Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse

You've Been Brainwashed! How Manipulators Train You to Never Leave

• Kerry McAvoy, Ph.D. • Season 5 • Episode 277

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0:00 | 9:10

Were you brainwashed to stay — and didn't even know it? 

A cult doesn't need a compound, robes, or a manifesto. All it needs is two people: one who sets the rules and one who lives by them.  

Dr. Kerry reads your most powerful wake-up moments — from the woman who recognized every cult trait laid down in the first three months of a nine-year relationship, to the viewer who grew up in a home where productivity meant safety, to the one who finally had a word for what she'd survived: brainwashed. 

This isn't about missing the signs. It's about a system that was designed to make coercive control feel like love, devotion, and belonging. Have you been struggling to leave? Stop asking why you didn't see it sooner. Start asking if you were trained not to. 

📩 Want Dr. Kerry to read your story on air? 

Email your question to clients@kerrymcavoyphd.com.

Submit your question to be answered on air here!

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Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D, a retired psychologist & author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships and deconstructing narcissism. 

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You've Been Brainwashed! How Manipulators Train You to Never Leave

Dr. Kerry: [00:00:00] What shocked me was in that relationship where there was no bad names used, when I took that assessment, it said I had been brainwashed with terror. This isn't about you being foolish enough and just not get- seeing the signs and getting out. This is a system has systematically manipulated you and applied tactics in order to force compliance, in order for you to only feel safe when you show up in the way that

they want you to When I say the word cult, what do you picture in your head? Are you thinking right now of some leader with long hair and white robes? Maybe a person who's surrounding a flag or has a uniform. Maybe they've even written a manifesto. But you may not know that you've probably at one point or another, and maybe even right now, is living inside of one.

And I bet if you hear me say that you're in a cult, you're gonna probably push back. You're gonna say, "Hey, I'm in a relationship," or, "That person was my mom," or, "I'm attending a really wonderful church." See, a, a cult [00:01:00] doesn't need a compound And it doesn't certainly need 30 members. It doesn't need robes or a manifesto.

All it needs is rules. It needs two people, one who sets the rules and one who lives by them. And today we're gonna be focusing on cults. You may have listened to Monday's episode with Brooke Diana as her description of her experience of growing up in a family cult and a church cult. But today we're gonna even open that lens a little bit further and look at how narcissistic relationships are a cult of two.

A viewer recently wrote in with one of the sharpest sentences I've ever seen. She said that her one-on-one relationships, every single one of them, had cult-like traits that we've been describing. They have a person who laid down the rules and they laid them down really fast in the first three months and yet and the relationship turned around and lasted for decades.

The reason that this happens, it's not because these playbooks are hidden. They're actually laid down really open and fast and it isn't that you're missing the signs. It's that you [00:02:00] think that you're in a relationship. It's actually the framing is the problem. We get told that these relationships are love and that this is how we show our devotion or this is the way that we stay safe or this is the way that we, we behave godly.

And because of that, we end up thinking we're maintaining a system that's important, that's protecting us, not harming us. And before we know it, those early stages of compliance stretch into years. We end up staying for a long time, not realizing that maybe our family or our church or our school is not a safe place, but actually has been one of coercive control and cult-like behavior.

Another viewer wrote in with a list that she actually made of her- for herself. She noticed that every single relationship that's been toxic had a charismatic leader, had a- some kind of a purpose that demanded self-sacrifice, that isolated her from the rest of the world and set its thinking in black and white frame, sort of [00:03:00] like the ends justify the means.

This is a huge reframe. It's something a lot of us don't recognize that we're in. We don't see the fact that these- there's a similarity between these relationships. We end up thinking, in fact, that we're probably making way too much of something and we don't recognize that we've gotten into a structure that's dangerous, that's harmful.

And the reason this happens is because we wanna survive a relationship. Our investment is making the best of it. It's not about necessarily our momentary happiness, even though we think it is, even though maybe the framers of the United States said it was. It's about safety and survival. And we often will make the best of the circumstances even when the circumstances is not doing its best for us.

