Seeing thought reform everywhere or
just single elements of it after you've been to the “hot seat” or
in a “star chamber” is part of recognizing that you were
traumatized – that something terrible happened to you in those
sessions.
Seeing the same patterns elsewhere is a part of your brain's effort to keep you safe.
For a time after I was exit counseled, every time I saw any kind of manipulation, I thought of thought reform. I became especially sensitive to any manipulation in any area of my life. I like to think of the analogy of an unhealed wound resulting from the experience. Just like a physical wound, pressing on it or bumping that affected area of your body on something causes pain, and people will guard that wound until it heals. In effect, anything that resembles the trauma you experienced will cause direct pain by reminding you of all of those aspects of the painful experience that have not yet had an opportunity to heal.
Seeing the same patterns elsewhere is a part of your brain's effort to keep you safe.
For a time after I was exit counseled, every time I saw any kind of manipulation, I thought of thought reform. I became especially sensitive to any manipulation in any area of my life. I like to think of the analogy of an unhealed wound resulting from the experience. Just like a physical wound, pressing on it or bumping that affected area of your body on something causes pain, and people will guard that wound until it heals. In effect, anything that resembles the trauma you experienced will cause direct pain by reminding you of all of those aspects of the painful experience that have not yet had an opportunity to heal.
I felt very unsafe for a long time
after we left our group, but looking back, I was in the throws of
trauma and the protective feature of survival called hypervigilance.
This is a very common experience for people after they leave a
spiritually abusive group because abusive leaders employ terrible
psychological harassment methods which group members find difficult
to avoid, resist, or halt. Because of a past experience that was
harmful or threatening, a person will be “extra vigilant” about
anything that resembles a threat, especially a threat that directly
or indirectly reminds them of the specific harm they suffered in the
past. If you've just been beat up and left for dead in a dark alley,
anything that reminds you of the dark alley or getting beat up takes
you back to that experience and those “active,” traumatic
memories as a means of keeping you safe. Your brain realizes
that "the last time this happened, I suffered terribly," so
it mobilizes all of your defenses and readiness for a similar
situation so that you can be ready, in an instant, to protect
yourself.
After some healing through time and distance from a trauma, reminders
of the experience can be more subtle and less obvious than a hurting,
sore wound. When you feel safe from continued threat, your mind will
naturally start to put the experience into perspective, and you'll
start to have nagging questions and feelings of doubt about what
happened to you. This emotional mechanism that happens apart from
things making sense logically.
Think of when when your car starts
making a new and funny noise, and your attention gets fixated on it
every time you drive the car. Probably because you once had a
similar experience with a similar car noise in the past, your brain
is subconsciously and automatically pulls all that related memory
together for you without your conscious choice to listen, and you
experience that as a feeling of something seeming wrong. That's
one of the wonderful things that the right side of the brain and the
survival system in the brain working together do for us without us
realizing it. That process makes you more alert and attentive
to things because "it feels like" something you remember
from the past. The right side of the brain speaks in analogy,
feeling, and experience apart from categories and linear progression
which brings up reasons why the nebulous sense of realization should
or shouldn't make logical sense. Threat and survival aren't process
of logic.
Soon after learning about thought
reform, I looked at all sorts of situations and behaviors of others
all over the place, and I could see where they were like aspects of
what Robert Lifton described. I found myself asking, "Is
everything mind control?" Before I worked through that
trauma and started to heal, the right side of my brain rightfully
identified the single elements of control, manipulation, influence,
and undue influence. At that point, all of those things set off
my warning system as a potential threat because I was still in "red
alert" mode because I was not yet truly well (so the experience
was still ultimately serving or was trying to best protect me). In
outright PTSD wherein disturbing symptoms and preoccupation with the
experience lasts for months without improvement, that whole survival
process and hypervigilence doesn't shut down very readily. It kicks
in when it's not really needed, identifying immediate threats when no
true threat exist.
Attention and Learning
If you're seeing similarities without
the trauma response kicking in, it means that your right cerebral
hemisphere is busy doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and it's enhancing your personal wisdom and mastery. You're likely having one of those right brain epiphanies as your brain pulls up all of the similar things that you remember about a similar situation from your own past.
I also think that there's something about the learning curve at play
in this, too. When you first learn a new principle, before it
gets integrated as a part of your memory, it catches your attention.
Your conscious realization of how the principle works and examples of
the principle help to work the new concept into your memory and are
part of the process. Think again of the noises in the car, a process
of gaining experience which becomes its own type of teacher.
Knowledge plus experience takes you from the status as a novice into
the realm of experienced worker and mastery. The first couple of
times you perform an important task or encounter a specific event,
they tend to be memorable. Later experiences fade out of your
conscious memory because you no longer have to deliberately think
about the process.
If you've never thought about
confrontations like this as a little systematic and predictable, and
it's a new idea like Lifton's criteria once were to me, until you
integrate that into your own reference bank in your head, you tend to
notice it more. It's especially true if you're actively thinking
about it because your mind is trying to figure out where it wants to
file it away or what true significance it has for you. Not only is
it catching your attention like the sound of a brake pad on your car
wearing thin, aspects of it have created questions that you consider
consciously, just like the thoughts that seem spontaneous when you
suddenly and consciously wonder about the last time someone performed
break service on your car. That's a good brain, doing exactly what
design intended.
Tomorrow's Question:
Do you think my pastor could have deliberately used thought reform?
Additional
Questions to follow:
- Did my pastor learn and study thought reform, believing that it was something else?
- (He's so good at it, and it fits the list of dynamics too well.)
- How could they have not known what they were doing?
- What if you work for your church?
.
