Need is a Four-Letter Word

Need.

It’s like a dirty word… needs are something that were ignored, in many survivors, from the moment we entered the world. The people around us taught us, by precept and by example, that our needs were unimportant, inconvenient, unwanted, things that would get us in trouble, things that would get us punished, things that nobody was going to respond to except to make us sorry we had them…

… and we tend to continue that trend, even long past the time when any “responsible adult” is enforcing the unimportance of our needs upon us. We ignore our own needs, deny ourselves the things we need (sometimes even on the basic level of food or water), deny that we even have needs.

This can get so extreme that, when the subject is discuss among survivors, it can take on the air of a competition. Who needs the least, who was denied the most, who can deny themselves the most… as if our self-denial were a badge of strength.

For many of us, though, who earned that self-denial through bitter and traumatic life experience, we do characterize it as a strength. It is a form of superiority over the lowly worms who crawl around craving attention and closeness and all the petty cares of normal humans… while we who have been thrown into the crucible of profound trauma and lived to tell the tale have had all such paltry concerns burned away from us.

Whether that is as much a strength as we want to make it, however, is open to some debate.

Because the fact is, we all need. We all need – even those of us who are reading this and thinking, “not me, I don’t need anything, maybe other people do, but not me” – yes, even you.

Need is an inescapable part of the human condition.

And denying our needs means that, at a fundamental level, we’re still operating on the beliefs learned through abuse – which by definition means they are not going to be healthy beliefs. So the longer we hold on to the definition of “strength” we created as abused children – the longer we’re slowing or blocking our progress toward healing.

And we seem to understand this – about every other person on the planet other than ourselves.

Have you ever noticed how, when other people are saying they “don’t need anything,” you can so easily see that it’s not true? You can see it in how they act, what they do, what they say when they aren’t specifically addressing the issue of need – it’s patently obvious that they do need things, no matter what they say about it.

But do you think it’s any less obvious to your listeners when you say you don’t need anything? The only person who thinks it’s convincing when they say they don’t need anything is the person saying it.

Denying we have needs does not actually make the needs go away – any more than denying our histories changes what happened to us.

However, denying our needs can (and very often does) force those needs to find other oblique ways to express themselves, so that they might be met – in much the same way that our histories express themselves despite our best efforts to shove them out of our minds and our lives. And then those who wish to support us must find ways to meet those needs for us in equally indirect ways, because our prickly “I don’t need anything” stance makes it impossible for them to address the subject with us directly.

We go looking for help and connection – in the form of therapists and support groups and peer groups – but then we force those support people to do extra and unnecessary work on our behalf – in the name of pretending we don’t need any effort from them at all.  And our support people are cognizant of this, even if we aren’t, so it can be an extremely frustrating and aggravating experience for them.

And yet, we still delude ourselves into thinking this is a strength.

It probably was a strength, at one time, in one set of circumstances… however, it is not a strength that will help us to heal. It is diametrically opposed to healing – and it is yet another of the multitude of ways that we can prevent ourselves from making any real progress toward the goal we all claim to want.

Getting into therapy, or a support group, or even a peer group, and then wasting everyone’s time yapping about how you don’t need anything from anyone – is a waste of time. Everyone who hears it or reads it – your therapist, your group leader, your friends, other survivors – everyone knows you are in need.

When you say “I don’t need anything” – nobody is taking it at face value or thinking “wow, they really don’t need anything, look at what a strong and capable person they are…”

What they are doing, is acknowledging that you’re someone who is going to complicate things – and they’re evaluating just how complicated you’re going to make it.

So – why complicate things? Since everyone can see we need things anyway, it’s probably better not to make ourselves look foolish by making an issue of how we don’t – we might as well just learn how to deal with our needs directly.

The good news is, that this is a step of healing that we can accomplish, whether we’re in therapy or whether we’re not. We can learn to identify our own needs, and how to meet them in ways that are acceptable to us and to the people around us – up to and including, expanding our confort zones, learning to ask for things appropriately, learning to ask for what we actually need, learning to address needs while they’re small instead of waiting until they’re at crisis point, etcetera. Having a therapist with whom to discuss the process can be helpful, but therapeutic expertise is not a requirement. A friend or a peer group can be just as helpful.

We can face the process or not, but either way, our needs aren’t going to go away. We don’t even need to ask ourselves whether we need something – because the answer to that will always be yes. We are human, therefore we need.

The real question is, how graceful are we going to be about it?
Will we learn what our needs are, accept them, and find dignified and mature ways of meeting them?
Or will we stick in childish refusal to admit to them, repress them until they squish out in some indirect way, and force the people around us to meet them for us?

It’s one or the other.
Not needing is not an option, but grace can be acquired.

Are you proud of yourself?

“Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.” ~ Samuel Johnson

I mentioned this topic briefly in my last post, but I thought maybe I would expand on it a little more. (Or a lot more…)

Pride is a basic human need, and something that every human has in some measure. No matter how beaten down and worthless we think we are, there will be a few things, possibly admitted only to ourselves, or possibly not admitted even to ourselves, from which we take some degree of pride.

They don’t have to be “big” things or things that are automatically recognized the world over as a source of pride. One person’s accomplishment may be another person’s ho-hum activity and be beneath a third person’s notice. But just because someone else might not take pride in a thing doesn’t mean we can’t or don’t.

And – sometimes we spend a great deal of time taking away our right to feel pride in an accomplishment or activity – telling ourselves we’re stupid for caring, or it was no big deal, or other people are doing other and better things – and yes, this can squelch our conscious feeling of pride in something. However, whether we allow ourselves to hold on to the feeling or not – the fact remains that the feeling was there, and the need was met.

However, because pride is an emotional need that every human being will strive to fulfill, on some level, in some way that is meaningful to them – it is also a prime target for mind control programmers, who use it as another string by which to bind their victims to them.

For example – depending on the degree to which the programmers control a particular person’s day-to-day world, they may purposefully try to prevent that person from achieving or accomplishing anything in their daily outside world.

This generally happens without any awareness on the part of the “day world” system members that there is any force at work against them – but from childhood on, the people (both internal and external) who are in collusion with the mind control programmers will make every effort to prevent the person from successfully doing anything that might fulfill their need to be proud of themselves.

At the same time, the abusive world will be busy filling the void. While the “day world” system members are left with feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction and failure, those system members who are active in the abusive world will be given rewards and accolades and advancement.

And even if, by the standards of the day world, the rewards and accolades given by the programmers are skimping and cruel – a sip of water, or merely an absence of punishment – they are still a reward in the context of the world wherein they occur and to the system members who live within that world. And if the day world is prevented from providing any standard of comparison – then even a sip of water, or exemption from torture, is better than nothing.

Better than nothing is precisely what the abusive world is striving to provide – by making sure there is nothing else but what they are offering.

The basic point is, that every person needs to take pride in something – and if the programmers are the only source of positive feedback and feelings of accomplishment available at any level, then their victims will accommodate their need to to feel pride within the abusive worlds.

Pride thereby increases a victim’s loyalty to their abusers, because the abusers are providing something that is not being satisfied anywhere else in the victim’s life; it acts as an incentive to live and profit by whatever rules or hierarchy govern a particular group, because greater accomplishment leads to greater rewards; and it increases the personal investment in the abusive world felt by those parts of the dissociative system who live in there and who feel that pride, because they are working to earn what they receive.

This has two important ramifications for healing.

First – in terms of internal collaboration and team-building – appreciating how pride was used against your system by mind control programmers can sometimes be helpful.

If there are parts of a system whose feelings of self-pride have been created by and subsequently bound to an abusive group, then the acitivies and behaviors which have been taught to them as “prideful” are likely to be absolutely appalling. And yet, the system members who engage in those acitivities will fight tooth and nail to defend them.

This is often the beginning of what becomes for many people an unbridgeable divide. How can we accept parts of our system who do such terrible things, and think they’re good?

But it is important, then, to look past the details – hard as that is, when the details tend to be so personally disturbing – but look past them to the bigger picture.

In the first place – as disturbing as those activities are, they were not chosen by us or by any part of us – so in that sense, they do not represent the things that we would have freely chosen as a source of pride if we had been left to our own devices. We must take pride in something. If only one thing is offered, and we are told “you can be proud of this” – and the environment supports that – then we will take pride in it, no matter what it is. So – as best we can, we need to avoid getting caught up in despising other parts of our system for taking pride in something so terrible, as if it was their choice or ours instead of simple psychological survival.

In the second place – the pride those system members feel is often genuinely come by – in the sense that they have worked hard and earned what has been given to them – and this is generally why they fight so hard to defend their activities.

If those system members had been given the option to play soccer – and all their blood and sweat and superhuman effort had been trained in that direction – then we would applaud their achievements. We would not be at all surprised or upset if they were proud of what they had done, or if they were fiercely defensive toward anyone who dared to imply that they should not be so proud of it. We would think their pride was justified.

But our system members were not given soccer. They were given abuse. That was all they were given, ever.

And yet, it is still their blood and sweat and superhuman effort, put into making the most of the world they were given. It is at the very least, the same amount of commitment and determination that is awe-inspiring when we approve of the direction to which it was put – and often our own survival required even more commitment and determination and effort, simply because it was achieved at the hands of people who didn’t care if they pushed our system past all rational human endurance.

So as best we can, we need to overlook the details – because no matter what those system members might say now about choosing it or liking it or wanting it… choice has never really been an option, and they have never had anything else to like or want – and we all want to hold on to things we’ve put that much of ourselves into, even if they’re unhealthy things.

But look – look at what they were able to make for themselves, out of the absolutely crappy situation they were given.

What they survived, and how they survived it – these things are as awe-inspiring as any of the feel-good stories aired during sporting events about people overcoming the odds to be where they are.

We all overcame the odds to be where we are too.

So we don’t want to strip away their pride, or make them feel less worthy or less acceptable because of what they were forced to do, or set them against us – that would demean and humiliate and unnecessarily alienate some of the strongest system members we have, and to lose some of our best potential allies in healing.

Instead – imagine how much stronger your group as a whole would be, if all the determination and intensity those system members possess was working for your group – toward safer, healthier goals and accomplishments that you can all take pride in achieving – instead of being locked into unhealthy directions. There would be no stopping you. So don’t let anything stop you from getting there – especially not yourself.

Second – in terms of personal safety – taking stock of how pride is managed within your system can be one of those “warning signs” to indicate there may be more going on in your life than you are aware of.

As mentioned earlier, the things that make us feel proud of ourselves can be quirky and individual, and the small things should not be overlooked as insignificant.

I am proud of my academic accomplishments and my professional accomplishments, my strength and my tenacity – but I also feel pride when I cook a meal that turns out well, when I go to the gym even though I hate it, when I hung my first wall shelf (even though it fell off the wall about half an hour later), when I beat my own high score in Text Twist… there are a dozen little things every day which bring small glows of pride – a dozen opportunities every day to work on letting myself keep those feelings, when they aren’t so big that I can’t help chipping away at them.

So – on the one hand, if you have trouble identifying things you are proud of in your life, you might just be looking too large and missing the small things.

But on the other hand – if you really can’t identify one single thing in your life that brings you a feeling of pride – then this can be a sign of very real trouble for you.

Because pride is a basic human need – so if you aren’t feeling any of it yourself, and you don’t know of anyone in your system who feels any better about it than you do – that means that the entirety of your need is being satisfied by other system members doing other things.

They might or might not be doing things you agree with. They might or might not be doing things that are unhealthy. They might or might not be doing things that are unsafe – for you, or possibly for someone else. The point is, they could be doing ­anything – so if you don’t know how this need is being met in your system, you might want to make it a priority to find out.

I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation…*

The Fox network is rerunning the first season of Glee this summer.

I don’t know if anyone else watches this. I never saw it on tv, but I’ve seen most of the first season on Hulu – it makes me laugh, and I like the music, and occasionally it presents things in a way that makes me think.

The Glee episode titled “Bad Reputation” was one that really got me thinking. The episode develops four or five separate vignettes that present various angles on reputation – being the “bad boy”, losing good reputations and rehabilitating bad ones, and the strength that comes with accepting and finding value in the reputation you have, even if it’s not necessarily “good”.

All these different angles on the subject really got me thinking about various real-life situations, both specific and general – and while most of those reflections have no place here, there were two that I thought might be relevant enough to share in this blog.

1. A history of abuse can make us more vulnerable to being influenced, even to our detriment, by what others think of us.

Considering the toll that our respective individual life experiences have taken on our self-confidence levels, reputation might at first glance seem like something that is largely irrelevant to the survivor population. So many of us are struggling just to get through the day – do we really have the time or the energy to care about what other people think of us?

But a closer look indicates that reputation can be a strongly influential factor in our lives, whether we are calling it that or not.

Lack of self-confidence means, for many survivors, that they are looking entirely outside of themselves for everything – guidance, approval, support, encouragement. Some survivors can’t take a single step in their own lives without ten other people agreeing it’s a good idea. Some survivors can’t hold to their own opinion or course of action in the face of even one person’s disapproval.

A survivor can be so worried about what another person thinks of them, about not losing that person’s perceived support or approval, that they will do anything to keep that person in their life. And in many cases this really does mean anything, including things that they personally would not agree with, things that bear a personal cost to them, things that are degrading or amoral or even illegal. (Of course, all of this can also be true of people who are not survivors – but I’m not talking about them.)

So in that sense, “what other people think of us” becomes a profoundly important aspect of our lives. And it can dictate more of our actions than we realize, because this kind of co-dependence can easily be masked within structures that appear benign, or even positive, like support groups, which can disguise a survivor’s need to be told what to do by others at the expense of listening to or respecting themselves.

This is just another angle by which to consider how easily and thoughtlessly suvivors can give away control of their lives, their thoughts and their actions, to someone else – who may or may not have the suvivor’s best interests in mind, and who can certainly never be relied on to put the survivor’s interests ahead of their own or even near the top of their list.

The only person who will put you first in their lives is you. So if we’re allowing our lives to be dictated by what other people think, then we’re giving the position of “first in importance” in our lives to a lot of people who are holding us second at best in the rank of importance to them (and more likely we are way down their list).