A third viewer wrote in and said that the home that she grew up in was measured by productivity and the more productive you were, the safer you stayed and that she learned how to be an over-functioner. What we miss about these is that a lot of childhood homes is actually about recruitment, [00:04:00] that the child is trained from the get-go to be compliant in order to achieve love and safety.

And we learn that performance and achievement is the way you get acknowledgement or validation. We end up finding out that in order to, to experience any kind of sense of belonging, we have to perform, that relationships are conditional. And we don't register that as captivity, we register that as home.

So we end up learning to over-function, which is not a personality trait. It's an adaptation to a system that exploiting your labor. And a fourth viewer wrote in that said she had to recognize that she had been brainwashed and it was when she heard about the cult framing that gave her a language to be able to put into words something that she'd experienced but she could never describe.

I found that really, really helpful. At a back end of Don Hennessy's book called How He Gets Under Her Head, he has a brainwashing assessment that you can take and it tells you how badly you were brainwashed. What shocked [00:05:00] me was in that relationship where there was no bad names used, I was never called a name, he never struck me, that when I took that assessment, it said I had been brainwashed with terror.

This isn't about you being foolish enough and just not get-- seeing the signs and getting out. This is a system has systematically manipulated you and applied tactics in order to force compliance in order for you to only feel safe when you show up in the way that they want you to . And it takes a lot to break through and break out of these framings.

It takes a lot of effort and often the way that we start this is by naming what happened to us, by understanding that these relationships start out as a cult of two or a family of cults. So maybe instead of asking yourself, "Why didn't I see it?" Start wondering out loud if you were trained to call what felt like love was actually forced compliance.

If it actually was [00:06:00] maybe a cult of two or a family of cults . It doesn't need a scale. You don't need a lot of people for someone to set the rules and for everybody else to follow to live by them. And often these rules aren't hidden. They're not like mysterious things. They're been reframed as showing love and devotion and they're a way to stay safe.

And a lot of times for a lot of this, this starts in childhood, that what we experience compliance as a way of showing love, and we're told that productivity is a way to stay safe. And we don't realize that our family is actually recruiting us long before we've ever met that toxic adult partner. And maybe something for you to consider in the future is that why you're struggling to leave that relationship is because you've been brainwashed to stay, that maybe you've been experiencing systematic manipulation, and maybe that shift in frame will help you start to recover in a different, maybe in a better way.

So [00:07:00] if you'd like me to take your answer on air or you'd love to have me take your comment, please reach out to me. You can email me at clients, C-L-I-E-N-T-S, @kerrymcevoyphd, or use the link that I've included in the show notes. And thank you so much for sharing a bit of your stories with me, for letting me be able to sort of see the bigger picture and tie it in.

I deeply appreciate that trust. It's 2:00 AM again, and you're replaying that whole conversation over, and you're wondering to yourself, "Was it really that bad, or maybe I'm just being dramatic?" So you start to draft that I'm sorry text again because the guilt that you're feeling or the confusion you're experiencing is just unbearable.

And you know this loop because you've been there before, but I want you to know that you're not alone. I'm Dr. Kerry McAvoy. I'm a retired psychologist, and for 25 years I've been helping people untangle exactly what toxic relationships do to your mind, how they create the confusion, the self-doubt, and that trauma bond that keeps pulling you back in.

Here's the truth. Recovery [00:08:00] isn't about getting more information. It's about having the right support in the exact moment you need it. That's why I've created Reclaim You. It's a private, always available coaching app built from my work and my content organized into an extensive library that you can actually use when you're triggered.

Inside it, you'll get five-minute lessons when your brain can't handle a deep dive, check-ins that meet you exactly where you are, whether you're feeling strong, shattered, or numb, boundary scripts that help you say no without overexplaining, grounding tools that work fast when you're activated, and progress tracking so you can see proof you're healing even on days when it feels like you're not.

There's no appointments, no waiting, no judgment, just practical support right when you need it. Reclaim You, real help in real time right in your pocket, and it's a coaching support, not therapy or emergency care. Learn more at studio.com/drkerry. So start your healing today and [00:09:00] reclaim you.

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Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D.

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