Dependency is one of many enemies of effective coping. Developing a sense of personal empowerment is difficult if you are psychologically dependent on others to fulfill your needs and wants. Does that mean you shouldn’t let your parents, spouse, or friends do anything for you? Of course not! We’re warning against chronic patterns of psychological dependency, not isolated occasions where you receive some assistance. There’s a big difference.
One of the best examples of excessive dependency is membership in a cult, or a group with strong cult-like features. Devotion to such organizations can be extremely hard to break when the group complements adherents’ personalities. They join because the leader compensates for their inner insecurities and weaknesses, often unconscious. If Pete joins an organization because they pay him a high salary, it would be easy to dissolve his loyalty: pay him more than that organization pays him! But if Pete is tormented by fears and helplessness that the organization mitigates with the reassuring message, “Join us and together we will help you resolve your fears,” weakening Pete’s loyalty will be difficult.
Loyalty to a cult and its leader is not based on political, legal, financial, or patriotic enterprises; it is a psychological undertaking based on one’s search for meaning, purpose, truth, and values. The simplicity and definitiveness of cult principles attracts those who are adrift, confused, and bewildered in that search. Unerring loyalty to the cult may fly in the face of logic, rationality, and self-preservation, but convincing believers that their loyalty is illogical, irrational, and self-destructive is futile when that loyalty satisfies psychological needs. Finding ways to help the follower satisfy those psychological needs without the cult and its leader, is the only way to show cult devotees the way out of their commitment. The key is to show them how to re-calibrate the search for values that brought them to the cult in the first place. It’s not an easy process, but few things worthwhile are easy. The point is, appealing to reason, logic, and level-headedness is not the way to go.
In the 1950s a small cult gathered on a hillside on a date specified by their leader as the day the world would end. According to the leader, God would save them and destroy everything else. In preparation for this day, these folks sold all their belongings, their houses, cars, clothes – everything! They made an incredibly strong commitment to their leader. When the world survived and the group experienced cognitive dissonance, they did not turn on their leader as a false prophet. Instead, they joined him in praising God for rewarding them for their great faith by saving the world. They reduced their dissonance by distorting reality, not by changing their beliefs about their prophet. They decided the world continued to exist because of faith in their leader. If you said to one of them, “Your leader was all wrong and caused you to get rid of all your worldly possessions! He’s a fake!” Their reply would be, “You’re wrong. God was so impressed with us and our prophet that He decided to spare the world. We saved you! And it was all because of our prophet!”
Psychology and Stress 