And if we haven’t built enough self-respect to put other people’s approval (or lack thereof) into proper perspective, and we allow ourselves to be blown about like a piece of paper on a windy day trying to keep everyone else happy so we don’t risk their disapproval, then among all the other dangers this kind of vulnerability creates, we can add the risk of severely damaging our own characters by the lengths to which we might blindly sink for someone else’s approval.

I don’t think we ever have so much self-respect that we really stop caring what anyone thinks of us. There will always be people whose opinions are important to us, or who can be influential over us, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But we need to have enough self-respect to be discriminating about whose opinions have that kind of power with us, and enough self-respect to put a limit on what we’re willing to do, even if someone else will disapprove of our refusal. Otherwise our need for approval from others might cost us the chance to ever be able to approve of ourselves.

2. Reputation can be used a programming tool.

The concept is used in different ways by various groups, but these are groups – and any group of people will have the dynamic of reputation in play – and if those groups engage in any form of mind control programming or behavioral programming, then reputation will be used as part of the programming.

This is an extremely simplistic discussion of a very complex subject but –

Many groups who use mind control have some form of hierarchy, real or created for programming purposes, to which their members are bound. Certain things will move you up the hierarchy, other things will cost you advancement or might even cause a demotion – and you create the reputation you have according to the rules of the group. However whinsical or insanely unpredictable those rules might be, they still provide whatever structure there is.

The hierarchical system is  used to create incentive, to create a sense of personal investment in the group, to create a sense of personal ownership of actions that is then used to imply choice and enforce loyalty – it is used to push victims to do more, to accept more, to withstand more – it is simultaneously the carrot and the whip.

The system members in the front world might not be aware of any such hierarchy, or they might know and simply be disgusted by it – but to those system members who were created for those worlds and those activities, the hierarchy will represent the be-all and end-all of their existence.

Whether they were moving up the hierarchy or forever trapped forever at the bottom of it (and the same system will generally have members whose placement and opportunities on the same hierarchy were vastly different), the hierarchy will be how those system members were defined and it will be all they had to define themselves. It will hold their personal successes and their personal defeats – it will be deeply and profoundly connected to who they are, both within themselves and within your group.

It is therefore important to be respectful of this factor in your internal work. The reputation episode of Glee brings up the point of how far people can go when their reputation has been lost or stolen and they feel like they have nothing left to lose – how viciously people can fight when they feel like everything they worked for is gone, and their back is against a wall, and they must fight or be obliterated – and this is a critical point to remember when approaching those members of your system who have “grown up” in an abusive hierarchy, especially those who felt invested in any promised opportunities for advancement or eventual leadership.

Those system members will likely have been forced to do things that will be incredibly difficult to learn about, and they will likely have attitudes that you find obnoxious at best – but then, you are questioning and prying into something that has been the core of their existence.

We might not like what they did then or how they act now – but this is their reputation, this is what they worked for and suffered for, this is what was held out to them as incentive to survive, and this was what they had to take pride in if they were going to take pride in anything – they earned what they have – and therapy and healing threaten to take their hard-earned reputation away from them. So we need to step carefully.

Those system members deserve respect for what they endured and how they managed to survive it. We can say that we don’t like certain things they’re doing and that we hope they will eventually be willing to stop or change those things, but before we ever make any demand that they change, we would be well served to take some time to learn about the world as they see it, where they’ve come from, and what’s been important to them – so that down the road, we can offer meaningful compromises or incentives to change. And they will need both time and space to take in the new possibilities offered by a different kind of life, and then to make their own choice regarding change.

We can give them the possibilities, and we can make the new alternatives look as inviting as possible by living and modeling and exemplifying what we want them to see. For example, if we want them to see that choice is possible, and that making different choices really can create a different life for them, then that is most effectively done by living the truth of it ourselves every day. If we want them to give us respect, that is best gained by respecting them. If we want them to see that life can offer better than what they’ve had so far, then live a life that is actually showing them something better.

However we go about it, we need to be very, very careful of backing those system members into a corner or putting them in the “nothing left to lose” spot – of making too many demands without enough understanding, of stripping them of the things that are important to them without respect or compassion – in the same way that we would be (or should be) careful of putting anyone into that kind of spot.

Even the nicest, kindest, gentlest person in the world, if they feel like the things that matter to them have been threatened or taken away, can suddenly sprout fangs and claws and rip someone’s throat out – and that can be true of your system members too.

(* The title of this post was taken from Joan Jett’s often-remade song “Bad Reputation”.)

The value of a negative comparison

“Do you know where you’re going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to? Do you know?”
~ Diana Ross (theme from Mahogany)

I have an acquaintance who is never having a good day.

If you ask him how it’s going, he always says it could always be going better, even on the occasions when he doesn’t have anything specific causing him to say that. His conversation is a litany of complaints, people who hate him for no reason, things that aren’t going how he wants, what a terrible person he is, how he’ll never ever have the things he wishes for, and how maybe he should just die.

Ironically, he doesn’t think he’s unhappy – and he genuinely doesn’t understand why people stop speaking to him, why he loses friends, and why life in general fails to go his way.

However, he also has absolutely no insight into how he comes across to others, and he absolutely refuses even to think about the possibility that his disappointments have anything to do with what he is bringing to all the different situations that end up going so badly for him.

There are two important things of which this acquaintance reminds me on a regular basis.

The first is, the importance of not assuming that everyone else sees me the way I see myself. This is true no matter what I’m thinking of myself – good or bad.

In fact, no matter what we’re thinking of ourselves or how sure we are that everyone else must be thinking it too – really, we will never fully know how other people see us.

First, because we aren’t seeing ourselves clearly. Like my acquaintance, who thinks he’s happy and can’t imagine how anyone could possibly call him negative – there are inaccuracies in everyone’s self-view. We might see some personal flaw in a more forgiving light than anyone outside ourself does, or we might imagine flaws that nobody else sees – but to assume that everyone else has the same inaccuracies in their view of us would be… well, inaccurate.

This is why it is sometimes helpful (sometimes even necessary) to find someone outside ourselves, someone who has our best interest at heart but won’t protect our feelings at the expense of the truth, to tell us how they see us – so that we can learn to see the inaccuracies in our own view of ourselves, since our views of ourselves can sometimes be inaccurate in extremely unhealthy or even dangerous ways.

And second, because others aren’t necessarily going to see us with complete clarity either. They might see us more clearly than we see ourselves, but they will have their own filters and assumptions affecting how they interpret and give meaning to their interactions with us – and we can never really know the individual complexities of each other’s psyches.

So really, the more we think about how many individual factors influence our perceptions of each other, the more obvious it becomes that it is a ridiculous and thoroughly unsupportable assumption to believe that we know what everyone (or anyone) thinks of us.

I don’t know what people are thinking of me – even when they tell me what they’re thinking, there’s often so much more to be heard in what they say than a simple “I think you’re great” or “you suck and I hate you.”

And I definitely can’t assume that they see in me what I see in myself, in the same way that I probably don’t see in them what they see in themselves.

My acquaintance of the perpetual bad day reminds me that the best I can do at any given time is to present myself honestly, and to act in ways that are representative of the kind of person I want to be, and then rely on that to come across well to those whose opinions I care about.

And if or when I find that I’m not getting the responses I want from the people whose opinions matter to me, it isn’t their fault for not seeing me correctly, but rather it is an indication that I need to listen to what they’re telling me, and then I need to look at myself and my own presentation and figure out why I am not coming across as I intend to.

Which leads me to the second thing my acquaintance reminds me of regularly – that if my life is not going the way I want it to… then I need to make the changes that are necessary to get it to where I want it to go. Nothing will happen because I really wish it would, and nothing will improve if all I do is sit around and complain about it.

This guy reminds me on a regular basis how important it is to not fall victim to my own excuses and justifications for inaction… not to overindulge myself in excessive self-pity… not to get too caught up in who’s at fault for this or that catastrophe in my life, contemplating the mess they made and thinking dire thoughts about what I’d like to do to them for it… not to become resigned to the mess, throwing up my hands and assuming that it will be there forever because it sure doesn’t seem to be cleaning itself up…

By seeing what he’s doing, and how miserable he is, and how resolutely he insists that it isn’t his mess to clean up, it isn’t anything he’s doing that’s responsible for his misery – it’s the whole world, it’s fate, it’s everyone else, it’s not him – by seeing how simultaneously sad and ridiculous and just outright frustrating he is – he makes it easier to look at myself and evaluate my own actions and attitudes more honestly – because I certainly don’t want to appear to anyone else the way he appears to me, if I can possibly prevent it. (And I can!)

He reminds me with every conversation, that we can stagnate forever in recrimination and blame games and finger-pointing and trying to get revenge. We can steep ourselves in bitterness and acrimony and resentment (our own and other people’s), and there is no limit to how deeply we can sink into it or how long we can submerge ourselves there – but meanwhile, life is moving on without us.

The frustration and anger over what we’ve lost and what we’ve already missed out on – these feelings are valid, and they have a definite place in our healing and a definite need to be expressed.

But it’s a painful and miserable place to get stuck, even for those who have lost or missed out on substantially less than the survivor population has.

And healing… does not mean forgiveness, but I think it does mean acceptance.

No depth or breadth or length of bitterness and resentment and recrimination and misplaced blame will fix the wrongs done to us or the wrongs we’ve done – but the longer we stay there now, the more of our own lives we steal from ourselves in ransom to wrongs that are long past changing.

Our future lives, our future selves, are not immutably defined by our pasts… we are creating them each and every day with each and every choice we make. Different choices really do create a different life.

Do you know where you’re going to?
Where are your choices taking you?

Healing is a forward journey

At some stages of the healing journey, particularly the early stages, it can be really helpful to find a sense of community among others who share the same struggles as you. It can be validating to hear that others experience things that are similar to your experiences, and it can be a great thing to have encouragement from people who really understand how even the ordinary things can be that much harder when you’re working around a diagnosis.

But it is to our own benefit to remember that the survivor community is only the first stop on our healing journey. It is not the end point, and there does come a point at which it stops being a help to us in any way.

The survivor community is a stagnant place – and as a member of that community, you will never really be challenged to choose healing over stagnation. You might get a few small challenges along the way if you exhibit some extreme of defeatist thinking, but very rarely will anyone even try to push you to look at yourself honestly, or ask you the really hard questions about your behaviors or your beliefs, or whether what you’re doing really supports your stated intention of healing.

And the reason this happens so rarely is, that the community will leap to the defense of anyone who is thus challenged, responding with outrage to the suggestion that anything a survivor does might be wrong or bad, or that a survivor’s responses might be skewed by their own trauma-created perceptions and therefore not accurate to the situation at hand.

In the survivor community, it is the person who issues the challenge who ends up being wrong. It doesn’t matter how appropriate or necessary or correct the challenge is – the community will band together against anyone who dares to suggest that anything another survivor does is anything less than perfectly acceptable.

The survivor community will actively defend your right to be sick with its last dying breath, and they will defend your right to be sick with equal fervor, whether you’ve been “working on healing” for a month or for a decade. They will defend a survivor’s right to be unchallenged in whatever sick thing they’re doing, to a degree that is sickening – but then, it is actually reasonable to expect a sick response from a sick community. The thing is, to not forget that the people in the survivor community are sick, and many of them have every intention of staying that way.

So what if you’re one of the rare few who actually hopes to move beyond being a card-carrying member of the dysfunctional brigade?

Then you’re going to have to think for yourself, and you’re going to have to find the necessary drive and incentive within yourself.

Your “friends” won’t be able to help you – they’re much more likely to want to keep you right there where they are, and it can feel like disloyalty to even think of outgrowing them.

But if they were really friends, wouldn’t they support you even if you were further along than they? Wouldn’t they respect you for accomplishing what they also hope to accomplish? Wouldn’t they want you to succeed, and then take encouragement from your progress and your success, as evidence that they can do it too?

Do you ever ask yourself why so few survivors offer this kind of leadership to each other?

Your friends may very well not support you or encourage you. But that doesn’t make you wrong for wanting more for yourself than they want, for themselves or for you. Regardless of what your “friends” are doing, it should not stand in the way of your own journey away from sickness and toward health.

And the “community leaders” won’t be able to help your healing either, because in case you haven’t noticed, they aren’t doing much healing themselves. We can’t look to them to show us where we can go or how to get there, because they’re not going anywhere.

The survivor community offers a cocooning protection for those who are just learning to recognize their dissociation, or just getting to know their dissociative systems – and in the earliest stages of healing, we really can benefit from the safety and nurturing of that cocoon – but a caterpillar who stays in the cocoon too long will smother and die in there.

We have to be ready and willing to leave our cocoon behind too, or we too will smother and die.

It may mean leaving behind the “friends” and “leaders” who have no real desire to accomplish what you’re striving for, and who won’t support you in doing it because it only highlights the fact that they’re not doing it.

It may feel selfish and disloyal, and you may be accused of being these things and more and worse in the process.

But despite this, you need to think for yourself and listen to yourself, ahead of anyone else, and you need to do what’s right for your healing even if nobody else is doing it.

Part of being healthier is understanding and respecting your own needs and finding ways to meet them even when that means not doing what other people are doing, or not doing what other people want you to do – and even when you care about the people who are telling you to do something different. Compromise should never mean self-abandonment for either side – and if your friends really care about you, then your health should be just as important to them as it is to you.

So when you begin to feel a need to move away from sickness and sick people and sick behaviors and people telling each other how okay it is to be sick – or if you ever heal enough to feel that need – don’t squash it out of a misguided sense of loyalty to, or an over-developed identity in, the survivor community.

If you’ve progressed far enough to feel like you’re ready to move on, then the community has offered you everything it has to give. Get out while the getting’s good! And take anyone who will come with you – but don’t let anyone hold you back.

Healing is a forward journey – so keep on moving.

Take Me To Your Leader

Last week, I wrote a post that I thought was going to be about one thing, but which adamantly insisted on being about something else altogether.

Not that the need for sources of real inspiration in the survivor community is not an important topic – it’s really important. So often we are left taking “inspiration” from rotten sources – people who really aren’t doing anything to resolve their own dysfunction, people who say they’re working at healing but aren’t really accomplishing anything in their healing – and yet, they set themselves up as “leaders of the community” anyway.

