I will just name a few characteristic highlight of my upbringing to illustrate the point.
Ram i rum was my favorite childhood story about two robots. "Black light" by Melentyev was a book about space visitors. In early teens age it felt my life with wonder. "Moscow-Cassiopeia" was a movie about the teens traveling to another planet and saving a civilization.
Russian and foreign science fiction books were my salvation from gloomy Soviet reality. I adore Ray Bradbury and am deeply aligned with humanism of his books. (Humanism may be a funny term for you, after all absurdities you learned about humanity. But still it is one of the finest concepts meaning kindness to all, including non-humans.) Strugatsky are my favorite writers. When I need moral support at difficult times, I reread "One billion years before the end of the world" and "Monday starts on Saturday" by Strugatsky.
I already mentioned "17 Moments of Spring" that taught me self-perception of a spy in the home world and helped me to live in hostile world in Soviet Union and in less hostile, but still foreign foreign world. I need here to comment that I am in no is good for a spy due to my open nature. By nature, I am very open and tend to share all what I know and what I think with everyone willing to listen. This is one of absurdities of the Earth, that such open sharing is not typically welcome by others. The norm is to be reserved and to follow standards of sharing and distorting the information. So the movie about a spy in a hostile totalitarian state helped me much to learn the concept of being secretive, reserved, dishonest and presenting self as in deceptive way. I am still not good at that but at least the concept of this sort of deception is not foreign to me anymore.
Another book of this sort which also influenced me very much was "How to stop worrying and start living" by Carnegie. It helped me to understand the positions of other people. It gave me ways to look for clues of deception and clues on psychology of other people who you meet for the first time. The idea is to deduce logically, what can be the main trauma or pain the person's life and rebuild the relationship from that. I certainly overused this book a lot. It taught me to be nice to people and in many situations people don't want to be treated nicely. They suspect that niceness is deceptive and this often prevents a healthy relationship. Very often building a relationship slowly via expected toughness, rigidness is more productive with many people.
Another similar book helped me greatly with relationships and health: "The art of being the other" by Vladimir Levi. Its main point was again learning about other people through empathy.
I grew up admiring songs by Novella Matveeva, Okudzhava, Nikitin, Vysotsky and Galich. Again, at difficult times, i play these songs and they help me assembling myself together.
Beatles and Russian Aquarium are the rock bands which make me sound and resonate most with me.
Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" and Mandelstam's poetry are my literary affections. They gave me a philosophical structure of incorporating spirituality in my worldview while the whole world was madly materialistic around me.
From my own experience I can attest that sound (music and speech) are very energizing for me. I know for sure that they are even too energizing for me, to the extent that I can not tolerate them too much. This oversensitivity actually helped me escaping much of mind control. I am too sensitive to it. I am energized and also very aware of its deception. When the vibration of mind control becomes too violent and when mind control becomes too intrusive, I am pushed away by my self-preservation instincts. In civilized world, especially in big cities, it is actually too hard to escape mind control. It is really hard to find place to be alone, in a quiet place and protected from intrusions. Paradoxically, one of the most protected places is a busy crowd, such as Subway train in rush hour. There, an individual can really feel alone and free of mind control. This is only when train is moving, because during the stops there are audio and commercials.