Shock Study: Psychologists (+Far Left) Turn Teens Against Parents (& Destroy Their Mental Health)

This episode critically examines the impact of modern psychological practices, particularly dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), on the mental health and familial relationships of teenagers.

1. DBT and similar psychological interventions may worsen mental health symptoms rather than alleviate them.
2. These therapeutic practices can damage crucial family relationships, particularly between teenagers and their mothers.
3. Modern psychological practices often serve ideological agendas, pushing individuals away from their traditional support systems.
4. The episode underscores the importance of skepticism towards the current psychological and therapeutic methods.
5. It calls for a reassessment of how therapy and psychology are taught and practiced, suggesting they have strayed from their beneficial roots.

1: Introduction

Malcolm and Simone Collins introduce the episode’s controversial topic and discuss the unexpected outcomes of the DBT study. Malcolm Collins: "The main findings, DBT intervention did not improve outcomes. Significant deteriorations were observed."

2: The Cult of Therapy

Discussion on how therapy culture resembles cult tactics by alienating youth from their families. Simone Collins: "It's a very effective cult tactic. Pretty much all cults do this."

3: The Statistics

Revelation of startling statistics regarding youth mental health and the alleged failure of school systems to address these issues effectively. Malcolm Collins: "We did another episode recently showing that one in ten kids in school right now has thought about unaliving themselves this past year."

4: Critique of Modern Psychology

A critique of how modern psychology is more aligned with cult-like practices than traditional therapeutic principles. Malcolm Collins: "Modern psychology has become more like a cult."

5: Conclusion and Solutions

The hosts discuss alternative approaches to mental health that do not rely on mainstream psychological methods. Simone Collins: "If you stop the therapy, you can get better."

1. Be critical of therapy: Question and research the therapeutic approaches suggested for you or your children.
2. Strengthen family ties: Work on maintaining and strengthening your family relationships as a primary support network.
3. Seek multiple opinions: Before committing to a psychological treatment, consider obtaining multiple professional opinions.
4. Focus on results: Opt for therapies that are outcome-oriented rather than those that encourage rumination.
5. Educate yourself on therapy: Understand the underlying philosophies of the therapies being offered.

In this eye-opening video, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the controversial world of modern therapy, particularly focusing on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and its impact on teenagers. They discuss a recent study revealing the negative effects of DBT interventions on adolescents, including worsened depressive symptoms and strained parent-child relationships. The couple explores how therapy culture has evolved into a cult-like system, drawing parallels with historical cult tactics and modern urban monoculture. They also touch on the dangers of over-medicalizing normal human emotions and the importance of critical thinking when approaching mental health treatments. This in-depth analysis offers a thought-provoking look at the current state of mental health care for young people and suggests alternative approaches to emotional well-being.

People

Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins, Peggy, Hank

Content Warnings:

Discussion of mental health deterioration and therapy culture criticisms

Malcolm Collins
The main findings, DBT intervention did not improve outcomes. Significant deteriorations were observed across outcomes immediately. Largest deteriorations were seen in depressive symptoms. And if you really need the help, it makes things even worse. Teen participants continue to report significantly poorer quality of parent child relationships, specifically mother relationships.

Simone Collins
And I think that comes down to. To the way in which this kind of behavior can irreparably recontextualize the way that you see your relationship. And I think it's really hard to fix that damage. And it's a very effective cult tactic. Pretty much all cults do this.

Malcolm Collins
They try to convince you that your primary support network is being abusive to you. And your primary support network is usually your parents or your birth culture. And you are of high intellect, Peggy, no matter what you've been told by your husband. Mm. Your father.

Peggy
Not really mother. How did you know? Because we love you. This ultra urban monoculture is what we historically would have recognized as a cult. Excuse me.

Hank
Are y'all with the cult? We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes love. Yeah, this is it. It didn't used to be like this.

Malcolm Collins
Like, I was in the thing in high school. I supported it in high school. It has been taken over by a cult. The cloop that is the holy guide to living pure. This will help explain.

Peggy
First.

Malcolm Collins
Her name's Lorraine, too. We're all Lorraine. And you will be Todd, a name chosen especially for you. Oh, yeah. An oppressed minority.

Peggy
You're a cult.

Hank
Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone. You sent a study to me that absolutely shocked me, and I really want to go over the results of it, because I think it is terrifying, fascinating. Disturbing, but also pretty definitive proof of your claim that one of the primary means by which the urban monoculture spreads is through therapy culture, and that it uses therapy culture primarily to alienate young people from their support network. So let's dive into it, actually, and leading to these absolutely horrible.

Malcolm Collins
We did another episode recently showing that one in ten kids in school right now has thought about unaliving themselves this past year. Like, that is an insane statistic. The percent that made a plan to analyze themselves, 24% among young women, 12% among young men. The ones who seriously considered attempting it. 30%, young women, 14% young men.

The feeling, persistent sadness. 57% of young women, 29% of young men. So what is happening in schools right now is not working. And a big part of this is the infiltration of. As I have always said, modern psychology has become more like a cult.

What you get if you go into a modern psychologist today is much closer to what Scientology was doing with people in the nineties than what would happen if you saw a psychologist in the nineties. And I'm not saying all psychologists fall into this, but the ones that are influencing the policy, what's happening to kids are. And we can see this in the study data. So what was the name of the study against Simone? I've got all that information on it.

Simone Collins
I just forgot to. The study is called investigating the efficacy of a dialectical behavior therapy based universal intervention on adolescent social and emotional wellbeing outcomes. That's a mouthful. But they're basically like, does DBT help teens? That's what they're trying to find out here.

