Transcription
If you clicked on this video, maybe you're interested in learning about SCOPS, otherwise known as psychological operations. And I am too, because I lived through one in my own family.
Now, let's go ahead and define psychological operations for those who might not have an idea. And this is coming from Chase Hughes on YouTube. A psychological operation, SCOP, aims to influence emotions, motives, and behaviors. It's more than just simple manipulation, though. But you can spot these SCOPs by looking for a deliberate attempts to bypass your critical thinking in favor of exploiting your raw emotions. Key warning signs include fear-mongering, users versus them narratives, tribal language, and rapidly vanishing sensational stories. But there's much more to it, and today we're going to just get right into the weeds.
Hi, I'm Maddie and welcome or welcome back to the Anti-aliination Project. I am somebody who grew up in like I said my parents delusional reality. Looking back, some of my beliefs, most of my beliefs were completely disconnected from reality and my true authentic self, especially my beliefs about my other parent. So my mom manipulated me, went on a campaign to destroy my relationship with my dad because of the fear and anger instilled in me. I rejected him for 20 years. That's one reason why I've spent years now studying psychological manipulation, course of control, family systems, and yes, psychological operations. Because once you've lived through your own version of reality distortion, you tend to become very interested in how humans can come to believe what we believe. That's why I love Chase Hughes and his work specifically on YouTube. He's an expert on psychological operations and I enjoy learning about what he has to say and how to spot psychological operations in particular.
Today's video is one that I have not seen yet from Chase Hughes who are reacting blind and it's called how cults recruit and program people. Now the child psychological experience for 20 years is often referred to a cult of two or cultlike parenting. It is possible for a parent to actually treat their children as cult members and to have their own sort of cult-like dynamic in the family. Studies have actually been done on this and I've reviewed those studies on my YouTube channel. But today, we're going to look at this video and we're going to come at it from multiple different perspectives. But yes, what I went through and parental alienation can be seen as a cult-like dynamic between a parent and their child.
How people get talked into joining a cult. If you think that cult members are desperate or weak, you are easier to recruit into a cult than you think. Because just that little belief that you are immune is the first thing that starts preventing you from having your guard up. So cults recruit people who are functional and thoughtful and curious and even intelligent.
>> And with a specific type of cultlike parenting, you have a child with an underdeveloped brain. They are especially vulnerable. Even though they might be intelligent, they are still a child with an underdeveloped brain. And not to mention, in the specific cultlike parenting I'm talking about today, the cult leader is your parent. Children naturally love their parents. It is innate in us to attach to our parents because for tens of thousands of years if children did not strongly attach to their parental figures, they would be eaten by predators in the wild or killed by natural disasters or they would be separated from the tribe and die of starvation. They would not survive. So those genes of those children who did not attach to their parents had been weeded out over many many centuries. Children are wired to attach to their parents. So children are in this case wired to attach to their cult leader. They are at a particular disadvantage. They are unbelievably vulnerable.
>> Good people can get recruited into a cult. But they recruit, cults recruit people who quietly feel like something is missing and feel alone for noticing it. And what's weird is that everybody with an IQ over a hundred feels that way, that there's something missing. And everybody feels like they are the only one feeling it. This is a universal trait that most people just may not be willing to admit.
the first feelings that someone gets as they join a cult. And I want you to process what I just said. To get good at influence or persuasion or leadership to make the world a better place, to change the world, you should be thinking in terms of what the other person is going through in their mind instead of what the operator is doing to someone. Please consider that difference of understanding what someone else is going through versus what I am doing to somebody. The beginning when somebody gets talked into joining a cult, this is the moment when nothing really feels dangerous yet in that person's mind. I wouldn't say that this is a formula with steps, but I would say these are the the basic phases that people go through.
Spent some time with quote recruiters and um super interesting people. Number one, let's call it setting. There's a ton of people out there that think that cults start by shifting your beliefs. And that's actually the opposite of what happens. It has nothing to do with your beliefs. It starts with where you are when the conversation takes place. It could be a a retreat, maybe a gym, a volunteer group, some kind of seminar you're going to, a mastermind, maybe it's church, or maybe it's church adjacent, maybe it's an online group or some kind of chat room that feels calmer than the rest of the internet for you. So, these places aren't random. I want to assure you, they're not random. They already filter human behavior for openness.
