Shut Up and Listen: The Importance of Active Listening in Internal Work

Staying in therapy and staying with therapy can be a difficult proposition for a dissociative group, even when there is no specific programmed response or therapeutic conflict getting in the way. Each person in the group has to work through their own individual issues with trust, connection, feeling dependent, being independent – and beyond that, there are the interpersonal dynamics that happen between members of a dissociative system, just like they would between different outside individuals.

Our group has had members interfere with therapy for a variety of reasons, including because…

- they actively wanted things to stay exactly as they were for very specific reasons, so they discouraged change because it was specifically and directly contradictory to what they wanted.

- they were afraid of what change would mean for them, so they discouraged change for others to keep from having to change themselves.

- they believed that change was unsafe, and they were attempting to protect others by discouraging change.

- they were just being a pain in the ass, discouraging others from change for no personal motivation other than not wanting someone else to have what they wanted.

Realizing that someone else in the group is interfering with therapy is incredibly frustrating. Therapy is hard enough work already – who wants to discover that their own system is making it even harder than it has to be? But it’s also pretty much par for the course for a dissociative system – we’re never going to enter therapy with everyone in agreement, and it’s more likely than not that, at some point, someone for some reason will try to interfere in the process.

For us, the most effective first step in dealing with this has been to identify who was causing a particular disruption, and then to understand why they felt the disruption was necessary, from their perspective.

This sounds pretty simple. Granted, it’s hard to find the patience to understand someone when all you really want is for them to stop arguing and just do what you want right now, but even that generally acknowledged difficulty doesn’t really make the process sound too difficult – which might be why it feels like such a monumental and inexplicable failure when the days and weeks and months drag on and nothing changes. Since it appears to be something we should be able to do, it can’t say anything good about us if we can’t do it.

Well, we can all cut ourselves a break on this one, because saying it’s harder than it sounds doesn’t even begin to encompass how difficult this process can actually be. Even when we think we’re doing what we need to do in order to understand the others in our systems and build bridges with them, we might not actually be anywhere close to doing what really needs to be done.

In order to make the complications clear, let’s put this in the context of external individual people for a moment. Imagine there are forty, or ninety, or two hundred people who are all forced to live together for the duration of their lives, whether they want to or not. Nobody asked them, it wasn’t an invitation, it wasn’t a choice. They can’t get out of the situation, they can’t get rid of anyone else, and there’s nothing they can change about the external reality.

The ideal result, the result that would bring the most harmony to the most people, would be for every member of that group to accept the situation and learn to work fully within the situation.

But how realistic would it be to expect that result? Everyone in the group has their own personality, their own strengths and weaknesses, their own thoughts and beliefs, their own way of doing things…

Isn’t it more realistic to expect that there will be people you like and people you don’t, people who like you and people who don’t, people who can be relied on or trusted for anything and people who can’t be relied on to do anything and people at every point in between, people who irritate you, people who are irritated by you, people who think they’re right about everything, people whose opinions change based on who’s standing next to them, people you wish you didn’t know, people you really don’t know or don’t know that well… etcetera… etcetera…

The larger the group of people, the more diverse the individuals are, the more complex the relationships between them all will be.

And this is just as true for our internal groups as it is for an external group. That’s a lot of complication right there.

And there’s the further complication that listening really is a lost art. Everyone thinks they’re great listeners, but very few people actually are. Often we’re so focused on the next thing we want to say – how to present our own opinion, or something nominally relevant that we want to share about ourselves – and we’re just waiting for the other person to stop talking so that we can talk instead – so we’re focused on ourselves, instead of really listening to the other person.

This is especially true when the other person is saying something we don’t want to listen to in the first place. And yet, it’s a guarantee that any explanation of why someone else in our group is interfering with our therapy (or anything else) is going to include something we don’t want to hear. It might not agree with what we believe ourselves, or it might sound incredible or unbelievable or just plain annoying, or it might be related to a terrible memory (or lots of terrible memories) – and of course we don’t really want to hear about any of that. All we really want is for that other group member to shut up and stop getting in the damn way.

So how closely are we really listening to them? How genuine is our attention to them or our desire to get to know them for who they are, as opposed to our desire to just change them into who we want them to be as fast as possible?

It is really really hard to put aside yourself, your own thoughts and reactions and what you want and what you think is right and what you think they should do and what you want to say to them to convince them to do what you want them to do… and just listen to them.

It’s so hard that most people can’t do it, even when they think they are doing it.

And I’m certainly not saying we’re an exception to that. We’re not. The only possible difference between us and anyone else is that this skill is something we are acutely aware of lacking – but the lack is still there.

But it’s also something we are actively working to learn and improve – genuine listening, genuine understanding – not merely expanding our own view of the other system members, but learning to see them as they see themselves.

This is something that mind-control programmers understand very well, and they use it to their advantage. Programmers know their subjects inside and out and through and through – and they didn’t come by that knowledge through some magic window into our heads, or even because most of what’s in our heads was their creation. The best programmers are the ones who can make use of a person’s innate skills and tendencies in order to make what they’re creating more effective, and they learn what they have to work with in each individual by listening to them as much as by observing or testing or any more objective means of gathering information.

It is compelling and seductive to be the complete center of someone’s attention, to know that they are focusing only and entirely on you, that they are listening fully to you… and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever find anyone else who will listen to us with the same attention and focus as the people who programmed our minds once did. At best, we usually have to pay someone to listen, and even a therapist is not guaranteed to be a very good listener. Even they can be focusing more on what they need to say next instead of focusing closely on what we’re saying at the moment.

The fact that the programmers gave us something we can’t easily replace contributes its part to explaining why any part of us would ever wish to remain with or return to the programmers, even when freedom beckons. It’s certainly not the whole explanation for why that connection is so difficult to break; there could be a hundred different elements contributing to that difficulty. However, this is one element. Genuine listening, if done right, can feel like love – and it is something that every person wants from someone else in their lives, but yet very few people can give it to someone else, so there is a perpetual deficit of feeling heard, or of feeling appreciate or loved in the way that being truly heard gives us.

So – genuinely listening to each other not only allows us to understand the other members of our systems, thus opening the door for real and lasting change, but it also addresses the need and the desire we all have to really be heard by offering it without the abusive price tag.

We need to listen to each other – not from a place of looking for the weak spot in the defense or the logical flaw that we can exploit to further our own agenda, but just for the sake of listening and learning and trying to see our world and our overall self and our activities through the eyes and perspective of someone else. If we listen genuinely and attentively, then we will learn everything we need to know about the other person without having to watch for it – but genuine listening might also change how we want to use that information once we have it.

And we must be open-minded about hearing what these other aspects of our self have to say, rather than listening from a perspective of judging, condemning, or immediately changing the other – because listening from those perspectives will likely cause more damage, and it certainly won’t resolve anything. If it were you and someone approached you that way, how would that go over with you?

Before we can ask someone else to change what they’re doing for the benefit of the group, we need to listen and understand them as and where they are and appreciate their perspective. Sometimes understanding can be a gateway to acceptance; if we truly understand why they feel and think and believe the way they do, we might be more accepting of their viewpoint, even though we don’t necessarily agree with how they see things. And although this is an incredibly complicated and difficult balance to achieve – on the few occasions that our group has achieved it, it has so far never failed to work something very like a miracle.

If listening leads to understanding, which leads to acceptance – acceptance can lead to a shift in the unconscious pressures within a system that dictate what is permissable and what is not – and the end result is that the system members who were so recalcitrant, so resistant to change, so beyond reach and entrenched in their position… are suddenly free to change.

Internal system dynamics have a complexity which simply can’t be addressed entirely on the surface level. But some surface actions can have very profound effects, if the actions are genuinely and honestly performed – and they can result in change at a level that we would never otherwise reach, if we went to therapy every day for a hundred years. These are the kinds of things that can only happen through the efforts we make on a daily basis, simply in the way we choose to interact with the world and with our selves and with our lives.

“But choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.” ~ Grail Knight, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

No regrets?

“I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, but I don’t regret anything.”

I heard someone say that on the tv last night. I was multitasking at the time, so I don’t know the show, but the quote really made me think.

At first, I thought it was just some ridiculous thing that only a tv character would say. How can we not regret something if we’re not proud of it? Aren’t those just different ways of saying the same thing?

Well, maybe in my life, they are. I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, and it doesn’t much matter that I was forced to do them, or that I was being abused myself in the process, or that I had no freedom to choose to do otherwise. I still regret every single one of them.

And was it my shame, or shame of their own produced by years of criticism and unrealistic expectations and the constant feeling of pervasive failure, that created regret in the “front world” people? Wherever it came from, they have it. They are never proud of anything they do. The closest feeling to pride that they, or any of us, are able to experience is relief that we didn’t fail.

Everything less than perfection is failure. And every failure is a badge of shame, which we regret.

But then again, just because the quote has never been true for me, that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be true at all.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about it that maybe the regret over the things I’m not proud of comes from lack of acceptance. I don’t want to accept that I did what I did under any circumstances. I don’t want to accept the consequences, or admit the consequences, or even think about the consequences – and I don’t mean the consequences that fell on me (which I believe I deserve), I mean the consequences that rippled out from my actions to affect one, or ten, or fifty other people in a negative way. Sometimes being forced doesn’t feel like an excuse, and acceptance feels impossible.

But – if a person could find acceptance – if they could accept a choice as being the best they could do at the time, even though in retrospect it might not have been the best choice ever – or if they could accept a reality for what it was, even though it was terrible and they did terrible things in that context – if they didn’t chastise themselves for eternity because they didn’t see the consequences ahead of time or because they existed in a reality that sucked – if they accepted all the consequences of the choices they made (good and bad) or the reality that was imposed on them instead of spending eternity dodging the consequences, or feeling victimized by them, or trying to make them someone else’s fault or someone else’s problem, or doing anything to avoid owning them – if a person could own and accept all the different aspects – then maybe they could make peace with themselves for whatever it was, even though they aren’t proud of it – and then maybe they would be able to look back on it and honestly say that, although they are not proud of it, they don’t regret it.

Maybe if a person can accept why they are not proud of something, then there is nothing left to regret.

Or at least, maybe that works some of the time. Somehow it doesn’t seem realistic to imagine that any human being (outside of tv land) could get through life with no regrets at all. But it might be true that acknowledging and accepting all sides of a choice, whether it makes us look good or not, whether we like it or not, whether we’re ultimately proud of ourselves for doing it or not – acceptance might mean laying some regrets to rest, which would mean that we end up with a lighter weight of regrets to carry with us through life, and a lighter load of baggage trailing behind us.

And when I think about all the things that would ultimately be different if our baggage were less, if our regrets were fewer, if our shame was less smothering – if we could genuinely accept, and therefore let go of, the things that are long past changing no matter how much we regret them – that could very well change everything. The basic mental structures that govern our every thought and choice and reaction would have to change in response to that kind of acceptance.

It sounds simultaneously too simple and too overwhelming.

But I think there is a kind of emotional alchemy that is sometimes brought about by genuine acceptance of the actual truth.

Acceptance is the necessary first step to a lot of other equally profound changes, the key without which doors remain locked and progress remains blocked. Maybe acceptance is also the first step to fewer regrets and a life of greater peace with myself and my history.

Just a random Friday thought.

The Therapeutic Relationship as a Vehicle for Change

Instances of negative transference are not the only time or the only way in which the therapeutic relationship can become a vehicle for learning, growth, and change. Actually, devoting a portion of therapy time to the therapeutic relationship on a regular basis can really have a significant impact on therapy. It’s like performing maintenance on the therapeutic relationship – evaluating its condition, confirming mutual understanding of and agreement on goals and methods, analyzing interactions that come across wrong even when they don’t cause major disruptions or misunderstandings, and all the other small tasks that keep a relationship on track and running smoothly. Not only will this help the therapeutic relationship to stay healthy and strong, thereby preserving its viability as a continued part of healing, but these small maintenance tasks can also prove to be surprisingly revealing.

However, despite its potential benefits, focusing time on the therapeutic relationship rather than on “actual therapy” is not always looked on favorably by therapy clients.

Some people believe that the therapist should be solely responsible for maintaining the health and strength and viability of the therapeutic relationship, and that the client should not have to contribute anything to that particular effort. These people never discuss the therapeutic relationship because it’s just not their problem – and if a problem does develop in the relationship, it’s not their responsibility to fix it, so there’s still no need to talk about it except insofar as the therapist needs to be told what to do about it.

These same people are likely to find that their therapy is a thoroughly unsatisfying and ultimately futile endeavor. No healthy relationship can be entirely and exclusively focused on only one side of the dyad. All relationships are two-way streets, even the therapeutic relationship, and it takes some maintenance from both sides to keep it viable. Additionally, how we treat the therapeutic relationship is a microcosmic and intensified view of how we treat all our other relationships. If we are willing to neglect it, abuse it, take advantage of it, assume on it, or otherwise treat it poorly – that’s a pretty good indication of how we treat the other relationships in our lives as well.

Other people think that focusing on their relationship with the therapist is an unnecessary waste of time because they’re in therapy to address their depression or their test anxiety or something equally unlikely to benefit from focus on any kind of relationship. And it’s true that focusing time on the therapeutic relationship might not be necessary for these people – but doing so is never a waste, even if it does seem like a complete digression at first.

It has been a constant surprise to me in my studies and experiences, how even issues that seem to be entirely self-contained and unrelated to any kind of relationship dynamic can so often be traced back to a difficult past relationship or a hurtful experience at an impressionable moment. Even a relationship that was positive overall might contribute one small negative that lives on in the backs of our minds, unregarded and unrecognized, but still influencing our current-day lives.

And this is not relevant only to dissociative survivors, or even only to survivors in general – anyone might have a relationship or an interaction from which they took away a hurtful or self-defeating lesson.

We can live our entire lives with these background influences and never realize that they’re coming from anything more than “just how we are.” The original precipitant can be so small, so distant, so seemingly insignificant to our current-day selves, that we might hardly even remember that it happened at all, and we never consider its potential strength.

But the lingering effects of these old lessons will still be apparent in how we act and react within the therapeutic relationship.

These effects are more subtle than the big transference issues, so they are easier to overlook, especially if nobody’s looking for them. However, if they are recognized for what they are, they can lead to some surprising realizations and some very positive changes.

This is why devoting regular time to the maintenance of the therapeutic relationship is important, and it is another way that the therapeutic relationship itself can be beneficial to us as clients.

If we spend time on the therapeutic relationship only when there are problems, then the problem at hand is always the focus, and we miss the smaller and more subtle influences that might be affecting us even when there are no big problems to resolve.

Spending a regular portion of therapy time on the therapeutic relationship, even in the absence of specific problems, gives our therapist and ourselves the chance to recognize and draw out these quieter factors that influence our relationships and our interpersonal skills, so that we can analyze and learn from them.

Therapy at its best and most effective has far greater potential than just being a place we go to dump our weekly troubles so we can move on. Therapy is a dynamic process, a product of the relationship between us and our therapist. The therapeutic relationship is a mirror and a magnifying glass for all of our real-world relationships. It is also the one relationship where, if we are willing, we can safely experiment with new and more effective ways of being in the world. It is a relationship in which all our expectations and projections and beliefs come to life, for good or bad – but it is also a relationship where we can examine these things as they are, develop new perspectives on old lessons, and gain mastery over them rather than allowing them to continue having mastery over us.

Three Things to Know Before Making An Ethical Complaint Against A Therapist

When people think about filing a complaint against a therapist, or when they actually do it, they may envision any number of things happening as a result.

But there are certain aspects of the complaint process that most clients never think about. There are aspects of the process that most clients probably don’t even know about – which is a shame, because the number of frivolous complaints might decrease if clients understood what the process really entailed.

Filing an ethical complaint against a therapist is similar to having a rape kit done at a hospital. It is intrusive, it is violating, and it’s a miserable experience for the clients who undergo it.

I think people must not understand this as thoroughly as they should, considering some of the patently ridiculous complaints I’ve heard reviewed by the Board. And yet, each of those complaints, however ridiculous, was some clinician’s headache and hassle, and each one left a negative impression about a diagnostic population on a room full of people who might now think twice about taking on a client with that diagnosis.

So, in the spirit of helping to protect our therapeutic resources from the clients who abuse them and thereby cost us all, this week I’m discussing a few of the things that people should know about the ethical complaint process before they choose to file a complaint against a therapist.

1. HIPAA doesn’t apply.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a broad-based piece of legislation which was passed in 1996 as part of the regulatory effort to catch up to the modern era of medical record-keeping. The overarching goal of this act is to protect the privacy and confidentiality of each individual’s personal medical information.

If you ask ahead of time, the Board tends to be very reassuring about the confidentiality of the information you give them. They might tell you that your name will be whited out of the complaint so that even the therapist about whom you’re complaining won’t be able to see it, or that nobody will have access to any of the personal information you provide to them.

Presumably there are people who actually rely on this promise of confidentiality when they file a complaint against a therapist – but unfortunately for those people, the promise just isn’t true.

Oh sure, your name might be whited out of the actual complaint – but it will be left visible on the Waiver of Confidentiality form that is a required part of the complaint submission.

And since it’s on that form, and since that form circulates everywhere along with the actual complaint, confidentiality becomes a moot point. Everyone who sees the complaint will also see the form that has your name on it.

So the suggestion that your complaint will have any degree of anonymity or confidentiality, while technically true, is still completely false in any practical sense.

And there’s nothing you can do about this, because the form is a waiver of confidentiality, meaning that you’ve voluntarily given up your right to confidentiality in all respects affecting the investigation and pursuit of your complaint.

Between the people affiliated with the state services and the people associated with the clinician’s defense and insurance, your complaint will cross the desks of literally dozens of people during the course of the investigation. And none of those people are prohibited from talking about what they see.

I mean, imagine that someone you went to high school with happens to work for the insurance company that provides malpractice insurance to the clinician about whom you’re complaining.. Imagine that person recognizes your name when your complaint crosses their desk. There is nothing constraining them from going home and calling your entire high school class to tell them all the gory details. They have no obligation to keep your information confidential; in fact, you no longer have any confidentiality with regard to your complaint, because you’ve already waived your confidentiality, and…

2. Once you waive it, you can’t get it back.

Does anyone really think about what they’re giving up before they sign the Waiver of Confidentiality?

The Waiver is a required part of the complaint package a client sends to the Board. The Waiver gives permission for the Board to speak to the clinician about the issues mentioned in the complaint. It also allows the clinician to defend themselves against the complaint.

This much is fairly obvious, but I still suspect that most people must not really understand what they’re giving away when they sign this Waiver, or fewer of them would be willing to sacrifice their right to confidentiality for the momentary satisfaction of filing a complaint that is unlikely to accomplish anything beyond wasting everyone’s time.

In addition to the possibilities mentioned above, here is something of which every client should be aware before they submit a complaint:
A clinician is permitted to use anything and everything the complaining client has ever said or done as part of their defense.

Think about it…

That means everything you ever told that clinician, every shameful secret, every embarrassing revelation, every humiliating confession, every moment of suboptimal behavior – all the things you thought nobody else would ever know.

By signing and submitting the required Waiver of Confidentiality with your complaint, you are voluntarily giving permission for the clinician to reveal absolutely everything about you in a public setting.

Not only can all these things be revealed, but the clinician can offer their therapeutic interpretation about this information as well – and those interpretations will be presented to the review board in a very different manner than they would have been presented to you within the context of the therapeutic relationship.

This is because it is no longer about helping you to understand your own behavior or trying to benefit you in any way, and nobody cares at this point whether you like what you hear or not. Once you file a complaint and sign the required Waiver, the clinician is free to use any and all of the information they have about you without regard for your therapeutic benefit.

And therapists have a gold mine of secrets about their clients, collected just by spending time with them. Every single therapist has this kind of information about every single client. But we never really think about them using that information in this kind of context, even when we create the context by filing the complaint. The more paranoid among us might have all sorts of unrealistic fantasies about all the ways in which a therapist might hurt them with the information they reveal, but in terms of real world events that are actually likely to happen, nobody really seems to believe that a therapist would ever use what they know against us.

Most of the time, we’re absolutely right in thinking that. Most of the time, therapists protect our confidentiality no matter what we do to them.

But the complaint review process is an exception to this rule. If we put them in the position where it is necessary for them to defend themselves against us, a clinician can and will use every piece of information they have at their disposal, without regard for how we’re going to feel about it.

It is one of the most shamefully violating experiences a therapy client can have, even with an entire history of abuse taken into account.

But anyone who ends up as the subject of such a humiliating exposé has nobody to blame but themselves. Nobody forced them to expose themselves, or exposed them without their knowledge or consent. They chose to file the complaint that put a therapist in the position of needing to defend themselves, and they chose to waive their confidentiality voluntarily.

If they regret it later… well, that’s what they get for doing something so stupid in the first place.

Waiving confidentiality would be a tremendously stupid thing to do, even if the only people present for this airing of a client’s most private and personal information were the clinician and the Board. But…

3. Ethical review sessions are open to the public.

Yes, public. Anyone who wishes to attend these sessions of the Board is allowed to do so.

So if you imagine that your complaint will be reviewed by the Board in some private, sequestered room where there is nobody but your clinician and the Board members present to witness your mortification, you could not possibly be more wrong.

Complaints are heard before all the clinicians whose cases are scheduled to be heard that day, and all their lawyers, and all the people they bring along to provide evidence, and all the people they bring along for support, and whatever audience is in attendance – and I’ve seen the spectators range from as few as three or four people to as many as thirty.

In short, filing an ethical complaint puts you and your issues on display in a very public way.

Your complaint, and the clinician’s response to your complaint (that is, their written response detailing their interpretation of your problems which led you to file a complaint against them), will be seen by the seated members of the Board, the Board’s investigators, the people at the clinician’s malpractice insurance provider, the people at the clinician’s lawyer’s office, and the administrative support staffs of all those various organizations and offices.

The discussion of your complaint and the clinician’s interpretation of your problems can and will be heard, at the very least, by the Board members, the Board investigators, the other clinicians in attendance, the lawyers, the support people, and the spectators.

All of these people will hear your name, and all of them will learn about your problems – and for the complainants who actually show up at the hearings, they will also see your face and know exactly who you are in connection with the complaint being presented.

And there is nothing to prevent any of these people from discussing you and your problems with anyone else in the world if they so choose. None of them have any ethical obligation to you at all.

There are some people with legitimate complaints against therapists, and those people endure the complaint process for much the same reason that a legitimate rape victim will endure the process of having evidence gathered in a rape kit – because they actually have a reason to tolerate it, terrible as it is.

And there are some hardy souls who think any kind of attention is good, even when it makes them look bad – those people will probably continue to file their frivolous complaints no matter what the consequences are to them.

But for the rest of us, who are human enough to feel angry or hurt but sensible enough to put limits on how far we’ll go to get back at someone who has evoked those feelings, this is just some information to encourage better and more informed choices – or possibly to encourage someone think twice before engaging in the complaint process.

Too many people are willing to file complaints against therapists without legitimate reason because they don’t realize what they’re getting into. Filing an ethical complaint might look like a good way to punish a therapist for doing something you didn’t like, but the only person who will end up feeling punished by a frivolous complaint is the person who filed it in the first place.

News from the Front: Psychic Alert!

Work and life have been a little too hectic recently, and the blog is going to suffer for it because I can’t seem to settle down and write anything that makes sense.

So in lieu of an actual post, here is short anecdote from a 2008 session of the Texas Board of Examiners – the board which oversees the licensed members of the various mental health professions in this state.

Did you know that you don’t even have to be a licensed mental health professional in order to have a complaint filed against you with the Board? All you really need is a disgruntled person who isn’t too particular about choosing their audience.

Such was the case last year when a professional psychic was was obliged to come all the way to Austin to respond to a complaint which had been filed against her by some idiot who couldn’t figure out the difference between pyschic and therapist.

Needless to say, the Board of Examiners does not license or oversee psychics. The main and only concern of the Board in this matter was to be sure that the psychic was not in any way representing herself as a licensed mental health professional in the course of conducting her business.

And she wasn’t. The complainant was just a moron.

Although this is an extreme case, it is nevertheless representative of a certain problem which is ever-present at the Board’s ethics sessions – the confusion over what, exactly, constitutes an ethical violation by a therapist.

Clients have some very interesting ideas on that subject. Many of them seem to think that anything which hurts their feelings or makes them angry is actually a punishable offense.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if that were actually true??

Of course, hurt feelings and not getting your own way are not ethical violations – but each session of the ethics board is likely to have at least one (and often more) complaints filed by people who think they are – and the Board is required to investigate every complaint, no matter how obviously frivolous or stupid. They even had to waste time investigating the psychic!<

Fortunately, the Board is very capable of making the distinction between a frivolous complaint and viable one, and that is something for which we can all be grateful. But for the clinician (or the psychic) in question, even an frivolous complaint entails hassle and headache – which is why those client populations who are prone to creating complaints out of nothing are the same populations who have a hard time finding qualified therapists to treat them.

I have found the Board’s ethics sessions to be very instructive on the risks inherent in being a mental health professional. Everyone is so consumingly concerned about protecting the patient, but the safeguards in place for the professionals from their clients could really bear some attention.

I mean, a complaint can be filed against a mental health professional with absolutely no factual basis at all, and it will still have to be investigated.

So therapists put their professional lives and reputations at stake every single day by offering of themselves, their time, their skills, and their compassion, to a bunch of mentally unstable people who can turn on them at any time – for any reason, or for no reason at all.

And that really does happen – it happens all the time. Even if you never get the opportunity to actually sit in on one of the ethics sessions, a glance over the records of the Board’s ethical decisions (publically available on their website) can still reveal that there are differences in the complaints received and reviewed by the board.

There are some serious complaints which receive serious consequences, such as fines, Board-mandated supervision, license suspension, or license revocation (that is, some valid complaints). And then there are a substantial number where the complaint was dismissed, sometimes with a warning of some sort, sometimes without even that (that is, a substantial number of frivolous complaints).

Each of these frivolous complaints represents a clinician whose entire professional life and livelihood was temporarily called into question by one disgruntled ex-client with an axe to grind.<

And we wonder why it’s so hard to find a qualified therapist??
Looking at it from this perspective, it’s really more of a surprise that there are so many therapists who are willing to accept the potential risks of their work.

Keep in mind that the axe grinders who claim to share your diagnosis are representing you in the eyes of the world. Every complaint filed by someone with a dissociative diagnosis is representing DID to the Board, to the other clinicians and observers at the ethics session, and to everyone who hears about the proceedings from those clinicians and observers.

It behooves us all to be sure that we encourage the public representation we want people to have of us, rather than encouraging the people who are making us all look bad.

Just something to think about.

A Matter of (Mis)perception

One of the things that makes the therapeutic relationship unique is that it is one of the rare cases where the other person in the relationship will be honest with us about how our actions and our assumptions are affecting the relationship – without those things necessarily having to end the relationship – thus creating a safe place for us to experiment with new approaches to interpersonal relations.

Another unique aspect of the therapy relationship is the imbalance of power – in what other relationship is one party expected to divulge their most personal information while the other party reveals next to nothing of themselves?

The imbalance of power is something that creates its own set of uncomfortable issues for people on the client side of a therapy relationship – but these two aspects of the therapeutic relationship working together are also one of the factors that make therapy the powerful tool for learning and change that it can be – if we use it to best advantage.

Because the less we actually know about the therapist, the more we fill in the numerous blanks with our own expectations and projections and beliefs, casting the therapist in roles of our own choosing. Absent any real facts to the contrary, we tend to see in our therapists the characteristics of other important people in our lives, and we react to our therapists based on the assumptions connected to our pre-existing perspectives.

These assumptions can be positive or negative, but it is the negative assumptions that provide the most grist for the therapeutic mill, because by virtue of this process, we are effectively recreating some of our most problematic real-world relationships within the therapy relationship.

If we’re willing, we can then learn from this. We can learn to recognize how our history is affecting our current view of the therapist, we can learn to recognize other places in our lives where this same effect has occurred, we can learn how our actions and reactions in these situations are viewed by someone outside ourselves, and we can learn to separate past from present so that the first does not so automatically and pervasively affect the second.

This is probably not a new concept to anyone who has been in therapy – the concept of therapeutic transference is as old as Freud, and has been very thoroughly studied in the decades since. However, despite its familiarity, and although most people agree that the concept makes sense from a theoretical standpoint, it is still true that most people have great difficulty in actually applying the concept in their own therapy in order to benefit from the valuable learning opportunities it offers.

