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!

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.

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.

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.

Internet Predators and Child Alters: 10 Ideas to Keep Them Safe

Another way that internet predators can infiltrate a dissociative survivor’s system is by befriending child alters.

These younger alters can be (although they are not always) more trusting than the adults, or they can be conditioned to unquestioning obedience, either of which makes them vulnerable if a predator wants to take advantage of them. Child alters also tend to have more difficulty discerning when someone is trying to trick them or manipulate them. With their child’s perspective, they can be influenced to believe things that would not get past an adult’s critical thinking skills.

Generally speaking (which is to say, true in many cases, but not necessarily true for every survivor or every child alter) – the child alters know vast amounts of information about the survivor’s dissociative system, information that can be very dangerous if it is given into unscrupulous hands. Some child alters also can wield immense power within the system. They might be able to affect other alters or even to change the system landscape.

As one might imagine, a predator could do a lot of damage to a survivor’s system by gaining influential control over the child alters.

Someone once mentioned to me, when I suggested that I thought it was risky to let their child alters go without supervision, that she didn’t have to worry because her background did not involve organized abuse or mind control – this is not true.

ANY AND EVERY CHILD ALTER IS VULNERABLE TO PREDATORS.

Your background does not have to include programming, mind control, ritual abuse, or cult activities to make your child alters vulnerable to a predator’s approach. All a predator requires is a malleable mind and an uncritical perspective, and any child alter will give them that.

Since this predatory tactic is designed to take advantage of divisions or dissociative walls within a system, it is most effectively combatted by developing and maintaing strong communication skills among alters. Dissociative survivors who are wrestling with denial, or those who leave their system to manage itself because they are too depleted to fight about it – those survivors are at particular risk for being victimized in this way.

It is absolutely critical that the adult members of our systems protect our younger alters from doing anything which might be dangerous to them or to the entire system-and there are a number of common-sense things we can do which will dramatically reduce the likelihood that our child alters will be easy pickings for an online predator.

1.       Build communication skills! Among all the other reasons why internal communication is such an important part of DID work, here is another. Predatory influences on your system can be detected and defused more quickly if the system is able to work together and communicate effectively.

2.       Child alters should never do anything online without an adult’s close supervision. It doesn’t matter if you think you know what they’re doing, or you trust them to follow the rules you’ve set for them, or you’re sure they can’t get into trouble at the sites they’re allowed to visit. Better safe than sorry. A child alter’s online activities should always be closely monitored.

3.       Child alters should not have instant messaging conversations or receive private e-mail. This is especially true if your system communication skills are still in progress. The most certain way to make sure that child alters do not become a predator’s target is to prevent them from conversing online at all. If you are not able to monitor what is said to your child alters or by whom, then in the interest of your own safety and that of your alters, keep the littles offline. Do not rely on conversation histories, as these can be erased. Do not rely on the belief that your online “friend” is a safe person and would never hurt you or your child alters. Online appearances can be deceiving.

4.       Be suspicious if someone wants to talk your child alters alone. There should be no reason for any outside person to speak to your child alters without your supervision-and a trustworthy person will have no problem with your supervision. If a person is persistent about having private conversations with your alters, there is likely a reason they don’t want you to know what they’re saying. Don’t be guilt-tripped into allowing private interaction because someone acts hurt that you don’t trust them. This is a blatant manipulation and a big red flag.

5.       Be suspicious if someone requests to speak to your child alters on a regular basis. Regularly asking for child alters, or turning the conversation in a way that they know will bring your child alters out, is a danger sign. Anybody who is attempting to manipulate your system in this way probably has other manipulative intentions in mind as well.

6.       Keep in touch. Talk to your child alters about the outside people with whom they interact. Even if you saw every word of the conversation, this is still important. As with any child, keeping yourself interested and involved in their activities will maintain a strong bond between you, and consistent attention can enable you to pick up on developing problems much more quickly. Some signs of possible trouble include the child alter appearing reluctant to repeat the conversation, any claims that they can’t or are not allowed to repeat what was said, or appearing more secretive than usual. Even if the conversation looked innocuous to you, these can be signs that a covert message has been passed to the child alter, and it should be thoroughly explored as soon as possible. The earlier you detect this and address it, the better for you and your entire system.

7.       Watch for patterns in your system. If your system begins to act or react in ways that are unusual, if things internally appear or feel very different from your norm, or if you experience any feelings or thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere and not relate directly to anything, pay attention to when they occur. See if they routinely occur within a predictable space of time after a child alter has talked to a particular person. If so, then your child alters should no longer be permitted to speak to that person-even if this means you have to stop talking to them too!

