The tactics of social and psychological coercion often involve both anxiety and stress. Therefore, they fall into seven main categories:
- Restrictive techniques. For example, extended audio, visual, verbal, or tactile fixation. They also include exhaustive, exact repetition of routine activities, sleep restriction, or social restriction.
- Creating control over the victim’s social environment, time, and sources of social support. In other words, they establish social isolation; removing contact with family and friends. People who promote self-esteem, independence, positivity, and a sense of well-being. Economic controls may also contribute.
- Rejection of alternate information and separate opinions. Sadly, there are rules about permissible topics to discuss. Most importantly, systems highly control communication.
- Forcing victims to reevaluate central aspects of their experiences of self and prior conduct negatively. In other words, they make the victim feel like a “bad” person. And establish efforts to undermine the subject’s consciousness, reality awareness, or world view. Therefore, they doubt, and reinterpret their life, adopting a new “reality”.
- Creating a sense of powerlessness. They do this by subjecting the victim to intense and frequently confusing, conflicting actions. Lastly, they also subject them to situations that undermine the victim’s self-confidence and judgment.
- Establishing strong, aversive, and emotional arousals in the subject by reactions. For instance, intense humiliation, loss of privilege, social isolation, and social status changes. Likewise, these actions also include intense guilt, anxiety, and manipulation.
- Intimidating victim with implied power, size, voice amplitude, or threat. They coerce victims to such a degree that they’re no longer able to make informed or free choices. They’re utterly inhibited. Likewise, the victim can’t make balanced decisions due to manipulation. Believe it or not, psychological coercion is even more effective than pain influence and torture.