Shut Up and Listen: The Importance of Active Listening in Internal Work

Staying in therapy and staying with therapy can be a difficult proposition for a dissociative group, even when there is no specific programmed response or therapeutic conflict getting in the way. Each person in the group has to work through their own individual issues with trust, connection, feeling dependent, being independent – and beyond that, there are the interpersonal dynamics that happen between members of a dissociative system, just like they would between different outside individuals.

Our group has had members interfere with therapy for a variety of reasons, including because…

- they actively wanted things to stay exactly as they were for very specific reasons, so they discouraged change because it was specifically and directly contradictory to what they wanted.

- they were afraid of what change would mean for them, so they discouraged change for others to keep from having to change themselves.

- they believed that change was unsafe, and they were attempting to protect others by discouraging change.

- they were just being a pain in the ass, discouraging others from change for no personal motivation other than not wanting someone else to have what they wanted.

Realizing that someone else in the group is interfering with therapy is incredibly frustrating. Therapy is hard enough work already – who wants to discover that their own system is making it even harder than it has to be? But it’s also pretty much par for the course for a dissociative system – we’re never going to enter therapy with everyone in agreement, and it’s more likely than not that, at some point, someone for some reason will try to interfere in the process.

For us, the most effective first step in dealing with this has been to identify who was causing a particular disruption, and then to understand why they felt the disruption was necessary, from their perspective.

This sounds pretty simple. Granted, it’s hard to find the patience to understand someone when all you really want is for them to stop arguing and just do what you want right now, but even that generally acknowledged difficulty doesn’t really make the process sound too difficult – which might be why it feels like such a monumental and inexplicable failure when the days and weeks and months drag on and nothing changes. Since it appears to be something we should be able to do, it can’t say anything good about us if we can’t do it.

Well, we can all cut ourselves a break on this one, because saying it’s harder than it sounds doesn’t even begin to encompass how difficult this process can actually be. Even when we think we’re doing what we need to do in order to understand the others in our systems and build bridges with them, we might not actually be anywhere close to doing what really needs to be done.

In order to make the complications clear, let’s put this in the context of external individual people for a moment. Imagine there are forty, or ninety, or two hundred people who are all forced to live together for the duration of their lives, whether they want to or not. Nobody asked them, it wasn’t an invitation, it wasn’t a choice. They can’t get out of the situation, they can’t get rid of anyone else, and there’s nothing they can change about the external reality.

The ideal result, the result that would bring the most harmony to the most people, would be for every member of that group to accept the situation and learn to work fully within the situation.

But how realistic would it be to expect that result? Everyone in the group has their own personality, their own strengths and weaknesses, their own thoughts and beliefs, their own way of doing things…

Isn’t it more realistic to expect that there will be people you like and people you don’t, people who like you and people who don’t, people who can be relied on or trusted for anything and people who can’t be relied on to do anything and people at every point in between, people who irritate you, people who are irritated by you, people who think they’re right about everything, people whose opinions change based on who’s standing next to them, people you wish you didn’t know, people you really don’t know or don’t know that well… etcetera… etcetera…

The larger the group of people, the more diverse the individuals are, the more complex the relationships between them all will be.

And this is just as true for our internal groups as it is for an external group. That’s a lot of complication right there.

And there’s the further complication that listening really is a lost art. Everyone thinks they’re great listeners, but very few people actually are. Often we’re so focused on the next thing we want to say – how to present our own opinion, or something nominally relevant that we want to share about ourselves – and we’re just waiting for the other person to stop talking so that we can talk instead – so we’re focused on ourselves, instead of really listening to the other person.

This is especially true when the other person is saying something we don’t want to listen to in the first place. And yet, it’s a guarantee that any explanation of why someone else in our group is interfering with our therapy (or anything else) is going to include something we don’t want to hear. It might not agree with what we believe ourselves, or it might sound incredible or unbelievable or just plain annoying, or it might be related to a terrible memory (or lots of terrible memories) – and of course we don’t really want to hear about any of that. All we really want is for that other group member to shut up and stop getting in the damn way.

So how closely are we really listening to them? How genuine is our attention to them or our desire to get to know them for who they are, as opposed to our desire to just change them into who we want them to be as fast as possible?

It is really really hard to put aside yourself, your own thoughts and reactions and what you want and what you think is right and what you think they should do and what you want to say to them to convince them to do what you want them to do… and just listen to them.

It’s so hard that most people can’t do it, even when they think they are doing it.

And I’m certainly not saying we’re an exception to that. We’re not. The only possible difference between us and anyone else is that this skill is something we are acutely aware of lacking – but the lack is still there.

But it’s also something we are actively working to learn and improve – genuine listening, genuine understanding – not merely expanding our own view of the other system members, but learning to see them as they see themselves.

This is something that mind-control programmers understand very well, and they use it to their advantage. Programmers know their subjects inside and out and through and through – and they didn’t come by that knowledge through some magic window into our heads, or even because most of what’s in our heads was their creation. The best programmers are the ones who can make use of a person’s innate skills and tendencies in order to make what they’re creating more effective, and they learn what they have to work with in each individual by listening to them as much as by observing or testing or any more objective means of gathering information.

It is compelling and seductive to be the complete center of someone’s attention, to know that they are focusing only and entirely on you, that they are listening fully to you… and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever find anyone else who will listen to us with the same attention and focus as the people who programmed our minds once did. At best, we usually have to pay someone to listen, and even a therapist is not guaranteed to be a very good listener. Even they can be focusing more on what they need to say next instead of focusing closely on what we’re saying at the moment.

The fact that the programmers gave us something we can’t easily replace contributes its part to explaining why any part of us would ever wish to remain with or return to the programmers, even when freedom beckons. It’s certainly not the whole explanation for why that connection is so difficult to break; there could be a hundred different elements contributing to that difficulty. However, this is one element. Genuine listening, if done right, can feel like love – and it is something that every person wants from someone else in their lives, but yet very few people can give it to someone else, so there is a perpetual deficit of feeling heard, or of feeling appreciate or loved in the way that being truly heard gives us.

So – genuinely listening to each other not only allows us to understand the other members of our systems, thus opening the door for real and lasting change, but it also addresses the need and the desire we all have to really be heard by offering it without the abusive price tag.

We need to listen to each other – not from a place of looking for the weak spot in the defense or the logical flaw that we can exploit to further our own agenda, but just for the sake of listening and learning and trying to see our world and our overall self and our activities through the eyes and perspective of someone else. If we listen genuinely and attentively, then we will learn everything we need to know about the other person without having to watch for it – but genuine listening might also change how we want to use that information once we have it.

And we must be open-minded about hearing what these other aspects of our self have to say, rather than listening from a perspective of judging, condemning, or immediately changing the other – because listening from those perspectives will likely cause more damage, and it certainly won’t resolve anything. If it were you and someone approached you that way, how would that go over with you?

Before we can ask someone else to change what they’re doing for the benefit of the group, we need to listen and understand them as and where they are and appreciate their perspective. Sometimes understanding can be a gateway to acceptance; if we truly understand why they feel and think and believe the way they do, we might be more accepting of their viewpoint, even though we don’t necessarily agree with how they see things. And although this is an incredibly complicated and difficult balance to achieve – on the few occasions that our group has achieved it, it has so far never failed to work something very like a miracle.

If listening leads to understanding, which leads to acceptance – acceptance can lead to a shift in the unconscious pressures within a system that dictate what is permissable and what is not – and the end result is that the system members who were so recalcitrant, so resistant to change, so beyond reach and entrenched in their position… are suddenly free to change.

Internal system dynamics have a complexity which simply can’t be addressed entirely on the surface level. But some surface actions can have very profound effects, if the actions are genuinely and honestly performed – and they can result in change at a level that we would never otherwise reach, if we went to therapy every day for a hundred years. These are the kinds of things that can only happen through the efforts we make on a daily basis, simply in the way we choose to interact with the world and with our selves and with our lives.

“But choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.” ~ Grail Knight, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Some Thoughts on Acceptance vs. Denial

Has anyone else read Stephen King’s book It? I re-read it over vacation, and it got me to thinking.

Stephen King might never be assigned in English classes, but he has themes just like the “serious” writers do… and one of the main themes in this novel regards the power of belief, and how that power atrophies as we grow from child to adult.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, this novel is actually two parallel stories – seven people as kids, and the same seven as adults, fighting against an evil that is pure Stephen King.

One of the problems the group has in facing their childhood battle as adults is the atrophy of belief – the loss of the magical thinking that all children have – because this loss narrows their ability to deal with the crazy or the insane or the “impossible” – to incorporate it as part of their experience and then just keep on living.

The story deals specifically and repeatedly with how kids can accommodate horrors that would leave an adult gibbering — a kid will be more able to accommodate, because a child’s perspective on possibility is a lot broader and more elastic than any adult’s can be. Kids don’t have to wrestle with the adult “rules” on what is allowed to be true. They just work with what is.

And this got me to thinking about acceptance – the acceptance by each dissociative survivor of whatever horrors lie in our respective histories.

Because although we all had to do some very creative mental maneuvering to make it possible, we did accommodate the horrors of our childhoods, and we did just keep on keeping on. Every single one of us did that.

But is there any one of us who, as an adult, didn’t struggle just with accepting the reality of those horrors? Forget marveling at our survival or our ingenuity, forget having compassion for our own terror or our own pain… we give ourselves no commendations for making it through something so terrible. Instead, we get stuck on the inability to believe that any of it could actually have happened. The memories that surface are just too incredible to be real in a rational world – therefore, they must not be real.

But when we were kids, we didn’t have any trouble believing it — and not just because we were stuck right in the middle of it, either.

If you asked a kid whether such things could happen – whether there was such a thing as mind control, and whether those controls could live and hide in the mind for years after they were created, and whether someone might put those controls in a child even if they had to hurt the child to do it, a kid would probably agree that these things could indeed happen.

If you asked an adult, they would say no. Period.

If you described any of the tricks used by programmers to establish and maintain their control – tricks which depend on our belief in order to work – a kid would find them convincing.

An adult would not believe any of them.

And I think that pretty much captures the essential conflict between acceptance and denial.

The tricks and lies the programmers feed us, and the orders and commands they leave in us, are frequently hidden within childish phrases and magical thinking… the kind of thinking that comes naturally to a child, but which seems ridiculous and embarrassingly nonsensical to an adult. The children within us know these things are true, but our adult minds reject them out of hand.

Wrestling our adult minds into a perspective broad enough to accept the truth of our own childhoods is the first battle we all have to fight, and sometimes no amount of proof is enough to really lay our doubts to rest. Sometimes we never get past the inability to believe that such things could possibly happen to anyone, let alone that they ever happened to us.

I suspect the programmers know that.
I suspect they even count on that.
I suspect that they rely on the fact that all their victims, if they live to grow up, will grow out of the wide perspective that is the province of childhood (a perspective where anything might be true) and into the narrow adult perspective, where belief is severely tempered by what we’ve learned about the limits of reality…

And I believe that the limitations we pick up just by growing up act as just one more layer of protection to keep the truth a secret.

Because if we can’t argue ourselves around to believing ourselves… well, how far are we likely to get in fixing a problem we don’t really believe exists?

The beliefs taught to us by the programmers – the ones that made such ample and effective use of our childish imaginations – continue to dominate and control us, even decades after our imaginations have shrunk to adult proportions. We continue to act on them and respond to them with the same immense feelings and the same wide willingness of belief that we had as children.

