By Shivani
Fear shows itself in ways that are covered over by the predominant and conscious thought processing going on in the person, who often, and usually, doesn’t identify the inner “turmoil” as fear. There is not any such recognition allowable in Nxivm. The manipulation of someone’s fearfulness doesn’t include showing the controlled person that he or she is being mentally, emotionally, psychologically controlled. Of course you are not going to be let in on this.
You are not supposed to see or feel that things are really and definitively not okay. The sucker has to demonstrate how workable he or she is. There needs to be manipulatable weaknesses, needinesses to exploit, unawarenesses to play upon, without the “sucker” catching on to the methods used to assert control. This is how abusiveness works to disguise itself.
Keith Raniere, as well as Nancy Salzman, pretended to be the gurus of a new path, cult and dogma with laws of how to be, how to think, how to behave, how to prove yourself, over and over again. You have to show that you are imprisonable, but this is warped into making you think that you have to prove that you are worthy of more immersion, that you are special.
You are worthy of the leader’s attention one moment. The cult minions will all salivate with approval, enthusiasm and hidden jealousy. The very next second, you can be made to feel that you are not doing well enough. Then the leader withholds approval, and the leader’s conditioned cult group will go right along with this “disapproval.” It is a constant jockeying, up and down, up and down, chaotically. People can live in a state of great tension, over whether they are good enough or not. The already unsteadfast psychological balance within can be smashed to smithereens, but this will be defined as part of what you MUST experience. This is crucial to understand.
Allison Mack didn’t know what was happening to her. No one got it, or each one would have left. You can only be caught unawares! Only unawarenesses, personal frailties, dependencies are required to become involved at all in the first place. Once you get hooked, you must conform and perform or you will be rejected, abandoned.
The senses of unworthiness and the fears of abandonment, or rejection, expulsion are played upon like a violin. No one of good conscience would do this garbage to another, but this is how cons work. You are so special to be part of it. But you are not good enough yet! And the trick is that you will never be worthy, regardless of what you give or how long and hard you can be made to keep trying, struggling, proving yourself.
A person who simply wants to grow, to meditate, to enjoy being with friends, but who is able to think things over independently and privately, is unlikely to be caught in the web of crushing and deceptive “interdependence.” The person who is able to sustain independent thought is too difficult to be trapped into the ongoing shitshow, which depends upon the ‘”disciple’s” willingness to believe the constant games, of comparison to others, to possibly being rejected or shamed, no matter how one tries to conform. It will NEVER be good enough. That is a huge part of the entire entrapment. The entire word salad, the whole social dynamic, has to be swallowed and ingested. Then the leaders have you where they really want you, in the first place.
Drip by drip, step by step.
Raniere had the radar to figure out how to deceive and who could be deceived. This very radar was/is built of his own desperation and need to dominate, and to rule sadistically. Yet he knew that he had to gift wrap his intentions, to conceal his own chaos, his intentions to do harm, to be supreme. His sexual habits alone would be a gigantic stop sign to many, many people.
This sexual illness is not so much a debatable topic, vis-a-vis morality versus immorality, as it is an overt manifestation of Raniere’s own pathology. He had to trick people into thinking it was something else, something “spiritually advanced”, innovative, original and necessary.
Allison and others were influenced to think their cult immersion was something precious, with secrets which had to be protected. I pick up how fully Allison was immersed in the delusions of cult “brainwashing.” For me this shows in her posture, her facial expression. To my perception, her cult immersion permeates her through and through. She bought the glitter of the bullshit being delivered as required conditioning; cult inculcation is deliberately designed to make her, or anyone who enters into it, unable to think outside of Raniere’s, or any cult dictator’s, totalitarian CAGE.
She bought that he could cure her neediness, her sense of combined unworthiness plus her imbalanced inferiority/ superiority scale specialness. Whereas actually what she shows, and consistently, is how easy it was to use her and abuse her and to force her to believe this madness was the greatest experience of her life and had become her mission, her sense of selfless. She had to keep following or she would ruin it all, be rejected and become, again and again the object of censure. It is a battle the cult manipulators use constantly.
Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, gurus for many people.
It starts out that you are great and should join in and you’ll become even greater, stronger and most crucially, alone no more, as long as you obey the rules, rules that you don’t know much of anything about at first. First you have to be seduced into membership. Then the real shit can be implemented.
Long term inculcation into cult madness plays heavily upon two essential components. The first is to play upon the person’s (easily identifiable) securities and insecurities. This can be called measuring and the controlling a person’s inner sense of worthiness and unworthiness. The second is the underlying threat of rejection, abandonment, exclusion from the “preciousness” of being included into such a cult’s membership.
Comprehension of this manipulation is likely to spring open the trapdoor. Therefore, the followers must not be given any such opportunity to comprehend the overall structure or its motivations or goals, intentions.
The one who is the mark, the sucker, is caught up in this deliverance of outer and inner tension.
“Am I good enough? Will I ever be good enough ? What can I do to deserve more praise and less blame? How can I prove my worthiness? OMG, what if I get kicked out?”
And concurrently, the same insecurities, the same unworthinesses are turned into a feeding source for how special the sucker, the mark, is and will become. You get to earn that hallucinated specialness if you behave.
Yet you will never be “good” enough. In fact, the leaders view the whole process contemptuously.
So here, emerging from a cult-warp meeting, I see Mack’s egoistic and fabricated self-identity “structure” permeating her every cell and gather many more specific impressions about how far immersed she was, as well as how it was affecting her. As mentioned, Allison would not have understood this consciously. She was already too wrapped up in it.
Maybe she is still. It depends upon what she is thinking, feeling now and how or if she has been able to begin to detach herself from her years of ongoing and encouraged cult dogma and its suppression of her own individuality and conscience.
Mack assumed the posture of the head guard dog, as I see it. Her slaves must appear subservient. Mack must appear as the knowing and the hearty Special One. There is suspiciousness boiling under her devoutness. She has become a rottweiler, unawares.
There is her belief showing (to me) as a patina of self-righteous SEPARATENESS.
”I represent the cult now. I am Keith’s bishop.”
I see how this sense of being special, being in on something which ordinary people can’t know, are not “spiritual” enough to understand had subsumed her.
The cult leader has to engender this illusion of special-ness, of having a mission greater than anything ordinary, and of the need to guard the delusional wonderfulness of it all, even to brand people, to become criminal in behavior, to allow ugliness to feel beautiful and unique, to become addicted to the darkness of falsities.
And if you don’t represent Raniere’s demands well enough, you will be in more and more trouble. No one can win at this game, because your willingness to be dominated, to be controlled is the game’s entire intention. And keeping the game going is the whole goal. The purported “spiritual” or self-help ideals are the very fabric of the lies and deceptions. There is a world of difference between “belief” and experience, but a cult doesn’t want anybody to know that. This is how they get somebody stuck along with them.