Okay, starting strong from the beginning. The child in the setting here is at home, mostly at home with their parent. And that is supposed to be a place where the child feels the safest. That is supposed to be a safe haven for the child. So, right off the bat, not only is the child vulnerable because of their underdeveloped brain and because the cult leader is actually their parent whom they love, but also because the setting in which it's taking place is their home where they probably feel the most comfortable or they ought to feel the most comfortable. I'll put it that way.
>> So, we feel more like we can let our armor down. we can be more vulnerable in certain places. So if you choose to be there, your nervous system is already decided at the moment that you walk in. Your nervous system already decides this is safe. This is relevant. This is worth paying attention to. So most people think persuasion happens in words. About 95% does not happen in words.
>> Boom. Very important to pay attention to you guys. Very important to talk about. A lot of people think that manipulating a child to reject their other parent is bad mouthing. I've made videos about this before. I've said it before. I'll say it again. You can alienate a child without a word. You could turn a child against their other parent without using a single word. How the heck would this happen, Madison? You might be wondering. Well, let me give you a good example. So, when I was a little 8-year-old girl, my parents had a tumultuous, to put it lightly, horrific, to put it accurately, marriage downfall. They'd scream, they'd fight. They hated each other. And after their fight, my dad would go off, calm himself down. My mom would come to me and cry. I had been hearing their fighting. I had been witnessing, seeing their fighting. And afterwards, I would hear my mom cry. I would watch her cry. I would hear how scared she seemed to be, how upset she was. And of course, I attributed this to my dad, to my dad's behavior, because in my little 8-year-old mind, my dad was making my mom so upset. My dad was making my mom so sad. Naturally, especially because I was the only girl, only child that was a girl. I had four younger brothers. I began to empathize, have compassion for my mom, pity my mom, and I began to feel angry or resentful toward my dad for hurting my mom so badly.
The exploitation of the child's emotions is so easy to accomplish as a parent, and it's also so incredibly destructive to the child. But if you have an emotionally immature parent or a parent with a personality disorder, as we know, especially by the work of Dr. Childress, people with personality disorders do not have the ability to regulate their own emotions. They do not have the ability to regulate their internal experience. If they're flying off the deep end, if that internal fear of being abandoned or being rejected is triggered, they do not have the ability to calm themselves down. So what do they do? They look outward. They have to find somebody else, some other person outside of them to do the job of regulating them. And in a marriage, they will usually use the spouse to do this. But when you're having a dissolution of a marriage or a divorce, that spouse, that other parent can't do the job of regulating them anymore because they are causing the disregulation. And so that parent often turns to their child and that child becomes the source of regulation for that parent. This is all backwards. Usually as a parent, you regulate your child, not vice versa. But that child becomes what Dr. children's terms a regulatory object for that parent. And now it's that child's job to regulate their parents emotions. Now, I want you to think about and picture what that would be like as a child. You are responsible for keeping your parent calm, sane. If they have a huge amount of anxiety or sadness or anger, it is your responsibility now to bring them back to their baseline. And so every you're going to be what it creates is a hypervigilant child. What it creates is a lot of dysfunction and trauma actually. But you have a child who becomes very hyperaware, hypervigilant. They're in fight orflight mode always and they're always trying to avoid that parent having an extreme emotional response because then it becomes their responsibility and then it's not good. So yes, I agree with what he said there about it's 95% not even using words because once you're in the position of regulating your parents emotions, anything that anyone else does to alter their emotions in a negative way, you become irritated with them. You become kind of resentful of them because it's your responsibility to take care of your parent and the other person is upsetting them. I hope that makes sense.
