Whether specifically spoken or not, working on addressing programming involves a contract of sorts by which both your system and your therapist should be operating.
On the part of the therapist, the obligation is to be aware that these programs exist and what they look like for you. It includes a willingness to interpret these behaviors as programming instead of as purposeful resistance or unconscious transference, and to bring them up in therapy for thorough discussion. The focus of the discussion should be on defining the behaviors and actions and thoughts involved and tracing them back to their roots – through the chain of alters that know or maintain them and the chain of events that created them.
On our part as the client, the obligations in this therapy work also involve a willingness to see these behaviors and thought patterns as programming – and therefore to listen when we are told they are occurring, to look at them with clarity and honesty, and to be willing to modify them.
Speaking specifically to the behavioral element – it is really no secret that programming can cause us to behave in ways that are flat-out obnoxious. But the obvious truth to this is, nothing about that will change unless we actually do something different. The fact that a behavior is programmed is not an excuse to disclaim responsibility for it or to let it continue unchecked. Behavioral programming can be changed by an approach as simple as forcing ourselves to behave in a different way despite the strong and insistent messages that it is wrong, dangerous, stupid, etcetera – rather than acting on those messages as if they were true.
Simple, but not easy.
I know someone who has spent years in therapy locked into an argument about how her therapist needs to respect her before she can learn to respect herself. The argument is strident and bitter in tone, it is accusatory and deliberately insulting in presentation, and it is almost exactly the same every week. Logic doesn’t make a dent. Addressing the argument never resolves it. It dominates and consumes her therapy time. And although she knows that she has been involved in mind control, she is not willing to believe that her behavior in her therapy sessions is the result of a program. She accepts her feelings and thoughts as being absolutely true, she never resists them, she never questions them – and consequently, she never stays with the same therapist for more than a few years. One of them inevitably fires the other. Over fifteen years of therapy with six or seven different therapists, she has done exactly the same thing and has made no progress at all.
The reason I mention this is that it’s such a good illustration of the consequences of accepting programmed messages as truth – and how effectively they can block our healing if we do.
I listened to the pre-session warm up for this person’s “I don’t get no respect” argument week after week, and I never saw any evidence that either of the therapists she had while I knew her were really disrespecting her. However, I heard about a thousand examples of what she was interpreting as disrespect. They were things like “I had to call her ten times last weekend before she called me back once” or “I emailed and asked him for an emergency session this afternoon and it took him three hours to call back, and then I couldn’t have one” or “I sent an email and I didn’t get a response”.
Sometimes, what programming causes us to interpret as disrespect – or disbelief or distaste or coldness or negativity or evil or selfishness or manipulation or control or whatever we think we see in a therapist’s words or actions – is not really there.
If we intend to address this programming, then we need to accept that our interpretations and perceptions, however true they feel, are not necessarily reliable indicators of truth. We need to recognize them as programming – and then push them away from us, rather than welcoming them in, embracing them, believing them, and acting on them.
In the beginning, we might not be able to get much distance from them at all. Programming presses on us like a second skin. We might have to sit in the discomfort of wondering, fearing, hating, feeling… and from the midst of it, find a way to hold on to the fact that it is programming and we are not going to act on it. This can make for some truly miserable stretches of time – however, if we truly wish to be free of it in the end, then we have to fight against it, even through the smothering emotional intensity of the first few attempts.
Programming requires our belief to make it work. It is built on the fears and insecurities that were purposely created in us at a very young age. It plays on our emotions – it bypasses our critical thinking skills and hits us in the vulnerable places where powerful feelings can distort the reality around them. The feelings then create thoughts.
To stick with the example provided, if we assume that a therapist is disrespectful of us, if we feel that very strongly and if we believe that the strength of the feeling means it must be based in truth, then our belief will filter and shape reality to prove us right.
More simply put, if we look for evidence of disrespect with the pre-existing assumption that there is something to find, then we will find something that we can interpret to fit that assumption.
But this is why our beliefs and feelings and thoughts cannot automatically be trusted – they are being created by our perceptions, which themselves are being influenced by programming – by someone else’s definition of what things are and what they mean.
If we want to free ourselves from this domination, then we have to tolerate the emotional discomfort of separating ourselves from the insistent, persistent messages left with us by the abusers.
And if you are as persistent in pushing those messages away from you, you will slowly begin to create some space around yourself in which you can begin to build your own perspective and create your own perceptions. The more you can think for yourself, the less influence the programmed thoughts will have. You will begin to recognize them more quickly, and be able to push them away more quickly as well. The urge to act on them will be weaker, outlasting them will become less painful, and it will be easier to determine whether they are something you really want to believe or act on.
Please note that when I say “push them away,” I don’t mean they should be dissociated. In fact, there should be no alter to whom they can be dissociated. All cooperative alters should be working together as a team in this. They should be sharing the emotional burden as much as they can. They should be making sure that those who need to function in the world are able to do so. They should be staying in contact and in communication with each other about who might need particular help or support and who might have information that might be valuable and how to use the information already gathered. They should be working together to push the programming away, so that the safe space is created as a group and encompasses everybody.
Programming cannot be addressed by one alter at a time or by each alter working individually. It must be addressed by the collective group, working together in exactly the way the original abusers taught us not to work – and although certain alters might have to do certain elements individually, the group as a whole should still be involved, at the very least offering back-up and support for each other every step of the way. So if the internal communication skills and the group relationships are not yet strong enough to do this, then it is better to hold off on addressing the programming and focus on relationship building first.
