When religious cults recruit individuals, the first thing they do is make the novitiate sever all ties to their former lives. This involves cutting off family, friends, all of the emotional support structure, thus making the individual vulnerable to "reprogramming" by the collectivist entity that seeks to recreate them. What cults engage in is the work of remaking the individual in the image of the collective, of alienating them to their intimates for the purposes of bonding them to their new social peers.
