Allyson Dwyer: In the spirit of investigation, I won’t bury the lede – you grew up in a cult called Wings Seminars, a spinoff of Lifespring – I know this because I listened to your gonzo podcast Good Cult – a non-fiction series where you grapple with this very thing. Was this the kind of cult where you shave your head and live in a compound? What exactly was it like growing up in Wings Seminars?
River Donaghey: You can—if you want to, I don’t know why you would—trace the lineage of my family’s cult back to the early 1970s, in the wake of the hippie counterculture movement. Basically, the protests didn’t end Vietnam, the LSD didn’t bring about any new widespread togetherness. People looked around and realized, OK, I can’t change the world. So I’ll just work on changing the only thing I actually have control over: myself.
That morphed into a huge wave of personal growth seminars. The idea was to speed-run therapy in a five-day intensive—you get locked in a hotel ballroom with 100 strangers, 10 to 12 hours a day, little sleep, little food, where they break you down to your core and make you face who you truly are. You screamed, you cried, you told strangers your deepest and darkest unresolved traumas. And when you left in five days, you felt reborn. Or that was the idea.
The most popular of these companies was called EST, but there were a bunch. Another was called Lifespring. Wings was a spinoff of Lifespring. These companies had offices all over the country and some were global.
In the late 1970s, Lifespring closed their office in my hometown—Eugene, Oregon—when one man suffered a psychotic episode after a seminar and committed suicide. Wings sprang up to fill its place.
Wings was a little softer, a little more New Age lovey-dovey than EST or Lifespring. It’s where my parents met. It’s where they met all their friends, and just about everyone I knew growing up. My childhood was constant processing and rebirthing and getting what my parents called HDR, “heavy, deep, and real.”
It wasn’t a cult in a traditional robes-and-commune sense, but it was multilevel marketing teetering on the verge of pyramid scheme and it was a very close-knit community inside my town. I went to normal school, but I definitely carried a certain self-righteousness around, like I was part of something special and secret. We weren’t physically separate from the rest of the world, but we were mentally separate—there were the enlightened people who were a part of Wings, like me and my family, and then there was everyone else.
AD: For those new to your creative output, you have a beautiful tapestry of projects that make it hard to pin down exactly what you do. Audio writing and producing, hybrid cartoon skits about talking tattoos, and now (I’d say) vintage VICE man-in-the-field videos. At the core of everything you do, though, I’d say, is some kind of investigative north star. I’m curious how your experiences growing up in the cult led to your creativity. Were you always an investigator?
RD: I got my start as a journalist at VICE, where, yes, I hosted a few of those now-cliché VICE documentaries. I got drunk and raced horses in Guatemala, I exposed a South African cult obsessed with channeling Demon Hitler. But I never really decided to aim that investigator brain on my own history until I was in my 30s. Maybe I was afraid of what I might find?
Because not everyone had the same transcendent experience that my parents did. When I started to do research, I first came across the story of the man who died after the Lifespring seminar in Eugene. That led me to a lawsuit his family filed against the company, which uncovered a whole lot more lawsuits, all with similar, tragic stories. People who claimed that the seminars pushed them to psychotic breaks and mental breakdowns, institutionalizations and depressive episodes and suicide attempts.
These were all lawsuits against Lifespring, not my family’s company, Wings, but it was the exact same seminar. The thing that changed my parents’ lives—and literally created my life, since they met and fell in love in a seminar—damaged a lot of other lives, too.
But there’s something interesting in your question that I want to dig into also. You’re drawing a line between the investigative spark in me, and my background in the seminars. And I actually do think they’re connected.
There’s a feeling that you get in the seminars, watching strangers break down in tears and share their biggest secrets, become fully vulnerable, open up completely. And maybe part of me gravitated towards that type of investigative journalism because it tapped into the same experience. It gave me an opportunity to sit in front of strangers and ask them to open up and share something deep and complicated and often difficult to say.
There’s definitely a parallel there. I haven’t really considered that before. I guess I should investigate that, too.
AD: Wings and Lifespring aren’t typical in their appearance as cults but I trust you completely when you say that they are. They’re more like MLMs, aren’t they? But then again I’d say all cults are at their heart an MLM. What would you tell people are the key signs of a cult?