It is the truth behind them that we as adults can’t accept – it is the source of our beliefs and fears and reactions that are too terrible to contemplate. As children, we not only faced those horrors – we survived them, we accommodated them, and we somehow still went on living. A child’s mind is elastic enough to do that. But our adult minds have grown into a rigidity that allows no room for that kind of accommodation – our adult minds groan and threaten to snap in the face of such awful, such incredible and unbelievable things. And so our adult minds keep us trapped in place simply through their unwillingness to accept something that doesn’t match with what they have been taught is possible, believable, or acceptable.

Our enduring childhood belief makes the programming work – and our adult inability to believe helps to keep it in place.

I guess that’s just something to think about.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
~ Hamlet, Act I, Scene v

More Lessons Learned: Repetition and Resolution

One time through is not enough.

If you read this statement and thought of memory work, raise your hand.
No, just kidding, you don’t have to – but was memory work the first thing that leapt to mind?

This statement is very definitely true for memory work, and it’s one that I personally have heard (either first-hand or directed at someone else in this system) so many times that it has developed a fingernails-on-a-blackboard effect. Hearing it makes me cringe and want to hit someone, preferably the person making that sound.

But despite having heard it said roughly nine hundred and thirty-seven times in the last five years, the bedrock truth of it never hit me until very recently – and the context of my realization had nothing to do with memory work, at least not in relation to abuse memories.

It was about something completely different – a misunderstanding, actually, between my therapist and myself, years old now and long-since resolved – or resolved, at least, in terms of what was between my therapist and myself. There were, however, some leftover feelings directed toward a third party which had never really died.

But these days, those feelings recur only rarely, and they hardly seem worth the effort of talking about them. The amount of intense discussion required to resolve the original issue with my therapist (where it mattered) quite thoroughly burned me out on the subject. I have therefore been less than enthusiastic since then about engaging in a productive discussion regarding the leftover feelings that remain, even when those leftover feelings raise their ugly heads and begin making noise.

Unfortunately, the unproductive nature of my feelings has made itself apparent. There have been occasional events which aggravated my temper to such a degree that I made some extremely intemperate comments regarding the offending third party at the slightest provocation (or no provocation at all).

My therapist allowed this to pass a number of times, but on the most recent occasion, she laid the subject flat on the table and said we were going to talk about it. I expressed my lack of enthusiasm about reopening the subject in no uncertain terms. I cited the fact that the subject was ages old and well-resolved, at which point I was presented with that grating homily to repetition – “sometimes you have to talk about something more than once before it’s really resolved.”

I’m sure the look I gave her at that point has been seen on the face of many a survivor in similar circumstances. We had already talked about it “more than once” – in fact, if I remember correctly, we pretty much beat the subject into the ground. How could there possibly be anything left to say about it that hadn’t already been hashed through a dozen times?

However, talk about it we did – again – and as the conversation progressed, I realized that she was right. Again.

We had resolved enough of the issue to repair things between us – and that was what had been important right in those tense moments when things could go either way, resolve or explode into a thousand shards, shredding both of us and the relationship between us. All of our mutual energy had gone into that resolution.

But there were certain aspects of the situation that really could only be dealt with from the distance of the years between then and now – most notably, for me, the unconscious and automatic ways that I had shifted things around to make tolerable what I could not immediately resolve. Emotions I didn’t have space to deal with at the time had been removed from the situation and transferred onto something less important, something I could afford to make into the scapegoat – namely, the offending third party.

But unfortunately, unlike the Biblical scapegoat, I couldn’t quite get this scapegoat to take my problems off into the desert and die with them. In fact, I couldn’t get it to go away at all – and therefore, I couldn’t really get the problems to go away either. So in the end, unless I wanted to have this stupid goat showing up periodically and bringing the same old problems back with it every time, I had to take my problems back and figure out something else to do with them.

And how often is this true for survivors, especially dissociative survivors – and in how many different situations? How many scapegoats do we have in our outside world, people we burden down with our problems and then drive away in the hope that they’ll take our problems away with them? And are not all the parts of our systems scapegoats, in a way, for all the events of our childhood which we were not equipped to handle?

It is so much easier to project or divert our troublesome feelings and difficult issues onto someone else, making it all their fault and their problem, and then drive them away from us – because if they’re gone, then the problems are gone too – right?
Well, maybe momentarily… but how often do our problems, internal or external, actually stay away?

We can’t escape from ourselves, or from the other parts of our systems. Our memories can be pushed away, and the members of our systems can be pushed away – but until we actually deal with them, they will always return.

And in this modern day of social networking and online accessibility, can we ever really get away from anyone, even externally? Or do we just keep on tripping over the same old problems because our scapegoats are never really gone?

Sending our problems off to die in the desert on the back of an unlucky goat might have worked in Biblical times, but these days, even the desert has internet service, and scapegoats never die in decent obscurity. They are much more likely to keep turning up, long after we hoped they were dead, to haunt us again, and again, and again, with what we left unaddressed and unresolved.

Their re-emergence is never welcome. We see them as the ghosts of problems we’ve already dealt with, things that have no right to still be hanging on and causing more problems now. We’ve wiped our hands of them – why won’t they just go away?

So nobody can really be enthusiastic about diving back into a problem they thought was already worked through – but if we do revisit the problem, it might become obvious why it’s still hanging around even after we thought it was resolved. Things can look very different the second time through – or the fifth, or the tenth, or the twenty-seventh – or however many times it takes.

If someone disappoints us, or hurts our feelings, or makes us angry, or all of the above, or more – how many times do we need to revisit the subject with them before we can let it go? Is one discussion enough to resolve the emotional responses? Usually not, because the emotional response to such an event (for anyone, not just for trauma survivors) is too complicated to even be fully realized in the first discussion we have about it. We resolve the most obvious layer, and a day or three later, another layer will make itself apparent and need its own resolution – it might take numerous conversations to fully resolve things.

And yet, as complicated as those situations are, they are not nearly as complicated as the traumatic events that happened in each of our lives.

So talking through something once really is never enough. The same event (abusive or non-abusive) can hurt so many different members of the system on so many different levels that the complexity of the pain is staggering – and it does take numerous reviews of the same piece of history in order to resolve it.

But in the process of repetition toward resolution, we need to be careful of the human tendency to believe that scapegoating others, internal or external, and then driving them away or ignoring them or punishing them will actually provide any real resolution to our problems. That might work for a time, but in the end, the problems are still ours. We can’t actually get rid of them by dumping them on someone else, and we can’t resolve them by anything we do to someone else.

Blaming someone else for our anger or hurt and then punishing them for it will not make us less angry or hurt. We can waste years on blaming and hating others for our own problems, looking for ways to avenge ourselves on them; meanwhile, our actual problems will remain untouched, and they will continue to trouble us until we address them directly.

If a problem is still coming up for us – then the resolution lies within us as well. We need to go through the event and the associated feelings again, and again, and again, until we find all the scattered pieces that are still causing us pain and distress and address them – not by pointing fingers and laying blame and acting it all out on other people, but within ourselves.

This is the only way to make emotional peace with an issue – and only when we do that, can we let it go and truly move on.

Some Lessons I’ve Learned I

I had more lessons to include than I thought — things that have made it difficult for me personally to let go of my old life. They are just going up in the order they occurred to me.

Life is not a gladiatorial combat.

By this I mean, it turns out that life is not after all a giant ring where everyone gets tossed in and only a few ever emerge, with those few being the best, the strongest, the winners. This was the extent of my social experience for the first 35 years of this body’s existence. There was no bowing out of the battle, and those who tried were simply the first to go down. Survival meant doing whatever it took to stay standing.

But life outside of the predator’s world is not that way. It is not a perpetual battle of wits and one-upmanship, and not everyone in the world is my enemy. The world is not conspiring to take me out. In fact, most people couldn’t care less about me. They have their own lives to worry about, and I am free to focus on my life without having to constantly worry about what everyone else is doing to mess with it.

This lesson was easy in some cases – most people are so obviously focused on their own worlds that, once I began to look, it was easy to see they had no real interest in mine. This lesson was most difficult in relation to other people who I knew had similar experiences and similar training to mine. With them, I still felt myself to be back in the gladiatorial arena, still wanting to strike at their weak spots before they struck at mine.

Resisting that impulse was very very difficult – but valuable, because it gave me an opportunity to watch what they did, and to evaluate the results in a new context, which led to another realization…

Predatory tactics do not dominate the whole world.

I realized this only after I saw it in practice. Those accustomed to predatory tactics have an extensive repertoire of manipulation, backstabbing, intriguing, and lying, and those are the means by which success is achieved in the predators’ world. Such tactics are the life blood that flows through the whole network. In those worlds, everyone is engaged in the same dirty games and whispered plots, and everyone is vulnerable to them as well.

In this world, however, such games are not the foundation of social interaction, and an individual’s level of skill at predatory tactics just doesn’t translate. In this world, a clumsy strike is as likely to work as a clever one, and skill is no guarantee of success. A strike that would be mortal in the predators’ world can actually be rather pathetic and completely harmless in this world.

Predatory tactics still work effectively against those conditioned to respond to them – that is to say, against other survivors who are not in therapy or who haven’t done much work with their system – but the more healing we do, the less vulnerable we are.

This was a particularly illuminating realization – because what it proved to me was that, whether someone attempted to strike at me or whether they didn’t,  it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to be alert for any pending attacks, or to strike first before someone else had the chance. I didn’t have to insure my survival in that way any more – the stakes were no longer that dramatic, and the route to safety was different. Someone else’s attempt to damage me was no longer an actual threat to my survival, and all I really had to do to protect myself was focus on my own learning and my own progress.

This general realization is also applicable to less dramatic situations. For example, in this world, it is usually more effective to ask directly for what I want rather than to employ manipulative tactics to get it. This was another new concept for me. Asking for something directly went against my ingrained experience that manipulation was the only way to get what I wanted – but in this world, manipulation is much more likely to backfire on me than to work for me, so directness was something I needed to learn.

I will never forget my experiences in the predator’s world, nor will I ever forget the skills I depended on there, but they no longer represent the totality of my social skill set or the first options I use. I can relate to people in other ways now, and each time that the new approach brings me the result I hope for (where I see so many people stuck in the old patterns of relating  and still not getting the results they want), it confirms for me the importance of this effort.

I can survive feeling like I’ve “lost.”

I gather that most people learn this much earlier than I did. Apparently that’s the point of tiny tot sports programs around the world. But in my world, everything was a competition, and losing had consequences that were more (or felt more) dire than just not getting the free pizza after the game.

In the world from which I came, fighting for survival was simply a fact of life, and this was true on many levels – the snake pits of social interaction, the games of wits, and the fight within my own self to stay on this side of the line between coherently broken and shattered beyond use.

The competitive atmosphere in which I lived fed into the naturally competitive personality of this self. Competitiveness is one of those qualities that can be seen across many members of the system in varying degrees because it is a quality that the single self would have possessed.

For me, though, because of my personal experiences, my competitive edge was honed more to the point of unhealthy jealousy and vengeful hatred than reasonable competition.

So when I first shifted from that world to this one, I was completely unable to handle feeling like I had lost in any way – not just at games, but in any way at all where it felt like someone else had bested me, or gotten to something before me, or gotten more than me, or anything at all along those lines.

And I was accustomed to dealing with such “losses” by attempting to smash the successful competitor and take what had been theirs — I was a real social star when I first emerged from my darker world.