The problem is that, in order to achieve this learning, we first have to get past a lot of really sticky points. We have to get past the challenge to our immediate response, past feeling criticized and wanting to defend ourselves or “attack back” at the therapist. We have to get past taking it personally. We have resist the inclination to turn the issue back on the therapist, making it their fault and then letting the matter end there – and we have be willing to look honestly at ourselves.

We have to get past the desire to abandon the therapy relationship, even in those moments when it feels like our therapist is acting just like our mother / father / sibling / neighbor / whoever – we have to stick with it especially in those moments – because if we are seeing echoes of a figure from our own history in what our therapist is doing, it is an absolute guarantee that we are not seeing current reality clearly.

These are the moments when we can learn the most from therapy – the moments when our histories are creeping forward to cast their long shadows over our perceptions of a current situation, the moments when we can actively learn how to disentangle the one from the other.

Unfortunately, these are also the moments when many people tend to walk away from a therapy relationship in varying degrees of anger, disgust, resentment, or high dudgeon – at which point, all opportunity for learning has been cut short.

These issues which provide such valuable learning opportunities are invariably also charged with high emotional intensity, making it incredibly difficult for us to see anything but our current emotional upheaval. Each and every one of these opportunities is a struggle to overcome our natural responses and to really think about what our therapist is saying and how it applies to us.

To illustrate what I mean, consider this basic example –

Imagine that historically you have issues with your mother. When you were a child, she was cold, uncaring, and neglectful. She didn’t respond to your needs or give you loving and caring attention.

Years later, you begin to work with a female therapist. You initially perceive her as caring and attentive and insightful, all the things your mother never was for you and which you have grown up longing to have, so you feel an immediate bond with this therapist. You think she is wonderful and perfect and every good thing, subconsciously attributing to her all the characteristics of the ideal mother that you’ve always dreamed of having, and you want to feel close and connected to her at all times.

But then suddenly, for some reason, your therapist becomes less available to you. This can be due to something as simple as a vacation or a family crisis that results in a temporary absence, but it feels much bigger than that to you. It feels like all the times when you were left neglected and starved for maternal attention and affection. It feels like your therapist is acting just like your mother – and instantly you attach to your therapist all the negative feelings and beliefs and assumptions that connect to the “cold mother” image you have lived with all your life. Although you don’t realize it, you begin to respond to your therapist’s actions as if she were your mother. The therapist is now the target of the intense bitterness and anger and disappointment and hurt spawned by a lifetime of neglect and longing – your reaction makes sense to you, but it is also totally out of proportion to the reality that prompted it.

From this distance, it’s easy to see that this reaction isn’t really about what the therapist is doing – it is gaining all of its force and direction from the old unhealed wound of feeling unloved and unwanted as a child.

But if we were the person being swamped by these feelings, it would be a lot harder to realize how profoundly our current perceptions were being skewed by our historical experiences.

We might get as far as thinking “my therapist is acting like my mother” or “I feel just like I used to when my mother did this” – but in terms of resolving the problem, the historical implications are usually ignored.

The situation arose because of something the therapist did, an event which we are interpreting through a perspective tainted by history – but when it comes to resolution, the obvious point is that the therapist did something. So the initial stance for most people is that the issue at hand is the therapist’s fault, because they acted in a way that reminded us of our mother (or whoever) – although in fact, it is our own interpretation of the situation which is causing us to see our history recreated through the therapist’s actions.

It is the task of the therapist to help us see these flaws in our own perceptions and reactions – but not every client is willing or able to tolerate hearing that the flaw is on their side, when what they want is to blame it on the therapist and have the therapist be responsible for making whatever changes are necessary to repair the situation and prevent it from happening again (such as, in the above example, not going on vacation, or putting the client ahead of a family crisis).

Again – from this distance, it is easy to see that the client’s expectations and desires are unrealistic – but again, this is much harder to see when we are the one in the middle of the emotional distress. At such times, it can be difficult to fully appreciate that the only way our distress will actually be resolved is for us to address our own issues rather than to insist that the therapist (or anyone else) change what they’re doing for our comfort and convenience.

Until we address the flaws in our own perceptions, we will keep seeing our history recreated by the people around us, and nothing they do to appease us will ever succeed in resolving our problem.

But this is a difficult point to grasp. And as a result, it is at this juncture – when the client is experiencing the intense emotionality of their reaction and not receiving the response they desire from the therapist – that many therapeutic ruptures occur.

Because if we refuse to accept that our interpretations and reactions are the product of our own issues, if we insist that they are the fault of the therapist, and yet the therapist does not accept the excess of responsibility we are attempting to assign to them, then a termination of the therapeutic relationship is really the only recourse left to us. After all, how can we work with a therapist who is so unresponsive to our needs, so insensitive to our pain, so unwilling to accept responsibility, so defensive in making everything our fault when we know that everything is really their fault…

How many times have you heard that list of justifications to explain why someone has left therapy?

Therapeutic terminations occur as a result of this kind of circumstance all the time – and this is truly unfortunate, because not only are those who terminate therapy due to this kind of scenario dooming themselves to repeat the same scenario over and over forever (or until they finally realize where the actual problem is), but they are also missing the some of the most valuable learning that therapy can provide.

For those who are able to tolerate the emotional discomfort of these situations and actually look past it, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a vehicle of deep learning and growth.

By learning where and how history is influencing our current perceptions, and learning to separate history from current day so that our feelings about the former do not inform and influence our every reaction in the latter – we are learning something from which every relationship in our life will benefit.

Some Thoughts on Acceptance vs. Denial

Has anyone else read Stephen King’s book It? I re-read it over vacation, and it got me to thinking.

Stephen King might never be assigned in English classes, but he has themes just like the “serious” writers do… and one of the main themes in this novel regards the power of belief, and how that power atrophies as we grow from child to adult.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, this novel is actually two parallel stories – seven people as kids, and the same seven as adults, fighting against an evil that is pure Stephen King.

One of the problems the group has in facing their childhood battle as adults is the atrophy of belief – the loss of the magical thinking that all children have – because this loss narrows their ability to deal with the crazy or the insane or the “impossible” – to incorporate it as part of their experience and then just keep on living.

The story deals specifically and repeatedly with how kids can accommodate horrors that would leave an adult gibbering — a kid will be more able to accommodate, because a child’s perspective on possibility is a lot broader and more elastic than any adult’s can be. Kids don’t have to wrestle with the adult “rules” on what is allowed to be true. They just work with what is.

And this got me to thinking about acceptance – the acceptance by each dissociative survivor of whatever horrors lie in our respective histories.

Because although we all had to do some very creative mental maneuvering to make it possible, we did accommodate the horrors of our childhoods, and we did just keep on keeping on. Every single one of us did that.

But is there any one of us who, as an adult, didn’t struggle just with accepting the reality of those horrors? Forget marveling at our survival or our ingenuity, forget having compassion for our own terror or our own pain… we give ourselves no commendations for making it through something so terrible. Instead, we get stuck on the inability to believe that any of it could actually have happened. The memories that surface are just too incredible to be real in a rational world – therefore, they must not be real.

But when we were kids, we didn’t have any trouble believing it — and not just because we were stuck right in the middle of it, either.

If you asked a kid whether such things could happen – whether there was such a thing as mind control, and whether those controls could live and hide in the mind for years after they were created, and whether someone might put those controls in a child even if they had to hurt the child to do it, a kid would probably agree that these things could indeed happen.

If you asked an adult, they would say no. Period.

If you described any of the tricks used by programmers to establish and maintain their control – tricks which depend on our belief in order to work – a kid would find them convincing.

An adult would not believe any of them.

And I think that pretty much captures the essential conflict between acceptance and denial.

The tricks and lies the programmers feed us, and the orders and commands they leave in us, are frequently hidden within childish phrases and magical thinking… the kind of thinking that comes naturally to a child, but which seems ridiculous and embarrassingly nonsensical to an adult. The children within us know these things are true, but our adult minds reject them out of hand.

Wrestling our adult minds into a perspective broad enough to accept the truth of our own childhoods is the first battle we all have to fight, and sometimes no amount of proof is enough to really lay our doubts to rest. Sometimes we never get past the inability to believe that such things could possibly happen to anyone, let alone that they ever happened to us.

I suspect the programmers know that.
I suspect they even count on that.
I suspect that they rely on the fact that all their victims, if they live to grow up, will grow out of the wide perspective that is the province of childhood (a perspective where anything might be true) and into the narrow adult perspective, where belief is severely tempered by what we’ve learned about the limits of reality…

And I believe that the limitations we pick up just by growing up act as just one more layer of protection to keep the truth a secret.

Because if we can’t argue ourselves around to believing ourselves… well, how far are we likely to get in fixing a problem we don’t really believe exists?

The beliefs taught to us by the programmers – the ones that made such ample and effective use of our childish imaginations – continue to dominate and control us, even decades after our imaginations have shrunk to adult proportions. We continue to act on them and respond to them with the same immense feelings and the same wide willingness of belief that we had as children.

It is the truth behind them that we as adults can’t accept – it is the source of our beliefs and fears and reactions that are too terrible to contemplate. As children, we not only faced those horrors – we survived them, we accommodated them, and we somehow still went on living. A child’s mind is elastic enough to do that. But our adult minds have grown into a rigidity that allows no room for that kind of accommodation – our adult minds groan and threaten to snap in the face of such awful, such incredible and unbelievable things. And so our adult minds keep us trapped in place simply through their unwillingness to accept something that doesn’t match with what they have been taught is possible, believable, or acceptable.

Our enduring childhood belief makes the programming work – and our adult inability to believe helps to keep it in place.

I guess that’s just something to think about.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
~ Hamlet, Act I, Scene v

Haters II: How to Spot A Hate Campaign

[Note: This is a long one, but I won’t be posting next week, so I thought I might as well post something now that will last through my absence. Enjoy!]

This week, I’ve picked up my very own hater! (Please see the comments to this post if you’ve missed the excitement.)

It seems kind of ridiculous – who am I, that anyone would even bother doing the hater bit with me? But someone has! So this seems like a good time to revisit the subject of haters, and how to spot them online on the occasions when they’re a little less obvious than the one here on my blog.

The internet is a brave new world for haters. It used to be that haters were limited by being identifiable. In order to spread their poison, they had to communicate it directly, by telephone or in-person conversations – and the risk always existed that what they said would be traced back to them. Their words could be directly connected with their face and their name, and they might end up being held accountable for anything they said.

With the advent of the internet, however, all of that has changed. People can hide behind screen names, announce their identities or not, claim to be someone they are not, present themselves as several different people – the possibilities for deception are virtually endless.

Further, the anonymity of the internet has made accountability pretty much a moot point. On occasion, a hater’s poison can be traced directly to them, but it’s rare. When Kelly (Secret Shadows) admitted, in a momentary fit of conscience, to posting three viciously hateful comments about her adjunct therapist under three different names on a public website, that tied those comments directly to her – but most haters do not have those kinds of moments. They thrive on the fact that, even if people know who they are, it can’t be proven, and they are careful not to provide that concrete proof. As a result, they are free to say whatever scurrilous nonsense they choose, secure in the knowledge that there is not likely to be any accountability for it whatsoever.

This being the case, it is necessary for each of us have our own common-sense defense in place as we surf the web – and part of that defense is knowing how to recognize a hate campaign when we see one. Here are some tips on what to look for.

1. Haters run in packs.
Any time you see a flock of people “coincidentally” descending on the same place at the same time, all repeating the same negative message, odds are that they are haters.

Haters never stick their necks out all alone. Individual people with personal gripes post single comments, as their individual spirit moves them. With haters, what you see is post after post after post written by what appears to be a veritable crowd of different people. They will claim they don’t know each other, or that they knew each other “way back when” but they haven’t spoken for years – and yet, by the magic of fate, with no coordination whatsoever, they all just decided to come to the same place at the same time to write the same nasty message about the same subject.

Well – I’m sure we can all see what bullshit that is.

Of course the haters know each other. They have their own places where they congregate, bonding in their negativity and coordinating their more public hate campaigns, and when they head out to the public arena, they do it in concert.

Haters also tend to enlist backup singers – people who aren’t actually part of the hate campaign but who don’t know any better than to support it. The backup singers don’t usually understand the real issue with the target – likely they’ve been fed the same lies that the haters are about to make public. But they don’t have to know the truth, because the only purpose of the backup singers is to sing the praises of the haters – their honesty, their victim status, what an all-around wonderful person they are, and how we should believe every terrible thing the haters say about their target because haters are just that trustworthy.

Normal people venting about real issues do not have backup singers. But haters almost always do.

The backup singers will also claim to have just happened to find the hate campaign. Like the haters themselves, they never admit to being part of a coordinated effort – but really, how many people can be involved in something before the “it’s all coincidence” story loses its last shred of credibility? I top the limit at four – because four people can’t even manage to meet at a restaurant for dinner without some serious coordination and planning – so the idea that all these haters and their backup singers just happened to get together is just plain ridiculous.

The pack is never as large as it appears, though – it is usually a relatively small group of people posting multiple times under different names in an attempt to appear substantially more numerous than they are.

The goal is to accomplish through numbers what they can’t accomplish through logic or evidence – that is, if ten people repeat the same gossip or tell the same lie, then maybe people will be impressed by the volume and forget about the fact that there is no concrete proof to back up whatever they’re saying. Concrete proof is never part of a hater’s arsenal, because the things they’re saying are never true.

2. Haters are self-referencing.
Haters generally run their hate campaigns in places that have no direct connection to them. For example, Secret Shadows and the others involved in that hate campaign didn’t post their comments in her blog, which everyone knew was hers and where accountability might be an issue – instead, they all went to post at the same random review site under anonymous names (further decreasing the likelihood that any of it happened by happenstance).

But in lieu of actual proof to back up what they’re saying, haters might offer a reference to another group or blog or site, constructed by themselves, where the intrepid surfer can view more examples of the same message being espoused. Of course, this is still not concrete proof – but it is another site broadcasting the same message, and sometimes readers fail to realize that it’s just the same people saying the same things.

What the haters don’t offer (because they can’t offer it) is anything concrete that readers could check out themselves for independent verification. Haters can’t use facts, because facts will never support what they’re saying – so instead, they try to create such a volume of crap that it overwhelms the facts. They want people to assume that, because the same message is said so strongly so many times in so many different places, then it must be true.

But this is a false conclusion – no matter how often a lie is repeated, or in how many different places, it is still a lie.

3. Haters get personal.
Also in lieu of proof, haters take things to a personal level immediately – their approach is never about a person doing a bad thing, it’s always an attempt at character assassination.

Why do they do this?

Well, the first reason they do it is that everyone loves drama. When things get juicy and the gossip and accusations start to fly, do readers even care who’s telling the truth? Or are they just enthralled by the spectacle of watching people zing each other?

The point of a hate campaign is always to distract and discredit, and making things personal is the best means to the end – haters distract from what the target is saying or doing by taking the focus of the discussion straight into the spicy heat of personal confrontation, and they discredit the target by attacking them on a personal level and hoping that some of the shit they throw will stick.

Hate campaigns attract attention, and the haters want the attention focused on them, on what they’re saying, on what they want other people to think about the person they’re attacking.

The other reason that haters get personal is that the personal level is the emotional level.

Haters use rhetoric geared toward provoking an emotional response – both from the target and from the spectators. They use loaded words and catchphrases intended simultaneously to demoralize the target and to turn the reading audience against them – hoping that, with emotions provoked and engaged, nobody will actually think about the messages enough to notice that they have no substance.

Does this sound like any other situation with which dissociative survivors are familiar?
Who else tries to hook people through their emotional responses in order to slip their messages past common sense and rational thought?

Programmers do. Manipulators do. Liars do.
And that’s really what haters are – they are manipulators, trying to manipulate you, the reading public, into swallowing their poisonous hatred and to turn you against their target.

But instead of blindly believing them, it is worthwhile to ask yourself why it’s so important to them to discredit their target. Why did they choose that particular target for destruction? What does that person or group or cause represent to them?

Thinking about it from that perspective can throw a whole new light on a hate campaign.

4. Haters have no point except hate.
Haters have plenty to say – but what prompted them to say it? Why did three, or ten, or fifty people suddenly show up at the same place to talk smack about someone?
Why did even one person show up here trying to insult my character?

The world may never know…

They’re not going to explain themselves. There will be no A=B, cause-and-effect connection that can be made. The real reasons behind the haters’ actions, whatever they are, will never even be hinted at in the slew of negativity that makes it into public view, because haters really aren’t there to explain themselves to us.

Their goal is to cause as much damage as they can to the public perception of a specific person, group, or cause – nothing less, nothing more – and their goal is not going to be furthered by explaining themselves, because if you knew the real motivations behind what they were saying, you would probably think twice about listening to them.

If you knew that hate campaigns were being engineered by predators, to discredit the sources of information available to us so that we are more likely to stay their victims – would you be as likely to believe what they said?

If you knew that a hate campaign was part of a borderline revenge tactic best defined as “I imagined that you hit me, so I’m hitting you back ten times as hard”… would you still consider it to be valid? Would you still want to support it?

Probably not – because you’d feel pretty stupid believing or supporting the haters if you knew that’s where they were coming from, right?

So we need to ask ourselves why it’s so important to these people that we hate their target with them, because the haters will certainly never tell you – they’ll just show up, start the blitz, and hope that nobody remembers to ask.

5. Haters never let go.
We’ve all been angry or suffered hurt feelings in the course of our lives – but how long do these feelings normally last?

Assuming that we’re not talking about our feelings toward perpetrators, and that we have enough self-awareness to separate those feelings from the feelings that are evoked by other events – how long do the feelings last?

How long do we wish we could exact revenge on a person who made us angry? How long do we want to hurt back in response to feeling hurt? How long do we have to keep venting about something before the emotions wane and it’s just not that important any more?

In short, how long does it take before we get over it?

We might continue to feel some emotional response for a while, but the kind of emotional intensity that drives us to do something about it is a much shorter-lived phenomenon… unless you’re a hater.

Haters go after their targets like rabid dogs. They don’t get over things and move on – because in truth, whatever natural emotion they might have felt regarding their target (assuming they ever had anything that might be called a reason for their feelings) has long since been subsumed in a soupy morass of bitterness and resentment and desire for destruction that has nothing to do with the target and everything to do with the individuals themselves.

And this is why, although people with normal and genuine complaints or reactions are generally satisfied with one public statement of their feelings (and many never feel the need to make a public statement at all), a hater just never runs dry. Haters spew their venom over and over and over – not just for the few days when an emotional reaction might be expected to remain intense, but for months, or even years, long past the time when anything natural or reasonable could possibly be driving them.

So what is driving them??

There’s that question again – and it’s the most important question to ask yourself when you see a hate campaign in progress – why does it matter so much to them? Why are they putting in the time and the effort to seek someone out and beat on them over and over and over? Why do they keep showing up to grind the same old axe?

WHAT, EXACTLY, ARE THEY TRYING TO DESTROY BY CLUBBING US ALL INTO SUBMISSION WITH THEIR HATEFULNESS, AND WHY ARE THEY TRYING TO DESTROY IT???
And what would it cost us if we let it work?

We might not be able to answer those questions – I know that I certainly have no answers, even with regard to myself. Why do I merit a hater? I have no clue – but clearly someone thinks I’m worth the time and the effort. So I guess I must be saying something that someone doesn’t want said.

So… think about it.

There’s not much we can do to stop the haters right now – the law is a long way from catching up to the speed with which the internet is growing. No doubt, in future decades, the anonymity factor will be removed – precisely because of these kinds of abuses – but it hasn’t happened yet, so right now the haters are running amok.

But even if the law can’t stop them, we can – because it’s our belief they’re after. It’s us that they’re trying to manipulate. And it’s up to each of us to decide how much credence we’re going to give the haters.

Do we believe their lies? Buy into their messages? Follow where they lead?
Or can we hold on to our common sense – step back from the dramatic intensity of the fracas, consider what they’re trying to accomplish – and wonder why?

Fraud Update

Today, not-a-doctor Judy Keith doesn’t have a website any more.
Her website, drjudykeith.com, is down.

I guess someone must have told her that just removing the letters “Ph.D.” from the page wasn’t enough — when your website is called “drjudykeith” and you’re not a doctor, then it’s fraudulent no matter what the actual page says. (duh…)

Of course, her problems won’t end there, because her business is registered in the State of Texas with the Ph.D. as part of the official business name.

A $1 search on the Secretary of State website can confirm this for anyone who cares to look. The Texas Comptroller might also have business documents that you can see for free. (I didn’t check there once I saw the business formation documents.)

When Judy Keith decides to commit fraud, she really goes all the way!

Fraud is never a minor offense — at the very least, it is a deliberate lie which involves gains for the liar and loss to anyone who believed the lie and acted in good faith based on that misrepresentation. Every single person who worked with Judy Keith in the belief that she was licensed as a Ph.D. when she was not, has been defrauded by her — her gain, their loss — and as survivors, have we not all been jerked around enough by people who have lied to us for their own benefit?

Let’s hope this not-a-doctor is off the page for good.

Why I Hate Liars

I had a pretty strong reaction to the discovery of Judy Keith’s fraud earlier this week. That might seem strange – I don’t know her, and I’ve never worked with her in any capacity. She’s just a face on a website to me, so why should I care even a little about what she does, let alone enough to get all excited about it?

Well, there is a reason for that.

I grew up in an environment permeated by lies. Lies are, in fact, one of the tools of the trade – mind-control programmers use lies with the same profligacy that doctors use latex gloves, and I have been lied to and manipulated all my life.

As a result, I am sick to death of lies, and I despise liars. I despise all liars, even though most are not remotely in the same league of skill as the programmers, and even though most of the lies told in the world do not touch me in any way.

I despise liars because every lie is intended to manipulate someone, even if that “someone” is not me. Lies are the mark of someone who can’t accomplish what they want by honest means (either because honesty won’t lead to what they want or because the honest route is too difficult to pursue), but for some reason they believe that what they want is so important that it’s okay for them to use dishonest means to get it.

They may think so, but I disagree.

There is nothing that makes it permissible for anyone to manipulate others to get what they want, or to tell lies in order to garner agreement in a situation where the truth can’t be relied upon to bring the desired support. If the truth can’t do it, then it shouldn’t be done.

And I hate to see anyone profit by a lie – this, to me, is the very definition of receiving an undeserved reward.

But it does give me great satisfaction when a liar is revealed, especially when they are revealed by their own lies – when their own stupidity and arrogance expose them for the manipulative frauds that they are.

I feel that this is truly justice served – when the liars are trapped by their own dishonesty, their own contradictions, their own unjustified superiority in believing that they can dupe the rest of the world (or any group, or any individual) into believing their lie over the truth.

It is hugely satisfying when the world turns out to be not quite as gullible as a liar expects them to be.

Life is full of people gaining undeserved rewards and receiving undeserved punishments.

But sometimes, people get exactly what they deserve.

Hopefully, the case of Judy Keith will be one of those times.

Fraud Confirmed…

Well, what I saw on Judy Keith’s website yesterday made me really curious, so I called the Texas LPC Board.

According to the Texas LPC Board, Judy Keith is not licensed as a Ph.D., and she should absolutely not be using that degree in any way connected with her LPC practice in Texas.

They would not say anything regarding whether a complaint had been filed against her in this matter, but their manner on the phone did suggest that the Board was aware of the matter and was looking into it — so whether they would admit it or not, somebody must have caught her.

That person has done the world a favor. Judy Keith was abusing the trust of every client who crossed her path, not to mention every professional who associated with her.

And can you imagine what kind of opinion she must have of herself, in comparison to the rest of the world, to expect that she would get away with this??? How superior do you have to feel to everyone around you before you think that you can just dispense with the little details that pertain to the rest of us  — like, for example, actually completing a valid doctoral degree before claiming you have one??

I’m glad she was caught.
I’m glad she has been brought down by her own lies and deception.
This, to me, is an example of karmic justice at work — and it makes me happy when a liar ceases to profit by their lies, and instead reaps the true consequences they have earned.

A Potential Case of Therapist Fraud?

Here’s something to ponder…

Dr. Judy Keith.
Many dissociative survivors might be familiar with this name. Judy Keith is the program director on the Trauma Unit at Timberlawn Hospital, one of the best-known inpatient programs available for dissociative survivors. She also maintains a private practice in the Dallas area.

Today, I noticed that Dr. Judy revised her website for her private practice.

Where it used to say “Judy Keith, Ph.D.”, it now says only “Judy Keith, MA”.

What does this sudden change suggest?
(And it was sudden – last week, the site had “Ph.D.” in all the places where, this week, it says “MA”…)
What happened to the Ph.D.? Did the degree get lost over the weekend?
hmmm… that doesn’t sound very likely…
Ph.D.s don’t just expire or vanish – so if she is no longer claiming to have this degree, there must be a reason…

What it suggests to me is that Judy Keith probably wasn’t a Ph.D. at all – but she was claiming that she was in order to receive the status and benefits of the advanced degree, and someone caught her at this fraudulent game.

I believe this because it makes the most sense, given the evidence available to me.

For anyone unfamiliar with the process – if a licensing board is alerted that a degree is being fraudulently claimed, the person is given a certain amount of time in which to remove the fraudulent reference from all advertising and business-associated material. I can’t think of any explanation that better fits the fact that Judy Keith was a Ph.D. on Friday, and on Monday she was just a plain old MA.

Criminal charges may also be filed in connection with this kind of misrepresentation, depending on the degree of the fraud involved.

Why are the penalties so harsh? Well, consider the implications…

If “Doctor” Judy’s claim of possessing a valid and relevant doctoral degree is fraudulent, then countless survivors — both at Timberlawn and in her private practice — have been defrauded. This is definitely the case in terms of self-representation (it would be hugely unethical for this woman to represent herself as a doctor if in fact she was not one), but possibly financially as well. Higher degrees command higher fees — what if she’s been charging rates commensurate with the possession of a doctoral degree that she doesn’t have?

And this so-called “doctor” has not only been misrepresenting herself to her clients; she has also been acting as supervisor to licensee candidates or newly licensed counselors, all of whom also believe they’ve been working with a doctor. They too have been defrauded – but even worse, if this woman has based her entire career on a lie, then what has she been teaching to the younger generation of counselors who have worked with her? One can only hope that she has not been teaching them to follow in her footsteps…

And what about the fact that she has been claiming a doctoral degree in connection with her work at Timberlawn – didn’t they check her out? Maybe not well enough… but regardless of the errors made in their background check, the hospital would still be a victim of this woman’s pervasive fraud.

This suggests a really important (but often neglected) step for anyone who is seeking a new therapist: confirming the credentials of a prospective therapist is an easy and non-intrusive process. The state licensing boards for the various mental health professions maintain online and publicly available rosters of their licensees. It is perfectly acceptable to ask prospective therapists what license they hold — and it takes only minutes, once you get home, to double-check the rosters of the appropriate licensing board in the appropriate state and confirm that what you were told is true.

Most of the time, this check will come back clean – most people don’t lie about their professional credentials, precisely because it’s so easy to check them out – but obviously, some people do. So we really shouldn’t rely on anyone’s word, or trust that someone else (like a hospital) has done our checking for us, especially not when it’s so easy to do ourselves.

Our therapist is someone who might well end up learning profoundly personal and painful information about us… but how would you feel if you were one of Ms. Keith’s clients? I think we can all afford a few minutes out of our lives to spare ourselves the possibility of ending up in that kind of situation.

This is a simple way that we can keep ourselves a little safer — not from any big bad evil, but from the smaller and pettier wrongdoers and self-promoters out there in the world who might try to take advantage of our vulnerabilities. Being a therapist is no proof against being a self-interested fraud, but our therapy is the last place in the world where we want to be subjected to that.

Blind Acceptance Is A Mistake

Has anyone ever analyzed a programmer’s message?

Or, to take it a little out of that realm, have you ever really stepped back and listened to a manipulator at work, when they are working on someone other than you?

It’s hard to see it when it’s being aimed at you, when it’s in your head and working on you already, when it’s your emotions and your vulnerabilities getting played – but seeing the same person using the same tricks on someone else can really give you a whole new perspective on what they’re doing.

