Autonomy, Authority, Anarchism, and Abuse

In this week’s session, we planned to talk about some really sensitive topics like abuse and trauma. In particular, I would be asking people to reflect on the emotions that they feel related to them. I began the class by reminding everyone that if the subject becomes too much to handle, and they need to take a step out, they should. They could also raise a hand as they leave the room, and then someone from the collective would know to join them for support.

This class is both theoretical, and I hope, very very practical. It’s about using anarchist principles to take care of ourselves, and our communities. It’s still a work in progress (like we all are), but I hope that it helps us all recognize problems and deal with them.

(The first half of the class was a bit more of a lecture, where I laid out a theoretical framework, but I also asked a number of “raise your hand if” questions to encourage everyone to reflect on their experiences. I also wanted to hear from people about their own experiences, but for timing reasons, if everyone shared, we wouldn’t have been able to get through the information.)

Authority, the State, and Anarchism

First, I asked if there were any people in the room who identified as anarchists. Quite a few hands were raised. Next, I asked “what is the State?”, at which point everyone gave a bit of a laugh, because it’s a tricky question.

Back in the day, plenty of anarchists just focused on the explicit parts of oppression and exploitation: the bosses, the police, the courts, the army. They spent their days railing against the terrible oppression of the state but then they’d come home and treat their wives and children like servants. Since the 50s and especially the 60s, we’ve learned it’s more complicated than that. As the feminists like to say “the personal is political”. Part of why anarchists came to rethink their position on the State is due to the work of Gustav Landauer, who wrote that “The State is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; ie, by people relating to one another differently.”

So what is Anarchism anyway?

Anarchists want a world built on freedom, equality, and solidarity. None of the three are possible without the other two.

Part of anarchist thinking on this matter is based on what Zoe Baker calls the “theory of practice”: society is formed by the social relations people exist within, and these relations aren’t fixed objects, but instead constant processes (“practices”), which shape the people engaged in them. The problem, as anarchists see it, is that not all practices encourage the development of autonomous, equal, pro-social people. Sometimes, we can end up in situations which encourage us to give up our own autonomy, ignore our own boundaries, and submit to the wills of others.

What Western thinkers started to realize after the Second World War is that authoritarian politics don’t just rely on direct coercion, like the police officer with a baton, but by mechanisms of consent that Hannah Arendt pointed out in “On Violence” and “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. Once again, we can see the connection between the personal and the political.

(If you’re into comics, Alan Moore has talked a good amount about the “last inch” a certain kind of freedom of thought we need to keep, even in the face of fascist rule.)

While plenty of harmful practices are sort of random (people don’t realize what they’re doing, we’re all different, and you just need a little more communication), sometimes authoritarian practices are systematic.

The Newman Tendency

(From Terror, Love, and Brainwashing):

In 1985, Marina Ortiz, a young woman with a pretty, round face, was in her third year of university at Hunter College in New York City, studying media and communications and editing the college magazine. She was pregnant with her second child and had just broken up with the father of her children. Understandably, perhaps, she was depressed. She found a therapist advertised in a free newspaper distributed at Hunter. After two months the therapist shunted her into group therapy, despite Marina’s misgivings. This was “social therapy,” the invention of Fred Newman. In 1974 he described it thus: “Proletarian or revolutionary psychotherapy is a journey which begins with the rejection of our inadequacy and ends in the acceptance of our smallness; it is the overthrow of the rulers of the mind.”

The therapist and others in the therapy group began to deluge her with invitations to various events: a workshop on sexism, productions at their Castillo Theatre, alcohol-fueled social functions held on riverboat cruises down the Hudson. At a meeting in Harlem on women’s empowerment another therapist said she was impressed by Marina’s comments and invited her to write for the National Alliance, a political newspaper produced by the New Alliance Party. From the first therapist to the National Alliance newspaper, all these involvements were the products of the Newman Tendency, an organization run by therapist-in-chief Fred Newman.