It is context. Persuasion is always going to be context. And context tells your body how hard it needs to defend you. And in these environments, it it tells you that it doesn't need to defend itself very much. So number two is regulation. This is the first interaction. And the first interaction with a cult recruiter is not persuasive. It is a regulating event where we're regulating something inside of us. Something's being regulated. So, it's small things that happen. It's eye contact that lasts just a little bit longer than you might have expected. Maybe a voice that doesn't rush. It's somebody who doesn't seem to need anything from you at all. Your shoulders drop a little bit. Your breathing slows down. Your internal noise goes quiet a little bit. So, if you've ever had a thought in your head of I don't know why, but I just feel calm around this person. That wasn't you getting some kind of intuition. That was your body deciding the person doesn't feel like a threat. And I'm not saying that this means that you're being manipulated. It means that you're with a good communicator. Some of the later stuff might mean manipulation, but once your body decides that, your mind stops asking certain questions. And I want to say that again. The moment that your body decides that something feels safe, your mind will stop asking questions.
>> Well, I think it goes without saying that you you naturally trust your parent as a child. And that's why most children who go through this dynamic do not even question if they're being told lies, if they're being made to believe a false allegation. They just don't even question it because how could your parent or why would your parent lie to you about something so heinous? For instance, my mom made me believe my dad was a monster that he couldn't feel empathy. Why would she make me believe that if it weren't true? Another thing is that they bring in a lot of other people outside of themselves to enforce to enforce the narrative. Family, friends, teachers, doctors, priests, the list goes on. And so when you have a whole community of people backing them up and enforcing these beliefs, it becomes even more uh difficult to question them. And of course, you feel comfortable or you should feel comfortable with your parent. So your mind will stop asking questions or it never even gets to the point of asking them in the first place.
>> Certain types of questions There's all this talk on the internet about lovebombing and like how cults do this love bombing. They're not flattering you at this stage. They're not selling you on some idea. They're recognizing something that you have never really said out loud. They're going to say, "I can tell you don't think like most people. You seem like a person who's always noticed patterns that other people miss. you've probably felt out of place in more than one situation in your life. So the uncomfortable part about this is even when you know that sentence could apply to other people, even when you know that you know that it's kind of a cold breeding sentence, it still lands and it still has an effect on you because being fully seen and not judged is more addictive than being right. Your brain is not asking the question, is this accurate? What your brain is really asking is do I want this to be true? That's the most important distinction that you could ever teach your children is the difference between your brain asking is something accurate or does the brain want this to be true. And the moment somebody touches something that you already believed about yourself, your brain quietly marks that person or puts a little tag on that person as somebody that's very safe to listen to, which means that your your defense systems don't come up automatically by default.
So number four, weaponized identity. And you see this all over the internet, too, even with these cult experts that they're going to present you a villain. We hate these people. These people are disgusting.
>> The other parent clearly >> all this that's that's not true. No cult in the world starts with a villain, but it does start with a type a type of person. So they get you to agree that there's another type of person and then there's you. They might say most people don't get this. Most people are asleep at the wheel. They
>> Yes. Yes. Yes. In my particular case, I was the only child out of five of us kids who was manipulated to reject my dad. All my other brothers were allowed to have a relationship with him. And I did question that. I would ask my mom like why the boys go with dad if he is so bad and dangerous. It was always this question I had that didn't make sense. But she would tell me, well, your brothers are not as intuitive as you. your brothers aren't as perceptive as you, not as intelligent as you, playing to my ego. Or she would say, "The boys are male and so they put your dad on a pedestal and they refuse to acknowledge anything bad about him because they want to be just like him." She would come up with these ways to make me feel different, to make me feel unique and superior. And in that way, it's exactly what cult what these cult leaders do. Apparently,
>> sleep through their life. Most people trade comfort for certainty. Most people live on the surface. Th I mean, those are those are all true statements. That's not me manipulating you. That's me saying things that you I know you're going to agree with because there's people out there. But I want you to notice what just happened. Nobody told you what to believe. What I told you with those statements is who you are not. And you don't want to be most people.
