In a cult, he explained, you are recruited through deception. The word "recruited" is vital. Most people do not join cults. They are targeted and recruited by members. As Amway distributors, we had been instructed to join any activity where we could meet and recruit new distributors. These people thought they were just meeting a nice couple with whom they would want to become friends. All the time, we were developing a relationship and gathering information to recruit them.

Few would get involved in a cult or cult activity if made aware of the ultimate purpose of their involvement. This was usually handled by having different tiers of knowledge available to members. We would not think of giving Dexter’s tapes to new distributors, because the messages were "too advanced." Similarly, as an active ‘Moonie’ recruiter, Steve would not have exposed new recruits to high-level teachings of Rev. Moon. (Many of his followers believed that he was ten thousand times greater than Jesus Christ and the father of all mankind.) We had both used the identical phrase of ‘you don’t feed steak to a baby’ to justify not revealing all levels of the teachings of our leaders to new recruits.

A technique called ‘love bombing’ normally occurs during the recruitment phase of cult indoctrination. Members of the group edify the recruits with great sincerity by telling them how sharp they are and what potential they have. Notice this is not some miscreant dancing in a sheet on the street that lavishes people with praise. You’d know to stay away from him.

A cult member today is more apt to dress in a suit or in good casual clothing. I had pictured someone in a cult as a weak-minded person, living in a commune, and submitting to a powerful leader. The most successful cult leaders will often be intelligent, very likeable, and have charismatic personalities. My paradigm of destructive mind control or thought reform was something that must have come from a movie in the 1960s. I had pictured Chinese water torture and solitary confinement.

-Amway Crown Ambassador Dexter Yager·

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most important factors for effective thought reform (which is a form of brain washing as recruits are pulled deeper and deeper into the cult) is that the person being reformed must be completely unaware of it. We all have the same knee-jerk reaction and think, "It wouldn’t happen to me, because I am too smart to let that happen."

Being recruited into a cult has a honeymoon phase in which most people feel a great deal of comfort. It seems that you have found new friends that truly understand and appreciate you. Succumbing to a cult is a very, very gradual process. The best way to describe it is the frog in the pot analogy. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out and save itself. The difference between those two temperature environments is blatant. However, if a frog is placed in lukewarm water, it feels good. It feels comfortable. If the temperature is then increased only one degree every few hours, the rising temperate is unnoticed, and eventually the frog will boil to death. This is what happens to people who are unknowingly victimized by destructive mind control. Most distributors will at first vehemently defend Amway and their upline leaders, as they are in the warm water phase and have no idea of what goes on in higher leadership. Most have never been fully exposed to what is revealed in this book.

The belief set, values, and power structure of the cult are slowly woven into the indoctrination process. The leaders are treated with tremendous respect and seem to have an abundance of knowledge. Steve explained, "Cults seem to work very hard to use the credibility of the current celebrities, religious and political leaders of the time." Some are recruited and are active members. Many others are just paid large speaking fees to come to conferences. They knowingly or unknowingly have their credibility used to give validity to the group and increase recruiting. In late 1999, a reporter broke a story that seems to be of relevance to this topic:

Is Bush aware of all of Moon’s activities? Certainly not. I believe he was used, as many were in Amway, to unknowingly lend credibility to something they would not have intentionally. In the cult portion of my research, I discovered that the Unification Church or "Moonies" consider Jerry Falwell to be a good friend of their cause. This was a shock to me. Dexter had brought Jerry Falwell in to speak to his high-level leaders at Go Diamond. I remember one such meeting very clearly. Mr. Falwell spoke of free enterprise and praised Amway and Dexter profusely. We had been taking a lot of flack on the Internet, so he had written the letter below that was posted on the web.

This letter, when read carefully, is out of place. It would be almost impossible for a layman to know that many facts about Amway. This looks like a PR piece that either Dexter’s people or Amway wrote. Perhaps they just collaborated with Mr. Falwell on the letter. An outsider could not have all that information at hand. In any event, Jerry Falwell very clearly put his stamp of approval on both Dexter Yager and the families that own and run Amway.

