Abuse and Cognition - The Burks Study, Part 1

Abuse impairs memory, particularly - but not exclusively - if it happens early in life.

Given this fact, it should be no surprise that psychological abuse can also impair cognition.

In plain language, being abused emotionally and mentally... may actually affect your ability to think, even for some time after you escape from the abusive environment.

The doctoral dissertation of Ronald Burks, published in 2002, focused specifically on how abuse affects our ability to think.

Dr. Burks first reviewed available professional literature on people who had survived abuse in cult environments. With respect to this information, he considered possible sources of bias in the reports. He also looked at the validity of making general conclusions based on the very specific sets of people who were studied.

Even allowing for these factors, he still observed that

"While results differed on whether members of groups are emotionally healthy, clearly some ex-members exhibit significant pathology that cannot be accounted for by pre-existing factors.  No studies were found that conclude that membership in a cult has long term, positive effects on those who leave."

Please consider those sentences again. "... clearly some ex-members exhibit significant pathology that cannot be accounted for by pre-existing factors. No studies were found that conclude that membership in a cult has long term, positive effects on those who leave."

In other words, from the available studies, cult experiences can damage some people. Significantly. And people who emerged from cults and were included in these studies didn't seem better off as a result of their experience.

Dr. Burks then conducted his own direct study, involving 132 people who had previously belonged to abusive religious cults [Eastern or Western], or "had been in abusive relationships or families that fit the admission criteria...." His volunteers were drawn from people who actively sought treatment at [a specific center] "for after-effects of their experience in the group or relationship."

This is important. He looked at people who had been seriously harmed, and knew they had been harmed, and were trying to do something about it.

The specific center he worked with "treats only persons who have experienced some form of perceived psychological trauma perpetrated by another person". Very importantly, "All clients who are admitted report having experienced repeated emotional injury and being led to believe that it was their own fault or for their own good."

Thus, all of his volunteer subjects were definite survivors of emotional and psychological abuse at the hands of other people.

Why did he include people from abusive families, abusive relationships? An abusive family is structured like a cult... or, more truly, a cult is structured like an abusive family. An abusive relationship is structured like a cult... and so are abusive workplaces. Many cliques, and essentially all gangs, are really cults, whether they are in realspace or cyberspace.

In any cult there are leaders and followers. There is power, with its perks, and there are toadies, feeding on scraps from the leaders' table. There are targets and scapegoats, rules spoken and unspoken that cult members violate at their peril.

So all of the people Dr. Burks studied had been immersed in cultic environments, and escaped to tell the tale - but they still carried the scars. And those scars were the focus of his study.

[Part 2 follows immediately.]

Abuse and Cognition - The Burks Study, Part 2

His study instruments included a test for dissociative symptoms [the Hopkins Symptom Checklist dissociation screen], a test for depression [Beck Depression Inventory], and a test for exposure to abusive group dynamics [Group Psychological Abuse Scale].

This third scale, the GPA Scale, is the centerpiece of the work in terms of defining the emotional abuse experienced by his study subjects. He describes it as follows:

"The GPA is a 28-item scale that seeks to examine four factors associated with abusive group environments: compliance, exploitation, mind control, and anxious dependency.  It was developed as an attempt to differentiate between groups that use practices or combinations of belief and practice that seem to be associated with deceptive persuasion techniques and those groups that do not. In the GPA, participants are asked to respond to each item in a sense of how characteristic it would be of their group.  The items are scored on a 5-point scale ranging from Not at All Characteristic (1) to Very Characteristic (5).  Total scores range from 28 to 140.  The GPA’s four subscales: Compliance, Exploitation, Mind Control, and Anxious Dependency are totaled to arrive at a Summary scale.  This scale was utilized in this study.
                The GPA is a narrowly focused instrument, designed solely for members and ex-members of groups suspected of using thought reform techniques and there is little information available on its reliability and validity.  Internal consistency ranged from .70 on the Mind Control scale to .81 on the Compliance and Summary scales.  To determine the criterion validity of the GPA, The authors compared the scores of former members of groups suspected of being cultic to the arithmetic midpoint of each of the subscales and the Summary scale.  Former members of cultic groups scored higher than the midpoint on all scales and significantly higher than the midpoint on the Summary scale.  Langone. (1999) found that former members of the Boston Church of Christ, a group alleged by its ex-members to have cult-like tendencies, scored higher on the GPA Summary scale than former Catholics or former members of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a much smaller group considered to be an intense but innocuous campus ministry.  The instrument seems to have concurrent criterion validity, that is, it is capable of fulling its purpose for this study, to provide a means of differentiation between the experiences of ex-members of cults from those of ex-members of other groups."