As it turns out, crushing people into the dust (literally or figuratively) really isn’t an acceptable way of dealing with things out here in this world. Of course, there are still people who do it, or attempt to do it, but it’s not quite the same as what I was familiar with. In this world, you can’t steal someone else’s status or favored position or other intangible concepts like that simply by destroying the person who holds them. The things of which one is jealous are destroyed along with the person who held them. They can’t be passed on.

For some people, the destruction is still enough – a living embodiment of the “if I can’t have it, then neither can you” mindset.

Sometimes I find that mindset tempting. Very tempting.

And occasionally I give in to it – but more often, I make every effort to stay away from that perspective. I do stay with the situation for as long as I can, trying to temper my feelings, trying to learn to moderate them to something appropriate – but if (or when) they get the better of me, I walk away.

Walking away, in my world, was an ignoble move tantamount to admitting defeat, and as such, making that choice is still a learning experience for me.

So far, I haven’t died. Walking away from something, purposely absorbing myself in something else, gives me enough distance to shift my perspective. And I feel better. The rumpled, angry, chaotic feelings that I once thought were just a way of life have dissolved into a somewhat calmer state of being, and I find I like it better – a lot better.

The old jealousies and rage and desire to vent my vengeful fury on whoever has crossed me still come, but they don’t feel as familiar as they used to, and they don’t feel comfortable at all. I don’t want to be in that place any more, and these days, when I find myself there, I work actively to get myself back out.

Who I was yesterday does not have to define who I am today.

The world is always looking to the past to set a precedent. If something has happened before, it stands to reason that we can expect it to happen again. If something has never happened, we would be foolish to expect that it ever will. Past precedent defines our legal system, our social hierarchies, and our personal expectations of the world and of ourselves.

Sometimes past precedent can be a form of security. But sometimes it can be a shackle that ties us to a place and a self we don’t want. In those cases, it is important to remember that past precedent – although it is given a lot of weight – is not the final word on anything. It is never too late to learn to be the person we wish we were.

I don’t have any experience being anyone other than who I am. But I am perfectly capable of envisioning who I wish I were, who I want to be – and then asking myself, would that person do what I’m thinking of doing? Does that choice contribute to me becoming that person? And that is how I try to guide my actions.

It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that – that is complicated enough! But at the same time, it’s very simple – and it is, in fact, the way we become who we want to be.

And if the response to such a choice is “well, maybe that person wouldn’t do this thing, but I’m not that person”… I answered my own questions this way many times – because I believed that I couldn’t change, that I didn’t deserve to have a better life than what I knew, that I wasn’t worth that much effort – but however much these things felt like facts, they were and are not facts. They were my beliefs. It was my beliefs holding me where I was, and changing my beliefs is allowing me to move on.

In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson says that “the force of character is cumulative.”

We have that quote written in a lot of different places in our home, places where we see it frequently, although nobody else is likely to see it at all. It is one of our guiding principles. Changing our selves will never happen overnight, or as the result of one big effort to make it happen – it will happen slowly, as the result of day after day after day of doing different things, acting in different ways, teaching our mind to think different thoughts. We have to work on it every single day. Every interaction and every personal or emotional crisis and everything we do when there is nobody else watching is another opportunity to let a drop of water fall on the stone of our old self… and as the old Chinese proverb says, enough drops of water can wear down a mountain.

Mind Control Programming Basics IX: Segué

In subsequent posts, I will be writing about some of the beliefs and ideas that stood in the way of my own healing.

I am not, in this case, speaking necessarily of the messages I received through programming, but more about all the conditioned lessons that were left behind once the programmed controls were removed – the lessons absorbed through the course of a lifetime spent with a group of predators. I am addressing the things I was taught to accept, and the things I accepted simply because I had no other choice. I am addressing some of the assumptions and beliefs that contributed, on many levels, to making me who I was in their hands, and how I am now redefining myself on my own terms.

At the most rock-bottom level, programming is nothing but learning reinforced by trauma. No matter how it was subsequently glorified or mystified or otherwise complicated, this is really all it is – lessons taught to us about what to do and how to think and who we are, with trauma cementing the lessons into place.

Removing the programming – breaking the link between the lesson learned and the compulsion to believe or obey which was created by the trauma – is the easy part. But even once that compulsion is removed, the lesson itself remains, conditioned into our brains by hours of training and years of uncontested existence in our heads. Breaking the compulsion doesn’t automatically erase the action or belief with which it was associated. It makes it possible for new things to be learned, but it doesn’t do the work of rewriting the original lessons for us. If we truly want the messages given to us by the programmers to be completely gone, then we have to go on and do the immensely hard work of actually learning something new to replace what we learned from them.

Our self is the sum of our own freely chosen actions, thoughts, and beliefs.
If we change what we do and how we think, then we change who we are.

Some might say this is too simplistic to have any degree of credibility, especially when it comes to issues involving mind control, but clearly a person saying that has not actually tried it – or at least, they haven’t tried very hard.

This method is as successful as the individual makes it. Working at it for a day or a week, or only sporadically when in the right mood, will yield results accordant with the effort put in – that is to say, none. On the other hand, working at it every day, regardless of whether we feel like it or whether we think it’s working fast enough or whether it’s a good day for that kind of thing or whether the moon is crossing Venus at the wrong angle – consistent effort will yield results.

One thing I hoped to illustrate through this series is that the programmers’ control is a thin veneer, held in place largely by what we contribute to keeping it there. Mind control takes advantage of our emotions and our weaknesses to protect itself and prevent us from approaching or analyzing it. We are contributing most of the strength to our own programming, and to its protections.

But letting go of the things we went through such trauma to learn – letting those scars fade – learning instead the lessons that would have come to us by right if we had had a safer childhood – this is the real challenge.

This is where I am on my own path.

Although there are certain basic concepts that many of us might share, nobody’s path is exactly the same as anyone else’s. We all have to reach the point of being ready to work at healing by our own roads, and we each travel our own route through our histories and experiences and memories and interpretations, through our personal thoughts and feelings and beliefs, in order to come to our own resolution. The details individual to each of us means that everyone’s journey to health will be unique.

This being the case, the only person to whom my examples are necessarily going to apply is me. We all place obstacles in our own paths which we must resolve,but  other people may have different obstacles facing them or different resolutions that work better for them. The posts to come will just be some examples of what has come up in my path, and the solutions that worked for me.

Mind Control Programming Basics VIII: Examining Our Own Motivations

If asked the question directly, nobody who has been subjected to mind control programming would say they wanted to hold on to the effects of that programming. If asked directly, everyone would say they wanted to be free of it – and most of them would mean it.

Then why do so many of us find it so difficult to free ourselves from that influence, even when we really do want to?

As has already been discussed, the programmers contribute their share of obstacles by making it as difficult as they can. Naturally they don’t want all their work and effort to come undone at the slightest touch. They don’t want their work to be touched at all, and they make every effort to surround the programming with protective measures designed to discourage or (as they hope) prevent the dissociative system from being able to undo it.

Their controls can be circumvented – but not until we address one very important question. What about what we’re contributing to keeping the programming in place?

Believe it or not, getting past the programmers’ controls and protections is easy compared to getting past our own motivations for letting the programming remain. The obstacles planted from outside our selves are easier to see, easier to disclaim, and easier to remove than our own reasons for holding on to this negative artifact from the past. This is true mostly because – well, who wants to admit they have any reason to hold on to their programming? But we do have reasons. Every single one of us has them. They are strong enough to influence our choices and our decisions – but, standing in the light of day, they look foolish, petty, shameful, and embarrassing – so we hide them, from the world and from ourselves.

In this post, I will mention some of the general things I have recognized as posing obstacles to approaching and undoing programming. Subsequently, I will focus more specifically on the obstacles I have had to overcome myself.

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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.

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

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

This is absolutely and unequivocally false.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind Control Programming Basics VI: Internal Programmers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind Control Programming Basics V: Object-Based Programming

As we all know, mind control programming is begun at a very young age – in some cases, even before birth. The obvious reason for this is, that the programmers wish to shape the mind before it has a chance to solidify any identity of its own. Although they are never able to entirely eradicate the original qualities of the self, the programmers will naturally do everything within their power to make sure that they have a permanent ascendency over those natural characteristics.

However, this then requires that the complexity of programming be formulated in a way that will be retained within a child’s mind. No matter how it is pushed to advance, a child can still understand things only in the ways that a child can. It is not possible to force an adult approach to information into a child’s mind.

Children do not begin to develop the ability to reason or think abstractly until they approach their teens. Younger children are much more concrete and literal in their understandings and interpretations, and programmers are required to make use of this concreteness in their work.

As a result, mind control programming will very often have concrete representations on the internal person to whom it is attached, or there will be a concrete internal structure representing a larger and more systemic program. Spin programs, for example, can be represented individually by a hand-held toy that spins, like a top with a spiral painted on it, while a more systemic spinning effect can be represented by a tornado or a centrifugal force machine. Chaos programs can be triggered by an internal child shaking a snow globe or blowing the seeds off a dandelion. The old recorded messages spoken by programmers can often be found playing on literal tape recorders or record players hidden in the internal landscape.

Individual parts may also indicate programming in their physical presentation. Someone who spent a great deal of time in sensory deprivation might appear internally as being deaf and blind (that is, without the use of their senses). People can appear as literal puppets or dolls or animals or have masks permanently attached to their faces. It is not at all unusual for someone’s internal appearance to reveal information about what was done to them.

The internal landscape may contain structures like merry-go-rounds or rainbows, “magic pools” or mirrors, which are also representative of a more systemic mind control program.

The importance of these objects is an interesting and often misunderstood aspect of programming. The mindless bond which forces the ascendency of an action (either external or internal), even against your will or your concerted efforts – is contained in the concrete manifestation. As long as there is the concrete object to shake, stare at, throw, move, enter, leave, turn on, turn off, or in any other way draw focus… the programming maintains its ascendency.

This is because, first, the training which created the program used that object or structure as a means to block out any and all information and input except what was relevant to the program itself, and this usually includes nothing more than the criteria for setting it off and the criteria for shutting it down. Second, it is because the concreteness of the object is a reinforcement to the mind. This is especially true with the structures – when parts of your system can still experience spinning, drowning, torture, drugging, or passing into another world as a literal event, it is very hard for any other parts of the system to resist it.

However, if you remove the concrete representation – turn off the tape recorders, unplug the machines, take away the toys, take down the walls, bar the doors – then the program has already been deactivated.

I think I can feel the waves of disbelief rippling back to me from that statement…
But it is nonetheless true.

On an individual level, the object is what makes the programmed system member impervious to new learning or any effort to change their thoughts or beliefs – not just resistant, but utterly impervious. Remove the object, and then they will merely be resistant – but reachable.

On a systemic level, the concrete structure is what gives the programming its ungovernable power. As long as any part of your system can literally re-experience internally any of the things done to them externally, or as long as any programming objects or structures remain to lend that concrete strength to the program, the programming will likely continue to influence you.

It might sound crazy, but it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the strength of the subjective experience in the internal world. Those of you who live in the outside world might think the internal world is unreal and that it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) have any power over you at all – but that world is very real to the parts of your system who live there – and what happens there can and does affect every part of your life.

The strength of your mind has been used against you all your life. It doesn’t have to remain that way, but it is up to you now whether to harness that power for yourself in aid of your healing, or whether you let it continue to run over you like a steamroller.