About a year into the process of engulfment by the Newman Tendency, two of its leading women therapists sat Marina down over drinks in a Manhattan bar, announced that the group was actually part of an underground political organization fighting for social justice, and invited her to become a full-time cadre of the International Workers Party (IWP). As Marina was, by this time, living with a man she had met in one of the therapy groups and her life already revolved around the various group activities, and, not least, she believed in the group’s stated goal of organizing to create a non-racist, non-sexist, non-exploitative society, she joined. Her personal life was already attached to the Newman Tendency through therapy, her lover and her social connections developed through the group. Her political and professional life, which previously had expressed itself in a variety of ways, including the college newspaper and other activities, had also fallen under the domain of the organization. So it was not really such a big step when Marina said “Yes.” Thus began a secret, closed life where she was under the organization’s discipline “24/7.” This outcome was not accidental or random. It was the result of a systematic, orchestrated and deceptive process of grooming and recruitment.

She regularly slept overnight in the newspaper’s office as “security” and now put her two young children to bed only two nights a week, childcare being shared with the other families with whom she lived. She lost contact with her own family: “You were discouraged from seeing your family. The family was holding you down, the family unit was not encouraged.” She became utterly committed to the group, convinced of their mission, which in her understanding was to create a “peaceful socialist revolution.”

But what was the group actually doing? During her tenure, Marina found not social justice, not anti-racism or anti-sexism. Rather, she saw families pulled apart, women ordered to have abortions, money laundering and fraud, including the bilking of both Medicaid and the Federal Elections Commission.

Newman, meanwhile, was engaging in numerous sexual relationships, some of which involved breaking up other couples in the group in order for him to take over the female partner. All of his (known) relationships involved women who had first been his therapy patients, and several of these women became part of what was to become known as his “harem.” Such was the nature of the much-touted women’s leadership of the Newman Tendency.

Fred Newman’s “Tendency” is just one example among thousands. No matter the ideology – left, right, religious, commercial, for “personal growth” or to get rich quick – the leadership, structures and processes are remarkably similar.

I then asked: Ryhi you’ve ever heard a similar story. Nearly everyone’s hands went up.

Alexandra Stein, herself a former member of a similar group, wrote a book called “Terror, Love, and Brainwashing” that analyzes how people fall into and stay within abusive power dynamics. She argues that abusive relationships, cults and totalitarian states are all instances of the same kind of traumatic form of relationship, and we should keep an eye out for this kind of dynamic arising in our lives.

Attachment Theory

The first step in understanding Stein’s model of “high control groups” is to learn about the theory of “attachment bonds” first written about by John Bowlby in the 1950s. Below, I lay out some of the basic concepts that are relevant to Stein’s theory:

Running from and to:
When we experience fear, we don’t only run away from the source of the threat, but also towards a place or person we expect will be safe.

Safe Haven:
We rely on certain places and people to act as sources of support. In childhood, we usually think of parents or caregivers as this kind of “safe haven”. You can imagine a small child out at the park with their parents one day, when they decide to go explore a little. Maybe they run into a dog who barks at them. The child then runs away from the threat and towards their safe haven – the parents. After being held and comforted, the child can calm down, and gain the confidence needed to go back out and explore more.

Secure Attachment:
Ideally, this system of fleeing fear to gain comfort, then going back out into the world works as a kind of homeostatic system: that is, the child finds a balance between feeling safe away from the world, and feeling confident out on their adventures. They know that if anything goes really wrong, they have a safe haven to run to, but they aren’t so scared they never leave home.

Disorganized attachment:
Stein’s idea is that high control groups (as well as abusive relationships and totalitarian states) operate by creating a disorganized attachment bond between a follower and the group. In this unhealthy system, the safe haven is also a source of danger: so the person stuck in one of these attachment bonds will run away from the source of the threat….back to their safe haven…. which is the source of the threat in the first place. Consider for example a physically abusive household: if a child is being physically attacked by their parents, and they try to run away from the threat to find a safe haven, they will likely have to return to their abuser, because in a traditional nuclear family, their parents are their only support system.

