Post by Admin on Oct 19, 2021 12:25:55 GMT
Thousands of People Are Trying to Leave QAnon, but Getting Out Is Almost Impossible
In a Cosmo exclusive, women on both sides—the former believers and the doctors they’re turning to—show us what it takes to escape.
www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a37696261/leaving-recovering-from-q-anon/
For Ceally Smith, it felt like she was suffocating. The 33-year-old holistic health entrepreneur would spend hours consumed with conspiracy theories—about sex trafficking, children secretly being sold on a furniture website, the multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. There was always another video to watch, another media lie to investigate, another stranger to enlighten. Things that once fulfilled her—exercise, her meal-prep business—no longer seemed to matter. Instead, she dug deeper and deeper into the horrors the internet presented her every day, feeling obligated, as a sexual abuse survivor, to “be the adult I needed as a child,” she says.
For Anna*, a 23-year-old pharmacy student in Pennsylvania, it felt like being trapped in a vortex of fear. “I had feelings of hope, but at the same time, I was incredibly scared, distressed, and anxious and even had panic attacks,” she says. She spent as many as eight hours a day poring over feeds on Telegram and Gab, listening to fringe podcasts. “Doing just about anything else,” she admits, “was really hard.”
Another person compared it to a “monster gnawing away at me.” On a message board this summer, they wrote, “My mind keeps circling back to it, no matter what I do. I don’t want this to happen, I’ve seen what it does to people, but I just can’t shake it off, I’m losing my goddamn mind, I can’t focus on anything and my anxiety keeps shooting up, this isn’t who I am.”
“It,” for all three, was QAnon, the infamous and violent pro-Trump conspiracy theory whose followers mushroomed during the pandemic to include suburban moms, yoga teachers, grandmas, and seemingly half of your Facebook feed. The movement was so easy to get into—a provocative post by an acquaintance, a few clicks, a video that rang true, which then surfaced other videos—but would prove to be much harder to get out of.
After the 2020 presidential election, followers disillusioned by Q’s false predictions of an overwhelming Trump victory flocked to Reddit message boards like QAnonCasualties and ReQovery, their posts tinged with vulnerability and desperation. They swapped articles, books, podcasts (commonly the New York Times’ Rabbit Hole series), and tips on how to let go of conspiratorial beliefs. They numbered more than 200,000.
Theirs is the QAnon story you haven’t yet heard—the one about the people left struggling and psychologically vulnerable in its wake. Who can’t move on. Who feel duped, angry, and confused. “How do I recover from Q?” wrote a Reddit user in June. “I just don’t know what to do anymore can someone help I have tried everything.”
black line breaker
Conspiracy theories have been around as long as America itself, but last year’s particular combination of social unrest, social isolation, and pandemic-related fear created the perfect conditions for them to flourish, says Diane Benscoter, founder of Antidote, an organization that works with people who have been psychologically manipulated. Q was the first internet super-conspiracy, rising from arcane origins on 4chan to achieve mainstream popularity on social media and morphing as it went from a specific story about Donald Trump saving trafficked children into an accumulation of anxieties about vaccines, lockdowns, anti-racism, and the government in general. “It feels grounding in an unsettling time to have a simple answer and a clear enemy,” adds Benscoter. “Those wanting control can create a sense of community around mistrust and hatred of ‘the other.’” Once someone is hooked, the feeling of knowing a secret truth “can trigger the brain like a drug,” says Rachel Bernstein, a licensed therapist in California. “The high they get from this is very much like an addiction.”
Cue the brutal comedown, or “hangover of paranoia,” as Bernstein calls it, which many former Q followers are currently experiencing. Of course, some hard-core believers have only doubled down since the election, shifting their attention to the government’s alleged COVID-19 lies (in their universe, the Delta variant is the “scariant,” a ploy to trick more people into getting vaccinated, aka microchipped) or to new dates on which Trump will supposedly reclaim power. They repeat the kind of clichés commonly used by cults to discourage critical thinking, like “trust the plan” and “all will be revealed.”
