A cult of two – you and the sociopath

Cult leaders are charismatic, charming, egocentric and manipulative, and their key strategy for recruiting followers is love bombing. Does this sound like the sociopath you encountered?

If you’re involved with a sociopath, you may be in a cult of two — you and the sociopath.

At first – love bombing

When you were targeted as the sociopath’s new romantic interest, it’s quite possible that you were showered with more attention, adoration, and perhaps gifts than you’d ever experienced. You may have felt giddy with excitement. You may have felt that you were placed on a pedestal so high that the air around you was thin and you could hardly breathe.

When they’re in full seduction mode, sociopaths want to be with you all the time. If they’re not physically with you, they want to be in constant communication with you. They proclaim their love — quickly, frequently and persistently. Most of us interpret this ceaseless devotion to mean that our new partner is truly smitten. But what you experienced was not love — it was love bombing.

Unlike true love, love bombing is insincere. It is not an expression of your new partner’s deepest feelings; it is a strategy to achieve an objective. The objective is winning you over, so that you will give the sociopath what he or she wants.

Love bombing and cults

The term “love bombing” is believed to have originated in a cult, the Unification Church. The founder, Sun Myung Moon, used the term in a speech back in 1978. He was describing how church members were always smiling because they were so full of love.

Critics of cults, however, say that love bombing is a recruitment technique, a deliberate use of intense attention and affection in an effort to draw new people into the organization.

Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer, an expert on brainwashing and coercive persuasion, Is author of Cults in our midst, an excellent explanation of cults and how people end up in them. She said that love bombing was more effective than the brainwashing techniques used by North Koreans on prisoners of war.

Cult leaders are probably sociopaths

In my opinion, cult leaders are probably sociopaths. They are charismatic, charming, egocentric and manipulative. I doubt that most run-of-the-mill sociopaths have spent time as cult members, yet they all seem to know the love bombing technique. Therefore, I believe that feigning love and affection in order to achieve an objective is instinctive sociopathic behavior.

Read more: Key symptoms of psychopaths

Cult leaders simply take what they do naturally and applied it to hundreds or thousands of recruits. They pour on the charm, or direct subordinates to pour on the charm, until the recruits become followers.

Love bombing is highly conditional. As long as cult members are mesmerized and unquestioning, they are showered with affection. But people who have left cults found that the affection they had previously received vanished — instead, they were shunned and even vilified.

This is also what happens when a romantic partner realizes that he or she is being used, and is no longer willing to be a member of a sociopath’s personal cult. Sociopaths turn on them with stunning ferocity. Maybe this happened to you.

Cult relationships

Dr. Singer defined a cultic relationship as one in which the leader intentionally induces others to become totally or nearly totally dependent on him or her for almost all major life decisions. The leader inculcates in the followers a belief that he or she has some special talent, gift, or knowledge.

Dr. Singer also points out that everyone is susceptible to these master manipulators. In her research, she found that two-thirds of the people who joined cults came from normal, functioning families.

Still, being in a vulnerable state increases risk of getting swept into a cult. What kind of vulnerabilities? Maybe you’re seeking companionship, looking for a sense of meaning in your life, or experiencing a transition or loss. Depression makes you especially vulnerable.

So does being in between important affiliations, according to Dr. Singer. That means you’re not engaged in a meaningful personal relationship, job, educational training program, or some other life involvement.

Predisposition to manipulate

How do people become cult leaders? I believe cult leaders are sociopaths, so they’re born with a predisposition to manipulation, but Dr. Singer never said this in her book. She never suggested that cult leaders are disordered individuals who are exhibiting their natural, disordered behavior.

She does call them “con artists” and says that their prime skills are persuasion and manipulation. She wrote that there is no end to the ways a person can learn to manipulate others, especially if that person has no conscience, feels no guilt over living off the labors and money of others, and is determined to lead. These, of course are the traits of a sociopath.

How do they learn what to do? Dr. Singer believed successful cult leaders monitor, observe, and learn from what they try, and revise their strategies as needed.

Mind control

Another expert, Steve Hassan, who was once in a cult himself, says cult leaders engage in “mind control.” He defines mind control as “any system of influence that disrupts an individual’s authentic identity and replaces it with a false, new one.”

People involved with cults often undergo radical personality changes — that is what Hassan means by the “false identity.” This also happens to people involved with a sociopath. I’ve heard from many family members of victims who say that they don’t recognize the person anymore. You may have felt this about yourself.

So how does this happen?

How cult leaders exert control

Hassan developed model to explain how cult leaders draw people in with the acronym of BITE. He says the sociopath or cult leader exerts control over: Behavior, Information, Thought and Emotion.

Behavioral control means regulating a person’s physical reality: where you live, what you eat, what clothes you wear, what you can do, whether you can work, who you can talk to. This is exactly what many people involved with sociopaths have experienced.

Information control means withholding facts or providing false information — sociopaths are experts at this. The key strategy for information control, by both cult leaders and sociopaths, is deception.

Thought control means indoctrinating the victim to accept a cult’s teachings. In the case of a sociopathic relationship, it could mean convincing you to accept and believe the sociopath’s story.

Emotional control means manipulating and narrowing the range of the victim’s feelings. This is accomplished through instilling fear and guilt, although you usually don’t realize that fear and guilt are being used to control you.

Another method of emotional control, Hassan says, is keeping people off-balance through alternating good and bad treatment. Victims are praised one minute and raged at the next, which fosters dependence and helplessness. Maybe you experienced this.

Falling into a cult of two

A common misconception is that people who fall for cult leaders or con artists are stupid or weak. I know that’s not the case. Many of the people I’ve spoken to who found themselves involved with sociopaths were educated and accomplished.

So how do smart, self-sufficient people fall into these involvements? Sociopaths find out as much as possible about their targets. They ask you questions and listen very carefully to your answers. You may feel like the sociopath is hanging on your every word because he or she is crazy about you. The reality is that the sociopath is looking for the deepest places within you in which to set the hook.

Many ex-cult members describe their experience with a cult as if they had fallen deeply in love, and given every ounce of their love, trust and commitment, only to find out that the person was a false lover and was just using them. The pain and the sense of betrayal are enormous.

That, of course, is the exact experience of a person who has joined a “cult of two” by falling in love with a sociopath. Maybe it happened to you.

Learn more: Self-forgiveness – Understanding and letting go of guilt