Before anyone writes off the previous post as indicative of my own failure to understand how programming can affect our quest for healing — how there is programming designed to interfere with therapy and the therapeutic relationship specifically, and other programming designed to interfere with talking, recalling memories, getting to know other alters, and just keeping ourselves internally functional, among many other things — let me say that all of those programs do exist in this system. So yeah, I get that. I understand that all these things can fall on us like a ton of rocks and appear to block our therapeutic path completely.
But I don’t consider that to be an excuse for letting it work.
Many times I’ve heard programming described in terms of finality — “it’s programming” — as if it were a be-all, end-all — but what that phrase really says is, “I’m abdicating.” It’s a way of saying I’m not in control, there’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m not even going to try.
And that seems to be the most common way of viewing it — that mind control programming is some incontrovertible force that we are powerless to resist or change.
Well — if you think the programming is beyond your ability to change — if you believe you are doomed to be controlled forever by the abusers — then congratulations, you’re right. But it’s your own belief that is trapping you there now, and not the programming itself.
However, it takes a lot of work and willingness on our parts to break the programming controls. Strong and consistent internal communication and cooperation between as many alters as possible is an absolute requirement. It also takes a lot of stepping back from the thoughts and feelings that are so familiar, looking at them with some perspective instead of swimming around in the midst of them, and deciding consciously whether or not they represent a truth we want to believe. It takes the grace to accept when we are wrong, the strength to admit it, and the courage to act against what we have been taught all our lives — over and over again. It takes the ability to relearn in the current day what was mistaught to us in our pasts. It takes humility and persistence and the ability to tolerate failure without giving up. It takes self-control, and it takes a willingness to tolerate some extreme feelings and acute urges without acting on any of them, or with a crisis plan which we will actually use if necessary. And nobody will be able to hold our hand through all of this — so we need to have the determination to stick to the plan even on our own.
These things are really difficult to do for people who have been conditioned to unquestioning obedience all their lives. Even survivors who were not subjected to mind control have a hard time doing this — it becomes more difficult when mind control is involved.
Maybe it’s not important enough to everyone to make it worth all that — and if it’s not, then that’s fine.
But that’s a completely different thing from saying it can’t be done.
Most people who were strong enough to survive being programmed in the first place are strong enough to undo it as well — if they really want to do it. We don’t have to let ourselves be controlled now the way we did as children. On the other hand, we don’t have to do more work in therapy than we each feel is necessary either.
We can make the choice to leave the programmed controls largely untouched if that is what we truly prefer — but we should at least have the honesty to acknowledge that it is a choice.