I asked everyone to Ryhi they’d ever heard of the “abuser’s cycle“. Once again, plenty of hands were raised. Stein’s description of a disorganized attachment bond seems to fit nicely in with the famous image of an abusive boyfriend who hits his girlfriend, but then gives her flowers to “apologize”, locking her into a destructive cycle.

Stein identifies five steps in the process of taking regular people and developing them into “useful” resources for the abusive relationship/cult/totalitarian state to use for whatever purpose is needed.

If you start to see signs like these in your own social group, or especially if you notice a friend moving through these stages, it’s never a bad idea to take a second look and reach out to give support.

Step 1: Recruitment

It’s important when talking about this indoctrination process that we don’t engage in victim-blaming. Psychological manipulation can happen to anyone – cults are a social phenomenon, and they do not fit easily into a simple model of “victim” and “perpetrator”.

Question: Ryhi you feel like you don’t have a strong sense of community in your life, or you could use more friends.

People are circumstantially vulnerable to cults; study after study has found that there is no “personality type” that makes someone likely to join or remain in a cult. Instead, the cult dynamic exploits people during transitional periods of their lives – the times when they are most in need of community. People don’t join cults, they join groups when they seek out community, and every now and again, they’re unlucky enough to be sought out by a cult.

These kinds of groups usually have an appealing message to send, a kind of ideology that makes them attractive, especially to people who are in transitional phases of their lives:

- We’re saving the world from sin! (if the cult uses a religious ideology)

- We’re fighting for the Revolution! (if it’s a leftist ideology)

- We’re falling in love! (if we’re talking about an abusive romantic relationship)

So you come in to a meeting for a book club that seems to match your values, and then?

(Again from Terror, Love and Brainwashing):

The activities of the Newman Tendency present a clear picture of coordinated, planned recruitment. For instance, when Sidney attended the political meeting he saw advertised in the Tendency newspaper, he reported that a woman stationed at the door to the meeting obtained all his contact details as he entered:

I had given my name and number – to a couple of the organizers at the beginning of the meeting – they were good with that, by the way, they knew some things. So they got me before the meeting, not the end! [laughs] And one of them called me a couple days later … They were … “We are interested in doing organizing if you want to work with us.”

Bernice’s initial contact with a Newman Tendency therapist involved what she later remembered as a surprisingly rapid response to her phone message to his therapy practice:

When I called them up for an appointment I was over at my girlfriend’s house and then I got home and it was about ten o’clock at night [and he was] calling me back for an appointment. And that just struck me, that struck me as really weird. I mean what kind of psychologist or whatever is gonna – you know I just said I wanted, I was recommended by S. to set up an appointment – and he called me back at ten at night. And I mean, so that was kind of my first contact with him.

By comparison, Stein also studied how the US Green Party recruited people, and the reality is that they just didn’t have the resources to track everyone down, so they didn’t.

Could you raise your hand if you’ve ever felt surprised by how eager a group was to have you join them?

Remember, these aren’t black-and-white diagnostics, only concerning red flags. One by itself isn’t the end of the world, but if they start to add up…

Step 2: Engulfment

Once a member has been recruited, the first step in establishing a disorganized attachment bond capable of “brainwashing” or “indoctrination” is to make the group a “safe haven” for the follower.

(Again from Terror, Love and Brainwashing):

When therapy was used as the recruitment channel, the individual started in individual therapy and then was rapidly moved to, first a single-sex “grouplet,” and then to a larger, mixed-gender therapy group – usually within only one or two months.
[…]
In a planned progression, then, the group’s therapists encouraged followers to become more deeply involved, to develop friendship ties within the group, while discouraging external ties. The group became the sole source of support for the recruit – the new safe haven – having edged out the recruit’s prior support system. The therapy groups were well-suited to this function, being an environment where people were both physically and emotionally available to form such ties, and to listen to relational advice from therapists and other group members. Activities – preferably with these newfound “friends” – with other Newman Tendency front groups were also encouraged.