If you wish to make use of it, then you need to enter into your internal world and learn to speak the language of your own self. Learn how you have interpreted the things that happened to you, how they are represented in your world and in your system. And look for creative ways to counter the things you see. You don’t have to employ them immediately, but the most effective response will be a response that is emotionally congruent with what it is responding to, and in the internal world, emotional congruence can mean literal congruence.

Your group needs to talk to each other, get to know each other – understand why each of you is there, what experiences have led to your respective beliefs or appearances or jobs – understand the structures and objects in your world, what they represent, and what they do, before you make any profound changes.

Because removing the objects is important, but it is only the first, and perhaps the easiest step. After that, you will have to work with the parts whose beliefs and behaviors were wrapped up in those objects, insulated from any new learning or even from really knowing there was any other way than their own, whatever that was – work with them to help them recondition their minds and their selves. Removing the objects merely makes that possible – but if you are not able to talk to each other and work with each other in this way, then removing the object alone will not really make very much difference at all.

Mind Control Programming Basics IV: Resolving Fundamental Conflicts

The previous article in this series highlights one of the most glaring contradictions I personally have so far encountered in therapy: Our actions and beliefs and choices define who we are, for good or bad – so if I acted a certain way with my trainers, and I believed it was my choice to do so – whether or not programming is involved, doesn’t that define me as the person they made me?

Well – no, it doesn’t. I stuck on this point for a very long time, but ultimately I realized that there truly is a qualitative difference between choice and what I had been doing. If my choice is “do <this> or something worse will happen to you” or “do <that> and you will be rewarded” or “if you don’t do <this> then <so-and-so> will suffer” or “commit to us or we’ll kill you” or anything even remotely along those lines – then those really aren’t choices. They are presented as choices, and I was told they were choices, and I was made to feel as though I made choices – but I didn’t.

A true choice would be something like, “you can commit to us and spend every weekend here getting tortured and torturing others, or if you would prefer, you can join the school soccer team and spend your weekends at soccer games, or if there’s something else you would rather do with your time, then let’s discuss it.” That would be a choice – to be given the open-ended freedom to prefer them or to prefer any other thing out there.

On the other hand, if I am only given the choice between one version of X and another version of X – then where is the real choice? The options given in the perpetrators’ worlds are like presenting the letter X in two different fonts and trying to say that it’s a material difference, when you know that an X is an X no matter what font it’s printed in.

So any apparent contradiction inherent in this series is generally attributable to this point – the choices a person makes in response to torture or threats of torture – or even in response to an outdated fear that the torture could still happen again – are not true choices. Only when freedom to choose is truly understood and experienced can the choice be considered representative of who we are.

This is a useful idea to keep in mind when attempting to resolve the fundamental conflicts that divide our systems and turn us against each other internally – and resolution is not only possible, but necessary, because these conflicts benefit nobody but the programmers who encouraged them.

At the beginning, however, it can seem like an impossible task. System members who live in the “normal world” are appalled and disgusted and ashamed and horrified by what was done to them and what they were forced to do. Those who were originally victimized by the programmers feel rejected and despised by their own system, which is hurtful at best and doubtless confirms their own personal fears, but which might also be a realization of exactly what the programmers told them would happen in such a case. Either way, with their fears confirmed and the rest of the system rejecting them, they will be all that much more willing to remain in thrall to the programmers, who at least appear to accept and even occasionally approve of them for being who and what they are.

It can feel impossible – but resolution of these conflicts is ultimately no different from resolving a conflict between two individuals in the outside world – with the exception that we, as members of dissociative systems, do not have the option of simply agreeing that the conflict is too profound for resolution. There is no walking away from our selves. Consequently, if a system remains locked in rejection or refusal to accept the truths of all members of the system, then they will remain in conflict, and they will be making themselves miserable at best, and potentially more vulnerable to perpetuation of the abuse as well.

Imagine the scene between two outside people, where one rejects and decries the behaviors or lifestyle of the other – what are the likely results? Fracture of any existing relationship, or severe damage to the chances of creating and building a relationship… anger and resentment on both sides… and often enough, the person rejected can be pushed by that rejection into a firmer or more extreme embrace of the thing that is causing them to be rejected. This reaction can be incredibly damaging to individuals in the outside world, and it is no less potentially damaging or dangerous when it happens within a dissociative system.

If we wish to be free of the programmers’ influence and safe from any possibility of their continued control over us, then these conflicts must be resolved. Obviously acceptance doesn’t happen overnight – but at the very least, it is important that we do not reject outright any other member or group within our systems, no matter how devastating their information or how alien their viewpoint. Rejection will not make them go away, or make their memories not have happened. However terrible it is or was, they are still part of the system, and they still represent an important and valid part of your shared life together.

So in that effort, which is admittedly a herculean one, it can be helpful to remember that, however they come across now and whatever they have been doing in recent times – at one point, there was a child being forced to learn those things, a child being forced to do them. Their current-day attitudes and actions are representative of the heartbreak and tragedy and extreme suffering of your entire system – and they can’t help where they are right now. But somewhere underneath all that, each part of the system holds some vestige of the person you truly are – and change is possible for every member of the system if they are given the chance.

Neither side should be the only one to change or “give up” things – neither side is completely right, any more than either side is completely wrong. Neither should be asked to jump further or faster than they are ready to. But if each side can inch toward the middle point between them, that is the point where balance can be found.

The daily living side of the system can inch toward it by not rejecting – even if they can’t immediately accept. The side of the system that was involved with the programmers can inch toward it by not doing whatever particular thing they do.

The daily living side needs to work toward acceptance – of the system members themselves, not of their activities. The side of the system that had been involved in the programming needs to work toward doing something different – because simply not doing, although the necessary first step, can’t be the only step they take, or it will be a temporary reprieve at best.

The daily living side needs to widen their definition of the self to include and embrace all sides of the system – and the other side needs to widen their definition of themselves, so that they can become more than what the programmers made them to be.

The mind is a truly incredible and incomprehensibly powerful tool. We are living proof of the amazing lengths to which the mind can go, and the even further lengths to which it can be pushed. So don’t sell yourself short by thinking that there is nothing you can do to help yourself. The only thing that will make healing literally impossible is your belief that it is.

Mind Control Programming Basics III: Individuality Survives Programming

One central truth of programming, which all programmers know and work with but which we who were their victims can fail to realize, is that no amount of programming can entirely take the you out of you.

Victims of mind control programming can feel like there is nothing left to them that is truly their own – and fairly so. The point of mind control programming is to submit the individuality of the self and dominate it with an external, somewhat standardized set of controls. In order to do this, it invades every corner of the victim’s self and attempts to recreate the whole in accordance with a set pattern.

And this does work to a degree – but every programmer knows that individual characteristics cannot be completely erased. Of course they would like to erase them, and of course they make every effort to do so as much as possible, but it can never be fully realized the way they wish it could.

What this means for us is, that no matter how intensely or thoroughly we were programmed – no matter how early it started or how consumingly it was pursued – programming cannot take away the individuality we were each born with. Even brainwave programming is unable to completely rewrite the self. Underneath everything that was done to us, each part of us retains some vestige of the individual self we were born to be. A blank template is never truly blank.

Notwithstanding all arguments to the contrary, this is absolutely a true statement.

Personal identity is something that programmers must work around, not something that they can completely remove to replace it with something else. However, they will tell us that they have completely rewritten our selves to their own styling – because whether or not it’s true, they want us to believe it’s true – so they will say it often, and they will plant the idea in many different parts of our systems – and on the surface, when programming kicks in and we find our will and our consciousness completely overridden, we will reinforce that message with our own fearful belief – but it is not true.

Programming can foist false beliefs and unwelcome actions upon us. It can make us betray ourselves and the things we truly believe and genuinely want. But it’s like applying a coat of stain to a wooden table. Even the most absorbent wood, if cut in half after staining, will have a central core where the stain has not managed to penetrate. Likewise, even the most absorbent personalities cannot be fully reshaped by programming. There will always be that base imprint of the original personality to be dealt with. And even if the programmers’ “workaround” is to crush the base personality to dust – dust is still something – the base personality was still there, and the dust of it remains there, an eternal invitation to hope.

There are three basic ways in which programmers work around the personality imprint.

First, they make use of the known personality structure of the individual in creating the programming. In its most elementary form, some examples of this include – if the person tends to be fearful, the programmers will focus more intensely on evoking fear to make the program stick. If the person is stubborn or competitive, the programming will be framed as a challenge. If the person has a particular skill or ability, then this will be used against them. This is usually much more complex than the examples given, but for the sake of simplicity, I think they serve to convey the idea.

Second, if the intention is to create a split whose eventual use will strongly conflict with one or more of the individual traits of the person, the split will be created with more degrees of separation from the core splits. For example, a core split might be subjected to brainwave programming, and then a series of other splits created from that programmed core split, to take advantage of the foundational brainwave programming as well as to get a little more distance from the original self. Core splits can withstand more in the course of programming – they are stronger, less likely to fracture or be otherwise destroyed by the rigors of the programming process – but core splits are also, obviously, closest to the core, which means the original personality imprint is strongest in them. In fringe splits, the personality imprint is weaker and can be crushed, broken, or  made to submit more easily – but it still can’t be erased.

Third, the programmers use the anomalous actions and ideas that they have forced into certain parts of the system to create a dissonance within the overall system. With enough drugs and enough abuse and enough training, parts of the system can be taught to do anything and genuinely believe they like it, or need it, or want it – and these parts and their activities provide the tension of conflict against those who not only need or want completely opposite things, but are unable to understand or accept that any part of their system would want those things.

Prior to any therapeutic intervention, these core conflicts are fundamental in keeping the parts of the system controlled by the programmers isolated and outside of general awareness. The activities and ideas of the system members created and controlled by the programmers are so antithetical to the “system-created” (unprogrammed) members of the group, that the system as a whole is very willing to look the other way and determinedly pretend that those things aren’t happening or don’t exist.

Therapy can bring the existence of these conflicts more into awareness – but if one side of the system remains unwilling to accept the other, this maintains or can even deepen the division between them.

Resolution of these conflicts is essential to healing – and in that effort, it may be helpful to remember that each of the members of a dissociative system does share a basic template of self. As much as the programmers might have liked to strip you of all individuality and remake you entirely as they chose, this was not and is not possible.

No matter how different each system member has become over time and through their own experiences, there is still a commonality between each and every one of part of your system, and this can work to your advantage if you choose to make use of it.

More on that next time.

Mind Control Programming Basics II: The Emotional Roots

The first thing to which most people point as the basic root of mind control programming is trauma. To a certain extent, this is true. The various traumas created by programmers are a key element in mind control training. But – trauma is not the actual foundation on which programming is built.

The difference between trauma and programming is that, in programming, there is an end goal toward which the trauma is used, with the trauma itself being merely a step in making the end goal happen. A trauma alone is merely pointless pain, and even in programming, the trauma itself teaches nothing.

Programming a mind (or programming an individual member of a dissociative system) involves shaping the beliefs and the world view of that mind/member, and then using those beliefs to impress an action or a set of actions. This is applicable to something as basic as a sexual slave or something as complex as a computer system that monitors and controls the workings of the larger dissociative system. There is no actual computer that gets implanted into the brain – rather, there is a part of the brain that is trained to perceive itself as a computer and to act accordingly – and while each part of our mind was separated by trauma and then was subjected to additional trauma in the process of learning, the trauma is not the programming. It is the message learned that is the actual programming.

