Progressive Brainwashing (Help!)

Hey guys, I'm sorry for posting this here, but I have to ask: do you guys know of any subreddits designed to help people understand or break down a psychological/emotional trauma that befell them? I had 2 radical feminist/progressive professors who have fucked up my psyche and made me slightly sexist/racist when I know it's completely wrong. I'm trying to dig myself out of the hole but I need an objective third person viewpoint. This seems like a really good sub for picking these kind of people apart, which is why I'm posting this. I'm sorry for this selfish of a post in here when other people are posting more relevant content, but this has been going on for months after the class, and seeing a psychologist concerning it hasn't helped. Any help or direction would be much appreciated!

EDIT: Here's my full story guys. Feel free to investigate or ask any questions you want. I really want to try and pull through this- Indoctrinated: One straight white male’s experience with radical academics

Hey guys, this is going to be a very long post. It needs to be long for me to finally write a well detailed, accurate, and summarized account of what happened to me several months back, and how I have been trying to cope with it ever since. My upbringing and background is an essential part of understanding the full picture, and I apologize if part of it seems to ramble; I will try to make it as clear and articulate as possible. Please keep in mind this has been very emotionally and psychologically traumatizing for me. I say that not for sympathy, but to let you that most of this text is coming from a place within myself that is trying to objectively articulate why I feel and continue to suffer a particular way emotionally. The purpose of this “essay”, if you want to call it that, is to try and get a clear, objective, 3rd person perspective’s thoughts on what is going on with me. So without further ado, lets jump in.

Childhood upbringing: To give you a clear understanding of why I reacted the way I did to what happened to me, I need to first tell you a little bit about my upbringing. I’m a straight, white male living in the Southwestern United States. Growing up, I was raised heavily Christian, and was indoctrinated into their sphere of thought. I was polarized from the dawn of my youth, taught to fear gay people and taught to fear something as mundane as the public school system. People in the school were extremely radical right, and didn’t allow us to a number of things, such as-

-No Black Nail Polish (Because that’s of Satan) -No tattooed sleeves at twin day (friend and I were rockers, wore fake sleeves, got called in to take them off..) So, basically no tattoos, because they’re bad. -Secretary scared of losing her job when we ran into her at an AC/DC concert (lol) -Couldn’t say the word “Sucks”, because apparently, that’s really bad. -Kids went straight off into heavy drugs/alcohol/partying in HS because of the brain-washing extremes placed on them in middle school. -Teachers would look down and sneer on people who had different political or religious viewpoints from them. -Kids from public schools were largely looked on as immoral and “a public school kid”. Stereotyped basically. -Gay people were looked upon as completely bizarre, immoral, segregated people of society. -They made you fear the opposite sex, fear having a relationship. This is evident in the way they made you dress, the way you could do your nails (for girls), their rhetoric in educating youth about sex, no hugging, etc. -Because engaging in sexual behavior or even kissing was so “unholy” or “immoral”, most girls and guys I knew went on to be big sluts/man whores because of it. I for one was terrified by it, partially because of my extreme anxiety and partially because of the fear instilled in me. -Musicians other than Christian ones were considered “off limits” and even when we went on trips they would constantly warn us about the “No secular artists” policy. -There would be a lazy attitude attributed to “secular” people. Our teachers would point out ahead of time that this person is “secular”, as if to brace ourselves, and then proceed to destroy that person’s argument after the conversation to us, just because that person doesn’t believe in God. -Using swear words was completely prohibited, even though some teachers and many parents would curse in more private areas. Swear words were deemed, “Oh, you’re just trying to be cool” Rather than being a strong form of verbal expression. -Divorced people were considered in the wrong at all times, kind of like they have a malicious imprint on them that they can’t shake. -Basically anything alien to them they considered to be vile, dangerous and wrong. -Said “Thank God” in a relieved manner, got a detention for it, because it was “unholy”.

These were just a few of the things I could think of. I got conditioned to fear and mentally categorize people into two different categories, mainly “good”, or “bad”. Good or bad was determined by my superiors. This instilled many traits into me that I subsequently had to work through after getting into High School, these were:

Guilt Prejudice Hatred Confusion

What I’ve identified here are the same emotions I am feeling now, except it has to do largely with race and gender instead of Heaven and Hell. In regards to race and gender, I grew up with my best friend being a white male, and my other best friend being Mexican. I never thought anything of it. I would say that even though I went to a school that was extremely biased and extreme in their ways, I had a very level head in viewing people. I viewed people through their character and intellect, not through their race or gender. It was a level headed viewpoint.

High School- Finding myself and art

When I arrived in high school, I was diagnosed with extreme anxiety disorder, and proceeded to go through 2 years of therapy to try and find the right dosage of medicine to level out the chemicals in my head. Because of this disorder, and the fact that I was brainwashed growing up, I get triggered easily by things, and anxiety comes to me a lot more easily than other people. Throughout all of this, because I was an introvert, I didn’t have a lot of friends. I was very lonely at times, and the thing that got me through these dark times, often suicidal, was entertainment, namely video games, movies, and books. I loved them. They were my friends when I didn’t have any. I loved to problem solve, I loved to explore different worlds, to see interact with different characters, to discover the vast imagination of the human mind. I was entranced by these sources. In parallel to being engrossed in these worlds, I was also a pretty good writer and found myself having fun in English class, something I had always liked and being relatively decent at. This led to a love of writing, which led to a love of creative writing, which eventually led me to find film. I love screenplays. I love their structure, I love the voice that good ones possess, and I love again: the vastness of the human imagination. I looked at entertainment on a personal level, as tools of entertainment, hope, innocence and wonder. I felt a connection to the people that had created the works of art that got me through tough times, and I wanted to hopefully create works of art that would help and inspire others, or at the very least, provide them a measure of comfort in their lives in the entertainment that I could weave into pages. So, I decided to go to film school and develop my talents there. During my freshman year, I had a few great professors, a lot of mediocre ones, and a few that were incredibly opinionated, radical, and used their platform as a means to indoctrinate students into a more political way of thinking when it came to creating art. This is where the brainwashing began again for me-