Research I did in August of 1999 revealed that the Institute for First Amendment Studies, Inc. had made an interesting discovery. The institute reported that, "Significant among Amway religious right donors is millionaire Dexter Yager, an Amway products distributor. Every month, Yager gives a whopping $100,000 to the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia."⁴ As I could not afford to make this kind of contribution, Mr. Falwell may never sign a complimentary letter about me to be posted on the Internet. Is credibility and character truly for sale in America today?

What I would soon discover about Mr. Falwell makes the above revelation seem inconsequential. Upon digging deeply into cult research, I was able to locate quite a few pro-Moonie sites. They take essentially the same conservative political stances that were massaged into the system. Strangely enough, on a page entitled books of interest, I found a list of books that included many of the same books that distributors are force fed in the system. I learned that many of Moon’s followers believe that he is the Messiah and the father of all mankind. I was so numb at this point, it seemed like no other discovery could shock me.

Once again, I was wrong regarding the depths of degradation indulged in by so-called "good people." I came upon a site that shocked me beyond words. Posted on this site, and now in my possession, was a picture of Rev. Moon embracing a smiling Jerry Falwell. The text implored followers to "Choose God’s side and hug Rev. Moon as Rev. Falwell does."⁵ Now why would a Pastor, who publicly claims to follow Jesus as his Savior, be caught on film embracing a wealthy Korean who believes he is the Messiah? Was this a fund-raiser for Liberty University? We have a former President of the United States and one of our nation’s most respected religious leaders allowing their credibility to be used to bolster Amway and Unification Church related entities. Amway and it’s motivational organizations now has the distinguished honor of showing up on cult-awareness sites along with groups of concern like Scientology (that Time Magazine referred to as "The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power")⁶, Heaven’s Gate, Jim Jones and many others.

There were a few more things that shocked me during this discussion. Steve continued my education by explaining that once the cult had control over a member, they may very quickly drain off all the recruit’s financial resources. Additionally, almost all of the member’s time would be dominated by recruitment or fund raising for the group—usually to the point of exhaustion.

Both Steve and I had worked beyond the threshold of exhaustion to the point of hallucinating. He asked what helped me to decide to come out of Amway and when I had begun to think clearly. I told him about the Leeza show and the gentleman from the Heaven’s Gate cult. Steve then said, "That’s Dick Joslyn …He’s a client of mine. Would you like to talk to him?" Steve had counseled Dick after many of his friends had committed suicide at the Heaven’s Gate compound.

I called Dick and introduced myself and was totally overcome with thankfulness as I explained to him the impact that he had on my life. That was an emotional conversation. Steve later explained that, from an insider’s perspective, there was no legitimate reason ever to leave a cult. This explains not only why it is so difficult for members to leave, but also explains why their character is immediately assassinated.

The day had sped by, so we made plans to meet the following morning. I was exhilarated. I felt an incredible sense of relief to know what had really happened to us. For the first time, I began to feel as though I would be able to return from the darkness. I felt normal human emotions for the first time in years.

With new energy and excitement, I went back to my father’s house and told him and his wife Kelly that I was making tremendous progress. The fact that I was seeing a cult exit counselor must have sounded crazy to them, but I had to share this good news. I left early the next morning and returned to Steve’s office in Boston. I stopped and ate at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and savored the food. My senses, which had been completely subdued, seemed to be returning. Even the sky seemed a brighter shade of blue.