Malcolm Collins
So, this is a AI summary of what the study ended up showing and the way the study was constructed, which I'm guessing is probably what you were gonna read. AI explains it in plainer English, how it is with these academic studies. They, like, decide to make them harder. To understand how they buried the lead, was the title of this study, because the results are shocking. It could be one of those instances in which they primarily did this research to try to show how good and effective DBT was.

Simone Collins
And then it turned out to really hurt, so they had to obfuscate things in the wording just so that the people who funded it didn't get super offended and never fund them again. I think that's more probably what's going on here. Yeah. So, study design and participants, it was a non randomized controlled trial, which is pretty good. It had over 1000 participants, pretty well split on gender.

Malcolm Collins
The intervention group had 563 participants and eight sessions of a wise teens program. We'll be talking about this group in a second that you did. The DPT and the control group with around 508 participants. Class, as usual, just so people know what this means from, like, a science perspective. It means that the results of this were likely very robust, not something where you can be like, oh, the sample size was small, or it wasn't controlled, or blah, blah, blah.

The main findings, the wise teens intervention, did not improve outcomes overall. Since the DBT intervention, significant deteriorations were observed across outcomes immediately. Largest deteriorations were seen in depressive symptoms. And if you really need the help, it makes things even worse. Yes, and.

And it explains. I remember how I was showing, like, the rate of depression going up in young kids, and yet we're seeing more and more like DBT therapy being put on these otherwise mentally healthy young. It's like adding fuel to the fire. It's adding fuel to the fire. Yes.

But while most group differences dissipated at follow up. If you can get out of the therapy culture, but if the kids get roped in and they end up building a trauma dependency on a therapist. A lot of therapy culture today is about trying to incept people with the idea of trauma. Very similar from detracting where they would. Try to get you to believe that, like, something in your youth created the thing that you couldn't get away from and that you needed to keep seeing them to create dependency.

Right. But the thing that didn't disappear, okay, was wise. Teen participants continue to report significantly poorer quality of parent child relationships, specifically mother relationships. And I think that comes down to the way in which this kind of behavior can irreparably recontextualize the way that you see your relationship. And I think it's really hard to fix that damage.

Simone Collins
It's one thing to, oh, you're framing or you're ruminating on something. I think therapy can, when presented the wrong way, especially when not really outcome oriented or fixing things oriented, CBT really get you to ruminate on the bad thing and identify with the bad thing. And if you start living life and getting distracted, you can get over that. So if you stop the therapy, you can get better. But once you recontextualize a relationship or you start to reframe something that happened in the past as traumatic, whereas you didn't view it as traumatic before, undoing that really freaking hard.

Malcolm Collins
And it's a very effective cult tactic. Pretty much all cults do this. They try to convince you that your primary support network is being abusive to you. And your primary support network is usually your parents or your birth culture, that is, your parents religious community. And so a core tactic of the urban monoculture, which is essentially a cult, is to use emissaries that basically its preacher casts are the psychologists and social workers, because they're the ones who recruit new members and ensure that people don't defect.

They first to get you into it. And they're not doing this intentionally. It's just the iterations of this culture, because it has almost no kids itself that were able to convince people that they had abusive relationships from their primary support network and birth culture. We're better at growing than the ones that didn't adopt these tactics, because most people they deconvert from their birth culture, it happens between 15 to 23. So it makes a sense to try to get this stuff into schools from the perspective of the urban monoculture, like you would expect after a large study like this sort of thing would be shut down, and yet it's continuing expansion.

So you can look at. And that's what social emotional learning is, which really should have no point in our school systems. And we'll do a whole other episode on social emotional. We do. We need to cover Sel deep.

The problem is, this is such a deep rabbit hole because it really is. People are like, it's not cult like. Sel is covered for a very specific cult you can look at. James Lindsey has talked about this a lot, and he has done some great research on this. I wanted to have him on the show.

We had talked about having him on the show at one point, but I don't know if we ever got him booked. But basically, it's not like a vague occult or an accidentally evolved cult. It is a perennialist, mystic cult. That is what it is. It is very dangerous, and it is.

Yet you can see from the downstream effects that we're seeing in the people that it's converting, because the communities where it is most widespread are often, like, lgbt communities. And if you look at things like, here's the statistic right here, 70% of LGBTQ students experience persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. And the unaliving attempts in that community, 20% every year, are attempting like, it is really bad in the communities that it has most deeply penetrated because it often uses those communities. What is a sign of the urban monoculture but the colonizers flag? And for people know what the colonizers flag, it was named in our discord, and I absolutely love this.

Where they took the gay pride flag, which literally meant everyone under the rainbow. It wasn't like the colors meant specific things, and then they started covering it up with specific groups. Absolutely. Animal farming. It.

Like, some groups are more equal than others, and now they. They put it on every institution that the urban monoculture has conquered, like bull baiting towards the lgbt community. Anger. And it was wild that they're doing this because they control, like, pretty much every institution of power in our society. Why do they need to have a minority group targeted for their actions?

It's just bull baiting. They don't care. But let's talk about what this wise group that's causing all these negative effects it's breaking up families is doing right now. If you go to their website and I'll put this on stage, this is front and center. When it comes to prevention, our mantra is early and often.

Think about that. This harmful thing that we know is causing a breakdown of familial relationships. Their motto is early and often, we know, is causing negative mental health outcomes in a place where this is already a crisis. Increasing rates of depression early and often, and increasing them among the most damaged communities. You can look at something like 70% of LGBTQ students, which is the group that the urban monoculture is most represented in.

