“No, You Weren’t Just Brainwashed”: Dismantling the Myths That Keep Religious Trauma Survivors from Being Believed
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to explain your experience to someone who has already decided they know what it was. You’re mid-sentence and trying to articulate something that took you years to even begin to understand; and you can see it on their face. The slight frown. The way they tilt their head. And then it comes: “But couldn’t you have just left?” Or: “You seem pretty angry about this.” Or the classic, offered with the confidence of someone who has watched one documentary: “Oh, so you were basically brainwashed.”
These aren’t just unhelpful comments. They’re myths and oversimplified stories about religious trauma that flatten its complexity, dismiss its legitimacy, and quietly place the burden of what happened back onto the person it happened to. And they are everywhere; in families, in workplaces, in therapy rooms, in the questions journalists ask survivors, in the way courts and institutions weigh religious harm against other forms of harm.
What makes these myths particularly insidious is that they don’t always come from malicious places. Sometimes they come from people who genuinely care but are working with an inadequate framework. Sometimes they come from people who are protecting something; a shared community, a family narrative, a faith they don’t want implicated. And sometimes, most painfully, they come from survivors themselves, who have internalised these explanations so deeply that they’ve started applying them to their own story.
This blog isn’t going to cover every myth that exists around religious trauma because honestly, there are too many. But these three come up again and again, in the mouths of people who mean well and people who don’t, and they deserve to be taken apart carefully.
Myth #1: “You Were Just Brainwashed”
Let’s start with the one baked into the title, because it’s probably the most common and one of the most misunderstood.
The brainwashing framing tends to get applied as a kind of explanation that is also, quietly, a dismissal. It acknowledges that something happened to you, while simultaneously suggesting that you were a passive recipient of it; a blank slate that got written on, a person without agency who simply absorbed whatever they were told.
It makes religious harm sound like a magic trick performed on the credulous, rather than a sophisticated and often gradual process of social and psychological influence that can affect anyone.
The reality is considerably more complex. Scholars like Robert Lifton, Margaret Singer, and Janja Lalich have spent careers documenting the specific conditions under which high-control groups (religious and otherwise) exert influence over people. These conditions don’t work by bypassing a person’s intelligence. They work by shaping the environment around them; controlling information, structuring relationships, creating systems of reward and punishment, and building worldviews that make alternative ways of thinking literally unthinkable from the inside.
People raised in high-control religious environments didn’t choose to be shaped by those environments any more than any child chooses the values, language, and frameworks they’re raised in. Their entire understanding of what is real, what is good, what is safe, and what is possible was formed inside a system that had a vested interest in their continued membership. Questioning it didn’t just feel wrong, it often felt genuinely dangerous. Not because the person lacked critical thinking skills, but because the system had specifically and deliberately made critical thinking feel like a threat to their spiritual, relational, and sometimes physical safety.
People who “joined” as adults were often recruited at vulnerable moments of grief, loneliness, and transition and welcomed into communities that offered genuine warmth, meaning, and belonging before the demands of the group became clear.
By the time the more controlling elements of the group were visible, the person was already embedded: socially, emotionally, often financially and practically.
Calling this ‘brainwashing’ not only oversimplifies the process, it also tends to make survivors feel either stupid (“I should have seen through it”) or robbed of their own story (“I didn’t think for myself at all”). Neither is accurate, and neither is useful.
What happened to you wasn’t a failure of your intelligence. It was the result of systems specifically designed to shape belief and behaviour; systems that were far more sophisticated than a single word gives them credit for.
Myth #2: “You Could Have Just Left”
This one is perhaps the hardest to push back on, because on the surface it sounds like it’s just stating a fact. The door wasn’t literally locked. You weren’t physically restrained. So why didn’t you just go?
What this question misses entirely, and often wilfully is everything that leaving actually costs.
For people raised in high-control religious communities, leaving isn’t a lifestyle change. It’s a kind of annihilation of the self as they’ve known it.
It means leaving behind not just a set of beliefs, but an entire world: the community you grew up in, the friendships that have defined your social life, often your family relationships, sometimes your employment, your housing, your sense of who you are and what your future looks like. It means leaving behind the framework through which you have understood every major question of existence; what happens when you die, what you’re here for, what makes you good or bad, what love looks like. There is no clean exit from that. There is only loss, in layers, over time.
And then there is shunning. Many high-control religious groups practice formal or informal shunning of those who leave which is a process by which the person is cut off from their entire social network as a direct consequence of their exit. Knowing that leaving means losing everyone you love is not a small barrier. It is, for many people, an almost insurmountable one.
People stay for years or decades not because they are weak or compliant, but because the cost of leaving is genuinely devastating and the support structures outside the group simply don’t exist yet.
