Today, as a licensed mental health counselor, he's a role model for cult-member clients. He doesn't so much get people out of cults as give them the tools to get themselves out. He teaches them about mind control. He creates a support team of family and friends. Everyone gets homework. "If the brother of a cult member says his brother tried to recruit him and he replied that the cult member was nuts, I ask him to think about when he last called his brother just to say he missed him and to do that instead."
His own experience and careful observation have taught him that people don't join cults, they are targeted and seduced by well-trained political, religious or other opportunists who know exactly on whom to prey—smart, well-educated youth who have a hard time getting themselves out of stressful, disappointing or depressing situations. They fall victim to those who take them back to the feelings they had as children, when their needs were met by all-knowing adults.
"The recruiters spend time with you, comfort you, take the time to get to know a lot about you even before a face-to-face meeting. You feel wanted, desirable, chosen, special, useful and, most of all, safe. I believed my father was Satan and despaired at the evil place that was the world outside. Cults get you to be confabulators of your own history."
His coaching aims to "get people to start thinking again, comparing what they've been told to reality—to motivate those whose minds have been closed to a painful real world to open their minds again.
Hassan asks that families not wait if they think their young have been swept up in a cult or have begun to pay attention to people who belong to secretive organizations. "These people haven't made an informed choice, they have been recruited and enslaved. The sooner you act, the better."
Seeking the "Gift in the Horror"
Just after dark, on October 28, 1989, Aloha Island Air Flight 1712 took off from Maui with eight athletes from Molokai High School and two of their teachers among the 20 passengers. Minutes later, it crashed near Molokai Island's Halawa Valley. All 20 aboard were killed.
The casualties in the close-knit community included the living as well as the dead. Lloyd Yonemura, for example, believes that athletic director John Ino took the fatal flight so that he wouldn't miss a basketball game with him the next day.
For psychologist Claude Chemtob, the guilt and helplessness that Yonemura experienced—in fact, the entire disaster—became an instruction manual in human resilience, with lessons for coping with mass catastrophes like 9/11. Called to Molokai because of his sensitive handling of an earlier crash, his task was to identify those at high risk for severe psychological trauma and to help others begin the process of recovery.
Born in Egypt to parents made refugees by the Suez Crisis in 1956, Chemtob grew up sensitized to the response of ordinary people to life-threatening situations. These days, he shuttles between Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and Honolulu, where he directs a research laboratory at the Pacific Islands Division of the National Center for PTSD.
Disasters and trauma, whether singular events or chronic threats, open a "window on real human nature, the affiliative part of it," Chemtob finds. They bring out altruism and self-sacrifice, emotions normally hidden in everyday life. No cauldron of unformed instincts erupts—except enormously well-organized impulses. "Our primitive essence is not wild and disorganized, he argues. "We have the capacity to form ties, to help and to connect." Such impulses facilitate recovery.
Chemtob's postdisaster experience has led him to one sure conclusion: It is necessary to help victims find "the gift in the horror." For recovery to begin, people need to exercise the powerful impulse to bond, to touch, to need one another, to create something positive in a nightmare experience—but it can happen only if they are first allowed to get as close to the pain as they wish.
Early in the aftermath of a disaster, he has found, people are grateful to have outside help. But unless the helpers mobilize locals, the community will eventually want to exclude the helpers because of embarrassment and feelings of helplessness and ineffectiveness. "Only they themselves can over time create the gift in the horror, some way of getting an entire community to feel it has come out better for the experience."
The common impulse of outsiders to "protect" parents from seeing their maimed children is misguided, Chemtob says; he particularly remembers one father who sneaked into a morgue to see his daughter. "There is a powerful human need to touch and see the loved one and to know the loved one died," he contends. "Soldiers will sacrifice their own lives to not leave bodies behind; in mass trauma people can't otherwise accept that the experience is real. We need affirmation."
France and Israel each have coordinated emergency response systems: "People come out feeling stronger and more resilient." Americans don't feel more capable, stronger or better organized post-9/11 or post-Katrina, he laments. "We have utterly failed to pay attention to what humans can do at times like this, and to provide support for them to do it."
The Last Gasp for Relationships
He is usually successful, blatantly ill-behaved, hyperjudgmental, focused on her demands for attention and unwilling to talk about problems. In fact, grandiose in beliefs and pronouncements, he looks down his nose at her "neediness" and brings his outside-the-world, above-the-rules stance home.
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