The Therapeutic Relationship as a Vehicle for Change

Instances of negative transference are not the only time or the only way in which the therapeutic relationship can become a vehicle for learning, growth, and change. Actually, devoting a portion of therapy time to the therapeutic relationship on a regular basis can really have a significant impact on therapy. It’s like performing maintenance on the therapeutic relationship – evaluating its condition, confirming mutual understanding of and agreement on goals and methods, analyzing interactions that come across wrong even when they don’t cause major disruptions or misunderstandings, and all the other small tasks that keep a relationship on track and running smoothly. Not only will this help the therapeutic relationship to stay healthy and strong, thereby preserving its viability as a continued part of healing, but these small maintenance tasks can also prove to be surprisingly revealing.

However, despite its potential benefits, focusing time on the therapeutic relationship rather than on “actual therapy” is not always looked on favorably by therapy clients.

Some people believe that the therapist should be solely responsible for maintaining the health and strength and viability of the therapeutic relationship, and that the client should not have to contribute anything to that particular effort. These people never discuss the therapeutic relationship because it’s just not their problem – and if a problem does develop in the relationship, it’s not their responsibility to fix it, so there’s still no need to talk about it except insofar as the therapist needs to be told what to do about it.

These same people are likely to find that their therapy is a thoroughly unsatisfying and ultimately futile endeavor. No healthy relationship can be entirely and exclusively focused on only one side of the dyad. All relationships are two-way streets, even the therapeutic relationship, and it takes some maintenance from both sides to keep it viable. Additionally, how we treat the therapeutic relationship is a microcosmic and intensified view of how we treat all our other relationships. If we are willing to neglect it, abuse it, take advantage of it, assume on it, or otherwise treat it poorly – that’s a pretty good indication of how we treat the other relationships in our lives as well.

Other people think that focusing on their relationship with the therapist is an unnecessary waste of time because they’re in therapy to address their depression or their test anxiety or something equally unlikely to benefit from focus on any kind of relationship. And it’s true that focusing time on the therapeutic relationship might not be necessary for these people – but doing so is never a waste, even if it does seem like a complete digression at first.

It has been a constant surprise to me in my studies and experiences, how even issues that seem to be entirely self-contained and unrelated to any kind of relationship dynamic can so often be traced back to a difficult past relationship or a hurtful experience at an impressionable moment. Even a relationship that was positive overall might contribute one small negative that lives on in the backs of our minds, unregarded and unrecognized, but still influencing our current-day lives.

And this is not relevant only to dissociative survivors, or even only to survivors in general – anyone might have a relationship or an interaction from which they took away a hurtful or self-defeating lesson.

We can live our entire lives with these background influences and never realize that they’re coming from anything more than “just how we are.” The original precipitant can be so small, so distant, so seemingly insignificant to our current-day selves, that we might hardly even remember that it happened at all, and we never consider its potential strength.

But the lingering effects of these old lessons will still be apparent in how we act and react within the therapeutic relationship.

These effects are more subtle than the big transference issues, so they are easier to overlook, especially if nobody’s looking for them. However, if they are recognized for what they are, they can lead to some surprising realizations and some very positive changes.

This is why devoting regular time to the maintenance of the therapeutic relationship is important, and it is another way that the therapeutic relationship itself can be beneficial to us as clients.

If we spend time on the therapeutic relationship only when there are problems, then the problem at hand is always the focus, and we miss the smaller and more subtle influences that might be affecting us even when there are no big problems to resolve.

Spending a regular portion of therapy time on the therapeutic relationship, even in the absence of specific problems, gives our therapist and ourselves the chance to recognize and draw out these quieter factors that influence our relationships and our interpersonal skills, so that we can analyze and learn from them.

Therapy at its best and most effective has far greater potential than just being a place we go to dump our weekly troubles so we can move on. Therapy is a dynamic process, a product of the relationship between us and our therapist. The therapeutic relationship is a mirror and a magnifying glass for all of our real-world relationships. It is also the one relationship where, if we are willing, we can safely experiment with new and more effective ways of being in the world. It is a relationship in which all our expectations and projections and beliefs come to life, for good or bad – but it is also a relationship where we can examine these things as they are, develop new perspectives on old lessons, and gain mastery over them rather than allowing them to continue having mastery over us.

Three Things to Know Before Making An Ethical Complaint Against A Therapist

When people think about filing a complaint against a therapist, or when they actually do it, they may envision any number of things happening as a result.

