Quote:Leaving Maga’s weekly online support group isn’t for people in Maga – it’s for the people who love them. That includes spouses, adult children, parents, siblings, friends and extended family who have watched someone close to them become “not the person who they once were”, said facilitator Julianna Forlano.

Forlano, a therapist, has worked with families of people with narcissistic personality disorder and in addiction recovery, and said the ruptures she sees every week aren’t really about ideology. “What’s happening in families and in marriages, and between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons has to do with behavior,” she said.

Forlano and her group borrow a framework used in addiction and recovery circles, treating the psychological grip of constant fear-based media and conspiracies like a disease. The mechanism is neurobiological, she said: people who consume a steady diet of fear narratives become fearful in general, adopt a “with us or against us” mentality and start treating loved ones as threats.

“The mind is functioning as a dope seeker,” she said, craving the next piece of alarming news the way an addicted brain craves its next hit. Forlano is careful to note that holding certain political beliefs doesn’t make someone diseased; the compulsive, threat-seeking pattern layered on top of those beliefs is what the group tries to address.