I think the thing we fail to see when it’s aimed at us is that, objectively speaking, the messages don’t make sense. The programmers and manipulators talk like experts on subjects about which they are intensely ignorant. They make assumptions and accusations that have no bearing on reality. They make huge and thoroughly incredible leaps in logic and fact. They tell us who we are like they know. They tell us what other people will do or how other people feel like they have the first clue about those things, like they know more about it than the people to whom those feelings or actions belong. They interpret the events of our lives like they understand them better than we do.

They target our fears and insecurities, our doubts and vulnerabilities, our hurt and anger – they play on our emotions in order to cloud our judgment and our reactions so that we swallow their ideas whole, without really thinking them through.
And it works.
But it shouldn’t.

Every single one of us has developed skills in critical thinking, and we need to use them, all the time.
We need to think for ourselves.

The world at large is perpetually bombarding us with excessive and frequently conflicting information from which it is truly impossible to escape, even if we don’t necessarily seek it out – and if we do seek out information, we can learn far more than we bargained for. Listening to various sources can provide us with important information about ourselves and the world around us. But just because someone says it or writes it or makes it public, and even if they wholeheartedly believe it themselves, we absolutely cannot substitute someone else’s certainty for our own. We must apply our own critical thinking skills before we decide to accept anything into our belief system.

If our histories have taught us anything at all, they should have taught us the dangers of blindly accepting someone else’s views or ideas or words. We should never let anyone tell us who we are, or what to think, or what to believe. We should never let anyone else revise our truths – and if they wish to interpret our experiences for us, then we need to listen with a critical ear, because our histories should also have taught us that the way in which information is presented can be a clue to the intentions behind it.

If information is presented in a way that targets our fear, shame, guilt, doubt, insecurity, hurt, or anger, then that is a red flag.

Someone who has our best interests at heart will not provoke these feelings intentionally, and will not play on the feelings if they are provoked. On the other hand, someone who intends to manipulate us will make it a point to target our emotions, hitting sore spot after sore spot with their “sympathy” and “understanding” until our common sense is drowned out by our feelings – and once this happens, they can twist us however they want.

When we were children, we had neither the freedom nor the knowledge nor the abstract skills to see these mental manipulations for what they were, but is there a single one of us who does not know firsthand the damage they caused? And knowing that, why would we ever allow it to happen again, in the current day? Why are we not more protective of our selves and the things we allow into our worlds? Why are we not more discerning about what we accept and what we reject?

Emotional rhetoric is intended to get past our guard, provoke our emotions, and circumvent logical thought, so that we accept what is presented purely on its emotional appeal. But emotions notoriously make really bad decisions, and if someone – anyone, in any situation – is encouraging us to make decisions based on emotion, then they do not have our best interests at heart. They are trying to manipulate us – and if we accept what they say and act or react on that basis, if we let our emotions rule our thoughts, then they have succeeded.

But if it does succeed, it is only because we have been parties to our own manipulation.

More Lessons Learned: Repetition and Resolution

One time through is not enough.

If you read this statement and thought of memory work, raise your hand.
No, just kidding, you don’t have to – but was memory work the first thing that leapt to mind?

This statement is very definitely true for memory work, and it’s one that I personally have heard (either first-hand or directed at someone else in this system) so many times that it has developed a fingernails-on-a-blackboard effect. Hearing it makes me cringe and want to hit someone, preferably the person making that sound.

But despite having heard it said roughly nine hundred and thirty-seven times in the last five years, the bedrock truth of it never hit me until very recently – and the context of my realization had nothing to do with memory work, at least not in relation to abuse memories.

It was about something completely different – a misunderstanding, actually, between my therapist and myself, years old now and long-since resolved – or resolved, at least, in terms of what was between my therapist and myself. There were, however, some leftover feelings directed toward a third party which had never really died.

But these days, those feelings recur only rarely, and they hardly seem worth the effort of talking about them. The amount of intense discussion required to resolve the original issue with my therapist (where it mattered) quite thoroughly burned me out on the subject. I have therefore been less than enthusiastic since then about engaging in a productive discussion regarding the leftover feelings that remain, even when those leftover feelings raise their ugly heads and begin making noise.

Unfortunately, the unproductive nature of my feelings has made itself apparent. There have been occasional events which aggravated my temper to such a degree that I made some extremely intemperate comments regarding the offending third party at the slightest provocation (or no provocation at all).

My therapist allowed this to pass a number of times, but on the most recent occasion, she laid the subject flat on the table and said we were going to talk about it. I expressed my lack of enthusiasm about reopening the subject in no uncertain terms. I cited the fact that the subject was ages old and well-resolved, at which point I was presented with that grating homily to repetition – “sometimes you have to talk about something more than once before it’s really resolved.”

I’m sure the look I gave her at that point has been seen on the face of many a survivor in similar circumstances. We had already talked about it “more than once” – in fact, if I remember correctly, we pretty much beat the subject into the ground. How could there possibly be anything left to say about it that hadn’t already been hashed through a dozen times?

However, talk about it we did – again – and as the conversation progressed, I realized that she was right. Again.

We had resolved enough of the issue to repair things between us – and that was what had been important right in those tense moments when things could go either way, resolve or explode into a thousand shards, shredding both of us and the relationship between us. All of our mutual energy had gone into that resolution.

But there were certain aspects of the situation that really could only be dealt with from the distance of the years between then and now – most notably, for me, the unconscious and automatic ways that I had shifted things around to make tolerable what I could not immediately resolve. Emotions I didn’t have space to deal with at the time had been removed from the situation and transferred onto something less important, something I could afford to make into the scapegoat – namely, the offending third party.

But unfortunately, unlike the Biblical scapegoat, I couldn’t quite get this scapegoat to take my problems off into the desert and die with them. In fact, I couldn’t get it to go away at all – and therefore, I couldn’t really get the problems to go away either. So in the end, unless I wanted to have this stupid goat showing up periodically and bringing the same old problems back with it every time, I had to take my problems back and figure out something else to do with them.

And how often is this true for survivors, especially dissociative survivors – and in how many different situations? How many scapegoats do we have in our outside world, people we burden down with our problems and then drive away in the hope that they’ll take our problems away with them? And are not all the parts of our systems scapegoats, in a way, for all the events of our childhood which we were not equipped to handle?

It is so much easier to project or divert our troublesome feelings and difficult issues onto someone else, making it all their fault and their problem, and then drive them away from us – because if they’re gone, then the problems are gone too – right?
Well, maybe momentarily… but how often do our problems, internal or external, actually stay away?

We can’t escape from ourselves, or from the other parts of our systems. Our memories can be pushed away, and the members of our systems can be pushed away – but until we actually deal with them, they will always return.

And in this modern day of social networking and online accessibility, can we ever really get away from anyone, even externally? Or do we just keep on tripping over the same old problems because our scapegoats are never really gone?

Sending our problems off to die in the desert on the back of an unlucky goat might have worked in Biblical times, but these days, even the desert has internet service, and scapegoats never die in decent obscurity. They are much more likely to keep turning up, long after we hoped they were dead, to haunt us again, and again, and again, with what we left unaddressed and unresolved.

Their re-emergence is never welcome. We see them as the ghosts of problems we’ve already dealt with, things that have no right to still be hanging on and causing more problems now. We’ve wiped our hands of them – why won’t they just go away?

So nobody can really be enthusiastic about diving back into a problem they thought was already worked through – but if we do revisit the problem, it might become obvious why it’s still hanging around even after we thought it was resolved. Things can look very different the second time through – or the fifth, or the tenth, or the twenty-seventh – or however many times it takes.

If someone disappoints us, or hurts our feelings, or makes us angry, or all of the above, or more – how many times do we need to revisit the subject with them before we can let it go? Is one discussion enough to resolve the emotional responses? Usually not, because the emotional response to such an event (for anyone, not just for trauma survivors) is too complicated to even be fully realized in the first discussion we have about it. We resolve the most obvious layer, and a day or three later, another layer will make itself apparent and need its own resolution – it might take numerous conversations to fully resolve things.

And yet, as complicated as those situations are, they are not nearly as complicated as the traumatic events that happened in each of our lives.

So talking through something once really is never enough. The same event (abusive or non-abusive) can hurt so many different members of the system on so many different levels that the complexity of the pain is staggering – and it does take numerous reviews of the same piece of history in order to resolve it.

But in the process of repetition toward resolution, we need to be careful of the human tendency to believe that scapegoating others, internal or external, and then driving them away or ignoring them or punishing them will actually provide any real resolution to our problems. That might work for a time, but in the end, the problems are still ours. We can’t actually get rid of them by dumping them on someone else, and we can’t resolve them by anything we do to someone else.

Blaming someone else for our anger or hurt and then punishing them for it will not make us less angry or hurt. We can waste years on blaming and hating others for our own problems, looking for ways to avenge ourselves on them; meanwhile, our actual problems will remain untouched, and they will continue to trouble us until we address them directly.

If a problem is still coming up for us – then the resolution lies within us as well. We need to go through the event and the associated feelings again, and again, and again, until we find all the scattered pieces that are still causing us pain and distress and address them – not by pointing fingers and laying blame and acting it all out on other people, but within ourselves.

This is the only way to make emotional peace with an issue – and only when we do that, can we let it go and truly move on.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned V

The instincts that helped me to read abusive situations can also be relied on in non-abusive situations.

After the years of dealing with and surviving the abuse, my instincts and perceptions surrounding abusive situations were well-developed and pretty reliable. I could tell who was approaching me with intent to harm, get a sense of how bad it was going to be, and I learned to read people and respond to them in ways that might protect me, at least to a degree. And I’m not alone in that – I think this ability is one that most survivors develop.

But when I moved over to this new world, for a time it seemed that absolutely everything I had learned up to that point was irrelevant, inapplicable, and useless. I felt like I would have to start all over with everything, that even my familiarly reliable perception had to be broken down and rebuilt from scratch.

This left me feeling like I couldn’t trust myself or anything I thought I knew or anything I believed about situations or people – because in this world, what I knew, or intuited, or perceived, was all wrong. I had relied on perception and intuition for years as the one skill I possessed in my own defense, and now I had lost even that. I felt helpless and vulnerable and out of place, almost enough to stay in the life I was familiar with, just to keep that familiar ground under my feet.

And in a sense, the feeling was true. My perceptions were informed by a whole different set of circumstances than anything I was likely to find in the standard day-to-day world, and the conclusions I drew tended to rely far too heavily on suspicion and distrust – so of course my perceptions and intuitions about most situations were skewed toward the negative.

But in another sense – my abilities didn’t really have to be rebuilt at all. They just had to be fine-tuned a little to allow for a new set of parameters that hadn’t ever existed for me before. I had to learn to allow for the possibility that, if my senses felt baffled and I couldn’t see the potential problem looming or the impending craziness in the person in front of me, it might be because there was no problem, no craziness – no danger. Not every situation in this world will turn dangerous. So if I don’t see it, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m missing it – that might really mean it isn’t there.

But if I do sense danger – or if I don’t see it right away, but the feeling develops over time – I also don’t have to discount what my perception and intuition tells me just because I’m relying on senses honed by a whole different context. Even in this world, my gut will not always be wrong. There are dangers in this world – not as omnipresent as they were in mine, but certainly there. So if I sense danger, I can listen to my gut, at least to the extent of checking it out, doing some reality testing, and being careful of myself in that situation until I get a better read on it.

The important thing, really, was learning to tell the difference between a real danger and a chimerical danger.

Wanting to share my life with others who will appreciate me and my accomplishments is not a tendency of weakness or evil.

Actually – I’m not sure where I got the idea that wanting to share of myself with another was weak, or bad, or even just… abnormal.

When I was being trained as a child – and when I was being used as an adult – the concept of positive reinforcement was always used to great effect. If I did X, then I would get Y, which was perceived as a good thing. When I was young, that might mean three sips of water, or it might mean removal of some painful stimulus. When I grew older, the reward became less concrete – usually being allowed a sense of approval, superiority, specialness, and/or belonging. And when I began on the path to leaving that world behind, those feelings were some of the hardest things to leave. Where else was I ever going to get that? Where else would I ever belong? Who else would ever approve of me, make me feel special, make me feel like they cared? (A cold, distant, purely conditional caring it was – but it was still all I knew, and it still seemed a lot better than nothing.)

Wrestling with those feelings should have been enough to clue me in to the fact that no man is truly an island. Even people with very low social needs still have some social needs – everyone wants at least one person in the world who can appreciate them for who they are, celebrate with them when things go well, offer commiseration and support when things are going wrong, someone who will discuss things with them honestly but still from a place of caring… everyone wants at least one person in their lives who makes them feel special and worthwhile just for being themselves.

And expanding outward – everyone likes positive reinforcement. They like to be told they did a good job, or that their efforts are notice and appreciated. In fact, people like to hear those things so much that they can get pretty darn pissy if they think they should be hearing them and they aren’t.

So where I got the idea that, in this world, wanting or needing or desiring positive reinforcement was weak and bad, I don’t know.

Most likely, it sprang from the belief that I didn’t deserve any positive regard in this world. In my world, my job brought me a lot of status. I hated the job itself, but let’s be honest – I loved being that special.

The problem was, that the very thing which had made me so special in that world would make me an absolute pariah in this world. My whole feeling of specialness was inextricably entangled with that world, and it had not a single part of it that could translate beyond the shadows. In the light of day, I was ugly and cringing and evil. By this world’s standards, I knew I didn’t deserve to feel special for anything I had ever done, and nothing I would ever do would make up for that.

And besides that, I figured someone would have to be insanely stupid to accept the things I had done and still think I was a worthwhile person. It was just never going to happen, or at least not from anyone I respected enough to give value to their opinion of me.

And so I determined that, that being the case, I’d better just not expect anything. I’d better just assume that, in this world, I would have to learn to do without any of the positive reinforcement that every human being craves, and learn to go on without it.

Well, as it turns out – that’s really not necessary. As it turns out, there are some people in this world who can see past what I’ve done and still appreciate me for the person that I am and the person I am becoming – and they are not, in fact, insanely stupid. But I had gotten myself so convinced that such a thing did not exist that it took quite a while for me to see that I was wrong.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned IV

Every relationship is a two-way street.

This statement is such a cliché that you’d think it would be self-evident – but all the same, it took me some time to understand it.

Where I came from, the imbalance of power ruled everything. There was no such thing as equality – there was always one person with all the power and one person with none. And no relationship in that world ever required effort or work. None of them were a choice. They simply were. They were functional and purpose-oriented. People were tools – you used or you were used, and the relationship was the medium of use, nothing more.

But in this world, things don’t work in quite the same way.

Out here, relationships are choices, they require a lot of effort to make them work, and the effort must go both ways.

Both people have to be willing to compromise for the sake of the relationship, to consider the other equally with themselves or sometimes even ahead of themselves, to find the balance point between relying on each other and relying on themselves, to blend dependence and independence successfully, to work out conflicts between themselves in a reasonably healthy manner, to respect each other, to be considerate of each other, to sometimes be the bigger person and be able to rely on the other to sometimes be the bigger person, to trust each other, and on and on… the list is truly endless, and none of it is easy.

If neither person is willing to put the effort into the relationship – or even worse, if only one side is expected to do all the work while the other side does nothing but receive what they are given and expect more, then the relationship is doomed.

This is a lesson I learned primarily through observation – it took me so long to figure it out that I haven’t really gotten around to giving it much of a test yet, except within the relative security of therapy.

The rules of successful relationships apply to therapy too.

Regardless of everything else that makes therapy unique and different from any other relationship we might ever have, it is still based on a relationship. As such, it is subject to the same dynamics that positively or negatively effect the other relationships in our lives.

And yet, because of the unique role that the therapy relationship holds in our lives and the unique way in which that relationship is structured, the complications are more obvious, and seem more obstructive, than they usually do.

I am among the one hundred percent of the therapy consumer population who has invested the role of “therapist” with a full load of expectations and projections and assumptions. And I am among that same one hundred percent in my tendency to lose sight of the person beneath the role that I created for them.

Learning to separate the role I created from the actual person was a very important part of keeping the therapeutic relationship a strong and viable part of my healing.

It was so easy for me, as it is for anyone, to get caught up in my own needs and my own expectations and what I believed a therapist should do for me, not to mention my own projections and trauma-related issues and misconceptions and negative assumptions – and to lose sight of the fact that none of these were actually relevant to that particular relationship. They were all products either of my own fantasy or my own history. They were not things that had grown from the actual relationship that I was trying to build with this actual person.

In fact, I had so many things clouding my vision of who the other person truly was, that the person I ended up relating to, reacting to, responding to, was almost entirely a figment of my imagination.

I was forever comparing the real actions and interactions to the “golden ideal” in my head, and responding to the difference between the two instead of evaluating the real action on its own merits. Or I was making automatic connections, so lightning quick that I didn’t even realize it was happening – this turn of phrase, that fleeting facial expression, a particular emotional response, dragging up history to taint the current day – and yet, I never saw that this was about my issues. It always seemed to be about what someone else (and most specifically the therapist) said or did in the current day.

It was exceedingly hard to see through my own automatic preconceptions and assumptions and faulty connections. It was a major challenge to sort through events and emotions to see where I had gone off track, where I fell into incorrect assumptions or carried a historical reaction forward into the present. It was another thing I could never have done alone, because it took a long while for me to learn how to do it at all, even with guidance.

But it was a crucial problem to resolve, because although it tends to be most obvious in therapeutic relationship, I was making the same kind of automatic assumptions and carrying the same kind of preconceptions in every other relationship as well.

Seeing a therapist – or any other person – only and entirely in the role we create for them can lead to some very strange and unreasonable abuses, and it can lead us to neglect or ignore or assume on the underlying relationship in some extremely unhealthy ways. Learning to see past the created role was essential – but not easy.

I had to learn to treat the therapist with respect, even when I was angry or hurt. I had to learn that, if I want to keep a person’s support, I probably shouldn’t lean on them so much that their willingness snaps under my weight. I had to learn how to resolve conflict without running from it or triangulating other people into it or making it all the other person’s fault and then waiting for them to repair it. I had to learn to ask for and accept help, but also to maintain my independence despite having help available, and when to do which.

I had to look at all the things happening between me and the therapist, in the space where the relationship was being built, and at how various actions or interactions affected that. I also had to look at the negative things I was contributing to the relationship – and I had to face some uncomfortably shameful and embarrassing and hurtful truths in the process.

It sucked to learn those things about myself, and it was humiliating to have someone else point them out to me. I tended to want to blame the therapist for that, to kill the messenger and hope the message died too, but it turned out that that wouldn’t work. Apparently plenty of other people had already noticed these things about me too. The only person who wasn’t seeing it was me. And ultimately it was more embarrassing to think that everyone else was seeing this when I wasn’t, than it was to face it and deal with it so that it was no longer there to be seen.

Relationships can be changed for good as well as bad.

The mutability of relationships was a point that was obvious to me from the start, but it took a long while for me to see that this could ever be a positive thing, or to realize that I wasn’t a helpless pawn of fate waiting to see which way things would go.

At first, my assumption was that change in a relationship was uniformly negative – relationships would inevitably go from “I like you” to “I hate you”, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t have a lot of experience with relationships, but this was my natural assumption.

But it left me feeling like my relationships were an unsteady tower of cards, and I was perpetually waiting for them to collapse. And it made me long for the relative security of the relationships with my abusers. I never felt like those relationships were going to collapse at any minute. Those relationships were bars of steel that surrounded me and kept me close, whether I wanted to be or not.

Relationships in this world, on the other hand, felt flimsy. Unreliable. Too unpredictable to be trusted. They were influenced and affected by so many different factors, I could never control all of them. And least of all could I control the other person or their feelings – therefore, I couldn’t depend on their feelings remaining constant. Even if all my actions within the relationship were technically correct, that was no guarantee. Maybe tomorrow they would decide my shirt was ugly, and they couldn’t tolerate such deplorable fashion sense, and the relationship would be over regardless of what I said or did.

It felt that arbitrary, that final, and that uncontrollable to me.

It took some time for me to realize that it wasn’t that uncontrollable or arbitrary – the success of any relationship really is dependent on what each person is (or isn’t) contributing to the bond between them. Disaster is not brought by the random finger of fate, but by the people involved, who are not building or maintaining that bond.

I realized that, in a way, the foundation of a relationship is created anew every day. Every day, there is the possibility that something might shake an apparently solid foundation to the ground, recasting everything that went before it in a new and different light. But every day, we also have the opportunity to shore up an unstable foundation and to help a relationship grow stronger, or to do things that will add to the strength already there.

Just another thing that I thought was entirely outside my control, where it turns out that my own choices make all the difference.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned III

I’m a little behind this week, so the line of thought I was following here is not complete, but here is what I have so far.

It is impossible for anyone to prove that they are trustworthy.

I got hung up on this point for a long time. In the course of my therapy, I was given a choice I had never been given before… actually, I was given a choice, period. For the first time in my entire life, I had the power to make real choices, to decide my own future fate all by myself…

… or so I was told by this therapist person. But who the hell was she, anyway? What did she know about it? And how did I know I could believe her? I knew I could trust my abusers – at least to the extent that familiarity had made them predictable. But how did I know I could trust this person who was presenting me with a possibility that I had long since abandoned as impossible? Why was she trying to help me? How could I know she wasn’t trying to raise my hopes just so she could shatter them again and laugh at my naiveté, one more cruel trick in a lifetime full of them? How could I know that she meant what she said?

Where was the certainty?

I paused there for a long time. I kept thinking I would somehow know, that this person would pass some ultimate last test after which I would know they were trustworthy forever more – but it never happened. And eventually, I realized that it never would.

Trustworthiness can never be conclusively proven. There is no ultimate test, and even the absence to date of any specific reason to distrust someone is not proof that there will never be a reason. We can never be absolutely about anything. Sometimes, we can’t even be certain of ourselves.

It took me a while, but I finally realized that there was never going to be a guarantee on the trust I extended in therapy, any more than any other relationship came with a guarantee.

Trust in a relationship, in any relationship, is always extended on credit. It is never given without risk. Nobody can really guarantee us that our trust will be well placed or that we will never take a loss, and anyone who says they can is lying.

The risk might be obvious in a therapy relationship, but it is also present when we send our kids to school or leave them with a babysitter, order food at a restaurant, have a contractor remodel the house, rent property as the tenant or as the landlord, accept a job, hire an employee – on every side of every relationship, there is some measure of trust involved, and there is never a guarantee on any of it.

The stakes in therapy feel higher, but the basic choice is still the same. Do I want what I want enough to take a risk to get it, or do I just want to leave things the way they are?

Nothing comes with a guarantee.
Trust is always a leap of faith.

Trust is not an all-or-nothing concept.

Making the decision to trust one person in one situation does not mean I have to trust all people, or trust the same person in every situation. Thankfully, I have a brain, and it functions fairly well. This means I can apply some judgment in each case. I can decide who to trust, and when I trust them. If they do something that breaks my trust (such as lying to me or manipulating me), I get to decide whether this means I will never again trust them about anything, or whether I simply won’t ever trust them in that situation again – or whether it was an aberration, with the possibility of trust being earned back.

Deciding which is which in any given situation is difficult and time-consuming. Sometimes there are so many possibilities in this world outside the shadows that it can be overwhelming. Sometimes the relationship in question isn’t worth the work, and it’s easier to just write it off than to sort through where I really stand on it. But some relationships are worth all the work they require.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned II

The several lessons I’ve chosen to include today are really one issue in its progressive permutations, and it is one that has been particularly difficult for me — finding the balance between reliance and independence. Even finding the healthy balance point (let alone putting it into practice) was a real challenge. This issue isn’t specific to overcoming programming — it probably affects every survivor. But even so, it was an issue that strongly affected my willingness to let go of the life I knew, and as such, I’ve included it.

I am still ultimately on my own.

This system, like many other dissociative systems, grew up learning that, overall, the only person we could really rely on was our own self. Adults might be caring one day and abusive the next, or change the rules in unpredictable ways, or they might be predictable only in how abusive they were – even adults who claimed they wanted to be helpful usually didn’t listen or understand enough to do anything but make things worse with their efforts to help. We, like so many others, learned early that nobody was really going to help. Our survival, even for the basic needs of food or shelter (which could certainly be denied if we didn’t perform as expected), was entirely our own responsibility.

As so often happens, the flip side of that early excess of self-responsibility was an excess of wanting to be taken care of – since none of the people who should have taken care of us did so, and since we were never taken care of when we should have been, we were constantly on the lookout for any likely substitute who would take on that role for us. But it also created an excess of distrust, and a too-easy willingness to find fault in any caring attention that we did receive.

And, again as so often happens, the entire mess ended up in the lap of the therapist. Wanting to be taken care of to the deepest extent of what was not provided in our childhood, wanting to give up the burden of self-care and make our care someone else’s responsibility – we expected the therapist to provide all of it, and we were unreasonably quick to find fault with what the therapist was reasonably able to provide. Thankfully, we didn’t go as far down that road as some people do, but it was still a lengthy digression. This seems to be a sidetrack that many survivors wander down in the course of their healing – and some get lost down that track for months, or years, or forever.

The trouble with that sidetrack is that it’s a black hole into nothingness. Nobody can ever really replace what we should have had but didn’t. Nobody can retrospectively be there for us during the abuse, or rescue us from what happened years ago, or parent our grownup selves the way our parents should have done it when we were young. We didn’t have any of that when we should have, and painful though this truth is to face, this really does mean we missed the chance. We can have other kinds of relationships, and if we allow it, those relationships can help to fill the void left by our defective early caretakers – but this only works if we accept the current relationships as they are, rather than trying to make them be something else that they can never be. Nobody can replace in the present day what we didn’t get thirty years ago.

Nevertheless, we wasted some time thinking that someone could do that, and moreover that they should do it, and we blamed others for their failure to fill our emptiness or to satisfy our neediness – because if they said they wanted to help and that they cared, and yet we still felt the way we did, then it must mean they weren’t trying hard enough.

My first response to this was to interpret it as proof that I was right in the first place – nobody really cared, nobody could be trusted, and I had nobody but myself to rely on.

Over time, however, it became clear that this extreme was too extreme, because…

I can’t always provide everything I need for myself.

I can provide a lot for myself – I can support myself, provide food and shelter and entertainment and pleasure, we have each other in this system for companionship and support – we are self-sufficient for the vast majority of our needs. But not for all of them.

I did return for a time to my original position of self-reliant distrust, and I could have stayed there forever if I had chosen to do so. It was something that had worked for 36 years at that point, and there was no reason it couldn’t continue to work just as effectively for another 36 years. But the question became, was it really the most effective position I could take on the issue?

I could probably have lived the rest of my life without ever being forced to re-evaluate that, and had I not been forced to do it, I can’t say whether it would ever have happened. I would like to think it still might have, but who knows. In any event, I was forced to re-evaluate, and subsequently I began to work on finding a healthier balance point.

It began in a situation where the choice between staying where I was or moving on to something new became a very concrete and unavoidable choice – and for a variety of reasons, the choice of staying where I was was completely unacceptable. I had to move on to something new. The problem was, I couldn’t do it alone.

So either I chose to accept help from others (and thereby relied on them to a certain extent), or I chose to rely only on what I could do for myself, even though I knew I couldn’t do this thing by myself – and refusing to accept help in this situation risked not only my own safety (which was tolerable), but the safety of other people as well (which was not tolerable).

The concrete clarity did not make the choice as easy as I wished it would have. But I did choose to accept the help. This obliged me to place a certain level of trust in those who would help me, and to rely on them for certain things.

Despite all the risks my choice involved, that felt like the biggest risk of them all.

There is a healthy balance between dependence and independence – it doesn’t have to be all or nothing either way.

It’s been about three years now since that initial choice, and I’ve worked since then (and still continue to work) on finding the healthy balance between independence and reliance. This balance, as I’ve defined it for myself so far, is as follows.

My healing is my responsibility. Most of it involves things that can’t be done by anyone else but me. It requires my effort, my determination, my consistency, my willingness, my sweat and blood and tears. If I sit around waiting for someone else to “fix me” then it will never happen.

My healing is not anyone else’s responsibility. Nobody else is obliged to help me or fix me, not even if I’m paying them – and paying them is not an excuse to dump the responsibility on them and then blame them for not taking care of it. Therapy is not about shirking my responsibilities or handing my responsibilities to someone else and letting it all be their problem. If those are the expectations I have of therapy, then it’s my own fault if I’m being constantly disappointed.

