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.

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.