Trauma is used primarily to evoke overwhelming emotion. The emotion is then used to make the programming, the message or lesson that represents the end goal, stick in our minds with tenacity. The emotional foundation allows programming to overpower any acquired logic, common sense, or other resistive measures we employ against it. The trauma is not the programming, but the emotion it evokes is what gives programming its power.

This might seem like a real nit-picking distinction. Who cares whether the trauma is the programming or is just a step in making the programming effective? It sucks either way, so… why does this matter?

But it is actually a very important distinction to understand if one hopes to approach and undo any mind control programming. It is critically important to separate the trauma from the message, and to understand that, although they are linked, they are not the same thing. They form a chain of progress – each link important, but each separate, and each requiring separate attention. Looking at a single link will not resolve the whole issue – addressing the trauma alone will not address the programming.

The chain of progress is: trauma > emotion evoked by trauma > message or lesson to be learned.

The trauma is whatever it is. For some programming, any trauma would be effective. The more complex the intended program will be, the more the trauma will be tailored to provide specific feelings on which the programmer can build.

The unholy triad of emotion on which programming is built is comprised of fear, guilt, and shame. If you think back on a time when a programmed response was triggered and look at the emotion surrounding the urge or idea or need, at base it will be at least one of these three.

Some programs, or some members of the group who have been heavily programmed as individuals, may operate or manifest with absolutely no emotion at all – but this does not mean there is not an emotional foundation. A program can build on the emotional foundation already in place. An individual may repress their emotions, or hand them off or spin them out to other members of the system, or have a mirror image or twin where one feels and the other does not, or some other means of disowning or avoiding emotion – but the very fact that there is a means in place to handle the emotion is evidence that the emotion exists.

The trick in that case is for the person in question to own their feelings, rather than using the habitual means of disowning them – sometimes this connection of the emotion to the person who owns it is enough to shake the programmed responses loose all by itself. This is because actually feeling what has been pushed away for so long, and perhaps in direct contradiction of what they were told (“you will not feel” is a common, if frequently only implied, message in programming)… feeling for probably the first time in decades, is enough to make that individual stop and think – and thought is the enemy of programming.

Programming is intended to undercut thought, to happen before thought can intervene or to be carried out by members of the system so conditioned to obedience that they never think for themselves. This is why programming relies on the emotional overwhelm caused by trauma. Fear, guilt, and shame can short-circuit our logic and make an end-run around our common sense. These feelings can manipulate us with beliefs that are compelling and unavoidable, despite their obvious lack of rationality. They can make us act in ways that logic and common sense would talk us out of, or they can prevent us from acting even when we know we should, or they can skew our perceptions so we see what isn’t there or fail to see what everyone else can in a situation, subsequently skewing our reactions as well.

Tying programming to primal emotions – so that we are afraid to look at it, let alone touch it, so that we are terrified to speak of it, so that we are ashamed of what we have done and don’t want anyone else to know, so that we feel guilty for things that happened to us or to others and don’t want to admit (sometimes even to ourselves) the magnitude of our own feelings of guilt – this emotional bondage traps us into continued obedience. The emotions can remain powerful and strong even decades after the last time a programmer has worked with us.

But the emotions are ours. They are not the programming. They are our feelings – our fear, our shame, our guilt – which we allow to dominate us because we don’t dare to argue with them or fight them or in any way test their validity – or because we believe we can’t bear to feel them and we are willing to “do anything” to avoid them or make them stop.

And so the programming – the actual message that is protected by our own emotional response – also remains alive within us.

Separate the feeling from the message, and the message can be evaluated for what it is without the emphasis and strength and power that our own emotions have added to it.

Trauma drives home the messages and lessons of programming with emotional strength and force – but we don’t have to let the programming keep drawing its power from us. We are giving it the only power it has – and we can take that power away from it too. If we accept the feelings instead of being willing to “do anything” to escape them, then the threat inherent in the programming (“obey me or else…”) is suddenly an empty bluff.

This is a reframe of how programming is commonly viewed – but reframing programming into an approachable and workable phenomenon that is amenable to change (and it is) is part of what healing involves. Healing is possible if we are willing to look beyond our own assumed limitations and risk the discomfort of changing the status quo.

Discrimen etiamnunc porro.
Hazard, yet forward.
(School motto of Seton Hill College)

Mind Control Programming Basics I: Introduction

It has been in my mind for a while that I wanted to write a series of posts addressing the basic principles of mind control programming. These would address some of the foundations on which programming is based and some of the myths I am aware of regarding how programming works, with the intention of providing some useful general information for those who wish to address any mind control programming in their own worlds.

Life has kept me away from the blog for a few months, but now that I have some free space in my head, I am getting my series underway.

Although there are many groups who use mind control techniques, and each of them have their own unique programming focus, designed to suit their own goals and group philosophy, there are still certain basic principles of programming which apply across the board. No matter the group to which your abusers belonged, no matter the relative level at which they were able to employ mind control techniques, no matter the jobs for which your group was created and trained – these basic principles will still be applicable.

Topics so far on the list are:

• the foundational roots of programming
• internal programmers
• the myth of self-maintaining programming
• factors that contribute to keeping programming in place

Should any reader wish to see a specific addition to the list of topics, I would accept suggestions.

Not Every Trigger Is About Programming

Triggers and programming.

Here’s the thing — the word “trigger” is not uniquely linked to abuse survivors who have been subjected to programming. It is a universal term for any stimulus that evokes the torrent of memories, physical feelings, and emotions of a trauma in its sufferer. Every PTSD sufferer has things that trigger them. This includes non-dissociative trauma survivors like war veterans, suvivors of a single adult rape, battered wives, and car accident victims — and it includes those who have suffered purely emotional traumas, such as a sudden death, a bitter divorce, or even a bad breakup.

Because what is perceived as traumatic is a purely subjective interpretation (i.e. what might traumatize one person might be taken in stride by another), it can fairly be said that every human being will suffer something they perceive as traumatic at some point in their life — which means that every single person we meet will have something that they perceive as a trigger.

It should therefore be obvious that a “trigger” does not necessarily point to programming. It does point to a perceived trauma of some sort, but not every trauma is caused by programming — not even for people who have been subjected to mind control techniques.

So it’s a little aggravating when “it’s programming” begins to be the refrain sung in response to every triggered response in a survivor’s life — especially when the responses being described have nothing at all to do with programming.

If programs were really being set off by every trigger to which that result is attributed, then the programmer had to be incredibly inept. Consider — how discreet would a real mind control program be if it could be set off by commercials on tv and random comments on the street? How controllable would a mind control program be if that were the case? And yet, the whole point of mind control is control. And it’s not control for any idiot who happens to say “ET phone home” or to make a commercial that happens to feature the concept of going home  — mind control programming is intended to give control to the programmers and only the programmers.

And no, the mind control groups are not infiltrating Hollywood studios or landing advertising accounts for major product lines so that they can manipulate the movies and tv shows and commercials with programming cues — if you believe this, then you are in desperate need of a reality check.

Believe me, the programmers do not have to go to such obscure lengths to reach the people they want. Such an idea is absolutely ludicrous. Why would they bother? If you are programmed and you haven’t done anything to address the programming, then they already know where you are and how to reach you. Someone in your system has already let them know those things.  And if they do still want you, then you probably aren’t nearly as far away from them as you want to think you are. They don’t need a cleverly constructed commercial to get to you. They have much easier — and more controlled — ways to do that.

Subsequently, no well-constructed program is going to be cued by what we see on tv or what the average person says to us or what we do in the humdrum routine of our everyday lives.

Programming is triggered only in response to something you have done (for example, don’t-tell programming), or in direct response to a cue from a programmer or a proxy for the programmer. Nothing else. And if it is being cued by a person, then it will require a very specific and very precise formula to cue it into action, something that isn’t going to happen just by chance. Some of these formulas are so complex and arcane that the programmers themselves need them written down in order to remember them from session to session.

The point is, the programmers do not want their programs being cued at any time except when the programs are intended to run. That is why programming doesn’t get triggered — it gets cued — and the nuanced difference there is intention.

I’m not certain why anyone would want to put more of their life, their responses, their behaviors, outside of their control than necessary — maybe it’s just a reflection of how out of control we can all feel at times — but it really doesn’t help us to start attributing more to programming than it fairly deserves. It doesn’t help us to throw away more control than necessary or to make the work of healing appear harder than it already is.

Mind control programming presents its own very difficult challenges to overcome — but triggers are a traumatic stress response, not a programmed response — and like the triggers created by any other type of trauma, our triggers are amenable to therapeutic intervention if we want to make a dedicated and consistent effort at working to defuse them.

Tricking the Program

This post intends to suggest one means by which your group can take a step towards self-control rather than being controlled by the programming – and among the many benefits of having that ability, one of the most notable is that it helps significantly in being able to tolerate the overall therapy process.

Some running programs will have a “condition met” recognition that shuts them off. This is true of several different types of programs, including behavioral programming, which I already discussed.

If you know what the condition is, then it is possible to “trick” the program into shutting down by appearing to meet the condition without actually doing whatever the program is designed to make you do (meeting the letter of the condition but not the spirit of it).

Remember that programs do not think, and alters who are extensively programmed won’t be able to think much either. For most programs where meeting a specific condition is the goal, neither the program itself nor the alters who are maintaining it will necessarily be able to distinguish whether the condition has been met but the program itself has been circumvented.

For example…

A self-injury program is designed to cause you to self-injure. Once you have done so, the program ceases to run.

But which precise element is the condition for the program to consider itself “fulfilled”? Is it the physical feeling of pain? Is it the sight of the wound? Is it the actual act of causing injury?

Among your group, some thorough discussion should help you isolate your key element, or at least to narrow it down to a few possibilities – and then, you can begin to develop circumventions which will shut the program down without engaging in the intended destructive action.

In looking for circumventions, it helps to think as literally and as concretely as possible. Programming, however complex it grows, is at bottom based in child-like thinking, and so child-like thinking is often the best way to get around it too. In fact, it might be worthwhile to ask a child – if you can ask the question in a way that will be useful to you without being traumatizing to them. The answers you get, while stunning in their simplicity, might also be something you would never have thought of in a million years. But often these suggestions will prove to be very helpful.

The thing to remember is that mind control programs are like legal documents. They are intended to cover every possibility and eventuality. However, they are created by human beings, and therefore they will never truly be perfect. (Programmers are inhuman in many ways, but they are still subject to that particular human failing.)

Laws and legal documents have loopholes that can be exploited. Video games have “cheats” that are actually exploitations of flaws in the original design code. Computer game companies routinely issue patches to correct the errors and bugs in the original release. Manufacturers have discount stores to sell the merchandise that came off the factory floor damaged.

Everything created by human beings has a margin of imperfection, including the machines they build to do their work for them. Mind control programs are created by human beings, or with machines built by human beings. Therefore, mind control programming also contains a margin of imperfection.

If you can identify the inherent imperfections and weaknesses of your programming, then you can exploit them for your benefit – and “tricking the program” is one way to do this.

Internal Communication Is the Key — Take 2

In the wake of last week’s posts about undoing programming, let me reiterate again that internal communication is the key to making this work.

If you don’t know the other alters in your system – if people shift and move ghost-like behind and around you but you don’t know anyone’s name or what they really look like, or if nobody seems to talk to each other, or if they talk to each other but you don’t talk to them, or especially if you’re still at the point where you’d rather the whole problem just dissolved and went away by itself because you’re sure as hell not talking to any people in your head (only crazy people do that!) – then you are not yet ready to address any programming issues.