Question: Ryhi you’ve ever felt this rush of activity after getting involved in a new group

I brought up the personal example of a previous toxic relationship I was in: We moved from barely knowing each other to spending every day together in very little time at all. Even at the time, this seemed a bit strange to me, and later on, I discovered just how unhealthy our dynamic was.

Question: Ryhi you’ve ever felt like you had to change yourself on joining into a new group or relationship.

Unfortunately, based on the number of hands raised, it seems this was a very common experience. Once again quoting from Stein:

Marina was finally successfully recruited as a full-time cadre of the underground political party whereas Gillian managed to get out before becoming consolidated but not before suffering what she described as devastation and intense, destabilizing confusion:

Everything was confusing – everything, the texts were confusing, and they became more and more confusing. The social therapy sessions were confusing. My supervision was confusing. It, everything was confusing. It was – they wanted you to question things you took for granted, any sense of right or wrong, normal, was turned upside down – everything was questioned. Everything that you took for granted – everything. So it was just confusion, and, and then the relationship was confusing, with like, with, with my supervisor, because he became so intimate and I couldn’t figure out any more if he was my friend? If he was my supervisor? If, I couldn’t figure out if he was, if this was becoming like um, some sort of love relationship? It was incredibly intimate.

Step 3: Isolation

We’ve all gotten involved in exciting new groups that we feel like spending a lot of our time on. And it’s not a bad thing to find a new safe haven…but sometimes, this new group or person starts to crowd out your other social life.

I then asked a number of RYHI questions:

ryhi: you’ve ever had a friend who spent so much time with their new partner, that you never get to see them.
ryhi: you’ve ever felt like you weren’t able to talk to your friends outside of the scene because they just wouldn’t understand you anymore.
ryhi: you’ve ever lost friends because they wouldn’t come to demos or other political activities with you.

Juliet describes her experience of this in the Newman Tendency. For example, her new obligations and schedule meant she became, as she told me, “totally unavailable” to her mother to whom she had previously been very close. Similarly she lost contact with her friends, telling them: “I’m really busy, I’m working on this thing, I can’t get together with you.” She continues:

I did make attempts. I think I invited people to a talent show that I was working at in the hopes of having them come see what I’m doing now, ’cause I was so excited about what I’m doing now … and spending some time with them but of course I got … um … I got put on security and I couldn’t spend any time with them. I don’t remember feeling angry about it. I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t get to spend time with them but then, like, I was getting closer and closer to the people in the organization and I had less and less in common with people outside of the organization. There was less to talk about um, I think I almost felt, not superior but … like, I, oh, I can’t talk about these mundane things like you know, your problems with your boyfriend or, you know, what I mean. I’m doing, I’m doing revolutionary work here, you know [laughs].

As we can see from Juliet’s example, people pulled into cults will become cut off from their previous support systems, their other “safe havens”. But the isolation goes much deeper. Stein describes a “triple isolation” faced by those trapped in high-control groups:

A follower, due to their busy, engulfing schedule, as well as a steady diet of ideological propaganda, is isolated from the outside world. They are brought to believe that their prior attachment relationships (like family, friends, communities) are “dragging them down”, “enemies of the Revolution”, “agents of Satan”, or whatever particular excuse the cult provides them. Once people are convinced to cut out their pre-existing support system, they’ve lost a key method of staying critical.
The rigid ideological system at play in cults (which is often just whatever the cult’s charismatic leader(s) decide to believe in that day) allows for no deviation or dissent. Because followers have no other safe haven, they are dependent on the group for approval and community, which means they need to work hard to demonstrate their loyalty. Doubt, critique, dissent – there’s no place for these things in the group. As a result, followers can’t be honest with each other, and so despite spending all their time in the company of others, they are isolated within the group as well.
Finally in the face of a constant ideological assault on what they thought they knew about the world, a back-breaking work load, and a lack of time to reflect, rest, and reconsider, the follower has no time for themselves. With time, this becomes a profound isolation from the self.

