[8] Proponents of deprogramming present the practice as a necessary counter-measure to the systematic "brainwashing" procedures allegedly employed by religious groups, which they claim deprive the individual of their capacity for free choice.
Ted Patrick, the "father of deprogramming", formed an organization he called "The Citizens' Freedom Foundation" and began offering 'deprogramming' services to people who wanted to break a family member's connection to an NRM.
[11][12] Brainwashing theory denied the possibility of authentic spiritual choice for an NRM member, proposing instead that such individuals were subject to systematic mind control programs that overrode their capacity for independent volition.
[13]: 56 Ted Patrick's theory of brainwashing was that individuals were hypnotized by brainwaves projected from a recruiter's eyes and fingertips, after which the state was maintained by constant indoctrination, a totalistic environment, and self-hypnosis.
This was primarily on the back of its propagation of the brainwashing/mind control ideology, which succeeded in turning affiliation with NRMs into an issue of public—rather than private—concern and gave a pseudo-legitimacy to the anti-cultists more extreme claims and actions.
"[18] Law professor Douglas Laycock, author of Religious Liberty: The Free Exercise Clause, wrote: Beginning in the 1970s, many parents responded to the initial conversion with "deprogramming."
Told that they would not be released until they renounce their beliefs, they are then subjected to days and sometimes weeks of verbal, emotional, psychological, and/or physical pressure until the demands of their abductors are satisfied.
[20] Carol Giambalvo, who worked for the Cult Awareness Network in the 1980s (later advocating for "voluntary exit counseling" and "thought reform consultation") said that although abductions certainly occurred, the more common practice was to forcefully detain people in their own homes, or in a cabin or motel room.
Giambalvo tells of "horror stories" of restraint, beatings, use of handcuffs and weapons, sexual abuse, and even rape, although she claims that these were only used in a minority of cases and that deprogramming "helped to free many individuals".
Carol Giambalvo described the reasoning behind deprogramming thus:It was believed that the hold of the brainwashing over the cognitive processes of a cult member needed to be broken – or "snapped" as some termed it – by means that would shock or frighten the cultist into thinking again.
In the United States, where there are First Amendment protections for religious groups, government officials and agencies frequently "turned a blind eye" to the activities of deprogrammers.
In China, government agencies have at times promoted activities resembling deprogramming to enforce official views of "correct" beliefs and behaviors, for example in the suppression of the Falun Gong movement.
[29] In the United States, from the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s mind control was a widely accepted theory in public opinion, and the vast majority of newspaper and magazine accounts of deprogrammings assumed that recruits' relatives were well justified to seek conservatorships and to hire deprogrammers.
[33][34][35][36] During the 1990s, deprogrammer Rick Ross was sued by Jason Scott, a former member of a Pentecostal group called the Life Tabernacle Church, after an unsuccessful deprogramming attempt.
Exit counsellors are typically brought in during a "family Intervention", where they explain their role and seek to change the subject's attitude to their religious group through reasoning and persuasion.
Because deprogramming relies on coercion (which is illegal except in the case of conservatorship and is generally viewed as unethical) deprogrammers' critiques of the religious organization tend to be less credible to the subject than the arguments of exit counselors.