Even for people who “joined” as adults, the social architecture of high-control groups is specifically designed to make leaving feel impossible. Members are discouraged from maintaining close relationships outside the group. Critical thinking about the group’s teachings is framed as spiritual failure or dangerous outside influence. Leaving is associated with catastrophic consequences; spiritual, relational, sometimes physical. The decision to stay is not irrational. It is a rational response to a set of conditions deliberately constructed to make exit costly.
“You could have just left” is the kind of question that makes sense only if you’ve never been in a situation where leaving means losing everything. Most people haven’t. That’s worth remembering before asking it.
Myth #3: “You’re Just Bitter / Angry”
This one tends to arrive later in the conversation; often once a survivor has started to speak with some force about what they experienced. The moment the tone shifts from measured and careful to something more urgent, more frustrated, more real, the myth activates: “It sounds like you’re still very angry about this.” Offered not as an observation, but as a diagnosis. As a reason to stop taking what’s being said seriously.
There’s a lot packed into that move. The implication that anger invalidates testimony.
The suggestion that a person who has been harmed should be able to speak about it with neutrality, or their account becomes suspect. The quiet insinuation that the problem isn’t what happened to them, but their emotional response to it. It is, at its core, a way of changing the subject; from what was done, to how the person is feeling about what was done and in doing so, letting the institution or the system off the hook entirely.
Let’s be direct; anger is a completely legitimate response to harm. It is, in fact, one of the more psychologically healthy responses available and a signal that something has been violated, that it mattered, that the person knows they deserved better. For many survivors of religious trauma, anger arrives late, after years or decades of having been taught that their own feelings; especially negative ones directed at the institution were sinful, dangerous, or evidence of a spiritual problem. When anger finally surfaces, it is often a sign of recovery in progress, not a sign of being stuck.
Bitterness is a different thing, and worth distinguishing. Bitterness tends to describe a state of sustained resentment that has become consuming, that has closed a person off from new experience rather than moving them through and beyond the harm. It’s a real experience, and a real risk in the aftermath of significant trauma. But it is not the same as anger, and conflating the two and treating any expression of anger as evidence of bitterness is a way of policing how survivors are allowed to feel about what was done to them.
Survivors don’t owe anyone a calm, measured, academically distanced account of their own trauma.
The presence of emotion in their telling of it is not evidence that the telling is unreliable. If anything, the absence of emotion after what many survivors have been through would be the more concerning sign.
What to Do With This
If you’re a survivor reading this, you may have encountered all three of these myths; possibly in the same conversation, possibly from the same person. You may have internalised some of them yourself, the way we tend to internalise the explanations that are offered to us most persistently. Noticing where those stories live in you is the beginning of something important.
Here are some things that might help as you navigate this:
You don’t have to justify your experience to people who have already decided not to believe it. Some conversations are worth having; many aren’t. You get to choose which is which, and that choice can change over time.
When a myth gets applied to your story, it’s worth asking whose interests it serves. Explanations that protect institutions tend to show up reliably when institutions need protecting.
Anger at what happened to you is not a character flaw, and it doesn’t disqualify your account. It is information. It is worth listening to, not suppressing or explaining away.
You are not less intelligent, less discerning, or less capable than people who weren’t raised or recruited into high-control environments. The systems that shaped you were designed by people who had been refining them across generations. Your susceptibility was human, not deficient.
Finding language for what happened; language more precise than ‘brainwashing,’ more honest than ‘you could have left,’ more spacious than ‘you’re just bitter’ is part of the recovery work. And connecting with others who have their own precise language for it can make that work feel less solitary.
If the people in your life are working from these myths and you’re finding their responses more harmful than helpful, a practitioner who specialises in religious trauma can offer a very different kind of witness to your experience. It matters to be believed by someone who actually understands the terrain.
If you’re a practitioner reading this, these myths matter to your work in ways that are easy to underestimate. Survivors often arrive already having had their experience filtered through one or more of these frames, by family members, by previous therapists, by institutions that had a stake in the story being told a particular way, and by their own long-practiced self-assessment.
Part of what good support looks like in this space is helping people find their way to a more accurate, more compassionate account of what actually happened to them.
That starts with not importing the myths yourself; which means doing the ongoing work of examining your own assumptions about religion, about trauma, about what ‘just leaving’ costs, about what legitimate emotional responses to harm look like. It also means being curious about the language a client uses to describe their own experience: when someone describes themselves as ‘just brainwashed’ or ‘stupid for staying,’ that’s often an internalised myth worth gently unpacking together.
The experience of religious trauma is specific enough that the frameworks we use to understand it need to be too. Precise, honest, human language; language that names what actually happened without flattening it is one of the most useful things we can offer the people who come to us trying to make sense of it.
RTC’s Practitioner Registry (Australia | New Zealand) connects survivors with practitioners who understand the specific landscape of religious trauma; without the myths. If you’re a practitioner wanting to deepen your knowledge in this space, we’d love to have join us.