Step 4: Terror (a.k.a. “Fright without Solution”)

In order to establish a disorganized attachment bond, the group needs not only to be the sole (isolation) safe haven (engulfment), but to also provide the threat, the danger, the fright, that scares a follower back into the arms of the group. This terror can often be created out of an external threat (for religious groups, there might be repeated, vivid descriptions of the apocalypse; for anarchist cults, followers might be constantly reminded that The State is hunting you down; if the cult is more anti-Semitic, followers will be told how “the Jews” are out to get them). At the same time, cults have plenty of opportunities to create internal stress (sleep deprivation, verbal/sexual/emotional abuse, or intense social pressure like is often seen in the “self-criticism sessions” of Maoist cults).

Question: Have you or a friend ever been involved in a group where you didn’t sleep for long durations?
Despite all the differences in ideology, tactics, demographics, and setting, one thing that all high-control groups seem to share is the use of sleep deprivation as a mechanism of control. If ever there was a red flag for cult dynamics, chronic sleep deprivation is it. If you or a friend find yourselves losing sleep for your group for extended periods, check in!

Question: How long has the stress been high in a group? What has caused that stress?

As Alexandra Stein writes:

Juliet describes how in the Newman Tendency, in addition to the stress of exhaustion:

Well you didn’t get hurt physically but a tongue lashing was enough and you didn’t want that – you didn’t want a tongue lashing… . Our whole staff was getting our butts kicked because we’re not organizing right, we’re not raising enough funds, we’re not working hard enough, we’re not bringing in enough signatures required. One time I came in without my full quota of signatures and I got in trouble… . Yeah, they could be as nasty as anybody else in the world – believe me

When I asked her if she had been frightened or worried during her time in the group she replied, “All the time. All the time, yeah.”

But fright and worry aren’t, by themselves, the problem. Fear is a natural part of the human experience, and can usually be dealt with by spending time in one’s “safe haven”. Fear becomes “terror” when it’s “fright without solution”. When the only safe haven remaining in a follower’s life is group causing the fear, the follower can’t resolve their stress. When exposed to a threat, the follower gets doused in the toxic neurochemicals of stress (think cortisol and adrenaline), and then tries to flee from the situation and find a place to calm down: their safe haven. But in a high-control dynamic, the follower isn’t ever able to relax, because they have no actual safe haven anymore, only more abuse. This cycle of running away and then back to danger (the so-called “cycle of abuse” that we talked about before) works like an addiction, as the controlling group can give the follower just enough of a hit of love chemicals every time they come running back that they’ll never be scared enough to actually leave.

But this little hit of dopamine and oxytocin doesn’t fix the problem. Constantly running away from and back to danger is psychologically and neurologically devastating. Stress levels never go down, but instead only cycle higher and higher.

Again quoting Stein:

In the first phase of a person’s reaction to threat, their alarm response is activated, with increased heart rate, blood pressure and other signs of distress. […] But if there is no useful action that can be taken using the physiological arousal that is now in play – if the struggle to escape the fear is unsuccessful – then eventually the body shuts down in order to conserve resources. Thus, if neither fight nor flight is effective, the only option is to freeze. […]

The second phase of a trauma response is dissociation: “detachment from an unbearable situation.” […] Imagine the toll on the body that this two-fold unresolvable process must take. Eventually, dissociation – freezing and giving up the failed effort to escape – comes to dominate. Along with giving up the struggle to fight against the group and the fear it has generated, the dissociated follower comes to accept the group as the safe haven and thus forms a trauma bond. This moment of submission, of giving up the struggle, can be experienced as a moment of great relief, and even happiness, or a spiritual awakening.

Step 5: Deployment

Ryhi: you’ve ever known a friend to have been encouraged to disregard your own wellbeing for the sake of the group or the cause?