It's also creepy because parents, more than any other relationship, I think as a parent, you know your child really well or at least you understand what they want, what they value, what they love, what they fear. You have all of this knowledge about your child um that you can exploit. If you are a pathological parent, it's really sick. Whereas a cult leader with the average cult member they're bringing in, they don't have quite that that that huge amount of knowledge that a child of a child um that a parent would have.
>> Agreement forms without any argument and the alignment happens without any decision. You're not pushing away from somebody. You're just feeling yourself. You're feeling this feeling inside yourself step to the side. This this little protective part of you is just kind of stepping over. So if all I do is to get you and me to agree to have a common type of person that we are not that person, I automatically gain instant alignment without you ever realizing that it's happening.
So number five is cognitive dissonance invitation. They're not inviting you to some big meeting and saying that we're going to burn some incense and do some crazy. They're just implying something. They're going to say that. They're going to say, "This isn't for most people. Not everybody makes it to this phase. Some people just aren't built for this kind of thing." And suddenly the question isn't, "Do I want to do this?" It's what does it say about me if I walk away now? My identity is being threatened. We we see all the sales training stuff on the internet about scarcity. Sail in Sunday, 12 seats left, 12 tickets left, whatever. It it's effective, but scarcity doesn't pull you forward. Identity is what pulls you forward.
>> Okay. So, one thing that comes to mind for me in this family dynamic is, you know, one of the clear signs of an alienated kid is they're made to believe they have one good parent and one bad parent. And you don't want to be like your bad parent. That is made clear to you. I think that any kid wants to be good. They want to be loved and accepted by their parents and they don't want to be bad. And so their identity becomes I want to be more like my good parent and less like my bad parent. And this is definitely exploited by the pathogenic parent. That's I think maybe part of how they get them to reject the bad parent. It's also used as a punishment. Believe it or not, I have interviewed dozens of survivors of this family dynamic now. And almost all of them across the board, myself included, have had the similar experience of when we did something or said something that was unfavorable to our pathological parent, they would either call us by our quote unquote bad parents' name or say something to the effect of, "Okay, you're acting just like your father. You're acting just like your mother." They would make us think, "Okay, they see resemblance of our bad parent in me right now when I'm doing this thing." And so they would make us believe our parent was bad and then relate us to our parent, our bad parent, when we were doing things that they did not approve of. Child abuse. Yes. Clear as day.
And I think this is a good place, a good and I just want to keep it light-hearted a little bit. If you can't laugh at yourself after trauma and abuse, you just might cry and I'd rather laugh. So, I always just want to play a few reels that I think really summarize and get at the heart of what it's like to go through this. And these just make me laugh so hard. I thought someone out there might appreciate the humor, too. To believe in yourself the way that your parents truly believe they did the best that they could. Yeah. I need you to believe in yourself with that much delusion. [ __ ] insane. My mom pulls the Do you know what I mean? End of story.
>> Yeah, I know what I mean. Yeah.
>> Okay, two more. This is so funny.
>> More people knew my mother so they could understand how well I'm actually doing given the circumstances.
>> I wish so too, Alyssa Hart. I wish so too. They would think, "Oh my god, you're thriving." reconnecting with nature after talking to my mom because literally WTF was that you know the expression like touching grass that's what I have to do after I have any interaction with my mom I have to go I have to go in nature and touch grass and ground myself in reality of the world okay back to the video I think it's about halfway over
>> and then comes number six which is the ask. And this is the most dangerous moment of the entire process, the ask right here. And this is where the person will ask them, can you show me that thing that you mentioned earlier? What's that really about? Can you send me that? So the question feels super friendly, interested, and and genuinely curious about something you're interested in or something you're smart about. It's voluntary. It it's feels harmless. But the moment that you ask, something flips. person's asking the recruiter. So now you're no longer evaluating, you're participating. Your brain now automatically labels the next step as self-directed that it came from within you.
