A real "tell" of if someone is operating from an authoritarian mindset – vs just mentally ill, behaving from ignorance, or has out-of-control anger – is to watch how they treat those above them vs those below them in whatever hierarchies they inhabit.

If he hits his wife but not a police officer?

If she screams at her children but not her husband?

If he can control his drunken rage towards his boss but not people of color?

If they don't direct their misbehavior upwards the same way they do downline, then they CAN control their anger. They CAN control their mental illness. They DO know how to treat people they respect...

...the key here is that they don't respect those they see as beneath them.

And that's the real crux of their worldview, of their moral system. They have fully bought into Abuse Culture.

And make no mistake, when I searched inward, I found that, while I don't do this as blatantly as the abusers in my life, I did find some of these views inside myself, particularly in the way I treated children and in unpacking my implicit biases based on race, gender, and other vectors. Because abuse culture is programmed into all of us.

(HT to Lundy Bancroft of Why Does He Do That for making me aware of this dynamic.)

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

He escaped once. In 2005, when he was 12 or 13, he broke off a piece of the door’s center paneling; but rather than fleeing the house, he simply slipped down to the kitchen to scrounge for food. When his breakout was discovered, he told the police, his bedroom door was reinforced with plywood. Threats of withholding food, or violence, kept him from trying again.

#criminal #law #abuse

#GiftArticle link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/nyregion/ct-waterbury-captive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-E4.SKiQ.LBj5Qy1mwyhW&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“He didn’t get to see a movie. He didn’t get to go to a concert, he didn’t get to fall in love & get his heart broken,” Tessman added. “It kills me.”

Inside his room, which was secured with a slide lock from the outside, the man read & reread a handful of books, he told the police, looking up words he didn’t know in a dictionary. He “ultimately educated himself,” the police affidavit reads.

Pannone was not the only one trying to uncover that secret: For decades, the man’s half sister, Heather Tessman, whom their biological mother had given up for adoption before her son was born, fruitlessly dug through yearbooks of local schools she found online, …hunting for the brother she had met once, when she was 3 yrs old.

“You can’t find a person who doesn’t exist,” Tessman, 35, who lives in Vernon, CT, said in an interview.

Lopes can still picture a too-skinny kid with an infectious smile. The boy was standing on the peeling porch next door, but ventured no further.

“I said, ‘Where have you been?’” Lopes recalled. “I’m home-schooled,” was his answer.

In a warrant for Mrs. Sullivan’s arrest, the man said that his stepmother & his father forbade him to have friends. “I have been kept a secret my entire life,” he told the police.

Frustrated, Pannone tried another way.

He asked for the help of the Lopes family, who lived next door to the Sullivans & whose son, Peter, was then a 10-yr-old Barnard student. Pannone asked Peter & his family to keep an eye on their neighbor.

Peter Lopes, who is now 29, has not lived in the neighborhood since 2009, but said he remembered the last time he saw his classmate…shortly after the boy was pulled out of Barnard.

But the child was still always hungry and disheveled. Over the five years the boy attended Barnard Elementary, Mr. Pannone said he made call after call to the Department of Children and Families. Each time, he said, they would investigate and report back that the child was fine.

“You knew something was not right,” Mr. Pannone said in a recent interview. “He appeared to be a happy-go-lucky kid, but we knew that something was amiss.”

Tom Pannone, who was a principal at Barnard Elementary School, says he can remember the uneasy feeling he had about the child enrolled at his school in 2001. The boy arrived daily with a dirty plastic lunchbox; at least once, Pannone found him in a bathroom before school started, devouring his packed lunch. It was there that he saw the boy standing at a urinal, drinking the water as he flushed. Mr. Pannone called the boy’s stepmother, he said, & the behavior stopped.

“She is adamant that she had done nothing wrong,” her lawyer, Ioannis Kaloidis, said in an interview . Kaloidis laid blame on the biological father, #KreggSullivan, who died in January of last year [do she kept it up for over a year after the father’s death. Sure, she’s totes blameless ]. (The biological mother had given up her parental rights to Sullivan, to whom she was briefly married.)

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

Late last month, the man’s stepmother, #KimberlySullivan, 57, was arraigned in Waterbury Superior Court. She has been charged w/ #kidnapping, #assault, #cruelty, unlawful #restraint & reckless #endangerment. If convicted of all charges, she could serve the rest of her life in prison.…She pleaded not guilty.

That year, his son was pulled from school, purportedly for *#HomeSchooling. In interviews w/police officers last month, the man told them that for a brief time he received school work sheets, but all formal education stopped shortly after. The next time he left his home, 20 years later, it was in the arms of the firefighter.

“He looked,” said Detective Steve Brownell of the Waterbury PD, who interviewed him later at the hospital, “like a Holocaust survivor.”

Many reports that may have documented these calls have since been lost, but what records remain show that responding *authorities* determined the boy was doing OK.

After a while, w/o turning up any evidence of #abuse, the calls stopped coming. In fact, until the fire, the last recorded police visit concerning the boy on Blake Street was April 18, 2005, in response to a call placed by his own father.… to complain that he was being harassed by people continually checking up on his #child.

But many in the community had feared for the boy’s safety for a long time.

For years before the man’s disappearance, his teachers, classmates, neighbors & his elementary school principal all believed he was suffering silently. They repeatedly called the Waterbury #Police & the #Connecticut Dept of #Children & Families [#DCF] to intercede for a child they said was so hungry that he ate from the trash & stole his classmates’ food.

The revelations that began in that ambulance ride on Feb 17 cracked wide one of the most shocking secrets to ever tarnish Waterbury, a small, former manufacturing city in the southern part of Connecticut. The police now believe what the man said in the ambulance that evening: For the past 20 yrs, an 8X9’ room on the top floor of a disheveled house at 2 Blake Street was a prison cell for a boy — now a man — last been seen by the outside world when he was in the 4th grade.

The ride in the ambulance, he said, was the first time he had been let out of the house since he was 12.

Then, he made a confession. He was the one who set the fire. He used a lighter forgotten in the pocket of an old jacket that his stepmother had given him. If he did not die in the fire, he had reasoned, he might finally be set free.

The patient started speaking & did not stop. He gave his name, said that he was 32 years old & had spent most of his life held captive by his father & stepmother, who locked him in his room for ~23hrs a day.

At the hospital, he continued his story. He had been trapped for 2 decades…. He hadn’t seen a doctor or a dentist in 20 years. Sometimes he was fed a sandwich. His teeth were so decayed they often broke when he ate. He was 5’9”, but weighed only 68 pounds.