Indoctrination means someone is trying to make you believe certain things without letting you think for yourself. This can happen in religious settings, spiritual groups, families, or relationships.
It can feel confusing because it often starts off in a friendly or loving way. But over time, it can make you feel afraid, guilty, or even like you’re losing who you are.
Indoctrination is often used in something called spiritual abuse. That’s when someone uses religion or spiritual ideas to control or hurt others. They might say, “This harmful thing is what God wants,” or “You must obey or bad things will happen.” When spiritual beliefs are used in this way, it’s not right. It’s abuse.
To read more about spiritual abuse, check out this post: Spiritual Abuse Explained: What It Is and How to Recognise It.
Why Is This So Hard to Talk About?
There might be reasons we don’t want to learn about indoctrination. If we realise we were indoctrinated, it can feel scary, sad, or confusing. We might feel angry or ashamed.
These feelings are normal. But it’s important to be honest with ourselves.
If we ignore the signs:
- We might keep believing things that hurt us.
- We could stay trapped in the group’s control.
- We might blame ourselves for being hurt.
- We might feel guilty for things we did when we were being controlled.
It’s important to remember that anyone can be indoctrinated. It doesn’t make you a weak person.
If this post is making you feel overwhelmed, it’s okay to stop reading and take a break. Visit the Help for When You Feel Overwhelmed: Getting Through Hard Moments page if you need support.
- If you are worried that you might be experiencing spiritual abuse or indoctrination, this post is for you: Am I Being Spiritually Abused? Signs, Support, and What to Do Next
- Or if you are worried about someone else, this post might be helpful: Supporting Someone Facing Spiritual Abuse: How You Can Help
How Indoctrination Works
Indoctrination doesn’t always happen quickly. Often, it happens slowly, step-by-step. It’s like a frog in a pot of water – if the water heats up slowly, the frog doesn’t realise it’s in danger and stays in the pot. Often indoctrination happens so slowly we don’t realise what is happening.
A man named Robert Lifton studied how people are controlled in harmful groups. He made a list of 8 ways groups or leaders use indoctrination. Let’s go through them:
1. Controlling Information
You are only allowed to read, hear, or watch things the group agrees with. Anything outside the group is “wrong” or “evil.” This makes it hard to learn or think for yourself.
2. Claiming Special Power
The leader says they are chosen by God or have special powers. They say you must obey them because they speak for a higher power. That makes it hard to question anything they say.
3. Expecting You to Be Perfect
The group gives you rules you can’t possibly follow perfectly. If you mess up, they shame or punish you. You may start to feel guilty or worthless. You might also start spying on other people and telling the leaders when they mess up.
4. Making You Confess
You’re told to share your secrets or “sins” with the group or leader. There might be big moments where you are asked to surrender yourself to God or the group. You may think this helps you grow, but it actually takes away your privacy and personal power. It becomes hard to set healthy boundaries.
5. No Questions Allowed
You’re not allowed to doubt or ask questions. If you do, you might be told you lack faith or are rebelling against God. You learn to see everything through the lens the group gives you.
6. Using Special Language
The group may use words or phrases only they understand. You start to speak like them. This can make it harder to talk to people outside the group or see things in a different way.
7. They Say Who You Are
The group tells you who you are. You stop trusting your own thoughts and feelings. Your life story is told differently by the group, and they have different stories about events in history or society that support their views.
8. Us vs. Them
The group is “good.” Everyone outside is “bad,” “lost,” or “going to hell.” This makes you afraid to leave, and afraid of people who think differently.
A Sliding Scale
Your group might have used all of these 8 ways to indoctrinate you. Or they might have only used a few. They might have used them strongly, or they might have used milder versions of the same things.
The important thing to remember is that all of these things are wrong. Even if your experience was on the mild end of the scale, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t harmful.
- To find out more about the scale of unhealthy groups, check out this post: From Healthy to Harmful: Where Is The Line?
- To read some examples of spiritual abuse, read this: Examples of Spiritual Abuse: From Mild to Extreme
Activity: Check Your Group
Write down these 8 ideas and ask yourself:
- Did my group do this?
- How strongly did they do it? (Rate from 1 = a little to 10 = very strong)
This can help you start to understand what happened to you.
How Indoctrination Happens
Two researchers, Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias, explained how indoctrination happens in groups. These include:
- Changing you slowly, so you don’t even notice it.
- Giving rewards when you follow the rules.
- Punishing you if you don’t follow the rules.