Therapy will also not replace what my parents never gave me, and I’m not entitled to expect that it will. I might have to cope with not being the most special person in my therapist’s life. I can’t reasonably expect to be treated like her friend, let alone to be treated like one of her kids. That’s not what a healthy therapy relationship is about, and if that’s what I expect, or if I’m going to blame my therapist for not treating me in these ways – that is most definitely my problem.

What therapy can do is be the extra hand I need to help me over or through the places I can’t get through alone. It can’t replace my own effort, but it is a necessary addition to it. I need to get past the desire to be in an unhealthy role in relation to my therapist,  but I also need to be able to take the hand that’s offered when I need it, because being unwilling to accept any help at all is just as much of an unhealthy extreme. Sometimes I need help to achieve the things I want most.

Being as independent as possible makes any necessary reliance on others less of a threat, and it makes disappointment by others less of a crisis.

Relying on other to do what they say they will or be who they say they are is not easy. People feel like a perpetual disappointment to me. It seems they never manage to live up to my expectations, even when my expectations are so abysmally low that I can’t understand how anyone could sink low enough to disappoint them.

I’m geared to expect disappointment, because disappointment is what I always seem to get – and this is true whether I expected a lot, or whether I expected nothing but some basic common sense or a little human dignity. Some people can’t even manage that.

And every disappointment hurts – some of them hurt on a personal level, some only on the level where I’m looking for something to tell me that this world is an improvement on the world I chose to leave, that the people on this side of things are not as stupid or selfish or self-absorbed or manipulative or dishonest or cruel – every disappointment hurts in some way.

So even in the cases where I decide that I could accept help, maybe even that I need to accept help – deciding whether or not it’s worthwhile to actually do it is still a difficult issue. My expectations of a person tend to increase when I feel I have a personal stake invested in them – and yet, I still can’t control them or make them live up to my expectations or their promises. Sometimes the potential disappointment makes the effort of accepting help seem like it’s just not worth it.

What I’m learning, though, is that the degree to which I maintain my own efforts and my own contributions to the project at hand makes an appreciable difference in all respects.

If I contribute everything within my own ability to the effort at hand, then it feels like less of a threat to allow someone else to also contribute. I never feel like I am depending solely or entirely on them, or like my own efforts require theirs. I can feel the solidity of my own independence even while working with another. That feeling is very reassuring to me.

And as long as I am contributing everything I can to the effort, not being overly reliant on the other or depending entirely on their presence, then I have also found that it isn’t the end of the world if they don’t come through. It doesn’t give me a very good opinion of them if they don’t, but I’m sure they can live without my good opinion. What is more important to me is that their failure does not mean the failure of whatever we were doing together. My success wasn’t riding on them, and my effort can and will survive and continue, whether or not anyone else does what they say they will. And that’s pretty reassuring too.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned I

I had more lessons to include than I thought — things that have made it difficult for me personally to let go of my old life. They are just going up in the order they occurred to me.

Life is not a gladiatorial combat.

By this I mean, it turns out that life is not after all a giant ring where everyone gets tossed in and only a few ever emerge, with those few being the best, the strongest, the winners. This was the extent of my social experience for the first 35 years of this body’s existence. There was no bowing out of the battle, and those who tried were simply the first to go down. Survival meant doing whatever it took to stay standing.

But life outside of the predator’s world is not that way. It is not a perpetual battle of wits and one-upmanship, and not everyone in the world is my enemy. The world is not conspiring to take me out. In fact, most people couldn’t care less about me. They have their own lives to worry about, and I am free to focus on my life without having to constantly worry about what everyone else is doing to mess with it.

This lesson was easy in some cases – most people are so obviously focused on their own worlds that, once I began to look, it was easy to see they had no real interest in mine. This lesson was most difficult in relation to other people who I knew had similar experiences and similar training to mine. With them, I still felt myself to be back in the gladiatorial arena, still wanting to strike at their weak spots before they struck at mine.

Resisting that impulse was very very difficult – but valuable, because it gave me an opportunity to watch what they did, and to evaluate the results in a new context, which led to another realization…

Predatory tactics do not dominate the whole world.

I realized this only after I saw it in practice. Those accustomed to predatory tactics have an extensive repertoire of manipulation, backstabbing, intriguing, and lying, and those are the means by which success is achieved in the predators’ world. Such tactics are the life blood that flows through the whole network. In those worlds, everyone is engaged in the same dirty games and whispered plots, and everyone is vulnerable to them as well.

In this world, however, such games are not the foundation of social interaction, and an individual’s level of skill at predatory tactics just doesn’t translate. In this world, a clumsy strike is as likely to work as a clever one, and skill is no guarantee of success. A strike that would be mortal in the predators’ world can actually be rather pathetic and completely harmless in this world.

Predatory tactics still work effectively against those conditioned to respond to them – that is to say, against other survivors who are not in therapy or who haven’t done much work with their system – but the more healing we do, the less vulnerable we are.

This was a particularly illuminating realization – because what it proved to me was that, whether someone attempted to strike at me or whether they didn’t,  it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to be alert for any pending attacks, or to strike first before someone else had the chance. I didn’t have to insure my survival in that way any more – the stakes were no longer that dramatic, and the route to safety was different. Someone else’s attempt to damage me was no longer an actual threat to my survival, and all I really had to do to protect myself was focus on my own learning and my own progress.

This general realization is also applicable to less dramatic situations. For example, in this world, it is usually more effective to ask directly for what I want rather than to employ manipulative tactics to get it. This was another new concept for me. Asking for something directly went against my ingrained experience that manipulation was the only way to get what I wanted – but in this world, manipulation is much more likely to backfire on me than to work for me, so directness was something I needed to learn.

I will never forget my experiences in the predator’s world, nor will I ever forget the skills I depended on there, but they no longer represent the totality of my social skill set or the first options I use. I can relate to people in other ways now, and each time that the new approach brings me the result I hope for (where I see so many people stuck in the old patterns of relating  and still not getting the results they want), it confirms for me the importance of this effort.

I can survive feeling like I’ve “lost.”

I gather that most people learn this much earlier than I did. Apparently that’s the point of tiny tot sports programs around the world. But in my world, everything was a competition, and losing had consequences that were more (or felt more) dire than just not getting the free pizza after the game.

In the world from which I came, fighting for survival was simply a fact of life, and this was true on many levels – the snake pits of social interaction, the games of wits, and the fight within my own self to stay on this side of the line between coherently broken and shattered beyond use.

The competitive atmosphere in which I lived fed into the naturally competitive personality of this self. Competitiveness is one of those qualities that can be seen across many members of the system in varying degrees because it is a quality that the single self would have possessed.

For me, though, because of my personal experiences, my competitive edge was honed more to the point of unhealthy jealousy and vengeful hatred than reasonable competition.

So when I first shifted from that world to this one, I was completely unable to handle feeling like I had lost in any way – not just at games, but in any way at all where it felt like someone else had bested me, or gotten to something before me, or gotten more than me, or anything at all along those lines.

And I was accustomed to dealing with such “losses” by attempting to smash the successful competitor and take what had been theirs — I was a real social star when I first emerged from my darker world.

As it turns out, crushing people into the dust (literally or figuratively) really isn’t an acceptable way of dealing with things out here in this world. Of course, there are still people who do it, or attempt to do it, but it’s not quite the same as what I was familiar with. In this world, you can’t steal someone else’s status or favored position or other intangible concepts like that simply by destroying the person who holds them. The things of which one is jealous are destroyed along with the person who held them. They can’t be passed on.

For some people, the destruction is still enough – a living embodiment of the “if I can’t have it, then neither can you” mindset.

Sometimes I find that mindset tempting. Very tempting.

And occasionally I give in to it – but more often, I make every effort to stay away from that perspective. I do stay with the situation for as long as I can, trying to temper my feelings, trying to learn to moderate them to something appropriate – but if (or when) they get the better of me, I walk away.

Walking away, in my world, was an ignoble move tantamount to admitting defeat, and as such, making that choice is still a learning experience for me.

So far, I haven’t died. Walking away from something, purposely absorbing myself in something else, gives me enough distance to shift my perspective. And I feel better. The rumpled, angry, chaotic feelings that I once thought were just a way of life have dissolved into a somewhat calmer state of being, and I find I like it better – a lot better.

The old jealousies and rage and desire to vent my vengeful fury on whoever has crossed me still come, but they don’t feel as familiar as they used to, and they don’t feel comfortable at all. I don’t want to be in that place any more, and these days, when I find myself there, I work actively to get myself back out.

Who I was yesterday does not have to define who I am today.

The world is always looking to the past to set a precedent. If something has happened before, it stands to reason that we can expect it to happen again. If something has never happened, we would be foolish to expect that it ever will. Past precedent defines our legal system, our social hierarchies, and our personal expectations of the world and of ourselves.

Sometimes past precedent can be a form of security. But sometimes it can be a shackle that ties us to a place and a self we don’t want. In those cases, it is important to remember that past precedent – although it is given a lot of weight – is not the final word on anything. It is never too late to learn to be the person we wish we were.

I don’t have any experience being anyone other than who I am. But I am perfectly capable of envisioning who I wish I were, who I want to be – and then asking myself, would that person do what I’m thinking of doing? Does that choice contribute to me becoming that person? And that is how I try to guide my actions.

It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that – that is complicated enough! But at the same time, it’s very simple – and it is, in fact, the way we become who we want to be.

And if the response to such a choice is “well, maybe that person wouldn’t do this thing, but I’m not that person”… I answered my own questions this way many times – because I believed that I couldn’t change, that I didn’t deserve to have a better life than what I knew, that I wasn’t worth that much effort – but however much these things felt like facts, they were and are not facts. They were my beliefs. It was my beliefs holding me where I was, and changing my beliefs is allowing me to move on.

In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson says that “the force of character is cumulative.”

We have that quote written in a lot of different places in our home, places where we see it frequently, although nobody else is likely to see it at all. It is one of our guiding principles. Changing our selves will never happen overnight, or as the result of one big effort to make it happen – it will happen slowly, as the result of day after day after day of doing different things, acting in different ways, teaching our mind to think different thoughts. We have to work on it every single day. Every interaction and every personal or emotional crisis and everything we do when there is nobody else watching is another opportunity to let a drop of water fall on the stone of our old self… and as the old Chinese proverb says, enough drops of water can wear down a mountain.

Mind Control Programming Basics IX: Segué

In subsequent posts, I will be writing about some of the beliefs and ideas that stood in the way of my own healing.

I am not, in this case, speaking necessarily of the messages I received through programming, but more about all the conditioned lessons that were left behind once the programmed controls were removed – the lessons absorbed through the course of a lifetime spent with a group of predators. I am addressing the things I was taught to accept, and the things I accepted simply because I had no other choice. I am addressing some of the assumptions and beliefs that contributed, on many levels, to making me who I was in their hands, and how I am now redefining myself on my own terms.

At the most rock-bottom level, programming is nothing but learning reinforced by trauma. No matter how it was subsequently glorified or mystified or otherwise complicated, this is really all it is – lessons taught to us about what to do and how to think and who we are, with trauma cementing the lessons into place.

Removing the programming – breaking the link between the lesson learned and the compulsion to believe or obey which was created by the trauma – is the easy part. But even once that compulsion is removed, the lesson itself remains, conditioned into our brains by hours of training and years of uncontested existence in our heads. Breaking the compulsion doesn’t automatically erase the action or belief with which it was associated. It makes it possible for new things to be learned, but it doesn’t do the work of rewriting the original lessons for us. If we truly want the messages given to us by the programmers to be completely gone, then we have to go on and do the immensely hard work of actually learning something new to replace what we learned from them.

Our self is the sum of our own freely chosen actions, thoughts, and beliefs.
If we change what we do and how we think, then we change who we are.

Some might say this is too simplistic to have any degree of credibility, especially when it comes to issues involving mind control, but clearly a person saying that has not actually tried it – or at least, they haven’t tried very hard.

This method is as successful as the individual makes it. Working at it for a day or a week, or only sporadically when in the right mood, will yield results accordant with the effort put in – that is to say, none. On the other hand, working at it every day, regardless of whether we feel like it or whether we think it’s working fast enough or whether it’s a good day for that kind of thing or whether the moon is crossing Venus at the wrong angle – consistent effort will yield results.

One thing I hoped to illustrate through this series is that the programmers’ control is a thin veneer, held in place largely by what we contribute to keeping it there. Mind control takes advantage of our emotions and our weaknesses to protect itself and prevent us from approaching or analyzing it. We are contributing most of the strength to our own programming, and to its protections.

But letting go of the things we went through such trauma to learn – letting those scars fade – learning instead the lessons that would have come to us by right if we had had a safer childhood – this is the real challenge.

This is where I am on my own path.

Although there are certain basic concepts that many of us might share, nobody’s path is exactly the same as anyone else’s. We all have to reach the point of being ready to work at healing by our own roads, and we each travel our own route through our histories and experiences and memories and interpretations, through our personal thoughts and feelings and beliefs, in order to come to our own resolution. The details individual to each of us means that everyone’s journey to health will be unique.

This being the case, the only person to whom my examples are necessarily going to apply is me. We all place obstacles in our own paths which we must resolve,but  other people may have different obstacles facing them or different resolutions that work better for them. The posts to come will just be some examples of what has come up in my path, and the solutions that worked for me.

Mind Control Programming Basics VIII: Examining Our Own Motivations

If asked the question directly, nobody who has been subjected to mind control programming would say they wanted to hold on to the effects of that programming. If asked directly, everyone would say they wanted to be free of it – and most of them would mean it.

Then why do so many of us find it so difficult to free ourselves from that influence, even when we really do want to?

As has already been discussed, the programmers contribute their share of obstacles by making it as difficult as they can. Naturally they don’t want all their work and effort to come undone at the slightest touch. They don’t want their work to be touched at all, and they make every effort to surround the programming with protective measures designed to discourage or (as they hope) prevent the dissociative system from being able to undo it.

Their controls can be circumvented – but not until we address one very important question. What about what we’re contributing to keeping the programming in place?

Believe it or not, getting past the programmers’ controls and protections is easy compared to getting past our own motivations for letting the programming remain. The obstacles planted from outside our selves are easier to see, easier to disclaim, and easier to remove than our own reasons for holding on to this negative artifact from the past. This is true mostly because – well, who wants to admit they have any reason to hold on to their programming? But we do have reasons. Every single one of us has them. They are strong enough to influence our choices and our decisions – but, standing in the light of day, they look foolish, petty, shameful, and embarrassing – so we hide them, from the world and from ourselves.

In this post, I will mention some of the general things I have recognized as posing obstacles to approaching and undoing programming. Subsequently, I will focus more specifically on the obstacles I have had to overcome myself.

*                              *                              *                              *                              *                              *

Although the details differ among individuals, there are two main categories into which most of these personal motivations appear to fall: fear of normalcy and fear of loss.

A fear of normalcy might seem ridiculous, but how many of us really know how to live a so-called normal life?

How much of our lives have been defined to date by the triggered reactions, the emotional storms, the dissociative time losses and confusion, the memories and flashbacks, tending to ourselves on the fragile days, shaping everything around what we can or can’t handle at any given time, or dealing with the consequences of not being able to shape things in that way?

What would life look like without all that effort being put into just getting through a day? None of us knows the answer to that, and that’s the problem.

Normalcy is the golden ideal toward which we all work. But it can also be pretty intimidating in its foreignness and unfamiliarity. Sometimes the unfamiliarity can be so daunting that we flee back to the familiar just to avoid it.

A fear of loss might also sound ridiculous. What could we possibly have to lose by getting rid of the programmed influences in our minds?

But depending on our individual perspectives, there are a number of secondary gains to a full-fledged and active disorder that might really be missed if they were lost – and although some of them sound “nicer” than others, they are all things that can be perceived as positive by the person benefitting from them. They include (but are not limited to):

The caché of being “different”
The feeling of being special to someone in particular or for some reason in particular
The caring attention of friends, family, or therapist
The excuse to feel bad
The excuse to disclaim responsibility for one’s actions, behavior, or feelings
The excuse to act out
The excuse to do nothing
The right to claim disability wages
Feeling entitled to special treatment
Receiving extra credit for the most minor accomplishments (not having to do as much before people think you’ve done something wonderful)
The loss of “family membership” (if the survivor has to go against the party line in order to work toward healing and the family closes ranks against them)
The loss of specific relationships in the family or organization
The fear of being alone (loss of all existing relationships)
The loss of status
The fear of not being protected by the organization / loss of life (suicide or retaliation)
The loss of the denial and “ignorance is bliss” protections, having to look the ugliness full in the face

Nobody wants to admit that most these things are appealing at all, let alone that they’re appealing enough to sabotage ourselves for them, but we do it all the same. Secondary gains are a powerful motivator, and all the more so because they remain hidden. We disguise them from ourselves under a cover more palatable than the truth, and we just pretend they aren’t there. But things we don’t see are also things we aren’t working to change. If we turn away from seeing these things in ourselves, then we’re standing in our own way more firmly than anyone and anything else is.

I know of numerous people getting free therapy, extra therapy, emergency sessions on demand, extra time, extra attention, and all manner of therapy perks, all on the basis of their professed need. Since these perks would be lost if there were no longer a “good reason” for them, some people prefer (at least at the moment) to make sure that there is always a good reason for them.

One person’s therapist brought a new intern to a session to learn about DID, and this person got so caught up in the excitement and importance of being the living example that she begged to be allowed to do it more often. In the process, she lost all incentive to be less of anything that she was right at that moment, because then she might lose the thing that made her interesting.

A number of people I have known seemed to get comfortable in the role of mental patient. They never wanted to get better or put into practice any of the skills they learned in therapy, because they liked being able to demand help and attention on behalf of their illness. After ten or twenty years in therapy, they were displaying more symptoms and more troubled behaviors than the newly diagnosed people, but they resented any suggestion that decades of therapy should have made them better instead of worse. Most of these people prefer very young or inexperienced therapists or therapists who know absolutely nothing about DID and will need to be taught everything from the ground up. They want therapists who don’t have the knowledge to take them at anything more than face value. The one thing they cannot tolerate is working with a specialist who might expect them to do something besides just be sick.

I know one person who believes that she’s the subject of a grand conspiracy – not in a schizophrenic sense, but in the sense of someone who feels so unimportant that they invent an illusion of being just the opposite. Of course it’s difficult being the sole focus of predators and perpetrators who all want to bring her down, she’s just an average person doing what she thinks is right – the subtext is, that she’s important enough to merit all this attention. The painful truth is that she’s alone, and there’s really nobody paying much attention to her at all, including the perps and predators – but that’s just too hard to admit or accept. She has no incentive to work on any mind control issues – in her case, I think the reality of the present is the thing that’s too difficult for her to face.

But I also know a lot of people who are just plain tired, beaten down by the effort of living. When weighed in the balance, not everyone will find that the amount of work and effort and energy and commitment required to effectively undo mind control programming is worth it. For some people, just getting through time and coping as best they can is enough. I have no argument with that, although I do wish those people would admit it. There’s no crime in not wanting to do deprogramming work, but it would be better for other people who do actually want to do it, if they could understand that lack of progress in “therapy veterans” does not actually mean that the work can’t be done – those who are content where they are should never discourage someone else from going further if they can. But yet, I understand why they don’t admit it – not wanting to do the work would be a shameful and embarrassing admission. Saying it can’t be done removes the pressure of expectation and the shame of acknowledging that it’s a choice.

These are just some of what I have seen – there are as many examples as there are people, because in our own ways we all do this. These are the kinds of uncomfortable truths that we all have to face about ourselves if we are serious about freeing ourselves from mind control programming – not just the horrors of history, but also the hidden obstacles hiding within us right now, in the current day.

They are embarrassing, and shameful, and just plain stupid. It can make us feel like a complete fool, exposing the truths that hide beneath our foolish little self-delusions.

We all have our reasons to hold on to our problems. But if we ever want to let those problems go once and for all, then we have to understand this piece of the puzzle too. Otherwise, we’ll just end up a victim of our own self-sabotage, and our problems will stay yoked around our necks long after the secondary gains are gone.

R.I.P. Feather

Too much has been going on this week, so I haven’t had time to think about the next post in my series.

I’d like to tell a story instead.

Once upon a time, I had two friends. Both were abuse survivors. One of them was dissociative, and one was not.

The one who was dissociative (DSB) was still involved with her abusive group. The one who was not (FD) gained a quick and ugly lesson in what it’s like to be involved with a dissociative person when they are not as free of their past as they want others to think they are.

I spent a year living with them off and on. I got to know them well, as their respective individual selves and as the couple they were at the time.

Unfortunately, one of the things that became clear over the course of that year was that DSB was not only still being accessed by her abusers in the current day – but that, as a whole, she had no intention of changing that fact. Her system was aware of the ongoing abuse, but none of them were willing to fight it.

This was not because they felt helpless or powerless, and it wasn’t because they had no help or support. They were one of the lucky few in that regard. They had knowledge of what was happening to them, they had support, and they had several good and trustworthy people who were willing to help them in any way it took to get them free.

What they did not have was the desire to get themselves free.

Various personality types may crop up among the dissociative population with the same frequency that they do in the non-dissociative population.

Having been abused and being dissociative is no guarantee that the personalities we would have had under other circumstances would have made us a good person, a kind person, a loving person, a generous person – any more than the mere fact of existence is an assurance that every human being in the world is good. We all know that that isn’t true. Among the billions of people in the world, there are hundreds of thousands who are dark or evil or simply bad in a staggering variety of ways.

This is true of survivors as well. Having been abused does not automatically mean someone would have been or is a good person. Underneath any and all sequelae of the abuse, our personalities still bear the original imprint it had when we were born – and that personality may or may not naturally lead us toward good.

Mind control trainers consider it a bonus when a natural personality tends towards the less positive human characteristics. These are the people who will remain easily controlled for the rest of their lives, the ones whose loyalty will never be in doubt, the ones who will never be a headache, the ones that the programmers don’t have to worry about. These are the ones who can’t be reached with any message of potential change, because they don’t want to hear it. They have found where they want to be already.

DSB was such a one.

These dissociative systems are relatively unusual, and anyone who has never had experience with  one of them may count themselves lucky – but it would be unfair to assume that lack of experience with them means they don’t exist, or that DSB was merely a misunderstood person whose helpers failed her, or that it was the effects of programming being mistaken for actual preference of life with and as a perpetrator.

Someone who has walked a path themselves can recognize where someone else is on the same path. Alcoholics in recovery can tell by a glance when someone is about to fall off the wagon or when they already have, whether they are truly committed to recovery or whether they have a distance yet to fall before hitting their personal rock bottom. They can tell these things about other alcoholics because they have been there themselves. It gives them an insider’s understanding and perception that a non-alcoholic can never have. In the same way, a survivor of mind control programming who has traveled a distance in their own healing can see things in other survivors, simply by virtue of having been in those same places themselves.

And the thing that was apparent about DSB was that she did not want to be helped to leave her abusive group. She did not want to leave them at all.

I mourned DSB years ago. I mourned the person I wished she could be, and then I stayed away from the person she truly was. She tried to jeopardize the safety I was working so hard to obtain for myself, and I could not allow her to do that.

This week, I mourn my friend FD, who was not as lucky as I was.

DSB gained nothing from what was offered to her by others in their desire to help her. But someone else did lose everything by giving too much to someone who had no intention of benefitting from it.

And I wish I could say this was an isolated occurrence – but it isn’t.

Survivors – whether you are dissociative or not – if you are committed to your healing, then guard it well. Guard it from anyone who would do it damage, even if they appear as a friend, and sometimes even from your own self. Remember that you can still be vulnerable – and regardless of where you meet them or how, not everyone does want to heal. Please be careful of yourselves – don’t give blindly, and don’t give so much to someone else that you cost yourself everything.

Let your ears be open and let your pride step back. Listen for the ring of truth, even as your self-love wants to jump out and slap the person who insulted it. Let the truth enter your heart and your mind – the truth about your history, and the truth about the things within you that need to be changed in order for you to find the kind of life you most want for yourself, and even the truth that others may not be the friends you want to think they are.

Let yourself heal – and offer a hand to others who need one as they travel the same path – but don’t be tricked into gripping a hand that only wants to pull you back down. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to take care of yourself first.

Mind Control Programming Basics VII: The Myth of Self-Maintaining Programming

The most common misconception I have seen regarding mind control programming is that it can maintain itself indefinitely through time with no diminution in strength or influence.

This is absolutely and unequivocally false.

The memories of what was done by the programmers, for those members of the system who hold them directly, will persist indefinitely.
The original feelings – the physical pain associated with what was done, the fear ranging to abject terror, the shame, the horror, the desire by the self as a whole to reject certain truths and keep them away from the majority of the self by isolating them in a single part of the self – all those things will persist until sufficiently addressed.
The ability of these feelings and memories to influence the system as a whole will persist until sufficiently addressed.
Memories and feelings of trauma evoked by seeing or hearing or smelling certain things will persist until sufficiently addressed.

But – these are not programming.
Rather, these are the effects of having been abused, which is a very different thing from the programming itself.

As noted in an earlier post, the actual programming is the message or messages learned, with the trauma and torture and pain and overwhelmingly abhorrent activities being intended to give weight and strength and staying power to the message.

The intention of the method is to protect the message from being analyzed or argued with, and the intention is effected in a number of different ways. These include (but are not limited to): (i) making the “distress volume” surrounding the message so high that the individual simply leaves it be because it is too difficult to approach; (ii) traumatizing a part of the system to the point of indifference to pain or horror, leaving an emotionless and affectless husk who would prefer to accept where they are as inevitable and unchangeable, rather than to reconnect with what they left behind; and (iii) training at least one member of the system, possibly more, as an internal programmer, who will protect the programming by punishing disobedience to programmed messages, repairing damage to the system’s programming, and otherwise acting, to a very limited extent, as the external programmer would.

Internal programmers can reinforce programmed messages, up to a point, by saying the same things the external programmer would say, or by acting out internally the same reprogramming techniques, including internal torture or internal use of programming equipment.

This can feel very real to the members of your system who are subjected to this internal reprogramming, but make no mistake – it is not the same thing as experiencing it externally.

This is why, as I noted in my last post, there is a fallback point at which the internal programmers are trained to shut the system down and return it to the external programmer as quickly as possible. There is simply no substitute for real life or direct experience – and although the programmers would prefer you to believe otherwise, they certainly understand this fact themselves. Self-maintaining programming is the ideal, but it has inherent limitations beyond which it simply cannot maintain itself. Some external maintenance is always necessary to keep mind control programming working as it was intended to do.

But what happens if there is no longer an external programmer to return to? What happens once you escape the abusive group and are no longer directly subject to their various techniques for controlling your mind?

What happens is, the programming begins to degrade. Like a wooden staircase in an abandoned house, it begins to dry out and rot away, even without any concerted effort on the part of the individual to undo it. It weakens simply through the passage of time and distance from the last direct, real-life reinforcement it received. It may still look solid for decades, and it might even continue to perform its function, but a person who wishes to use it as it was intended must be more and more careful of where they put their feet. The wood might not be strong enough to bear their weight. In a moment of carelessness, they might break right through it.

What is left, as the programming itself degrades, are the memories and the feelings caused by the trauma – and to those who have not done much work on addressing the programming in their system, the difference can be hard to appreciate. Since the programming is based on our own emotional responses, we can still feel the same terror, the same panic, the same reflexive need to obey because bad things happened when we didn’t, the same need to do a certain thing in order to avoid something else…  and there may still be objects in the system, or in the possession of specific system members, which allow the programming to be maintained more easily… and the internal programmers will still be doing their best to do their job, however abandoned they might feel to make the best of a bad situation. So initially, it may feel as though the programming is just as strong and impervious to change as it ever was.

But the difference is these are your feelings and your memories. They do not have to control you, because there is no longer any external force making sure you stay controlled – and without anyone left to make good on the threats that once bent you to their will, the threats are empty – simply so many bad memories. With no external force to back them up, they will continue to control you only for as long as you continue to do what they tell you to do. The dire consequences that drilled those lessons into place so long ago are no longer applicable.

The truth of so-called “self-maintaining programming” is not that the programming is actually maintaining itself, but that it is maintained simply because the person allows it to continue.

So the sooner you stop running, dig in your heels, and fight back, the sooner you will realize that change is possible. Simply not doing what you were originally told to do is actually already breaking the programming. It is the first step in rerouting the connections that link thought or event to action. This was how your brain was programmed in the first place, and this is how new connections and new routes are formed. If you are able to not do what the programming wants to make you do, then you can do all the rest as well.