And this therapy culture is most represented in experience. Persistent feelings of sadness and unhappiness. This is going up as their level of oppression is going down, but as the level of infiltration of their culture, it's going up by the urban monoculture. And 20% of them have attempted unaliving themselves year over year. Just absolutely chilling to me.

And then if you look at what they are pushing out, what does wise do? How does it do this? It does this both with just general urban monoculture conversion. You can see this through their words of things like the wise elementary school program on builds, blah, blah, blah. Protective skills of empathy and safety.

Like, what do they mean by empathy and safety? Right? Like, they mean that they are medicalizing and therapy. I think normal human child interaction because of it's good for pulling kids out of their birth culture. That's why they're doing this even though we know it hurts now.

Like, why would they still be doing this? Because they built a bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy is self reinforcing. Kids who get sucked into this culture find it very hard to get out of it once you're in it, once you've broken their relationships with their support network. That's why cults do that. But let's talk about dialectical behavioral therapy for a second.

It's an evidence based psychotherapy that was originally developed to treat borderline personality disorder, but has since been adopted to address various mental health conditions. In this context, DBT is a structured form of therapy that combines elements of cognitive behavioral therapy with concepts of mindfulness, distress, tolerance, and emotional regulation. Skills training. DBT typically involves group sessions focused on teaching four core skills. Again, mindfulness, distress, tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotional regulation.

However, when they say emotional regulation, they actually mean the exact opposite of emotional regulation. But we'll get to that in a second. I think when they teach mindfulness instead, they're teaching rumination and identification with mental illness. So, understanding emotions. DBT teaches the function and importance of emotions, helping clients see them as valid and meaningful.

So that is, you should experience all the emotions that your body outputs. It's very much like a lot of people think that inside out is this, like, totally non threatening message. I've heard this from a lot of conservatives they're like, it's not woke. And I'm like, no, it is the worst of woke. It is therapy culture, cartoonized and given to kids.

It treats all of their emotions as, in many ways, equally valid. And you need this balanced emotional landscape where sometimes you're angry and sometimes you're sad, and all of the emotions play a role. And I actually heard this when I was talking to my old school, and they're trying to get money from me. They're like, inside out really taught us this. And I'm like, that is not what the data says.

As from, like, the studies, like, if you allow yourself to succumb to an emotion like anger, like, if you go and punch a wall after getting angry, your level of anger actually rises, and the probability that you feel that in the future rises. If you allow yourself to feel, really any negative emotional state, it increase. It. One decreases your ability to inhibit those states in the future, allowing them to spiral out of control. This is what you.

How you get, like, anxiety spirals and stuff like that. And why we're seeing this explosion in anxiety. That and the removal of corporal punishment, the removal of negative stimuli. Discipline for kids, because when you don't experience negative stimuli, you become hypersensitized to it, and then you need things like trigger warnings, which we've talked about before, which creates these negative effects. But when you teach kids, oh, just experience all your emotions.

Like, this is not what the data says. This is a made up, cult version of psychology. What the data says is, you should treat your brain like a fascist landscape where your logic controls your emotions. Because your logic can control your emotions, you can largely control what you feel through the narratives you create about how you interact with the world around you. And you have a duty to exercise that control, and I will continue to do something here.

So, what else does it teach when it's teaching, like, emotional control? Mindfulness. Practicing awareness of the present moment without judgment helps. Observing and experiencing emotional without being overwhelmed by them. This observing and experiencing emotions is the very last thing you want to do.

Your brain is not a democracy. And if your brain is a democracy, if you have logic as one tiny voice in your brain and all the emotions are these very loud voices in your brain, you're going to spiral into negative mental health outcomes, because these emotions were evolved within a very different social and technological context. Basically, the emotions that we feel, both positive and negatives, are just the things that our ancestors, when they felt them, they had more surviving offspring. And if you succumb to those, if you're like, oh, I'll just let those guide me. Like, those will be one voice among the logic in my head.

And we'll have, like, council, where logic is like, one member, and then we have anger, and then we have. And you're taking an average of opinions. You're going to be making catastrophically stupid decisions. And these decisions will then cause more negative emotional output, which causes a spiral. And then they break the relationship with your family and birth culture by saying, oh, that caused trauma.

All these things that they did were trauma causing, like, discipline, as you say, like corporal discipline, which we know from the data is good. You can look at the study, don't throw the baby out with the bass water. Parental punishment. This was done in 2023, big meta study. And it showed that when you actually match it, it does help with mental health outcomes.

And duh. Like, anyone could have told you that. They could have told you that the earlier results were manipulated, but they didn't. They don't. Just in case people are wondering how they're manipulated, I'll just say it really quickly, although watch for the first show will know this.

What they did is they didn't match results. So they would take a family like ours where our daughter doesn't get corporal punishment because she just doesn't need it. They put her in the no punishment group, and they put our sons in the punishment group and then say, see, the punishment group's acting out more. And it's. That is astronomically stupid that you did that, but anyway.

But why would they do that? They really benefit from these negative mental health effects. Because when you create these negative mental health spirals in young teens and you've broken them off from their birth culture, you've broken them off from their parents. What else are they going to turn to but these affirming cults? And that's what.

When anyone can identify, for example, as non binary and then enter the queer community, which is one of the things we complain about, when anyone can identify as non binary and enter the queer community, and then you get loved bombed for doing this, or, for example, us, we would be considered trans within the modern context. Right? Because I don't particularly care what my gender is. Neither does Simone. If I broke up tomorrow, a different gender, I'd figure out a way to make it work, and that would be called agender, which is a form of genderqueer, which is a form of trans.

