Stockholm syndrome

The term "Stockholm syndrome" refers to a psychological anomaly in which a potential victim, who initially feels fear and hatred towards his or her tormentor, eventually begins to sympathize with him or her. For example, people taken hostage may later feel sympathy towards the bandits and try to help them without coercion, often even resisting their own release. Moreover, after a certain period of time, it may happen that a long-term warm relationship may develop between the victim and the captor.

Causes of Stockholm Syndrome

The described case proves that a long stay together of a criminal and his victim sometimes leads to the fact that, in the process of close communication, they become closer and try to understand each other, having the opportunity and time to communicate "heart to heart". The hostage "enters the situation" of the captor, learns about his problems, desires and dreams. Often the criminal complains about the injustice of life, the authorities, talks about his bad luck and life's hardships. As a result, the hostage goes over to the terrorist's side and voluntarily tries to help him.

Subsequently, the victim may stop wanting his own release because he understands that the threat to his life may no longer be the criminal, but the police and special forces storming the premises. For this reason, the hostage begins to feel at one with the bandit, and tries to help him as much as possible.

This behavior is typical for a situation where the terrorist initially treats the prisoner loyally. If a person succumbs to aggression, is tortured with beatings and threats, then of all possible feelings he can only experience fear for his life and open hostility towards the aggressor.

Stockholm syndrome is a situation that occurs relatively rarely, occurring in only 8% of captive cases.

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Hostage syndrome in Stockholm syndrome

The essence of Stockholm syndrome is that, with absolute dependence on the aggression of the criminal, the hostage begins to interpret all his actions from the positive side, justifying him. Over time, the dependent person begins to feel understanding and affection, to show sympathy and even sympathy for the terrorist - with such feelings, a person unconsciously tries to replace the fear and anger that he cannot allow himself to splash out. Such chaos of feelings creates a feeling of illusory security in the hostage.

This terminology took hold after the high-profile incident of the kidnapping of people in Stockholm.

At the end of August 1973, a dangerous criminal who had escaped from prison seized the Stockholm Central Bank together with four bank employees. In exchange for the lives of the people, the terrorist demanded a certain amount of money, weapons, a gas-filled car, and the early release of his cellmate.

The police went to meet the criminal, releasing his freed friend and delivering him to the crime scene. The remaining demands remained in question for another five days, during which both the terrorists and the hostages were kept in a closed room of the bank under the control of the police. Failure to fulfill all the demands forced the criminals to take extreme measures: a period of time was agreed upon during which the hostages would be killed. To prove their words, one of the robbers even wounded one hostage.

However, over the next two days, the situation changed radically. Criticism began to be voiced by the victims and captured people that they did not need to be released, that they felt quite comfortable and were happy with everything. Moreover, the hostages began to ask that all the demands of the terrorists be met.

However, on the sixth day, the police still managed to storm the building and free the captured people, arresting the criminals.

After their release, the alleged victims said that the criminals were very good people and that they should be released. Moreover, all four hostages even jointly hired a lawyer to defend the terrorists.

Symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome

• Victims try to identify themselves with the aggressors. In principle, at first this process is a kind of immunity, a defensive reaction, which is most often based on the self-instilled idea that the bandit will not be able to harm the hostage if the latter supports him and helps him. The victim purposefully longs to receive the criminal's leniency and patronage.
• The victim in most cases understands that the measures taken to save him may ultimately pose a danger to him. Attempts to free the hostage may not end as planned, something may go wrong and the life of the captive may be in danger. Therefore, the victim often chooses what he considers a safer path - to side with the aggressor.
• Being held captive for a long time can lead to the criminal appearing to the victim not as a person who has broken the law, but as an ordinary person with his own problems, dreams and aspirations. This situation is especially clearly expressed in the political and ideological aspect, when there is injustice on the part of the authorities or the people around him. As a result, the victim can gain confidence that the captor's point of view is absolutely correct and logical.
• The captured person mentally moves away from reality - thoughts arise that everything that is happening is a dream that will soon end happily.