Face the feelings and memories, address them, process them, and the “programmed effects” linked to them can be resolved. This is hard work – simple to say, but not easy to do – but it can be done, and it should be done. We all deserve to live a freer and more self-determined life, without the interference of someone else’s programmed controls in our minds. If self-reclamation is truly what we want, then we can all have lives free of these binding shadows.

Mind Control Programming Basics VI: Internal Programmers

Many dissociative systems which have been subjected to purposeful mind control techniques will have at least one, and possibly more, internal programmers in their system. They might be called something different, and they can appear in many different guises, but they will share a purpose.

Their purpose is to protect the programming in an individual system. This includes preventing other members of the system from analyzing or understanding the programming that was done to them ( or even realizing that there is any programming controlling them in the first place), and it also includes blocking the system and/or any therapist from examining or undoing the programming. Additionally, internal programmers might possess the power to activate or deactivate a programmed effect in the system or other similar tasks.

To a limited extent, internal programmers are also able to maintain the programming and to repair any damage – caused, for example, by an inadvertent glimpse caught of memories or events that should not be part of a particular self’s awareness, or by the efforts of a therapist to help the individual. If the damage extends beyond the capability of the internal programmers, their instructions will often include some means by which the system will be shut down and any existing internal communication broken off. This measure was originally intended to contain the damage until the individual returned to their external programmer for more a comprehensive repair.

The internal programmer of the system might be represented by a computer technician who maintains the central operating system, or a ranger walking the perimeter of his preserve, or a guard behind a particularly formidable gate, or a sentient shadow, or the image of the programmer who created it, or any one of a number of other metaphoric representations. They are likely to be well-hidden, and likely to want to stay that way – but as you begin to make more concerted efforts toward reaching and undoing the programming in your system, their presence will become more and more apparent, and eventually obvious.

Even when located, however, they will not make themselves easy to work with. They tend to be heavily programmed themselves, and they can and will make it very difficult for you to connect with them. They will know all your vulnerable spots and emotional hot buttons, all the places left raw and sensitive, and they will not hesitate to use those against you to drive you away from them and make you more vulnerable to them. (Remember that fear, shame, and guilt are the emotional base upon which programming is founded – if you are afraid of the internal programmers in your system, then you are giving strength to the very thing you are hoping to undo.)

Working with internal programmers can be further complicated because they often hold some very disturbing memories. For example, organized groups make it a practice with each and every system under their control to involve them to some extent in harming animals and/or harming other children. They do this for a number of reasons, the most commonly understood of which is to establish the guilt and shame of being a perpetrator in the minds of their victims. Internal programmers often also have the experience of harming others, but in their case it will be slanted more toward the creation of an identification with the programmers. It will be presented to them as a loyalty-increasing and bonding experience.

These types of memories are exceedingly difficult for most survivors to accept or process, and they can create a large (or, as the programmers hope, insurmountable) obstacle to working with these system members. In addition, the shame and guilt can mushroom to epic proportions upon realizing what some members of the system were forced to do, and further that they might very honestly profess to need, or even enjoy, these activities. These emotional reactions drive a wedge between one side of the system and the other, deepening the core conflict that already divides them and making it that much harder to reconcile the conflict or form connections.

As difficult as they make it and as repugnant as it may feel, however, it is important to reach this member (or these members) of your group. Your internal programmers can become strong and incredibly useful allies in healing, if you can get past the first impression and do the necessary work with them. They will know what kind of programming was done with your system, what sets the programs off, and how they can be deactivated if triggered, and their knowledge can help your system more safely deconstruct what is there.

They should not be ignored or passed over or left until a later time – when you make contact with them, it is a good idea to focus your time and attention on them until you are able to reach some accord with them, no matter how long that takes – not least because it is nearly impossible to effectively undo programming if the internal programmer is following behind you and repairing anything you manage to touch.

If you are truly free from the abusive group of your past, then these system members will be more vulnerable than they expect (and certainly more vulnerable than they will admit) simply through the natural decay of the programming. As I will address in more depth in a later post, programming does not last forever without external maintenance – the internal programmer can do some maintenance, but since the internal programmer will also be contained by programming, someone external also needs to be performing maintenance. When was the last time the external programmer contacted the internal programmer? How is the programming being maintained now? Is anyone doing this? When was the last time anyone did?

Do what needs to be done to remove any objects that are keeping your internal programmers focused on their programming, and then help them to begin the process of relearning. Rather than pushing them into defensiveness by directly challenging their perceived identity or their belief system, get your internal programmers thinking and help them to reach the necessary conclusions for themselves. It will be more meaningful to them overall if it’s a result of their own thought process.

You may never completely eradicate the effects of their one-time identification with the real-life programmers, but once they are able to identify themselves as part of your group instead of as part of the abusive group, then they can start to find new ways to redefine themselves. They can experiment with the options available in the wider world, and they can use the skills they were forced to learn or the characteristics they were forced to adopt in new ways that give them a different meaning.

It will feel horribly awkward at first, and they may resist or say it’s pointless and be inclined to give up, but they need to keep with it, and your entire group needs to be committed to seeing it through with them. New learning never feels comfortable or natural or like a good fit; it never has the broken-in ease of the things they have already been doing for years or for decades. New learning will never really feel natural until they have done it enough for it to become old and familiar and commonplace – but it will never reach that point, either, if you as a whole don’t stick with it through the awkward early days.

Internal programmers can become strong and valuable members of your system team. They can help you progress in ways that, from your current vantage point, might seem impossible. Please don’t neglect them or pass them over as being too difficult or complicated – they are not beyond help – they are part of you and part of your group, and they are worth the time and effort it takes to reach them.

Mind Control Programming Basics V: Object-Based Programming

As we all know, mind control programming is begun at a very young age – in some cases, even before birth. The obvious reason for this is, that the programmers wish to shape the mind before it has a chance to solidify any identity of its own. Although they are never able to entirely eradicate the original qualities of the self, the programmers will naturally do everything within their power to make sure that they have a permanent ascendency over those natural characteristics.

However, this then requires that the complexity of programming be formulated in a way that will be retained within a child’s mind. No matter how it is pushed to advance, a child can still understand things only in the ways that a child can. It is not possible to force an adult approach to information into a child’s mind.

Children do not begin to develop the ability to reason or think abstractly until they approach their teens. Younger children are much more concrete and literal in their understandings and interpretations, and programmers are required to make use of this concreteness in their work.

As a result, mind control programming will very often have concrete representations on the internal person to whom it is attached, or there will be a concrete internal structure representing a larger and more systemic program. Spin programs, for example, can be represented individually by a hand-held toy that spins, like a top with a spiral painted on it, while a more systemic spinning effect can be represented by a tornado or a centrifugal force machine. Chaos programs can be triggered by an internal child shaking a snow globe or blowing the seeds off a dandelion. The old recorded messages spoken by programmers can often be found playing on literal tape recorders or record players hidden in the internal landscape.

Individual parts may also indicate programming in their physical presentation. Someone who spent a great deal of time in sensory deprivation might appear internally as being deaf and blind (that is, without the use of their senses). People can appear as literal puppets or dolls or animals or have masks permanently attached to their faces. It is not at all unusual for someone’s internal appearance to reveal information about what was done to them.

The internal landscape may contain structures like merry-go-rounds or rainbows, “magic pools” or mirrors, which are also representative of a more systemic mind control program.

The importance of these objects is an interesting and often misunderstood aspect of programming. The mindless bond which forces the ascendency of an action (either external or internal), even against your will or your concerted efforts – is contained in the concrete manifestation. As long as there is the concrete object to shake, stare at, throw, move, enter, leave, turn on, turn off, or in any other way draw focus… the programming maintains its ascendency.

This is because, first, the training which created the program used that object or structure as a means to block out any and all information and input except what was relevant to the program itself, and this usually includes nothing more than the criteria for setting it off and the criteria for shutting it down. Second, it is because the concreteness of the object is a reinforcement to the mind. This is especially true with the structures – when parts of your system can still experience spinning, drowning, torture, drugging, or passing into another world as a literal event, it is very hard for any other parts of the system to resist it.

However, if you remove the concrete representation – turn off the tape recorders, unplug the machines, take away the toys, take down the walls, bar the doors – then the program has already been deactivated.

I think I can feel the waves of disbelief rippling back to me from that statement…
But it is nonetheless true.

On an individual level, the object is what makes the programmed system member impervious to new learning or any effort to change their thoughts or beliefs – not just resistant, but utterly impervious. Remove the object, and then they will merely be resistant – but reachable.

On a systemic level, the concrete structure is what gives the programming its ungovernable power. As long as any part of your system can literally re-experience internally any of the things done to them externally, or as long as any programming objects or structures remain to lend that concrete strength to the program, the programming will likely continue to influence you.

It might sound crazy, but it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the strength of the subjective experience in the internal world. Those of you who live in the outside world might think the internal world is unreal and that it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) have any power over you at all – but that world is very real to the parts of your system who live there – and what happens there can and does affect every part of your life.

The strength of your mind has been used against you all your life. It doesn’t have to remain that way, but it is up to you now whether to harness that power for yourself in aid of your healing, or whether you let it continue to run over you like a steamroller.

If you wish to make use of it, then you need to enter into your internal world and learn to speak the language of your own self. Learn how you have interpreted the things that happened to you, how they are represented in your world and in your system. And look for creative ways to counter the things you see. You don’t have to employ them immediately, but the most effective response will be a response that is emotionally congruent with what it is responding to, and in the internal world, emotional congruence can mean literal congruence.

Your group needs to talk to each other, get to know each other – understand why each of you is there, what experiences have led to your respective beliefs or appearances or jobs – understand the structures and objects in your world, what they represent, and what they do, before you make any profound changes.

Because removing the objects is important, but it is only the first, and perhaps the easiest step. After that, you will have to work with the parts whose beliefs and behaviors were wrapped up in those objects, insulated from any new learning or even from really knowing there was any other way than their own, whatever that was – work with them to help them recondition their minds and their selves. Removing the objects merely makes that possible – but if you are not able to talk to each other and work with each other in this way, then removing the object alone will not really make very much difference at all.

Mind Control Programming Basics IV: Resolving Fundamental Conflicts

The previous article in this series highlights one of the most glaring contradictions I personally have so far encountered in therapy: Our actions and beliefs and choices define who we are, for good or bad – so if I acted a certain way with my trainers, and I believed it was my choice to do so – whether or not programming is involved, doesn’t that define me as the person they made me?

Well – no, it doesn’t. I stuck on this point for a very long time, but ultimately I realized that there truly is a qualitative difference between choice and what I had been doing. If my choice is “do <this> or something worse will happen to you” or “do <that> and you will be rewarded” or “if you don’t do <this> then <so-and-so> will suffer” or “commit to us or we’ll kill you” or anything even remotely along those lines – then those really aren’t choices. They are presented as choices, and I was told they were choices, and I was made to feel as though I made choices – but I didn’t.

A true choice would be something like, “you can commit to us and spend every weekend here getting tortured and torturing others, or if you would prefer, you can join the school soccer team and spend your weekends at soccer games, or if there’s something else you would rather do with your time, then let’s discuss it.” That would be a choice – to be given the open-ended freedom to prefer them or to prefer any other thing out there.

On the other hand, if I am only given the choice between one version of X and another version of X – then where is the real choice? The options given in the perpetrators’ worlds are like presenting the letter X in two different fonts and trying to say that it’s a material difference, when you know that an X is an X no matter what font it’s printed in.

So any apparent contradiction inherent in this series is generally attributable to this point – the choices a person makes in response to torture or threats of torture – or even in response to an outdated fear that the torture could still happen again – are not true choices. Only when freedom to choose is truly understood and experienced can the choice be considered representative of who we are.

This is a useful idea to keep in mind when attempting to resolve the fundamental conflicts that divide our systems and turn us against each other internally – and resolution is not only possible, but necessary, because these conflicts benefit nobody but the programmers who encouraged them.

At the beginning, however, it can seem like an impossible task. System members who live in the “normal world” are appalled and disgusted and ashamed and horrified by what was done to them and what they were forced to do. Those who were originally victimized by the programmers feel rejected and despised by their own system, which is hurtful at best and doubtless confirms their own personal fears, but which might also be a realization of exactly what the programmers told them would happen in such a case. Either way, with their fears confirmed and the rest of the system rejecting them, they will be all that much more willing to remain in thrall to the programmers, who at least appear to accept and even occasionally approve of them for being who and what they are.

It can feel impossible – but resolution of these conflicts is ultimately no different from resolving a conflict between two individuals in the outside world – with the exception that we, as members of dissociative systems, do not have the option of simply agreeing that the conflict is too profound for resolution. There is no walking away from our selves. Consequently, if a system remains locked in rejection or refusal to accept the truths of all members of the system, then they will remain in conflict, and they will be making themselves miserable at best, and potentially more vulnerable to perpetuation of the abuse as well.

Imagine the scene between two outside people, where one rejects and decries the behaviors or lifestyle of the other – what are the likely results? Fracture of any existing relationship, or severe damage to the chances of creating and building a relationship… anger and resentment on both sides… and often enough, the person rejected can be pushed by that rejection into a firmer or more extreme embrace of the thing that is causing them to be rejected. This reaction can be incredibly damaging to individuals in the outside world, and it is no less potentially damaging or dangerous when it happens within a dissociative system.

If we wish to be free of the programmers’ influence and safe from any possibility of their continued control over us, then these conflicts must be resolved. Obviously acceptance doesn’t happen overnight – but at the very least, it is important that we do not reject outright any other member or group within our systems, no matter how devastating their information or how alien their viewpoint. Rejection will not make them go away, or make their memories not have happened. However terrible it is or was, they are still part of the system, and they still represent an important and valid part of your shared life together.

So in that effort, which is admittedly a herculean one, it can be helpful to remember that, however they come across now and whatever they have been doing in recent times – at one point, there was a child being forced to learn those things, a child being forced to do them. Their current-day attitudes and actions are representative of the heartbreak and tragedy and extreme suffering of your entire system – and they can’t help where they are right now. But somewhere underneath all that, each part of the system holds some vestige of the person you truly are – and change is possible for every member of the system if they are given the chance.

Neither side should be the only one to change or “give up” things – neither side is completely right, any more than either side is completely wrong. Neither should be asked to jump further or faster than they are ready to. But if each side can inch toward the middle point between them, that is the point where balance can be found.

The daily living side of the system can inch toward it by not rejecting – even if they can’t immediately accept. The side of the system that was involved with the programmers can inch toward it by not doing whatever particular thing they do.

The daily living side needs to work toward acceptance – of the system members themselves, not of their activities. The side of the system that had been involved in the programming needs to work toward doing something different – because simply not doing, although the necessary first step, can’t be the only step they take, or it will be a temporary reprieve at best.

The daily living side needs to widen their definition of the self to include and embrace all sides of the system – and the other side needs to widen their definition of themselves, so that they can become more than what the programmers made them to be.

The mind is a truly incredible and incomprehensibly powerful tool. We are living proof of the amazing lengths to which the mind can go, and the even further lengths to which it can be pushed. So don’t sell yourself short by thinking that there is nothing you can do to help yourself. The only thing that will make healing literally impossible is your belief that it is.

Mind Control Programming Basics III: Individuality Survives Programming

One central truth of programming, which all programmers know and work with but which we who were their victims can fail to realize, is that no amount of programming can entirely take the you out of you.

Victims of mind control programming can feel like there is nothing left to them that is truly their own – and fairly so. The point of mind control programming is to submit the individuality of the self and dominate it with an external, somewhat standardized set of controls. In order to do this, it invades every corner of the victim’s self and attempts to recreate the whole in accordance with a set pattern.

And this does work to a degree – but every programmer knows that individual characteristics cannot be completely erased. Of course they would like to erase them, and of course they make every effort to do so as much as possible, but it can never be fully realized the way they wish it could.

What this means for us is, that no matter how intensely or thoroughly we were programmed – no matter how early it started or how consumingly it was pursued – programming cannot take away the individuality we were each born with. Even brainwave programming is unable to completely rewrite the self. Underneath everything that was done to us, each part of us retains some vestige of the individual self we were born to be. A blank template is never truly blank.

Notwithstanding all arguments to the contrary, this is absolutely a true statement.

Personal identity is something that programmers must work around, not something that they can completely remove to replace it with something else. However, they will tell us that they have completely rewritten our selves to their own styling – because whether or not it’s true, they want us to believe it’s true – so they will say it often, and they will plant the idea in many different parts of our systems – and on the surface, when programming kicks in and we find our will and our consciousness completely overridden, we will reinforce that message with our own fearful belief – but it is not true.

Programming can foist false beliefs and unwelcome actions upon us. It can make us betray ourselves and the things we truly believe and genuinely want. But it’s like applying a coat of stain to a wooden table. Even the most absorbent wood, if cut in half after staining, will have a central core where the stain has not managed to penetrate. Likewise, even the most absorbent personalities cannot be fully reshaped by programming. There will always be that base imprint of the original personality to be dealt with. And even if the programmers’ “workaround” is to crush the base personality to dust – dust is still something – the base personality was still there, and the dust of it remains there, an eternal invitation to hope.

There are three basic ways in which programmers work around the personality imprint.

First, they make use of the known personality structure of the individual in creating the programming. In its most elementary form, some examples of this include – if the person tends to be fearful, the programmers will focus more intensely on evoking fear to make the program stick. If the person is stubborn or competitive, the programming will be framed as a challenge. If the person has a particular skill or ability, then this will be used against them. This is usually much more complex than the examples given, but for the sake of simplicity, I think they serve to convey the idea.

Second, if the intention is to create a split whose eventual use will strongly conflict with one or more of the individual traits of the person, the split will be created with more degrees of separation from the core splits. For example, a core split might be subjected to brainwave programming, and then a series of other splits created from that programmed core split, to take advantage of the foundational brainwave programming as well as to get a little more distance from the original self. Core splits can withstand more in the course of programming – they are stronger, less likely to fracture or be otherwise destroyed by the rigors of the programming process – but core splits are also, obviously, closest to the core, which means the original personality imprint is strongest in them. In fringe splits, the personality imprint is weaker and can be crushed, broken, or  made to submit more easily – but it still can’t be erased.

Third, the programmers use the anomalous actions and ideas that they have forced into certain parts of the system to create a dissonance within the overall system. With enough drugs and enough abuse and enough training, parts of the system can be taught to do anything and genuinely believe they like it, or need it, or want it – and these parts and their activities provide the tension of conflict against those who not only need or want completely opposite things, but are unable to understand or accept that any part of their system would want those things.

Prior to any therapeutic intervention, these core conflicts are fundamental in keeping the parts of the system controlled by the programmers isolated and outside of general awareness. The activities and ideas of the system members created and controlled by the programmers are so antithetical to the “system-created” (unprogrammed) members of the group, that the system as a whole is very willing to look the other way and determinedly pretend that those things aren’t happening or don’t exist.

Therapy can bring the existence of these conflicts more into awareness – but if one side of the system remains unwilling to accept the other, this maintains or can even deepen the division between them.

Resolution of these conflicts is essential to healing – and in that effort, it may be helpful to remember that each of the members of a dissociative system does share a basic template of self. As much as the programmers might have liked to strip you of all individuality and remake you entirely as they chose, this was not and is not possible.

No matter how different each system member has become over time and through their own experiences, there is still a commonality between each and every one of part of your system, and this can work to your advantage if you choose to make use of it.

More on that next time.

Mind Control Programming Basics II: The Emotional Roots

The first thing to which most people point as the basic root of mind control programming is trauma. To a certain extent, this is true. The various traumas created by programmers are a key element in mind control training. But – trauma is not the actual foundation on which programming is built.

The difference between trauma and programming is that, in programming, there is an end goal toward which the trauma is used, with the trauma itself being merely a step in making the end goal happen. A trauma alone is merely pointless pain, and even in programming, the trauma itself teaches nothing.

Programming a mind (or programming an individual member of a dissociative system) involves shaping the beliefs and the world view of that mind/member, and then using those beliefs to impress an action or a set of actions. This is applicable to something as basic as a sexual slave or something as complex as a computer system that monitors and controls the workings of the larger dissociative system. There is no actual computer that gets implanted into the brain – rather, there is a part of the brain that is trained to perceive itself as a computer and to act accordingly – and while each part of our mind was separated by trauma and then was subjected to additional trauma in the process of learning, the trauma is not the programming. It is the message learned that is the actual programming.

Trauma is used primarily to evoke overwhelming emotion. The emotion is then used to make the programming, the message or lesson that represents the end goal, stick in our minds with tenacity. The emotional foundation allows programming to overpower any acquired logic, common sense, or other resistive measures we employ against it. The trauma is not the programming, but the emotion it evokes is what gives programming its power.

This might seem like a real nit-picking distinction. Who cares whether the trauma is the programming or is just a step in making the programming effective? It sucks either way, so… why does this matter?

But it is actually a very important distinction to understand if one hopes to approach and undo any mind control programming. It is critically important to separate the trauma from the message, and to understand that, although they are linked, they are not the same thing. They form a chain of progress – each link important, but each separate, and each requiring separate attention. Looking at a single link will not resolve the whole issue – addressing the trauma alone will not address the programming.

The chain of progress is: trauma > emotion evoked by trauma > message or lesson to be learned.

The trauma is whatever it is. For some programming, any trauma would be effective. The more complex the intended program will be, the more the trauma will be tailored to provide specific feelings on which the programmer can build.

The unholy triad of emotion on which programming is built is comprised of fear, guilt, and shame. If you think back on a time when a programmed response was triggered and look at the emotion surrounding the urge or idea or need, at base it will be at least one of these three.

Some programs, or some members of the group who have been heavily programmed as individuals, may operate or manifest with absolutely no emotion at all – but this does not mean there is not an emotional foundation. A program can build on the emotional foundation already in place. An individual may repress their emotions, or hand them off or spin them out to other members of the system, or have a mirror image or twin where one feels and the other does not, or some other means of disowning or avoiding emotion – but the very fact that there is a means in place to handle the emotion is evidence that the emotion exists.

The trick in that case is for the person in question to own their feelings, rather than using the habitual means of disowning them – sometimes this connection of the emotion to the person who owns it is enough to shake the programmed responses loose all by itself. This is because actually feeling what has been pushed away for so long, and perhaps in direct contradiction of what they were told (“you will not feel” is a common, if frequently only implied, message in programming)… feeling for probably the first time in decades, is enough to make that individual stop and think – and thought is the enemy of programming.

Programming is intended to undercut thought, to happen before thought can intervene or to be carried out by members of the system so conditioned to obedience that they never think for themselves. This is why programming relies on the emotional overwhelm caused by trauma. Fear, guilt, and shame can short-circuit our logic and make an end-run around our common sense. These feelings can manipulate us with beliefs that are compelling and unavoidable, despite their obvious lack of rationality. They can make us act in ways that logic and common sense would talk us out of, or they can prevent us from acting even when we know we should, or they can skew our perceptions so we see what isn’t there or fail to see what everyone else can in a situation, subsequently skewing our reactions as well.

Tying programming to primal emotions – so that we are afraid to look at it, let alone touch it, so that we are terrified to speak of it, so that we are ashamed of what we have done and don’t want anyone else to know, so that we feel guilty for things that happened to us or to others and don’t want to admit (sometimes even to ourselves) the magnitude of our own feelings of guilt – this emotional bondage traps us into continued obedience. The emotions can remain powerful and strong even decades after the last time a programmer has worked with us.

But the emotions are ours. They are not the programming. They are our feelings – our fear, our shame, our guilt – which we allow to dominate us because we don’t dare to argue with them or fight them or in any way test their validity – or because we believe we can’t bear to feel them and we are willing to “do anything” to avoid them or make them stop.

And so the programming – the actual message that is protected by our own emotional response – also remains alive within us.

Separate the feeling from the message, and the message can be evaluated for what it is without the emphasis and strength and power that our own emotions have added to it.

Trauma drives home the messages and lessons of programming with emotional strength and force – but we don’t have to let the programming keep drawing its power from us. We are giving it the only power it has – and we can take that power away from it too. If we accept the feelings instead of being willing to “do anything” to escape them, then the threat inherent in the programming (“obey me or else…”) is suddenly an empty bluff.

This is a reframe of how programming is commonly viewed – but reframing programming into an approachable and workable phenomenon that is amenable to change (and it is) is part of what healing involves. Healing is possible if we are willing to look beyond our own assumed limitations and risk the discomfort of changing the status quo.

Discrimen etiamnunc porro.
Hazard, yet forward.
(School motto of Seton Hill College)

Mind Control Programming Basics I: Introduction

It has been in my mind for a while that I wanted to write a series of posts addressing the basic principles of mind control programming. These would address some of the foundations on which programming is based and some of the myths I am aware of regarding how programming works, with the intention of providing some useful general information for those who wish to address any mind control programming in their own worlds.

Life has kept me away from the blog for a few months, but now that I have some free space in my head, I am getting my series underway.

Although there are many groups who use mind control techniques, and each of them have their own unique programming focus, designed to suit their own goals and group philosophy, there are still certain basic principles of programming which apply across the board. No matter the group to which your abusers belonged, no matter the relative level at which they were able to employ mind control techniques, no matter the jobs for which your group was created and trained – these basic principles will still be applicable.

Topics so far on the list are:

• the foundational roots of programming
• internal programmers
• the myth of self-maintaining programming
• factors that contribute to keeping programming in place

Should any reader wish to see a specific addition to the list of topics, I would accept suggestions.

A Lesson I Learned From the Soaps

I don’t have the head space for anything serious right now. All I have to write about are the ridiculous things I think about when I’m not being serious, so I guess I’ll post that.

I was watching my soap opera last night and it occurred to me, I never see anyone on a soap really holding on to their problems. Of course, that might be because they have so many new problems coming up all the time, who has time for the old ones — but that doesn’t make them unique. I have problems coming up all the time too.

My life could be a soap opera — of a particularly dark and depressing variety.

But one clear difference between me and the people on the soaps is, they don’t carry yesterday’s problems forward to make a bigger problem for today.

Tonight, Chelsea doesn’t want her boyfriend coming with her to visit her mom. Is that because Chelsea is remembering that, the last time mommy saw this boy, he wasn’t Chelsea’s boyfriend… he was an accomplice after the fact to Chelsea’s commission of manslaughter? Is she afraid that mommy will disapprove?

(That would be what I was worried about!)

But no… Chelsea and her boyfriend both seem to have entirely forgotten about those dark days when there was a body hidden in the sorority basement and the law was breathing down their necks. For them, today’s problem is all about today.

Now, I don’t normally see anything worth learning in a soap opera, but this particular observation got me thinking.

Obviously there are plenty of things I can’t leave behind so easily (or at all). My past drags on my every present step like a weighted chain. There are memories and conditioning and programming of which I will never be free until I do the work required to make it happen.

But there are also plenty of other things that I hold on to more voluntarily — and completely unnecessarily.

For example, the thousand and one examples of my social ineptitude, starting at about age 5 and accumulating through the 30+ years since then. I don’t even remember the earliest examples of this, except as anecdotes that my mother helpfully repeats at family dinners, but even the ones I don’t remember can become clubs with which I batter my own confidence and self-esteem… assuming I have the temerity to develop any. Or else they are just very effective factors in preventing me from developing them.

And that’s just one example, among the many other unnecessary thoughts, feelings, and memories I collect like an emotional packrat.

And the question is — why? Why do I cling so tightly to these absolutely useless feelings and reactions? I’m not gaining anything from them, I’m not benefitting from them… at best, they make me feel bitter and frustrated and resentful without being able to do anything about it, and at worst, they are means to cause myself a little extra hurt and damage.

So why do I hold on to them? Why are they so hard to let go of?

I really don’t know the answers to those questions — but I do know that I would be better off if I could let go of them — or better yet, if I had never picked them up to hold on to in the first place. Like Chelsea and her guy, it would be better to leave yesterday’s mistakes behind instead of carrying every single one of them forward into today. In this instance (if in no other), I might actually benefit by learning a lesson from the soaps.

Not Every Trigger Is About Programming

Triggers and programming.

