The Sad, Sad Truth About Why Ex-QAnoners Won’t Be The Same Again
This is a grim reminder to loved ones: your buddy has been brainwashed.
As many people know, I am one of the many people in the United States who watched once-mellow people become radicalized by right-wing conspiracy theories. Thankfully, it’s no one too close to me.
On Reddit’s r/QAnonCasualties, you will find countless stories of people who had it worse. Unlike me, the people who became infected with Q beliefs were often people they adored.
On there, so many posts will tell horrific stories of how the once-loving parent who taught them tolerance and adored science turned into a screeching, hateful, paranoid mess.
Having seen people who went down the rabbit hole and as a person who has experienced brainwashing before, I can tell you that it’s like watching a real-life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Q-affected family members often just want their old loved one back.
They stay around them hoping that one day, they’ll change. Or they’ll snap out of it and suddenly get over it — like waking up from a bad fever dream. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is not going to happen.
There’s this weird hope that Q victims will snap out of it and revert back to who they once were. This is not how brainwashing works, nor how it affects people.
While it’s possible for them to drop the Q crap, they will never be quite the same. Here’s why.
Brainwashing can take years or even decades to undo.
Ask any ex-cult member or anyone else who has been put in a situation where brainwashing was part of the role, and you’ll see a person who is literally rebuilding their brain from nothing.
This is why there are entire Reddit channels devoted to people recovering from religious abuse. Brainwashing often means that you have to question and undo every single belief that was drummed into you.
When it comes to matters of hate or disgust, it takes a herculean amount of effort to wipe those attitudes entirely outside of your brain. Much of this is due to the Illusory Truth Effect.
The Illusory Truth Effect is a known scientific phenomenon that causes people to believe lies, even when presented with the truth. Why? Because they heard the lie so many times.
Moreover, there’s another psychological effect at play: Confirmation Bias. This bias means that anything that supports your current views — an experience, a quote, a study — will be more likely to impact you than a study that flies in the face of what you believe.
Between those two psychological quirks, Q followers face an uphill battle when it comes to deradicalization. They may remain averse to vaccines for years after they got into that rabbit hole.
Q changes peoples’ personalities due to rage addiction and dehumanizing propaganda.
Most of us heard about the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust, as well as the genocides currently happening in the Middle East. As an American, I grew up wondering how this could happen.
What could drive people to kill one another? Well, historians can tell you that words have a lot more power than we want to admit. Seriously, there are entire museums and sites devoted to exposing this methodology.
Hitler was able to get Germans onboard with unspeakable cruelty by dehumanizing his targets and then stoking the flames of anger in his followers.
When you stop viewing people as human, you stop empathizing with them. When you stop having empathy for them and start to get angry at them, you begin to hate them.
When you hate people you don’t see as human, you don’t care if they suffer. In fact, you begin to enjoy hearing about it — and sadly, that lack of empathy tends to stick for far, far longer than people want to admit.
If you were hoping to get your old loved one back, you are going to be sadly disappointed. That “bully streak” you started to see when they got into Q is going to stick around quite a bit.
Contrary to popular belief, the de-Nazification of Germany did not happen overnight. While being confronted with the deeds soldiers did had a major impact, many Germans who were indoctrinated in antisemitism never fully got away from that belief set.
Most, however, were able to shed those beliefs within 20 years’ time. During the remainder of the 1940s, the de-Nazification movement was seen as a “fiasco” and a “failure.” Some today might argue it was one, too.
Sadly, that’s the best possible outcome in most cases. If you look at the radicalization of the post-Civil War South, you’ll see our society still harbors that hate as a collective.
Societies are often a good macrocosm of what goes on in a person’s own mind. So, take that as you will. Hate, disgust, and anger are the most challenging emotions to override because you have to confront them. That’s not easy.
There’s also reason to believe Q traumatized its followers.
Being involved in a community that constantly discusses the worst of the worst is a traumatic thing. It’s also a movement linked to recruitment via trauma.
According to Maryland Today, 44 percent of Q followers joined after a past trauma. 68 percent of people arrested for the January 6th insurrection also diagnosed with mental illnesses when they were screened.
If you look at how ex-Q members talk, it becomes clear that the very Q content they are addicted to also traumatizes readrs. If they manage to get out, you are going to be dealing with a person who may struggle with PTSD.
Speaking as a PTSD sufferer, your ex-Q may end up losing a lot of their upbeat, happy-go-lucky behavior. PTSD can and does change your personality, often permanently. Your loved one simply won’t be the same.
A bigger issue is that Q often becomes a person’s coping mechanism, which means the temptation to return is always there.
Q isn’t just a conspiracy theory mentality. It’s also a community and identity. As it turns out, this can make getting out a nightmare — especially if you were lonely before. Research at Westpoint backs this up.
Q followers who were particularly lonely before their radicalization tend to cling to the community because they need that social network. They know that the very people they considered to be comrades will hate their guts if they leave.
Isolation is often why people fall into Q in the first place. Don’t be shocked if it also remains the reason why they stay there or choose to return to it. Conspiracy theories provide a rush, a community, and a way to make life seem a little more fair.
A lot of people love to live their lives seeing themselves and their friends as heroes. They want to be given a reason why their lives are shit. And they want someone to blame and others who can commiserate.
And Q? It covers all those bases.
Speaking of the importance of social ties, maybe we need to address the elephant in the room…
Even if they become mostly normal again, you might not want to deal with them.
Another major issue that you might come to deal with is the way you perceive your Q family member. Q followers have a remarkably good knack for burning bridges, hurling abuse at people close to them, and being psychotically selfish.
It hurts to hear your Q family member scream at you and call you names. It hurts when you can no longer talk about anything but anti-vaxx crap, Trump, and conspiracies. And it hurts if they (like they often do) never apologize for it.
If you’ve dealt with them for a couple of months, you might be able to forgive them. If you were severely abused by them or had to deal with extreme fallout as a result of their actions, you might have little interest in reconnecting with them.
There are only so many times you can forgive someone before you just can’t see them for anything but the sum of problems they’ve given you. And even if you get your wish of having them back, you’ll wonder if they’ll ever revert to who they were during their Q phase.
A lot of people find their loved ones reverting back (partially) to who they were pre-Q. This is great, but there’s a catch. The “Q ick” is still there. And it might never go away.
Unfortunately for ex-Q followers, they have to live with the consequences of their actions.
There’s no right answer to dealing with Q radicals who walked away from the hate.
It’s great and hope-inducing to see people who managed to overcome the Q-Anon brainwashing cycle. It truly is. However, Q has an alarming, even shocking, way of leaving a tornado of destruction in its wake.
For most people, including people who severed ties with loved ones over the vile shit Q made them do, there’s a good chance you might never really get back to the relationship you once had.
For others, you might be able to mend things to the point of remaining friends. However, the person you knew before Q will never be there again. You will have to deal with a person who is different — a traumatized individual who may not have fully come to terms with what they did.
It’s true that having a social network to go to can facilitate deradicalization. Whether or not you have the patience, the mental health, and the forgiveness to be there for your ex-Q is up to you.
I abandoned the intense Catholicism with which I was raised in Oct 1992.
I was 23 then, 55 now.
I am still using workarounds to cope with the ever-present trauma of my upbringing.