>> So important. And if you're familiar with the family dynamic I'm talking about, you probably know or have heard of something that people call the independent thinker phenomenon. I don't like the term independent thinker phenomenon. I really don't. But it's basically referring to the fact that the parent gets the child to believe all their beliefs are their own idea. This is so important because if the child doesn't believe their beliefs are their own idea, they will know they're been they're being manipulated. And if somebody asks the child, hey, has your mom said anything bad about your dad? Or hey, has your dad made you mad at your mom? If they don't believe it's their own idea, they might, you know, think, hm, I wonder if they have. Have they? No. Okay. Especially if you have a parent who's abusive and smart. That was my situation with my mom. She's very highly intelligent. And she would say, you know, I'm worried one day that you're going to blame me for your relationship with your dad. Here I am as a little kid. I would respond to make her feel better as her regulatory object. No, mom. Of course, I won't. These are all my decisions, all my beliefs. I'm mature enough and old enough to be able to see through, Dad. I'm not going to blame you. This is all my decision. What did that accomplish? By expressing that fear a little bit to me and having me reassure her, no, these are all my beliefs, all my decisions, she was actually getting me to walk through the script that I would relay to anyone who might ask me questions or prod the narrative. And so when my dad did ask me, "Hey, what's going on? has anyone said anything bad about me to you? I would say no. No. This is this is all my beliefs. This is my decision to not go with you because those sentences and that thought process had already been mapped out in my brain ahead of time. It's kind of diabolical.
>> All humans protects the paths that they believe they chose themselves. So from this point on, there's no more recruiting happening. They're getting you to a point where you're essentially doing something that I would I would just call self-investing. So you're doubling down on something that you've agreed to yourself, who you are.
In number seven, we have definitions. And in the definitions part, beliefs don't get attacked. The cult wants you to outgrow one or two beliefs. So the old world that you lived in starts feeling a little bit clumsy. Language feels cleaner when you're here in this cult. Sharper. It's more honest. The old world starts to sound dull and and boring. They have language that makes your regular life sound childish. So cults are not just like deleting your reality. All they're really doing is relabeling, renaming, and redefining all of that stuff. So if I can shift language, if a cult can shift language, the thinking follows automatically. And this is what's happening on a national scale for most of us. And I want this to be a huge warning that you think this is a video about somebody joining some cult somewhere in in San Bernardino. This is national and you don't notice this happening. You notice that some thoughts feel easier than others. And that's the trick. They're easier to accept, easier to adopt, easier to compare to the world around you.
>> I have a lot of thoughts on this point. Language. Let's talk about language. So, it's very common for children who've been manipulated to reject their parent believing it's all their own beliefs and decisions to start referring to their parent by either their parents first name. So, they're distancing themselves psychologically from that parent, calling them Fred or Mary, whatever it is, calling them by their first name, or even going so far as to call their parent something even more degrading like sperm donor, egg donor, whatever it might be. They might refuse to acknowledge the parent with a title at all. And this is an attempt at using language to reject them further, to psychologically distance themselves from any association they have with that parent. And they may or may not choose to replace or attempt, you can't replace a parent, but they attempt to replace the parent they're rejecting with a stepparent. Very common. They might begin calling their stepmom mom, their stepdad dad. This is very clear um example of how the language shifts in this cultlike parenting dynamic. Another thing you might notice when it comes to language in this cultlike parenting dynamic is the use of a lot of therapeutic verbiage in particular phrases, terms, even phenomenon that are not age appropriate for your child to know. I for instance was told my dad had narcissistic personality disorder. And so from the age of eight or nine onward in my head my dad was a narcissist. I knew the terms narcissist, gaslighting, um a whole bunch of other terms too that were not age appropriate for a 9 10 11 12year-old to know. And yet I did. And that is not those are not natural words for a nine-year-old to have in their vocabulary. It is a sign that language is coming from outside of them.
>> Which brings us to number eight, which is isolation. Nobody's going to tell you to cut people off. What they're going to do is prepare you for what other people are going to say. When you go back into your life, your family's not going to understand. Your wife, your husband's, they're not going to understand. They're gonna try to pull you back. It's very seductive. They're afraid. They're stuck in the old system. And this isn't isolation yet, but it's preemptive invalidation. So, when those people eventually question you, the spouse, the co-workers, the friends that you hang out with, their concern feels predictable and you feel clever for having predicted it. All of this makes it super easy to stop taking the people in your life seriously.