There is no true inspiration to be found there – what are those people doing that any of us would really want to emulate? But with nothing to compare them to, we tend not to question the “leadership” we end up with, even though they’re not really leading us anywhere.

Healing doesn’t have to be the slow-moving (or no-moving) process it so frequently appears to be when we look at these non-leaders, these people who sit in the same place “working on” the same problems for five or ten or twenty years without making an inch of real progress. Doesn’t anyone ever wonder why, with all that work and all that time, they never actually get better?? Or are we all just assuming that they’re actually doing the best they can, and the nothing they’re getting for all their purported effort is really all there is?

Well, it’s not all there is. It’s not all we can hope for. It’s not the best that can be done. And the boundaries and limits of the healing journey should not defined by people who aren’t actually traveling anywhere. Although we all have to face and overcome our own limitations and roadblocks in healing, we should not take on someone else’s limitations, to define and limit what is possible for us.

When we’re finally ready to really work at healing – to give it the consistent energy and focus and attention it needs – to put our healing first, instead of ranking it behind absolutely everything else in our lives – to leave the safety of denial and the security of being sick – or IF we’re ever ready to do all that – then healing and progress and change will happen.

If we’re really working at our healing, then we absolutely will not be in the same place and talking about the same things five or ten years down the line. The healthy changes, the steps made toward a safer, more stable, more peaceful life, a life that is more ours than our lives have ever been before – will be so dramatic and so obvious that nobody will be able to miss them – because even if ninety percent of the work is done in our internal worlds, between and among and by our internal selves, where nobody can see it – the results of that work will be clearly reflected in every aspect of our external life.

But it’s an unfortunate truth that we can’t look to the so-called “leadership” of the survivor community to help us get there, because ironically, every one of these people, whether they’ve been there for one year or twenty, are still full-fledged, card-carrying members of the dysfunctional brigade – and where will we get, by following where they lead? No further than they’ve gone themselves.

These people can talk the talk well. They know all the “therapeutic” explanations and suggestions for every problem – and well they should, since they’ve spent so much time in therapy themselves. They’re quick to share what they know with everyone, and to rely on their words to be so impressive to others that we become almost dazzled by how much they know, by how much they talk, and we never really examine what they do.

And they have to hope we never do look past their words, because there’s nothing there. A leader should lead by example and action as well as by words – but our so-called leaders are not exemplifying successful healing, or even healing that makes progress. To the observer, the “healing journies” of our so-called leaders are like a soap opera – take a year or two off from watching, and when you come back, the same people are still be dealing with the same problems. If the people who set themselves up as leaders of our community can’t make a step of progress themselves, then how can they lead anyone else? And why are we looking up to them in the first place?

Our community leaders are also wonderful at making the newly diagnosed feel more comfortable with being where they are – and well they should be. They are experts in finding ways to be comfortable with where they are themselves, with rationalizing and justifying where they are, so that it not only becomes tolerable, but almost desireable – and this is something they pass on freely to the masses.

But a good leader should not make you feel good about being where you are – certainly not in terms of healing – because the whole point of healing is change, and if you feel good enough with where you are, then where’s the incentive to change anything?

A good leader should make you slightly uncomfortable with where you are, because they are modeling and exemplifying where you want to be. And if you aren’t there yet, then how good do you want to feel about that?

A real leader should be someone who is living the goals you have for yourself – not someone whose own life is no better or healthier than yours is. You already know how to be where you are – you don’t need someone to lead you there, and you certainly don’t need a leader who exemplifies nothing more encouraging than stagnation.

Of course, it’s not in their own interest for these putative community leaders to encourage you to change or heal or progress – because if you do it when they still haven’t, it makes them look bad. But that’s their problem – and it’s up to you whether or not you take it on to become your problem too.

That being said, we owe it to ourselves to take a good hard look at who we’re looking up to in the survivor community, and why.

What are they exemplifying to you?
What are they modeling for you?
What do they represent to you?
What have they accomplished, in their healing or in their lives, that you hope to accomplish yourself?
What goals do you feel encouraged to work toward by the leaders you look up to?
Are your leaders really showing you that you can do more or be more or heal more than you thought possible?
And if they aren’t doing any of these things, then why are you looking up to them in the first place?

Looking for Inspiration

I am not a big fan of change. I want everything I do, everywhere I go, the people I know and my relationships with them, to remain in a fixed and unchanging state so I always know what to expect.

However, I am also committed to progress and healing – and if there’s one thing that both those processes require, it’s change.

The conflict between my desire for a predictable world and my commitment to healing is one that has required constant attention over the years, because it seems like, at every step, there is a chance for this conflict to trip me up or slow me down – a chance that my own resistance to change might be the thing that prevents my own healing.

And ironically, I think this becomes more true the more we progress.

When we first begin the healing journey, most of us enter therapy in various stages of finally admitting that something needs to change. As little as we might want to admit it, and as hard as it is to make the changes that really need to be made – we are at least nominally acknowledging the fact that change is necessary.

And these changes have elements that can feel good, even while they also bring their fair share of confusion and difficulty. They can make us feel like we are finally taking action on a problem that we have put off for too long, like we’re finally doing something. We are finding ourselves, we are gaining a sense of community with others like us, we are making connections – even the difficult times are opportunities to discover that we are not alone or “weird” or isolated in negative uniqueness.

The discovery of community can be emotionally addictive, especially since most of us have gone our whole lives up to this point without ever feeling like we’re on the inside, like we’re part of the group instead of trapped on its fringes.

So many of us have spent decades feeling unacceptably weird, unforgiveably different, undeserving, worthless, hated – and to finally find a community where people understand our struggles and accept us anyway, is like balm to our aching souls.

We can finally have a space for honesty, places to tell the truth of what we see and what we feel and how things really are, instead of having to hide everything behind smiling faces and facades of functionality.

However, I think there are a lot of people who get so caught up in finally feeling like part of the group, that they forget that this community was supposed to be only a waystation on their journey.

If our sense of self, our identity, our friends, the things we’ve done that make us feel good about ourselves, the things we do that are important to us, become inextricably entwined with our diagnosis, with being sick – then it is entirely possible to lose our incentive to work toward getting well, because “healing” becomes synonomous with loss.

The desire to hold on to this good thing they’ve found can sidetrack people from their healing, and cause them instead to take up permanent residence as a perpetual patient, eternally “working to get better” but never actually getting anywhere.

So many of us want to reach out to other survivors and offer them encouragement and support and hope – but the truth that many of us miss here is that, before we can really serve as a living example to anyone else, we have to actually accomplish something ourselves.

Support along the way is a great thing to share – but if we let the giving and receiving of that support become an end in and of itself, instead of a step that lifts us closer to where we really want to go, then we are missing the point – and cheating ourselves – and by example, cheating everyone who is newer to the journey than we are and is looking to us to see where they might hope to be when they’ve been at the process as long as we have.

So after you’ve been part of the survivor community for five years, ten years, twenty years – if you’re still doing the same thing you were doing five or ten or twenty years ago, it might be time to re-evaluate and ask yourself what you’re still doing there – because proof that you can be in therapy for twenty years without getting much of anywhere is really not all that inspiring.

Our own successful healing and peaceful lives are the most inspiring thing we can offer to other survivors.

What are you modeling to newcomers at this point in your healing journey?
Are you showing them that they can get where they hope to go?
Are you living the kind of life that could inspire or encourage anyone else’s healing?
And if not – then why not?

A defense mechanism gone wrong

I have always hated the suggestion that it’s my outlook on things (the world, the day, other people, activities, life) that affects my experience with them.

It sounds so trite, so corny… so… stupid… kind of reminiscent of people saying that you can “just snap out of” a depression, or that the past is the past and we should just get over it… don’t we all generally agree that those particular platitudes are so wrong as to be offensive? If it were that easy, we’d all just do it and go on with our lives. (Well, most of us would, anyway…) So is it any less offensive when someone suggests that the only thing we really need to fix is our attitude?

Well… it’s probably not the only thing that needs fixing for any of us – but every now and then I am reminded that my approach to things really does make a qualitative difference in my experience.

Generally, I am not a patient person. Just living in the world demands far more patience than I have – which means that I’m generally going through life in a state of repressed (or not so repressed) irritation.
But ever so occasionally, my mood mellows.

Such was the case last week on my way to the gym – and it kind of took me by surprise. I was driving along, stuck behind two slow-moving morons who had to drive slow next to each other instead of leaving a lane open for passing – and I realized that this lack of courtesy, which would ordinarily have me fuming over the whole minute or two it might add to my trip, just wasn’t bothering me that day.

Wonderful realization!

And on its heels came a host of additional realizations. I felt less stressed, less tense, less on edge, less hypervigilant. The prospect of being in a gym with forty or fifty other people was less daunting than usual. I smiled at someone in passing, and they smiled back – and I thought in passing about how smiles are things that get passed around, and if you aren’t giving them out, you aren’t likely to be receiving many of them either. Everything looked different, everything felt different… I actually felt relaxed…

The mellow mood didn’t last long – but long enough to make a clear impression on the day, and on the following week.

It made me think about what I’m putting into my world – not so much into the world at large, although I suppose you could put it in those terms if they make more sense to you – but what I was adding to each of my days and to the environment around me as I move through my days.

There are aspects of my life at the moment and historical aspects as yet unresolved that are going to cause me some stress regardless – they’re just stressful things, and there’s nothing that’s going to change that – but this compare-and-contrast exercise made it very clear that not all of the stress in my life is coming from those things. Actually, I’m not sure it could even be said that most of my stress is coming from those things.

It appears that quite a lot of stress is coming from how I look at the events in my days – large and small. And I suspect that, since the actual sources of stress feel so large or resolve so slowly, I am deflecting that stress onto smaller things, like annoying drivers, in an effort to put some of the stress onto things I can deal with right away.

It’s a defense mechanism – but the unfortunate side effect of this defense mechanism is that I’m spreading the feeling of stress around to all kinds of places it doesn’t belong, and I end up feeling like the whole world is going out of its way to stress me out.

As you might imagine, this is ultimately not very helpful at all.

I might not be able to make the genuine sources of stress any less stressful than they are, nor can I necessarily make them resolve any faster. Some things just have to be taken at the pace they come, and they can’t be rushed along for love or money. But at the very least, I can stay clear on where the stress is actually coming from. I don’t need to spread it around to everything.

I think it’s important to remember that sometimes a defense mechanism, even though on a subconscious level we intend it to be helpful – is not always a real help. Sometimes our defense mechanisms can choose an unhelpful defense, or they can go out of control and run amok.

A defense mechanism, after all, is intended to hide or defuse something that we can’t or won’t look at, in ourselves or in our world – it doesn’t solve anything, it’s just another way of avoiding the truth.

And we’re all experts at avoiding the truth – but part of genuine healing is to avoid it less.

Although, as usual, we don’t have to do this. As usual, we can probably go through our entire lives without delving into our defense mechanisms, without looking at what we’re doing or why we’re doing it or what we’re hiding from ourselves.

Our defense mechanisms might cause us a lot of additional stress and trouble, headaches and angst – and depending on the defense mechanism in question, we might be causing a lot of those things for other people as well – but we don’t have to do anything about it, and in the short run, it will always look easier to just let it slide.

In the long run, though… I’m probably not even halfway through my natural lifespan. And is this the way I want to live the rest of my life? Do I want to go through my remaining decades, habitually spreading a few big stressors around to all the little things that happen, so that every event ends up feeling stressful to me? Do I want to spend half a century being stressed out over nothing?

No, thank you. I’d rather make the effort to deal with it right now, so that hopefully I can have whatever time there is afterwards without that particular problem dogging my heels.

We are not stuck with the default solutions our subconscious puts into place.

Conscious attention and conscious choice and conscious effort can repair and improve on the stopgap answers our defense mechanisms have come up with – and if we actually attend to and resolve the real problem, then the defense mechanism will no longer be necessary.

But as usual, this often involves facing some really unpleasant truths – in this case, usually about ourselves – which can be harder than facing the truth of our various pasts, although in a different way. We are all accustomed to being insulted and degraded and feeling worthless and feeling less than human – but despite all the things that other people have told us and taught us until we believe them about ourselves – there is still something different about looking honestly at ourselves for ourselves, without any of the defenses or glossy lies that make our faults and weaknesses more tolerable to us.

These are the truths about ourselves that are too painful to touch for more than a fraction of a second, and they are certainly never dwelt on… the truths that involve the kind of person we really are, under the social masks and the things everyone else has always told us about ourselves… the reptilian “I” crawling in the sludge at the bottom of our minds, expressing craven desires and black thoughts that are too shameful to allow into conscious awareness.

If they were easy to look at, easy to admit to, easy to accept – then we wouldn’t need defense mechanisms to render them tolerable.

But this is just one more situation where, if we have the courage to face the truth and deal with it, then we can get on with the business of actually living in the way we choose to live, instead of wasting our lives in running away from the truths we can never really escape anyway.

What’s on my mind today…

(A topic for when real life is too busy for blogging.)

I saw a story on the news a while ago, cautioning people not to look to Twitter for medical advice because there was no quality control on the information posted there.

It nearly made me fall over.

I mean really… were people really looking to Twitter for medical advice? Twitter???

And am I the only person who is appalled by the fact that this problem was so prevalent that it required a news story cautioning people not to do it??

The people who were interviewed as part of the news story said things like “well, if you see it printed on the internet, then you assume it’s true”…

This comment almost provoked an apoplectic fit. It’s true… I know it’s true… but what a commentary on how people just don’t think.

And, I think this story underscores some of the points I’ve been making lately about needing to learn to think for ourselves.

Just seeing something printed on the internet does not make it true. For goodness sake, any idiot can write something and publish it on the internet! Five year olds can twitter, Jack the Ripper could have a blog about his understanding of anatomy, Jim Bob can post his granny’s herbal tea recipe that granny said “cured everything” – but as readers, we need to exhibit some basic common sense.

People can say anything, but if you don’t know who the person is or where their information came from, then you really should find some more reliable source (like, for example, your doctor, or any doctor that you’re sure is actually a doctor, as opposed to some random nitwit on Twitter) to at least confirm the information before you act on it.

