Cultic Stockholm Syndrome

1) See Stockholm Syndrome to grasp the general use of the term.

2) See Why do people stay in a cult even when they know it is cultic? in not-moses’s reply to the OP on that Reddit thread. And then...

3) I had trouble with (understanding and "buying into") SS until I got into the following:

Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity

Seligman’s Original Article on Learned Helplessness

Learned Helplessness, Dread & the Victim Identity

And -- with the help of Atack, Bandura, Delarue, Kramer & Alstad, Lifton, Milgram, Riezler, Sargant and others, especially including Alexandra Stein and her use of John Bowlby's attachment theory in A More than Basic Cult Library -- came to understand how rapidly LH & VI > Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder > SS can be conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, imprinted, socialized, habituated, and normalized into a default mode network in the human brain.

IME, those who understand The Five Progressive Qualities of the Committed Cult Member on any Cultic Pyramid can wrap their minds around the cultic version of SS by the time they're half-way through Understanding Codependency as "Soft-Core" Cult Dynamics... and Cult Dynamics as "Hard-Core" Codependency.

BUT... After decades in The Hunt, I'm still (somewhat) amazed at how rapidly SS can be "installed" by using isolation, hunger, lack of sleep, terror and dispensation of existence in mostly smaller, non-Judeo / Christian / Muslim cults, and...

Relentless verbal abuse, gaslighting, group dynamic criticism, guilt-tripping, emotional blackmail, public embarrassment & humiliation, scapegoating and demonizing to install SS in ultra-authoritarian, "purity culture," evangelical and/or fundamentalist Judeo / Christian / Muslim cults, albeit considerably less rapidly.