And then we get to number nine, weaponize morality. So eventually you're getting
>> I'm nodding because I already have things coming to my brain before he even describes what weaponized morality is. See my mom and many parents who do this, most parents who do this, there's a schema that they usually it comes from their own childhood trauma and they imprint it on their current situation. Watch my videos by Dr. Childris to understand more about this and how it happens crossgenerationally. But you have a parent who truly believes they are a protective parent and that their other parent, the co-parent is suddenly a monster. So you have a protective parent and then you have the abusive parent and then the child becomes the victimized child. So the role of the protective parent of course is to protect the child from the other parent. Now as that child, okay, I was made to believe my dad was bad. My dad was a really bad guy. And if I were to go with my dad, that would be putting a stamp of approval on abuse, on injustice, on poor behavior, on accepting poor behavior. That would be putting a stamp of abuse on how he's allegedly treated my mom so poorly. And so to not go with my dad would mean the opposite. It would mean I'm standing up for justice. I'm standing up for what's good. I'm doing the right thing. And so in my mind, everything was upside down. I was so obviously manipulated and exploited, too. My emotions were obviously exploited. I got to the point where I believed I was doing the right thing. And as far as I know, that is uh that is um what he just said, weaponized morality.
pulled into a cult and it stops being interesting and it starts being super important. All the stuff we're talking about matters. This helps people. This is so so much bigger than personal preference. This is about truth.
>> And I've always been the type of kid who wanted to know the truth, who wants to stick up for people who are being hurt. I've always been this way. I've just always wanted to stand up for justice, wanted to know the truth, do the right thing. And that quality that a character trait in me was clearly exploited. And I think that's what he is kind of talking about right now.
>> And the moment that you get morality to enter the room, logic loses authority. And and disagreement when we used to like I would I'm going to disagree with an idea because that felt intellectual to us. Now disagreement feels unethical. So doubt starts to feel selfish. If you're doubting the idea, you must be a selfish posos. Questioning what somebody's saying starts to feel like you're betraying the cult. That's the moment that leaving the cult becomes super hard. There's a leader. There's doctrine you have to follow. You're isolating yourself.
And number 10 is the commitment. And in sales, this is called the close. No one ever says the word join. They say that you're one of us now. You finally get it. You've done the work faster than everybody else. All those sentences, they're not very dramatic, but they all all of them sound like a verdict. Like you the judgment's being passed in a positive way. Cuz now leaving the cult, if I want to like stand up and leave the cult, it doesn't feel like I'm changing my mind. It feels like I'm betraying who I have become. And it feels like you're betraying your parent. If you're bought into these beliefs, you truly believe that you're once loving parent is now bad, a monster, hurtful, etc., then to go with them, to have a relationship with them cannot be good, right? You're hurting your other parent if you do that. You're abandoning your own values to stand up to injustice and to seek truth. You're abandoning your own goal of being a good person then, right?
>> And this is the biggest piece. And if you look at a narcissistic relationship goes through this entire exact process pretty much verbatim with a spouse, it's a cult of two. Well, it's a cult with one member.
>> Wow. I'm so glad he's talking about this cuz this is what this is. And the abuse I live through is a form of narcissistic abuse. And I hope he mentions that it can also be not just a romantic relationship but a parent child relationship which I think is even more destructive because your brain is developing and the child is way more vulnerable than a grown adult is.
>> And then we get to number 11 is the social coffin. They ask you to do one small thing. You've been through so much. You've been through all these things. We've talked about aliens and all this other that we talk about. The only thing I want you to do is share this. What I want you to do is explain this to somebody and there's somebody here that's brand new and you're senior to them now. So, what I want you to do is correct their misunderstanding that they have about this and I want you to defend it. This is the real trap. This is the fastest way to believe something is to explain it out loud. That is uh very weird because I was always taught in school and I put this to practice is that that the quickest way to understand something whether it's in math or physics or biology or anything is to teach it to someone else. And that's literally what I believed. And so I would do that like I would write it out and like teach other people and I would learn it better. I would understand it better. I would get better at whatever subject it was in school. So, that's kind of crazy. Kind of crazy.
