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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.I.P. Feather

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

I’d like to tell a story instead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DSB was such a one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is absolutely and unequivocally false.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind Control Programming Basics VI: Internal Programmers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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