Everyone wants the quick fix. We all want to feel better, we want the programming gone, we want the other alters to be happy and quiescent (or gone altogether), we want to be “normal”, and we want it right now – or as close to “right now” as possible.

With this goal in mind, and the HMO concept of how long therapy “should” take spurring them on, both patients and therapists tend to rush in where angels should fear to tread and completely neglect the necessary foundational work.

Consider…

If you are flooded with memories from an alter you don’t know, can’t find, won’t talk to – then what do you do about the flood that is inundating you? How do you stop it? How do you comfort that alter? How do you comfort yourself? How do you process the information in a meaningful way when the alter who holds that particular memory is out of your reach?

If you are influenced by programming but you don’t know what the program is, who maintains it, who else is influenced by it, who supports it, who is against it, or who knows what valuable information that might help you undo it – then how can you address the programmed influence?

If you still have internal programmers in your system (and if you have been subjected to mind control in any organized way, then you very likely do have at least one) – if they are there, and they are not working with you – then what do you imagine they are doing?

I ask these questions only to emphasize the importance of building relationships within the system before turning to other focal points in therapy. From the most basic issue to the most complicated, there is no part of your healing that will not benefit from focusing on relationship-building first.

And focusing on building relationships doesn’t mean that other therapy work gets put completely on hold. In fact, the process is likely to necessitate processing numerous memories and possibly even addressing some programming in order to form a cohesive group from the disparate members of your system. However, the shift in focus means that the issues as they arise will be addressed by the system working together, even if all they are working on together at the time is simply learning to work together. It is still a shared effort toward a common goal, where the hardships and obstacles surmounted become memories that bond the group together instead of dividing it further.

But like everything else, building relationships takes time – and usually more time than we wish it would. It doesn’t happen in a day, or a week, or even necessarily in a month. And it requires consistent daily effort to make it happen at all – this is true on the days when we don’t feel like it, on the days when we feel discouraged, and even on the days when we don’t want to be DID. Each day wasted in pretending the other alters don’t exist is a lost opportunity to be doing something that is actually helpful.

How do I know? Because I’ve watched it work and felt it work – and because I do not assume that this system is any better or stronger or more capable than any other system. What we can do, anyone else can also do. What works for us in a general sense will likely work for others as well. We all differ in our individual details, but the efficacy of an approach is probably not limited to us alone. We just aren’t that special.

In fact, the only way I can see that we differ from any of the numerous other dissociative systems we know is in a few of the choices we’ve made. But anyone else could do that too – if they chose.

Excerpts from the poem You by Edgar A. Guest

You are the fellow that has to decide
Whether you’ll do it or toss it aside.
You are the fellow who makes up your mind
Whether you’ll lead or will linger behind,
Whether you’ll try for the goal that’s afar
Or just be contented to stay where you are.
Take it or leave it, here’s something to do –
Just think it over – it’s all up to you.

Nobody here will compel you to rise;
No one will force you to open your eyes;
No one will answer for you yes or no,
Whether to stay there or whether to go.
Life is a game, but it’s you who must say
Whether as cheat or as sportsman you’ll play.
Fate may betray you, but you settle first
Whether to live at your best or your worst.

Breaking Free from Pavlov

Pure behavioral programming is frequently created using conditioned stimulus-response training, like that used with Pavlov’s dogs. If a person does or says or hears or sees any of the programmed stimuli, they immediately react with the programmed response (such as self-injury, suicidal urges, binging and purging, starving, and acting out in therapy). However, breaking the behavioral link eventually makes the program stop working altogether.

We all know how Pavlov’s dogs were “programmed” to salivate when they hear a bell – but it is equally true that, if they stop getting food when the bell rings, then eventually they stop expecting it – and eventually their mind breaks the link between the ringing bell and food, and they don’t salivate in expectation anymore.

This works even better (faster) if the existing behavioral link is simultaneously reattached to a new expectation – ring a bell, and instead of getting food, the dogs get to go for a walk. It doesn’t take them long to stop salivating and start jumping around at the door instead.

So basically, undoing behavioral programming is more a case of reprogramming your mind with a new response to a given stimulus – replacing the programmed “food expectation” response with the new “go for a walk” response.

This works best if the new response chosen is something absorbing enough to serve as at least an adequate distraction, even from the beginning. Just as an example – taking an activity as emotionally addictive, compulsive, and habitual as self-injury and replacing it with watching CNN on television probably won’t be too effective – however, replacing self-injury with running or walking outside, going to the gym, cleaning the house, doing yardwork, shooting hoops in the driveway, shooting aliens in Halo, playing Wii tennis, playing real tennis, just smacking tennis balls agains the side of the house – anything you can do safely and regularly, something that suits you and caters to your interests and your needs, something that pulls you out of yourself and (ideally) moves you away from your location and tools of choice for self-injury, will give you a fair chance for success.

Of course, just offering an alternative won’t keep us from longing for the comfort of the familiar. Choosing an alternate activity to be our new response is easy – the hard part is to keep acting on the new response even when it seems futile and pointless and we’re sick of fighting and we’d rather just go back to the old way. This is especially true at the beginning of the process, when the programming has years’ worth of “obedience” reinforcing its strength and it is very very hard to resist.

Backsliding at the beginning of this process is not equivalent to failure – you have as many chances to make this work as you need, and it can take effort and practice just to build up the strength for a prolonged fight. You might progress in increments of hours, or even quarter hours – but progress is progress, and every step is a success.

Expecting overnight success, however, will lead to certain disappointment. The programming was created over decades. It is strong, and it is insistent, and we are used to doing what it tells us to do. It takes time and persistence to teach ourselves not to do those things. Like learning any new skill, but with the added disadvantage of having to overcome what we’ve already learned and then to learn the new thing instead.

Compare your mental memory to your physical (muscle) memory. Has anyone ever played a musical instrument where they had to break an old, incorrect habit in their playing? How long did it take before the old habit was finally eradicated? Ever driven a stick shift car and then gotten an automatic? How long did you continue to reach for the gear shift or press the clutch even when neither was necessary? Ever rearranged the furniture in a room and then had to readjust your course every time you walked into it for the next few weeks because your autopilot was still expecting the old arrangement?

But wouldn’t it be kind of ridiculous to get rid of your automatic car because you were still used to driving a stick shift, or moving the furniture in a room back to the old arrangement because you didn’t instantly adjust to the new one?

Well, learning new responses to old stimuli is the same way – and if we give up on trying to make it work because it doesn’t work fast enough, then it’s never going to work.

All new learning requires time. Habit is a really powerful thing – the number of things that physical and mental memories accomplish without our conscious thought is immense, and obedience to programming is a deeply rooted habit that all mind control victims were forced to learn. It is neither easy nor comfortable when a rote activity suddenly requires conscious awareness – as when we are learning a new way to do an old task – but it’s not going to happen any other way.

Learning doesn’t happen by magic. It happens through effort and application over time. Someone put a lot of time and effort into forcing us to learn their programming. They spent years teaching us what they wanted us to learn. I think we are worth at least as much of our own time and effort to learn what we want to learn.

Addressing Therapy-Specific Programming III

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.

Addressing Therapy-Specific Programming II

(…continued from previous post…)

Another main point in addressing therapy-specific programming (or any kind of programming) is, that you and your therapist should be in full and complete agreement as to the fact that you are going to approach it as programming (not as resistance, transference, or absolute truth that should be believed and acted on).

The therapist, if not part of the initial analysis of triggers, likely behavior, and thought patterns, should be fully apprised of this information so that they know what to look for – they might recognize emerging patterns more quickly or be able to add things to look for.

You should also have a crisis plan in place ahead of time. This is not as likely to be needed when addressing this type of programming, but it is always best to stay on the safe side. Even the most basic programming will have protections in place to prevent it from being tampered with or destroyed. The programmers would prefer that their work remain intact, and they have devised all manner of things (from pressure-sensitive bombs to “mind traps” that will set some internal effect into motion to hiding the programming under some innocuous structure, and many many more) to discourage or deflect any attempts at undoing their work.

Approaching the therapy-specific programming with the kind of alter-inclusive approach I’ve described elsewhere will increase the odds of finding pitfalls ahead of time instead of by walking into them. It is also a good way to develop some familiarity and experience with the approach. Be sure to ask the alters you know, or the ones you meet along the way, about traps and other protective devices. If the chain of information appears to dead-end, ask specifically whether anyone knows about other worlds, alters from other worlds, and connections between worlds. If the alter who could provide this information is not yet cooperative, take the time to get to know them and include them in your group. The more alters your group has working together, the stronger the group is.

Each pitfall, trap, trigger, and program has at least one alter who knows about it and/or maintains it – and that someone also knows how to circumvent, defuse, and/or remove what they are currently protecting. Listen to them – get to know them for themselves, apart from the goal you want to reach or the information you want them to give you. Consider whether you would be  friendly with or trusting of someone who only wanted to pump you for information – would you want to be helpful in that situation? Alters should never be used in this way. It’s worth the time and effort to build genuine relationships with them – whether or not you end up being best friends, everyone in the group should work toward a place of mutual respect. Our alters will be with us literally for the rest of our lives, so there’s no point in starting off on a bad foot or allowing animosity to fester and disrupt the entire system when we can do something to prevent that from happening – and your group needs to be able to work together if addressing the programming is going to be effective.

(… to be continued, again. My next post will have some examples which might hopefully make it clearer.)

Addressing Therapy-Specific Programming I

So how do we address the programming? More specifically, how can we defeat the therapy-interfering programming so that we have the chance to do the other work we want to do?

Just to be clear (again) – I am not defining therapeutic methods here. I am just elaborating, from the survivor’s side, on some things to look for and some places to focus. Also, just to be clear, this is not “entry-level therapy.” Reliable and consistent internal communication and cooperation must be established before even considering this kind of work.

So – let’s assume, for the sake of the rest of this series, that we each have a therapist with whom we really “click,” someone who is capable of working through this with us and (maybe more importantly) someone with whom we really want it to be successful – a therapist we’d actually regret losing or driving away. Then what?

One main thing to be aware of is, that addressing programming involves stretching ourselves in ways that are unfamiliar and extremely uncomfortable – and one of the most immediate and obvious sources of discomfort in therapy is that we need to talk. A lot.

I’m sure I’m not the only DID survivor who finds talking to be extremely challenging even under the best of circumstances. After thirty years of don’t-talk programming, forcing words out of my mouth can have the same feeling of fatalistic resignation as jumping off a cliff to avoid being eaten by a lion. The lion would be worse, but I’m going to be dead either way.

So I’m not unaware of the difficulty, but I am emphasizing that forcing ourselves to talk anyway is not without purpose or value.

First, because a therapist cannot be expected to help us with problems that we don’t mention or don’t fully explain. If we give no information, or if we provide only half the information we could give them, then we can’t blame them if their suggestions and interventions aren’t effective or helpful, because we’re the ones who tied their hands.

Second, because therapy-specific programming works best when it is left unexamined, unanalyzed, and unchallenged. The thoughts, fears, and suspicions make far more sense when they’re building on themselves in the darkness of our minds than they ever will if we expose them to the light of day and try to examine them rationally. In fact, some programming can and will fall apart that easily (although most of it will not).

The more we can force ourselves to explain and discuss, the more we are helping ourselves.

