A summary for those who are considering intervention:
My availability for interventions as of August 2023 and the foreseeable future is limited due to family concerns. I can work with people who will travel to my area or through using internet meetings.
Intervention using a professional is often a last resort during difficult and painful attempts to open someone’s mind about a disturbing and obsessive social and ideological orientation. So, whoever you look to for help will generally have a huge relational problem to mend prior to any attempt at intervention. Intervention may not be the best solution or a solution at all.
Intervention with a cult specialist is an attempt to educate someone about options and perspectives they may have not considered with the hope that they absorb enough useful information over two or three days (on average) to choose a better way to think and live.
Most people contact me for intervention consultation about someone they know after that person has become deeply enmeshed in a relationship or group with cult-like features that may include deceptive and manipulative group or church influence, gaslighting by a life coach or guru, financial entanglement with a con-artist, or a self-driven obsession with a conspiracy, weird occult path to enlightenment, or online self-improvement scam or with an eccentric YouTube pundit. Other factors might include questionable diet changes, intrusive relational advice, and spurious spiritual awareness rituals that might include drug (entheogen) use or excessive mindfulness and meditation.
The result of harmful cult-like behavior can be summed up as personal, social, emotional, and intellectual constriction that leads to psychological closure toward healthy and useful outside influences.
In brief, a rigid or facile us versus them posture arises.
Cult-like behavior in this context of a tendency to harm means excessive devotion to a special idea, path, object, group, or person that appears spurious, harmful, or dangerous to reliable and informed observers.
Cult behavior in some contexts can be fulfilling, stabilizing, and socially acceptable. In those cases, devotion to a special idea, path, person, object, or group does not result in psychological closure.
If that sounds like a contradiction to you, you will need to do more research into what a cult actually is. Simplistic definitions are generally not useful and can be misleading.
Cult behavior like most any behavior exists on an influence and behavioral continuum of benefit to harm. For example, just because someone chooses to become a Buddhist after growing up in a Christian or Jewish family does not mean they are in a bad cult.
I do not take cases to bring someone back to a family religion or for their spiritual “salvation.”
Assessing where someone is on that continuum or spectrum of harm and what if anything can be done about it is the job of the cult specialist you will hire.
Hiring anyone in this field, a field that is basically unregulated and unlicensed, places a burden on the client, so buyer beware: Do your homework. Even credentialed interventionists, therapists, and “experts” may not suit your specific needs.
Fees for consultations among “cult intervention experts” or exit counselors by any other name can vary widely. Keep in mind that someone like me who has been at this for four decades, since 1980, has valuable information and skill. Sliding scales depend on whom you consult.
The video on the right, “How to get someone out of a cult” has a misleading title that I correct during the interview. Interventionists do not “get someone out” of anything. The rigorous educational and discursive process of intervention or “exit counseling” provides a means and reasons for a person to choose out of the controlling group or abusive relationship.
Please email me for first contact. I will charge for all audio and video contacts as well as in person meetings at agreed upon rates.
jszimhart@gmail.com
If you are interested in consultation regarding personal matters, recovery, general information, or interviews, please email me at jszimhart@gmail.com
Three short videos you can view to familiarize with my work:
The first is a four-minute interview with me done by a New York journalist for the Berks Story Project at my studio in the Goggleworks Art Center in Reading, PA.
The second is one of my YouTube channel series of over 70 videos.
The third is by Inside Edition for its online outlet features one of my interventions in Australia.
Why consult with me or hire me?
This is an expansion of my background mentioned in “About me” on the menu.
You will notice that I am not credentialed as a counselor or therapist. When I began helping people to choose out of cults at the end of 1980 with some success, I had recently emerged from nearly two years of participation in a major New Age cult. Since then, I have formally assisted in over 500 interventions internationally with most of those ending with the cult member choosing to defect from the group. Perhaps 40% resisted the intervention and remained in their respective groups.
My intervention career slacked off considerably after 1998 when I took a job at a psychiatric emergency hospital where I eventually worked as a crisis caseworker for 23 years in the intake department. That job required a variety of tasks and skills including management of unruly patients, taking suicide hotline calls, processing voluntary and involuntary clients for admission or referral elsewhere, advising police departments and emergency room personnel, insurance precertification, and training new employees. The job was very demanding and at time dangerous.
For one year in 2000, I was a Primary Therapist for a recovery house for men with substance abuse histories. I was an outlier in that field as I was the only therapist in that company with no history of an addiction. My experience with cults offered a unique approach to recovery. Before I left the job for another that paid better, the company offered me a position as director.
During 1976, I taught art courses inside the maximum-security New Mexico State Penitentiary.
In the early 1970s, I was employed as a therapeutic Activities Worker at a large asylum (Pennhurst) for intellectually disabled adults.
I have lectured about the cult problem for police departments, Native American tribes, churches, colleges, high schools, business clubs, Freemasons, Mensa conferences, Unitarians, anti-cult conferences, and sociology of religion conferences for academics.
Cults come in thousands of shapes and have a variety of purposes from religious, political, scientific, athletic, sexual, therapeutic, financial, social, self-improvement, philosophical, liberal, conservative, criminal, or merely ridiculous.
I have become familiar with hundreds of types of cults that range from very simple premises to demanding intellectual programs. Cult members can commonly have high IQs and higher educations, depending on the group agenda. For example, I conducted an intervention with a young man in a cult of twenty-five medical students led by a professor who used the manipulative Fourth Way teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff. I have also intervened to help a young woman choose out of a neo-Nazi militia commune that eschewed higher education of any kind.
In 2016, the International Cultic Studies Association gave me a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the many people I have helped and for my contributions to society to recognize the dangers of deceptive and harmful cults.
What this award means is that since 1980, I participated in many hundreds of interventions and have helped thousands of individuals and groups through personal contact, Internet, phone calls, lectures, litigations, letters, coincidences, YouTube and Podcast appearances, television shows, and countless hours over the past four decades of volunteering to write book reviews and articles and assist ex-cult members in chat rooms. I will not detail all the harassment from cults and cult members I have endured along with my colleagues in the field.
The cult I was most involved with for nearly two years before self-defecting in 1980, Summit Lighthouse or Church Universal and Triumphant, combined a variety of religions and occult practices including fundamentalist Christianity, ultra-conservative politics, Theosophy and New Thought religions, Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, secret approaches similar to Freemasonry, the power of magic words through excessive chanting, spiritual and personal development though vegetarian diet, sacred colors and music, contact with ascended masters and angels, and cult-like social pressure to conform and donate. As a result of my extensive efforts to sort through all that to decide what was real, what was historical, and what makes any religion healthy or not, I developed a vast, workable knowledge of cults and cult behavior.
One of my many YouTube appearances. This one is a discussion with ex-scientologist, Chris Shelton on his Sensibly Speaking podcast.