But there are certain aspects of the complaint process that most clients never think about. There are aspects of the process that most clients probably don’t even know about – which is a shame, because the number of frivolous complaints might decrease if clients understood what the process really entailed.

Filing an ethical complaint against a therapist is similar to having a rape kit done at a hospital. It is intrusive, it is violating, and it’s a miserable experience for the clients who undergo it.

I think people must not understand this as thoroughly as they should, considering some of the patently ridiculous complaints I’ve heard reviewed by the Board. And yet, each of those complaints, however ridiculous, was some clinician’s headache and hassle, and each one left a negative impression about a diagnostic population on a room full of people who might now think twice about taking on a client with that diagnosis.

So, in the spirit of helping to protect our therapeutic resources from the clients who abuse them and thereby cost us all, this week I’m discussing a few of the things that people should know about the ethical complaint process before they choose to file a complaint against a therapist.

1. HIPAA doesn’t apply.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a broad-based piece of legislation which was passed in 1996 as part of the regulatory effort to catch up to the modern era of medical record-keeping. The overarching goal of this act is to protect the privacy and confidentiality of each individual’s personal medical information.

If you ask ahead of time, the Board tends to be very reassuring about the confidentiality of the information you give them. They might tell you that your name will be whited out of the complaint so that even the therapist about whom you’re complaining won’t be able to see it, or that nobody will have access to any of the personal information you provide to them.

Presumably there are people who actually rely on this promise of confidentiality when they file a complaint against a therapist – but unfortunately for those people, the promise just isn’t true.

Oh sure, your name might be whited out of the actual complaint – but it will be left visible on the Waiver of Confidentiality form that is a required part of the complaint submission.

And since it’s on that form, and since that form circulates everywhere along with the actual complaint, confidentiality becomes a moot point. Everyone who sees the complaint will also see the form that has your name on it.

So the suggestion that your complaint will have any degree of anonymity or confidentiality, while technically true, is still completely false in any practical sense.

And there’s nothing you can do about this, because the form is a waiver of confidentiality, meaning that you’ve voluntarily given up your right to confidentiality in all respects affecting the investigation and pursuit of your complaint.

Between the people affiliated with the state services and the people associated with the clinician’s defense and insurance, your complaint will cross the desks of literally dozens of people during the course of the investigation. And none of those people are prohibited from talking about what they see.

I mean, imagine that someone you went to high school with happens to work for the insurance company that provides malpractice insurance to the clinician about whom you’re complaining.. Imagine that person recognizes your name when your complaint crosses their desk. There is nothing constraining them from going home and calling your entire high school class to tell them all the gory details. They have no obligation to keep your information confidential; in fact, you no longer have any confidentiality with regard to your complaint, because you’ve already waived your confidentiality, and…

2. Once you waive it, you can’t get it back.

Does anyone really think about what they’re giving up before they sign the Waiver of Confidentiality?

The Waiver is a required part of the complaint package a client sends to the Board. The Waiver gives permission for the Board to speak to the clinician about the issues mentioned in the complaint. It also allows the clinician to defend themselves against the complaint.

This much is fairly obvious, but I still suspect that most people must not really understand what they’re giving away when they sign this Waiver, or fewer of them would be willing to sacrifice their right to confidentiality for the momentary satisfaction of filing a complaint that is unlikely to accomplish anything beyond wasting everyone’s time.

In addition to the possibilities mentioned above, here is something of which every client should be aware before they submit a complaint:
A clinician is permitted to use anything and everything the complaining client has ever said or done as part of their defense.

Think about it…

That means everything you ever told that clinician, every shameful secret, every embarrassing revelation, every humiliating confession, every moment of suboptimal behavior – all the things you thought nobody else would ever know.

By signing and submitting the required Waiver of Confidentiality with your complaint, you are voluntarily giving permission for the clinician to reveal absolutely everything about you in a public setting.

Not only can all these things be revealed, but the clinician can offer their therapeutic interpretation about this information as well – and those interpretations will be presented to the review board in a very different manner than they would have been presented to you within the context of the therapeutic relationship.

This is because it is no longer about helping you to understand your own behavior or trying to benefit you in any way, and nobody cares at this point whether you like what you hear or not. Once you file a complaint and sign the required Waiver, the clinician is free to use any and all of the information they have about you without regard for your therapeutic benefit.

