My abuser deliberately used a range of tactics from hypnosis, to ritual, to punishment/reward, to indoctrination techniques (and on, and on) for the purposes of abusong me, and because he seemed to take some kind of enjoyment from making me believe some pretty messed up things.
It took me a long long time to be able to admit that I was brainwashed. I was, but I still feel incredibly uncomfortable with that. My preferred word is ‘conditioned’. A lot of the time I feel like the victim of a malevolent science project.
The big change in my recovery from that element of my abuse occurred when I was given a book to read about treating victims of satanic cults. The info about satanic cults? Not helpful! But the treatment approach was to essentially normalise the “brainwashing” that the victims were recovering from - and that was a game changer for me.
A lot of therapy for this stuff is directed at “deprogramming”. But it places a lot of emphasis on how, when you’re brainwashed, it’s as if someone has inserted some kind of computer chip in your mind so that your mind is being controlled somehow.
Actually, the big difference between “brainwashing” (that you might get from a cult), and the type of daily messages that kids in abusive households grow up with? Is simply that in some situations, like cults, the conditioning is simply carried out in a more deliberate and considered way, and sometimes using more techniques. Same end product though: you’ve been taught to believe something, and eventually you do.
Taking the mystery out of “brainwashing” in that way was really helpful to me. The same ‘re-learning’ process that any other abused child needs to go through when they’re healing? Is what I need to do. The only difference is the methods and motivations of the perpetrator, which isn’t something that actually needs to really impact my recovery process at all.
Brainwashing, as an expression, to me is not much more than emphasisng the deliberateness and intentional nature of teaching the victim certain things. I absolutely believe there are individuals, communities and organisations around that deliberately set out to convince people of things that are untrue, dangerous, and are for the purpose of serving the perpetrator rather than the victim. That’s not a conspiracy, it’s just nasty version of what parents and schools and churches do every day of the week.
A child who is routinely beaten and told by an alcoholic parent “You’re useless” needs to relearn things much the same way I do. It’s just that the way they were taught “You’re useless” wasn’t necessarily the calculated end-game that my abuser had. It’s all conditioning - it’s just different methods and motivations.
ETA: the biggest possible difference? Is that as part of my recovery, I need to somehow accept that all of the vicious and mind-altering things my abuser did to me? Was incredibly calculated. That’s hard to come to terms with. But I don’t think it’s necessarily any worse than the person who has to come to terms with “These are things my abusive parent taught me because they didn’t care, or were just plain messed up themselves”. They’re different things to have to accept and heal from, but I’m not convinced that one is any worse than the other, they’re just different.