Ironically, this news story aired at the same time that commercials started appearing to support the new bill regarding internet accessibility. The tagline of the commercial is, “internet makes you smart” – ummm, really?

The internet doesn’t make people smart. Good genes make people smart, and education teaches them how to use what nature gave them.

What the internet does is let people give in to their penchant for lazy easy answers, which they will accept without question regardless of whether the answers they get are accurate or not.

God gave us all brains. Use yours.

No More Silence!

Too many writing projects and not enough time! I guess it’s time to drag out another old chestnut from the storage trunk of thoughts and see if I can make a blog post out of it…

Have you ever noticed the tendency of people to feel bad for “telling on” someone else?

As survivors, of course, we have a heightened awareness of this feeling, since so many of us learned not to tell under threat of dire consequences, but it’s not a feeling that is limited to survivors. In fact, it seems like a pretty universal feeling.

People are worried that there might be some kind of backlash…
Or they worry that someone will be angry with them…
Or they want to protect someone by not breaking bad news to them…
Or they think it’s none of their business…
Or they just don’t want to get involved…

If you think about it that way, the threats that were used to make us all too afraid to “tell” were really only emphasizing a message that everyone is learning. But what a terrible message…

Why should the person who exposes wrongdoing ever feel like they did something wrong?
Why are we all bending over backwards to protect the person who actually did the wrong thing?

This is the kind of mindset that allowed many of us to be abused for years without relief, even if we believe there were adults who knew (or at least had an idea) that it was happening.

This is also the kind of mindset that allows crime to flourish at all levels – from the streets to the board room. Someone always knows what’s going on, what was done, who did it – but regardless of whether the justification is that “they’d kill me if I ratted” or “I’d lose my job if I blew the whistle”, the end result is the same. The criminals are protected by the conspiring silence of everyone around them.

It’s the kind of mindset that allows teenagers to bully each other until they commit suicide or go on murderous rampages, and everyone knows it’s happening, but nobody says anything until it’s too late.

It’s the kind of mindset that causes us to teach our children that “nobody likes a tattle-tale” and end the lesson there, so that we can raise another generation of people who are afraid to “tell” on anyone, for any reason.

It’s also the kind of mindset that allows someone to present themselves as a hero for daring to “tell” something, even if what they’re telling is lies. We’re all so impressed with the strength it takes to tell, that we don’t bother to question the content of what we’re being told, and we certainly don’t bother checking it out to see if it’s true. Society at large is so conditioned against “telling” that we can actually be manipulated through a false show of courage.

It’s so ingrained, so habitual, so taken for granted by absoutely everyone, that it doesn’t even stand out as odd or unusual to hear someone agonizing over whether to tell something… we never even ask why they’re hesitating. It seems obvious.

But as survivors… we also know what that hesitation can cost. We know how much damage can be done, while the world is protecting perpetrators with a shield of conspiring silence. We know what it is to suffer through what the silence hides, and how desperately we wished that someone, anyone, would have the courage to help us, by daring to break the silence.

And is the situation always that serious? No, of course not. But if nobody dares to “tell” in the small situations, then is it any wonder that nobody dares to do it when the situation is that serious?

So it all matters. Small or large, every conspiring silence causes damage somewhere, to someone – if nothing else, by simply reinforcing the idea that silence is preferrable to speaking the truth.

I can’t change the world. I can’t change everyone’s perceptions or change how everyone does things.
But I can change what I do. My complicit silence, and the complicit silence of everyone around me, stole decades out of my life. The complicit silence of society allows crimes large and small to be committed with impunity every day.
I am speaking, not only in defiance my own history of secrecy and silence exacted by threats and torture, but also in defiance of the social malaise, the mindless willingness to protect the criminal at the expense of the victim.

My complicit silence has come to an end.

I will not let someone else’s wrongdoing be hidden and protected by my fear or my indifference – I will not hide the truth with my silence.
And the more of us who join together in speaking the truth – about anything, large or small – the more we change the currently prevailing perception that the criminals and the perps and the liars have the power, and that the truth should not be spoken, about anything, anywhere, because nobody dares to speak it.
I dare.
How about you?

It would take a miracle…

It would take a miracle…

How often have you said or thought that about your healing?

I used to think it, on average, about ten times a day. My history, my misery, my PTSD reactions, my mood, were getting in the way of my day (again…), and it would take a miracle to change it. And some days, I thought even a miracle might not be enough.

Ironically, I turned out to be right. Healing does take a miracle. In fact, it takes a lot of miracles.

We need to find a therapist who knows up from down when it comes to DID, or one who is willing to learn with us – really learn, since the skills required for effective treatment of DID cross numerous areas of specialization and demand a number of different approaches – and that takes a miracle. Too many trauma therapists think they’re competent to treat DID when they aren’t, and in those cases, we’re lucky if we come out of it no worse off than we started. The bad or merely incompetent therapists outnumber the good ones, and the good ones tend to figure out relatively quickly that treating DID is a thankless and unprofitable path and move to a different focus, so it’s a miracle when we find a therapist who knows what they’re doing, or who is willing to actively learn what they need to know, and who is really willing to work with us.

Our therapist needs to have a strong enough sense of their own self and their own competence to withstand the many challenges a DID client can present – from anger and hostility to manipulation to sexual coercion to intense neediness to outright attack – even when our switches are whipsawing from one extreme to the other – without getting pulled to pieces in the middle of it all.

At the same time, they need to be human enough to admit when they’ve reached the limit of what they can safely or reasonably help us do, and have the good sense to seek their own support or consultation or supervision for the areas where their ignorance might present a serious danger. (This definitely includes mind control issues. )

It is hard to find strength and humility in the same person, and it’s really stretching the odds to hope that the therapist we’ve found will be one of those rarities – so it might seem like it would require enough of a miracle just to have all those things come together for us… but finding the right therapist is really the least of the miracles we need for healing. We also need to create our own internal miracle – and that’s a much harder miracle to come by.

We, who have been hurt beyond hurt, who have no reason to trust anyone or have faith in anything or believe that anything will ever be different than it ever has been… we whose hope has been burnt out by years of extreme yet pointless suffering at the hands of other human beings for whom we are merely objects to train as needed… we need to find some vestige of hope to grow on, and enough faith to push us forward, and enough trust to let someone else into our worlds.

We need to do things differently instead of sticking with the familiar comfort of “what gets us through”… we need to be able to stick with the work of healing when it gets difficult instead of just falling back into apathy and giving up… we need to begin the actual work of healing at all, instead of wasting all our therapy time on everyday issues and whatever few system members are least threatening to work with. We need to face the hardest aspects of our history… the things that were done to us, the things we did to others, the ways that our sickness has damaged the people we least want to hurt, the ways that our history has stunted the lives we might otherwise have had, what we’ve missed out on and what we’ve lost forever… and then we have to find a reason to go on and build the best life we can have, despite all that.

When it comes right down to it, we can have the best therapist in the world and still throw that miracle away because we can’t find the miracle within ourselves to truly heal from the devastating and all-encompassing abuse we have suffered.

So, some people settle for building a life without the miracle. They do just enough work to reach a tolerable point of existence, and then they settle there and live as well as they can around their disorder. Therapy is used to maintain functionality, without significantly challenging the current state of affairs, and these people just do the best they can with where they are.

This is a perfectly viable option. It’s not healing, but it is surviving within a reasonable facsimile of a life. And it lifts the burden of having to face any of our past horrors, and makes that a purely voluntary exercise, periodically engaged in for a variety of reasons, with little to no actual benefit in terms of healing – because healing has already been dismissed as impossible. This is the easier option, insofar as we don’t have to face history any more than it takes to function around it in our current day.

The cost is, that it’s static. We can maintain where we are indefinitely, but we will never really get better. We will never really be free of any of the symptoms or difficulties or issues presented by a mostly untreated dissociative system. We will continue to suffer with depression, anxiety and panic, eating disorders, self-injury, suicidal feelings and thoughts and urges and plans, we may still lose some time, we will still have flashbacks and periodic problems with unprocessed memories causing problems in functioning… none of the things we experienced at the beginning of therapy will ever be fully resolved by therapy, because we are not fully engaged in therapy. We’re really just trying to maintain the status quo.

In a cost-benefit analysis, there are many people who are going to find this arrangement tolerable enough to live with, especially compared to the alternative – and many people do make this choice. There are actually a number of reasons I think this can end up being true, but certainly one of the reasons is, that the cost of trying to genuinely heal is too high, whereas the cost of staying in more or less the same place seems negligible.

After all, what are we really giving up, to stay in the same place, but some things we’ve never had anyway? That hardly even feels like a loss.

So, part of the miracle required for genuine healing, is to believe it’s ever worth the work it takes, even when it really isn’t necessary.

We can live forever in a maintenance daze, battling the same old issues but never really going anywhere, just getting along from each day to the next, until our days run out.

Sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes, it isn’t enough – but it takes a miracle to believe that there is anything more, that we can achieve more, that we deserve more, that we can have more, and then to actually do it.

Another part of the miracle is taking the chance for healing when it comes to us. We might not feel ready. We might not be ready. But miracles can’t be counted on to come around again just because we weren’t ready to go along for the ride the first time around. If we let them go by, they could very well be gone forever. So – part of the miracle is knowing that a miraculous opportunity is being presented to us, to see it for what it is and to realize what it could mean for us, if we could make the leap out to catch it – and part of the miracle is jumping, committing ourselves, throwing ourselves into what we can make of that opportunity, whether we’re ready or not.

Healing takes a huge miracle.

This, from a confirmed atheist who finds their own use of the word “miracle” in any context to be highly questionable, not to mention hokey.

Hokey, but true – I can find no other word to accurately encompass what was required, as a lifetime member of a group who brainwashed and programmed my mind from the earliest years to the present day to believe and think and be their possession and their slave, to find the faith and hope that healing required. It took a miracle.

But it was a miracle I made myself – and that’s the beauty of it, and the trap.

We make it happen for ourselves, or we don’t. If we’re sitting around “waiting for the miracle to happen” – we’ll be waiting forever. Making a miracle, benefitting from a miracle, is an active process, not a passive one.

We have to use our own efforts to find what we need in the world – and every day that we settle for less, or waste our time with ineffective (or outright damaging) therapists, or squander the therapy resources we have on trifles, is a day lost.

And we need our own courage, to face what really needs to be faced, and to allow ourselves the hope for something better.

When the damage is so extensive, it truly does take a miracle to find hope and faith, in ourselves or in life.

But miracles do happen, if we make them happen.

“I have found in life that if you want a miracle you first need to do whatever it is you can do – if that’s to plant, then plant; if it is to read, then read; if it is to change, then change; if it is to study, then study; if it is to work, then work; whatever you have to do. And then you will be well on your way of doing the labor that works miracles.” ~ Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author

Online Safety – A Point That Can Stand To Be Made Again

For those of us whose lives are heavily affected by trauma, the damage done to our ability to connect with or feel a connection to another person can be a devastating consequence to live with.

We are caught between the human need for connection and an ingrained fear of the pain that connection can inflict on us if we open ourselves to it. We may even feel that allowing ourselves to be that vulnerable to another person is an actual impossibility.

This is no doubt why so many of us are drawn to the online community. The personal-yet-anonymous structure of online communication often feels like a safer environment within which to experiment with the risk and desire of forming a connection, however limited, with other people.

This new opportunity for connection is a great thing… and yet, it is also more vulnerable to misuse or abuse than the older, less anonymous methods of communication.

The internet is the first means of creating and maintaining an entire relationship that involves little or no actual human contact. We don’t have to see each other’s faces, we don’t have to hear each other’s voices… all of our contact can happen through an electronic medium.

This sounds great for those of us who have a hard time feeling safe or secure when we’re actually with other people – but this faceless, voiceless, almost-anonymous form of communication opens the door to all manner of misuse.

For one thing, the constraints and the accountability of being “in public” are generally not present in online interaction. There is nobody around to see us doing whatever we’re doing – no witnesses to connect our actions with our identities. Most online interactions are occurring while we are each in the privacy of our own homes, the one place above all others where most people feel least constrained to act in keeping with socially acceptable standards.

And, online interactions can feel private even if another person is in the room while they’re occurring, or even if the participant is sitting in a public place. Most of the time, there is only one person who can see what’s happening on the computer screen at any given time, and windows can be minimized or hidden from view with a simple click. Online interactions can happen in the middle of a crowd with little or no danger of being seen or overheard doing something you shouldn’t be (or wouldn’t want to be caught) doing.

This “being public in private” dynamic, together with the anonymity of online interactions, creates a unique atmosphere of bizarre and excessive permissiveness. People will say and do things online that they would never in a million years do to someone’s face, or never do if they thought there was even a remote likelihood that it could be connected back to them.

This can be good, for all the reasons that survivors feel safer “speaking” online than in person, but it can also be bad. Some of the things people would never do if they knew they could be held accountable for it, should really never be done.

People engage in some pretty disturbing behavior in the virtual free-for-all of the internet, and your own common sense is the only protection you have in surfing the internet safely.

This is incredibly important to remember. The legal world is still stumbling to catch up to modern technology. Prosecution is tricky in a world where there are no regulations enforcing quality control or accuracy of any of the information provided, where nobody has to be who they say they are, and the same identity can hide behind fifteen different screen names that claim to be unrelated. And most times, legal prosecution won’t even be an option.

We are our first and only line of defense in protecting ourselves from being used or taken advantage of, even in minor ways, in online interactions. If we are too quick to believe the first thing we read, too quick to buy a sob story, too quick to support something we don’t fully understand, too quick to assume that face value is full value – we can cause ourselves a lot of trouble and heartache.

Our online “friendships”, however intimate they may feel, are still lacking some of the basic elements that create actual intimacy – primary among these being, the ability to really trust the other person, or even to be sure that they are trustworthy. A true level of intimate trustworthiness is impossible to establish in the sterile, faceless online environment – simply because of the staggering amount of space that exists for deception and lies.

People tweak the truth all the time to present themselves in what they think is their best light, but in real life, we are constrained in how much we can do that. In the first place, there are certain aspects of the truth we can’t really tweak at all, because anyone who sees us would see the lie. For example – in real life, we can’t say we’re female in order to gain acceptance with a group of women if in fact we are a heterosexual male just looking for a target – but this can (and does) happen online all the time.

