How would I know if someone was attempting to brainwash me?

 The simplest answer is - to know if someone is attempting to brainwash you the degree of your education and expertise on the subject of brainwashing is a key factor.

Plainly, you need to understand brainwashing to determine if it is being attempted.

I was in the Scientology cult for twenty five years and upon leaving it in 2014 discovered that my assumptions about efforts at coercive control and covert persuasion (more recent and broader terms than brainwashing) were grossly wrong. I had assumed, like many people who are fooled by unethical persuasion, that I was too intelligent and educated to be duped. That assumption is often a key foundation to being fooled, you assume it happens to people who are especially gullible, stupid, crazy, and so on then believe you are not one of those people, opening the door to being thoroughly duped.

The unfortunate reality about brainwashing (and other terms for undue influence) is that we have assumptions about human psychology, group dynamics, human predators and many related topics that are often incorrect. They function as folk psychology, and we are mislead by these incorrect beliefs into not only being ignorant about these subjects but into being unaware of our profound ignorance and thinking the ideas we do have are correct and reliable.

So, to understand brainwashing we need to be humble and understand that it is a big subject that requires a bit of education in numerous areas to begin to understand.

I like many thousands of ex cult members have followed a similar path. I consider the work on brainwashing in particular by two cult experts to be the best, most concise, and accessible for people who have no college education. That's intentional as they know many ex cult members never went to college, but need to understand their work.

I would start with the eight criteria for thought reform (his term for brainwashing) by Robert Jay Lifton. They are a concept he developed and listed as a chapter in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which describes the brainwashing done to American prisoners of war. Lifton has studied cults and the methods of persuasion for decades and written numerous books on the topic.

The eight criteria have been known to have a significant effect on numerous ex cult members - upon reading them we realize that the cult we were in practiced them exactly as the book says and produced the results exactly as Lifton described, no matter what cult we were in or if it is big or small, if it is religious or political in nature or if it is not.

The description fits nearly perfectly and the more of his writing you read the more you can find he has taken into account virtually every variety of cultic influence and broken it down. For example, many cults have a guru or leader. But Lifton has noted that for some cults the doctrine, the ideas and sacred texts or even slogans, can serve as the guru. Numerous white supremacists don't admire one universal guru, some consider Hitler an “okay” historical figure, because a guru is not supposed to fail, so they instead focus on the doctrine of white supremacists and certain slogans and phrases instead of a living or even dead guru.

I believe that if you want to understand brainwashing a great start is looking at the eight criteria for thought reform, and the book Cults In Our Midst by Margaret Singer gives a great description of this in detail. The book Freedom of Mind by Steve Hassan has perhaps the best simple description of cults and is a great first book on the topic.

If you want to be a serious student, the book Cults Inside Out by Rick Alan Ross has a superb description of the materials on cults and could be the basis of a whole curriculum in itself.

I have experienced the efforts that Scientology has for controlling members and in particular the techniques used to brainwash people which Ronald Hubbard delineated in Scientology doctrine.

I am going to list a group of posts at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology related to brainwashing and quote on the eight criteria for thought reform.

Dr. Robert J. Lifton's Criteria For Thought Reform

Any ideology -- that is, any set of emotionally-charged convictions about men and his relationship to the natural or supernatural world -- may be carried by its adherents in a totalistic direction. But this is most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claim, whether a religious or political organization. And where totalism exists, a religion, or a political movement becomes little more than an exclusive cult.
Here you will find a set of criteria, eight psychological themes against which any environment may be judged. In combination, they create an atmosphere which may temporarily energize or exhilarate, but which at the same time pose the gravest of human threats.
(a brief outline)

MILIEU CONTROL

• The most basic feature is the control of human communication within an environment
• If the control is extremely intense, it becomes internalized control -- an attempt to manage an individual's inner communication
• Control over all a person sees, hears, reads, writes (information control) creates conflicts in respect to individual autonomy
• Groups express this in several ways: Group process, isolation from other people, psychological pressure, geographical distance or unavailable transportation, sometimes physical pressure
• Often a sequence of events, such as seminars, lectures, group encounters, which become increasingly intense and increasingly isolated, making it extremely difficult-- both physically and psychologically--for one to leave
• Sets up a sense of antagonism with the outside world; it's "us against them"
• Closely connected to the process of individual change (of personality)