But plenty of others have struggled to reconcile the things they were led to believe with the things they’ve seen unfold with their own eyes: Trump’s loss, the certification of the election on January 6 (despite the violent storming of the Capitol), Biden’s inauguration. Yet they “can’t just flip a switch and go back to their life unaffected,” says Benscoter. Q was much more than a hobby or an internet fixation. It was (and is) a support network that isolated followers from friends and family, becoming a close virtual community and impenetrable echo chamber. “You have to rebuild your entire identity, so it’s a psychological, emotional, and oftentimes interpersonal crisis.”
Extrapolate that to hundreds of thousands of distraught former acolytes, and we may be facing “the next public health crisis,” Benscoter warns—one that could lead to the rise of new conspiracy theories and even more violence. “People are focusing on the problem of QAnon but not on the solution,” she says. “We’re in the forest-is-on-fire kind of situation.”
Bernstein and Benscoter are part of a small but growing vanguard of mental health professionals and organizations that are rushing to help. Bernstein has specialized in treating Q patients trying to leave the movement since 2018, using techniques similar to cult exit counseling to help them see how they’ve been manipulated and to explore the trauma or thought patterns that left them vulnerable to manipulation in the first place. The approach was developed in the late ’70s and ’80s as a gentler alternative to the more coercive deprogramming techniques that had been used to help people escape the Children of God, a religious group that was accused of sexual abuse. But this kind of counseling has always been a niche therapy with few trained practitioners. Fast-forward to the present, when social media has enabled psychological manipulation on a massive scale. “I don’t think there’s a widely distributed body of knowledge in the mental health community for when someone is leaving hate or violence or conspiracy theory thinking,” says Shannon Foley Martinez, a reformed extremist in Athens, Georgia, who helps people exit groups like QAnon. In 2020, Bernstein says her practice “went from steady to busy to overbooked at a very fast clip.”
Some experienced practitioners, like Benscoter and Foley Martinez, are drawing on their own history to help followers disengage. When Benscoter was 17, she joined the Moonies (formally known as the Unification Church), a fringe religious group that left her cut off from family and living out of a van. Her mother ultimately helped get her out, and Benscoter has worked ever since aiding others in rescuing loved ones from cult-like groups. (She famously helped film producer India Oxenberg escape NXIVM in upstate New York, as seen on HBO’s The Vow.) Benscoter now receives “thousands of requests for help,” often from loved ones of Q followers.
Some therapists assume these patients suffer from a mental health disorder and need meds or dismiss them as being “delusional or paranoid,” says Bernstein. Since the Capitol insurrection, media reports fed the narrative that Q followers have high rates of mental illness. But Bernstein says this is largely false: Often, conspiracy theorists are just scared or lonely, seeking validation or community. They have a need that isn’t being met, and Q presents itself as the answer. As David McRaney, author of the forthcoming book How Minds Change, recently explained on a podcast, “Conspiratorial thinking is something that all brains do…searching for patterns in noise, order inside of chaos, meaning within ambiguity is part of how brains make sense of the entire world.”
black line breaker
It all started for Ceally in 2019 when she met a guy who was cute and handy and happened to be deep into QAnon. Which, at the time, felt like whatever. She didn’t consider herself political back then. She hadn’t even bothered to vote in the 2016 election.
She was focused on holistic health and had been “vaccine skeptical” ever since her son almost lost his life, she says, after getting the MMR vaccine. (Serious allergic reactions to the MMR vaccine are extremely rare, according to the CDC.) When she learned that Q followers were also skeptical of vaccines, she started digging around online. Her research soon took on a life of its own, and eventually, Ceally was following every major Q account on Facebook, messaging with other followers for hours each day. She became obsessed with the idea that powerful people were trafficking children and that she could help bring these abuses to light by encouraging others to do their own research into the issue. But she had nothing to show for her activism except a deep and debilitating paranoia about the world her children were growing up in. “I felt like I needed to control the outcome they would be exposed to,” she says.