Things that come to mind for me here are like a sibling being recruiting their other siblings, maybe. Or your parent asking you to snoop around at your quote unquote bad parents house and see if you can find evidence that they're having an affair, for example. That's something my mom asked me to do. It could be anything, anything at all like that. Ask your father about this. Ask your mother about this when they're in a good mood. Teaching the child to manipulate.
>> The fastest way to believe something is to explain it out loud. Your mouth convinces your brain more efficiently than evidence. So once you've defended something, you do not want to be wrong anymore.
>> Yes. And >> that is so on point because I've often said I think one of the biggest hurdles for grown adults to realize that they have been living in the parents delusion to realize they've been rejecting a parent who loves them who does not deserve to be rejected. I think one of the biggest obstacles in figuring all this out is simply one's pride. And I say that with the lived experience of having that. Okay. So I had to put my pride aside completely in order to even question whether my mom may have been wrong about my dad. That's how it started. Maybe she could have been a little bit wrong. Maybe she could have exaggerated a little bit. And then it went from that to realizing, oh my god, she was wrong about most everything. She made me believe lies, false allegations. She even involved the police, the law enforcement, all my friends, family, my teachers, my doctor, everyone. She involved everyone. It was a scop. I lived through crazy scop. It was a delusion. And I learned over a period of years, you know, just how lied to and how manipulated I had been. But it started with a seed of doubt. And that seed of doubt never would have sprouted and grown if I hadn't been able to put my ego aside. Put my pride aside and consider maybe I have gotten things wrong. That was really hard to do because I had made so many decisions over the course of 20 years that if I were not coming from the truth with my beliefs, if I had been coming with false beliefs, making those decisions, oh my god, I have hurt my dad so badly. Not only that, oh my god, I have lost out on so many things and so much time I could have had with my dad. And then also, oh my god, my mom caused the biggest pain in my life and then pretended to comfort me, then pretended to protect me from him when I didn't need protection at all. I just needed to be able to love both parents. So there are so many levels to unravel. So much grief, sadness, shame, guilt, anger, every emotion you could think of. And to get to that point, you have to be willing to admit you were wrong. even if you were even though you were manipulated to admit that you were wrong that you have made tons of decisions and you have lived a life in accordance with values and beliefs that were never yours and that is so hard to do.
>> Then we get to step 12 is called sunk social cost. So the final lock and people are going to say okay so Chase is talking about the final step this is where I believe something this is where my beliefs are shifting the final lock is in cost and it's not money first the cost is consistency or your pride the story that you've already told other people about who you are as a person walking away now is not just going to make you wrong or whatever they want to call you. Walking away is going to mean that you have to admit that you carried something false long enough for it to cost you something totally real. So most people don't leave after that. This is because they're cornered. They're painted into a corner by their past certainty.
>> Yeah.
>> And let me wrap with this.
>> There's a part here that nobody likes. If at any point you thought, "Yeah, but I would see all this coming." That's the hook. And that should be a warning to you. There's not a cult out there that's going to be out there stealing your freedom from you. There's no cult in the world that wants to steal your freedom. They all want you to feel stupid for wanting it back. That's the cult. What greater social cost do you have when leaving the cultlike dynamic with your parent might mean losing a relationship with a parent you thought loved you all along. Might mean losing a relationship with both parents because at that point you don't know if you're going to be able to reconnect with a parent you've rejected. might mean losing extended family members. It's going to mean a lot of grief, not to mention a whole lot of healing work and almost rebuilding your identity. I know this is really dark and deep stuff, but I just wanted to make this video because I think it's so important to realize that cults don't have to be scary and outside in the world apart from us. Sometimes they are in our own households, sometimes our own families. And I think those are the most destructive and the most difficult cults to leave. If anything in this video was insightful or helpful to you, please help me by liking the video, leaving a comment, even just an emoji, and subscribing to my channel to tell YouTube this matters. I appreciate you being here, and I'll see you next time. Bye.