because I loved Jesus so much! I could not get enough, and I started staying upstairs with the adults for the sermon when I was about eight or nine years old (instead of going to “children’s church). I love the Word because I love Jesus, and it is a joy to study. I had no idea how powerfully the realization of the spiritual abuse I’d endured would later challenge my love of Bible study.

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More About Crash Test Dummies and Dissonance: A Review of Key Ideas

Given the length of this previous post that covered several topics, let’s review the highlights:

• We are dynamic creatures with active minds. We always end up renewing our minds with something, whether we actively work at renewing them or whether we are passive about it (e.g., renewing our minds with paranoia by rehearsing our own fears). The forces of life, particularly ideological ones, affect us whether we invite them to do so or not.

• When we stop scrutinizing the information that we take into our minds, we become passive which makes us vulnerable to misuse and exploitation.

 

• Lack of scrutiny can happen for many reasons:

• We might be tired of thinking.

• We may not believe that it is possible or are unaware that we are being influenced.

• We may be deceived about the virtue of the information we take in, believing that scrutiny is not required.

• We may accept someone else’s judgment about what to believe, deferring to their leadership and discernment while suspending our own because we believe it is wisest to do so.

• We may ignore the influence that others have over us while they actively meet a need that we have because we like the good feeling we experience as a result of the other aspects of our relationship with them.

• ETC…

• When we lapse into passive mode, we are like crash test dummies for someone else because we let other people or belief systems do our “ideological driving” for us. We can be used to test other people’s untested theories about how to live, even if they intend to be virtuous and helpful. This post and this one talk about some of the potentially negative effects that shifting into a passive mode has on the mind.

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Let Cognitive Dissonance Teach You How to Resign Your Job as “Crash Test Dummy”

I received this email from someone, and after writing it *[my response], I decided that it would make a great blog post about cognitive dissonance. I also struggled with this myself in the early years after leaving my spiritually abusive church.

But, sad to say, my thinking has become tainted, I suppose, by reading the No Longer Quivering blog, where many, if not most, of the guest bloggers and commenters are former Christians. So, as I read about cognitive dissonance, I wondered if the whole Christian conversion experience can actually be viewed as being a result of cognitive dissonance taking its course, rather than being the work of the Holy Spirit.

You have to figure out who converted you and what they converted you into. Was it the Holy Spirit or the exploited desires of your own heart that talked you into getting out of your own driver’s seat? How much of what you learned was really true? What did you put up with but didn’t think was right? What did you think was truth at the time? What do you know now? You have a lot of work to do if you want to do it right -- to rebuild your spiritual house.

Watching some of the footage from the Haiti earthquake, it struck me that it might be an analogy for what it is like to rebuild your life after this kind of thing has rocked your world. It is painful, hard, and intimidating, but it does have its blessings. If the building or the foundation of your faith was flawed (and all of us do have such flaws), you have a chance to rebuild it right. As you do this hard work and “heavy lifting,” you gain some muscle.

 

First, consider that the word “repent” in derives from the Greek “metanoia” which is a compound word that translates literally into “a change of mind.” “Noia” means “to think with your mind.” “Meta” means “after” with the implication of “change” such as it appears in the English word “metamorphosis.” Actually, Romans 12:2 uses “meta” in the compound word “metamorphoo” for our English word of “transformed,” directing us to “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what (is) that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.” 

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Discerning the Discomfort of Dissonance

Early last year, I wrote several well-received blog posts on cognitive dissonance, the psychological stress all human beings experience when they are faced with information or experience that is inconsistent with previously understood information, expectation, or context. Sometimes, it just involves hearing things we don't expect or being asked to do something that doesn’t seem to make sense (e.g., like a doctor asking us to say “Aye” and “Eee” as he listens to our chest with a stethoscope if we do not know that they are not just acting silly but are ruling out a specific lung disorder).

Getting through the dissonance may involve the raising of our eyebrows, causing only a fleeting moment of confusion or distraction, something that a smile may bring us through safely. An extreme example might be the dissonance that my friend felt when his pastor told the congregation that everyone with faith needed to get out their checkbooks so they could write out a check for $1000, payable to the pastor personally and not to the church to boot. (This was a watershed moment for him after previous troubling problems produced several episodes of dissonance that gave him reasons to doubt.) Cognitive dissonance varies by degrees, and it can be used as a powerful manipulation technique. (Please read more in previous posts HERE.

Like the rest of the human race and as a natural consequence of living, I’ve experienced many different types of dissonance recently. (Note that dissonance indicates a healthy response, though how we respond in turn to the uncomfortable mental state often predisposes us to manipulation. Self-control starts with managing responses despite our discomfort.) In my own dissonance recently, I took note of my own experience, I observed the dissonance in others, and I recalled my own past memories of dissonance while reading someone else’s testimony of spiritual abuse. I also regularly observe varieties of dissonance in others when I receive feedback from readers who do feel comfortable with or dislike this blog’s specific content. (If you’re one of those folks, I’m writing a new post about all this, just for you.) I would like to write a series of posts over the next several weeks that further explore this topic.

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Towards Understanding Voddie Baucham

Bacham's missing blog post copied elsewhere

  NEW EDIT 29Sep25: 

An Epitaph for Voddie

Please Refer to the Index of Blog Posts about Voddie Baucham that follows this narrative.

Revised March 2023

In March of 2008, I presented a workshop at a meeting of a  counter-cult apologetics organization on the history of the Patriarchy Movement among some ten thousand Evangelical Christian homeschoolers from across many denominations and backgrounds. In the early-1990s, the group developed a style of worship in what they eventually called Family Integrated Churches (FIC). I described the movement as an affinity group patterned after the Roman Paterfamilias for separatist homeschoolers who follow the principles of the Quiverfull Movement (QF). At that time, I'd only heard of Voddie Baucham twice before (on a blog and in the Return of the Daughters video). Later that year, Baucham claimed in error on his website that my presentation came about because he was unliked by the seminary where the conference just happened to be held that year.

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Photo and Vector Attriblutions

Unless otherwise noted, apart from original works or book covers, most images and graphics that appear on this site have been adapted from royalty free downloads at 123rf.com.

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