When I was twelve years old, I discovered my mother’s old Kidsnatcher notebook in a pile of papers and books on her bedroom floor. The cheerful-looking binder with a swirly pattern contained a steady stream of correspondence mostly between moms and upper management in Synanon. For the next few hours, I sat enthralled reading through the old mail. Here were letters from various women, some of whom I had known, applying for the privilege to bring their child or children into the commune. There were even pictures of myself and some of the kids I’d known during my years in the cult. Later that day I asked my mother if I could borrow the notebook. She agreed, and it has been in my possession ever since. Over the years I have read through those letters, puzzling over my odd past and the adults who made up the community of Synanon.

For one year my mother had been part of the Kidsnatchers, a support group for parents working to bring their children into the community.

Some parents who were finding it difficult to negotiate with ex-spouses and relatives resorted to kidnapping.
The notebook contains some fifty odd letters and the authors of the letters, mostly mothers, note their examples of loyalty and devotion they have shown to earn the reward of seeing their children again.

…I demonstrated consistently in the school in Tomales for about ten months to bring X into Synanon. I was in the Kidsnatchers before I was rotated to Santa Monica. I have been pretty consistent in my letter writing.

…I’ve been in Synanon 9 months. I’ve gone through the Boot Camp and graduated with some very good basics and will continue to use them all the time. I also know what’s expected of me after 9 months in Synanon and where to put my energies, which is to play a hard Synanon game, look out for my peers, keep a nice smile, and look out for the newer people because “ I can’t keep it unless I can give it away.”

…I have two children, Y six years old and X three years of age. They are now living with my mother in Detroit on welfare and in the ghetto…I will have lived in Synanon for two years. For about a year or more I have written letters, demonstrated, played games, and talked endlessly regarding bringing my children into Synanon.  I’ve worked in the lower school almost four months and in the Middle school program about eight months. Within the last three months, I have had two promotions in my job. I am also in the Kidsnatchers group.

Amongst the letters are reports and notes from school management and staff, as well as essays outlining, ideas, hopes, and dreams about the school in general and the participation of a specific child in particular, usually the author’s child. One paper in the notebook stood out for me, a polemic against the evils of parenting.  The author analyzes her maternal instincts as an adverse outcome of society, admonishing what she calls ‘desperate parents’, “non-thinkers that are the most influenced by nuclear family imprinting.” She cites the founder of Synanon, Chuck Dederich, and his quest to “kill, completely destroy: 1) organized religion 2) psychiatry 3) the nuclear family, and 4) motherhood,” as her source for this new paradigm in what she had come to consider enlightened thinking.
“Thank God,” she gushed, “a real thinking man who was also a drunk came along before us and founded Synanon…My old pictures of being a parent and mother are changing rapidly.  My nuclear family imprinting was as strong as the next unfortunate on my block, yet even before I came to Syananon, I realized that the system of mom vs. kids-total dependency on one another (this goes for the fathers too) was destroying us.”

My mother had told me fragments of her story over the years of how she had come to be in Synanon and what attracted her to the cult, as well as the difficulty she experienced being a single mom in Los Angeles during the 1970’s. While I understood all of this on a superficial level, I often wondered how a person becomes caught in the grip of fanaticism. For me, it was clear that my mother wanted to be a mom. She wanted to be in my life and have those day to day experiences that parents at one time or another take for granted, yet she gave up a chunk of that time for seductive ideology, why?
Although I empathized on a certain level, it wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles as a single mom with my youngest daughter that I had a glimpse of how difficult things must have been for my mother. In the early 1970’s single moms still carried the status of being wanton and possibly immoral. My mother told me that during her pregnancy she stayed in an apartment complex specifically for unwed pregnant women funded by the Catholic Church. On a walk home one day, she spotted a pregnant cat. Delighted to see another expecting female, she bent to pet the animal but the owner, an old man, stopped her. Knowing she was from the apartment complex for single moms, he ran out of his house and yelled,
“Don’t touch my cat. I don’t want you women touching my cat!” Startled and ashamed, my mother yanked her hand back and walked quickly away with her head down.

In 2009 when I moved to L.A., being a single mom was a non-issue. I was thirty-nine, recently divorced and had raised a brood of six children, biological and otherwise. I had run several small businesses and had left a lucrative position as a massage therapist in a luxury resort, where I worked for nine years. Although I was not a young woman in her early twenties as my mother had been when she had me, my self-esteem still took a nasty nosedive.  Unprepared for the high cost of living in L.A., my daughter and I spent the first eighteen months in my father’s apartment. We slept on sofas while I scrambled to find clients. At times I awoke in the night panicked. The mind-numbing commute from Inglewood to Van Nuys to give my daughter a decent education, the crushing isolation I felt at times far from close friends, and my other children contributed to a constant low-grade anxiety. For all my years of experience and skills I had developed, there were times I felt like I just didn’t count as a human anymore. People were all around, yet I never felt so alone. When I pondered my situation and state of mind all I had to do was multiply how I was feeling by ten, and that would be my mother’s world years ago. When my mom spoke of going to her first Synanon party in Santa Monica at the Casa Del Mar Hotel, she said, “the people seemed to shimmer, their eyes were clear, and they spoke about creating positive change in society.” What’s more, the parties were racially integrated, something to take notice of back then. Even today, Los Angeles is still very segregated.

Over the years I have tried to write about my childhood in Synanon, always unsuccessfully. It wasn’t until I fell on hard times as a single mother in the same city my mom struggled in that I was able to gain perspective and inspiration to write  Synanon Kid. In the summer of 2013, I pulled out a notebook and began jotting down notes of my memories. Over the course of several phone interviews with my mom, while I sat on a futon in my sparsely furnished apartment, I began to piece together my past. What emerged from the stories we shared with each other was a deeper understanding of how a place like Synanon with its radical ideas and lifestyle choices could appear enticing to an individual during a time of heightened vulnerability. For my mother, Synanon provided the social wealth of community that was missing in her life.

The late Margaret Singer, who was a clinical psychologist, and professor at the University of  Berkeley, studied cults and coercive persuasion. In the literature she had produced on the subject, she has outlined six conditions for thought reform:

• Control over a person’s time
• Creating a sense of powerlessness
• Keeping a person unaware of what is going on and how he or she is being changed one step at a time
• Creating a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval and executive order
• Manipulation of rewards, punishments, and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects a person’s former identity
• Manipulation of rewards, punishments, and experiences to promote learning the group’s ideology and belief system and group approved behavior.

My mother had turned to Synanon for help and step by step she was led deeper into Synanon doctrine in the closed network of their private properties.  Kidsnatchers offered her something to work for, which matched her objective, to be reunited with her child. We children were the reward for parents who learned Synanon philosophy well and adopted the group’s ideology, our absence from the community, a punishment. The idea of reuniting with one’s child became a strong incentive for parents to work harder at becoming exemplary Synanon members. I saw this theme again and again in the letters written by Kidsnatchers to upper management.

Margaret Singer has said that most people who join cults were not looking to be in a cult when recruited. My mother, I have surmised from our conversations over the years was not seeking to be in Synanon for seven years of her life, rather she had sought help from the organization out of her desire and need to be a better mother. For her, the carrot on the stick had been the school and the enriching experience of community. Ironically she had not joined Synanon to escape motherhood, but to embrace it.