Why Leaving Andrew Cohen’s Group Can Be So Hard

In addition to the direct difficulties Cohen often creates for close students who wish to leave him, including threats and acts perhaps just this (or the other?) side of false imprisonment (see my previous article Karma Will (Literally) Cost You And Leaving Isn’t Easy), there are psychological reasons why leaving a group like Cohen’s can be very difficult. In many ways, abusive spiritual groups like Andrew Cohen’s replicate the circumstances created by Dr. Philip Zimbardo in his famous Stanford Prison Experiment.

A friend who was a former close Cohen student recently pointed me to Geoffrey Falk’s Stripping the Gurus, a book available on-line, that contains a chapter that makes this point, compares abusive groups and analyzes the reasons members often have a difficult time leaving them despite their abuse. Here is a brief excerpt:

AS WE HAVE SEEN, a common set of alleged problems, even expressed in nearly identical words, tend to occur in our world’s spiritual communities. Indeed, the reported characteristics observed are essentially independent of the specific beliefs espoused by the community, and of the historical time and place in which the spiritual leader and his disciples have existed.
Why would that be?
A large part of the answer surely comes from well-known research done at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, Dr. Philip Zimbardo—later, president of the American Psychological Association—was able to inadvertently transform a group of “healthy, intelligent, middle-class” college-age individuals into “fearful, depressed, neurotic, suicidal shadows” in less than a week. He did that simply by arbitrarily assigning them (via the flip of a coin) to guard/prisoner roles in a simulated prison environment which they all knew was just an experiment.

Falk describes the Stanford Prison Experiment and discusses the similarity of the psychological coercion created there to the environment in abusive groups. In examining the role of psychological trauma and abuse in disempowering students in abusive spiritual communities, he mentions Andrew Cohen’s group. For example:

To a more chronic degree, though, much of the emotional violence and psychological abuse reportedly perpetrated in the name of “ego-killing discipline,” as a betrayal of trust and widely recognized “spiritual rape,” would also qualify as trauma. Indeed, Tarlo’s (1997) and van der Braak’s (2003) stories of alleged discipline at Cohen’s hands are nothing if not descriptions of repeated emotional trauma/shocks, humiliation and degradation. Further, those occurred in an “intimate or bonded relationship” with the guru-figure, which they could not escape without being “bad disciples” or “failures.” And wherever there is such inescapable trauma, one will find instances of both “learned helplessness” and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Thus, “crazy wisdom” or “Rude Boy” environments in particular cannot help but be breeding grounds for exactly those ailments.

Many former Cohen students find this chapter of Falk’s book eerily familiar. The complete chapter can be found here:

Stripping The Gurus: Chapter XXVII, Gurus and Prisoners.