Here’s the thing — the word “trigger” is not uniquely linked to abuse survivors who have been subjected to programming. It is a universal term for any stimulus that evokes the torrent of memories, physical feelings, and emotions of a trauma in its sufferer. Every PTSD sufferer has things that trigger them. This includes non-dissociative trauma survivors like war veterans, suvivors of a single adult rape, battered wives, and car accident victims — and it includes those who have suffered purely emotional traumas, such as a sudden death, a bitter divorce, or even a bad breakup.

Because what is perceived as traumatic is a purely subjective interpretation (i.e. what might traumatize one person might be taken in stride by another), it can fairly be said that every human being will suffer something they perceive as traumatic at some point in their life — which means that every single person we meet will have something that they perceive as a trigger.

It should therefore be obvious that a “trigger” does not necessarily point to programming. It does point to a perceived trauma of some sort, but not every trauma is caused by programming — not even for people who have been subjected to mind control techniques.

So it’s a little aggravating when “it’s programming” begins to be the refrain sung in response to every triggered response in a survivor’s life — especially when the responses being described have nothing at all to do with programming.

If programs were really being set off by every trigger to which that result is attributed, then the programmer had to be incredibly inept. Consider — how discreet would a real mind control program be if it could be set off by commercials on tv and random comments on the street? How controllable would a mind control program be if that were the case? And yet, the whole point of mind control is control. And it’s not control for any idiot who happens to say “ET phone home” or to make a commercial that happens to feature the concept of going home  — mind control programming is intended to give control to the programmers and only the programmers.

And no, the mind control groups are not infiltrating Hollywood studios or landing advertising accounts for major product lines so that they can manipulate the movies and tv shows and commercials with programming cues — if you believe this, then you are in desperate need of a reality check.

Believe me, the programmers do not have to go to such obscure lengths to reach the people they want. Such an idea is absolutely ludicrous. Why would they bother? If you are programmed and you haven’t done anything to address the programming, then they already know where you are and how to reach you. Someone in your system has already let them know those things.  And if they do still want you, then you probably aren’t nearly as far away from them as you want to think you are. They don’t need a cleverly constructed commercial to get to you. They have much easier — and more controlled — ways to do that.

Subsequently, no well-constructed program is going to be cued by what we see on tv or what the average person says to us or what we do in the humdrum routine of our everyday lives.

Programming is triggered only in response to something you have done (for example, don’t-tell programming), or in direct response to a cue from a programmer or a proxy for the programmer. Nothing else. And if it is being cued by a person, then it will require a very specific and very precise formula to cue it into action, something that isn’t going to happen just by chance. Some of these formulas are so complex and arcane that the programmers themselves need them written down in order to remember them from session to session.

The point is, the programmers do not want their programs being cued at any time except when the programs are intended to run. That is why programming doesn’t get triggered — it gets cued — and the nuanced difference there is intention.

I’m not certain why anyone would want to put more of their life, their responses, their behaviors, outside of their control than necessary — maybe it’s just a reflection of how out of control we can all feel at times — but it really doesn’t help us to start attributing more to programming than it fairly deserves. It doesn’t help us to throw away more control than necessary or to make the work of healing appear harder than it already is.

Mind control programming presents its own very difficult challenges to overcome — but triggers are a traumatic stress response, not a programmed response — and like the triggers created by any other type of trauma, our triggers are amenable to therapeutic intervention if we want to make a dedicated and consistent effort at working to defuse them.

Another Kind of Internet Predator

In my earlier articles on internet predators (here, here, here, and here), I spoke primarily about cult recruiters and other perpetrators trained in mind control who claim to be dissociative survivors in order to find new victims. These predators are difficult to recognize because they are going out of their way to look like members of the community — but at the same time, their methods of operation can become more apparent if you know what to look for.

However — not all predators are recruiters. Some of them have nothing to do with organized perpetration of any kind — except for the fact that they have been victimized by those groups. They are survivors, just like you are, but they can also be predators.

Dissociative survivors who are either not actively involved in therapy or not very far along in the process are very likely to have parts of their systems engaged in activities about which the “day people” know nothing. They might be acting out their pain and trauma in any number of ways — through prostitution, or excessive casual sex, heavy drinking, drug use, attending S&M clubs or psuedo-slavery groups — or some of them might be choosing to use the techniques learned at the hands of their perpetrators to hurt others.

Dissociative systems created through purposeful programming are not composed only of the hurt children longing for comfort and the noble adults who have managed to hold the system together through all these years. Survivors who have been subjected to organized mind control programming will have some very very dark parts to their worlds — such as people who learned to abuse others, or people who learned to program others, or people who learned by force of necessity to like the world in which they were trapped. These parts can and do cause serious damage.

Some might feel it’s unfair to classify these people as predators simply because they’re also survivors. Haven’t we all been hurt? Don’t we all deserve understanding and compassion? Aren’t we all trying to heal?

Well… we have all been hurt. But we’re not all trying to heal — and even if we are, we start at the beginning of the road, not the end of it. And some people stay lingering at the beginning of the road for months. Or years. Or decades. Or forever. The simple fact of being in therapy does not make all survivors safe and harmless. If a system’s dark ones have not been addressed, then whatever it is that they do to vent their own pain and rage and fear and frustration — they’ll keep right on doing it.

So you’re free to expend all the compassion and understanding you want — but don’t kid yourself into thinking that your compassion and understanding will be the magic balm that will reach these wounded souls and kindle the light of warmth and caring.

Not everyone is waiting for the one person in the world who will reach out to them. Some people are simply waiting for the next person who’s stupid enough to try.

Sure, they’re acting out of their own pain and woundedness — but that doesn’t change the fact that they are dangerous.

Anyone who purposely attempts to cause damage to someone else is a predator. That includes survivors who would rather hurt others than help themselves. It also includes survivors who simply haven’t gotten to the point in their healing where different choices can be made .

Dissociative survivors, and especially the front-world people of dissociative systems, want communities where they can find understanding and validation and support — of course they do. It’s a basic human desire to find connection and society. And I’m not discouraging any of us from doing that.

But don’t throw caution to the winds when you do. Don’t assume that the system members you meet and get to know represent the totality of someone else’s system. Don’t assume that every member of someone’s system looks kindly on you or wants to be your friend. Don’t assume that the person you think of as your friend is incapable of looking on you with predatory interest.

Guard your own safety and your own healing work. Talk within your group about the people you know and the interactions you have with them. Be sensitive to the way things are presented to you, and to interactions that seem intended to hit your sensitive emotional hot buttons, pushing you into some action that you wouldn’t have done if your feelings hadn’t been so worked up. Don’t believe another survivor blindly, especially if they’re telling you negative information about yourself, your other friends, or your therapist. Don’t let your child parts have unsupervised interaction with anyone. (As I’ve said before, a therapist or a friend with nothing to hide and no agenda to pursue will have no reason to object to your supervision.)

And if you can’t do these things — if you can’t talk to your system members or supervise your child parts — then at the very least, keep all your interactions with other survivors in a group setting, where the public nature of the conversation will impose some restraint and substantially lessen the likelihood that your vulnerabilities can be taken advantage of.

Having friends is a good thing — but not at the risk of your own safety, stability, or chance to heal.

Taking Control of Triggers

Triggers seem to be part and parcel of every trauma survivor’s experience. Any survivor of any trauma can be triggered into post-traumatic flashbacks – and for dissociative survivors, navigating potential triggers can sometimes be like trying to cross a demilitarized zone… although the land looks peaceful and quiet and empty, any move we make could touch off an unseen and unexpected explosion, dissolving the apparent peace into a chaotic nightmare.

Identifying and learning to manage triggers can absorb a big chunk of therapy time. We learn about being mindful of what leads to a trigger, and we learn grounding techniques to employ if we are triggered. We learn about relaxation and self-soothing and “acting through the fear”. We learn about biofeedback and how to breathe through anxiety and panic attacks and how a support network of other survivors can help us to feel more validated and less like a freak.

All these things are very helpful in terms of managing triggers – but is that good enough? What about defusing them so that we are no longer plagued by their intrusion into our lives?

Defusing a trigger is a difficult, but at the same time fairly straightforward task in cases of “simple” PTSD  –that is, PTSD that arises from a single or short-term trauma such as being mugged or raped, or being in a war zone for a period of time. These things are undeniably painful and traumatic, but the fact that the trauma is a discrete and easily-defined event makes it that much easier to identify where triggers are coming from (because the number of potential sources is much more limited), and easier for the survivor of the trauma to make the connection between the trauma and the trigger.

In the complex post-traumatic morass that is DID, where there are frequently decades of abuse and hundreds or thousands of individual events from which to choose, identifying the source of a trigger can be much more complicated. And it is extremely taxing on a survivor’s strength and energy to withstand the distressing images, the terror, the rage, the physical pain or other feelings – in short, all the elements that can comprise a response to a trigger – let alone to do anything more productive than get through it.

However, it is worth our time and energy to analyze our triggers, and here’s why.

Our triggers are often (although not always) linked to definable phenomena. They might link to a memory or event that we aren’t ready to deal with yet – and if that’s the case, then we’ll simply have to cope with the trigger until we are ready to deal with its source – but there may be some triggers whose sources lie in things we can deal with right now.

It is therefore worth listening to what our triggers can teach us. If a specific activity triggers a particular memory, then look at as much of that memory as you are able. If a feeling is triggered, follow the feeling, define it, link it to other times when you felt the same way, follow the chain back through however many events it takes until you arrive at the source (or sources). (Please note that I am not at this point discussing programming getting triggered – that’s a completely different subject. What I’m saying here refers only to PTSD-related triggers.)

PTSD triggers spring from the rejected or denied or repressed elements of our own experiences and memories.

Consequently, being able to face and accept our own truths is what takes the power away from these triggers.

If we can accept our truths, learn about them, talk about them, feel the feelings in connection with the right event (instead of having them triggered by fifty other similar-but-different events), express what needs to be expressed – process the memory, internalize it and connect to it, and begin to actually heal from it – then the triggers that were once associated with that experience or person or memory will fade away.

Connecting to our own experiences means that our mind will no longer need to use subconscious tricks to catch our attention and remind us of our secrets. If we know and connect to the truth of why we feel or act or react a certain way, then we will no longer be caught off guard by our own spontaneous cross-association. There will be no more uncontrolled linking of our pain to every similarity we meet because we are unaware of the one thing to which that pain actually belongs. We will be aware, we will be connected, and the mystery will be gone (as will the trigger).

Ignoring the truth of our histories, however horrendous they were, will never undo what has already happened. Pretending or denying or ignoring reality is not, in the end, in our best interest. We already know the horrors that are there – we have already seen and experienced them, and we have already survived them. It is doing ourselves no favor in the current day to encourage ourselves in the belief that the one thing we can’t handle is to remember them. Such a belief is a denial of our own strength and potential; it suffocates us with our own unnecessary defeatism.

If we truly want to heal, if we truly want to feel better in the long run (and not just run from bandaid to bandaid in a quest for immediate short-term relief) – then we will need to stop running from ourselves and our truths – we need to stop giving in to our irrational fears that we are too weak to remember what we were already strong enough to survive.

Bandaids are easier, but real healing is worth every tear we shed to achieve it.

Straightening Out “Your Legitimate Rights”

There’s a document making its way around the web world right now (for about the dozenth time) which purports to list “Your Legitimate Rights”.

This list has been circulated as part of the “loose paper” in dialectical behavior therapy groups for about ten years, and it was finally revised and published as part of a recent dialectical behavior therapy workbook. For those who are unfamiliar with dialectical behavior therapy, it is a cognitive-behavioral treatment program designed specifically to treat borderline personality disorder.

Unfortunately, as a guide for borderlines, the list of rights falls more than a little short. It is lacking some codicils to address the errors that so frequently accompany borderline thinking.

This lack was addressed in discussion when the list was distributed as part of group therapy, but on the net, I usually see it posted as a standalone document without any of the necessary additional explanations — so I’m adding those myself.

For anyone who has not yet seen this list of rights, here it is:

Your Legitimate Rights

• You have a right to need things from others.
• You have a right to put yourself first sometimes.
• You have a right to feel and express your emotions or your pain.
• You have the right to be the final judge of your beliefs and accept them as legitimate.
• You have the right to your opinions and convictions.
• You have the right to your experience – even if it is different from that of other people.
• You have a right to protest any treatment or criticism that feels bad to you.
• You have a right to negotiate for change.
• You have a right to ask for help, emotional support, or anything else you need (even though you may not always get it).
• You have a right to say no; saying no doesn’t make you bad or selfish.
• You have a right not to justify yourself to others.
• You have a right not to take responsibility for someone else’s problem.
• You have a right to choose not to respond to a situation.
• You have a right, sometimes, to inconvenience or disappoint others.

Doesn’t that just make you feel all empowered and strong?
Well, don’t let that feeling run away with you just yet.

The problem is, there are a few common errors in borderline thinking which are exacerbated rather than helped by this list of rights, and that is why it requires additional discussion when it is distributed in therapy groups for borderlines. The list as it stands is open to a number of potential abuses through misinterpretation — and borderlines are a population for whom misinterpretation is not merely a symptom – it’s an art form.*

The most confused member of a dissociative system doesn’t hold a candle to a borderline when it comes to misinterpretation. There is no other population who can so universally manage to take a pat on the head, turn it into a kick in the teeth, and then respond in kind with interest and feel completely justified about doing it. And yet they wonder why the diagnosis has such a negative stigma in the therapeutic community? Where’s the source of wonder? They earn every bit of negative press they get.

In any event — this list of rights has always required additional discussion simply because the rules of appropriate interaction can never be assumed to be self-explanatory to a borderline — and it’s not doing anyone any favors to circulate the list without the discussion. So here, for the record, are the codicils to Your Legitimate Rights.

You have a right to need things from others.
This is true. You do have a right to need things from others. What you do not have the right to do is expect that others will meet your need just because you have it. Nobody owes you anything. Nobody is obliged to meet your needs. Needing something from others does not make you wrong, but failing to meet your need does not make them wrong either – and attacking someone because they don’t meet your needs does make you wrong.

You have a right to put yourself first sometimes.
This is true — but unfortunately, most borderlines are already far too self-centered as it is. They benefit a lot more from learning how to see things from others’ perspectives than from being encouraged to greater self-involvement.

You have a right to feel and express your emotions or your pain.
By all means, express it – in appropriate places, and in appropriate ways. However, beware of the many inappropriate ways in which you might be tempted to express your pain. For example, stalking someone is an inappropriate response. Another inappropriate response would be filing frivolous complaints with a work supervisor, the police, or an ethics board in an attempt to get someone fired, arrested, or reprimanded. You do not have the right punish anyone because you are in pain, not even if you think your pain is their fault.

You have the right to be the final judge of your beliefs and accept them as legitimate.
Very true – but of course, the same thing might be said to a schizophrenic. A schizophrenic might believe that the government is bugging their television and that wearing tin foil hats will protect them from thought interference, and they have every right to accept their beliefs as legitimate. On the other hand, it’s not likely that anyone else will agree with them. You might think you sound a lot more rational than the average schizophrenic – but that doesn’t necessarily mean you do.

You have the right to your opinions and convictions.
Again, true – but your conviction of being right does not subjectively mean you are right, so have a care what behavior you base on your opinions.

You have the right to your experience – even if it is different from that of other people.
True as it stands.

You have a right to protest any treatment or criticism that feels bad to you.
Yes, you can protest. But your freedom to protest is the same freedom that allows someone else to criticize you in the first place, so be aware that protesting the criticism is not the same thing as attempting to prevent the criticism, and it is definitely not the same thing as seeking revenge for being criticized. A revenge plot is not a protest.

You have a right to negotiate for change.
True – but “negotiation” implies “compromise” – and “compromise” means you won’t necessarily get everything you want. You might not even get everything you think you need. A negotiation has not failed if you don’t get everything you want. However, it does fail if you get huffy or whiny or accusatory because you aren’t getting your way.

You have a right to ask for help, emotional support, or anything else you need (even though you may not always get it).
Well, at least they tried to include the important codicil here. You may not always get what you ask for. Again – that doesn’t make you wrong for asking, but nobody else is wrong for refusing you either.

You have a right to say no; saying no doesn’t make you bad or selfish.
True. You have this right. Other people have the same right, and it doesn’t make them bad or selfish either. Even when the person they’re saying “no” to is you.

You have a right not to justify yourself to others.
True. And nobody has to justify themselves to you either, so you do not have the right to throw a hissy fit if you don’t get the full explanation for why something has happened, or if you don’t like the explanation you get, or if you don’t believe the explanation you get. Nobody owes you an explanation at all.

You have a right not to take responsibility for someone else’s problem.
True. And nobody has to take responsibility for your problems either, not even when you really really want to make your problems into someone else’s fault or say that they’re someone else’s responsibility to fix. If the problem involves your reactions or your feelings or your behaviors or anything else that is yours then the problem is also yours.

You have a right to choose not to respond to a situation.
This is poorly phrased. It was not originally intended to read as though people were being sucked into responses they didn’t want to give, but to address the frequency with which people wanted to respond to situations that they had no business involving themselves in. Maybe this was supposed to be a nice way of saying that there are some situations to which you should choose not to respond.

You have a right, sometimes, to inconvenience or disappoint others.
True. And others have the right to inconvenience or disappoint you – and if they do, it is not an excuse to hate on them, to hurt them, to trash them behind their backs, or to otherwise attempt to cause them harm. Everyone has the right to protect their own rights – and standing up for your rights does not mean you can trample on somebody else’s rights.

We all need to learn our rights as free human beings – so many of us were denied those rights when we were young – but many of us, and borderlines especially, also need to learn how to meet our needs and stand up for our rights without infringing on the rights of everyone around us.

If we step on someone else’s rights in the current day, or if we hold expectations of others that are not respectful of their rights, or if we attempt to “punish” others for disappointing us or hurting our feelings or otherwise failing to be or do what we want of them – then we are acting the part of an abuser ourselves. That is never benign, it is never justified, and it is never small enough to escape being wrong.

We deserve better treatment than that from the people around us – and our friends, our relatives, our co-workers, our therapists, and even the strangers on the street deserve better treatment from us.

* If anyone is wondering where I get the nerve to make these sweeping generalizations about borderlines – it comes from twelve years of experience with them. My experience includes long-term contact with over 150 diagnosed borderlines in a variety of inpatient, outpatient, individual, and group settings. So when I say “borderlines”, I mean the majority of the diagnosed borderlines I have known — and my experience did not involve any kind of selective process. Rather, it developed over time simply from whatever walked in the door. So I believe that what I have seen is a fairly representative sample of the borderline population in general. And that is where my generalizations come from.

The 50-Minute Hour Is Not Enough

Lack of sufficient time in therapy is a frequent complaint. For dissociative clients, the 50-minute hour is an unproductive limit – it’s just too short a time within which to arrive, get acclimated, get into something serious, do some work on it, and then to get reoriented enough to go on with the day.

Many therapists have also recognized the inefficacy of the 50-minute hour, and they have responded by providing 90-minute or 2-hour sessions. There are even some therapists who will go beyond that. And many dissociative clients who are in therapy attend sessions two or three times a week.

Considering the amount of psychic energy required, that’s a lot of time spent in therapy – so then – why is it still not enough?

And clearly it isn’t – dissociative patients remain locked in uncommunicative darkness within their systems, they continue to go in and out of hospital programs, they continue to struggle with suicidal or self-injurious urges, eating disorders remain trenchant, flashbacks and phobias maintain a dominant interference, memories plague them without being processed – and this is often just as true for survivors after five or ten or twenty years of therapy as it was when they began. Despite the vaunted treatability of dissociative disorders, they somehow appear at the same time to be singularly resistant to treatment. Why is this?

I believe the the problem lies in the unspoken expectation that therapy can do all the work for us. Please note, I did not say the therapist was doing all the work – I said therapy. It’s not that everyone expects to just show up and have that be enough, or that they aren’t willing to do the work required – there are plenty of people who work very hard at their healing when they are actually in a therapy session.

But what about all the hours and hours of time that we are not in session? Are we using those hours to continue what work we can do on our own, or are we wasting them in “just getting through” until our next therapy appointment? Do we talk to other members of our systems and work on building relationships with them ourselves, or would we prefer that they just do all their talking to the therapist? Do we work to find ways to reach all the members of our systems, or do we prefer to stay with the “nice” ones – the helpful adults, the least broken of the children, the least aggravating of the teenagers?

The 50-minute hour of therapy is not enough – in fact, no amount of therapy is enough – to make up the lack if we are not working with our systems on our own time. And, it is not enough for the members of our systems to talk to only to the therapist – in fact, it’s not even practical to assume that this should be enough for them, or to imagine that healing can be achieved this way.

Take your system as you know it – if you don’t know your system very well, multiply the number of members you do know by five (that’s a very conservative estimate), and if you think you know your system pretty well, multiply the number you know by two – then multiply that number by 500. That’s a rough (and again, very conservative) estimate of how many therapy hours it would take for each person to introduce themselves, get to feel comfortable, share even a few of the secrets and the traumas they have experienced, and barely begin to heal from them. How many years of therapy does that end up being for you?

And those hours do not account for the challenges that might still lie ahead and which might, when they happen, need to occupy the therapy time for a while.

Those hours are also not taking into account all the little day-to-day issues that will be presented to your therapist for resolution if your group proves unwilling to handle them internally.

How many people have had a sad or sulky child part or an irritated teenager firing off embarrassing emails to the therapist or occupying actual therapy time getting answers on simple issues like “I want time to do this and so-and-so won’t let me” or “why can’t I have that thing I want” or “she won’t listen to me” or “she hurt my feelings” or any one of a hundred other similar things?

How much of your therapy time has been wasted resolving issues that could have been resolved just as easily – more easily, in fact, and with a lot less embarrassment too – if your group just settled it themselves? I mean, do you really need your therapist to explain why your child parts can’t eat cookies if the adults need to stay on a healthy diet, or helping to establish rules to keep the tweens from driving, or soothing someone’s hurt feelings, or mediating every dispute that comes up? Is that really the best use of that time and that resource?

There are a lot of things that the system members can mediate, explain, teach, or resolve themselves. They can soothe and comfort the children, they can establish and maintain their own rules for how to function safely and responsibly in the outside world, they can devise a fair schedule around the constraints of the outside world for members who want time of their own, and they can take care of the supervision of children or teenagers during their outside time, among other things. Some memories can be processed even without therapeutic assistance, and the group can brainstorm for new ideas or new solutions where needed and then experiment with implementation themselves. Therapy work doesn’t have to end when the session ends. But all of this is only true if the group is working together.

If being “in session” is the only time we interact with our systems, if the system members don’t talk to each other in between sessions (or talk to each other at all), if we’re waiting for all the work to get done in therapy… then therapy will go on forever – literally.

And no matter how long we go or how often we go to therapy… if we cling to the belief that anything can compensate for our own lack of internal communication and cohesion, then we will still be presenting an insuperable block to our own healing.

Effective Alternatives – A Personal Example

One method to help with finding effective alternative activities for resisting behavioral urges or to help your group learn new concepts is to adapt current activities already enjoyed by your group into teaching tools.

Are there any activities that are enjoyed by more than one member of your group? Do several of the children particularly enjoy cars or blocks or drawing? Do any of you enjoy the same sport? Are there any shared interests? Are there any shared hobbies? Or, do any members of the group want to try something that someone else already enjoys doing?

Looking for existing commonalities, or creating commonalities of interest, can provide a good place to start as far as introducing options to those parts who don’t yet know what they like or what they want to do. They are also good choices as alternatives to help the group to resist behavioral urges, whether programmed or not – the more people who are interested in the alternative activity, the stronger the resistance will be. These activities can even provide a concrete means by which difficult abstract concepts can be taught.

Lacking any better way to explain this, I will provide a personal example.

Several members of this group share a consuming interest in computer and video games. This interest is not by any means universal – some are much more interested than others, some will try any game while others stick with their few favorites, and some are merely tolerant of others playing. However, given that a number of group members already share this interest, it tends to be one of the first activities we use with those we’ve just met or those who are ready to try safe or fun activities for the first time.

It hasn’t been universally effective, any more than the games are universally enjoyed, but it has proven to be useful in some surprising ways.

• For some group members, a new game is a powerful attraction, and their desire to stay present and playing can be of immense help to the group as a whole in resisting certain programming – especially if obeying the programming would put an end to the game play for any reason.
• A game that involved the concept of moral choice in an appealing setting helped one particular person learn some of the nuanced differences in these choices. The manner in which the game responded to his choices helped him to understand in a very visual and immediate way how each choice was viewed in a social context.
• One person has learned to accept imperfection through being rewarded for outstanding (but not perfect) skill in a game.
• Another found, for the first time, that he could release some anger in a way that fit him without being harmful to himself, the body, or anyone else.
• It has provided a corrective learning experience to several — that virtual media can be interactive without being painful or traumatic, that they can participate without being forced to learn anything or do anything, that virtual “death” can mean nothing worse than starting over, and that it can even be sort of fun.
• Two parts whose relationship had been strained for years were able to establish a more cooperative bond through their shared interest in two specific games, which they played together.
• The distraction and absorption of a game which requires detailed planning and micromanagement can, for us, compete with the obsession of self-injurious or suicidal urges and help us to combat them.
• A game that demands a lot of focused attention but not a lot of thought can help us to get through any stretch of time where we don’t have the energy to think about a game, but we don’t want to listen to our own thoughts either.

Who would have thought that video games could be so useful…

What does your group enjoy doing? What other group members could be invited to try those activities, and what new concepts could they learn through their participation?

A sport could help to release anger, or teach concepts like leadership or teamwork or persistence. Playing a musical instrument can teach physical control and coordination and the value of regular application and practice. Enjoyment of the same toy or game can teach the children how to accept each other, share with each other, respect each other, and work with each other. A shared interest in music or cars or photography or anything can help to build a connection between people who might not have realized they had anything in common. It can help the development of tolerance and reduce conflict and tension within the system.

Almost anything that your group enjoys doing can be adapted to the purpose of helping you build strength and learn new concepts – the things you’re doing already might have a lot of helpful potential if you look at them from this perspective. And in addition to everything else that can be gained, this particular approach fosters the development and growth of relationships within your system, which alone makes it worth doing.

Healing from our various histories is largely about reuniting our selves into a cohesive group (rather than simply a matter of spewing trauma memories until we run dry). Whether or not “group cohesion” leads to “integration”, our lives and our minds and our worlds can only heal if and when our systems can come together as a team.

I imagine that none of us would get very far in therapy if our therapist treated us the way we can sometimes treat the members of our own systems – but the fact is, if we are treating our system members in any way that we would not find acceptable from our therapist – then we are doing just as much damage to our own healing as a therapist would if they treated us the same way.

Focus on the person who experienced the trauma, instead of the trauma alone, and the memories will emerge at a natural and manageable pace – and in the meantime, you will have gained something a lot more valuable than another bad memory. You will gain relationships with the parts who experienced those memories – in the most fundamental sense, building a relationship with yourself.

So – what kinds of things do you and your group need to work on? How can you adapt your everyday activities, or the activities you enjoy, so that the things you do are also helping your healing? What interests do you share that could help your progress? You might already have some very effective tools for relationship- and skill-building just in the things you’re doing already.

If we work together...

Tricking the Program

This post intends to suggest one means by which your group can take a step towards self-control rather than being controlled by the programming – and among the many benefits of having that ability, one of the most notable is that it helps significantly in being able to tolerate the overall therapy process.

Some running programs will have a “condition met” recognition that shuts them off. This is true of several different types of programs, including behavioral programming, which I already discussed.

If you know what the condition is, then it is possible to “trick” the program into shutting down by appearing to meet the condition without actually doing whatever the program is designed to make you do (meeting the letter of the condition but not the spirit of it).

Remember that programs do not think, and alters who are extensively programmed won’t be able to think much either. For most programs where meeting a specific condition is the goal, neither the program itself nor the alters who are maintaining it will necessarily be able to distinguish whether the condition has been met but the program itself has been circumvented.

For example…

A self-injury program is designed to cause you to self-injure. Once you have done so, the program ceases to run.

But which precise element is the condition for the program to consider itself “fulfilled”? Is it the physical feeling of pain? Is it the sight of the wound? Is it the actual act of causing injury?

Among your group, some thorough discussion should help you isolate your key element, or at least to narrow it down to a few possibilities – and then, you can begin to develop circumventions which will shut the program down without engaging in the intended destructive action.