8.       Be suspicious if system communication inexplicably breaks down. Once they get a hold on your child alters, predators will instruct the alters to hide their activities from you. In some cases, the alters themselves will be hidden. Be sensitive to any shifts or changes in your ability to see or speak to other alters in your system. Early detection can make all the difference in your ability to help an alter who has been entrapped by a predator.

9.       Stay away from known predators. This should be self-evident, but experience has proven that it needs to be said. If you become aware that a certain person is suspected of harming others through any kind of predatory behavior, DO NOT GO STRIKE UP A FRIENDSHIP WITH THEM.

10.   Have an open mind. Child alters will pick up on your attitudes as easily as outside children do. If they fear they will be rejected or disbelieved, or if they do not have a good relationship with you, then they are less likely to tell you if anything is happening. No doubt we all remember, on some level, what it was like to be a child living in fear of punishments and reprisals for “telling.” Predators can and will use those same threats on your child alters in the current day.

Safety is something we all deserve-but it is also something we owe to our younger selves who have already been hurt enough. It is up to us to prove to them that the current day is a safer time than our childhood was. Part of this is protecting them from any predatory influence.

We need to make our systems strong enough and cohesive enough to repel any attempt by a predator to breach our inner walls and run rampant through our worlds, and until we develop the necessary skills to do that, we need to take the necessary precautions to prevent our defenses from being breached.

Surf safely.

Internet Predators: One Way They Work

Survivors generally have a lot of trouble with trust. For many of them, trusting other people can seem like a near impossibility – with one major exception: survivors tend to have an inordinate amount of trust for other survivors. And this is something predators know.

It is therefore very easy and very common for a predator to create an online persona and say that he or she is a survivor. Such a persona earns them an instant claim on the good faith of other survivors. It is a predator’s entreé into the groups and forums where their targets congregate, and a password to unqualified acceptance within those groups.

Beyond that commonality, there are a variety of tactics that predators may use.

One effective approach is to exploit the distrust of Self to increase the fear of Other. This tactic, successfully employed, will encourage the target survivor to separate themselves from other reliable sources of support and make them emotionally dependent on the predator, who can then manipulate the survivor as they wish.

The reason this works is that, much as they distrust other people, for many survivors the person they distrust most is themselves. They are painfully uncertain of their own decisions, afraid to have their own opinions or feelings, often unsure what their opinions or feelings are, and terrified that the feelings or thoughts they can identify are “wrong.” Self-distrust is the legacy from a lifetime of having one’s thoughts and feelings stifled, ignored, or punished.

Unfortunately, self-distrust can be exploited in adult survivors. If someone is profoundly uncertain of their own thoughts and feelings, then they are vulnerable to anyone who is authoritative enough to overwhelm the survivor’s fragile personal beliefs with their own.

Predators can take a survivor’s doubts and fears and twist them unmercifully into an even bigger and much more serious issue.

For example, if a survivor expresses any doubt in a current relationship, “my spouse isn’t respecting my needs” or “my friend did something that hurt my feelings” or “my therapist isn’t available right now but I really need to talk to them”…

… then they have opened the door for the predator. “I hear you, that’s terrible, and it’s way worse than you think, let me tell you what I know about that person, here’s the rest of the story, now that you’re finally beginning to see it for yourself, I can tell you, this is the truth, listen to me, I know…your best friend is spreading rumors about you behind your back… your therapist is cold and withholding, your pain makes them happy… you can’t trust your spouse/lover/friend/therapist, they don’t care about you like they say they do, if they really cared about you then they wouldn’t do what they did, they don’t care about you like I do… I’m your only real friend…”

From the smallest moments of insecurity, a predator can begin to reshape the survivor’s entire perspective toward the safe people in their lives on whom they rely.

The survivor, beguiled by the insights and empathy the predator demonstrates in early interactions, begins to look to the predator to help them interpret everything that happens to them. And the predator is only too happy to make those interpretations for them.

Predators build a framework of half-truths and lies. They build in small steps, never straying so far from the truth that the lie becomes obvious, but giving everything a twist calculated to play on the survivor’s own insecurities. The survivor is effectively blinded to the predator’s manipulation with their own fears. The cumulative effect can be quite dramatic.

Under the predator’s influence, survivors turn on the people they have far more reason to believe in, people with whom they have had longer and more intimate relationships. They confront these people, both directly and indirectly, with the fears and suspicions bred by the predator. Human relationships are never without occasional disagreements or misunderstandings or mismatches between need and response; however, in the skillful hands of the malicious predator, each and every one of these occasions is transformed into a major grievance with which the survivor will accost friends, spouses, partners, and therapists.

