Brainwashing or thought reform is not a one-off event but a gradual process of breaking down and transformation. Thus, thought reform is a concerted effort to change a person’s way of looking at the world, which will change his or her behaviour.
To understand more about mind control, or brainwashing, I will explain it in three stages: attacking the self; invisible social adaptation; and producing a new identity.
Attacking the self
- Brainwashing uses the attack on a person’s capacity for self-evaluation as a principal technique.
- They do this by breaking you down and building you back up with their own set of beliefs and morals without you even noticing it is happening.
- This begins with convincing people to give up their past affiliations and belief systems, including their support system outside of the group.
- Your old beliefs and old patterns of behaviour are defined as irrelevant and dysfunctional, if not evil.
- You end up believing that your former life was wrong, that your support system is bad and that the only way to have a good support system and to be a good person is by joining this new group/ ideology/ leader.
- Once you have done this, it creates a vulnerability and destabilisation within you which makes it easier for you to adopt this new way of being prescribed by the cult and its leader.
You can see how anyone could become vulnerable in this situation.
Invisible social adaptation
- Next, or alongside, they control your social and physical environment, especially your time, to make sure you don’t have time to think much about what is happening to you. The more time and resources you invest, the more acceptance you get from the group and the leader.
- The cult rewards behaviour that is approved by them and punishes or excludes when you stray from this.
- This keeps you constantly on edge and willing to comply whist evoking anxiety and guilt if you don’t.
- But again, because the belief system is reinforced by the environment and the group, you believe that the fear and guilt that you feel must have something to do with how wrong you are, and nothing to do with how the organisation is treating you.
Essentially, if you criticise the leader and/or the ideology, you are defective.
Producing a new identity
- You have now given up your old identity, your former support system and invested considerable resources into the cult. You have confirmation from your cult environment that you are on the right path, and that this is the only way.
- The more investment and affirmation there is, the more imbedded you become. Now it is very hard to turn back, let alone admit that you are being deceived. This would mean social exclusion and having to question your whole new life.
- Without any checks or balances from the outside world, the group is only accountable to the leader and to itself.
- This makes it a closed authoritarian system that permits no feedback and refuses to change except with leadership approval.
- The result is the person becomes a deployable agent for the organization and totally dependent on the organisation/ leader.
- In the following articles in this series, I will expand on the psychology of the cult leader, children in cults, why people join and why does it matter for us to educate ourselves and know more about this topic.
Sam Jahara is a UKCP registered psychotherapist and clinical supervisor. She is experienced in working with the psychological impact of high-control groups and cults on individuals, families and organisations. She has also given public talks and podcast interviews on this topic.
References –
- Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (Lifton, Robert Jay. 1961)
- Cults in our Midst: The Hidden Menace in our Everyday Lives (Singer, M.T. and J. Lalich. 1995)
- Combatting Cult Mind Control (Hassan, Steven, 1988)
- Escaping Utopia (Lalich and McLaren 2018)
- Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Shaw, Daniel. 2013)
- The Guru papers, Masks of Authoritarian Power (Kramer and Alstad, 1993)
Further reading by Sam Jahara
The psychological impact on children who grow up in cults
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