Levels of Brainwashing and Mind Control from Least to Most Complex and Binding, and often used in combination, especially in ritual abuse:

“You can't come to a new point of view until you realize what your brainwashing has been."

Morton T. Kelsey

1. Terrified Submission: Outward compliance, but one’s own beliefs and identity are preserved.
   
   
2. Willful Compliance: A disturbed or abused child/adolescent/adult is provided with objects, drugs, affection, sex, “freedom”, etc., and chooses the abuser over his/her current life situation.
   
   
3. Stockholm Syndrome: Terror (abuser harms victim or threatens victim and his/her family with violence), plus isolation from prior support, often combined with lies of family abandonment, lead to dependence on abuser(s), and perceived loyalty to the abuser.
   
   
4. Religious Indoctrination: A psychologically weak or dependent person submits to a charismatic leader who claims to be spiritually connected to some kind of God, professing to be chosen for a spiritual agenda, promises salvation to devotees and eternal damnation promised to non-followers.
   
   
5. Brainwashing through Social influence: An individual is placed only among successful “converts” to the abuser or cult, who profess the belief system of the group, while the person is isolated from family and previous support systems and activities.
   
   
6. Brainwashing through Deprivation of Basic Needs: Sleep, food, water, combined with chanting, social isolation, etc.
   
   
7. Self-View as an Accomplice or Evil: Abuser forces victim into double-binds that cause the victim to feel culpable.
   
   
8. Unidimensional directives: are communicated during severe abuse, convincing affected personalities that the abuse will re-occur if the programmed mandate is broken. The most common are, “Remember to forget” the abuse and “Don’t tell” about the abuse. A central function of most mind control is to cause the victim to physically and psychologically re-experience the torture used to install the programming should she or he act in violation of programmed commands. The re-experience of the original torture often includes somatic manifestation of the original injuries, such as bruising and swelling, though not to the degree of the original injury.
   
   
9. Spiritual “Programming”: Evil attachments, claims, curses, covenants, etc. Witchcraft ritual abuse seeks to “attach” evil entities (spirits of abusers and demons) to dissociated identities to harass and control victims for their entire lives. Claims, curses, covenants, hexes, vexes, etc. are used to forever malevolently define victims as evil, physically or mentally ill, socially devalued and isolated, sexually enslaved, a murderer, a cult member, a witch, etc.
   
   
10. Psychic driving: Taped messages are played for hours non-stop while the person is in states of consciousness altered by sleep, electro-shock, sensory deprivation, inadequate food, water, sleep, oxygen, isolated, confinement or other torture.
    
    
11. Machiavellian manipulation of the inner psychological world of the child. Examples of process: from “The First Five Steps of Discipline” (Svali, 1999) http://www.geocities.com/lord_visionary/svali_index.htm
    
    
12. Trauma-based Coercive Mind Control – Trauma-based mind control programming can be defined as systematic torture that blocks the victim’s capacity for conscious processing (through pain, terror, drugs, illusion, sensory deprivation, sensory over-stimulation, oxygen deprivation, cold, heat, spinning, brain stimulation, and often, near-death), and then employs suggestion and/or classical and operant conditioning (consistent with well-established behavioral modification principles) to implant thoughts, directives, and perceptions in the unconscious mind, often in newly-formed trauma-induced dissociated identities, that force the victim to do, feel, think, or perceive things for the purposes of the programmer. The objective is for the victim to follow directives with no conscious awareness, including execution of acts in clear violation of the victim’s moral principles, spiritual convictions, and volition.