Coercive control is a pattern of techniques and behaviors that can profoundly alter your sense of self and affect your ability to make decisions. These techniques can be used by an individual, a group, an organization, or other entity. Below are some examples of techniques and methods used in varied combinations, in order to exert control.

Ways to Make You More Physically Vulnerable:

The brain needs rest, nutrition, and time to process information in a healthy way. When it is physically overwhelmed, our brain’s functioning can be affected.

• Reducing Your Sleep: This can include waking you early and/or keeping you up late, or interrupting your sleep in some way. Sleep deprivation can also be an indirect result of doing tasks that take up so much of your time that you sleep less than your body needs.

• Reducing Your Food Intake: Similarly, the reduced food intake can be a result of methods that take up so much time that you have less time to eat, re-center yourself, and unwind.

• Overworking and exhausting you, or over-stimulating your brain: when our brains are exhausted by overwork or over-stimulation, they can become more vulnerable.

• Restricting your movement, or inducing repetitive movements: it is an interesting phenomenon that many coercive groups or individuals that aim to restrict your thinking will also try to restrict your physical movements. For example, they may tell you to “remain still” for potentially hours at a time when you are attending lectures, listening to coercive content, meditating, praying, chanting, or talking. They may also induce stereotypic movements (rhythmic, repetitive, fixed, and predictable body movements).

• Using techniques that induce dissociation and/or hyperventilation: certain forms of breathing, chanting, and meditation can overwhelm your brain and cause it to dissociate. In other words, these “shut down” your brain’s capacity to think clearly and impact your ability to make decisions. While some mindfulness meditation can be good for our brains and thinking, certain forms and their overuse can lead to issues with our brain functioning.

  Overwhelming mental stimulation (for example, presenting you with a train of confusing information) can flood the brain and create dissociation. Also, stimulus deprivation, such as different forms of solitary confinement, or engaging in solitary rituals for hours at a time, can impact the brain’s ability to think and process information.

Ways to Hijack Your Thinking:

Our brains process information and make decisions on multiple levels. Coercive control methods hijack multiple levels of brain functioning.

• Reducing your ability to obtain outside feedback or information: ideally, you should be able to have time to reflect on new information and have other sources of information than what is provided to you by the group/individual, or environment. In contrast, if you are in a “closed” coercive environment, you will find yourself starting to think more similarly to the other people within that closed system.

• Creating double-binds that reduce your ability to make decisions. Coercive environments can make you feel like even minor decisions are confusing, or difficult to make. There may be pressure put on you about making even small decisions. This is a technique aimed to confuse and restrict your thinking.

• Changing the language: you may be exposed to new phrases or reductive expressions, or words that you usually think of one way may be re-defined in the coercive environment. This is another way to confuse and restrict your thinking. Thinking is linked to expression and language; when language is changed in certain ways, the way you think is altered.

• Conditioning and indirect techniques (these include indirect styles of hypnosis, NLP, classical and operant conditioning): can include conditioning you to associate negative feelings with your own free thinking (for example, being criticized harshly, yelled at, humiliated, or “shut down” for your own beliefs), and positive feelings/pleasure with the group or individual’s suggestions or values. For example, you could experience feelings of being “broken down” or reduced, and then finally rewarded with praise or positive bonding experiences when you finally “get” what the person/community/group is trying to make you understand. This is a powerful technique that uses what is called operant conditioning or reinforcement combined with a social reward. These types of techniques can create powerful changes in the brain and body.

  In addition, the use of indirect hypnotic techniques is capable of creating an array of phenomena, including making you feel dissociated, distorting time, and creating depersonalized or derealized feelings (feeling like you are observing yourself, or that things around you are surreal, distant, “lifeless”, or not real). A common hypnotic technique is age regression - creating a feeling of being younger or re-creating a feeling from your childhood. This state of regression can increase a person’s vulnerability to coercive suggestions.

Ways to Hijack Your Feelings:

Alongside methods of reducing your brain’s critical thinking ability, coercive control often leverages your feelings.

• Inducing and conditioning shame and fear: shame and fear can be used as mechanisms to separate you from yourself, specific people, groups, “outsiders”, or the world at large. Using simple conditioning techniques (manipulating the “fast” processing in the brain), fear can be linked to things that you previously thought were neutral or even things that you used to like. Feelings such as shame and guilt can also be leveraged in similar ways.

• Inducing euphoria, and feelings of excitement, awe or love: coercive control methods used in combination can create a feeling of euphoria, or of being “high”. This can be so overwhelming to the system that you may even notice physical changes due to rushes of adrenaline (dilated pupils or eye alterations, increased talkativeness, expansive feelings, awe). The achievement of this state can occur through various tools such as love/bonding (some people call this “love bombing”, but these tools can often be much more subtle than “bombing” would entail), breathing techniques, music, chanting, and other tools. These tools can affect brain chemicals that are linked to love and feelings of relief, awe, and joy.

  Ways to Create Attribution Bias:

• Attributing positive feelings to the controlling person/community/group: conditioning and indirect methods allow the controller to make you think that they are the source of your positive feelings (when, in fact, they are not). In other words, you believe that the elation or new awareness that you are feeling is a result of them or their unique knowledge, when in fact it is actually a direct physical result of using standard techniques that affect the body and brain. And, this association or attribution is bolstered by the controlling environment or person(s) telling you (indirectly or directly) that they are the one(s) responsible for your brain’s good feelings!

It should be noted that if medications, drugs, and/or various uses of psychedelics are included along with these methods, the coercive effects can be powerful.