Essentially that's what my #AbuseCulture model does. It addresses those beliefs, not just within an individual survivor, but for all of us, in how we help abusers with our language, beliefs, preferences, in who we choose to defend, in our moral systems, in our laws and biases.

I've taken what I've learned from my own abuse recovery and therapy of many years, my studies on psychology and trauma, but most importantly, from learning about cults, high-demand groups, coercive persuasion, and religious trauma recovery, and merged those into a unified theory.

There really isn't much difference between domestic abuse and cult membership.

And cult recovery involves deconstructing those beliefs, making yourself aware of them so that you can consciously choose which to keep and which to throw away.

I've been out of Mormonism for 24 years, and I still find beliefs I have not been aware of this whole time. I've been away from my worst abuser for almost a decade, and still find beliefs he instilled in me that I have not yet examined.

The undue influence techniques used by cults are almost identical to those used by abusers and manipulators. These techniques are used at the societal and political levels as well, and can also demonstrate how racism, sexism, etc all work.

I can't tell you specifically which beliefs you have in you, but I can show you the purposes they serve... there will be beliefs about who you can and cannot trust, what you should be afraid of, what punishments await you for misbehaving, and a couple dozen others. Knowing that framework can guide you through discovering your own induced phobias, milieu control, and thought-terminating clichés.

(Brief plug for my book, Recovering Agency, which outlines 31 manipulation techniques in context of Mormonism, but that can be applied elsewhere.)

#ReligiousTrauma #Abuse
#PTSD #CPTSD #cults #MindControl

There's an aspect of #CPTSD I don't see much discussed or even studied, but you can bet that whoever is causing the CPTSD thinks of it this way, either with conscious awareness or not:

Behavior modification.

That's what really separates PTSD, say from a random act of violence, from complex PTSD that affects almost every area of one's life.

CPTSD is a result of a behavior modification program. An abuser or abusive system conditioned you to believe and behave a certain way, often many sets of behaviors across most areas of your life. That's what makes something a cult or a high-demand group. That's what makes for a domestic abuse situation – it's in the things they force you to do.

The recovery focus tends to be on the trauma itself -- ok we're in sympathetic nervous state, let's unpack triggers, get coping skills, EMDR, meditation, calm you down. Fine.

But rarely (outside of cult exit counseling) have I seen much focus on the BELIEFS an abuser or system has instilled in us. Beliefs that modify behavior. That sense that if I touch a hot stove I'll be burned, but it's not a stove, it's normal everyday things that I can't avoid and I'm wandering an inescapable maze of pain-points.

Address the beliefs themselves.

It's a major gap in how PTSD is treated in our culture. EVEN the helping professional community is so bogged down in these abuse culture assumptions (that trauma is "in the past," that the abusers are no longer present, that it's just a nervous system thing, just process the trauma events) that they often ignore the set of interlocking ever-present beliefs, and they ignore the very aspects of society we're just supposed to tolerate (bad workplaces, chronic stress, toxic religious beliefs).

What did my abuser make me *believe* about myself? What did my toxic religion make me believe about the world? How do I view reality through an abuser-provided lens?

#ReligiousTrauma
#fascism #antifa #Abuse
#exmo #exmormon #PTSD #AbuseCulture

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