The Other Side of Enlightenment

Steven Alan Hassan’s first intervention took place in 1976, and involved a 21-year-old would-be poet and starry-eyed idealist from Queens, New York. The young man had joined a religious group and abruptly dropped out of college, throwing away all 400 of his poems, distancing himself from his family, turning over his bank account to the church, and declaring that he was ready to kill or die for its leader—a conservative, wealthy Korean man who claimed to be the Messiah. That Messiah was the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church. And the young Moonie was Hassan himself.

Hassan spent more than two years in the Moonies, living in communal housing, sleeping only three or four hours a night, praying to Moon, and chanting, “Glory to heaven!” or “Crush Satan!” whenever a negative thought about the group or its leader came to mind. He sold carnations on New York street corners for charities he knew didn’t exist, and he brought in as many as 40 new recruits—his primary duty—13 of whom became full-time members and, as such, his “spiritual children.”

In 1976, after pulling two consecutive all-nighters in a fundraising frenzy, Hassan fell asleep while driving a Unification Church van and rear-ended a tractor-trailer. After the accident, the church granted Hassan rare permission to visit his sister. His parents, who hadn’t seen their son in a year, pounced on the opportunity. His father arrived with deprogrammers, who whisked Hassan off to an apartment where he spent the next five days listening to a distinctly different interpretation of Moon. On day five, he says, it was as if someone had thrown a switch: He decided he’d been brainwashed by the church.

Though he had escaped, Hassan was tormented with guilt for recruiting others into the Moonies, and also overcome with shame for getting sucked in himself. There were moments when he thought of trying to go back to the church, to reform it from within, but that seemed at best a naive plan. He chose another, more confrontational course: He would dedicate his life to studying cults and developing strategies to help their members escape. And he’d travel around the country and the world to speak about the pernicious nature of the groups in front of any audience that would have him.

After getting his therapy license and spending years reading up on everything from narcissism to “thought reform” in Communist China, from battered-wife syndrome to hypnosis, Hassan devised a diagnostic model he calls B.I.T.E. He uses the model to measure the degree to which behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions are controlled in a given organization, and, if it qualifies as a cult, just how dangerous it is. In the mid-’90s he founded the Freedom of Mind institute, and today posts dossiers on its website on the many organizations he has investigated or received complaints about, including the Hare Krishnas, Al Qaeda, and Opus Dei. One of the groups on the site, as it happens, is Dahn Yoga. The Freedom of Mind site notes Dahn has been the subject of lawsuits alleging brainwashing, manipulative sex, financial exploitation, and even death—and that its leader claims to be able to use a practice called “brain respiration” to teach a form of ESP.

Now 53, Hassan has also written two books that fall somewhere at the literary crossroads of memoir, self-help guide, and mind-control theory primer. He has appeared on 60 Minutes and Nightline, been interviewed by Oprah and Larry King and quoted in the Washington Post and the New York Times. He believes he has even received a nod in the film Holy Smoke, in which Harvey Keitel plays a rough-and-tumble American deprogrammer flown to Australia to pry a young woman (portrayed by Kate Winslet) from the grips of a guru. Hassan thinks that Keitel’s cowboy boots, featured prominently in one close-up, are an oblique reference to his own footwear of choice, worn to support a weak ankle.

Whatever the sartorial similarities, Keitel’s character is hardly an accurate portrayal of Hassan. In the movie, the intervention rapidly devolves into lots of sex and a knock-down, drag-out fight. Hassan, however, is anything but a brawler. Though he dabbled in traditional 1970s-style deprogramming earlier in his career, he has come to favor what he describes as a gentler and more effective method. “I like his approach,” says one man who hired Hassan to help get his girlfriend out of Dahn after, he says, she spent tens of thousands of dollars on the group after attending a 72-hour retreat. (He asked that his name not be used.) “I researched some cult experts and his ideas and philosophy seemed to be the most sensitive to the cult member, who, after all, is the true victim.” Another client, who was born into a cult she eventually left on her own, worked with three therapists over 15 years in an attempt to overcome her trauma. Then she saw Hassan on television and decided to fly to Boston for a week of intensive counseling with him. She says she made a breakthrough on the very first day. “Steve understands more deeply, and from the inside, what it is like,” she says. “You feel like you are talking to a friend.”

Hassan attributes that empathy to his own personal history. “If I had never been in a cult myself, I would think what most people do, that the people who get into cults are stupid and weak, or losers,” he says. “There are a few other people in the field, but they don’t know what I know and haven’t amassed the skill set that I have. I feel like I have a talent and a gift I am obligated to use.”

Hassan once saved a friend from drowning in the Red Sea, an experience he uses to describe the emotions involved in a successful intervention. “It’s such a high when you’ve made a difference,” he says. Which may have something to do with his perhaps inflated sense of how much help he can actually offer. His sister, Thea Luba, still remembers Hassan’s reaction to the deadly standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. “He went bananas trying to reach the right people, to tell them he could handle this without the firepower,” she says. “He kept hitting the bureaucratic bullshit. They didn’t want his expertise. They knew how to handle it, they said. They pushed him away. He tried with every ounce of his being to prevent Waco, and when it went down he was devastated. For him it was like, if only they had called him, if only he had been there.”

Another tragedy he was powerless to stop haunts Hassan, too. In January 1991, his first wife—whom he’d divorced two years earlier but remained close to—drowned as she was trying to save her golden retriever from the frigid waters of Sandy Pond in Lincoln. After her death, Hassan took ice rescue training. To this day he carries ropes in his car at all times.