Fact: as well as being clergy, he was also quite a brilliant scientist - not just charismatic, but actually incredibly intelligent. And I know now that when it came to 'brainwashing' me, he threw in pretty much every technique known to man, from basic paedophilic grooming techniques, ritual, indoctrination techniques, graduated exposure & commitment, hypnosis... And he did all that in a very structured way.
I think this is significant, and you are right to see it as such. I'll say something that will sound horrible - but you were an experiment, it sounds like. And it sounds like he was very thorough, which means, he was effective - which means, you have a hard road ahead. That's not 'poor me' talk, that's just being realistic.
Being realistic doesn't mean you can't work through it. It's only making sure you aren't minimizing what happened.
Something that is true about programming: it depends on some simple (but strong) principles. Imagine them as table legs. So, one leg is going to be called, lets say, 'dependency/security'. Conditioning gets you to be actively dependent on whoever is conditioning you. The things you will be asked to do in order to be rewarded with security will be increasingly warped. The security itself might be shown as nothing more than cessation of pain, or a moment of acceptance, or kindness, or silence. You will have done things to get the reward, and you will hate yourself for those things - they are the confirmation (in your mind) that you were complicit, that you 'wanted it to happen', because you were needy, needed that security. But you
didn't have a choice. I don't mean rationally, I mean functionally - your ability to choose was erased through the conditioning. It was never that you wanted to be dependent - you were taught to be dependent.
When you eventually can accept that it was done to you, this dependency - and you probably won't accept it all the way across the years, but you'll accept it for enough 'key' moments - then the whole table leg will start to crumble. And now, the table is tilted. Every other leg holding that table up has been compromised, because you affected
one of them. De-programming has periods where it accelerates, and is easier, because a core value you were imprinted with begins to fall away. It gets harder again when you move onto another one. But in the big picture, they are all connected.
"this damage is going to be too hard for you to undo...your brain has been deliberately and carefully programmed by a person who was a helluva lot better at this gig than you'll ever be, and it's become part of your brain for over 20 years".
The good news is, it's all science. It's all methodology. You don't have to be better at it, you just have to keep hammering at it. He built the jenga tower (if you don't know what that is, google it, it's a good analogy) - you just need to keep pulling out pieces. It will collapse eventually.
