Alienated from her Mother at Age 4, Parental Alienation and Patterns of Cult Mind Control

Over the last four decades of my work with cults and destructive groups, I have seen the almost standard operating procedure for mind-control cults to instruct members to do parental alienation behaviors. For example, if one parent realizes they are in a cult and leaves, if the other parent doesn’t leave with them, they are indoctrinated to remain loyal and keep the children. In destructive groups, like Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses,  the Mormons, Moonies, and many others, the parent still in the cult is ideologically driven to poison the child against the parent who exited. This is known as parental alienation. However, years later I learned that Parental Alienation is a global problem affecting millions of individuals who were never in a formal destructive cult (religious, political, therapy, commercial).