Anti-cult Leaks

(Written 9/20/2010)

John called me the Friday after the conflict had begun. A disagreement over whether to use the word "spiritual" or the word "psyhological" in describing cultic trauma had turned into a slew of emails back and forth between John and Lema. Their disagreement had started on Tuesday.

Most all the emails were going between all three of us, myself and Lema and John as we were a team for John's online discussion board. John owned the board; we were, all three, co-administrators.

But I was trying to stay out of the conflict between Lema and John, giving only my opinion and vote on which word to use. It was pretty much a non-issue for me, which word to use. But they were each passionate about their opinion. I was the tie-breaker. I voted in accordance with John's proposal; that was to use the word "spiritual."

On Thursday, Lema started questioning my motives; insinuating and accusing me. At least I wasn't alone since he had been doing similar with John.

On the phone call that Friday, John told me Colleen, a therapist in California, had called him. He felt like she was fishing for information. She asked him something about dual relationships with clients and if John had an organization of some sort called "The Knapp Center." Knapp was John's last name.

He felt her question about dual relationships probably had something to do with his relationship with me, and it probably did.

John and I did have dual relationships of client-therapist-colleague-friend. Though we had referred to me as a "previous client" for months, I'd continue to pay John for his counseling and coaching services through the end of June, 2010. I pay other friends for there professional services, so why not John? But now it was July and John had insisted that I not pay anymore; so I wasn't.

John then brought up Colleen's usage of the words "The Knapp Center." He told me that he had only told a few people the precise name - "The Knapp Center." So Colleen could only have gotten that information from a few sources. Lema was one of those sources.

I got the impression that John might be inferring that Lema had been discussing with Colleen about the conflict he and Lema were having and about my relationships with John. I wondered what difference it made that Colleen would have heard about The Knapp Center, which was the tentative name for an organization John was in the formative stages of pulling together.

Couldn't John just ask Colleen and Lema?

John had shared with me that he felt the professional anti-cult or cult-recovery field (or whatever one calls it) was failing, a laughing stock to academic fields; that there was too much in-fighting, and that if something didn't change the next generation wouldn't understand cultic trauma and how cults work. I had felt my red flags go up when John had shared his passion about "the next generation." That was pushed a lot in The Way, to carry on the message to the next generation.

John seemed passionate about his role in trying to change this "abysmal failure," as he later referred to the professional cult-recovery field. Thus, his desire to form a non-profit center.

John never stated to not mention anything about The Knapp Center. Are we supposed to keep that quiet?

I didn't say anything about my questioning thoughts. I should be smart enough to know all this stuff without asking.

John told me that now, in the slew of emails, Lema had referred to John as, or at least compared him to, a cult leader. I hadn't had time yet to read the latest emails; plus it was getting hard for me to follow all of them.

I asked John, "Why is Lema doing this? Where has all this suspicion come from?"

John answered that it came from anyone who had the International Cultic Studies Association mindset. A mindset of paranoia, always on the look-out for ulterior motives. He said he'd been under this type of attack for 15 years, from his own colleagues. He said that this is the way it is; that one has to have a backbone of steel to do work in this field.

John told me about a tactic he had used in the past in order to track down when someone was talking. "I'm going to tell you something I've used in the past" he began. "It's a Sopranos-type thing. I didn't lie really, but I would change my wording about something just a little. I'd change it as I would talk to different people. That way, if word got back to me about something and certain words were used, I'd know who had been talking."

Isn't that being paranoid? Thinking you gotta discover the leak? Why not just be upfront about stuff? God I hate that shit.

I immediately rationalized my thoughts: This is John, not some paranoid anti-cultist. Plus, he's mentioned on more than one occasion how he and his family had been stalked and threatened by people with the Transcendental Meditation Organization. He's also been verbally attacked by people in the anti-cult field. Of course he needed to protect himself.

Cults. Anti-cults. Same shit, different label.

Dismissing and rationalizing my immediate feelings of John's Sopranos-tactic as being paranoid and his suspicion of Colleen fishing, which I felt she probably was but I really didn't see what a big deal that was and why John just couldn't be up front with her, I responded, "I understand why you had to do the Sopranos thing. It doesn't really bother me. You had to protect yourself and your family."

John shared that he couldn't continue with Lema's verbal attacks, that it had to stop within the next 24 hours.

John sounded tired. It was draining him. I stated that I wasn't sure that a democratic process could work on an online discussion board, that maybe John simply needed to have the final say. He disagreed, stating that he believed it could work.

I didn't feel qualified or familiar enough with all this professional anti-cult stuff or its history to know what to do or say. That must have been obvious to John. I wasn't being much help.

John said he needed to talk to someone about all this, wondering who he could call, who he could trust. Wednesday when he had talked to me on Skype, he had stated the same thing. At that time he mentioned that maybe he could call Karen Spade, someone who was prominent in the cult-recovery field.

"Maybe Lema just needs to get laid," John stated at the end of our phone conversation. I chuckled and said, "I thought that same thing about you when you were sharing your anxiety this past Wednesday."

I immediately felt I had said the wrong thing.

"Huh?" he responded.

"Well, when you were in so much anxiety about your work, feeling you were buried too deep, and your personal challenges - I thought later that maybe you needed a good lay. I mean not from me; I'm not offering or anything like that. I just know it helps my husband when he is so stressed out about his work. A good lay helps him. You know."

God I felt awkward.

We stated our goodbyes.

I never imagined that that would be my last cordial communication with John.

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Note: In June/July, 2011,  I changed John Knapp's pseudonym in this piece to his real name.
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Note: The above is more from my personal journal and/or other writings as I moved through the inner turmoil after the Knapp trauma which happened the end of July/beginning of August, 2010. The sharings are simply my thoughts at the time processing through events that took place with my ex-therapist, John M. Knapp, LMSW. To access an ongoing index, click here and scroll down to the section entitled June 26, 2011.
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