Mind Control: Not Just Used in Pseudo-Religious Cults

Mind control. The term brings up images of pseudo-religious cults attempting to "recruit" new members, and military operations against prisoners-of-war; but while the tactics these groups use are generally known, what isn't as widely recognized is the fact that the same and similar tactics also occur in everyday life.

The purposes of mind control are really very simple: to "break" you, and render you powerless; to take away everything that you believe and everything that you know as fact and replace the truth with what someone else wants you to believe and think.

A number of organizations which deal with battered women have been coming forward with the information that this is becoming more and more commonplace-- that perpetrators in abusive relationships are increasingly "covering their tracks" by resorting to such measures which are not as easily seen and understood as the more well-known physical and verbal assaults.

As with any other form of abuse, mind control hinges on weakening the victim. One tactic, which in its military state has been deemed by the Geneva Convention as torture is sleep deprivation. Short of drugging a person-- and, in fact, its effects are quite similar to being drugged-- this is the most effective method of immediately placing a human being in the position of Victim. Not only does it cause disastrous effects to a person's cognitive abilities, which also have longterm consequences, what sleep deprivation does to a person's mind is, indeed, torture. The victim's responses include an overwhelming sense of fear, helplessness, vulnerability; and sleep deprivation also produces the most extreme state of suggestibility. In reviewing the purpose of such tactics when used by cultists and military operations, one can see the same pattern in an abuser: the highly-suggestible, weakened state is used to pry information from the victim who does not wish to give it; to coerce "agreements" which he or she does not wish to and would not normally consent to; to keep the person so unfocused and "out of it" that she finds it very difficult to grasp what is actually happening.

In the suggestible state, other tactics are also often employed. One is conditioning-- similar to what most people learned in their High School science classes about the Pavlov's Dogs experiments, conditioning by an abuser repeating and repeating specific words and phrases is designed to orchestrate the response that he wants-- the victim will no longer have control over her responses, and may even behave in an erratic manner when those words and terms are used.

Isolation is one of the most significant factors in mind control. The perpetrator may limit his victim's personal interactions to those who are no threat to his agenda; or he may close her off from all of her outside contacts entirely. It may range from "Don't go anywhere unless I am with you" to putting on a "good guy" performance in front of her associates, becoming their "friend," so that he has even more clout and less resistance.

There are two main purposes to isolation: first and most obvious, to cut the victim off from those she may go to for support or help; but even more insidious, being isolated away from one's full and normal range of contacts destroys what can be termed one's frame-of-reference-- in pop-psych terms, the victim no longer has "her Reality," the only "Reality" that exists is that which the perpetrator says exists.

The general idea is "where the mind goes, the body will follow;" if an abuser succeeds at "taking away your reality" and replacing it with his, he is then in the ultimate position of Power. When everything you've known, everything you've believed in, everything you've remembered during your lifetime are tossed aside as erroneous and replaced with what he wishes you to believe is the truth, the results are devastating, even deadly. You are no longer you.

Although these horrendous tactics have been proven as "tried and true" for cultists, military operations, and now more and more frequently perpetrators who have a sick need to dominate and control others, occasionally their best efforts fail. In the rare instances when a potential mind control victim does not "break" as easily as the abuser had planned, he may even go as far as to ironically claim that she is "mentally ill"-- that if she were "sane," she would not put up any resistance, but merely hand over her mind and her life in the fashion that he demands.
Your basic instincts telling you that there is something very wrong going on, and your attempts to extract yourself from the situation, are smugly pointed at as "proof that there is something wrong with you."

Torture. The word is accurate.