Brainwashed?

While doing research for my memoirs, I found information about Mind Control techniques. If someone were going to control me, they would follow each of the Eight Steps based on Stephen Martin's book, The Heresy of Mind Control, and Margaret Singer's Cults in Our Midst.

As I read through the steps, they verified my hunch that we had been brainwashed in the convent. I don't know why I doubted it. Back in the 1950s and 60s, convent life smacked of all the cult ingredients.

It began with Step One:  Control of the environment, which includes people and information.

A Cult takes control over the member's access to the outside world.

In the convent, we were allowed a minimum of contact with Worldly folk, as Outsiders were referred to then. We were cut off from former friends, teachers, and especially boyfriends, and restricted to once-a-month-visits from our family, as well as twice a month letters home. That was it. No other contacts. Even inside the convent, we were forbidden to strike up friendships with any group besides our own. That is, those in training were not allowed to collaborate with the nuns.

As far as information was concerned, the convent controlled our access to outside information in several ways. Our reading materials were limited to religious books. We were especially forbidden to read anything that was published on the Church's Black List. (Materials that were considered heretical, frivolous, sexual, etc). There were no magazines or newspapers, except those kept in the musty, convent library. We had no TV or radio. Letters to and from the Outside were carefully censored. Our world revolved around an increasingly narrow axis.

There's a lot more about Step One that is written by Martin and Singer, but for now, I learned enough to have little doubt that  Step One applied to me.