And therapists have a gold mine of secrets about their clients, collected just by spending time with them. Every single therapist has this kind of information about every single client. But we never really think about them using that information in this kind of context, even when we create the context by filing the complaint. The more paranoid among us might have all sorts of unrealistic fantasies about all the ways in which a therapist might hurt them with the information they reveal, but in terms of real world events that are actually likely to happen, nobody really seems to believe that a therapist would ever use what they know against us.

Most of the time, we’re absolutely right in thinking that. Most of the time, therapists protect our confidentiality no matter what we do to them.

But the complaint review process is an exception to this rule. If we put them in the position where it is necessary for them to defend themselves against us, a clinician can and will use every piece of information they have at their disposal, without regard for how we’re going to feel about it.

It is one of the most shamefully violating experiences a therapy client can have, even with an entire history of abuse taken into account.

But anyone who ends up as the subject of such a humiliating exposé has nobody to blame but themselves. Nobody forced them to expose themselves, or exposed them without their knowledge or consent. They chose to file the complaint that put a therapist in the position of needing to defend themselves, and they chose to waive their confidentiality voluntarily.

If they regret it later… well, that’s what they get for doing something so stupid in the first place.

Waiving confidentiality would be a tremendously stupid thing to do, even if the only people present for this airing of a client’s most private and personal information were the clinician and the Board. But…

3. Ethical review sessions are open to the public.

Yes, public. Anyone who wishes to attend these sessions of the Board is allowed to do so.

So if you imagine that your complaint will be reviewed by the Board in some private, sequestered room where there is nobody but your clinician and the Board members present to witness your mortification, you could not possibly be more wrong.

Complaints are heard before all the clinicians whose cases are scheduled to be heard that day, and all their lawyers, and all the people they bring along to provide evidence, and all the people they bring along for support, and whatever audience is in attendance – and I’ve seen the spectators range from as few as three or four people to as many as thirty.

In short, filing an ethical complaint puts you and your issues on display in a very public way.

Your complaint, and the clinician’s response to your complaint (that is, their written response detailing their interpretation of your problems which led you to file a complaint against them), will be seen by the seated members of the Board, the Board’s investigators, the people at the clinician’s malpractice insurance provider, the people at the clinician’s lawyer’s office, and the administrative support staffs of all those various organizations and offices.

The discussion of your complaint and the clinician’s interpretation of your problems can and will be heard, at the very least, by the Board members, the Board investigators, the other clinicians in attendance, the lawyers, the support people, and the spectators.

All of these people will hear your name, and all of them will learn about your problems – and for the complainants who actually show up at the hearings, they will also see your face and know exactly who you are in connection with the complaint being presented.

And there is nothing to prevent any of these people from discussing you and your problems with anyone else in the world if they so choose. None of them have any ethical obligation to you at all.

There are some people with legitimate complaints against therapists, and those people endure the complaint process for much the same reason that a legitimate rape victim will endure the process of having evidence gathered in a rape kit – because they actually have a reason to tolerate it, terrible as it is.

And there are some hardy souls who think any kind of attention is good, even when it makes them look bad – those people will probably continue to file their frivolous complaints no matter what the consequences are to them.

But for the rest of us, who are human enough to feel angry or hurt but sensible enough to put limits on how far we’ll go to get back at someone who has evoked those feelings, this is just some information to encourage better and more informed choices – or possibly to encourage someone think twice before engaging in the complaint process.

Too many people are willing to file complaints against therapists without legitimate reason because they don’t realize what they’re getting into. Filing an ethical complaint might look like a good way to punish a therapist for doing something you didn’t like, but the only person who will end up feeling punished by a frivolous complaint is the person who filed it in the first place.

News from the Front: Psychic Alert!

Work and life have been a little too hectic recently, and the blog is going to suffer for it because I can’t seem to settle down and write anything that makes sense.

So in lieu of an actual post, here is short anecdote from a 2008 session of the Texas Board of Examiners – the board which oversees the licensed members of the various mental health professions in this state.

Did you know that you don’t even have to be a licensed mental health professional in order to have a complaint filed against you with the Board? All you really need is a disgruntled person who isn’t too particular about choosing their audience.

Such was the case last year when a professional psychic was was obliged to come all the way to Austin to respond to a complaint which had been filed against her by some idiot who couldn’t figure out the difference between pyschic and therapist.

Needless to say, the Board of Examiners does not license or oversee psychics. The main and only concern of the Board in this matter was to be sure that the psychic was not in any way representing herself as a licensed mental health professional in the course of conducting her business.