- Using strong emotional moments to stop you from thinking clearly, like:
- Long meditations
- Chanting or singing the same thing over and over
- Confessing in front of others
- Being beaten, tortured or sexually abused
- Not letting you eat enough or get enough sleep
- Making strict daily rules
- Using peer pressure
- Controlling what information you can read, watch or listen to
You can use the same activity from above: tick the ones that happened in your group, then rate them from 1 to 10.
Deception, Dependency, and Dread
Another expert, Michael Langone, explained three big things that abusive groups use: Deception, Dependency, and Dread.
1. Deception (Lies)
At the beginning, the group may seem kind and peaceful. They may promise:
- Love
- Happiness
- Purpose
- A better life
They may not tell you the full truth about what they believe or what they will ask you to do later. You might join thinking it’s just a normal church, class, or friend group. But over time, they change you.
2. Dependency (Needing Them)
Once you’re in the group, they start making you depend on them:
- At first, they make you feel special and accepted.
- They slowly ask more of your time.
- They ask for your secrets or confessions.
- They make the emotional experiences more intense.
- They ask for some kind of sign of commitment, like taking vows, joining as a member, or converting.
- They may ask you to cut off friends or family outside the group.
People who have belonged for a long time might show you how you should think or behave. They might tell you off gently or criticise you when you do things differently.
Soon, you start to believe that the group has all the answers and you need to change to belong.
3. Dread (Fear)
As the group becomes your whole world, the fear gets much worse. They expect more and more from you, and the punishments get even worse if you don’t obey.
We might have lost our old friends and family, so we feel that we have nowhere else to go.
They may tell you that leaving the group means:
- You’ll go to hell
- You’ll be endlessly reincarnated
- Your family will suffer
This fear keeps people trapped.
What Happens to Your True Self?
Over time, people who are indoctrinated start to hide their real thoughts and feelings. You may put on a fake version of yourself — one that matches what the group wants. This can help keep you safe, but it can also make you feel empty or confused.
You might stop:
- Asking questions
- Saying how you really feel
- Acting like yourself
But here’s the good bit:
Your real self is still inside you. It hasn’t gone away — it’s just hidden.
When you start to heal and step away from the group, your real thoughts and feelings will start to come back. You’ll begin to feel more like you again.
To read more about healing from spiritual abuse, check out this post: How to Heal from Spiritual Abuse: A Step-by-Step Recovery Guide
What if I was brought up like this?
If your family growing up were spiritually abusive or belonged to a spiritually abusive group, you might have been indoctrinated since you were very young. You might be a:
- ‘second-generation’ survivor (your parents joined the group)
- ‘multi-generation’ survivor (your parents were born into the group too)
This can make it even harder, because you never got the chance to figure out who you are before people indoctrinated you. But, you do have a real personality buried underneath. With time and support, you can make your own choices about who you want to be.
What About Cults?
Many of these ideas come from the study of cults. Not all cults are religious. Some are:
- Political groups
- Online communities
- “Self-help” or business groups
The important part is not the topic — it’s the behaviour. If a group tries to control how you think, feel, act, or live, and they punish you if you don’t follow them, that’s a sign of a controlling or abusive group.
To find out more about whether we should call unhealthy groups ‘cults’, read this: Was It a Cult? Deciding What To Call A Harmful Group
Isn’t All Teaching Indoctrination?
Some people ask, “Isn’t all teaching a kind of indoctrination?”
The short answer is: no — not always.
Healthy families, schools, or communities teach you how to live in the world. They help you:
- Think for yourself
- Ask questions
- Learn many different ideas
That’s called socialisation, and it’s part of growing up.
But when someone teaches you only one way to think, and punishes you for having your own thoughts or feelings, that’s indoctrination.
There is debate about how some governments or systems may use indoctrination. This is a big topic with lots of interesting opinions (I can recommend Robert Lifton’s book, Losing Reality, for more on this). But in a healthy world, teaching should help you become your true self, not someone else’s version of you.
You Can Heal
If you’re reading this and thinking, “This happened to me,” you are not alone.
It can be scary to face up to what happened to us. That’s ok. You can think about it for a little bit and then go and do something else. There is no rush to figure it out all at once.
If you want help:
- Talk to someone you trust
- Visit the Get Help For Spiritual Abuse page
- Check out the Help for When You Feel Overwhelmed: Getting Through Hard Moments if you’re struggling right now.
The journey can take time, but in the end, you can find your way back to you.
Books I Used to Write This Post
- Take Back Your Life: Recovering From Cults and Abusive Relationships, by Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias
- Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, by Robert Jay Lifton
- Combatting Cult Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
- Walking Free From The Trauma Of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse, by Gillie Jenkinson
For more helpful books, videos and podcasts about spiritual abuse and the road to recovery, check out the Spiritual Abuse Recovery: Helpful Resources page.