They have expanded the definitions of all this, or demi gen demisexual, they would say, which actually is the standard sexual presentation among women. And yet they treat it like it's a form of being queer. For people who aren't inducted into the insane leftist cult, demisexual means that you usually only feel sexually aroused when you already have an emotional attachment to somebody in a yeah, normal female sexuality works that way. Yeah, some women are outside of that, but mostly for most women, that's how sexual. But now they're saying that means most women are queer.

So queer identification is not seen. To me, when you're looking at, and when I'm looking at statistics, it's primarily a sign of something like same sex attraction or even a real trans identity anymore. It's more of an identification of being a member of this extremist cult. And we're seeing the negative mental health outcomes with one in five of them trying to analyze themselves every year who are adolescent people in this community, 70% having this intense dissatisfaction with their lives, like it is not leading to good outcomes. It comes around with this we will affirm you, we will affirm you, we will protect you with trigger warnings, we will protect you from negative stimuli, sort of candy cart.

And so you go. When you're in this intense state of emotional insecurity and self questioning and poor mental health, it's created by these sorts of programs, and then it can use that to snatch you up because you've been disconnected from all of your classic support networks. Because the classic support networks are going to tell you what you need to hear, which is discipline is good, you need to austerity is good. You should experience unpleasant things. You should not learn to love yourself as you are.

You should be pressured to become the type of person worthy of you loving, but that in the moment, that isn't cotton candy. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Simone. I'm just sad with how far we've gone, and I'm disturbed by how much good and responsible sounding language is presented to people like parents who are genuinely concerned about their kids well being and how their really well meaning attempts are backfiring and causing them to lose their children even more. It breaks my heart that a parent that is doing everything they can to help their kids, who really cares and who really does want to help them, is ultimately doing so much worse for their kids outcome than a parent who is actively negligent and who actively doesn't care.

Simone Collins
It shouldn't be the case in modern society that literally neglectful parents are going to see better mental health outcomes for their children. And yet that's what we're seeing. It's no wonder that people who are more affluent and educated and have all these resources and who, like, really care about getting their kids right are terrified of becoming parents. Because when you look at the outcomes of their kids and the kids of their peers, they are worse. And I don't think they realize that a lot of it's because of their culture.

And they're probably thinking, oh, neglectful, irresponsible parents are probably seeing something even worse. And I don't know, it would be really interesting to see that, that divide. I just listened to that, that one youtuber's really long piece on the other pronatalist, Collins family. And they actively don't do a lot of things to take care of their kids. Like, they may not take their kids to the doctor a whole lot.

They certainly don't send their kids to therapy, as far as I'm aware. But I could reckon that their kids are probably mentally a lot healthier than kids who are getting tons and tons of resources, as their critics would argue they should be doing. It's just sad to me. So this reminds me of an influencer. There was this, like, obviously completely brainwashed by the cult young Jin Alpha, Gen Z Youtuber I was watching who was complaining that mental health outcomes getting worse.

Malcolm Collins
And she's we can fix this by getting more psychologists that are cheap. I think it's a very complex conversation as to why Gen Z is not wanting to have kids, because it doesn't just pertain to financial issues or inflation eating out our asses clean. But Gen Z has a rampant problem with mental health, issues that have gone long unaddressed, mostly for the reason being that the mental health system is largely lacking. For example, I am still on a waitlist to see a psychologist. It has been, what, eight months, nine months?

Gen Z Youtuber
I can't even remember the last time that I even followed up on that, because the last time I did, I remember calling the psychologist and he's on the phone like, well, I'm actually leaving for holidays next week, so we're going to be pretty backed up. I'll give you a call in a few weeks time. I saved the day in my phone and everything like that. I never got a call. So a week later I called them again and I was like, hey, just following up, blah, blah, blah.

Well, actually, no, we don't have any appointments available until mid December. This was in, I think, June last year. What are you. There are more youth psychologists today, more psychologizing was in school than there's ever been. Do you think this stuff existed in the old west, do you think that in the greatest generation, or in our parents generation when they were objectively we can look at the data, had better mental health outcomes that they were not being exposed to this, when you get in this cult, you see the mental health problems that are downstream of these sorts of mechanisms, and all they can think is turn up the volume.

Malcolm Collins
Now, if you're here and you're a parent, or you are a person who is struggling with a mental health outcome, I used to say that CBT at least still worked. I now no longer think that. I think it's been so infiltrated and twisted that it doesn't really work that well anymore. We wrote the problem, or maybe what. We were exposed to is CBT.

Simone Collins
Like you, when you studied psychology in school and me when I went through it, is basically an extinct strain of it, and now what is happening is totally different. Yeah. So what I would recommend people do, if they are like, what's the alternative? Is the pragmatist guide to Life. The first book we wrote, I wrote it as an alternative to CBT, actually.

Malcolm Collins
If you read it, you'll notice a lot of if then functions. Basically, it was really meant as a user manual for a type of psychologist that we were eventually going to spin out, but we just never really got around to it. We got in with our company right now, blah, blah, blah. But it's still very usable from an individual perspective. And it focuses on a completely different mechanism for therapy.

Essentially, the mechanism is determine what you think has value in life. And we go through all the various things that somebody might think has value in life. And then using those set of things you think have value in life, how do you maximize those things and then develop a conscious system from doing that? And then here's all these mental hacks you can use for controlling the way that your brain outputs emotion to give you more mastery over your emotional state, so you have much less. And I think that's one of the problems, is when we say, like, the things that you think about value, we call this your objective function.