1st Radical Professor: My first professor in the 2nd semester of my freshman year of college was what I would describe as very far left radical progressive, who was a fantastic orator and a self proclaimed narcissist. The course was a History of Film, and was designed to take us through the birth of film all the way up to modern day, covering the birth of sound, the studio system of the 50’s, the French Revolution of the 70’s, Martin Scorsese, etc, etc. Basically a very broad but detailed overview of where film was, the cultural times it lived in, and how it has progressed in the past 100+ years. This teacher saw this as a perfect opportunity to manipulate student’s passion and love for film to a more political motivation. These kind of professor’s viewed their lectures as a “revelation” for students, as if they are preaching the one true word of the world. She presented it like that. She was a great orator. There is this everpresent temptation to just give into what they are saying simply because some of them can present it as something very sexy. She talked about the “White invisible norm”, calling Star Wars, one of my all time favorite films, a “White Hope”, referred to Stanley Kubrick as a misogynist, and basically reduced everything I had ever loved in the world of entertainment to a black vs white, male vs female, oppressor vs oppressed narrative, which I believe is wrong, but she made some sense. But even an idiot or radical can make sense, right? I’m not sure. She used her position as a teacher of film, a department that is almost completely subjective in nature, as a staging ground to instill radical doctrine into students to go out into the world and push that doctrine through the medium of film. When I came out of her class, I had logically sifted through her arguments. She didn’t touch me on an emotional level, but what she was trying to do was this: Make me feel racist and sexist for writing characters that weren’t minorities or female. Above all, she created a confusion in me that would fester into the next semester, with a teacher that held the same radical viewpoints (I assume, based on where her arguments were coming from and the doctrine she was teaching from), but communicated the viewpoints in a much more rational, logical, and compassionate way. In other words, she didn’t polarized, but unified, instilling a deeper confusion in me.

2nd Radical Professor:

My 2nd professor who held radical views came through a class called Dramatic Analysis. It sounds self explanatory enough. Throughout each unit, we would take a few plays and movies, look at the history of the genre or story, where it came from, and proceed to break it down and discuss what we liked, what we didn’t like, etc. Again, this class is set up to be pretty self explanatory and objective, yet, through discussion based rhetoric, the teacher could now control where everyone’s thoughts went to based upon her own personal interests and biases. She was actually pretty level headed and seemed to care about both men and women. She was compassionate as well, which I believe allowed her viewpoints to get through to me this go-around as opposed to the last teacher. It's easy to get onboard with something that sounds idealistic and logical in nature when the person pitching the logic to you isn't attempting to polarize the audience. Everything was going fairly smoothly throughout the year, but upon looking at the syllabus, I couldn’t held but dread the last two upcoming topics of discussion, “Critical Race Theory” and “Feminism”. Now, what I hate most about what has happened to me is the fact that these people have polarized me. I no longer go into reading something with little to no bias. Now, I’m always on guard, ready to be triggered, basically a mirror image of both party lines. The main reason why I am writing all of this is to attempt to get all of these intrusive thoughts, prejudice, and bias out of my head, and be my own person again, free from the fear and guilt instilled into me. When we arrived at critical race theory week, I was so terrified for some reason that I skipped one class period, and arrived late to my other one to try and avoid the discussion concerning race. I was terrified on an emotional and psychological level. This where I got triggered, my emotion taking me over, and this hasn’t stopped for months now. It has certainly gotten better though.

Since then:

Since then, these people have attempted and succeeded to instill the following emotions and psychological outcomes within me:

Confusion Guilt Prejudice Hatred Decreased attention span
Loss of passion (to better myself, to learn, and to do what I love: write) Loss of motivation (the same as passion) Individuality stripped Numb to critical thinking Feel incapacitated Feel blocked

Made me feel irresponsible, guilty and confused for not being political in my viewings and writings. Made me feel that if I don’t have some sort of racial or gendered lens on when I interact with entertainment, then I’m being ignorant and irresponsible.

View people as: Groups, not individuals. Have more bias to like a black guy more than a white guy. Have anger if I see newscasters are white, etc. Blatant racism, I know, but these people dug deep and somehow manipulated me into feeling this way, even if I know it’s wrong. They have made me label everything, categorize it, and basically changed some of my mind’s psychology in how I feel and interact with the world, which comes back to the stripping of individuality.

Almost above all, my safe haven and refuge, art, has been stripped from me and been labeled, perverted and manipulated until I can’t experience it like I did. I have little to no joy regarding it because of the perversion.

I have more or less sifted through and broken down a lot of these feelings, and attempted to get to the core, but it seems like I’m always running in circles. I don’t have a completely objective viewpoint, and I never will, which is why I come to you guys to ask for advice and an opinion on how I can get better, and how I can push this load off of my shoulders and get back looking at the world through my eyes, and not theirs. I hope I’ve been clear and thorough. Feel free to ask me any questions you have regarding specifics, because in the end, a lot of what I’m having is an emotional reaction, so I might be blurry when it comes to viewing myself. Thank you all.