And even beyond the obvious, most people still won’t depart too far from the truth when what they say can be connected directly to them, their real and actual identities – the potential risk of getting caught is much higher for in-person interactions, and the potential consequences can be much more serious. But even when the consequences are merely public exposure and embarrassment, the fear of having that embarrassment directly connected to us is enough to serve as an effective deterrent for most people.

However, neither of these factors apply to online interaction. In the online world, there is nothing to prevent a person from lying about every single aspect of themselves. And while most of us don’t go quite so far, studies of online behavior have shown that everyone tends to tweak the truth a little more online than they would in a face to face relationship – because they can get away with more. They may purposely omit physical issues that could never be hidden in real life (such as a physical characteristic or physical disability or illness), or they may purposely omit details of their lives that they would not be able to hide so easily in real life (such as a spouse), or they may purposely misrepresent information because they feel secure that nobody reading online will have any chance of recognizing the lie, or of knowing who was spreading the lie even if it is exposed.

People online can lie about even the most basic things, like gender or age or location – things we would know without even having to ask if we met them in person. There is no way to be sure that an online acquaintance is telling the truth about anything. So a truly intimate and trustworthy relationship is literally impossible in the virtual sphere.

Common sense would suggest, then, that we be even more cautious of online information and stories and acquaintances and interactions than we are of the the people and information we come across in the real world – because so much more can be hidden online, and what we don’t know about online acquaintances can hurt us deeply. The “safety” of online interaction is truly an illusion.

And yet, paradoxically, when we go online, we tend to be more trusting, less cautious, less discriminating in what we believe or what we accept, than we would be of in-person experiences – and in the process, we set ourselves up for all kinds of trouble.

Some people go way too far in what they do online. And there will always be some saps who will fall for a line of crap, no matter how outrageous it is. And they are all milling around together in an environment that imposes neither responsibility or accountability. As you might imagine, this breeds a thousand new disasters, large and small, every day.

We don’t want to be one of the disasters. Even if it affects nobody but us – we really don’t need the headaches this can cause us. A little awareness as we surf, a little less willingness to assume that we are always seeing or being told the truth and a little more willingness to check things out for ourselves instead of accepting someone else’s words without any real idea of how valid or true they are – in other words, a little common sense – can go a long way in terms of self-protection.

(This includes my words – don’t just believe me because I’ve posted my words online! If I say something and you question it, or even if I say something and it makes sense to you – check it out for yourself. I’m a person, not an oracle, and I encourage people to inform themselves and think for themselves. The time to worry is when someone tries to discourage us from checking out the facts – or even worse, when there aren’t any facts to check out. If you can’t verify the facts of a story independent of the person telling it to you, then you invest your belief at your own risk.)

Let your common sense protect you so you can surf safely!

This Ship Has Sailed

I’ve been thinking lately about choices – choices I’ve made, and choices that I’ve let pass by.

There are plenty of life choices that have passed me by while I’ve been distracted with some aspect or element of healing (or not being healed)… some of those choices are not really gone, and I will have other chances to try again, but some of them were one-time or time-limited opportunities – chances I will truly never see again. I sincerely regret that I was not in a place to take advantage of those choices at the time, or that I didn’t recognize them when they were open to me.

Thankfully, there are not many events of that nature in the healing journey. I’ve written before about how long it took me to finally get to the point of actively working on my healing – and of course, until I reached that point, I was going absolutely nowhere, whether I was in therapy or whether I wasn’t.

That period of time spanned a solid decade… so I really am thankful that healing is not one of those processes where I look back now and see ten years’ worth of choices and chances that I missed out on and can never get back.

Life didn’t wait for me – but my chance to heal did.

I find that reassuring – that the chance to heal can’t be lost by not getting there fast enough. It is generally a chance that will be open to us whenever we catch up to it.

But on a very few occasions, there actually are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in our healing journeys.

I don’t think they occur often (or at least, they haven’t for me) – which, again, is a relief! Because, like most rare opportunities – they change absolutely everything – and if they happen to us, it will stretch and challenge every fiber of our beings, cross every limit and smack every sore spot and force us into a stumbling run of growth if we want to keep up… or stunt our progress immeasurably if we don’t. They’re the kind of opportunity that you almost don’t really want to get.

We don’t get to choose, though. If it happens to us, it happens like a lightning strike. One day, suddenly, we’re right in the middle of it.

This hasn’t happened to me often, but I did get one of these opportunities once – and although I missed a lot of chances in my life, I’m pretty glad that I didn’t miss this one.

On the surface, it didn’t appear as monumental a situation as it was. It didn’t immediately announce itself as the kind of opportunity that would stretch out to shape the future of my healing for better or for worse based on the choice I made right then. But as I got deeper into it, those implications became unarguably clear.

The easy choice, and the default choice, was to do nothing but the same old thing I’d been doing. The situation didn’t initially seem to call for any big change, and big change is not something I jump up and down with excitement about making anyway, so I certainly wasn’t looking for an excuse to do that. It seemed initially like the “same old, same old” approach would be just fine.

But then the “same old” approach started to raise some really uncomfortable questions – like, was I really committed to healing? Committed enough that, when the “same old” approach proved inadequate, I would be willing to try something drastically different? Even if it meant facing things I didn’t want to see, or doing things I’d never had any real intention of doing?

Well, the first answer was a resounding no. I mean, committed to healing when all it meant was doing the same old thing, sure, but not if it was going to involve all that… Uproot everything, internally and externally? Change everything? There were rules! There was precedent! There were habits, and “this is just how things are”, and the comfort of familiarity, and a sort of outraged and defensive sense of events outpacing me. I wasn’t there yet. (And secretly, in my head, I was thinking it would be okay with me if I never got there either.)

But my healing wasn’t waiting for me. And in this one situation, it wasn’t going to wait. I could run to catch up, or I could sit there being defensive and let it run away from me – and if I did that… well, it would be like missing the last bus home. There wasn’t going to be another chance.

Oh sure, I could keep working on healing. But at that point, I would just be “healing” – just doing the little stuff, the relatively meaningless stuff, the fluff stuff – because I’d let the really deep stuff go on without me. I’d decided it wasn’t worth a big effort from me, and I’d refused to do what it would have taken. And if I changed my mind a few years down the road – I would have the consequences of this choice to overcome, in addition to all the other challenges and roadblocks in my way.

I generally and genuinely believe that anything can be overcome – but of course, the “anything” I’m usually referring to is “anything that someone else did to me.” And in that context, I do believe that anything can be overcome.

But in this situation – where I had all the elements in place – a good therapist, and as much stability as my outside world was ever likely to provide, and the internal teamwork to back it up – and I still chose to let my healing opportunity run away without me – that would be something I did to myself, and I’m really not sure I could ever have overcome that.

I think the messages that choice would have conveyed to our group would have been catastrophic. I think it would have told them all that healing wasn’t really that important after all, and nobody really had to take it that seriously. I think it would have been an insult to all the system members who were forced to handle abusive situations, whenever and however those happened, because I wouldn’t take a risk to help them when it didn’t happen on my terms. It would have been a very literal choice to stay with our primary abuser instead of even trying to get away from him – an actual choice to do that, even though we finally had an actual and valid opportunity to choose something else, and we knew that, even when we tried not to admit it – and that would have been a disaster. An absolute disaster. How would we ever have overcome that?

So I’m thankful that I had a therapist who recognized the psychological importance of this situation and could help me to recognize it too, in time to actually do something about it, because otherwise I’m pretty sure I would have missed it.

And I’m glad that I ran to catch up with my healing, even though it was a nightmare whirlwind time of feeling like I wasn’t ready for any of the things I had to do or face or decide. (I’m also glad that period has passed now, and I hope (and expect) that I will never have to do things in quite that way again.)

It was a horribly unpleasant time to get through. But having reached the other side of it…

I’m devoutly glad that I didn’t let the ship sail without me.

Some Hurts Can’t Be Healed

In our world, February is a month of grief.

February was one of the few occasions in our abuse history when a perennial event (or nearly perennial event) occurred. The accumulated force of repetition has stained this month with a permanent patina of loss.

And over the years, it has seemed like February just tends to collect losses of every kind.

In truth, loss happens to me with the same randomness that it happens to everyone else – but I feel it more keenly when it happens in this month. February is the month of grief.

It seems like so many of us hope that healing will make things stop hurting, or take away the pain of what happened to us – and yet, it rings false if anyone actually says they can do that. The pain is so deep-dyed and just part of who we are… if someone could really take away all our pain, would there even be anything left?

This kind of puts us in a quandary when it comes to therapy. If therapy can’t lessen our pain, then what’s the point of doing all that work?
And yet, how stupid and naïve would we have to be to think that anything could really make existence less painful when we know that it’s always going to hurt?
It sounds like a dilemma…

But February is also a month when we remember that this apparent dilemma is not as unanswerable as it seems. Some of the hurts we have sustained will cause us pain forever, that is true… but still, some of the things that cause us pain really can be resolved. The key is to distinguish between what can be “fixed” and what can’t.

Healing does not take away the pain of what happened to us – that simply isn’t possible. Those events were painful when they happened, and they still are, and they always will be. Nothing can make them not have happened, and nothing can make them not hurt.

What healing does is help us to connect to our various feelings about all things, and then integrate the feelings and reactions that result from trauma into all the other feelings and reactions we have, so that the trauma stops dominating our lives and becomes just one of the many things that make up who we are.

February is a time when I remember that therapy is not a panacea, and it’s not a feel-good endeavor… and “being healed” does not mean never feeling pain again. It just means feeling pain in balance with everything else.

There was a time when February was a perennial disaster for me. Self-injury happened on a daily basis, usually several times a day. Some years I was intensely suicidal. Every year, the month passed in a haze of dissociation, and yet I was still in pain for every second of every day. I drove away friends, I lost a job, I failed classes by putting myself so far in the hole that I couldn’t recover. In the years when I was using drugs, my usage during February would triple or quadruple. I’ve heard stories about things I said and did during various Februaries that I hope I never actually remember, because just hearing about them is shameful or embarrassing enough.

Regardless of where I was and what I was doing, my whole life came to a screeching halt in February.
Every single year, when February arrived, I would fall apart.
And every year, around mid-March, I had to pick up the pieces and find a way to limp on through the wreckage I’d created.

And I had no idea what the problem was. Why was February a disaster every single year? Why did my best intentions to stop it, prevent it, mitigate it, avert it, never make any difference? I had no clue. February was a predictable disaster that I felt utterly powerless to change, and I didn’t understand it at all.

And yet, change and healing have come, even to February – primarily because now I do understand what the problem was, and is. I know where the feelings come from, and why they’re there, what happened to create them, what traumas are associated with them, and what else in the more ordinary course of my life has connected in to these traumas and reinforced the feelings of grief and loss already present.

Originally, I didn’t even understand that grief was what I was feeling. So it took a lot of work to reach a point where I had enough understanding to change even the smallest part of the February disaster, let alone resolve it – but understanding was the basis on which change and resolution were built.  Understanding the true reasons behind the annual crisis (rather than the exhaustive list of pseudo-reasons I had compiled over the years) allowed me to make changes where previously no effort to change had made the slightest dent.

The issues involved were immensely painful, and looking at them honestly was not easy. And at the time, it seemed pointless – nothing else had ever worked, I didn’t believe this would work, so why drag up such a huge series of hurts that I hadn’t even known existed until someone had to go and tell me about it?

Well… I might not have known the facts, but obviously that hadn’t protected me from suffering the fallout. My life had fallen into crisis every year even when the facts were still unknown to me. Learning the facts didn’t create the pain, even though it certainly felt that way at the time. It simply explained the pain I was already feeling.

And the first time a February rolled around… and passed… and in the wake of its passing, my life was not an unmitigated disaster of smoking wreckage… then, finally, it seemed worth it.

Resolving the issues that were present in February does not mean I don’t still feel the grief associated with this stretch of time. I still feel it, because I still have all the same reasons to feel it. The original reasons still exist, and the losses have continued to accumulate, both from the same old perennial event and because life is just like that.

No amount of therapy or healing can take that away. An event that rightfully causes grief (or pain or anger or any other natural reaction) will always be capable of evoking that emotion, and the point of therapy is certainly not to teach us how to become better automatons, more separated from our emotions, less in touch with the natural emotional reactions to various events.

But healing has brought balance where previously there were only wild weather-vane swings from one extreme to another.

Physics experiments prove that, the further apart two things are, the harder it is to find a balance point between them, and the more vulnerable they are to being knocked off balance by any little thing.

Therapy lessened the distance I needed to keep between myself and the truth of what happened to me – and in keeping with the basic principles of physics (but contrary to all of my beliefs beforehand), this actually made the truth easier to balance.

The truth is terrible, but survivable.
The truth will always hurt – but in understandable ways that I can acknowledge and address, even if nothing can really make it go away.

Keeping my distance from the truth – that was a problem that I might not have survived, given some of the destructive behaviors I used to maintain that distance. And it hurt, in ways I didn’t understand and couldn’t do anything about.
That problem, that pain, that terrifying descent into uncontrolled misery – that was something that therapy could help to resolve, if I was willing to put forth the effort required.
I did put forth the effort, and the therapy has worked.

My life doesn’t fall apart in February any more. I’m no longer being consumed and dominated by an emotional crisis I can’t even identify, let alone change. And I’m not wasting all my energy on not really wanting to know what it’s all about and just trying to make it go away. That fight was exhausting, and it was never even remotely successful. It never spared me a second of pain, and it never kept my life from being crushed by the very juggernaut I was trying to avoid or repel or escape. It was a complete exercise in futility.

I understand the feelings now; I know what they are and why they’re there. I’m not denying the truth any more – and in turn, the truth doesn’t have to smash my life to pieces in order to get through my denial and grab my attention.

Today I can acknowledge that I feel terrible, and I have a damn good reason for it.
And then I can get on with the rest of my day, my week, my month, my life.

Upholding Your Therapeutic Standards

The question of “whose fault is it” is a big one for people who have had negative experiences in therapy. It must be some sort of human need, to find someone to blame when things don’t end up how we want them to – because this is a question that nags at us and seems to demand an answer, even when there is no answer.