In a Cosmo exclusive, women on both sides—the former believers and the doctors they’re turning to—show us what it takes to escape.
www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a37696261/leaving-recovering-from-q-anon/
For Ceally Smith, it felt like she was suffocating. The 33-year-old holistic health entrepreneur would spend hours consumed with conspiracy theories—about sex trafficking, children secretly being sold on a furniture website, the multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. There was always another video to watch, another media lie to investigate, another stranger to enlighten. Things that once fulfilled her—exercise, her meal-prep business—no longer seemed to matter. Instead, she dug deeper and deeper into the horrors the internet presented her every day, feeling obligated, as a sexual abuse survivor, to “be the adult I needed as a child,” she says.
For Anna*, a 23-year-old pharmacy student in Pennsylvania, it felt like being trapped in a vortex of fear. “I had feelings of hope, but at the same time, I was incredibly scared, distressed, and anxious and even had panic attacks,” she says. She spent as many as eight hours a day poring over feeds on Telegram and Gab, listening to fringe podcasts. “Doing just about anything else,” she admits, “was really hard.”
Another person compared it to a “monster gnawing away at me.” On a message board this summer, they wrote, “My mind keeps circling back to it, no matter what I do. I don’t want this to happen, I’ve seen what it does to people, but I just can’t shake it off, I’m losing my goddamn mind, I can’t focus on anything and my anxiety keeps shooting up, this isn’t who I am.”
“It,” for all three, was QAnon, the infamous and violent pro-Trump conspiracy theory whose followers mushroomed during the pandemic to include suburban moms, yoga teachers, grandmas, and seemingly half of your Facebook feed. The movement was so easy to get into—a provocative post by an acquaintance, a few clicks, a video that rang true, which then surfaced other videos—but would prove to be much harder to get out of.
After the 2020 presidential election, followers disillusioned by Q’s false predictions of an overwhelming Trump victory flocked to Reddit message boards like QAnonCasualties and ReQovery, their posts tinged with vulnerability and desperation. They swapped articles, books, podcasts (commonly the New York Times’ Rabbit Hole series), and tips on how to let go of conspiratorial beliefs. They numbered more than 200,000.
Theirs is the QAnon story you haven’t yet heard—the one about the people left struggling and psychologically vulnerable in its wake. Who can’t move on. Who feel duped, angry, and confused. “How do I recover from Q?” wrote a Reddit user in June. “I just don’t know what to do anymore can someone help I have tried everything.”
black line breaker
Conspiracy theories have been around as long as America itself, but last year’s particular combination of social unrest, social isolation, and pandemic-related fear created the perfect conditions for them to flourish, says Diane Benscoter, founder of Antidote, an organization that works with people who have been psychologically manipulated. Q was the first internet super-conspiracy, rising from arcane origins on 4chan to achieve mainstream popularity on social media and morphing as it went from a specific story about Donald Trump saving trafficked children into an accumulation of anxieties about vaccines, lockdowns, anti-racism, and the government in general. “It feels grounding in an unsettling time to have a simple answer and a clear enemy,” adds Benscoter. “Those wanting control can create a sense of community around mistrust and hatred of ‘the other.’” Once someone is hooked, the feeling of knowing a secret truth “can trigger the brain like a drug,” says Rachel Bernstein, a licensed therapist in California. “The high they get from this is very much like an addiction.”
Cue the brutal comedown, or “hangover of paranoia,” as Bernstein calls it, which many former Q followers are currently experiencing. Of course, some hard-core believers have only doubled down since the election, shifting their attention to the government’s alleged COVID-19 lies (in their universe, the Delta variant is the “scariant,” a ploy to trick more people into getting vaccinated, aka microchipped) or to new dates on which Trump will supposedly reclaim power. They repeat the kind of clichés commonly used by cults to discourage critical thinking, like “trust the plan” and “all will be revealed.”