And she wasn’t. The complainant was just a moron.

Although this is an extreme case, it is nevertheless representative of a certain problem which is ever-present at the Board’s ethics sessions – the confusion over what, exactly, constitutes an ethical violation by a therapist.

Clients have some very interesting ideas on that subject. Many of them seem to think that anything which hurts their feelings or makes them angry is actually a punishable offense.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if that were actually true??

Of course, hurt feelings and not getting your own way are not ethical violations – but each session of the ethics board is likely to have at least one (and often more) complaints filed by people who think they are – and the Board is required to investigate every complaint, no matter how obviously frivolous or stupid. They even had to waste time investigating the psychic!<

Fortunately, the Board is very capable of making the distinction between a frivolous complaint and viable one, and that is something for which we can all be grateful. But for the clinician (or the psychic) in question, even an frivolous complaint entails hassle and headache – which is why those client populations who are prone to creating complaints out of nothing are the same populations who have a hard time finding qualified therapists to treat them.

I have found the Board’s ethics sessions to be very instructive on the risks inherent in being a mental health professional. Everyone is so consumingly concerned about protecting the patient, but the safeguards in place for the professionals from their clients could really bear some attention.

I mean, a complaint can be filed against a mental health professional with absolutely no factual basis at all, and it will still have to be investigated.

So therapists put their professional lives and reputations at stake every single day by offering of themselves, their time, their skills, and their compassion, to a bunch of mentally unstable people who can turn on them at any time – for any reason, or for no reason at all.

And that really does happen – it happens all the time. Even if you never get the opportunity to actually sit in on one of the ethics sessions, a glance over the records of the Board’s ethical decisions (publically available on their website) can still reveal that there are differences in the complaints received and reviewed by the board.

There are some serious complaints which receive serious consequences, such as fines, Board-mandated supervision, license suspension, or license revocation (that is, some valid complaints). And then there are a substantial number where the complaint was dismissed, sometimes with a warning of some sort, sometimes without even that (that is, a substantial number of frivolous complaints).

Each of these frivolous complaints represents a clinician whose entire professional life and livelihood was temporarily called into question by one disgruntled ex-client with an axe to grind.<

And we wonder why it’s so hard to find a qualified therapist??
Looking at it from this perspective, it’s really more of a surprise that there are so many therapists who are willing to accept the potential risks of their work.

Keep in mind that the axe grinders who claim to share your diagnosis are representing you in the eyes of the world. Every complaint filed by someone with a dissociative diagnosis is representing DID to the Board, to the other clinicians and observers at the ethics session, and to everyone who hears about the proceedings from those clinicians and observers.

It behooves us all to be sure that we encourage the public representation we want people to have of us, rather than encouraging the people who are making us all look bad.

Just something to think about.

A Matter of (Mis)perception

One of the things that makes the therapeutic relationship unique is that it is one of the rare cases where the other person in the relationship will be honest with us about how our actions and our assumptions are affecting the relationship – without those things necessarily having to end the relationship – thus creating a safe place for us to experiment with new approaches to interpersonal relations.

Another unique aspect of the therapy relationship is the imbalance of power – in what other relationship is one party expected to divulge their most personal information while the other party reveals next to nothing of themselves?

The imbalance of power is something that creates its own set of uncomfortable issues for people on the client side of a therapy relationship – but these two aspects of the therapeutic relationship working together are also one of the factors that make therapy the powerful tool for learning and change that it can be – if we use it to best advantage.

Because the less we actually know about the therapist, the more we fill in the numerous blanks with our own expectations and projections and beliefs, casting the therapist in roles of our own choosing. Absent any real facts to the contrary, we tend to see in our therapists the characteristics of other important people in our lives, and we react to our therapists based on the assumptions connected to our pre-existing perspectives.

These assumptions can be positive or negative, but it is the negative assumptions that provide the most grist for the therapeutic mill, because by virtue of this process, we are effectively recreating some of our most problematic real-world relationships within the therapy relationship.

If we’re willing, we can then learn from this. We can learn to recognize how our history is affecting our current view of the therapist, we can learn to recognize other places in our lives where this same effect has occurred, we can learn how our actions and reactions in these situations are viewed by someone outside ourselves, and we can learn to separate past from present so that the first does not so automatically and pervasively affect the second.