It is entirely possible, even likely, that we might at one time or another end up with a therapist who is just terrible. They aren’t helpful, they don’t have the first clue how to be helpful, they think they know everything even though they’re wrong about almost all of it, they say things that are actually hurtful or damaging, they don’t believe in DID, they think we’re all malingering liars… basically, they don’t do a single thing that’s therapeutically beneficial to us.

Whose fault is this?

The problem is, it really isn’t anyone’s fault, because fault implies intention. Most terrible therapists don’t intend to be so terrible. But sometimes even good intentions can’t compensate for utter lack of knowledge, or an inflexible mind, or an inability to listen as well as we wish they would. Sometimes, even though they want to help, even though they insist that they know how to help, or that they are helping, or that they can help, even though they might go so far as to say that any failure in their helping ability is our fault and not theirs – sometimes they still can’t help.

This is not a matter of fault. However egregious the differences are, this is still just a case of therapeutic mismatch. However hard it might be to believe, there are other people in the world for whom this terrible therapist will actually be a good match. They just aren’t a good match for us.

So this is where the subject of last week’s post comes into play – the best and most certain way of protecting ourselves from wasting time or money on unhelpful therapy, or feeling hurt or damaged in any way by therapists who aren’t half as helpful as they think they are, is to listen to our own selves and nobody else when it comes to evaluating our therapy.

The one commonality I’ve heard when people discuss previous negative therapy situations is that they knew (felt, sensed) that things weren’t going right. They were hurt by the therapist, they felt like the therapy was stagnant, they felt like the approach wasn’t suited to them – people know when their therapy is not going well – but they don’t listen to themselves. And that’s the mistake that can leave us trapped in a negative situation.

It is not our fault if a therapist sucks. We didn’t make them bad at therapy, and it’s not our fault that their approach doesn’t work for us.

Fortunately for us, there are plenty of other therapists and other approaches we can try.

BUT – if we don’t listen to our own sense of what is or is not working for us, and we stay with a therapist even though it doesn’t feel right – or if our therapy is going well, but we allow some other person to argue us into believing negative things about our therapy contrary to our own experiences – then this is our problem, because we are ignoring what our own feelings and intuition are telling us in favor of what someone outside our self is telling us.

This is a tricky issue for most survivors, particularly for those of us with mind control backgrounds. After all, weren’t we specifically taught not to trust ourselves and not to listen to ourselves, and to accept wholeheartedly the words of someone outside our selves to dictate our every thought and action? Isn’t that what mind-control programming is? And isn’t that what we need to go to therapy to fix??

Yes, that is what mind-control programming is – but therapy can’t fix it for us. Therapy can help to fix it, but this is one of the many many things where our own effort is really the only thing that will or will not change the problem.

Nobody can teach us to think for ourselves. Not even therapy can teach us to think for ourselves. There’s no magic in the process, and nothing that can come to us from outside ourselves in making it happen.

Learning to think for ourselves is not something that we can learn by doing what someone else tells us to do. Even if that someone else is a therapist.

It’s something we learn on our own, through our own experimentation, taking the risk of listening to ourselves and doing what we think is right, or what we hope is right even when we’re abysmally unsure, and then seeing what happens.

And one of the ways that therapy can help you learn to think for yourself is for you to evaluate the progress of therapy and decide for yourself if it’s working or not.

Every single person who has gotten out of a genuinely negative therapy experience has obviously figured out at some point that the experience was negative – or else they would have nothing to talk about. And however that therapeutic relationship ended, they usually don’t need someone to explain to them how or why the experience was negative for them. They know it was bad, because they were there, and they experienced it for themselves.

If people “need” explanations before they can recognize how bad their therapy is, that is actually a red flag. If someone is providing you with information about your therapy or your therapist that resonates with your fears but does not resonate with your actual experience, this is a huge red flag. In these cases, it is much more likely that they are attempting to influence you for their own reasons than because they are trying to “open your eyes” for your benefit.

People in a genuinely bad situation know it’s bad – but again, the commonality between all the stories I’ve heard in this vein is that these people didn’t trust their own awareness that it was a bad situation for them.

They doubted themselves, they listened to other people with conflicting opinions, they were indecisive, they didn’t know what to do – so they just stayed, and stayed, and stayed.

And whose fault is this?

Well again, it’s not really anyone’s fault. We probably don’t intend to cause ourselves the kind of damage we’re causing ourselves by being indecisive. But it’s not the therapist’s fault either, if our indecision causes us to stay in a therapeutic relationship long past when we know it’s not doing us any good – and it’s certainly not the therapist’s fault if we stay even though we feel that it’s doing us harm.

I have heard a lot of opinions expressed about the therapists in these situations – and I’m not disagreeing with them entirely. I agree that it would be nice if all therapists could see and admit when they were in over their head, or if all therapists were good at their job, or if all therapists were good matches with all clients so that we didn’t have to make the effort of trying to find a good match and we could just settle in mindlessly with the first therapist we tried.

But therapists are only human – and holding them to a higher standard just because they’re therapists is not going to change the fact that we have to do the work of assessing their skills and capabilities and personalities to see how they match with what we need and what we want.

Having high standards is very noble, but human beings will invariably and inevitably disappoint them. That’s a fact of the human condition, and therapists are no exception to it.

It is idealistic and frankly naïve to imagine that therapists are or will ever be “better human beings” just because of their career choice. I mean seriously… therapists are just the same cross-section of humanity that can be found in any other profession, or any other group, or any other population. Good, bad, smart, stupid, good at what they do, bad at what they do, nice, grumpy, brusque, friendly, extroverted, introverted, and on and on and on… it’s all in there. So get real in your expectations!

You can have high standards – of course you can – but don’t assume that therapists (or anyone else) have the same high standards until they prove that they do. There is no protection in just believing or wishing or hoping that everyone will act the way you think they should.

Real protection, reliable and solid and effective protection, will only come when you enforce your own standards – by assessing how each individual meets or does not meet those standards, and then acting based on that.

Imagining that all therapists will or should meet your standards just because they’re therapists is an abdication of your own responsibility to keep yourself safe by doing the work required to ensure that the people in your world meet the standards you have. Your responsibility to yourself is to listen to yourself, to respect your own feelings and opinions, and to act in ways that are in keeping with who you want to be and where you want to go and who you want in your life along the way.

It is not a therapist’s job to meet your standards, uphold your standards, or enforce your standards. Finding a therapist who comes up to standard for you is your job.

So asking who is at fault in these situations is asking the wrong question.
If we get a bad therapist, it’s not our fault.
And if we stay with a bad therapist, it’s not our fault or their fault.
Having high standards is great, but to assume that having them is enough, and if therapists fail to live up to them then that makes it all their fault, is wrong.
Fault is a completely inappropriate concept to apply to this situation, and getting stuck on assigning blame is just not helpful.

The real question is, how long did it take us to listen to ourselves and act on what we knew was right for us? And if it took too long, why did it take so long? And how can we do better next time?

A bad therapist might not be able to do one other positive thing for us, but at the very least, they are the perfect opportunity to practice thinking for ourselves.

Be Your Own Final Word

Testing a therapist is all well and good, but what if they just plain suck? What then?
Whose problem is this? Is it really that bad, or is it just me? Am I the problem?

Many dissociative survivors are so conditioned to feel perpetually at fault for everything around them that they genuinely can’t distinguish whether something “should” be their fault or not. It all feels like their fault. So trying to determine whether a therapist is genuinely helpful, genuinely safe, genuinely trustworthy, can seem like an impossible task, regardless of how many tests we put them through or how many months or years we sit in their office giving it the good old college try.

This difficulty is only compounded by the number of people who have had some kind of previous negative experience in therapy… and those numbers are unfortunately large.

So how can we provide ourselves with that little bit of emotional protection going in, so that we don’t end up getting screwed all over again in a situation where we were hoping for help?

First, a few things not to do…

DON’T jump into therapy and spill your guts right away. This might seem like a good idea ahead of time – a way to jump-start the process quickly before second thoughts make you clam up – but it’s also something you are likely to regret so strongly that it might end up destroying your therapy. With the passage of time, regret over hasty revelations can (and very often does) turn into resentment toward the therapist who was there to hear them. Many therapy relationships have been destroyed over this kind of regret – and there’s no need to set ourselves up for this. Therapy is a long-term investment that will not benefit from attempts to rush it along – and secrecy is bred into the very bones of dissociative disorders. We need to respect that, even as we begin working to change it.

AND, DON’T take someone else’s opinion of your therapy over your own – not your therapist’s, not your friend’s, not some online idiot’s. (And yes, that includes me – the minute I start intruding on your personal space and trying to impose my opinions on you, instead of just posting them in my own blog and letting you decide what, if anything, to do with them, is the moment at which you should start ignoring me, if you aren’t already.)

Other people can sound very compelling in what they have to say – and they might be right, or they might be wrong – and they might have your best interests at heart, or they might have their own agenda which they are pushing on you, or they might have their own issues which they are projecting onto you, or they might have their own obscure needs which they are acting out through you – this can be true of anyone. The point is, you don’t know.

Nobody is guaranteed to be safe or trustworthy or honest.

I find it mind-boggling, when survivors are so hypervigilant about a therapist’s safety or trustworthiness, but then they go to the opposite extreme of blind trust when it comes to other people in their lives. Survivors will allow themselves to be played like a deck of cards by family members, friends, and other survivors, without even considering whether or not they should have been worried about their safety with those people, but put them in front of a therapist and suddenly it’s all sharp claws and protective defenses.

I’m not suggesting that we should not exercise this much care with our therapists – what I am suggesting is that we should be just as careful when it comes to everyone else in our lives. Therapists are not the only people capable of hurting us or lying to us or deceiving us or manipulating us, so they should not be the only people toward whom we exhibit such fierce self-protection.

Nobody comes with a guarantee. We should not extend blind trust to anyone, or ever assume that someone is trying to help us just because they say they are. This applies to therapists, and to friends, co-workers, colleagues, fellow survivors – none of them can be assumed to have our best interest at heart, regardless of what they say.

But – this doesn’t mean we lock ourselves away, abandon all hope of healing, never reach out for friendship, never open up again. It means we learn to trust ourselves over and above every other person around us, so that we are less vulnerable to being hurt or manipulated by others.

The only motives we have any likelihood of ever being able to understand or rely on are our own – and the difficulty of understanding ourselves does not excuse us in letting other people lead us around by the nose because we can’t be bothered to figure it out. Such willing self-abdication is inevitably and invariably a recipe for trouble.

We need to learn to have our own best interest at heart, and how to listen to our own gut about what is and is not right or safe or trustworthy for us.

When it comes to therapy, this means listening to ourselves as much as to the therapist, and to the complete exclusion of anyone who thinks they know our private situation better than we do. All therapists are likely to say they are helping us – and some of them will even mean it – but not all of them are capable of being as helpful as they want to be, and some of them really do just suck. And plenty of people will have an opinion to share about therapy in general or about our therapist in particular – but since we can never know where their opinion is really coming from, we should be careful as to how much weight we give it – especially when it is telling us something that completely contradicts our own experience, or when we don’t have enough personal experience to reasonably evaluate that opinion.

Our own experience should be the guiding voice in our own decision-making process.

Because whether or not we are able to communicate easily with our internal world, our own experiences and reactions can give us a very a reliable sense about our therapist…
… apart from the typical “we can’t trust anyone, that person says we should trust them which automatically makes them bad, bad person, must get away, can’t trust anyone” and etcetera…
… and apart from the typical “change is bad, this person has no business in our world, we don’t want anyone messing in our shit, change is evil and they want change, therefore they are evil and anyone who listens to them is stupid” and etcetera…
… and apart from the typical “I suck, I don’t know why this person is even being nice to me, they must have an ulterior motive, I wonder what it is, I certainly can’t believe them…” and etcetera…
… basically, apart from all the things that we’d be hearing about anyone, or about any therapist  (because if the same phrases or ideas or reactions are applied indiscriminately, then they probably shouldn’t be taken seriously as a reflection of the situation at hand, they are more a reflection of the biases and fears and concerns of the person or group saying them)…
… apart from all this, there will still be some truths that can actually be helpful to us if we listen to them.

How does the therapy make us feel? It shouldn’t necessarily make us feel good… because good therapy will push into some very uncomfortable places, and it can confront us with some really unwelcome truths about ourselves, and both of these are hard to hear, and neither of them feel good… so good therapy actually involves a lot of feeling bad… but good therapy should make us feel supported, even despite the hard things. It shouldn’t make it comfortable to be the way we are (because obviously, we are there to change, and the first precursor to change is not being comfortable where we are), but it should feel like a place where it is okay to recognize the truth of how we are and what we do, what happened to us and what it did to us and what we’ve done to ourselves in order to cope… therapy should be where we can face our own fear and shame, our own wounds, our own traumas, face them honestly, without turning away… because the therapist is willing to face them with us, with honesty and compassion… and then we can work on changing them.

That’s a tough role to fill, because if something is succeeding when we leave feeling tired or disturbed or distressed, that can really complicate our ability to determine whether or not there’s a problem, but at rock bottom, I guess the only question we really need to ask ourselves is – do we feel like the therapy is helpful to us, or not?

If therapy with a particular therapist does not feel helpful, then that’s really enough. We don’t have to have a “good reason”. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault, and we don’t have to point fingers on the way out the door. If it doesn’t feel right for any reason or no reason at all, that’s really and truly still enough.

As I noted in this post, there are multitudes of ways that therapy can get done, and thousands of therapists in practice – so we never have to accept working with a therapist we don’t like or an approach that doesn’t feel like it suits us.

In therapy, despite the confusing emotional components, you are a consumer. You are never obligated to stay in a therapeutic relationship you don’t like or that doesn’t feel like it’s working for you.

So… listen to yourself – if your therapy doesn’t feel like it’s working for you, then don’t let anyone argue you into doubting your own sense of needing a different approach to your own healing. And conversely – if your therapy is going well, don’t let anyone talk you into seeing a problem where there isn’t one. People have all sorts of motivations for trying to convince you to think what they think instead of letting you think for yourself – but their motivation in such a case is rarely your best interest.