Some indicators that this might be a manipulated action are: (i) the survivor is committed to making everything the fault of the other and is unable to retain or process any contradictory information; (ii) the survivor’s presentation is repetitive, with unnaturally excessive use of a precise phrase or description; (iii) these repetitive responses are used even when they are not actually a response to what is being said; (iv) the survivor persists in their accusations beyond all reason (i.e. in the face of clear and concrete evidence to the contrary); and/or (v) the same argument keeps breaking out again and again across months or years, with the same strength and virulence, as if it had never been addressed before.

The most common immediate reaction to confrontation and accusation is anger. People can generally be relied on to “snap back,” especially when they’re accused of things they think are ridiculous or when the accusations are based on a faulty interpretation of reality. Defensively trying to “set the record straight” is also a very common reaction. The survivor will then take these reactions back to the predator, who will continue to interpret for them. And so the cycle continues.

This is an easy and reliable way for a predator to shape a survivor’s perspective without the survivor recognizing what’s happening. At each step, the predator will appear to empathize with the survivor – but will also touch on the survivor’s deeper fears and insecurities, connecting to those feelings and relating them to current events. A predator will use and manipulate the feelings, magnifying the “wrongs” of the other person, subtly expanding the suggestion of hurts caused and damage done to the survivor by that person.

If this is done right, the survivor will believe at each step that the thoughts and feelings are their own, rather than things being suggested to them. For outside observers, it will become clear over time that some other influence has been at work, but by the time this recognition is possible, the predator will already have closed off their prey from outside intervention. The survivor will have been coached to believe that the predator is the only one who has their best interests at heart, that others are jealous of the relationship and want to destroy it, that others will say anything to pull the survivor away, and that they are trying to hurt the survivor by doing so. Intervention at this point only serves as proof that the predator is right.

This mirrors in many ways the dynamics and mind tricks used by perpetrators on children. All adult survivors, and dissociative survivors in particular, are well-conditioned to be victimized by this kind of manipulation. And too many of them are, in fact, falling into precisely this trap.

Ultimately, the survivor will break off relationships with friends, family, therapists, everyone who was once important in their lives, leaving them alone and isolated with the predator. At that point, the survivor is truly at the predator’s mercy – and mercy is something that no predator understands.

I have a few guesses as to the motivations behind the manipulations, but they are only guesses. And that is a subject for another day.

For today, suffice it to say – the visible results vary. Most times the predatory influence appears destructive. I know of several people who were induced to take medication overdoses. Two survived, one did not. A few, once isolated, were abandoned by the predator. They were left utterly alone and in despair. One such victim committed suicide. Another drifts through life, barely functioning, in a miasma of chaos and darkness and confusion. I do not know what became of the others. They simply vanished.

In a very few cases, the influence appears constructive – to the predator, at least. Some few targets have become willing tools for the manipulative predators who control them. Human tools provide predators with new potential targets, bring them important information about the targets, give them “home bases” from which to work, and generally cover their activities with a veneer of respectability so that other survivors will approach and lower their guards. I am not certain whether the tools realize the truth of what they are doing or not. I tend to think that they don’t – but then, I also don’t consider ignorance to be an excuse.

But what is to be done about it? Internet predators hide in the virtual shadows behind showy mouthpieces who give them an appearance of credibility. Nobody knows who they really are behind the anonymous screen name – and even if we did know, “internet predation” would be an incredibly difficult allegation to prosecute.

So, as survivors, we need to protect ourselves on the internet. And it is up to each of us to do it for ourselves. The so-called security measures of any web site will not do it for us. Nobody else will do it for us. Nobody else can do it for us. We have to accept and attend to that responsibility ourselves – we have to exercise care and caution in every interaction with the online community – or else we are leaving ourselves vulnerable.

And the predators are out there, looking for their new best friend.

Internet Predators: They Really Are Everywhere

The internet can be a great resource for survivors. So many of us have issues with trust, anxiety, panic, and other pitfalls of face-to-face socializing. The anonymity and digital distance of online interaction feels like a safer alternative to many.

Unfortunately, predators know how to surf the web too, and survivors are often just as vulnerable to their ruses and imprecations online as they would be to any real-life perpetrator. Sometimes, in fact, the online connection creates more vulnerability, since there is so much less information on which to rely. There is no body language to see, no chance to study a person’s eyes or facial expressions, no ability to observe the person in their real world or verify what they say of themselves. A person hiding behind an anonymous screen name can tell any lies they want with very little risk of exposure.