This is probably not a new concept to anyone who has been in therapy – the concept of therapeutic transference is as old as Freud, and has been very thoroughly studied in the decades since. However, despite its familiarity, and although most people agree that the concept makes sense from a theoretical standpoint, it is still true that most people have great difficulty in actually applying the concept in their own therapy in order to benefit from the valuable learning opportunities it offers.

The problem is that, in order to achieve this learning, we first have to get past a lot of really sticky points. We have to get past the challenge to our immediate response, past feeling criticized and wanting to defend ourselves or “attack back” at the therapist. We have to get past taking it personally. We have resist the inclination to turn the issue back on the therapist, making it their fault and then letting the matter end there – and we have be willing to look honestly at ourselves.

We have to get past the desire to abandon the therapy relationship, even in those moments when it feels like our therapist is acting just like our mother / father / sibling / neighbor / whoever – we have to stick with it especially in those moments – because if we are seeing echoes of a figure from our own history in what our therapist is doing, it is an absolute guarantee that we are not seeing current reality clearly.

These are the moments when we can learn the most from therapy – the moments when our histories are creeping forward to cast their long shadows over our perceptions of a current situation, the moments when we can actively learn how to disentangle the one from the other.

Unfortunately, these are also the moments when many people tend to walk away from a therapy relationship in varying degrees of anger, disgust, resentment, or high dudgeon – at which point, all opportunity for learning has been cut short.

These issues which provide such valuable learning opportunities are invariably also charged with high emotional intensity, making it incredibly difficult for us to see anything but our current emotional upheaval. Each and every one of these opportunities is a struggle to overcome our natural responses and to really think about what our therapist is saying and how it applies to us.

To illustrate what I mean, consider this basic example –

Imagine that historically you have issues with your mother. When you were a child, she was cold, uncaring, and neglectful. She didn’t respond to your needs or give you loving and caring attention.

Years later, you begin to work with a female therapist. You initially perceive her as caring and attentive and insightful, all the things your mother never was for you and which you have grown up longing to have, so you feel an immediate bond with this therapist. You think she is wonderful and perfect and every good thing, subconsciously attributing to her all the characteristics of the ideal mother that you’ve always dreamed of having, and you want to feel close and connected to her at all times.

But then suddenly, for some reason, your therapist becomes less available to you. This can be due to something as simple as a vacation or a family crisis that results in a temporary absence, but it feels much bigger than that to you. It feels like all the times when you were left neglected and starved for maternal attention and affection. It feels like your therapist is acting just like your mother – and instantly you attach to your therapist all the negative feelings and beliefs and assumptions that connect to the “cold mother” image you have lived with all your life. Although you don’t realize it, you begin to respond to your therapist’s actions as if she were your mother. The therapist is now the target of the intense bitterness and anger and disappointment and hurt spawned by a lifetime of neglect and longing – your reaction makes sense to you, but it is also totally out of proportion to the reality that prompted it.

From this distance, it’s easy to see that this reaction isn’t really about what the therapist is doing – it is gaining all of its force and direction from the old unhealed wound of feeling unloved and unwanted as a child.

But if we were the person being swamped by these feelings, it would be a lot harder to realize how profoundly our current perceptions were being skewed by our historical experiences.

We might get as far as thinking “my therapist is acting like my mother” or “I feel just like I used to when my mother did this” – but in terms of resolving the problem, the historical implications are usually ignored.

The situation arose because of something the therapist did, an event which we are interpreting through a perspective tainted by history – but when it comes to resolution, the obvious point is that the therapist did something. So the initial stance for most people is that the issue at hand is the therapist’s fault, because they acted in a way that reminded us of our mother (or whoever) – although in fact, it is our own interpretation of the situation which is causing us to see our history recreated through the therapist’s actions.

It is the task of the therapist to help us see these flaws in our own perceptions and reactions – but not every client is willing or able to tolerate hearing that the flaw is on their side, when what they want is to blame it on the therapist and have the therapist be responsible for making whatever changes are necessary to repair the situation and prevent it from happening again (such as, in the above example, not going on vacation, or putting the client ahead of a family crisis).

Again – from this distance, it is easy to see that the client’s expectations and desires are unrealistic – but again, this is much harder to see when we are the one in the middle of the emotional distress. At such times, it can be difficult to fully appreciate that the only way our distress will actually be resolved is for us to address our own issues rather than to insist that the therapist (or anyone else) change what they’re doing for our comfort and convenience.