But plenty of others have struggled to reconcile the things they were led to believe with the things they’ve seen unfold with their own eyes: Trump’s loss, the certification of the election on January 6 (despite the violent storming of the Capitol), Biden’s inauguration. Yet they “can’t just flip a switch and go back to their life unaffected,” says Benscoter. Q was much more than a hobby or an internet fixation. It was (and is) a support network that isolated followers from friends and family, becoming a close virtual community and impenetrable echo chamber. “You have to rebuild your entire identity, so it’s a psychological, emotional, and oftentimes interpersonal crisis.”
Extrapolate that to hundreds of thousands of distraught former acolytes, and we may be facing “the next public health crisis,” Benscoter warns—one that could lead to the rise of new conspiracy theories and even more violence. “People are focusing on the problem of QAnon but not on the solution,” she says. “We’re in the forest-is-on-fire kind of situation.”
Bernstein and Benscoter are part of a small but growing vanguard of mental health professionals and organizations that are rushing to help. Bernstein has specialized in treating Q patients trying to leave the movement since 2018, using techniques similar to cult exit counseling to help them see how they’ve been manipulated and to explore the trauma or thought patterns that left them vulnerable to manipulation in the first place. The approach was developed in the late ’70s and ’80s as a gentler alternative to the more coercive deprogramming techniques that had been used to help people escape the Children of God, a religious group that was accused of sexual abuse. But this kind of counseling has always been a niche therapy with few trained practitioners. Fast-forward to the present, when social media has enabled psychological manipulation on a massive scale. “I don’t think there’s a widely distributed body of knowledge in the mental health community for when someone is leaving hate or violence or conspiracy theory thinking,” says Shannon Foley Martinez, a reformed extremist in Athens, Georgia, who helps people exit groups like QAnon. In 2020, Bernstein says her practice “went from steady to busy to overbooked at a very fast clip.”
Some experienced practitioners, like Benscoter and Foley Martinez, are drawing on their own history to help followers disengage. When Benscoter was 17, she joined the Moonies (formally known as the Unification Church), a fringe religious group that left her cut off from family and living out of a van. Her mother ultimately helped get her out, and Benscoter has worked ever since aiding others in rescuing loved ones from cult-like groups. (She famously helped film producer India Oxenberg escape NXIVM in upstate New York, as seen on HBO’s The Vow.) Benscoter now receives “thousands of requests for help,” often from loved ones of Q followers.
Some therapists assume these patients suffer from a mental health disorder and need meds or dismiss them as being “delusional or paranoid,” says Bernstein. Since the Capitol insurrection, media reports fed the narrative that Q followers have high rates of mental illness. But Bernstein says this is largely false: Often, conspiracy theorists are just scared or lonely, seeking validation or community. They have a need that isn’t being met, and Q presents itself as the answer. As David McRaney, author of the forthcoming book How Minds Change, recently explained on a podcast, “Conspiratorial thinking is something that all brains do…searching for patterns in noise, order inside of chaos, meaning within ambiguity is part of how brains make sense of the entire world.”
black line breaker
It all started for Ceally in 2019 when she met a guy who was cute and handy and happened to be deep into QAnon. Which, at the time, felt like whatever. She didn’t consider herself political back then. She hadn’t even bothered to vote in the 2016 election.
She was focused on holistic health and had been “vaccine skeptical” ever since her son almost lost his life, she says, after getting the MMR vaccine. (Serious allergic reactions to the MMR vaccine are extremely rare, according to the CDC.) When she learned that Q followers were also skeptical of vaccines, she started digging around online. Her research soon took on a life of its own, and eventually, Ceally was following every major Q account on Facebook, messaging with other followers for hours each day. She became obsessed with the idea that powerful people were trafficking children and that she could help bring these abuses to light by encouraging others to do their own research into the issue. But she had nothing to show for her activism except a deep and debilitating paranoia about the world her children were growing up in. “I felt like I needed to control the outcome they would be exposed to,” she says.