Everyday Stockholm Syndrome

The psychopathological picture, often called "hostage syndrome", can often be found in everyday situations. Cases are often observed in which women who have experienced violence and aggression subsequently experience attachment to their rapist.

Unfortunately, such a picture is not uncommon in family relationships. If in a family union the wife experiences aggression and humiliation from her own husband, then with Stockholm syndrome she experiences exactly the same abnormal feeling towards him. A similar situation can also develop between parents and children.

Stockholm syndrome in the family primarily concerns people who initially belong to the psychological type of "suffering victim". Such people were "underloved" in childhood, they felt envy towards the children around them, loved by their parents. Often they have a complex of "second-rateness", unworthiness. In many cases, the motive for their behavior is the following rule: if you contradict your tormentor less, then his anger will manifest itself less often. A person suffering from bullying perceives what is happening as a given, he continues to forgive his offender, and also defends and even justifies him to others and to himself.

One of the varieties of everyday "hostage syndrome" is post-traumatic Stockholm syndrome, the essence of which is the emergence of psychological dependence and attachment of the victim to whom violence was applied in physical form. A classic example is the restructuring of the psyche of a person who has survived rape: in some cases, the very fact of humiliation with the use of force is perceived as a self-evident punishment for something. At the same time, there is a need to justify the rapist and try to understand his behavior. Sometimes there were situations when the victim sought a meeting with her offender and expressed her understanding or even sympathy to him.

Social Stockholm Syndrome

As a rule, a person who sacrifices himself to an aggressor cohabitant outlines for himself certain survival strategies that help him survive physically and morally, being side by side with the torturer every day. Once conscious, the mechanisms of salvation over time remake the human personality and turn into the only way of mutual coexistence. The emotional, behavioral and intellectual components are distorted, which helps to survive in conditions of endless terror.

Experts have managed to identify the basic principles of such survival.

• The person tries to focus on positive emotions (“if he doesn’t yell at me, then it gives me hope”).
• There is a complete denial of negative emotions (“I don’t think about it, I don’t have time”).
• One's own opinion absolutely repeats the opinion of the aggressor, that is, it completely disappears.
• The person tries to take all the blame on himself (“I am the one who is driving him to this and provoking him, it’s my fault”).
• The person becomes secretive and does not discuss his life with anyone.
• The victim learns to study the mood, habits, and behavioral characteristics of the aggressor, and literally “dissolves” in him.
• A person begins to deceive himself and at the same time believe in it: false admiration for the aggressor appears, a simulation of respect and love, pleasure from sexual intercourse with him.

Gradually, the personality changes so much that it is no longer possible to live differently.

Stockholm Buyer Syndrome

It turns out that the "hostage syndrome" may relate not only to the "victim-aggressor" scheme. A common representative of the syndrome may be an ordinary shopaholic - a person who unknowingly makes expensive purchases or uses expensive services, after which he tries to justify unnecessary expenses. Such a situation is considered a particular manifestation of a distorted perception of one's own choice.

In other words, a person suffers from an acute form of the so-called “consumer appetite”, but, unlike many people, he subsequently does not admit to wasting money, but tries to convince himself and those around him that the things he has purchased are extremely necessary, and if not now, then certainly later.

This kind of syndrome also refers to psychological cognitive distortions and is a constantly recurring mental errors and discrepancies between statements and reality. This has been repeatedly studied and proven in numerous experiments in psychology.

Stockholm syndrome in this manifestation is perhaps one of the most harmless forms of psychopathology, but it can also have negative everyday and social consequences.

Diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome

Modern psychological practice in diagnosing cognitive distortions is based on a whole combination of specially designed clinical-psychological and psychometric methods. The main clinical-psychological option is considered to be a step-by-step clinical diagnostic survey of the patient and the use of a clinical diagnostic scale.

The listed methods consist of a list of questions that allow the psychologist to detect deviations in various aspects of the patient's mental state. These may be affective disorders, cognitive, anxiety, provoked by a state of shock or taking psychoactive drugs, etc. At each stage of the survey, the psychologist can, if necessary, move from one stage of the interview to another. If necessary, relatives or close people of the patient can be involved in the final diagnosis.