MYSTICAL MANIPULATION (PLANNED SPONTANEITY)

• Extensive personal manipulation
• Seeks to promote specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that it appears to have arisen spontaneously from within the environment, while it actually has been orchestrated
• Totalist leaders claim to be agents chosen by God, history, or some supernatural force, to carry out the mystical imperative
• The "principles" (God-centered or otherwise) can be put forcibly and claimed exclusively, so that the cult and its beliefs become the only true path to salvation (or enlightenment)
• The individual then develops the psychology of the pawn, and participates actively in the manipulation of others
• The leader who becomes the center of the mystical manipulation (or the person in whose name it is done) can be sometimes more real than an abstract god and therefore attractive to cult members
• Legitimizes the deception used to recruit new members and/or raise funds, and the deception used on the "outside world"

THE DEMAND FOR PURITY

• The world becomes sharply divided into the pure and the impure, the absolutely good (the group/ideology) and the absolutely evil (everything outside the group)
• One must continually change or conform to the group "norm"
• Tendencies towards guilt and shame are used as emotional levers for the group's controlling and manipulative influences
• Once a person has experienced the totalist polarization of good/evil (black/white thinking), he has great difficulty in regaining a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human morality
• The radical separation of pure/impure is both within the environment (the group) and the individual
• Ties in with the process of confession -- one must confess when one is not conforming

CONFESSION

• Cultic confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself
• Sessions in which one confesses to one's sin are accompanied by patterns of criticism and self-criticism, generally transpiring within small groups with an active and dynamic thrust toward personal change
• Is an act of symbolic self-surrender
• Makes it virtually impossible to attain a reasonable balance between worth and humility
• A person confessing to various sins of pre-cultic existence can both believe in those sins and be covering over other ideas and feelings that s/he is either unaware of or reluctant to discuss
• Often a person will confess to lesser sins while holding on to other secrets (often criticisms/questions/doubts about the group/leaders that may cause them not to advance to a leadership position)
• "The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you"

SACRED SCIENCE

• The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic doctrine or ideology, holding it as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence
• Questioning or criticizing those basic assumptions is prohibited
• A reverence is demanded for the ideology/doctrine, the originators of the ideology/doctrine, the present bearers of the ideology/doctrine
• Offers considerable security to young people because it greatly simplifies the world and answers a contemporary need to combine a sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a science embodying the truth about human behavior and human psychology

LOADING THE LANGUAGE

• The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliche (thought-stoppers)
• Repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon
• "The language of non-thought"
• Words are given new meanings -- the outside world does not use the words or phrases in the same way -- it becomes a "group" word or phrase

DOCTRINE OVER PERSON

• Every issue in one's life can be reduced to a single set of principles that have an inner coherence to the point that one can claim the experience of truth and feel it
• The pattern of doctrine over person occurs when there is a conflict between what one feels oneself experiencing and what the doctrine or ideology says one should experience
• If one questions the beliefs of the group or the leaders of the group, one is made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to even question -- it is always "turned around" on them and the questioner/criticizer is questioned rather than the questions answered directly
• The underlying assumption is that doctrine/ideology is ultimately more valid, true and real than any aspect of actual human character or human experience and one must subject one's experience to that "truth"
• The experience of contradiction can be immediately associated with guilt
• One is made to feel that doubts are reflections of one's own evil
• When doubt arises, conflicts become intense

DISPENSING OF EXISTENCE

• Since the group has an absolute or totalist vision of truth, those who are not in the group are bound up in evil, are not enlightened, are not saved, and do not have the right to exist
• "Being verses nothingness"
• Impediments to legitimate being must be pushed away or destroyed
• One outside the group may always receive their right of existence by joining the group
• Fear manipulation -- if one leaves this group, one leaves God or loses their transformation, for something bad will happen to them
• The group is the "elite", outsiders are "of the world", "evil", "unenlightened", etc.

Excerpted from: Thought Reform And The Psychology of Totalism, Chapter 22, (Chapel Hill, 1989) & The Future of Immortality, Chapter 155 (New York 1987).

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