And the problem with the urban monoculture is that it doesn't have an objective function for many people other than reduce the amount of suffering that anyone's experiencing in the moment. And because of that, and because people recognize that isn't a thing of actual value, it leads to these really terrible mental health outcomes. Another thing I would want to point out, when people are like, oh, you shouldn't be discussing trauma this much. We have a whole episode on this topic, but there's a great study done on trauma. I really just need to beat this because this is an important thing that the general public knows.

It looked at correlations between reported trauma in childhood and negative mental health outcomes. Great correlation. Then it tried to correlate reported trauma with actual documentable trauma, looking at court records and stuff like that, and it found that there was almost no correlation. In other words, contextualization is everything. And if you believe that you've been subject to trauma and identify as someone who's been traumatized, you will suffer mentally.

Simone Collins
If you don't, then you probably won't. It doesn't really matter what actually happened to you. Of course there are exceptions to this. If you have PTSD, that is real, by the way. Not the.

Not the I've self diagnosed with PTSD or I tripped on the way to a store and I have PTSD now, but that doesn't count. But there are some like real mechanical things that can go wrong, and also there's depression that is real and mechanical and that can be triggered by hormones and a whole bunch of other things. This is not to deny any of those things, and I am afraid for when we have an instance of a kid who is actually depressed, who probably needs some form of chemical intervention that we can only get from a psychologist because it has to be prescribed, our book and our methods can only go so far. And as we explained in the pragmatist. Guide to life, sometimes you actually prescribe medication.

Psychiatrist. No, wait, that's safer if you're sending a kid. So my parents used to do this with me. They would. Psychologists.

No, there's therapists who don't prescribe and then there's psychologists who do. No matter. Psychologists don't prescribe. They are the people you go to regularly. It's a different degree path then who psychiatrists do prescribe?

Psychiatrists. Thank you. Sorry, I'm ignorant. I was on the pathway to become a psychologist and not a psychiatrist, and I thought about changing career trajectories to become a psychiatrist, but it's a different degree pathway. I see.

Malcolm Collins
So anyway, so this is coming from somebody who, like, knows a great deal about all of this, but just thinks outside of their framework. I am not coming to you here as an anti mental health person. I am coming to you here saying that there used to be a functioning mental health system in the west and it doesn't exist anymore and it is just a danger now. And what my parents used to do as me, which is what we do as our kids, is warn them against these individuals warn them that these individuals will try to manipulate them into joining these weird cults and cultural groups and that they. This is what you say to them to get the meds you need, basically, because they are just really toxic right now.

And when people are like, oh, you shouldn't go so far as to call it a cult, like, the urban monoculture isn't actually a cult. These institutions aren't actually a cult. I want you to consider the language I've been reading here recently, and I'm going to play some scenes from a king of the Hill episode about what cults are, what they look like, and how they act. And I think you will see very. Quickly, Omega House is Luann's sorority.

Hank
What I'm babbling about is how the omega cult recruits unsuspecting young women from campus, deprives them of protein bathrooms and all contact with their families and friends, then ships them off to a ranch for general enslavement. Oh, God. Excuse me. Are y'all with the cult? We're not a cult.

Peggy
We're an organization that promotes love. Yeah, this is it. In this part, I would call your attention to the name changes, which is a very common tactic in cults, to have people adopt new names and new identities as well as unique titles, salutations, and greetings. Cults do this for a few reasons, but probably the biggest is it's really powerful at separating people from their existing support networks, because when their support networks regard these individuals by their old identities, the cult will say, like, well, that's an attack on you, or that's violence against you. And through that, they're able to prevent these people from being able to reconcile as easily or have as fluid conversations with their natural support network.

Malcolm Collins
It also makes it very hard for these individuals to talk to people who aren't indoctrinated into the cult's ways and therefore don't know how to talk to them. Within this very narrow and, from a mainstream societal perspective, bizarre rule set which is unique to the cult itself. Peggy Luann. It's me, your husband, and your uncle. We don't have any peggys or luanns.

Peggy
You're thinking of Blonde Jane and old Jane, and they don't want to see you. Another common cult tactic to look out for is any group that shames individuals for eating meat or getting proper sleep through denying people the. Well, the regular resources that the human brain needs to stay sharp. It's very easy to cloud an individual's mind and convince them of absurd things. It's too late, they've been deprived of protein so long that their bodies are feeding off their own brains.

Hank
They're nothing but solace. Autonomatonomatons. I'd also really encourage people. If a loved one, a parent, a sibling, tells you you have joined a cult, or they think that you have joined a group that is acting like a cult, and this is not an accusation that they've made to you before, like, I keep. Okay, maybe you have a sibling or parent that just says, everything's a cult.

Malcolm Collins
Basically, they say, Pokemon's a cult. Whatever. Ignore that. But if you have one who has not said this to you before, or even worse, if they have said it to you before, and on reflection, you realized after leaving that group that it actually was displaying cult like behavior. Please, please take that seriously.

Parents and siblings, don't just drop this accusation out of the blue. If they say that you've been brainwashed or that you're being manipulated, please take it seriously. This is a common scene with all cults. It's parents yelling at their kids, you are being brainwashed. You are being brainwashed.

And the kids thinking that the parents are just out of touch. Piggy, you can't get on the bus. Trust me. You joined a cult. Come on.