When enough of the groundwork has been laid with a therapist that you are ready to mention programming, and enough internal communication and cooperation has been developed to provide a foundation for the heavier work, the subject of therapy-specific programming should be one of the first types of programming discussed. This is primarily because discussing any other type of programming is likely set off the therapy-interfering programming anyway, so you won’t get very far with anything else until the therapy interference is addressed first.

Preparatory to this, it helps to review any previous therapy experiences from the perspective of where programming might have been influencing your thoughts or actions. This can provide you with a rough map of sorts, a way to anticipate where and how at least some of the problems might occur.

It can also be considered the first test of your commitment to the process and your willingness to accept what it shows you – because looking at past actions and behaviors from a new perspective can recast them in a light that is unflattering, to say the least. At the same time, however, before something can be changed, we need the humility to be able to admit where things are wrong – which goes hand-in-hand with the ability to see where things have gone wrong, and why.

It has worked best for me to start at the end of a therapy relationship (since that has always been a point where problems were obvious) and work back.

Look for times when retrospect indicates that your reaction was excessive to the situation, and check in with yourself in the current day to see whether that excessive emotion is still smoldering. Emotions that remain ready to jump alive at full strength, no different from when they were new and relevant, can indicate programming influence. By carefully analyzing the details of the situations where this is true for you, you can identify the specific ideas, thought patterns, and behavioral urges that define the programming.

Look for arguments that began and then could not be resolved by anything the therapist said or did, and get feedback about this from your current therapist. Was the old therapist truly doing something “wrong”, or was it your perceptions which were skewed? Look also for circular or repetitive arguments, where you brought up the same issues week after week after week. Unresolvable arguments also tend to indicate programming influence.

What subjects make the don’t-talk urges stronger?

What subjects provoke self-injurious or suicidal urges?

What skills do you currently have to manage those urges? What new plans might help to counter or contain them?

Working backwards, can you identify any specific event or chain of events which caused your opinion of your therapist to undergo a dramatic change?

Can you detect any ways in which that change was underway even before the obvious events occurred? (That is, can you find any evidence that your reaction was actually just a “reaction waiting to happen”?)

Can you identify any negative thought patterns that are typical for you? What are they? What triggers them?

Analyze each event as minutely as possible for clues as to what was happening in your world and among your alters. Talk to each other about how your reactions were similar and how they differed. Some programming affects certain alters more than others. The more detailed and complete you can be, the more this can help to identify and highlight the programmed patterns in your behavior.

If you are not initially able to do all of this on your own, your therapist should be able to help you analyze past situations – but again, it will take honesty on your part to present the information with as little bias, exaggeration, or spin as possible – and it will take humility both to hear how a situation is assessed and to accept the assessment without taking it as a personal insult or put-down. Truth hurts, as the old adage goes, and never more than when it sheds a harsh light on our own behaviors and reactions. However – the pain is survivable, the embarrassment is survivable, and we have to accept the truth as it stands before we can really change anything.

Or, to phrase that another way, if we don’t want to hear the truth, if we refuse to tolerate even the first step toward real change – then maybe we need to revise our therapeutic goals downward to something more in keeping with what we’re willing to do.

The truth of our lives is already ugly. We aren’t making the truth uglier by seeing it and accepting it – it still looks just as ugly whether we look at it or not. But if we refuse to look at it or acknowledge it or talk about it or accept it, then we don’t really want to heal it or change it. And that’s pretty much the long and short of that.

Assuming, however, that our desire for change is genuine and strong… then, if we value the therapeutic relationship we have, we need to take steps to protect it from ourselves, so that we don’t sabotage our own chances for healing. We need to be alert, as therapy proceeds, for clues that might indicate that programming is at work. Therapy-specific programming tends to become obvious once you know what to look for.

…and this is already getting long, so the rest will be another post.

Followup to Yesterday

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.

…but RA/SRA therapy is limited after all

I’ll start right out by saying that my opinion as presented in this post might not be very popular — however, when it comes to my opinion (to quote Jane Austen), I must speak as I find.

So. At the end of my post regarding the elements I believe have been important in our healing thus far (Internal Communication is the Key to Everything), I opined that a person’s system will provide the keys for how to progress when they are ready and willing to do the work involved.

What I didn’t mention in that post — but will mention here — is that my answer was a little sophistical. Although it is true enough that each system could provide this information, odds are that they never will — because most people (regardless of what they say) do not actually want to do that kind of work. What they want is to feel better right now, or as quickly as possible. They want therapy to improve their immediate functioning and maybe smooth their emotional turmoil to a bearable level. For most people, that is enough.

And they are supported in that intention (or lack thereof) by the vast majority of mental health professionals, hospitals, and networks. Most professionals absolutely refuse to touch the deepest mind control programming, and they steer their patients away from addressing it as well. They are complicit with the patients in believing that a little improvement in current day functioning is enough.

To be fair, being content with this level of improvement is not beyond understanding. After all, it takes long enough just to achieve that much. Developing stable and solid internal communication and cooperation between the alters most responsible for daily functioning, learning to manage feelings, and processing the most intrusive memories — doing that much can take years. Who really wants to devote yet more years to therapy when they can function well enough without it? And who’s going to pay for all that therapy? We’ve had to make enough of an investment in our healing — doesn’t there come a time when there are better uses for our time and money?

Well… yes and no.

Here’s the problem with cutting therapy short as soon as the surface world has been smoothed and soothed — and this is a problem for which I believe the world of mental health care is at least equally responsible, to their shame.

The problem — as I said before — is that, if the deep programming is never addressed, never touched, never undone — then each and every person who has been subjected to mind control programming remains vulnerable to their own perpetrators and to any other predator who knows how to take advantage of them.

Furthermore, I would be willing to bet everything I have spent on therapy (which amounts to a lot more than everything I have) that many people, although they may believe their involvement with their abusive group is in entirely the past, are still in contact. Not every week or every month — once every year or eighteen months would be enough, and there is absolutely no reason the individual would know or even suspect it had happened — but contrary to popular misconception, programming does not maintain itself indefinitely. Someone who knows how that person’s system operates is checking in every once in a while to make sure that the programming remains intact.

So — what I am saying is that no mind control/RA/SRA survivor can truly be safe while they are still vulnerable in this way. In fact, they probably aren’t half as safe as they think they are.

Therefore, the fact that it is so difficult to find a therapist who can or will do the kind of work necessary to break these controls is a tantamount to a crime against survivors. Those therapists who claim to do trauma work should lose sleep pondering their abject failure of the population they claim to serve. Even hospital trauma units will not do this kind of work.

This is easier and safer for them. In the first place, they aren’t risking the potential dangers (and subsequent potential lawsuits) involved in approaching such sensitive material (and both potentialities are very real, considering how few mental health professionals have the expertise necessary to do this depth of work safely). And in the second place, who’s going to pay them for their time and expertise, even assuming they have any? Insurance companies no longer support long-term therapy or lengthy hospital stays without a “good reason” (by their definition), and most survivors are not in any position to afford these services on a cash-pay basis.

However, by taking this hands-off approach, the mental health professionals are making the perpetrators’ jobs easier, and thereby doing a grave disservice to the survivors coming to them for help.

On the other hand, is anyone pressuring them to do things differently?

I don’t believe anyone is. In fact, I believe most survivors are perfectly content with the status quo as they know it. And in further fact, when given the opportunity to do something deeper than surface level work, most survivors will take the first excuse to turn tail and run. So why would mental health professionals bother to develop an expertise that nobody wants anyway?

The front worlds prefer to delude themselves with the belief that head pats and surface comfort will heal them, and out of expediency if nothing else, the professionals are more than happy to agree with them. Nobody is really trying to reach the dark worlds; nobody really wants to reach them. People want to know how to control their troublesome alters more than they want to heal them, and therapy tends to encourage this “bandaid” approach — as a result of which, even the first step in true healing is left incomplete.

Although therapy can help the front worlds function somewhat better, there are still entire sections of people’s internal systems that are being left untouched and unhealed, except insofar as they are being “controlled” to prevent them from causing trouble — and this tiny ray of light in the pitch blackness is what most survivors and nearly all mental health professional consider “healing.”

Each person has the right to make their own choice regarding their therapy, of course — but as long as this definition of “healing” prevails, I don’t think we need to worry about how to approach a level of work for which no real interest exists.

Internal Teamwork is Key to Everything

John Says:
December 19, 2008 at 7:48 am

I enjoyed reading the article on RA Memories Can Hide a Lot. I work with many differernt types of abuse. You are on the money that the traumatic memories are typically the point of focus. Do you have any specific methods of getting around this?

I’ve given this question a lot of thought.

Before I begin, there are two things I think I need to say.

First, just to clarify — I am speaking in this case only about traumatic memories involving RA or SRA. Traumatic memories in general will of course be the focus of therapy. In many cases, they are the entire reason for being in therapy, and they deserve to be the focus. Those memories are what they appear to be, they don’t hide anything more, and there is no reason to bypass them or get around them. In the case of RA or SRA memories only, however, I am proposing that the excessive horror of the rituals and the compelling and consuming memories they create are intended to hide and protect deeper levels of programming and mind control, and therefore that RA/SRA memories cannot be fully addressed or resolved through a purely frontal approach.

Second, I/we are not a practicing mental health professional at this time. We know a lot of dissociative survivors, but we do not now, nor have we ever worked with them in the context of trying to help them heal.

That being the case, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to suggest methods of working with other individuals.

I can, however, elaborate on some of the things which I believe were key components of our own successful work in this area. And the fact is, there is no particular method for doing this particular thing. The same principals that guide all good DID system work will work here too. This is just a different direction than the one in which most people go.

The most fundamental aspect of our work in this regard — and in everything else we have done in terms of our healing as well — is internal communication and cooperation.

Although some of this group’s traumatic memories naturally presented themselves prior to our achievement of strong communication skills and had to be handled in therapy, the vast majority of the early work was focused on getting to know each other and developing a working cooperative.

This was begun in the front group, among alters who knew of each other. Then, as the work progressed and new alters were met or discovered, we paused each time to get to know the new alters and find a way to mesh them into the group.

There are numerous reasons why this has been so important — but they can all be summed up by saying, there is both safety and strength in numbers. Strength for healing, strength for learning the truths we have hidden from ourselves, strength to safely ride out the emotional crises that memories can precipitate, and strength to find what lies beyond the ugliness with which we are all most familiar.

For survivors who have been subjected to purposeful mind control techniques, the multiplicity has been used against us to divide us within ourselves and against ourselves. Developing a working internal cooperative makes the multiplicity work for us. And it can be achieved, regardless of the amount of splitting or the expertise of the programming. It won’t happen quickly, but it can happen — and in my opinion, it should, overall, be the focus of therapy.

In the case of approaching and bypassing RA/SRA memories specifically, it is absolutely crucial to have the understanding and agreement of as many alters as possible. This should never be undertaken as a unilateral action by the therapist, or forced on the system members if they are not willing. Apart from the disrespect this would entail for the genuine horror of these memories, it would also be a complete failure. Dissociative systems are hard enough to work with without incurring the resentment and enmity of the group — so this approach and its intentions should be thoroughly discussed with the alter cooperative before it is attempted, until it is fully understood and they indicate their willingness to proceed, or it should not be attempted at all.

As I said in my last post on this subject (RA Memories Can Hide A Lot), RA memories in many cases are intended to hide and protect the actual programming work done by the programmers. By drawing and holding the focus of the survivor and their therapist, these compelling and horrifying memories prevent anyone from suspecting that there might be anything “more” to look for. This distraction of focus keeps the actual mind controls safe and intact, usually throughout therapy — and RA memories tend to be resistant to any length of therapy. They remain painfully vibrant and strong even decades after a survivor has managed to free themselves from the actual group. This is because, as long as the mind control programming remains, the RA memories will remain there to hide it.