Find and follow your own instincts as to what is right for you and what isn’t – this is the simplest and safest and most reliable way to keep others from hurting or manipulating us.

Be your own best friend and your own best protection.
Be your own final word.

Testing… One… Two… Three… Testing…

Testing our therapists.

It’s something so common that therapists are taught expect it while they’re still in school – and it’s something that probably all of us have done – to an extent, we have to do it. Anyone who has been abused enough in any way to dissociate to any degree will need time to build the trust in a therapist that is required for actual therapy to begin – because if we don’t trust them enough to talk to them or be honest with them, then we’re not giving our therapy the fuel it needs to actually move forward in any reasonable way. Testing our therapists is what we do in an attempt to build trust.

That being said, though, we need to remember that the process of testing the therapist is intended to be a temporary process that ultimately benefits us by helping us to move on to the next stage. It should not be an end in and of itself.

I have known some people whose entire therapeutic career consisted of testing a therapist until the therapist failed in some way, then using that failure as an excuse to quit and move on to the next therapist, where they began the same process again. They actually took pride in how no therapist was ever able to pass all their tests.

Personally, I never saw anything to be proud of in that accompishment. After all, it’s not like we couldn’t all drive our therapists away just as successfully if this was something we really wanted to do. Therapists are really not going to bend over backwards to gain our trust, or track us down and beg us to stay every time we threaten to quit, or jump through every hoop we set before them in the hope that we’ll finally believe they have our best interest at heart. They are not going to put their lives on hold to help us, or reorganize their lives to center around us, or drop everything to attend to us. And they do not look very fondly on clients who expect any of these things from them.

And why not? It’s not because they don’t care – if they really didn’t care, they really wouldn’t be in the profession at all. There are no rewards in being a therapist that do not involve the clients with whom they work, so there is nothing in that line of work that would make up for what therapists put up with if they didn’t care about the people with whom they worked, if they didn’t want to be helpful, if they didn’t believe they could be helpful… to some people.

But most therapists have better sense than to believe they can be helpful to all people, or that someone actually wants to be helped just because they walk through the door and say that they do. And there is a limit (variable according to the individual, but present in every individual) on what a therapist will tolerate in terms of being tested.

This limit is usually not associated with the length of time it takes for a particular client to go through the process. More often it is associated with whether a client has a particularly obnoxious style of therapeutic testing, or whether a client feels entitled to violate the therapist’s boundaries in the name of testing, or whether the client ever appears to be learning anything from the process.

Because for most of us, the testing process does have meaning, and we do learn something from it. We may be glacially slow, and we may have to learn the same thing numerous times before it really sinks in, and we may need a lot of explanation and talking to really understand it all… but there is a qualitative difference, from the therapist’s side, between a person who is really working through this process (however slowly) and someone who is engaging in the process for its own sake.

If we are in the first category, most therapists will join us in the process with all the patience and tolerance we could want – the mere fact that it takes us a good long while is not usually enough to drive a therapist away. But if we are in the second category… that will drive them away.

Many veterans of the therapeutic testing battles have expressed the belief that all failures are the therapists’ failures. The rationale seems to be that a client should be free to do anything, say anything, cross any line, go to any length, and it should be okay – because if we aren’t free to do or say whatever we want within the therapeutic relationship and see that it won’t make the therapist angry or drive them away, then how do we know we can trust the therapist? And if something we do can successfully drive them away, then obviously we were smart not to trust them in the first place.

This rationale is crap, and it’s no wonder that people who think this way go through therapists like rolls of toilet paper and never make any therapeutic progress at all.

We can drive anyone away if we really try, and therapists are no exception. Not even for money can we expect people to tolerate being abused or mistreated by us in the name of proving they’re worth our trust. They will end up deciding our trust just isn’t worth it, and they are perfectly justified in doing so. This doesn’t make them untrustworthy failures, it makes them sane.

And the further point is this…

Ultimately, the phase of testing a therapist is just giving ourselves time, to acclimate, to get some breathing room, to get to know this person before we share our secrets and fears and innermost selves with them, because it is impossible to share something so personal with someone we’ve just met.

We might need six months of breathing room, or we might need six years’ worth… the thing is, though… that in the end, we can never be a hundred percent sure of our therapists. No matter how many tests of trustworthiness and reliability and safety they’ve passed up to now, there will always be the chance that tomorrow is the day it all changes.

So the testing phase is just what we need to do until we’re ready to take the risk of trust… and until we’re ready to take the risk of actually facing ourselves.

But it’s also another place we can just stick… for longer than is really productive for us, or forever if we really lose track of what we’re supposed to be doing.

Having jumped into therapy, of course we need some time to gather our courage for the next jump… but it will always be a little like the high dive at the pool. We’ve climbed to the top of the ladder, we’ve gotten to the edge of the board, and we stand there, shivering and looking down, trying to prepare ourselves…

But we’re never really ready. In the end, we always just have to jump.

(The difference is, that at the pool, we’re always keenly aware of all the people behind us who are waiting their turns while we hold up the line with our indecision, people who will start to complain if we take too long… and sometimes that pressure can be helpful in preventing us from wasting more time than necessary trying to gather “enough” courage.

Without that implied time limit, sometimes we can wait forever just because it never feels like we have “enough” – and we can burn out numerous therapists and friends who want to be supportive, but who can’t really support us if we’re just standing in the same old place doing nothing… nobody wants to support that.)

So don’t lose awareness of what the testing is meant to accomplish… or the limitations inherent in what it can accomplish. Don’t linger there waiting for some miracle of certainty that will never come… if you really want to heal, then at some point you have to accept the risk and plunge forward anyway. Therapy doesn’t start until the testing is done.

Don’t Be A But-Head

I went through a phase in therapy where my favorite word was BUT.

I’m sure that works for other people, BUT…
I know you’re trying to help, BUT…
I appreciate the suggestion, BUT…

… BUT, of course, it won’t work for me.

I had an extremely negative attitude toward therapy during that time, and it leaked out in everything I said and did.

Partly, this phase was a result of the fact that I didn’t want to be compared to anyone else, or to be given the same pat solution that worked for everyone else. After a lifetime of feeling different in a negative way, and never special enough in the right ways, I wanted to be different and special in a positive context, and I wanted to have an approach to healing mapped out just for me. It took some time to realize that every individual’s healing is a unique journey, regardless of the standardized feeling of the therapeutic techniques… by using those techniques, and applying them to my own unique self, I was making them uniquely my own.

So having to come to that realization was part of it… but the much bigger factor behind the BUTs was that, at the time, I wasn’t really committed to change. I said I wanted to change, because “change” was the magic password without which the doors to therapy remained closed, but it wasn’t something I believed could happen… how could any therapist change the functional misery that was my life?

Well… no therapist could, not while I was just sitting there waiting for them to do it all for me… and certainly not while I was bouncing back their every attempt to help me with an explanation of why their attempt was a pathetic failure.

In this sense, my BUTs were a self-fulfillng prophecy. As long as I insisted that what was being offered to me could not help me… it couldn’t. Again, it took some time to realize that therapy was a self­-driven process – it was not something the therapist did for me, it was something I did, with the therapist sometimes there to help – and being a but-head was preventing me from doing it.

Being a but-head is an insidious kind of self-defeatism, because it can so easily masquerade as someone else’s failure instead of our own. After all, we are attending therapy – so aren’t we doing everything that can reasonably be asked of us? It isn’t our fault if the therapy doesn’t work, right?

Wrong – and especially wrong if the reason the therapy isn’t working is because we’re wasting all our therapy time explaining to the therapist why their techniques won’t work instead of applying the techniques and learning whatever there is to be learned from them.

If we are blocking our therapy with endless BUTs – if we are attending sessions but resisting the actual therapeutic process – if we would rather find fault with every suggestion made to us than find a way to make those suggestions work – then this is our therapeutic failure. Not a failure of therapy, not a failure on the part of the therapist – it is our failure.

How do we know something won’t work if we’re shooting it down before we even try it?

Sometimes, in the process of trying something, and then discussing what did and did not go well, we can refine the technique into something that is incredibly effective for us – but if we reject it out of hand, or if we give it only a cursory try with no sincere effort behind it, then we will learn nothing from that technique, not even how it could be improved.

Being a but-head is simply another way we can let our own negativity stand in the way of our health and healing.

I had this article written last Friday and then forgot to post it. Coincidentally, this weekend I happened to witness a powerful illustration of but-head negativity at work… which also reminded me of something I forgot to mention: how damaging it can be to the other people who get caught up in it.

I was with a group of people this weekend, several of whom were trying to be supportive of another person who had indicated being upset about something. They made numerous suggestions, offered support and encouragement, offered factual information, but all to no avail – the individual fended off every effort with negative comments about how nothing could help them, nothing would make them feel better, they already knew everything and none of it made any difference – and this individual told the other people that they were just making everything worse in their efforts to be helpful.

This unchanging negative response left the would-be helpers feeling angry and frustrated and as if they had done something wrong, or failed in some way – and this was just over the course of an hour or so.

Exposure to someone else’s negativity over long periods of time can cause a lot of damage. We can lose all perspective on what is reasonable in an objective sense and what is not. Everything will be colored by that negativity, including our own expectations and goals for ourselves, what we can accomplish, what we have to offer, and what others can or will offer to us.

In the same way that we can be positively inspired by other people’s passionate actions toward good causes, we can be negatively affected by passionate negativity and negative causes.

It probably sounds obvious in this context, right? But when we’re actually in the middle of the situation, when we’re the one being the but-head… sometimes it’s not as obvious.

We can all fall back on the BUTs sometimes. There are very few people, abused or not, who greet change and new ideas with open arms and don’t fall back to some degree on questioning and challenging the validity of some untested and untried suggestion. This is a purely natural response, and it’s a place we can all get stuck sometimes.

However, we do need to be careful of those in the survivor community for whom being a but-head is a way of life.

We all want to be helpful to each other and supportive of each other in the survivor community – but at the same time, we need to be aware that sometimes our own desire to help can be our downfall, because as much as we don’t want to believe this of each other – it really is true that not every survivor is all that committed to healing. There are a thousand and one ways that people avoid or unnecessarily derail their own healing, and being a permanent but-head is one of them.

If someone is determined not to be helped, then nothing we do will reach them. We can’t do it for them, or get them there faster, or make them see what they resolutely refuse to see – we can’t help someone who doesn’t want the help. This is a situation where either they figure it out for themselves in their own time, or they never figure it out at all.

And the potential danger to other survivors who try to reach out to them is greater than just wasting the time and effort. Because although our efforts at support and encouragement don’t touch them, their negativity can and will touch us. We can absorb it without even realizing it, just through frequent exposure. And negativity, even absorbed second hand from someone else, is a consuming parasite that will interfere with our own health and our own healing unless and until we free ourselves from its influence.

Do we need to take on someone else’s problems in this way? Don’t we each have enough problems of our own?

Dealing with our own negativity is hard enough, without taking on someone else’s as well.

Many Roads, One Destination

Has anyone else ever thought about all the different paths there are available to reach the same place?

I’ve been in therapy off and on since college, and I’ve trained as a therapist – I have a good idea of what works for me in terms of my healing journey, but it always interests me when I read or hear about someone who has reached (or is reaching) the same destination by a completely different path.

For example, Richard Schwartz modified family systems therapy for use by internal family systems. His approach is predicated on the idea that internal systems exhibit many of the same dynamics as external families, and that family systems techniques are therefore applicable and effective. In addition to his published explication of his theory, he also published a book called Mosaic Mind, basically a book-length case study in which he documents the treatment of one particular patient using the internal family systems techniques.

Based on what I read (which, of course, says as much about the perspective I bring to the book as it does about the book itself, but nonetheless…) … based on what I read, the patient at the center of this book could easily have been diagnosed with DID. She had a number of different system members who could and did take control of the body’s external actions at different times. But she was never actually diagnosed with anything at all, because DSM diagnoses are not considered relevant to Schwartz’s treatment protocol.

He spoke to the various system members, and learned about their various perspectives, and helped them to achieve balance and harmony between them – so those basic elements of “standard” DID therapy were all there – but he never called it DID. He was treating the internal system as a dysfunctional family, and in fact, one of his sharpest points of divergence from “standard” DID therapy is that he preferred not encourage the idea of system members being as separate as many other therapeutic approaches suggested they were.

The issue of many individual system members vs. one body, one person can bear as many perspectives as people want to bring to it. I happen to disagree with Schwartz’s approach to this, and I also don’t like the vagueness of not calling something what it is – I had a therapist who did that, and it felt to me like being gaslighted. Give me someone who will call a spade a spade any day over someone who wants to pussyfoot around with maybes and might bes.

But despite my own opinion of how effective it would be for me, the internal family systems approach was a fantastic success for the patient in the book – and I would imagine she is not remotely unique in that. There are probably hundreds of people for whom this approach would be effective. And its de-emphasis on diagnosis might even make it the preferred approach for many, since it avoids all the strings and implications connected to receiving a diagnosis. Not being the approach for me does not make internal family systems therapy a bad approach.

Another example is James G. Friesen… I almost can’t read him. He writes about dissociative disorders from a heavily Christian approach that makes me simultaneously cringe and want to hit him. Religious issues can be a bit of a trigger for me sometimes, and on a general level, I find the concept of demonizing and then “exorcising” dissociative system members to be objectionable simply because it seems ignorant and needlessly cruel to me.

Obviously, then, a therapist who had a strongly religious approach would not be an ideal choice for me. But what I did learn from Friesen’s books is that the demonization and exorcism approach is not, after all, universally negative. There are people who naturally view their internal system in a way that is congruent with such an approach, and for them, an exorcism can actually be an effective therapeutic technique – hard as that is for me to believe.

Although at the same time, it does make a kind of sense – our dissociative systems, regardless of whether they developed naturally or were purposely created, will still be completely individual and unique, reflective of our own personal experiences and our reactions to those experiences. I can imagine that personal experience might lead some individuals to create and conceptualize their internal system in religious terms, including demons and angels and etcetera – and if the system genuinely believes that some members are demons, then I guess an exorcism might actually work.

It wouldn’t work for me, though, that’s for sure.