Peggy
Stop it. No. Do not listen to that he person. He is on the wrong side of the love fence. The more times you hear a group use terms like love, validation, acceptance, belonging, especially when they twist these words to mean things that they historically didn't mean.

Malcolm Collins
You know, like, in this scene, they call it a love fence. That is a high red, blaring signs that you are dealing with a cult. Cults always coat their actions in this facade of love, and particularly unity, because unity can be used as a concept to stamp out dissenting thought. I'm sorry, Hank. My new friends have invited me to spend eternity, I think, with them.

Hank
All right, have fun, then. But maybe bite for the road. Jane, get back here. My name is not Jane. My name is Peggy, and I love meat.

Peggy
That's funny. I can't remember my name. I think it starts with an r. It's luan.

Malcolm Collins
Next scene, we'll show how cults often recruit people. And it's very important to look for these actions in the organizations that you are interacting with. First, you'll note, love and unity are going to be two of the core values that a cult will always put out of, because unity allows them to silence dissent as a concept. And also, it often means, you know, unity under the accepted authority or hierarchy of the group. If you're talking about the urban monoculture.

This might be a gender or ethnic based authority, but in more traditional cults, it'll just be a generic hierarchy. Another thing that you'll see very frequently is love bombing. And it's a very important thing to look out for. This will often happen if you see, like, a group of people in a circle, and they're all just constantly affirming someone, you know, telling them how great the decisions they're making are, how great what they're doing is, how great they are as a person. Especially if they're doing this while looking for ways that they can create divisions between this individual and their traditional support network, like their family.

That is almost certainly a cult, even if it wasn't, like, created as a cult. As we mentioned in other episodes. Like, has a cult evolved under the trans movement? Just cult like behavior, if it is protected from criticism, begins to self replicate. And in society where we have certain groups that, you know, I think may need legitimate protection, like the trans community, unfortunately, within far progressive circles, any accusation of, oh, you're doing something wrong here, or you're doing something bad here.

Is unallowed if it's targeted as something that's seen as trans. So the negative behavioral traits weren't able to be. And it basically evolved an organically formed cult with most of the behavior patterns that you see in other cults, as you'll see from this scene, as an. Organization that promotes love and unity, omega House appreciates a mother as caring as you are. I wish I could jump in your head and crawl around.

Peggy
You seem like a fascinating individual. You are probably very popular. Actually, no, it's difficult to find people you can really connect with. People of high intellect often intimidate people. And you are of high intellect, Peggy, no matter what you've been told by your husband.

Mmm. Your father. Mm, not really, mother. How did you know? Because we love you.

You know what I love about this place? Nobody ever gets tired of hearing about me. My hobbies, favorite movies, my deep seated resentment towards my soul crushing mother. Oh, okay. This is a cult.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah, I should have known. Yeah. This ultra urban monoculture is what we historically would have recognized as a cult. And they do all of the cult things. One joke I remembered, and I have constantly tried to find this.

It was from an old nineties media. So I am dumb because I've asked AI, and I can't find it. And maybe somebody in the comments will find this source of media. I found it. It was from bubble boy.

And you'll get to see it. And it even includes the name change that I mentioned before. It's just a classic cult thing. Any group where people start changing their names, watch out, buddy. But I remember a scene where a bunch of people were on the bus and the cult members had their genitals removed because that was seen as a joke thing that a lot of cults did is that the cult members would have themselves castrated, and that was seen as, like, a sign that you had joined a cult.

Or the types of wording that I will put from the king of the Hill episode that would be seen as, like, a sign that you enjoyed a cult. And you should know, when a group's talking like that, stay away from them. Stay away from them. Stay away from them. The kluh is the holy guide to living pure.

Peggy
This will help explain. First, we prepare our souls by stripping ourselves of all sexual desires.

Malcolm Collins
Her name's Lorraine, too. We're all Lorraine. And you will be Todd, a name chosen especially for you by guilt. Oh, you're an oppressed minority. You're a cult.

Why? We stop. But people don't know anymore. They don't know. Oh, there's this weird vegetarian group that tells me to hate my parents and that my parents have traumatized me.

They say that they're all about love and caring and that they're the people who really care about me. This is not like the modern GSA. And it didn't used to be like this. Like, I wasn't in high school. I supported it in high school.

It has been taken over by a cult. We've entered clown world timeline, and it is. It's different. It's different. People want to hear your thoughts, Simone.

Oh, by the way, anyone who's here is. You're just trying to shill your book. I'm sorry. Our book is owned by a non profit and cost $0.99 in its ebook form. And in its physical form, we have it literally the lowest margin.

Amazon will allow it to set it. So, no, we're not trying to make money. We're trying to make any money. And if you literally don't have $0.99, just been on the book, just email us at Partners ragmatistfoundation.com and you'll get it for free. So leave us a positive review, though.

I'd really appreciate that. That would help a lot. Yeah, the more positive reviews we get, the more that we can get it in the Amazon algorithm, which helps us a lot. But, Simone, I want to end with saying that the fans keep saying they want to hear you talk more. You're the smart one of the two of us.

And think I hear it in the comments. They go, Simone is the mastermind. Why doesn't she talk more? Go. And I will explain that the audience thinks that I'm the mastermind or thinks that I'm smart because I don't to speak as much.

Simone Collins
And I once read this book when I was a kid that was all about how to do corporate power plays in the political world as a manly man who has wide shoulders. And the one of the big power plays was to basically never speak and just to look unimpressed and lean back in your chair and be very pithy. And I'm not intentionally doing that. I just really think that what Malcolm has to say is far more interesting and I don't have a whole lot to add. The role that I play in our relationship is I ask them questions and then often when Malcolm tries to explain himself or clarify what he's trying to say, then he ends up coming up with some new idea that's even better.

