Summary
Cult recovery practice is our name for what has been learned, over some fifty years, about how people leave high-control groups. In the United States of the 1970s, families hired ‘deprogrammers’ who abducted members and confronted them until they recanted. It often failed, did harm, and was all but ended by a 1995 court case. Voluntary ‘exit counselling’ grew up as the alternative, which depends on respectful contact and leaves the person free to walk away.
The lesson this entry draws is that confrontation entrenches. People tend to leave when doubt meets a relationship kept warm and somewhere else to belong, and many leave with no intervention at all.
Rationale
We use it as an analogy for what Part 2 calls “unlearning and deconditioning”, with a caveat: a culture isn’t a cult, and nobody was recruited into the dispositions they were born among.