Once terror has lead to dissociation, we’ve moved into the final stage of indoctrination, and also the most dangerous one:

If the group can succeed in disorganizing the individual, resulting in dissociation, they can then control that person’s interpretations of his or her feelings. Now the group can seize hold of the follower, offering up an opportunistic interpretation to substitute for the follower’s own lack of evaluative function, and consolidate the follower as a deployable resource. In other words: listen to the group, they will tell you what the trouble is.

Unable to interpret the meaning of events? Don’t worry, the group will do it for you. Follow what they say, that will show a way out of the terror. Commit even more fully and all shall be well. […]

Outsiders are often confounded and confused when observing followers and the numbed, restricted emotions, inability to protect their own survival and lack of empathy that they demonstrate. Observers can also be confused by the inappropriate or rigid emotions of members of cults or totalitarian states. Which emotion is presented depends on the demands of the group. In many religious cults, followers may present a “happy face” that masks the dissociation and terror that followers are not able to act on, nor perhaps even be aware that they are feeling. Or, as in the group I was in, a serious, committed and studious expression was deemed suitable for our task of building the revolution.

This final stage is where we can understand why many researchers on cults describe the social phenomenon as a kind of “killing of the self”. Unfortunately, that phrase can often move beyond metaphor, as we see in the case of mass suicide at Jonestown, suicide bombings by the Iranian Mojahedin, or the deadly self-criticism sessions of the United Red Army of Japan.

At this point, I reminded everyone about how sensitive of a topic this was, and the importance of treating those involved with compassion. In the words of Anne Singleton, a woman recruited into the Iranian Mojahedin, and later commenting on the 2005 London Tube bombings:

Psychological manipulation can happen to anyone, any time. If you’re lucky, you end up with a timeshare. If you’re unlucky you end up blowing yourself and innocent people up on the Tube.

At this point, we took a much-needed break.

After the break, the conversation was much less structured. I began with a brief introduction to the work of Shuli Branson (she/they). A few years ago, they wrote a book called Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life.

As Branson reminds us, if we, as anarchists want to live in freedom, equality, and solidarity, we need to develop social practices that build them. We are complex, ever-changing things, and how we treat each other prefigures the world we build together. This is what feminists mean when they say “the personal is political”.

For this, they frame anarchism as a daily ethics of care. Anarchism, in Branson’s eyes, is a politics of refusal: mainstream society systematically deprives us of any practice saying “no” (obviously some groups have been more deprived of this ability than others!). Building power as a movement means creating the ability to say no to various things: a strike is when workers can say no to their bosses, community self-defense is when a community is able to say no to violence, but this practice applies on the micro-scale in the form of healthy consent in our interpersonal relationships.

I asked three questions to the crowd:

How free are you if you can’t say no to things?
How can we be equal if I can’t say no to you?
How can I act in solidarity with you if I don’t listen to your wants and needs?

So now that we’ve established the connection between refusal and anarchism, we can think about how this applies to our daily lives. Branson sees anarchist practice in the creation and defense of “personal boundaries”.

Ryhi you’ve heard of the idea of “personal boundaries”

Reflect:

1. How often do we slow down and pay attention to our own needs/feelings/opinions/boundaries?

2. What does it look like when you ignore your own boundaries?

I then showed a number of terms on the board, and encouraged everyone to reflect on how they related to personal boundaries:

Spoon theory
Emergency Culture
Burnout
Rigid Radicalism

The final point I raised was on how a strong practice of respecting personal boundaries (both our own and others’) could relate to the cult dynamics we talked about in the first part of the session. If we want to build resilient communities that can protect themselves from high-control dynamics, we need to encourage everyone to form as many safe havens as they can, to look out for each other and the boundaries we form, and to respect each others’ autonomy.

The remainder of our class time was a free flowing discussion of how we could apply the lessons we learned today to our lives outside the classroom.

Slides: