"To me that's a way of saying leave your family and move on," Romero said.

After hooking up with Madonna, A-Rod was soon frequenting Manhattan's Kabbalah Centre — where he's been spotted recently — in an all-white uniform, the sect's symbol of purity.

The temple on East 48th Street near Lexington Avenue is the same center that Madonna and her family visited yesterday. "I've seen him walking out of it," said doorman Andrew Rodriguez (no relation to A-Rod), who works at a building next door to the center.

Rodriguez and Oseary became fast friends, and Oseary's influence over A-Rod led the Yankee to a highly publicized breakup with agent Scott Boras, baseball's most powerful player representative, according to a source with knowledge of the split.

Pop icon Madonna is using kabbalah to brainwash Yankee star Alex Rodriguez into believing they are "soulmates," the ballplayer's estranged wife is telling friends. 

Friends say the baseballer has been "brainwashed" by the pop star's mystical Kabbalah religion. "This all started with Kaballah," one friend told the New York Daily News. "Alex told Cynthia that he'd discovered that he'd been looking for his soul mate. And now, he said, he'd found her." The friend said Mrs Rodriguez had found a letter in which her husband told Madonna: "You are my true soul mate." 

Wife says Madonna using kabbalah to brainwash A-Rod 

Pop icon Madonna is using kabbalah to brainwash New York Yankee star Alex Rodriguez into believing they are "soulmates," the ballplayer's estranged wife is telling friends. 

http://www.nypost.com

http://abclocal.go.com

http://www.bloomberg.com

 PSYCHOLOGISTS AND CULT EXPERTS:

1. They define cults as organizations that feature "coordinated programs of coercive influence and behavioral control," many religiously or politically oriented and increasingly centered on New Age self-improvement techniques that they claim are now being peddled to businesses.

They enumerate the dangers of cults to the individual, particularly the attack on the sense of self; they analyze the leaders' techniques (almost all these groups are authoritarian), including isolation from family and friends, trance induction, guided imagery and indirect suggestion; they offer practical advice on methods of helping survivors to escape and recover.

http://www.factnet.org

2. There may be other factors, but I see at least two major evolved psychological mechanisms emerging from the past to make us susceptible to cults. The Patty Hearst kidnapping 2 exemplifies one. We know that people can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family. Usually called "brainwashing," it is also known as The Stockholm Syndrome 3 and “mind control.”

http://www.human-nature.com

3. "A cult is a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of [consequences of] leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community."

- West, L. J., & Langone, M. D. (1985). Cultism: A conference for scholars and policy makers. Summary of proceedings of the Wingspread conference on cultism, September 9–11.

4. Group members are thus often cut off and isolated from any outside frame of reference or objective feedback. They become constrained through their largely exclusive associations within the group, this may also include being substantially removed from family and old friends. All these factors can create a kind of vacuum regarding any meaningful critical analysis. And then the group and/or its leadership fills that vacuum with its own perspective and agenda…

The person in submission is also frequently isolated from family and friends and becomes very dependent upon the dominant authority figure.

http://www.rickross.com

1. People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
3. They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader;
4. They get a new identity based on the group;
5. They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.

- Psychology 101, Carole Wade et al., 2005