In looking for circumventions, it helps to think as literally and as concretely as possible. Programming, however complex it grows, is at bottom based in child-like thinking, and so child-like thinking is often the best way to get around it too. In fact, it might be worthwhile to ask a child – if you can ask the question in a way that will be useful to you without being traumatizing to them. The answers you get, while stunning in their simplicity, might also be something you would never have thought of in a million years. But often these suggestions will prove to be very helpful.

The thing to remember is that mind control programs are like legal documents. They are intended to cover every possibility and eventuality. However, they are created by human beings, and therefore they will never truly be perfect. (Programmers are inhuman in many ways, but they are still subject to that particular human failing.)

Laws and legal documents have loopholes that can be exploited. Video games have “cheats” that are actually exploitations of flaws in the original design code. Computer game companies routinely issue patches to correct the errors and bugs in the original release. Manufacturers have discount stores to sell the merchandise that came off the factory floor damaged.

Everything created by human beings has a margin of imperfection, including the machines they build to do their work for them. Mind control programs are created by human beings, or with machines built by human beings. Therefore, mind control programming also contains a margin of imperfection.

If you can identify the inherent imperfections and weaknesses of your programming, then you can exploit them for your benefit – and “tricking the program” is one way to do this.

Internal Communication Is the Key — Take 2

In the wake of last week’s posts about undoing programming, let me reiterate again that internal communication is the key to making this work.

If you don’t know the other alters in your system – if people shift and move ghost-like behind and around you but you don’t know anyone’s name or what they really look like, or if nobody seems to talk to each other, or if they talk to each other but you don’t talk to them, or especially if you’re still at the point where you’d rather the whole problem just dissolved and went away by itself because you’re sure as hell not talking to any people in your head (only crazy people do that!) – then you are not yet ready to address any programming issues.

Everyone wants the quick fix. We all want to feel better, we want the programming gone, we want the other alters to be happy and quiescent (or gone altogether), we want to be “normal”, and we want it right now – or as close to “right now” as possible.

With this goal in mind, and the HMO concept of how long therapy “should” take spurring them on, both patients and therapists tend to rush in where angels should fear to tread and completely neglect the necessary foundational work.

Consider…

If you are flooded with memories from an alter you don’t know, can’t find, won’t talk to – then what do you do about the flood that is inundating you? How do you stop it? How do you comfort that alter? How do you comfort yourself? How do you process the information in a meaningful way when the alter who holds that particular memory is out of your reach?

If you are influenced by programming but you don’t know what the program is, who maintains it, who else is influenced by it, who supports it, who is against it, or who knows what valuable information that might help you undo it – then how can you address the programmed influence?

If you still have internal programmers in your system (and if you have been subjected to mind control in any organized way, then you very likely do have at least one) – if they are there, and they are not working with you – then what do you imagine they are doing?

I ask these questions only to emphasize the importance of building relationships within the system before turning to other focal points in therapy. From the most basic issue to the most complicated, there is no part of your healing that will not benefit from focusing on relationship-building first.

And focusing on building relationships doesn’t mean that other therapy work gets put completely on hold. In fact, the process is likely to necessitate processing numerous memories and possibly even addressing some programming in order to form a cohesive group from the disparate members of your system. However, the shift in focus means that the issues as they arise will be addressed by the system working together, even if all they are working on together at the time is simply learning to work together. It is still a shared effort toward a common goal, where the hardships and obstacles surmounted become memories that bond the group together instead of dividing it further.

But like everything else, building relationships takes time – and usually more time than we wish it would. It doesn’t happen in a day, or a week, or even necessarily in a month. And it requires consistent daily effort to make it happen at all – this is true on the days when we don’t feel like it, on the days when we feel discouraged, and even on the days when we don’t want to be DID. Each day wasted in pretending the other alters don’t exist is a lost opportunity to be doing something that is actually helpful.

How do I know? Because I’ve watched it work and felt it work – and because I do not assume that this system is any better or stronger or more capable than any other system. What we can do, anyone else can also do. What works for us in a general sense will likely work for others as well. We all differ in our individual details, but the efficacy of an approach is probably not limited to us alone. We just aren’t that special.

In fact, the only way I can see that we differ from any of the numerous other dissociative systems we know is in a few of the choices we’ve made. But anyone else could do that too – if they chose.

Excerpts from the poem You by Edgar A. Guest

You are the fellow that has to decide
Whether you’ll do it or toss it aside.
You are the fellow who makes up your mind
Whether you’ll lead or will linger behind,
Whether you’ll try for the goal that’s afar
Or just be contented to stay where you are.
Take it or leave it, here’s something to do –
Just think it over – it’s all up to you.

Nobody here will compel you to rise;
No one will force you to open your eyes;
No one will answer for you yes or no,
Whether to stay there or whether to go.
Life is a game, but it’s you who must say
Whether as cheat or as sportsman you’ll play.
Fate may betray you, but you settle first
Whether to live at your best or your worst.

Breaking Free from Pavlov

Pure behavioral programming is frequently created using conditioned stimulus-response training, like that used with Pavlov’s dogs. If a person does or says or hears or sees any of the programmed stimuli, they immediately react with the programmed response (such as self-injury, suicidal urges, binging and purging, starving, and acting out in therapy). However, breaking the behavioral link eventually makes the program stop working altogether.

We all know how Pavlov’s dogs were “programmed” to salivate when they hear a bell – but it is equally true that, if they stop getting food when the bell rings, then eventually they stop expecting it – and eventually their mind breaks the link between the ringing bell and food, and they don’t salivate in expectation anymore.

This works even better (faster) if the existing behavioral link is simultaneously reattached to a new expectation – ring a bell, and instead of getting food, the dogs get to go for a walk. It doesn’t take them long to stop salivating and start jumping around at the door instead.

So basically, undoing behavioral programming is more a case of reprogramming your mind with a new response to a given stimulus – replacing the programmed “food expectation” response with the new “go for a walk” response.

This works best if the new response chosen is something absorbing enough to serve as at least an adequate distraction, even from the beginning. Just as an example – taking an activity as emotionally addictive, compulsive, and habitual as self-injury and replacing it with watching CNN on television probably won’t be too effective – however, replacing self-injury with running or walking outside, going to the gym, cleaning the house, doing yardwork, shooting hoops in the driveway, shooting aliens in Halo, playing Wii tennis, playing real tennis, just smacking tennis balls agains the side of the house – anything you can do safely and regularly, something that suits you and caters to your interests and your needs, something that pulls you out of yourself and (ideally) moves you away from your location and tools of choice for self-injury, will give you a fair chance for success.

Of course, just offering an alternative won’t keep us from longing for the comfort of the familiar. Choosing an alternate activity to be our new response is easy – the hard part is to keep acting on the new response even when it seems futile and pointless and we’re sick of fighting and we’d rather just go back to the old way. This is especially true at the beginning of the process, when the programming has years’ worth of “obedience” reinforcing its strength and it is very very hard to resist.

Backsliding at the beginning of this process is not equivalent to failure – you have as many chances to make this work as you need, and it can take effort and practice just to build up the strength for a prolonged fight. You might progress in increments of hours, or even quarter hours – but progress is progress, and every step is a success.

Expecting overnight success, however, will lead to certain disappointment. The programming was created over decades. It is strong, and it is insistent, and we are used to doing what it tells us to do. It takes time and persistence to teach ourselves not to do those things. Like learning any new skill, but with the added disadvantage of having to overcome what we’ve already learned and then to learn the new thing instead.

Compare your mental memory to your physical (muscle) memory. Has anyone ever played a musical instrument where they had to break an old, incorrect habit in their playing? How long did it take before the old habit was finally eradicated? Ever driven a stick shift car and then gotten an automatic? How long did you continue to reach for the gear shift or press the clutch even when neither was necessary? Ever rearranged the furniture in a room and then had to readjust your course every time you walked into it for the next few weeks because your autopilot was still expecting the old arrangement?

But wouldn’t it be kind of ridiculous to get rid of your automatic car because you were still used to driving a stick shift, or moving the furniture in a room back to the old arrangement because you didn’t instantly adjust to the new one?

Well, learning new responses to old stimuli is the same way – and if we give up on trying to make it work because it doesn’t work fast enough, then it’s never going to work.

All new learning requires time. Habit is a really powerful thing – the number of things that physical and mental memories accomplish without our conscious thought is immense, and obedience to programming is a deeply rooted habit that all mind control victims were forced to learn. It is neither easy nor comfortable when a rote activity suddenly requires conscious awareness – as when we are learning a new way to do an old task – but it’s not going to happen any other way.

Learning doesn’t happen by magic. It happens through effort and application over time. Someone put a lot of time and effort into forcing us to learn their programming. They spent years teaching us what they wanted us to learn. I think we are worth at least as much of our own time and effort to learn what we want to learn.

Addressing Therapy-Specific Programming III

Whether specifically spoken or not, working on addressing programming involves a contract of sorts by which both your system and your therapist should be operating.

On the part of the therapist, the obligation is to be aware that these programs exist and what they look like for you. It includes a willingness to interpret these behaviors as programming instead of as purposeful resistance or unconscious transference, and to bring them up in therapy for thorough discussion. The focus of the discussion should be on defining the behaviors and actions and thoughts involved and tracing them back to their roots – through the chain of alters that know or maintain them and the chain of events that created them.

On our part as the client, the obligations in this therapy work also involve a willingness to see these behaviors and thought patterns as programming – and therefore to listen when we are told they are occurring, to look at them with clarity and honesty, and to be willing to modify them.

Speaking specifically to the behavioral element – it is really no secret that programming can cause us to behave in ways that are flat-out obnoxious. But the obvious truth to this is, nothing about that will change unless we actually do something different. The fact that a behavior is programmed is not an excuse to disclaim responsibility for it or to let it continue unchecked. Behavioral programming can be changed by an approach as simple as forcing ourselves to behave in a different way despite the strong and insistent messages that it is wrong, dangerous, stupid, etcetera – rather than acting on those messages as if they were true.

Simple, but not easy.

I know someone who has spent years in therapy locked into an argument about how her therapist needs to respect her before she can learn to respect herself. The argument is strident and bitter in tone, it is accusatory and deliberately insulting in presentation, and it is almost exactly the same every week. Logic doesn’t make a dent. Addressing the argument never resolves it. It dominates and consumes her therapy time. And although she knows that she has been involved in mind control, she is not willing to believe that her behavior in her therapy sessions is the result of a program. She accepts her feelings and thoughts as being absolutely true, she never resists them, she never questions them – and consequently, she never stays with the same therapist for more than a few years. One of them inevitably fires the other. Over fifteen years of therapy with six or seven different therapists, she has done exactly the same thing and has made no progress at all.

The reason I mention this is that it’s such a good illustration of the consequences of accepting programmed messages as truth – and how effectively they can block our healing if we do.

I listened to the pre-session warm up for this person’s “I don’t get no respect” argument week after week, and I never saw any evidence that either of the therapists she had while I knew her were really disrespecting her. However, I heard about a thousand examples of what she was interpreting as disrespect. They were things like “I had to call her ten times last weekend before she called me back once” or “I emailed and asked him for an emergency session this afternoon and it took him three hours to call back, and then I couldn’t have one” or “I sent an email and I didn’t get a response”.

Sometimes, what programming causes us to interpret as disrespect – or disbelief or distaste or coldness or negativity or evil or selfishness or manipulation or control or whatever we think we see in a therapist’s words or actions – is not really there.

If we intend to address this programming, then we need to accept that our interpretations and perceptions, however true they feel, are not necessarily reliable indicators of truth. We need to recognize them as programming – and then push them away from us, rather than welcoming them in, embracing them, believing them, and acting on them.

In the beginning, we might not be able to get much distance from them at all. Programming presses on us like a second skin. We might have to sit in the discomfort of wondering, fearing, hating, feeling… and from the midst of it, find a way to hold on to the fact that it is programming and we are not going to act on it. This can make for some truly miserable stretches of time – however, if we truly wish to be free of it in the end, then we have to fight against it, even through the smothering emotional intensity of the first few attempts.

Programming requires our belief to make it work. It is built on the fears and insecurities that were purposely created in us at a very young age. It plays on our emotions – it bypasses our critical thinking skills and hits us in the vulnerable places where powerful feelings can distort the reality around them. The feelings then create thoughts.

To stick with the example provided, if we assume that a therapist is disrespectful of us, if we feel that very strongly and if we believe that the strength of the feeling means it must be based in truth, then our belief will filter and shape reality to prove us right.

More simply put, if we look for evidence of disrespect with the pre-existing assumption that there is something to find, then we will find something that we can interpret to fit that assumption.

But this is why our beliefs and feelings and thoughts cannot automatically be trusted – they are being created by our perceptions, which themselves are being influenced by programming – by someone else’s definition of what things are and what they mean.

If we want to free ourselves from this domination, then we have to tolerate the emotional discomfort of separating ourselves from the insistent, persistent messages left with us by the abusers.

And if you are as persistent in pushing those messages away from you, you will slowly begin to create some space around yourself in which you can begin to build your own perspective and create your own perceptions. The more you can think for yourself, the less influence the programmed thoughts will have. You will begin to recognize them more quickly, and be able to push them away more quickly as well. The urge to act on them will be weaker, outlasting them will become less painful, and it will be easier to determine whether they are something you really want to believe or act on.

Please note that when I say “push them away,” I don’t mean they should be dissociated. In fact, there should be no alter to whom they can be dissociated. All cooperative alters should be working together as a team in this. They should be sharing the emotional burden as much as they can. They should be making sure that those who need to function in the world are able to do so. They should be staying in contact and in communication with each other about who might need particular help or support and who might have information that might be valuable and how to use the information already gathered. They should be working together to push the programming away, so that the safe space is created as a group and encompasses everybody.

Programming cannot be addressed by one alter at a time or by each alter working individually. It must be addressed by the collective group, working together in exactly the way the original abusers taught us not to work – and although certain alters might have to do certain elements individually, the group as a whole should still be involved, at the very least offering back-up and support for each other every step of the way. So if the internal communication skills and the group relationships are not yet strong enough to do this, then it is better to hold off on addressing the programming and focus on relationship building first.

Addressing Therapy-Specific Programming II

(…continued from previous post…)

Another main point in addressing therapy-specific programming (or any kind of programming) is, that you and your therapist should be in full and complete agreement as to the fact that you are going to approach it as programming (not as resistance, transference, or absolute truth that should be believed and acted on).

The therapist, if not part of the initial analysis of triggers, likely behavior, and thought patterns, should be fully apprised of this information so that they know what to look for – they might recognize emerging patterns more quickly or be able to add things to look for.

You should also have a crisis plan in place ahead of time. This is not as likely to be needed when addressing this type of programming, but it is always best to stay on the safe side. Even the most basic programming will have protections in place to prevent it from being tampered with or destroyed. The programmers would prefer that their work remain intact, and they have devised all manner of things (from pressure-sensitive bombs to “mind traps” that will set some internal effect into motion to hiding the programming under some innocuous structure, and many many more) to discourage or deflect any attempts at undoing their work.

Approaching the therapy-specific programming with the kind of alter-inclusive approach I’ve described elsewhere will increase the odds of finding pitfalls ahead of time instead of by walking into them. It is also a good way to develop some familiarity and experience with the approach. Be sure to ask the alters you know, or the ones you meet along the way, about traps and other protective devices. If the chain of information appears to dead-end, ask specifically whether anyone knows about other worlds, alters from other worlds, and connections between worlds. If the alter who could provide this information is not yet cooperative, take the time to get to know them and include them in your group. The more alters your group has working together, the stronger the group is.

Each pitfall, trap, trigger, and program has at least one alter who knows about it and/or maintains it – and that someone also knows how to circumvent, defuse, and/or remove what they are currently protecting. Listen to them – get to know them for themselves, apart from the goal you want to reach or the information you want them to give you. Consider whether you would be  friendly with or trusting of someone who only wanted to pump you for information – would you want to be helpful in that situation? Alters should never be used in this way. It’s worth the time and effort to build genuine relationships with them – whether or not you end up being best friends, everyone in the group should work toward a place of mutual respect. Our alters will be with us literally for the rest of our lives, so there’s no point in starting off on a bad foot or allowing animosity to fester and disrupt the entire system when we can do something to prevent that from happening – and your group needs to be able to work together if addressing the programming is going to be effective.

(… to be continued, again. My next post will have some examples which might hopefully make it clearer.)

Addressing Therapy-Specific Programming I

So how do we address the programming? More specifically, how can we defeat the therapy-interfering programming so that we have the chance to do the other work we want to do?

Just to be clear (again) – I am not defining therapeutic methods here. I am just elaborating, from the survivor’s side, on some things to look for and some places to focus. Also, just to be clear, this is not “entry-level therapy.” Reliable and consistent internal communication and cooperation must be established before even considering this kind of work.

So – let’s assume, for the sake of the rest of this series, that we each have a therapist with whom we really “click,” someone who is capable of working through this with us and (maybe more importantly) someone with whom we really want it to be successful – a therapist we’d actually regret losing or driving away. Then what?

One main thing to be aware of is, that addressing programming involves stretching ourselves in ways that are unfamiliar and extremely uncomfortable – and one of the most immediate and obvious sources of discomfort in therapy is that we need to talk. A lot.

I’m sure I’m not the only DID survivor who finds talking to be extremely challenging even under the best of circumstances. After thirty years of don’t-talk programming, forcing words out of my mouth can have the same feeling of fatalistic resignation as jumping off a cliff to avoid being eaten by a lion. The lion would be worse, but I’m going to be dead either way.

So I’m not unaware of the difficulty, but I am emphasizing that forcing ourselves to talk anyway is not without purpose or value.

First, because a therapist cannot be expected to help us with problems that we don’t mention or don’t fully explain. If we give no information, or if we provide only half the information we could give them, then we can’t blame them if their suggestions and interventions aren’t effective or helpful, because we’re the ones who tied their hands.

Second, because therapy-specific programming works best when it is left unexamined, unanalyzed, and unchallenged. The thoughts, fears, and suspicions make far more sense when they’re building on themselves in the darkness of our minds than they ever will if we expose them to the light of day and try to examine them rationally. In fact, some programming can and will fall apart that easily (although most of it will not).

The more we can force ourselves to explain and discuss, the more we are helping ourselves.

When enough of the groundwork has been laid with a therapist that you are ready to mention programming, and enough internal communication and cooperation has been developed to provide a foundation for the heavier work, the subject of therapy-specific programming should be one of the first types of programming discussed. This is primarily because discussing any other type of programming is likely set off the therapy-interfering programming anyway, so you won’t get very far with anything else until the therapy interference is addressed first.

Preparatory to this, it helps to review any previous therapy experiences from the perspective of where programming might have been influencing your thoughts or actions. This can provide you with a rough map of sorts, a way to anticipate where and how at least some of the problems might occur.

It can also be considered the first test of your commitment to the process and your willingness to accept what it shows you – because looking at past actions and behaviors from a new perspective can recast them in a light that is unflattering, to say the least. At the same time, however, before something can be changed, we need the humility to be able to admit where things are wrong – which goes hand-in-hand with the ability to see where things have gone wrong, and why.

It has worked best for me to start at the end of a therapy relationship (since that has always been a point where problems were obvious) and work back.

Look for times when retrospect indicates that your reaction was excessive to the situation, and check in with yourself in the current day to see whether that excessive emotion is still smoldering. Emotions that remain ready to jump alive at full strength, no different from when they were new and relevant, can indicate programming influence. By carefully analyzing the details of the situations where this is true for you, you can identify the specific ideas, thought patterns, and behavioral urges that define the programming.

Look for arguments that began and then could not be resolved by anything the therapist said or did, and get feedback about this from your current therapist. Was the old therapist truly doing something “wrong”, or was it your perceptions which were skewed? Look also for circular or repetitive arguments, where you brought up the same issues week after week after week. Unresolvable arguments also tend to indicate programming influence.

What subjects make the don’t-talk urges stronger?

What subjects provoke self-injurious or suicidal urges?

What skills do you currently have to manage those urges? What new plans might help to counter or contain them?

Working backwards, can you identify any specific event or chain of events which caused your opinion of your therapist to undergo a dramatic change?

Can you detect any ways in which that change was underway even before the obvious events occurred? (That is, can you find any evidence that your reaction was actually just a “reaction waiting to happen”?)

Can you identify any negative thought patterns that are typical for you? What are they? What triggers them?

Analyze each event as minutely as possible for clues as to what was happening in your world and among your alters. Talk to each other about how your reactions were similar and how they differed. Some programming affects certain alters more than others. The more detailed and complete you can be, the more this can help to identify and highlight the programmed patterns in your behavior.

If you are not initially able to do all of this on your own, your therapist should be able to help you analyze past situations – but again, it will take honesty on your part to present the information with as little bias, exaggeration, or spin as possible – and it will take humility both to hear how a situation is assessed and to accept the assessment without taking it as a personal insult or put-down. Truth hurts, as the old adage goes, and never more than when it sheds a harsh light on our own behaviors and reactions. However – the pain is survivable, the embarrassment is survivable, and we have to accept the truth as it stands before we can really change anything.

Or, to phrase that another way, if we don’t want to hear the truth, if we refuse to tolerate even the first step toward real change – then maybe we need to revise our therapeutic goals downward to something more in keeping with what we’re willing to do.

The truth of our lives is already ugly. We aren’t making the truth uglier by seeing it and accepting it – it still looks just as ugly whether we look at it or not. But if we refuse to look at it or acknowledge it or talk about it or accept it, then we don’t really want to heal it or change it. And that’s pretty much the long and short of that.

Assuming, however, that our desire for change is genuine and strong… then, if we value the therapeutic relationship we have, we need to take steps to protect it from ourselves, so that we don’t sabotage our own chances for healing. We need to be alert, as therapy proceeds, for clues that might indicate that programming is at work. Therapy-specific programming tends to become obvious once you know what to look for.

…and this is already getting long, so the rest will be another post.

Followup to Yesterday

Before anyone writes off the previous post as indicative of my own failure to understand how programming can affect our quest for healing — how there is programming designed to interfere with therapy and the therapeutic relationship specifically, and other programming designed to interfere with talking, recalling memories, getting to know other alters, and just keeping ourselves internally functional, among many other things — let me say that all of those programs do exist in this system. So yeah, I get that. I understand that all these things can fall on us like a ton of rocks and appear to block our therapeutic path completely.

But I don’t consider that to be an excuse for letting it work.

Many times I’ve heard programming described in terms of finality — “it’s programming” — as if it were a be-all, end-all — but what that phrase really says is, “I’m abdicating.” It’s a way of saying I’m not in control, there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m not even going to try.

And that seems to be the most common way of viewing it — that mind control programming is some incontrovertible force that we are powerless to resist or change.

Well — if you think the programming is beyond your ability to change — if you believe you are doomed to be controlled forever by the abusers — then congratulations, you’re right. But it’s your own belief that is trapping you there now, and not the programming itself.

However, it takes a lot of work and willingness on our parts to break the programming controls. Strong and consistent internal communication and cooperation between as many alters as possible is an absolute requirement. It also takes a lot of stepping back from the thoughts and feelings that are so familiar, looking at them with some perspective instead of swimming around in the midst of them, and deciding consciously whether or not they represent a truth we want to believe. It takes the grace to accept when we are wrong, the strength to admit it, and the courage to act against what we have been taught all our lives — over and over again. It takes the ability to relearn in the current day what was mistaught to us in our pasts. It takes humility and persistence and the ability to tolerate failure without giving up. It takes self-control, and it takes a willingness to tolerate some extreme feelings and acute urges without acting on any of them, or with a crisis plan which we will actually use if necessary.  And nobody will be able to hold our hand through all of this — so we need to have the determination to stick to the plan even on our own.

These things are really difficult to do for people who have been conditioned to unquestioning obedience all their lives. Even survivors who were not subjected to mind control have a hard time doing this — it becomes more difficult when mind control is involved.

Maybe it’s not important enough to everyone to make it worth all that — and if it’s not, then that’s fine.

But that’s a completely different thing from saying it can’t be done.

Most people who were strong enough to survive being programmed in the first place are strong enough to undo it as well — if they really want to do it. We don’t have to let ourselves be controlled now the way we did as children. On the other hand, we don’t have to do more work in therapy than we each feel is necessary either.

We can make the choice to leave the programmed controls largely untouched if that is what we truly prefer — but we should at least have the honesty to acknowledge that it is a choice.

…but RA/SRA therapy is limited after all

I’ll start right out by saying that my opinion as presented in this post might not be very popular — however, when it comes to my opinion (to quote Jane Austen), I must speak as I find.

So. At the end of my post regarding the elements I believe have been important in our healing thus far (Internal Communication is the Key to Everything), I opined that a person’s system will provide the keys for how to progress when they are ready and willing to do the work involved.

What I didn’t mention in that post — but will mention here — is that my answer was a little sophistical. Although it is true enough that each system could provide this information, odds are that they never will — because most people (regardless of what they say) do not actually want to do that kind of work. What they want is to feel better right now, or as quickly as possible. They want therapy to improve their immediate functioning and maybe smooth their emotional turmoil to a bearable level. For most people, that is enough.

And they are supported in that intention (or lack thereof) by the vast majority of mental health professionals, hospitals, and networks. Most professionals absolutely refuse to touch the deepest mind control programming, and they steer their patients away from addressing it as well. They are complicit with the patients in believing that a little improvement in current day functioning is enough.

To be fair, being content with this level of improvement is not beyond understanding. After all, it takes long enough just to achieve that much. Developing stable and solid internal communication and cooperation between the alters most responsible for daily functioning, learning to manage feelings, and processing the most intrusive memories — doing that much can take years. Who really wants to devote yet more years to therapy when they can function well enough without it? And who’s going to pay for all that therapy? We’ve had to make enough of an investment in our healing — doesn’t there come a time when there are better uses for our time and money?

Well… yes and no.

Here’s the problem with cutting therapy short as soon as the surface world has been smoothed and soothed — and this is a problem for which I believe the world of mental health care is at least equally responsible, to their shame.

The problem — as I said before — is that, if the deep programming is never addressed, never touched, never undone — then each and every person who has been subjected to mind control programming remains vulnerable to their own perpetrators and to any other predator who knows how to take advantage of them.

Furthermore, I would be willing to bet everything I have spent on therapy (which amounts to a lot more than everything I have) that many people, although they may believe their involvement with their abusive group is in entirely the past, are still in contact. Not every week or every month — once every year or eighteen months would be enough, and there is absolutely no reason the individual would know or even suspect it had happened — but contrary to popular misconception, programming does not maintain itself indefinitely. Someone who knows how that person’s system operates is checking in every once in a while to make sure that the programming remains intact.

So — what I am saying is that no mind control/RA/SRA survivor can truly be safe while they are still vulnerable in this way. In fact, they probably aren’t half as safe as they think they are.

Therefore, the fact that it is so difficult to find a therapist who can or will do the kind of work necessary to break these controls is a tantamount to a crime against survivors. Those therapists who claim to do trauma work should lose sleep pondering their abject failure of the population they claim to serve. Even hospital trauma units will not do this kind of work.

This is easier and safer for them. In the first place, they aren’t risking the potential dangers (and subsequent potential lawsuits) involved in approaching such sensitive material (and both potentialities are very real, considering how few mental health professionals have the expertise necessary to do this depth of work safely). And in the second place, who’s going to pay them for their time and expertise, even assuming they have any? Insurance companies no longer support long-term therapy or lengthy hospital stays without a “good reason” (by their definition), and most survivors are not in any position to afford these services on a cash-pay basis.

However, by taking this hands-off approach, the mental health professionals are making the perpetrators’ jobs easier, and thereby doing a grave disservice to the survivors coming to them for help.

On the other hand, is anyone pressuring them to do things differently?

I don’t believe anyone is. In fact, I believe most survivors are perfectly content with the status quo as they know it. And in further fact, when given the opportunity to do something deeper than surface level work, most survivors will take the first excuse to turn tail and run. So why would mental health professionals bother to develop an expertise that nobody wants anyway?

The front worlds prefer to delude themselves with the belief that head pats and surface comfort will heal them, and out of expediency if nothing else, the professionals are more than happy to agree with them. Nobody is really trying to reach the dark worlds; nobody really wants to reach them. People want to know how to control their troublesome alters more than they want to heal them, and therapy tends to encourage this “bandaid” approach — as a result of which, even the first step in true healing is left incomplete.