Then there’s Irvin D. Yalom, who is one of my favorite authors in the field. He’s an existential psychotherapist and widely respected – and even though the existential perspective is not the one I have chosen for myself in terms of practicing therapy, I still think his books are fascinating, well-written, and offer a lot of general wisdom from which any therapist can benefit.

He wrote a book, in conjunction with a patient, called Every Day Gets A Little Closer. The patient in question was not diagnosed with a dissociative disorder – she had a catch-all schizoid diagnosis – but there were some details mentioned in the book that made me wonder… things that I would have followed up on or questioned differently if I had been the therapist in the room. (Or so I imagine, from my distant reader’s perspective.)

I wondered if the existential perspective really leaves room for an accurate diagnosis regarding dissociative disorders. It seems to me that the framework provided by the existential approach encourages interpretations of symptoms and behaviors that tend to lead the clinician away from considering a dissociative disorder as the cause of those symptoms. So I wondered if “schizoid” in this case actually meant “misdiagnosed multiple” – because it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened. But on the other hand, I also had to acknowledge that, misdiagnosed or not, the patient did appear to benefit from the treatment she received.

I think, if it had been me, I would have stagnated in arguing about how the approach was “wrong” – but it wasn’t me. And it worked for the person to whom this treatment was actually provided.

I could go on with the examples, but this last comment brings me to my point rather neatly.

All of the approaches I mentioned have differences that can loom very large in the actual treatment process, however small they might seem here.

Each of these differences speaks to how we do or do not match with our therapist in how we visualize our selves and our systems and our treatment, and in terms of what makes sense to us as a means of healing.

This means there are going to be a lot of therapeutic mismatches out there. Some therapists will have approaches that feel diametrically opposed to what makes sense for us.

However – this does not mean those therapists are wrong, or that they’re charlatans, or that they have no business practicing, or that we should get on our hobbyhorses and try to run them out of the field. What it means is, they are not the right therapist for us. Nothing more, nothing less.

A therapeutic mismatch is not something we can or should try to change by insisting that the therapist cater their practice or their approach to us. Therapy is not, in the end, a dictatorial relationship in which we are always right and the therapist must do what we want. They have a right to their own approach, whatever it is – and if it works for us then that’s great, and if it doesn’t work for us, then we move on to find someone who’s a better fit for us.

A therapeutic mismatch is not the therapist’s fault – and it’s not our fault either. It’s just a fact.

It’s a little appalling sometimes, how people can get fixated on a therapeutic mismatch, on trying to make the therapist be what they want, and how they ultimately blame the therapist when it doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work! Nobody can force someone else to be what they want, and it’s a waste of time to try. It would be so much easier and more sensible if these people simply found a new therapist who did suit them… I’ve never understood why they don’t just do that.

Do they not realize how many options there are out there?
Do they perseverate with trying to force a round peg into a square hole because they believe that all therapists are basically the same, and they might as well stick with trying to force the one they have as opposed to starting the same process over with someone new?
(Do they really think that the therapist is supposed to change everything just to suit them?)

Maybe people really just don’t think about it… but therapy is not a one-road ride through the same small town. It’s more like a big city, with many different starting points and numerous equally valid ways for different people to get to the same place.

And there are as many different styles of practicing therapy as there are different styles of cooking food. As consumers, we have a wide variety from which to choose. So if you don’t like one style, don’t fixate on the restaurant and blame it for not cooking something you like and try to blow it up because how dare any restaurant ever not please your super-special self – the drama is a complete waste of time and energy. Just go to a different restaurant. There is sure to be one that suits what you’re looking for in your personal journey to healing.

Choose Wisely

“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

Choice is a concept I am only recently coming to understand.

As a child, in the world and in the environment where I grew up, there was really no such thing as choice.

I might be asked if I would rather hurt someone else or be hurt myself, or I might be asked to “choose” my torture for the day – and each year I was obliged to say that I chose to be a part of my abusive group, and to pledge my unconditional loyalty to them – but none of these things were true choices.

I thought they were at the time. I remember arguing vociferously with my therapist about my freedom to choose and how I wasn’t letting any upstart bitch tell me what to do when I’d already made my choice and was happy with it.

Well, thank goodness she has more patience with people acting like idiots than I do, because looking back on it, I was putting on a fair show of idiocy myself at that time.

I thought the scope of “choices” that had been presented to me by programmers and abusers were real choices. And I believed, at the time, that the words I spoke saying I chose to be with them meant I really did. It took a lot of time and effort on both our parts for my therapist to help me see this a different way.

Since then, I’ve been particularly interested in the concept of choice as it is used and misused – what goes into the choices people make, and how those choices turn out, and how various individuals then respond to the consequences of their choices. Maybe it’s the novelty, but I just find the whole process fascinating.

And in that context, I’ve found the above quote to be profoundly true, on many more levels than the obvious life-or-death context of the movie it came from.

Our choices grant life or take life from us on all levels.

When we get into an argument with a friend – we can choose to forgive, or we can choose to harbor a grudge. If ending the friendship is truly the better and wiser choice – we can choose to do it in a way that we can look back on with respect, or we can be bitter and hateful and destructive toward the other person, a choice that is much more likely to destroy us from the inside out than it ever is likely to destroy the target of our bitterness.

We can choose to face problems as they are – the true problem – or we can choose to completely deny a problem, or twist it into something different (someone else’s fault, something we make personal or take personally when we shouldn’t, something that’s less of a problem than the truth would be, something that’s a more acceptable problem that the truth would be) – and let the true problem suck the life out of us while we choose to pretend it’s not.

We can choose to fight for what we want, or we can choose to roll over and be helpless, the eternal victim, because it’s all just too difficult for us.

We can choose to be honest with ourselves – or not.
We can choose to believe ourselves – or not.
We can choose to believe in ourselves – or not.

There are challenges for each of us in each of these things. I doubt that any of us really have the self-assurance to simply lay claim to them without a fight.

Dissociation is the essence of hiding the truth from ourselves.
Dissociation can make it difficult to believe ourselves, or even to know what to believe, and programmers will purposely create additional self-doubt and confusion to make belief even harder.
And believing in ourselves requires things like hope, and confidence, and self-esteem, which can be in painfully short supply for an abuse survivor.
They are not easy choices… but they are still choices.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see that certain things are choices at all. After all, none of us chose to be dissociative, or to have been abused badly enough to require a dissociative defense – so it can be difficult to see anything else about the dissociation or the abuse as a choice, because our choice would have been that none of it ever happened.

That’s true enough – historically, every single one of us had our right to choose taken away from us by force, and we have all left with the consequences of someone else’s choice to abuse us.

But – staying locked in bitterness or helplessness or willful ignorance is our choice.
Not approaching things because they’re eternally “too hard”, not speaking to the other members of our system because we don’t want to hear their stories or we don’t want to believe they even exist – those things are choices.
Avoiding our problems by blaming them on other people, and then taking out our frustration and anger about our problems on those people like it really is their fault – that is a choice.

Maintaining our dignity in the face of the unfair adversity life has thrown at us is a choice.
Abandoning our selves to stagnation or negativity or anger, raging against the injustice of our lot until our resentment consumes our lives – that is also a choice.

Lying to ourselves is a choice, and believing those lies is a choice, and never taking a stand for what we know is right is a choice, and silence at any time when silence protects something that doesn’t deserve protection – that  is a choice.

Nearly every part of how we deal with things in the current day is a choice.
Even if we refuse to admit that we have a choice, it’s there.
Even if we don’t want the responsibility of making a choice, it’s there.
Even if we don’t like the consequences of the choice we made, and we try in retrospect to disown it… well, that too is a choice, and it’s compounding the errror in addition.

If we sit idly, waiting for time and fate and our therapist and our friends to make our choices for us, then we will stagnate in our own suffering and unhappiness, and we will drift ever away from where we want to be.

If our active choices do not represent where we really want to be in our lives – emotionally, spiritually, internally – then we are actively driving ourselves in the wrong direction.

And if we think we’re making the right choices, but somehow we seem to be driving ourselves away from where we want to go anyway – then we’re not being as honest with ourselves about the choices we’re making as we need to be.

If we want freedom, healing, safety, peace, calm, a better life, a more predictable life, a more “normal” life… more stable relationships, safer relationships, healthier relationships… quiet selves, quiet heads, quiet souls…
… it is nothing but our choices that will get us there, if we get there at all. Nothing else can carry us so far – and by the same token, nothing else can thwart us so thoroughly, or keep us so firmly in the same place.

So choose wisely.

Changing Internal System Dynamics

“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.”

I said that at the end of my last post, and I wanted to expand on it. Even though it’s something that all dissociative survivors deal with every day, it is still a complicated and easily misconstrued issue in the overall system dynamic.

The various parts of our system are more or less separate – and yet, however separate the system parts are, and however separate the various parts of our internal worlds are, they are still part of the same system, and they still affect each other, even if they don’t or can’t directly interact with each other.

On the conscious level, individual system members appear to be operating on their own unilateral, and sometimes conflicting, agendas. Some want to get involved in therapy and work toward greater health, others remain loyal to abusers or programmers and try to sabotage healing efforts, others are trapped in past events and perspectives and are not able to interact with the current world on its own terms, and still others don’t care about any of that and just want to do their own thing. Each system member has their own history, their own experiences, their own personality, and their own perspective.

Since everything feels so separate on the conscious level, we might have parts who believe certain things and acts accordingly, and who dominate us even though we don’t agree with them – and we might feel helpless and powerless to change things because they are so separate and different from us.

But if we are feeling powerless in our own system, it is really not because any other part of our system is just so incredibly strong that we can’t stop them no matter what we do.

We are powerless against them because, in some way, they are acting on something that we (as a system) accept as right, or necessary, or inevitable – even if, at the same time, what they’re doing is also diametrically opposed to what we (as individual system members) want or what we need or what we’re trying to believe we deserve.

It sounds like a paradox – but within the complexity of dissociation, it is not paradoxical. The disparity is possible because a dissociative system, however large it is and however different the individual members are, is still one system existing in one mind, and there is a meta-conscious process that governs overall system dynamics.

The meta-conscious process is absolutely not, and never can be, under the control of any one person or group in a dissociative system, even though there may be some who claim that control. The meta-conscious process is only and always a collective process which is dictated by the group as a whole, and it reflects the group as a whole – not any one part or one world or one faction, but everyone.

Every single member, whether you know them or whether you don’t, whether they agree with you or whether they don’t, whether you want them to or whether you don’t, is contributing to this meta-consciousness. (It is also true that we are always contributing to it, whether the other members of our system say we are or not.)

And it is the meta-conscious level we must reach to achieve the most profound changes for our system.

To give this concept a little concreteness, consider this example in the context of last week’s discussion.

Imagine that, as things stand, there is you (and whatever system members are on “your side”). You believe in working toward health, open internal communication and cooperation, safety for yourself, safety for your children, healthier relationships with the world, the kind of parenting you never got, and every other good thing.

But your system is stuck with “her” (and everyone on “her side”). She attacks every effort you make toward health, she gets in the way of communication to stifle or block it or to punish those who dare to speak, she might return you to abusers or refuse to stop those who do, she picks fights with your partner and yells at your kids… basically, her side is causing all the problems.

And there’s nothing you can do about it – she’s too strong, and she just does whatever she wants. You don’t know how to reach her and make her change – she has no interest in therapy, she likes things just the way they are, and she’s making every effort to keep them that way. You feel stuck, powerless, defeated by your own system, with no idea of how to move things forward from there.

This is an impasse that nearly all of us will run into at one point or another. “She” might jump on us as soon as we begin in therapy, or she might not bother interfering until we do enough effective therapy work to catch her attention. (In these cases, useless therapy won’t cause this kind of reaction, because why bother?) But if we are lucky enough to get into effective DID therapy, the impasse is likely to happen at some point.

What this internal stalemate reflects, however, is not that “her side” is actually stronger, strong enough to dominate the system as a whole, and completely unassailable by “your side.” Rather, it is just the system as a whole illustrating and reflecting the stalemate and conflict that happens when the very new comes up against the very established.

This is a stalemate that happens at a social level, when the old guard is faced with the up-and-comers. Think about New York at the turn of the last century, and the stubborn stalemate that happened when the nouveau riché  began to challenge the established blueblood society.

This kind of stalemate also happens on a personal level – for example, when we move from a city we’ve lived for a decade to a new city where we’ve never been before. We get homesick, we miss the familiar, we miss knowing where the best pizza is and where the nearest grocery store is and when the best time is to avoid a crowd when we go shopping.

On any level, it is difficult to leave the comfort of familiarity and shift to something new.

But on most levels, we at least have the advantage of being able to recognize that choice for what it is – and based on whatever reasons we hold dear, we can decide whether to support change or support the established way of doing things.

The internal dynamic is no different – but it’s harder to see for what it is when it is because the whole system, both sides, are so entrenched in how things are that it’s difficult for the group as a whole, or any individual within the group, to look past that.

We get stuck in our own dynamics – in who has power and who doesn’t, who someone has always been and how we’ve always seen them, who the heroes are and who the villains are – and we present these things as a static force, not only the way it always has been, but the way it always will be.

But these are the dynamics that govern the meta-consciousness of the system – and if we keep the surface-level dynamics static, then the meta-conscious will also remain static, and change will never really happen.

Going back to the example, imagine how different things would be if you stopped seeing “her” the same way you always have. Imagine that you got to know her well enough to really understand her – not in the same old “she’s just like that” way that you’ve always understood her, but understood her from her perspective. Imagine how that might change your every reaction to her and to everything she does – and how your different reaction might change the relationship between you and her – and how that new relationship might change the general dynamics between “your side” and “her side” – and how that change in surface dynamics might begin to affect the meta-conscious dynamics of the system.

That’s how it happens. Over time, in each small change we choose to make, there are the seeds of larger and deeper change being planted.

If we want to change the meta-conscious influences, then we have to let go of how things are, the stagnating stasis of how things have always been. We need to develop a different perspective on the same old people that we’ve lived with internally for decades – develop patience where we’ve always been dismissive, develop acceptance where we’ve always been rejecting and oppositional, listen to each other where we’ve so far only talked at each other.

The longer we stick on how things are, the longer things will stay exactly that way.
If we want to have a hope of change, we actually have to do something different.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.