One of the greatest misconceptions about abuse is the belief that victims simply “fall for” bad people. In reality, grooming rarely appears dangerous in the beginning. It often looks kind, attentive, protective, trustworthy, holy, or even godly.
Predators do not always appear frightening or obviously manipulative. Many people imagine danger as something immediately visible—someone aggressive, socially isolated, or outwardly threatening. We might think of the scruffy man in the trench coat standing on the street corner. Yet grooming typically works in the opposite way. It presents itself as safe, credible, compassionate, and trustworthy. A predator may be the least likely person someone would suspect: a teacher, coach, priest, family friend, or someone in a position of authority.
Because of this, victims are not simply “missing red flags” in the simplistic way people often assume. Grooming is not a failure of intelligence or discernment. It is a deliberate process of psychological, emotional, and sometimes spiritual manipulation that gradually reshapes how a person interprets reality, trust, and safety itself. This is why grooming must be understood not as a single act of deception, but as a sustained pattern of coercive control.
Although the term is often associated with child abuse, adults can also be groomed, particularly during periods of vulnerability, transition, grief, spiritual searching, or emotional dependence.
The Devil in Rome illustrates this reality with devastating clarity through Rachel Mastrogiacomo’s experience of clerical abuse in Rome. Her account offers a sobering and deeply instructive example of how grooming unfolded within a spiritually authoritative relationship.
Grooming Often Begins Inside Legitimate Trust
Rachel was a young devout Catholic woman full of hopes and dreams when she went to live in Rome. Fr. Jacob Bertrand (now defrocked) helped her navigate unfamiliar surroundings, translated for her, and appeared deeply invested in her physical and spiritual well-being.
This is often how grooming begins. The predator first becomes helpful. They may offer support during grief, loneliness, confusion, vulnerability, spiritual searching, or major life transitions. Rather than immediately harming the victim, they establish trust and emotional reliance. The relationship can initially feel healing, stabilizing, or deeply affirming.
For Rachel, Bertrand appeared safe, protective, spiritually wise, and dependable. He exploited her need for guidance, belonging, comfort, and spiritual reassurance. What began as support became manipulative long before she recognized anything unhealthy was taking place.
Grooming Works Through Gradual Boundary Erosion
Grooming rarely begins with obvious violations. Instead, boundaries are tested slowly and incrementally. Behavior that would normally feel uncomfortable is reframed as care, mentorship, or spiritual depth. The victim is gradually conditioned to override discomfort in favor of trust, gratitude, obedience, or emotional attachment.
Over time, the victim’s sense of what is “normal” shifts. This is not because the victim lacks awareness, but because the relationship itself has systematically reshaped the framework through which events are interpreted. By the time serious physical/sexual abuse occurs, the victim is often already operating inside a distorted version of normalcy created by the abuser.
Dependency and Control Often Disguise Themselves as Closeness
In Rachel’s story, Bertrand’s control intensified when she sought spiritual guidance outside of him. He increasingly inserted himself into areas of her life, and in doing so, he quietly increased his control over her.
What appears to be extraordinary trust or spiritual friendship may actually function to narrow the victim’s world. The abuser slowly becomes the dominant emotional, relational, or spiritual authority in the victim’s life.
Isolation in abusive relationships is not always physical. More often, it is psychological. The abuser becomes the primary interpreter of reality, morality, conscience, or even God. This is especially true in cases of clerical abuse.
Grooming Often Exists Alongside Public Credibility
One of the most confusing realities of grooming is that it is often carried out by highly respected individuals, particularly in cases of clerical abuse. Bertrand was a Catholic priest who was trusted by Rachel’s family and by other clergy. To outsiders, there appeared to be no reason for alarm.
This is why abuse can be so difficult to identify from the outside. Many abusers maintain a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde presentation. They appear virtuous in public while privately manipulating and gaslighting their victims.
Survivors often describe living within two realities simultaneously. There’s what everyone else sees, and then there’s what they themselves experience. That internal conflict is the direct result of a predator’s deliberate manipulation and control.
Intermittent Kindness Deepens Attachment
Grooming is a cycle of affection and harm, affirmation and fear, warmth and control. This inconsistency creates powerful emotional attachment. Victims may cling to moments of kindness because they desperately hope the caring version of the person is the “real” one. They want deeply to preserve what they believe is good.
Over time, the brain can become focused on restoring emotional safety rather than evaluating the relationship clearly. The coercive control becomes so psychologically powerful that the victim is not only being harmed, but also conditioned.
Because grooming manipulates trust and attachment, many survivors later struggle with intense shame and self-blame. It’s easy to mistakenly interpret their conditioned responses as consent or complicity.
Spiritual Grooming Exploits Sacred Trust
One of the most devastating aspects of clerical abuse is spiritual grooming.
In Rachel’s experience, her love of God, prayer, holiness, and the Church were not obstacles to manipulation. They became the means by which her abuser groomed her. This reality is painfully familiar to many survivors of clerical abuse. Obedience was distorted into submission. Sacrifice became exploitation. Spiritual trust became dependency.
A victim’s sincere desire to grow closer to God can be manipulated when the abuser presents himself as spiritually authoritative. Yet this is not authentic spiritual guidance. It is spiritual coercion.
Why Victims Often Remain Attached
One of the most misunderstood realities of grooming is victim attachment to the abuser. This attachment is not proof that the abuse was wanted or consensual. It reflects the psychological impact of sustained coercive conditioning.
When one person becomes a source of emotional stability, spiritual guidance, social grounding, and perceived safety, recognizing them as dangerous can feel psychologically overwhelming. Victims often adapt in order to survive the relationship emotionally.
They may minimize, rationalize, compartmentalize, or struggle to leave. These are common survival responses within coercive relationships.
The Wrong Question
People often ask abuse victims, “Why didn’t she leave? Why did she keep going back?”
Grooming works through the gradual reshaping of trust, loyalty, fear, dependence, and perception. The victim is not operating with the clarity or freedom outsiders often assume.
The question we should be asking is: how thoroughly was the victim’s internal world shaped to make leaving feel confusing, impossible, unsafe, or even spiritually wrong?
Many survivors cannot identify one precise moment when everything changed. Grooming rarely transforms a relationship all at once. It unfolds slowly, making the erosion difficult to recognize while living inside it. Survivors of abuse often recognize these patterns only years later, once the fog of coercion begins to lift.
Final Truth
It needs to be said that the effectiveness of grooming says nothing about the intelligence, strength, faith, or discernment of victims. However, it does reveal the calculated nature of coercive manipulation by predators.
If society truly wants to protect vulnerable people, we must stop treating abuse as something that should always have been obvious in hindsight. Grooming often succeeds precisely because invisibility is part of the method.
The tragedy is not that victims “failed to see.” The tragedy is that they were systematically conditioned not to.