Let's reiterate the four subscales of the Group Psychological Abuse Scale:

-Compliance,
-Exploitation,
-Mind Control, and
-Anxious Dependency.

These four characteristics are associated with deceptive persuasion techniques. The first three are tools used to manipulate people dishonestly - and anxious dependency is an emotional state that's induced in people to make them easier to manipulate. Who's easiest to manage? Someone who desperately needs what you offer, and is terrified of losing it. Dependent and anxious.

A group that displays these four characteristics - whether it be a religious organization, a family, or the Accounting Department at XYZ Widgets - is cultic in nature and, depending on the extent to which these characteristics are expressed, abusive.. Conformity is demanded, certain people are taken advantage of, group members are told what to think and feel and how to react to situations and events, and the members feel a strong need for, attachment to, dependence on the group - and fear being separated from it or from other members.

In addition to these tests for emotional harm and abusive past environment, Dr. Burks also had his study population take a standard test of cognitive impairment. This was the Neuropsychological Impairment Scale, which is commonly used to assess cognitive impairment and recovery of cognitive function following traumatic brain injury, disease, or stroke.

The people in his study were tested both before and after two weeks of intensive psychological treatment at the study center. By comparing the 'group abusiveness' [GPAS] scores to the Neurological Impairment scores, he was able to see the extent to which abusive group dynamics [and their intensity] connected to cognitive problems - mild, medium, or severe - in ex-group members.

What did he discover?

He found a small positive correlation between 'intensity of thought reform environment' and cognitive impairment. Between the brainwashing type of abusiveness demonstrated by a cult, and difficulty thinking clearly, retaining information, and so on.

In other words, in this small study,

abusive brainwashing, whether it came from a group, a family, or a significant other, was found to correlate with damage to people's ability to take in, process, and retain information and to reason clearly.

The study was not longitudinal. It was impossible to look at the people prior to their abusive experience to determine the extent of harm to their reasoning faculties. It wasn't able to tell the extent to which they might have 'self-selected' for cults whose reasoning patterns matched their own, and thus had pre-existing problems amplified by their cult experience. It also looked only at people who had been definitely harmed, and were harmed significantly enough to be seeking help; thus, the sample of volunteers was biased by definition. It wasn't designed to evaluate the length of time any damage might persist, or how well and quickly people recover with treatment vs. without.

The results of this study cannot be used as a basis for believing that cognitive effects of abuse are permanent, and they don't predict the extent of any damage.

But these results do carry a strong message that abuse is nothing to be taken lightly. Nothing to be tolerated, shrugged off, ignored when it is happening to someone else.

It does damage. It wounds not only hearts and souls, but can affect people's very minds.

The concept of abuse affecting cognition also helps me to understand two important issues about abusers and their 'sidekicks'.

First, it may explain why some otherwise decent-seeming people are unable to draw the most obvious conclusions about an abuser's true character. If they have been abused themselves, if they are fully committed members of the abuser's cult, it is quite possible that they simply cannot think clearly about what they are experiencing, or about what is happening to anyone else around them. This cognitive disruption is to be pitied, not condemned. This is something to make onlookers rend their garments and sit in the ashes, weeping, once it is truly, deeply understood.

Second, it almost certainly explains why abusers so often openly sneer at and deride obviously intelligent people - people who reason clearly and lucidly, people who know 'how things work', and especially people who want to share what they learn with others.

Abusers, being predators, regard other people as prey. Purely and simply. We're not friends, we're not family. We're fodder.

And it's much easier to prey on people whose reasoning powers are muddled, confused, emotionally disrupted - especially if they can also be kept anxious and dependent on the very people who prey on them.

Rational, intelligent people make lousy prey. They resist allowing abusers to disrupt their thought processes. They are the people that abusers can't control. They ask the embarrassing questions, notice the telltale inconsistencies, see the patterns in the behavior, put the evidence together, draw conclusions. And then they talk about it.

Abusers don't want them talking, sharing, thinking. They don't want their prey to see any of these things as 'good'. Because these things model independent thought, and fodder is not supposed to think.

Abusers are well aware that the people who refuse to be lied to and led are the ones who get away, and often do everything in their power to take others with them, into freedom.