Jack Donaghy
Use my techniques and I don't care who you're negotiating against, you'll win. You're going to wear dark colors with a single power accent. Every hair in place. Hair movement is a sign of weakness. And whatever you do, don't speak.

1st 90% of negotiations are lost by the person who speaks first. Because what is speaking a sign of.

Simone Collins
Weakness? You outfired, so you've lost the initiative, perhaps by being a woman or a shorter man, but you can regain by fighting on your home turf. I thought you might do that, which is why I'm going to be the first person to do power quiet talking, forcing you to lean in and wonder if you're missing any key phrases. Like an idiot. I thought you'd try power quiet talking, which is why I'm wearing a hearing aid still mate.

So I do help him come up with better ideas and I do play an important role in the ideas that we jointly generate. But it's only by asking dumb questions. So don't let the fact that I don't speak a lot make you think that I am somehow this puppet master or this mastermind or this very smart person. It's just because when you don't hear someone talk, it's a whole lot easier to pedestalize them. It's a whole lot easier to assume that they're going to say something smart.

And then as soon as they open their mouths, they expose themselves to criticism. They expose themselves to any sort of scrutiny that's going to reveal that they're imperfect. And master would say, no, not, and, and I would say, everyone who chooses to criticize you, Malcolm, for your whatever, out their views, or be like this and that, and you missed this, or you're wrong about that. Shut the fuck up. And why don't you publish something yourself online?

Why don't you expose yourself to scrutiny? So few people online post anything at all. The people who have the balls to even leave a comment are doing something amazing. But just keep in mind that so few people are willing to expose themselves to any scrutiny. Most of the people who do bother to publish something online and expose themselves to scrutiny are just repeating other people's ideas and not actually putting themselves out there in the personal way.

And I really admire the fact, Malcolm, that you're doing that. And I'm just reflecting on what you say and asking dumb questions. You make my life easy. You make my job on this podcast easy. And you also do all the prep, all the editing, all the publishing.

So I'm grateful to you for that. And I love you a lot. I really like the point you made there that I would say, the point. That you're the smart one and you're. Pretty out there if you do want to criticize.

Malcolm Collins
But yeah, if your ideas are just going along with what the urban monoculture thinks or what your cultural group thinks, that is like your average presbyterian view or your average catholic view, like, you're not actually moving anything forward. Yeah, congratulations. You've copied someone's notes. You can transcribe, but it's not even really putting yourself out there because, like. You, it wasn't your idea in the first place.

No, but what I mean is you have a preset community that's gonna back you. Like, you don't have to feel uncomfortable with your beliefs or views if it's what some large group that has a defensive mechanism thinks. I. This is one of my criticisms of funding Fridays that we did recently is she has zero takes that go in any way against the urban monoculture. Yes, she goes around criticizing people, but it's with the backing of this giant institutional system where she just refuses to have unique takes.

And a note to self here. When Simone is talking, I want to have the Jack Donaghy negotiation advice scene play because he does one about being. Quiet and, oh, he does. It's such a thing. I can't remember this book that I read.

Simone Collins
I got it from the library. It was back when I walked down library aisles and I had free time and I would just choose books. Looked interesting. God, it was so much fun, and it's such a thing, and it's so stupid. It's so stupid.

Malcolm Collins
I've got to. I've got to. But the audience doesn't want to hear an explanation of why you're not talking. They want to hear you engage with this subject. So talk about the therapeutic of kids, what's going on with this, and the dangers of therapy in a modern context.

What are your thoughts on this topic, on this study? God, you've just been so articulate in talking about it. I will say that my personal experience with therapy as a kid was that it did not resolve my depression. That at one point, I tried to convince my father that instead of paying $60 an hour for a therapist who was someone who's nice, I just. I didn't find it to be particularly helpful that he should just pay me dollar 60 an hour and I'll just stop acting so sad.

That is the most baller based f move for an adolescent girl who is feeling depression and was like, I am depressed, but I realize I can get undepressed for $60 an hour. Yeah, if that's what you're paying. Shit like you got it. But then ultimately, my own dad came up with the solution. For example, that cured my extremely dangerous eating disorder, where I just was losing and losing weight.

Simone Collins
Like, I'm five eight and a half, and I weighed under 100 pounds at one point, and that's pretty unhealthy. And he just figured out that if I could actually control that, for me, it was about control, and that if I could weigh and measure all of my food and I had to balance calories in and calories out, I would be able to feel like I still had control and not die, maybe. And so I just. I think that parents should not underestimate the extent to which they can look at their children and come up with solutions to their problems. And you've done this a lot.

Like, you had this revelation a couple of weeks ago where you were like, you know what? We need to stop thinking about what society assumes our kids want for birthday parties, for going to bed, for activities, and look at what they say they want, and look at what they react to and just build custom solutions for them. And each of our kids needs something a little different, and sometimes they're pretty counterintuitive. And I really admire the fact that you said that. And I'll point out that the other major sources of my depression and my especially, like, behavior that was maladaptive was in response to a school environment or a lifestyle that really didn't work for me and that in many cases, the best thing you can do as a parent is try to find the source of the issue.

