do stockholm syndrome victims continue to have affects after they have been released?

Question

and do they tend to stay with similar people?what signs do they display afterwards? thanks

Answer 1

People and their minds are wickedly complicated. So even though we can categorize a lot of different incidents as 'Stockholm Syndrome', you aren't going to see everyone behaving exactly the same before, during, or after.

Having said that, it helps to understand exactly what Stockholm Syndrome is. It is a form mental defense, and a subtype of what psychologists sometimes refer to as 'cognitive dissonance'. Cognitive dissonance springs up when your thoughts and beliefs would seem to contradict your actions. This creates a lot of mental stress. Another good example of a kind of cognitive dissonance can be seen in post-traumatic stress disorder. Intentionally caused cognitive dissonance is a common form of 'brainwashing'.

But it all starts when a person is made to do something they wouldn't normally. People can't just do things mindlessly (no matter how hard the military may try to train soldiers to do so at times) - they THINK about what they're doing and why. It forms part of their self-image. If you're trained to shoot back at someone who's shooting at you, it may not occur to you that the result of this training may very well be a dead person. But when the situation arises and a dead person is right in front of you, you suddenly and violently have to realize that you are a person who kills other people.

Your mind can go two ways with this. Either you have to completely stop doing whatever it is that's causing the problem, or your self-image and ideas start adapting to relieve the stress. Exactly which ideas and what part of your self-image depends a lot on the situation and how it's perceived.

So in the Stockholm variety we have people who are kidnapped or held at gun-point. They don't like this, but they don't want to die, either. So they do what the gun-holder says. Then maybe the gun-holder talks about himself. Their mind sees an escape: the gun-holder isn't bad... he's just got a problem. So maybe it's okay to cooperate.

Again, the pervasiveness and durability of this probably depends a lot on the 'problem' that the mind picks up on (and how many!). In the famous case of Patty Hearst, she went so far as to help her kidnappers commit further crimes, though she later repented. There are a number of reports of victims testifying on their victimizers' behalf in criminal trials, but also incidents where the victim seemed to snap back shortly after liberation. In some brainwashing cases the victims never recover, even when removed from the oppressive environment they've been in. They have effectively adopted all the organizations' views as their own; changing them back is no less difficult than convincing any other member of such a group to change their ways.