Tactics for Breaking People and How to Recover From Them

Since time immemorial, power structures, ruling elites, and fascists have sought to break human beings to further their own agendas.  If you think that this is not present in your own society, think again.  Even in the most enlightened countries, such dynamics still occur in dysfunctional family systems.

When people are put under sufficient pressure, they will abandon their integrity and conform to the demands of the authorities. If we’ve experienced this, with determination, we can recover, and reclaim our own power and integrity.

In these tactics for breaking people, a big theme is the creation of dependency, along with the destruction of self-reliance, personal power, self-determination, and autonomy.  If individuals are empowered, they can pursue their own goals and live according to their own values.  This can be detrimental to the agenda of an illegitimate authority and so we’ve developed a plethora of tactics for inhibiting this and replacing it with dependence and passivity.

Just a quick note: This is not written in the spirit of resentment or vengeance. It is written for the purpose of bringing light to these dynamics and helping survivors to empower and heal themselves.  Additionally, I am not a licensed mental health professional.  These are my own thoughts, based on my own experience and knowledge, but I am not responsible for anyone else’s decisions or the results of the use of any ideas described here.

Social Isolation

When people are isolated, they are easier to dominate and manipulate. Human connection is an immensely important survival need, so when you take this away or it is threatened, an authoritarian can more easily get people to do what they want. Social isolation is a means of control in more institutions than you might think.  As Alfie Kohn points out, it is a part of families with the use of the “time out”, which psychologists and researchers have demonstrated are in fact destructive to a child’s emotional development.  The child learns to abandon their authenticity and show up in a way to please the attachment figure.

It seems to me that there are at least three mechanisms through which social isolation serves a tyrannical or illegitimate authority. The first is that the threat of such a painful punishment radically changes the priorities of the individual.  In order to avoid the pain of social isolation, people will usually do whatever is required, including abandoning whatever other priorities they had before the threat came along.

The second mechanism is through divide and conquer. When people are isolated, they are prevented from using each other to validate their issues with the given authority and are more likely to assume they are alone in their feelings and grievances.  The development of cogent views that are outside of the window of thought sanctioned by the authorities takes time and effort.  Social isolation increases the necessary time and effort to a prohibitive degree.  It then prevents people from mounting any kind of viable challenge against the authoritarian.

The third is that having the omnipresent threat of such a painful punishment itself causes fear, which reduces the ability to think clearly and makes us easier to control and manipulate. Heightening fear-based consciousness in and of itself weakens us.

Noam Chomksy said, “If you’re isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you’re going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell’s story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible.”

Lack of Privacy

In his book Get up Stand Up, psychologist Bruce E. Levine says, “Cult leaders indoctrinate new members by both isolating and surveilling the new recruits so as to first break them down and then build them up with allegiance to the group.  New recruits are routinely cut off from the outside world, not allowed to talk to other new recruits, constantly watched, and thus prevented from discussing the process of indoctrination.”  Survivors of the so-called “troubled teen industry” know that this is a chillingly apt description of the institutional abuse that many of us endured.

When you don’t have privacy or free time to nurture your feelings and reflect, you are more easily broken and molded into whatever the authority demands. Levine goes on to say, “the goal is to establish complete dependency on the group and the leader.”

Shame

Shame makes us emotionally dependent on whomever or whatever is doing the shaming.  Thus we become dependent on something that is not dependable, and this is destructive.

This can precipitate a treacherous dynamic.  When we’re under the control of an authority that is using shame as a tactic for control, we will likely be further shamed for the toxic results produced by the initial shaming. Thus, such an environment can produce dense layers of psychological oppression that can feel impossible to extricate oneself from.

By producing feelings of deep unworthiness, shame also increases social isolation.  You can see this very clearly in the community of survivors of the “troubled teen industry”.  Because so many aspects of our experience were covered in shame, we were coerced into being silenced, thus discouraging us from sharing the truth of it, and preventing any kind of coherent challenge to the industry.  That all changes when people can really look at their shame because the light of awareness allows it to dissolve.

Similarly, shame destroys self-trust which increases dependence.  If we are taught to believe that there is something wrong with who we are, we will be less likely to listen to ourselves and will depend on others’ opinions for what to think and what to do.

Pathologizing Non-compliance

Authoritarians may pathologize resistance to or truth-telling about their abuse.  In the mid 19th century, a Louisianan physician announced the discovery of “drapetomania”, a condition that caused slaves to seek freedom.  A disturbing aspect of this means of control is that it allows authorities to portray themselves as humane and compassionate when, in fact, they are falsely pathologizing someone as a means of coercion and domination.

This method of control is present in many authoritarian political systems. However, in the United States, the school system and the establishment mental health profession also treat non-compliance, especially in children, as pathological. They dismiss or simply have no awareness of the countless potential reasons for non-compliance that are entirely legitimate including: the authority itself is flawed in some way and/or the individual’s authentic needs aren’t being met by the environment.

Pathologizing non-compliance accomplishes several things. By stigmatizing the individual, it marginalizes their words and actions in the eyes of others.  That feedback from the environment can undermine the non-compliant individual’s self-confidence and resolve. Additionally, such pathologizing undermines the non-compliant individual’s self-worth and encourages repression of authenticity. Again, many survivors of institutional abuse know that this is precisely what happens to thousands of young people around the country every year.

Dishonest Communication

Dishonest communication weakens people by undermining their reality.  While at a “troubled teen” institution, I remember the authorities there would often talk about acting with “integrity”. I found this strange because all I saw was these people systematically breaking peoples’ integrity as though they had it down to a science. After repeatedly hearing these lies about so-called “integrity”, my sense of what integrity truly was became distorted, as I was forced to comply with the authority’s account of reality, which was opposed to my own interests.

An authority is in a unique position to use communication to dictate the group’s sense of reality. They have great power to decide what things mean, what matters, and how we ought to behave and interact.  Authorities play a huge role in building our socially constructed reality.  The way that the rest of us retain our power in the face of that is through vigorously questioning things and communicating freely.  Seeing just how often this doesn’t happen can be shocking and depressing.

Reclaiming Your Power

Doing the work to heal the wounded conditioning from these dynamics can be difficult but, from my own experience, I believe it is totally doable.  My ideas on how to do so come largely from my own experience of what has worked and what I’ve learned from a variety of mentors. In future articles and videos, I will share practices and tools for this.