A therapist is not going to change the fact that your kid, for example, is just really not dealing well with your school schedule or that their homeroom teacher is just terrible and hates them, makes their lives miserable every day. A lot of the people who've left comments on the YouTube video that you made on just how bad is daycare and also other YouTube videos you did on the schooling system, they've pointed out how, oh, my kid would come home with dark circles under his eyes. He would have tantrums. My kid had huge anxiety, and then as soon as we moved them to homeschool. So I would say, trust yourself as a parent, listen to your kid and consider changing their environment and surroundings, and that's probably going to handle 90 plus percent of your kid's mental illness problems.

Even like, serious chemical depression, which is what I was experiencing. I never actually went on antidepressants. I only ever experienced lifestyle changes that significantly evaporated my depression. That was very serious and in some cases life threatening. So that's what I'll add.

Malcolm Collins
When you went to therapy as a kid, and that was great addition, by the way. Did they do trauma based therapy? Did they. Were they, like, look for trauma in your childhood? No, my therapist was a family friend of my parents, so I think they trusted her, who had primarily stopped practicing and become, like, a poet.

That's good that you were in this sort of last wave of non trauma based therapy. Yeah. Also note in terms of, like, when to nope out the moment somebody starts talking about trauma, they're trying to brainwash. And she was definitely. So she came from the old school, which I guess now would be seen as mansplaining.

Simone Collins
Right. Like, the new philosophy is don't address grievances like a man in a relationship where the woman shows up and she's, oh, my day was so bad. And he's, why don't you do this to solve the problem? Why don't you do that? He's supposed to just listen and say, oh, that was so horrible.

Oh, gosh, I understand. Oh, and that's what therapy has become. Whereas she was that old school of therapy, which was more mansplaining. Like, I would talk about how, like, I had these huge, like, contagion fears and I couldn't touch people. And she's like, what's the worst thing that would happen?

If someone touched you, have you tried it? Like. And that was pretty great. It didn't solve my problems because I still just had this really intense stress. Have that in.

Malcolm Collins
What did solve her problems? For anyone who has these sorts of problems, understanding that those are her limitations and then building systems around them, even though they make her look weird, which. Is what my dad eventually did for me and which is what you helped to expand by being like, it's okay. And also, I loved your mom's motto, like, again, and I've mentioned this on other podcasts, but I knew that I could be okay in your family when your mom told me on a phone call that one of the family mottos, Washington, I'm not okay, you're not okay, and that's okay. Essentially saying, we're all fucked up in this family.

Simone Collins
Don't worry about it. You're still welcome here. I don't have to like the way that you have to weigh all your food when we go to fancy restaurants. Yes, it's going to be embarrassing, but whatever. It's not that big of a deal.

I'd rather have you be there. But I think that was the thing that got you through it. It was realizing you didn't need to worry about other people's judgments at fancy restaurants. Yeah, like, it's not okay, but also, screw it, do it anyway. Or realizing that it's okay for you to ask me for personal space that I don't enter, you know, that is fine.

Malcolm Collins
It is okay for you to ask me. Don't touch it. Like, it's not okay. But sometimes not okay is gonna have to be okay. It is okay.

The point I'm making is that there are certain fights to have and certain fights not to have. Yeah, choose your hill to die on, for sure. That is this podcast. We have a lot of new viewers, and they don't know why we're in separate rooms in the same house. Simone is autistic, and you can explain why are we in separate rooms?

Simone Collins
Yeah, I really can't think straight when I'm around other people. I guess infants don't count because they're still so much a part of my body. But, yeah, if we're actually going to have intellectual conversations, we're going to do it far more effectively. If I'm not making eye contact with person, with a person, if I'm not in the room, like, literally, I'm not even making eye contact with Malcolm on our on streamyard right now, I am watching an Instagram reel of a japanese chef cutting tonkotsu again and again on a loop. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
And so that's how we get mental efficiency from her. And people are like, but that's weird. And it's like, but it works. Yeah. I think when you are okay, so much of what we're doing, people are like, don't do that.

That's a weird thing to do. And it's. Yeah, but why is it bad? It would be bad for me, for x, y, and z. And it's.

Yeah, but we're not you. Yeah, why is it bad for. For us? And I think that this is how you really power through as well, is one. Take control of your emotional states and to recognize your limits and build your lifestyle around those limits while respecting the limits of your partner, looking for the actual things.

Like, if something's just unreasonable, everything the trigger to someone, then you're like, you just have to get over that. That's the way you are with, like, going to parties. Like, it is a nightmare for you, but sometimes you just have to do it. And I'm like, you don't have a choice. You'll come to me and you'll be like, do I have permission to not go to this?

And I often say, no, you don't have permission to not go to this. So, yeah, absolutely. What was another thing that we've seen recently was. I don't know. Anyway, I just love you to death.

I love that we have found systems that work for us, and I would encourage other people to search for systems that look for them and stay out of the psychology industry. For people who want to hear more on how psychology has become a cult, look up our video. Has psychology become a cult? Or our video to be sad is to sin. Or our video, the trauma conspiracy, all of which deal with this topic or aspects of this topic in a lot more detail.

Simone Collins
Yeah. Yeah. Stop taking Tylenol and just avoid walking on beds of nails. So. Love you.

Love you too. Okay, I'm gonna go downstairs and start shredding that chicken for taco night. Remember to re up the slow cooker. Re up? Yeah, I did it at, like, 02:00 p.m.

great. I love you. I love you, too. You're perfect. No, you're perfecter.

You're perfecter. The perfectest. I love you so much. You are just too gay. I'm gay for Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins
That's the truth. Love you, Sadhan. Love you too. I'll see you downstairs.

Simone Collins
I'll see you downstairs.