Therefore, part of the discussion about attempting to bypass the RA memories (and thereby defeat the purpose of those memories)should include the fact that doing so is likely to incur substantial backlash within the system. This can include unknown alters attempting to sabotage the work in progress (such as attempting to “kidnap” and/or replace key alters from the front group or threatening the front group), memory flooding, and the triggering of programs designed to completely distract the survivor from this course of action. These programs could cause systemic effects such as sickness, sudden amnesia among alters, pervasive internal darkness, rearranging or restructuring the system to confuse members, or suicidal feelings, among many other things.

The alter cooperative should develop strategies ahead of time among themselves and with their therapist for how to address these crises if and when they occur. Part of being prepared will be to speak to as many alters as possible about what the various traps are, how they were made, how they are set off, who they are intended to effect, and how they can be dismantled. Information is valuable — but obviously there has to be a lot of trust within the system (among alters) and of the therapist before this information will be shared, so don’t expect to have this information handed over in the first couple years.

Spend the necessary time to build a cooperative between alters, and the information will appear when the system is ready to act on it.

It is never a waste of time to pause at any step where a new alter or group of alters is discovered. However much this seems to slow you down, it will be to the benefit of the system as a whole to take the time necessary to learn about new alters met along the way. Not only does this keep the cooperative group cohesive, but who knows what useful information new alters might possess?

Don’t rush. Care and caution, however slow they may seem, are worth the safety they offer.

Be committed to the process — and I mean fully committed to seeing it through. Deciding at the first deluge of memories or the first triggered program that it’s too hard is worse than not starting at all. It wounds the morale of the cooperative — but even worse, it strengthens the general system belief in the efficacy of the blocks in place to prevent any work from getting done.

This is it’s whole own subject, but briefly put — programming hangs very very heavily on the belief of the survivor to keep it running. However real or autonomous it seems, the programming is getting its power from you. It requires the imagination and the unqualified belief of the subject in order to work — BUT, if you can see the trick that makes the magic look real and you cease to believe that it is magic, then it stops having power over you.

And RA/SRA memories, although they are real memories, are also programming, because their purpose is to conceal and distract from the deeper programming, the real controls placed on the individual. They hide the locations from which the dissociative system is controlled, the locations through which a programmer can access that individual at any time throughout their life unless these controls are broken.

Anyone who truly hopes to be free of their abusers and not have to constantly live in fear of the day they are found and accessed again will need to free themselves at this most basic level in order to really be free.

But care must be taken — the programmers know what they’re doing, and your therapist better know what they’re doing too. This is one area in which an expert therapist must be found, at the very least as a consultant, or inpatient care sought.

It is not easy — but is freedom worth it? Is it worth overcoming the difficulties and obstacles in order to be sure that we will never be vulnerable to the perpetrators again? I say yes. No matter what it takes. We would rather be free than anything else. It’s already cost us just about everything. But it’s still worth it.

Dare to look behind the curtain — and these memories, while they will always be horrific in their own right, can shrink in perspective the way the Great and Powerful Oz shrinks to be nothing but a man using a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Dare to see what these memories hide, and they will suddenly become memories that can be processed like any other terrible abuse memory — never gone, but at least no longer perpetually alive to us.

I probably didn’t answer your question — but then, I don’t really believe there is a standard answer on “how to do it.” Good system work will do it. Looking in new directions will do it. Beyond that, the answer will be different for each system, because each system (even if created by the same programmer) is unique. Be creative, work with each system as it is, get to know each alter and get alters working together with each other — and then, if they really want to, they will be able to answer the question of how to do it themselves.

When My Words Are Empty

A quick thought in my free hour here. (It is very rushed, for which I apologize.)

Every year, on the 21^st or 22^nd of December, I have had to undergo a “commitment ceremony” for “my” abusive group. This is an annual event during which I affirm the commitment of my life and my service to the group.

Recently, we had the pumpkin pie conversation with the female parental unit. Sadly, this is also an annual event.

These two events are not entirely without connection.

“You aren’t eating any of the pumpkin pie,” the female parent says every year. “I don’t want any pumpkin pie,” the front girl says. “You don’t want any pie? Why not?” “I don’t like pumpkin pie.” “What do you mean, you don’t like pumpkin pie?” “I don’t like pumpkin pie.” “Since when?” “Since forever. I’ve never liked pumpkin pie.” “You liked it last year.” “No, I didn’t, I ate a piece after you guilt-tripped me into it, like you do every year.” “Everyone likes pumpkin pie. How can you not like pumpkin pie? That’s ridiculous.” “I don’t like it.” “Yes you do, here, eat your piece.”

And every year we eat a piece of pumpkin pie, despite the fact that we hate it.

Does the fact that we eat the pie under duress really mean we like the pie? Do we like the pie because the female parent says we do?

Or are we just trying to keep the peace and eat the damn pie because it’s not worth arguing over?

(That one, definitely.)

So what about my commitment ceremonies?

The point of these ceremonies is to emphasize that my attendance and my service are my own choice — but let’s look at how these really happen.

My first ceremony was when I was 13 — I didn’t drive myself there, and my attendance certainly wasn’t my own choice.

That year, and every year since, I have been a small female body, naked and on my knees in half-slave position, surrounded by fully-clothed men.

The body has not yet been drugged, raped, sodomized, shocked, subjected to any mind games, or forced to hurt anyone else — but those things loom ahead, and I know it. And there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. My only choice is, how bad do I want it to be?

So… yes, I say what I’m expected to say. I do not tell them that I wish they would all suffer from simultaneous heart attacks and die in screaming agony, even though I think that. They pretend they don’t know I’m thinking that, even though they do know it. We go through the motions together.

I’ve been forced under duress to say that I want to be there, that I live to serve them, that I’m willing to die at their command — but do I mean that? Does just saying the words actually bind me to them?

Legally, the answer is no.

Psychologically, it’s been a little trickier to figure out. If I said it, and they said I meant it, then I must have meant it. And what about those hopeless years when I believed (with all the reason in the world) that I would be trapped there forever, and my only hope of survival was to appease these men and resign myself to my fate? Even if I don’t mean it now, didn’t I mean it back then?

Yes, I did… but it still wasn’t a choice. Nobody said to me that I could commit to them — or, if I’d rather, I could commit to apprenticeship at any of these other fabulous (and normal) careers. This was all I had. I was choosing between this and non-existence.

Some choice.

What we say under duress is not binding. What we are forced to accept when we are powerless to refuse does not reflect what we really want. What we “choose” when there is no real choice available does not make us solely responsible for the so-called choice we’ve made.

Only when we have real choices, and when we understand that those choices are finally truly ours to make, can we then be held responsible for our choices — and make choices that reflect what we actually want.

RA Memories Can Hide A Lot

Just as a note – we are getting ready for our annual holiday trip and will most likely be offline until after New Year’s, but there will be more to come after the holidays are over, if anyone wants to check back then.

So – what I’ve been thinking about today is ritual abuse and what it often hides.

I’ve gotten to know a fairly large number of ritual abuse survivors through my years on various forums and online support groups, and I’ve met a smaller number in person.

One thing they all share in common is, that they get stuck on the memories of the rituals, and they never look beyond them.

Now don’t get me wrong – I am absolutely not diminishing or minimizing the true horror of these memories. They really defy words in how awful they are.

What I am saying is, they usually aren’t the bottom of the barrel in terms of memories. Sometimes they are, but more often, ritual memories are like a camouflage of leaves strewn over a trapdoor to conceal it. They are real, but at the same time, they are not what they appear to be.

Before I go any further, let me take a moment to talk about me – in case that might help people understand where I’m coming from when I say this kind of thing.

I am one member of a fairly large dissociative system. I was previously a leader of one of the dark worlds. There are, as it turns out, worlds even darker than mine, but mine was dark enough.

Our worlds and their inhabitants were created on purpose and with purpose by programmers. I was one of their primary liaisons. I worked with the programmers directly and frequently. I was programmed by them, but I also simply learned from them.

I have been like them. I have done what they do, and I have done things they will not do themselves.

I have been a slave with delusions of elitism. I have been a predator with delusions of power. I am not writing about subjects with which I have no personal experience. I have very personal knowledge of all these things.

This blog is, in the first place, my opportunity to express feelings and thoughts that cannot be expressed in any other venue. But the other reason I created it is as a form of atonement. My knowledge has been gained at the expense of many. That is something I can never really undo or make up for, but perhaps sharing what I know might have some beneficial use to others in the current day.

Whether this is actually true or not, I don’t know. My views have never met with a warm reception in any place I have expressed them, so perhaps I don’t have the knack for being helpful. But either way, the information is here.

In any event – back to ritual abuse memories.

Ritual abuse memories are often a screen to keep anyone from suspecting there is more to find.

Programmers leave nothing to chance. Despite the amount of time spent teaching their victims not to trust, not to tell, not to remember, not to enter therapy – they are aware that programming degrades over time if it is not regularly maintained. They are further aware that a certain percentage of victims, in later years, will recover memories, will be in therapy, and will find the courage to speak.

So how do they ensure that their real work remains intact and untouched by any therapist or, preferrably, by the victim either?

They hide it behind something so ugly that nobody will think of looking any further for the “real problem.”

And thus are the rituals used. Programmers cover the true purpose and extent of their work with these bizarre satanic overlays that simultaneously repel many listeners (due to either the disgusting details, or the incapacity of most people to comprehend and believe anything so extreme, or both) and compel attention from those who wish to help the survivor.

The survivor tends to fixate on the ritual memories. The entire calendar is full of dates that have been given meaning by the rituals to which they were once subjected, so there is always another anniversary looming on the horizon. As a result, many survivors remain trapped in dreading and dealing with the anniversary cycle for decades, even if they have long since been free of the actual horror of attendance.

Survivors rarely get past the satanic cover-up to discover what truly lies at the hearts of their own internal systems. Survivors, and their therapists, are so riveted by those horrifying memories that they get stuck on them. Therapy becomes a process of attempting to defuse the memories and give the survivor some peace from them – but this is often a futile battle.

The reason ritual memories are so difficult to dislodge is that they have been precisely calculated on two crucial levels to remain firmly in place. The first level is that something so traumatic will naturally be consumingly upsetting to the person who went through it; the second is that they are being held in place by the deeper programming they hide. In many cases, the entire purpose of ritual memories is to keep anyone from moving past them.

Survivors are focused on them, therapists would look unforgivably uncaring in bypassing them – and so the ritual memories effectively stall the therapy while both the therapist and the survivor search for a means of relief from them.

Unfortunately, if these memories are in fact a screen of traumatic events designed to obscure and protect the real programming and mind control – then real relief will only be found through bypassing the surface memories and dealing with them at the deeper level.

If there is nothing left for them to protect, then the ritual abuse memories can be processed and laid to rest in a more natural way, as much as they possibly can be.

But if they are approached only from the surface level, then they will in most cases continue to be a therapeutic block and a dominant source of distress for the survivor who is plagued by them.

(I realize that this post ignores a lot of elements that ultimately get tangled in to the ritual abuse, but one post can only do so much. I have a lot more I could and eventually will say about this subject. In the meantime, if you want to say anything about what I’ve got so far, feel free.)