Band on the Run : I think that the title for this thread is most appropriate, I am explaining cult indoctrination from a TA perspective, however the title will change meaning, you see a child denotes that it has physical parents but as well the child could acquire an invisible parent as substitute.
TA is all about understanding ego states, transactions, games, scripts and strokes but I am focused on cults so in that regard I need to explain what TA is before we delve into cults, but not everything about TA because some parts are irrelevant to the topic being discussed.
TA isn't the only thing that appeals to me, anything that can help me understand myself and others helps, I am currently doing CBT and halfway through reading Working With Emotional Intelligence. But in the context of this thread, the topic, TA is my most favourite, you will find many aspects of TA in harmony with other psychological perspectives (psychoanalysis, cognitive, humanistic, behavioural, positive, etc.) and it was the easiest for me to understand and apply in real life. Now this is just my opinion, what works best for me and not for someone else.
Let’s take for example Hassan on mind control in which he wrote that our approach to those in the cult are important, we do not want to turn on their cult mentality so our approach to them is important, he then goes on explaining the importance of rapport and timing, which I totally agree with. This is completely sound with TA, cult mentality is the Parent ego state, but the only difference is that we can understand why by imagining the transactions between person A and person B ego states, not only that but in real time, I have to make sure that our transactions are maintained between Adult to Adult, but as well cognitive dissonance can be applied to the ego states. Furthermore, knowing that we can relate to them and since we understand their past and present TA becomes a very powerful tool that can almost be used to predict what will occur during transactions.
And just so we are clear, I am not implying that TA is everything just as Combatting Cult Mind Control is all I need to read and understand. No, not the way I see it, just as psychology does not have a paradigm like biology, chemistry and physics, but rather perspectives, so to me it is beneficial to understand many aspects of psychology and apply what I think is best for a situation.
The purpose to understand indoctrination is that it is a component to TA such that we can understand them better, their personality and beliefs/values later in their adult life. It is not really on what we went through (we all have at least a basic understand of hardships of child indoctrination) but how it transcends into our adult life. People flying planes into buildings, avoiding blood transfucions, shunning family members, paying a cult 10% of their salary, it all starts when we are cognitivily dependent of someone, so just like psychoanalysis we need to start from the root.
