This is My Does Touch. I'm joined by Diane Penskitter. Thank you for joining us today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And so Diane, I want to discuss your background,

particularly in the research and studies you've done in cult behavior and breaking through

that behavior through deprogramming and what that all means. But to get there, I think it's helpful

that we start with kind of your background and how you got into this field. So can you tell us,

you actually had personal experience that led you to pursue this career path?

Yeah, I joined a religious cult. It's commonly known, the moonies back in the 70s. And I was a member

for five years. My family had me deprogrammed. I hesitate to use that word because people have

these ideas of what it is. But after I got out, I ended up writing a memoir about my life

in the cult and as a deprogram where I started going out on cases after I got out and helping families

who had loved ones in various cults. And I was pretty young at the time and didn't really have a

deep understanding of how it all worked. But since then, I've spent most of my life trying to

understand what it really is. Why do people join these groups? What do they get out of it?

Why do they stay and how do they leave and put their lives back together? And since then, I've started

a nonprofit organization to help people navigate and find the help they need if they want out or if

they have a family member who's part of a group and also to do prevention work.

And so getting into those different elements of where you've studied, how they get into it,

what they see in it, ultimately how you get out. Let's start with the first, which is what have

you seen in terms of what attracts people to cults in the first place and why do they get involved with it?

This is a really important point. It's important to understand that you don't join a cult for the

doctrine and you join for psychological reasons. People get in because of a psychological need they

have, for instance, to be part of something bigger than themselves or to feel like they're going to

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