Among other diagnostic methods most commonly used in medical practice, the following can be distinguished:

• rating scale for determining the severity of psychological trauma;
• Mississippi Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Scale;
• Beck Depression Interview;
• interview to determine the depth of psychopathological signs;
• PTSD scale.

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Treatment of Stockholm syndrome

Treatment is carried out mainly with the help of psychotherapy. It goes without saying that the use of drug therapy is not always appropriate, since few patients believe that they suffer from any pathology at all. Most patients refuse to take medications due to personal circumstances, or stop the prescribed course, since they consider it inappropriate.

Properly conducted psychotherapy can be a promising treatment, since the correct attitude of the patient allows him to independently develop effective options for overcoming mental changes, as well as learn to recognize illusory conclusions and take the necessary measures in time, and perhaps even prevent cognitive abnormalities.

The cognitive treatment scheme uses various cognitive and behavioral strategies. The techniques used are aimed at detecting and evaluating misconceptions and misleading conclusions and mental constructions. During the course of treatment, the patient learns to perform the following operations:

• monitor your thoughts that arise automatically;
• trace the relationship between your thoughts and behavior, evaluate your emotions;
• conduct an analysis of facts that confirm or refute your own conclusions;
• make a realistic assessment of what is happening;
• recognize functional disorders that may lead to distorted inferences.

Unfortunately, emergency assistance for Stockholm syndrome is impossible. Only the victim's independent awareness of the real damage from his situation, an assessment of the illogicality of his actions and the lack of prospects for illusory hopes will allow him to abandon the role of a humiliated person deprived of his own opinion. But without consulting a specialist, it will be very difficult, almost impossible, to achieve success in treatment. Therefore, the patient must be under the supervision of a psychologist or psychotherapist throughout the entire rehabilitation period.

Prevention of Stockholm syndrome

When conducting a negotiation process during hostage-taking, one of the main goals of the mediator is to push the aggressive and injured parties to mutual sympathy. Indeed, Stockholm syndrome (as practice shows) significantly increases the hostages' chances of survival.

The task of the negotiator is to encourage and even provoke the development of the syndrome.

In the future, people who were taken hostage and successfully survived will undergo repeated consultations with a psychologist. The prognosis for Stockholm syndrome will depend on the qualifications of a specific psychotherapist, the willingness of the victim to meet the specialist halfway, and the depth and degree of trauma to the person's psyche.

The difficulty is that all of the above mental deviations are extremely unconscious.

None of the victims tries to understand the real reasons for their behavior. They behave unconsciously, following a subconsciously constructed algorithm of actions. The victim's natural inner desire to feel safe and protected pushes them to fulfill any conditions, even those they have invented themselves.

Movies about Stockholm syndrome

There are many films in world cinematography that clearly illustrate cases when hostages went to meet terrorists, warning them of danger and even shielding them with themselves. To learn more about this syndrome, we recommend watching the following films:

• "The Chase", USA, 1994. A criminal escapes from prison, steals a car and takes a shopper hostage. Gradually, the girl gets to know the kidnapper better and develops warm feelings for him.
• "Excess Baggage", USA, 1997. A car thief steals another BMW, not suspecting that along with the car he is also stealing a girl who is hiding in the trunk...
• "Tie Me Up", Spain, 1989-1990. A film about the kidnapping of an actress by a guy, which subsequently gave rise to mutual feelings for each other.
• "The City of Thieves", USA, 2010. A gripping film about the relationship between a robber and his former hostage.
• "Backtrack", USA, 1990. A hired killer needs to deal with a girl artist who has become an unwitting witness to a mafia showdown. Having gotten to know the girl better, he falls in love with her and goes on the run with her.
• "The Executioner", USSR, 1990. A girl is raped and, for revenge, is forced to hire a bandit. However, a situation arises that makes the victim forgive her offenders.
• "Stockholm Syndrome", Russia, Germany, 2014. A young girl who went on a business trip to Germany is kidnapped right in the middle of the street.

The phenomenon of "Stockholm syndrome" is usually considered paradoxical, and the developing attachment of victims to criminals is considered irrational. Is this really so?