At the office, I excitedly told Steve how much better I was feeling. He was very calm about it. He asked many questions that did not challenge me but helped me think through my current belief set(s). He explained that cults often utilize phobia-building techniques to keep their members fearful from ever leaving. We had heard countless horror stories during our Amway years about distributors who had left and then gone totally downhill. After several years, I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated that I believed there was no happiness, success, or any way to fulfill God’s call in my life but to build the Amway business. Additionally, everything that was pro-Amway was of God and anything else was of Satan. Was this type of indoctrination an isolated incident? Certainly not and Amway is very much aware of it. In 1985, Amway The Cult of Free Enterprise was published. This book revealed that the same techniques and deceptions used upon hundreds of thousands of distributors in the 1990s were being utilized as early as the 1980s. The book exposed it on a small scale and stated:

Did Amway knowingly look the other way when a book was published that exposed cult techniques being perpetrated upon Amway’s own loyal distributor force? Were the DeVos and Van Andel families, who owned and managed Amway, aware of these abuses? There appears to be little room for doubt. In 1985, Forbes did an article on Amway that revealed:

How outrageous! "Downplaying" cultism?!!! Isn’t that like downplaying the raping of nuns or the murder of children? This is reprehensible! It appears obvious that this "downplaying" of known cultism never took place. From a liability standpoint, this could be crushing to Amway, as senior management acknowledged "cultism" in Amway; yet the corporation allowed, if not encouraged, the offending distributors to flourish.

Additionally damaging were the comments of Amway-insider Don Gregory in the same article. Don Gregory was Van Andel’s former speechwriter. From his inside perspective he stated, "Recruits are brainwashed into spending a fortune on peripherals while consuming Amway products."⁹

"Brainwashed" seems to be an accurate description. Why would Amway allow this abuse to continue? The answer seems to be quite simple. One of the key cult-like teachings of the motivational organizations (that allegedly control most all of Amway’s volume) is the hyper consumption of Amway or Amway-marketed products.

Cult leaders, Steve explained, may use a technique called planned spontaneity. The leader would gather information about certain followers and then ‘spontaneously’ have a revelation that applies directly to them. This would make him appear to be omnipotent. For a time, we thought that Zack could almost read our minds. In our counseling sessions, he knew almost intuitively what struggles we were having. It was almost scary. He had a deep penetrating gaze, and it looked as if he were peering into your soul at times. Now, I know that he and Kerry communicated by fax, phone, or voice mail before our counseling sessions, so he had tons of information from which he would reveal ‘insights’ as we counseled. We had duplicated this perfectly and had used the same information gathering techniques on some of our leaders, thinking it was helping us to better counsel them. It gave them the mistaken opinion that we had tremendous wisdom for our young age. Realizing what I have done intensifies the shame and guilt I carry.

One key point that Steve covered with me is why people in cults are regarded as fools or weak minded, and why so many leave in silence. He refers to it as the "illusion of choice." In your mind, in the recruitment and indoctrination phase, you feel as if you are making certain choices that will enhance your life. In reality, your paradigms or belief sets have been slowly changed, and you are being led down a specific, pre-ordained path. Distributors have the illusion that they are choosing to get on the programs of tape-of-the-week and book-and-video-of-the-month. They have the illusion that they are choosing to spend a great deal of money and weekends away from their children to invest in themselves. From the moment they were sponsored, their environment and social contacts within the group were shaped and molded to make these "choices" their only option if they truly loved their family and wanted to succeed. When distributors leave the group emotionally and financially broken, they are cast off as weak and become "losers" to those who had allegedly loved them like family when they were buying tapes.

My meeting with Steve was going very well until he asked me one final question. Essentially, he told me that I had both my freedom and my life back and asked what I had to look forward to. With little or no expression, I told him, "nothing." I knew it was illogical, but that was how I felt. He explained that my perception was normal and that former cult members had to go through a grieving process for several reasons.

First, they feel as if they have lost their God-ordained, great commission in life. They seem to feel adrift without this great, driving purpose. Second, they often feel survivor’s guilt, as they think about those they recruited, loved, and left behind. Everything in terms of your thoughts is black and white in a cult. Your life is pre-ordained. There are few real decisions to make. To suddenly become free and stare into the vast expanse of your future is not yet liberating. It is like staring into a deep, bottomless chasm. He warned me that it might be at least a full year before I would begin to feel like myself. I naively thought that he did not know how great I was really feeling at that moment.