Predators take advantage of this anonymity. And survivors, in my experience, are overly trusting in online communications. They are gathering mainly in forums which are either wide open to the passing public or protected only through the need to respond to an administrative e-mail that “yes, I’m dissociative, may I please join” (because nobody could possibly lie about that). And yet, survivors seem to suspend all critical thinking, rational judgment, and common sense when they participate in these communities. Not that they don’t possess these skills – they do possess them, in the same proportions and across the same range as any other group of people – they simply stop using them.

They are in such a rush to accept and support every member that they never pause to question or evaluate the information they’re receiving, even when it’s blatantly false. Apparently, within these groups, it is a greater crime to call attention to an obvious lie than to tell the lie in the first place.

They are so desirous and willing to believe that every member is a genuine suffering soul seeking solace that they are lured into private conversations and individual face-to-face meetings where they are vulnerable, and they walk right into traps of all kinds.

(Just because someone says they’re a survivor does not automatically make them safe for private chats or real-life meetings! An axe murderer could say he was a survivor if he wanted a new and creative way to meet victims! And yet, most survivors will not even question someone else once they’ve claimed to be a fellow survivor… just saying that seems to be taken as some kind of infallible insurance of safety and credibility. *sigh*)

Survivors can be so trusting that they will share full names, personal email addresses, home addresses, and phone numbers in public or semi-public online settings. I don’t care how “secure” a forum or web group might be – people should always always keep their personal contact information to themselves. That is always a stupid thing to share. We can’t control who sees what we put online, so we should never put anything there that is too personal for the world to know.

And by “personal,” I don’t mean our memories or our most embarrassing moments. I mean the addresses where our kids live, the numbers to the phones we carry with us everywhere we go, or the legal names by which we can be easily traced and located. Not everyone in the world is a nice person! They’re not going to give us a break because they feel pity for the trauma we’ve already suffered! They’re going to look at all the information we’ve provided for them, and they’re going to see a big sign saying “easy mark” – and they will use that information against us! For god’s sake, you would think survivors already understood that…

To top it off, there’s actually a blog out there in cyberspace where a person claiming to be a dissociative survivor has posted their entire system map on an open page for anyone and everyone to see, complete with the names, ages, and functions of each of the alters. Is this person insane??? Are they not aware how dangerous it is for any dissociative survivor to expose that much of themselves where any idiot with a computer can see it??? Even a dissociative survivor with a non-organized background can be manipulated and used by perpetrators who know how to take advantage of the dissociative condition. I can hardly conceive of the stupidity attendant upon making this level of disclosure online. Why would anyone make it so easy for the perps to get to them??

Unless it’s a ploy by a predator to draw out genuine survivors…

The tricks of the predators are many and varied, and they don’t feel obliged to play fair.

But say it is a genuine survivor. Then this just exemplifies how survivors all over the internet are making themselves vulnerable to internet predators, apparently without the slightest awareness of the danger they’re creating for themselves.

This is true in every web community for dissociative survivors of which I’ve been a participating member. (To date, I have participated in a total of twelve such communities over seven years.) There is not a single exception – every single one of those communities, regardless of what they claim, has been infected to some degree by predators taking advantage of the naivétè and blind good faith of the genuine survivors who have gone there seeking support and companionship.

And this should be no surprise to anyone. The communities are not hard to join, and there is no way to substantiate that a person is who they say they are.

I would never suggest that survivors should not gather in their forums and communities. I think the strength and support that can be gained from these groups is invaluable.

I am, however, saying that we absolutely cannot check our common sense at the door when we go in. We have to keep our eyes open and our antennae out. We have to use some judgment regarding what we say, and regarding who can be believed and who can’t, instead of blindly trusting everyone without discrimination.

I know many people who have been very seriously hurt by internet predators. There are some whose healing has been set back years. There are a few who have died.

And I know of some who are still blindly following where the predators lead, lost in denial and refusing to see the source of the devastation being wrought in their minds and in their lives.

I can tell someone the truth as I see it, but I can’t make them see it the same way. They have to be able to see the truth for themselves, and the best thing I can do is to stay away from them until that happens – because until then, they’d prefer to bring me down with them rather than believe I might be right.

Next post I’ll be writing some of my observations on how internet predators get their holds on people. Maybe a future post will also address some of my speculations on why, although I really can’t presume to know why. It doesn’t always seem to make much sense from what I can see. (Of course, there is doubtless plenty in those relationships that I DON’T see.)

In the meantime, be safe in your surfing.