Although therapy can help the front worlds function somewhat better, there are still entire sections of people’s internal systems that are being left untouched and unhealed, except insofar as they are being “controlled” to prevent them from causing trouble — and this tiny ray of light in the pitch blackness is what most survivors and nearly all mental health professional consider “healing.”

Each person has the right to make their own choice regarding their therapy, of course — but as long as this definition of “healing” prevails, I don’t think we need to worry about how to approach a level of work for which no real interest exists.

Imperfection Deserves Forbearance

Today I’ve been considering this contradiction:

On the one hand, people tend to have this idea that their therapist’s life is “perfect” — perfect kids perfectly raised, happy marriage, everything organized, no crises, no trouble, no trauma. Some people believe this to such an extent that they can’t cope with any evidence proving that the therapist is actually human. They feel betrayed and angry if their therapist’s imperfect life interferes in any way with their idealized vision of who the therapist is and how they live.

On the other hand, many DID people are drawn to enter the “helping professions.” (I’m putting that in quotes because, although there are a few exceptions, the vast majority of DID people I know who are or want to be mental health professionals have absolutely no business being anything of the sort.)

Sometimes the people who can’t tolerate disorganization or personal crises or anything more than the most minor imperfection in their own therapists are the same ones who believe they are (or would be) fantastic therapists themselves.

hmmmm…

Am I the only one who thinks that doesn’t make sense?

How can any person whose own life is complicated by the ups and downs of DID (in addition to the random vicissitudes of life) imagine themselves as a therapist — and yet be unable or unwilling to tolerate it when their own therapist is not constantly available, constantly supportive, constantly attuned to them, constantly able to meet their needs and wants regardless of what might be going on in the therapist’s own life?

If someone is already feeling overwhelmed dealing with their own marriage, job, children, or life in general — if sometimes the chores and errands don’t get done, the bills don’t get paid, the kids aren’t attended to as well as we might wish, or the crises and emergencies and troubles are just piling up faster than we can handle them (and anyone who says they don’t have those periods of time would be lying, it has nothing to do with being DID, it’s just how life goes sometimes) — then where would a roster of needy clients fit in to all that?

Would we make a good therapist if we allowed any other demand to take priority over our own families or our own health?

Would we want a therapist who didn’t make their self-care or the care of their families a priority?

My answer is a definite no…

But then… is it fair to be unforgiving or intolerant when our own therapists need to put their priorities somewhere other than on us for a time? Or is it fair to expect that their personal troubles can always be left at home and never interfere with our schedule or our time or our wants?

I don’t think that’s reasonable.

Therapists are human. They are imperfect. They have lives, families, marriages, children, which are no more perfect than anyone else’s, and they are as likely to have a personal crisis as anyone else on the planet. They are subject to the same universal laws of humanity as the rest of us.

So when it happens — I think it behooves each of us to extend to our therapists the same grace, understanding, and forgiveness that we want them to extend to us when we make our inevitable mistakes or have our own inevitable family crises.

This is still true when our therapist’s crisis inconveniences us, or when it means we don’t get what we want, or even when it means we have to weather our own crisis of the moment all by ourselves. Most of us who are in therapy somehow survived the last two or three decades or more without our Magic Helper of choice, so we can probably make it through a few days or even weeks without said Magic Helper now.

It is basic courtesy and respect, and I think it is part of what we owe to our therapists — because being a paying client does not entitle us to have unreasonable expectations of perfection met by our therapists, any more than we would be entitled to expect perfection from anyone else. Including ourselves.

Internal Teamwork is Key to Everything

John Says:
December 19, 2008 at 7:48 am

I enjoyed reading the article on RA Memories Can Hide a Lot. I work with many differernt types of abuse. You are on the money that the traumatic memories are typically the point of focus. Do you have any specific methods of getting around this?

I’ve given this question a lot of thought.

Before I begin, there are two things I think I need to say.

First, just to clarify — I am speaking in this case only about traumatic memories involving RA or SRA. Traumatic memories in general will of course be the focus of therapy. In many cases, they are the entire reason for being in therapy, and they deserve to be the focus. Those memories are what they appear to be, they don’t hide anything more, and there is no reason to bypass them or get around them. In the case of RA or SRA memories only, however, I am proposing that the excessive horror of the rituals and the compelling and consuming memories they create are intended to hide and protect deeper levels of programming and mind control, and therefore that RA/SRA memories cannot be fully addressed or resolved through a purely frontal approach.

Second, I/we are not a practicing mental health professional at this time. We know a lot of dissociative survivors, but we do not now, nor have we ever worked with them in the context of trying to help them heal.

That being the case, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to suggest methods of working with other individuals.

I can, however, elaborate on some of the things which I believe were key components of our own successful work in this area. And the fact is, there is no particular method for doing this particular thing. The same principals that guide all good DID system work will work here too. This is just a different direction than the one in which most people go.

The most fundamental aspect of our work in this regard — and in everything else we have done in terms of our healing as well — is internal communication and cooperation.

Although some of this group’s traumatic memories naturally presented themselves prior to our achievement of strong communication skills and had to be handled in therapy, the vast majority of the early work was focused on getting to know each other and developing a working cooperative.

This was begun in the front group, among alters who knew of each other. Then, as the work progressed and new alters were met or discovered, we paused each time to get to know the new alters and find a way to mesh them into the group.

There are numerous reasons why this has been so important — but they can all be summed up by saying, there is both safety and strength in numbers. Strength for healing, strength for learning the truths we have hidden from ourselves, strength to safely ride out the emotional crises that memories can precipitate, and strength to find what lies beyond the ugliness with which we are all most familiar.

For survivors who have been subjected to purposeful mind control techniques, the multiplicity has been used against us to divide us within ourselves and against ourselves. Developing a working internal cooperative makes the multiplicity work for us. And it can be achieved, regardless of the amount of splitting or the expertise of the programming. It won’t happen quickly, but it can happen — and in my opinion, it should, overall, be the focus of therapy.

In the case of approaching and bypassing RA/SRA memories specifically, it is absolutely crucial to have the understanding and agreement of as many alters as possible. This should never be undertaken as a unilateral action by the therapist, or forced on the system members if they are not willing. Apart from the disrespect this would entail for the genuine horror of these memories, it would also be a complete failure. Dissociative systems are hard enough to work with without incurring the resentment and enmity of the group — so this approach and its intentions should be thoroughly discussed with the alter cooperative before it is attempted, until it is fully understood and they indicate their willingness to proceed, or it should not be attempted at all.

As I said in my last post on this subject (RA Memories Can Hide A Lot), RA memories in many cases are intended to hide and protect the actual programming work done by the programmers. By drawing and holding the focus of the survivor and their therapist, these compelling and horrifying memories prevent anyone from suspecting that there might be anything “more” to look for. This distraction of focus keeps the actual mind controls safe and intact, usually throughout therapy — and RA memories tend to be resistant to any length of therapy. They remain painfully vibrant and strong even decades after a survivor has managed to free themselves from the actual group. This is because, as long as the mind control programming remains, the RA memories will remain there to hide it.

Therefore, part of the discussion about attempting to bypass the RA memories (and thereby defeat the purpose of those memories)should include the fact that doing so is likely to incur substantial backlash within the system. This can include unknown alters attempting to sabotage the work in progress (such as attempting to “kidnap” and/or replace key alters from the front group or threatening the front group), memory flooding, and the triggering of programs designed to completely distract the survivor from this course of action. These programs could cause systemic effects such as sickness, sudden amnesia among alters, pervasive internal darkness, rearranging or restructuring the system to confuse members, or suicidal feelings, among many other things.

The alter cooperative should develop strategies ahead of time among themselves and with their therapist for how to address these crises if and when they occur. Part of being prepared will be to speak to as many alters as possible about what the various traps are, how they were made, how they are set off, who they are intended to effect, and how they can be dismantled. Information is valuable — but obviously there has to be a lot of trust within the system (among alters) and of the therapist before this information will be shared, so don’t expect to have this information handed over in the first couple years.

Spend the necessary time to build a cooperative between alters, and the information will appear when the system is ready to act on it.

It is never a waste of time to pause at any step where a new alter or group of alters is discovered. However much this seems to slow you down, it will be to the benefit of the system as a whole to take the time necessary to learn about new alters met along the way. Not only does this keep the cooperative group cohesive, but who knows what useful information new alters might possess?

Don’t rush. Care and caution, however slow they may seem, are worth the safety they offer.

Be committed to the process — and I mean fully committed to seeing it through. Deciding at the first deluge of memories or the first triggered program that it’s too hard is worse than not starting at all. It wounds the morale of the cooperative — but even worse, it strengthens the general system belief in the efficacy of the blocks in place to prevent any work from getting done.

This is it’s whole own subject, but briefly put — programming hangs very very heavily on the belief of the survivor to keep it running. However real or autonomous it seems, the programming is getting its power from you. It requires the imagination and the unqualified belief of the subject in order to work — BUT, if you can see the trick that makes the magic look real and you cease to believe that it is magic, then it stops having power over you.

And RA/SRA memories, although they are real memories, are also programming, because their purpose is to conceal and distract from the deeper programming, the real controls placed on the individual. They hide the locations from which the dissociative system is controlled, the locations through which a programmer can access that individual at any time throughout their life unless these controls are broken.

Anyone who truly hopes to be free of their abusers and not have to constantly live in fear of the day they are found and accessed again will need to free themselves at this most basic level in order to really be free.

But care must be taken — the programmers know what they’re doing, and your therapist better know what they’re doing too. This is one area in which an expert therapist must be found, at the very least as a consultant, or inpatient care sought.

It is not easy — but is freedom worth it? Is it worth overcoming the difficulties and obstacles in order to be sure that we will never be vulnerable to the perpetrators again? I say yes. No matter what it takes. We would rather be free than anything else. It’s already cost us just about everything. But it’s still worth it.

Dare to look behind the curtain — and these memories, while they will always be horrific in their own right, can shrink in perspective the way the Great and Powerful Oz shrinks to be nothing but a man using a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Dare to see what these memories hide, and they will suddenly become memories that can be processed like any other terrible abuse memory — never gone, but at least no longer perpetually alive to us.

I probably didn’t answer your question — but then, I don’t really believe there is a standard answer on “how to do it.” Good system work will do it. Looking in new directions will do it. Beyond that, the answer will be different for each system, because each system (even if created by the same programmer) is unique. Be creative, work with each system as it is, get to know each alter and get alters working together with each other — and then, if they really want to, they will be able to answer the question of how to do it themselves.

When My Words Are Empty

A quick thought in my free hour here. (It is very rushed, for which I apologize.)

Every year, on the 21^st or 22^nd of December, I have had to undergo a “commitment ceremony” for “my” abusive group. This is an annual event during which I affirm the commitment of my life and my service to the group.

Recently, we had the pumpkin pie conversation with the female parental unit. Sadly, this is also an annual event.

These two events are not entirely without connection.

“You aren’t eating any of the pumpkin pie,” the female parent says every year. “I don’t want any pumpkin pie,” the front girl says. “You don’t want any pie? Why not?” “I don’t like pumpkin pie.” “What do you mean, you don’t like pumpkin pie?” “I don’t like pumpkin pie.” “Since when?” “Since forever. I’ve never liked pumpkin pie.” “You liked it last year.” “No, I didn’t, I ate a piece after you guilt-tripped me into it, like you do every year.” “Everyone likes pumpkin pie. How can you not like pumpkin pie? That’s ridiculous.” “I don’t like it.” “Yes you do, here, eat your piece.”

And every year we eat a piece of pumpkin pie, despite the fact that we hate it.

Does the fact that we eat the pie under duress really mean we like the pie? Do we like the pie because the female parent says we do?

Or are we just trying to keep the peace and eat the damn pie because it’s not worth arguing over?

(That one, definitely.)

So what about my commitment ceremonies?

The point of these ceremonies is to emphasize that my attendance and my service are my own choice — but let’s look at how these really happen.

My first ceremony was when I was 13 — I didn’t drive myself there, and my attendance certainly wasn’t my own choice.

That year, and every year since, I have been a small female body, naked and on my knees in half-slave position, surrounded by fully-clothed men.

The body has not yet been drugged, raped, sodomized, shocked, subjected to any mind games, or forced to hurt anyone else — but those things loom ahead, and I know it. And there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. My only choice is, how bad do I want it to be?

So… yes, I say what I’m expected to say. I do not tell them that I wish they would all suffer from simultaneous heart attacks and die in screaming agony, even though I think that. They pretend they don’t know I’m thinking that, even though they do know it. We go through the motions together.

I’ve been forced under duress to say that I want to be there, that I live to serve them, that I’m willing to die at their command — but do I mean that? Does just saying the words actually bind me to them?

Legally, the answer is no.

Psychologically, it’s been a little trickier to figure out. If I said it, and they said I meant it, then I must have meant it. And what about those hopeless years when I believed (with all the reason in the world) that I would be trapped there forever, and my only hope of survival was to appease these men and resign myself to my fate? Even if I don’t mean it now, didn’t I mean it back then?

Yes, I did… but it still wasn’t a choice. Nobody said to me that I could commit to them — or, if I’d rather, I could commit to apprenticeship at any of these other fabulous (and normal) careers. This was all I had. I was choosing between this and non-existence.

Some choice.

What we say under duress is not binding. What we are forced to accept when we are powerless to refuse does not reflect what we really want. What we “choose” when there is no real choice available does not make us solely responsible for the so-called choice we’ve made.

Only when we have real choices, and when we understand that those choices are finally truly ours to make, can we then be held responsible for our choices — and make choices that reflect what we actually want.

RA Memories Can Hide A Lot

Just as a note – we are getting ready for our annual holiday trip and will most likely be offline until after New Year’s, but there will be more to come after the holidays are over, if anyone wants to check back then.

So – what I’ve been thinking about today is ritual abuse and what it often hides.

I’ve gotten to know a fairly large number of ritual abuse survivors through my years on various forums and online support groups, and I’ve met a smaller number in person.

One thing they all share in common is, that they get stuck on the memories of the rituals, and they never look beyond them.

Now don’t get me wrong – I am absolutely not diminishing or minimizing the true horror of these memories. They really defy words in how awful they are.

What I am saying is, they usually aren’t the bottom of the barrel in terms of memories. Sometimes they are, but more often, ritual memories are like a camouflage of leaves strewn over a trapdoor to conceal it. They are real, but at the same time, they are not what they appear to be.

Before I go any further, let me take a moment to talk about me – in case that might help people understand where I’m coming from when I say this kind of thing.

I am one member of a fairly large dissociative system. I was previously a leader of one of the dark worlds. There are, as it turns out, worlds even darker than mine, but mine was dark enough.

Our worlds and their inhabitants were created on purpose and with purpose by programmers. I was one of their primary liaisons. I worked with the programmers directly and frequently. I was programmed by them, but I also simply learned from them.

I have been like them. I have done what they do, and I have done things they will not do themselves.

I have been a slave with delusions of elitism. I have been a predator with delusions of power. I am not writing about subjects with which I have no personal experience. I have very personal knowledge of all these things.

This blog is, in the first place, my opportunity to express feelings and thoughts that cannot be expressed in any other venue. But the other reason I created it is as a form of atonement. My knowledge has been gained at the expense of many. That is something I can never really undo or make up for, but perhaps sharing what I know might have some beneficial use to others in the current day.

Whether this is actually true or not, I don’t know. My views have never met with a warm reception in any place I have expressed them, so perhaps I don’t have the knack for being helpful. But either way, the information is here.

In any event – back to ritual abuse memories.

Ritual abuse memories are often a screen to keep anyone from suspecting there is more to find.

Programmers leave nothing to chance. Despite the amount of time spent teaching their victims not to trust, not to tell, not to remember, not to enter therapy – they are aware that programming degrades over time if it is not regularly maintained. They are further aware that a certain percentage of victims, in later years, will recover memories, will be in therapy, and will find the courage to speak.

So how do they ensure that their real work remains intact and untouched by any therapist or, preferrably, by the victim either?

They hide it behind something so ugly that nobody will think of looking any further for the “real problem.”

And thus are the rituals used. Programmers cover the true purpose and extent of their work with these bizarre satanic overlays that simultaneously repel many listeners (due to either the disgusting details, or the incapacity of most people to comprehend and believe anything so extreme, or both) and compel attention from those who wish to help the survivor.

The survivor tends to fixate on the ritual memories. The entire calendar is full of dates that have been given meaning by the rituals to which they were once subjected, so there is always another anniversary looming on the horizon. As a result, many survivors remain trapped in dreading and dealing with the anniversary cycle for decades, even if they have long since been free of the actual horror of attendance.

Survivors rarely get past the satanic cover-up to discover what truly lies at the hearts of their own internal systems. Survivors, and their therapists, are so riveted by those horrifying memories that they get stuck on them. Therapy becomes a process of attempting to defuse the memories and give the survivor some peace from them – but this is often a futile battle.

The reason ritual memories are so difficult to dislodge is that they have been precisely calculated on two crucial levels to remain firmly in place. The first level is that something so traumatic will naturally be consumingly upsetting to the person who went through it; the second is that they are being held in place by the deeper programming they hide. In many cases, the entire purpose of ritual memories is to keep anyone from moving past them.

Survivors are focused on them, therapists would look unforgivably uncaring in bypassing them – and so the ritual memories effectively stall the therapy while both the therapist and the survivor search for a means of relief from them.

Unfortunately, if these memories are in fact a screen of traumatic events designed to obscure and protect the real programming and mind control – then real relief will only be found through bypassing the surface memories and dealing with them at the deeper level.

If there is nothing left for them to protect, then the ritual abuse memories can be processed and laid to rest in a more natural way, as much as they possibly can be.

But if they are approached only from the surface level, then they will in most cases continue to be a therapeutic block and a dominant source of distress for the survivor who is plagued by them.

(I realize that this post ignores a lot of elements that ultimately get tangled in to the ritual abuse, but one post can only do so much. I have a lot more I could and eventually will say about this subject. In the meantime, if you want to say anything about what I’ve got so far, feel free.)

Internet Predators: Why Do They Do It

The big question is, why. Why would these predators go after the online survivor population? What’s the point? What’s in it for them?

Well – since I’m not one of them, I don’t really know. All I really have are some guesses, based on the knowledge I unwillingly gained through 33 years being victimized by a particular organized group. So for what that’s worth, here’s what I think.

There seems to be an idea among the DID community that organized perpetrator groups are acting with some greater goal in mind. There has to be something BIG to explain why they do what they do, something big enough to fit the monstrousness of their actions.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is.

I believe their only real gains are money, profit, and a limited sort of power – the most plebeian and prosaic goals imaginable, but extremely powerful incentives all the same.

I believe the “conspiracy theories” have grown from the stories of victims who have escaped from their various abusive groups. These victims emerge from the years of torture believing it was for some greater purpose – becoming a moon goddess or a high priestess, being a satanic bride or some other form of chosen one, playing a vital part in their group’s plans to take over the world or gain secret control over world leaders – no matter what group was behind the abuse or what specific beliefs the victims were taught, they universally received the clear message that their group was special, and that they themselves were destined for a higher purpose.

What nobody seems to realize is that the abusers have been saying  exactly the same thing to every child victim for decades. Every single child is told they are The One, that they are going to grow up to rule the moon, become the high priestess, or play an instrumental part in the group’s plan for world domination.

It’s like telling every eight-year-old gymnast that she’ll be on the Olympic team someday – although there are millions of eight-year-old girls in gymnastics, and only six girls on the Olympic team. Obviously there are a few million girls who are never going to make it. And yet, each of those millions of eight-year-old girls has a better chance of being an Olympic gymnast than any victim of organized abuse has of being a high priestess or a moon goddess. Those things will never happen. They are complete and utter lies.

Abusers teach the myth of specialness for the same reason that gymnastics coaches sell the myth of the Olympian – because it gives the recipient an incentive to tolerate whatever harshness and sacrifice is necessary to achieve that final goal. It drives people to reach as high as they can. It is a motivation.

It is also a control. With the promise of a reward glittering ahead, people will psychologically commit themselves more deeply. Every drop of blood and sweat, every moment of pain, becomes a sacrifice that increases the worth of the envisioned reward. When they are the high priestess or the triumphant world conqueror (or the Olympic champion), then it will all have been worth it. To quit before achieving the reward becomes a failure, a waste of all the effort already put in. With a reward in sight like a carrot on a stick, abusers can drive their victims until they drop, and without having to give them anything more concrete than a promise to spur them on.

And the cold truth is, many predators don’t need any better reason than that. Controlling others, manipulating them, twisting their minds, dancing them around like a puppet – these things are enough of a reason for predators to do what they do.

In fact, if we remove the blatantly cruel and abusive element from these examples, probably everyone can think of someone who delights in controlling others just because they can. There may be no real reason they need to, but they like to do it. Anyone can be a controlling person. Predators are just willing to go to greater lengths to gain and keep their control.

And there is another, perhaps more compelling reason for some of them – they don’t want anyone messing with their monopoly. Because let’s face it, the predators have had things pretty much their own way up to now. They operate in the shadows outside the boundaries of society, where the laws can’t touch them because it can’t even see them. They abuse their victims so severely that most are too terrified to ever risk attempting to expose them. They hide their identities and their locations from their victims so that, even if the victims do dare to tell what happened to them, they can’t turn the perpetrators in to the authorities.

Predators have lived undisturbed in the secret shadows behind our every-day world, and they have been protected by secrecy and fear.

Until, that is, the age of the internet…

When has there ever been so much information available to learn the truth of what these abusive groups do, or so much support and knowledge available to their victims? When before have we ever been able to group together, share stories, receive validation of our memories, and learn from each other like we can now? And when before has there been so much good therapeutic information available, even to those of us who are not able to find qualified therapists where we live?

Of course, the predators don’t want this to happen. They don’t want therapists who understand mind control or organized abuse to share their expertise with the community at large. They don’t want survivors congregating and sharing knowledge and support with each other. These things threaten the ignorance and isolation and secrecy they need in order to thrive.

So… predators go to great lengths to sow distrust of therapists and other supportive people among the survivor community, and to spread seeds of discord and dissension in the support groups.

This is an extension of what they have always done. They have specifically taught their victims to fear and distrust the authority figures that a child would be most likely to turn to for help – such as teachers, police, judges, therapists.

In this case, the predators are simply activating the distrust they have already created toward real-life people and linking it to the online world. They are seeking to discredit the available knowledge and turn survivors against their helpers, each other, and themselves – because they know that survivors, once isolated by their own distrust, will neither give nor receive any help.

And in doing so, they continue to seek the power and control that has always been their turn-on.

With knowledge and caution, however, we can be armed to protect ourselves, our systems, and our opportunities to heal and create the our own safe lives as we deserve to do.

Internet Predators and Child Alters: 10 Ideas to Keep Them Safe

Another way that internet predators can infiltrate a dissociative survivor’s system is by befriending child alters.

These younger alters can be (although they are not always) more trusting than the adults, or they can be conditioned to unquestioning obedience, either of which makes them vulnerable if a predator wants to take advantage of them. Child alters also tend to have more difficulty discerning when someone is trying to trick them or manipulate them. With their child’s perspective, they can be influenced to believe things that would not get past an adult’s critical thinking skills.

Generally speaking (which is to say, true in many cases, but not necessarily true for every survivor or every child alter) – the child alters know vast amounts of information about the survivor’s dissociative system, information that can be very dangerous if it is given into unscrupulous hands. Some child alters also can wield immense power within the system. They might be able to affect other alters or even to change the system landscape.

As one might imagine, a predator could do a lot of damage to a survivor’s system by gaining influential control over the child alters.

Someone once mentioned to me, when I suggested that I thought it was risky to let their child alters go without supervision, that she didn’t have to worry because her background did not involve organized abuse or mind control – this is not true.

ANY AND EVERY CHILD ALTER IS VULNERABLE TO PREDATORS.

Your background does not have to include programming, mind control, ritual abuse, or cult activities to make your child alters vulnerable to a predator’s approach. All a predator requires is a malleable mind and an uncritical perspective, and any child alter will give them that.

Since this predatory tactic is designed to take advantage of divisions or dissociative walls within a system, it is most effectively combatted by developing and maintaing strong communication skills among alters. Dissociative survivors who are wrestling with denial, or those who leave their system to manage itself because they are too depleted to fight about it – those survivors are at particular risk for being victimized in this way.

It is absolutely critical that the adult members of our systems protect our younger alters from doing anything which might be dangerous to them or to the entire system-and there are a number of common-sense things we can do which will dramatically reduce the likelihood that our child alters will be easy pickings for an online predator.

1.       Build communication skills! Among all the other reasons why internal communication is such an important part of DID work, here is another. Predatory influences on your system can be detected and defused more quickly if the system is able to work together and communicate effectively.

2.       Child alters should never do anything online without an adult’s close supervision. It doesn’t matter if you think you know what they’re doing, or you trust them to follow the rules you’ve set for them, or you’re sure they can’t get into trouble at the sites they’re allowed to visit. Better safe than sorry. A child alter’s online activities should always be closely monitored.

3.       Child alters should not have instant messaging conversations or receive private e-mail. This is especially true if your system communication skills are still in progress. The most certain way to make sure that child alters do not become a predator’s target is to prevent them from conversing online at all. If you are not able to monitor what is said to your child alters or by whom, then in the interest of your own safety and that of your alters, keep the littles offline. Do not rely on conversation histories, as these can be erased. Do not rely on the belief that your online “friend” is a safe person and would never hurt you or your child alters. Online appearances can be deceiving.

4.       Be suspicious if someone wants to talk your child alters alone. There should be no reason for any outside person to speak to your child alters without your supervision-and a trustworthy person will have no problem with your supervision. If a person is persistent about having private conversations with your alters, there is likely a reason they don’t want you to know what they’re saying. Don’t be guilt-tripped into allowing private interaction because someone acts hurt that you don’t trust them. This is a blatant manipulation and a big red flag.

5.       Be suspicious if someone requests to speak to your child alters on a regular basis. Regularly asking for child alters, or turning the conversation in a way that they know will bring your child alters out, is a danger sign. Anybody who is attempting to manipulate your system in this way probably has other manipulative intentions in mind as well.

6.       Keep in touch. Talk to your child alters about the outside people with whom they interact. Even if you saw every word of the conversation, this is still important. As with any child, keeping yourself interested and involved in their activities will maintain a strong bond between you, and consistent attention can enable you to pick up on developing problems much more quickly. Some signs of possible trouble include the child alter appearing reluctant to repeat the conversation, any claims that they can’t or are not allowed to repeat what was said, or appearing more secretive than usual. Even if the conversation looked innocuous to you, these can be signs that a covert message has been passed to the child alter, and it should be thoroughly explored as soon as possible. The earlier you detect this and address it, the better for you and your entire system.

7.       Watch for patterns in your system. If your system begins to act or react in ways that are unusual, if things internally appear or feel very different from your norm, or if you experience any feelings or thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere and not relate directly to anything, pay attention to when they occur. See if they routinely occur within a predictable space of time after a child alter has talked to a particular person. If so, then your child alters should no longer be permitted to speak to that person-even if this means you have to stop talking to them too!

8.       Be suspicious if system communication inexplicably breaks down. Once they get a hold on your child alters, predators will instruct the alters to hide their activities from you. In some cases, the alters themselves will be hidden. Be sensitive to any shifts or changes in your ability to see or speak to other alters in your system. Early detection can make all the difference in your ability to help an alter who has been entrapped by a predator.

9.       Stay away from known predators. This should be self-evident, but experience has proven that it needs to be said. If you become aware that a certain person is suspected of harming others through any kind of predatory behavior, DO NOT GO STRIKE UP A FRIENDSHIP WITH THEM.

10.   Have an open mind. Child alters will pick up on your attitudes as easily as outside children do. If they fear they will be rejected or disbelieved, or if they do not have a good relationship with you, then they are less likely to tell you if anything is happening. No doubt we all remember, on some level, what it was like to be a child living in fear of punishments and reprisals for “telling.” Predators can and will use those same threats on your child alters in the current day.

Safety is something we all deserve-but it is also something we owe to our younger selves who have already been hurt enough. It is up to us to prove to them that the current day is a safer time than our childhood was. Part of this is protecting them from any predatory influence.

We need to make our systems strong enough and cohesive enough to repel any attempt by a predator to breach our inner walls and run rampant through our worlds, and until we develop the necessary skills to do that, we need to take the necessary precautions to prevent our defenses from being breached.

Surf safely.