RD: I’ve spoken to a lot of cult experts—I use part of a conversation with one, Dr. Janja Lalich, in the play—but a guy named Steve Hassan has what I think is the clearest and best explanation of what makes a cult. He calls it the BITE Method. It’s about the four aspects of your life that cults try to control: Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotions. Cults certainly exist on a spectrum, and Wings Seminars may not tick all the boxes of a traditional destructive cult, but it definitely fits all four of Hassan’s BITE Method. Be concerned about any person or group that tries to control how you act, what you read, and how you think and feel.
AD: I know in those seminars you experienced some funky exercises. Can you share a few of them to give us a sense of what was being asked of attendees?
RD: The idea was that the seminar exercises would push you to reveal and then examine the deepest and thorniest parts of yourself. To shine a light on your unhelpful patterns, and then get some distance so you can detangle yourself from them.
Sometimes, there are lectures—lessons about accountability, about integrity… Nothing too groundbreaking, but people are coming into these seminars with all different levels of self-awareness, so the lectures give a kind of foundation that everyone can work from. Then there are exercises. Sometimes, you pair up with a partner and go through a little hypnosis process and speak to your partner like they’re your parents. Say all the things you’ve never said to your dad.
Sometimes the exercises are as simple as standing up in front of the 100-person room and silently making eye contact with everyone, seeing how long you can stomach being silently perceived. I remember being a little kid and watching adults break down into tears in that process and not understanding—they’re just standing there, no one’s doing anything but looking, why were they crying?
Sometimes, the exercises are games—variations of the prisoner’s dilemma that force you into a state of anxiety to reveal the ways you show up when you’re in a panic. Do you shout at your teammates and try to bully them into following your lead? Do you shrink back into the corner of the room and follow someone else, even if you have a better idea? Well, where else outside the seminar do you use anger to get your way? Where else are you letting someone else into the driver’s seat of your life? How you do one thing is how you do everything, and how you play the games are how you’re living your life. Or that’s the idea.
AD: There’s some cross-pollination between what it’s like to be in that room and to be in an audience, except at least in theater we can go back to the idea that it isn’t real. Except, this is so deeply based on your experience that it’s still quite real for one person in the room: you. I find it really risky and exciting that you’re putting so much of yourself on the line for the audience. I guess my next question is very basic: why theater? What told you theater was the next step in this exploration?
RD: Well, the seminars themselves were a tightly guarded secret. In my parents’ era, there were no cameras allowed, no recording of any kind, and everyone who went through it made a strict agreement that anything said inside the seminar would stay inside the seminar. And people stuck to that—I heard a story about one of the other seminar companies, not my parents’, where someone admitted to committing a murder inside a seminar. And the entire room collectively kept that one quiet for years.
It’s a huge secret. Fortunately or unfortunately, those seminar processes have been deeply ingrained in me since I was a baby. So in GOOD CULT, I wanted to finally bring an audience inside the seminar and illustrate what actually happens and how it feels. I do a fast-forwarded version of the five-day seminar, compressed down into 50 minutes. It’s the closest you can get to walking back into a rented hotel conference room with my parents in 1986, without having to actually take a microphone and share any of your traumas.
There was a time, when I was 15 or 16, when I was on a path to become a seminar trainer. When I thought my entire life would be standing on a stage, leading people through these controversial self-help techniques. And that’s not far from what I’m actually doing now. But this time, I’m trying to interrogate and dismantle it as I go.
AD: What can folks expect from the GOOD CULT experience? Will you be selling us something, having us do the Mom-Dad Dyad? Give us the when, where, how.
RD: The first GOOD CULT workshop will take place over three nights—October 9, 10, and 11, at Studio 17 in Manhattan. You can learn more and buy tickets at GoodCultShow.com. And if you’re committed to continuing the work that you start that night, some volunteers will be waiting afterwards ready to sign you up for the Advanced Seminar.
Some of you may be thinking about ways to handle your tuition. You may need to enroll your friends or family into assisting you on your journey. It’s all about making a commitment to yourself, to prioritizing your personal growth. If you make this a priority, you will be able to handle it.
Sorry, that seminar trainer is still ranting constantly inside my head. I’m hoping this show will help open up a little space between me and that seminar voice. Or I’ll just wind up starting a cult. Hoping it doesn’t go that way.
Leave a Reply