Your Journey to Healing Starts Here
The term “perspecticide” is a neologism, although in reality it is not completely new because it was used for the first time in reference to the brainwashing of prisoners of war. The term has also been used to explain the psychological mechanisms that make people fall into the networks of sects. This term is the union of the words perspective and pesticide.
In practice, the perspecticide implies losing our perspective even thinking of not having the right to have our ideas, beliefs and feelings. It is something horrible because with the passage of time we come to forget our opinions, objectives and thoughts to adopt those of the dominant person. As a result, we not only renounce our dreams and goals in life, but we also lose our identity.
Your stats are booming! Parental Alienation is getting lots of traffic.What is denial? More importantly, what is Denial — the psychological term for openly denying have done, thought, or said something to another human being (especially in such a way that it provokes a triggering response from a target).
To bait or provoke then wait for a response is considered antagonistic; it is a truly offensive move (pun intended) on the football field of life, aggressively initiating an attack on a rival before they have even been informed that they are expected to participate in game playing the abusive personality already — while striving to dominate while attention-seeking — already started.
Source: Narcissistic people use denial as a brainwashing technique
Attachment theory deals with relationship. The relationship between a follower and a guru-figure is often a “disorganized” attachment. The guru takes on a parental role and becomes the only significant source of comfort, but at the same time is the significant source of distress.
Alex cites the originator of attachment theory, John Bowlby, “Most people think of fear as running away from something. But there is another side to it. We run TO someone …”
This disorganized attachment creates a double bind, where the guru traumatizes the follower, who then looks to the instigator of that trauma for resolution. Add psychological and often physical isolation from the wider world, and you have a recipe for ideological slavery.
In secular circles, indoctrination and brainwashing are used almost interchangeably. It’s not all that hard to understand why. Instructing young, vulnerable children to pledge their blind allegiance to certain authority figures can, especially for the most cynical among us, evoke rather disturbing images. (Karl in A Clockwork Orange, anyone?) And because hell is so often dangled as a punishment for disbelief, religious indoctrination possesses a fear factor that seems, well, kind of mean.
But, for all the sometimes-unpleasant underpinnings of indoctrination, there is a significant difference between what happens to children in CCD and what happened to Karl in Room 23. In short, indoctrination is not brainwashing. And I think that’s worth talking about — because parents who blow indoctrination out of proportion will hinder their kids’ ability to understand the difference between most religions and harmful cults. And I think that’s important — really important — especially if they don’t want to, ahem, indoctrinate their kids.
So here’s the deal: The Oxford English Dictionary defines brainwashing as pressuring someone to adopt radically different beliefs by using systematic and forcible means. It often implies mind control, and other unethically manipulative methods of persuasion. Some religious sects and many cults are famous for employing classic brainwashing techniques. In his book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, author Lawrence Wright touches on a number of them. He writes of policies that prohibit church members from reading articles, essays or blogs that criticize Scientology, and he describes incidents of violence, threats and systematic punishments employed by church leaders to keep members from speaking — or even thinking — ill of Scientology themselves.
Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist, has devoted his life to the study of mind control. His books include The Nazi Doctors, Cults in Our Midst and Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. In the latter, Lifton lays out “Eight Criteria for Thought Reform.” They are:
It’s clear that, under Lifton’s criteria, few religious parents are actually brainwashing their children. They may be employing one or two of these methods — I know quite a few Catholics very familiar with No. 3, for instance, and a few Mormons familiar with No. 8, and, Oh My God, can we talk about the broad employment of No. 5?— but not more than a few, and certainly not all.
I’m not saying indoctrination is a good thing. To be honest, any degree of intentional indoctrination makes me twitchy, whether it’s associated with religion or with atheism. But, after viewing Lifton’s list, it’s clear that what most parents are doing — on both sides of the aisle — falls far outside the bounds of brainwashing. And that, at least, is a relief.
Psychopaths are hard to understand. I think it was hard to believe that anyone could be that scared of a child to research and implement such a program. But if we understand that everything they do is from the emotional space of their own wounded child that is completely trapped, that carries all their repressed anger and has no other outlet for all the negative feelings connected to their own abuse other than through power, it becomes possible to see they are afraid of the child locked inside themselves first and foremost, and by extension their child victims.
https://annekelucas.com/writing/2018/3/25/programming-traumatizing-deprogramming-healing
Your Journey to Healing Starts Here 
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