27 Facts About Steven Hassan

Steven Alan Hassan is an American mental health professional and author who specializes in the area of cults.

Steven Hassan worked as a deprogrammer in the late 1970s, but since then has advocated a non-coercive form of exit counseling.

Steven Hassan is a former member of the Unification Church, and founded Ex-Moon Inc in 1979.

Steven Hassan was raised in a Jewish family in Queens, New York.

At age 19, while pursuing a poetry degree at Queens College, Steven Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church, and spent 27 months as a member.

Steven Hassan was involved in recruiting, fundraising, and political campaigning for the Unification Church of the United States.

Steven Hassan was "a former Unification Church high official" and "a national leader of CARP".

Steven Hassan described living in communal housing and sleeping less than four hours a night.

Steven Hassan said that he believed Richard Nixon was an archangel and that, during the Watergate scandal, he and other members of the church engaged in prayer and fasting to "prove their loyalty to the president".

Steven Hassan surrendered his bank account to the Unification Church, and quit college and his job to work for the organization.

Steven Hassan said that "he was ready to kill or die for" Sun Myung Moon.

In 1976, after working for two full days without sleep, Steven Hassan fell asleep while driving, resulting in a serious automobile accident that required medical care.

Steven Hassan's parents hired "deprogrammers" who seized him from his sister's home and took him to an apartment.

In 1979, Steven Hassan founded a non-profit organization called Ex-Moon Inc The organization consisted of over four hundred former members of the Unification Church.

The center is registered as a domestic profit corporation in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Steven Hassan is its president and treasurer.

Steven Hassan took part in a number of "deprogrammings" in the late 1970s, but has been critical of them since 1980 and has instead advocated exit counseling.

An affidavit from one subject, and Steven Hassan's own written description of the same deprogramming, indicate that the subject, who was a football player, was restrained by his former teammates.

Steven Hassan's preferred approach, exit counseling, is a form of family-initiated intervention, but distinguishes itself by allowing the subject to leave at any time and by adopting a non-violent, persuasive approach.

In 1985, Steven Hassan completed a Master's degree in counseling psychology at Cambridge College.

Steven Hassan studied hypnosis and is a member of the International Society of Hypnosis.

Steven Hassan spent several years developing and promoting a model to evaluate cults and cult-like groups.

Steven Hassan argues that theorists like Hassan take well-founded suspicion of some manipulative religious leaders and generalize it into a mind control ideology applicable to all cult leaders and cult members.

Steven Hassan received his doctorate from Fielding Graduate University and published a dissertation in January 2021.

Steven Hassan's dissertation was titled "The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking and the Law".

Steven Hassan describes his model as an effort to measure degrees of exploitative control or undue influence and as an attempt to evaluate behavior, information, thought and emotional controls.

Steven Hassan contributed two chapters relating to hypnosis and society to the 2024 edited volume The Routledge International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis.

Steven Hassan is often described in the media as a cult and mind control expert.