Until we address the flaws in our own perceptions, we will keep seeing our history recreated by the people around us, and nothing they do to appease us will ever succeed in resolving our problem.

But this is a difficult point to grasp. And as a result, it is at this juncture – when the client is experiencing the intense emotionality of their reaction and not receiving the response they desire from the therapist – that many therapeutic ruptures occur.

Because if we refuse to accept that our interpretations and reactions are the product of our own issues, if we insist that they are the fault of the therapist, and yet the therapist does not accept the excess of responsibility we are attempting to assign to them, then a termination of the therapeutic relationship is really the only recourse left to us. After all, how can we work with a therapist who is so unresponsive to our needs, so insensitive to our pain, so unwilling to accept responsibility, so defensive in making everything our fault when we know that everything is really their fault…

How many times have you heard that list of justifications to explain why someone has left therapy?

Therapeutic terminations occur as a result of this kind of circumstance all the time – and this is truly unfortunate, because not only are those who terminate therapy due to this kind of scenario dooming themselves to repeat the same scenario over and over forever (or until they finally realize where the actual problem is), but they are also missing the some of the most valuable learning that therapy can provide.

For those who are able to tolerate the emotional discomfort of these situations and actually look past it, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a vehicle of deep learning and growth.

By learning where and how history is influencing our current perceptions, and learning to separate history from current day so that our feelings about the former do not inform and influence our every reaction in the latter – we are learning something from which every relationship in our life will benefit.

Fraud Update

Today, not-a-doctor Judy Keith doesn’t have a website any more.
Her website, drjudykeith.com, is down.

I guess someone must have told her that just removing the letters “Ph.D.” from the page wasn’t enough — when your website is called “drjudykeith” and you’re not a doctor, then it’s fraudulent no matter what the actual page says. (duh…)

Of course, her problems won’t end there, because her business is registered in the State of Texas with the Ph.D. as part of the official business name.

A $1 search on the Secretary of State website can confirm this for anyone who cares to look. The Texas Comptroller might also have business documents that you can see for free. (I didn’t check there once I saw the business formation documents.)

When Judy Keith decides to commit fraud, she really goes all the way!

Fraud is never a minor offense — at the very least, it is a deliberate lie which involves gains for the liar and loss to anyone who believed the lie and acted in good faith based on that misrepresentation. Every single person who worked with Judy Keith in the belief that she was licensed as a Ph.D. when she was not, has been defrauded by her — her gain, their loss — and as survivors, have we not all been jerked around enough by people who have lied to us for their own benefit?

Let’s hope this not-a-doctor is off the page for good.

Fraud Confirmed…

Well, what I saw on Judy Keith’s website yesterday made me really curious, so I called the Texas LPC Board.

According to the Texas LPC Board, Judy Keith is not licensed as a Ph.D., and she should absolutely not be using that degree in any way connected with her LPC practice in Texas.

They would not say anything regarding whether a complaint had been filed against her in this matter, but their manner on the phone did suggest that the Board was aware of the matter and was looking into it — so whether they would admit it or not, somebody must have caught her.

That person has done the world a favor. Judy Keith was abusing the trust of every client who crossed her path, not to mention every professional who associated with her.

And can you imagine what kind of opinion she must have of herself, in comparison to the rest of the world, to expect that she would get away with this??? How superior do you have to feel to everyone around you before you think that you can just dispense with the little details that pertain to the rest of us  — like, for example, actually completing a valid doctoral degree before claiming you have one??

I’m glad she was caught.
I’m glad she has been brought down by her own lies and deception.
This, to me, is an example of karmic justice at work — and it makes me happy when a liar ceases to profit by their lies, and instead reaps the true consequences they have earned.

A Potential Case of Therapist Fraud?

Here’s something to ponder…

Dr. Judy Keith.
Many dissociative survivors might be familiar with this name. Judy Keith is the program director on the Trauma Unit at Timberlawn Hospital, one of the best-known inpatient programs available for dissociative survivors. She also maintains a private practice in the Dallas area.

Today, I noticed that Dr. Judy revised her website for her private practice.

Where it used to say “Judy Keith, Ph.D.”, it now says only “Judy Keith, MA”.

What does this sudden change suggest?
(And it was sudden – last week, the site had “Ph.D.” in all the places where, this week, it says “MA”…)
What happened to the Ph.D.? Did the degree get lost over the weekend?
hmmm… that doesn’t sound very likely…
Ph.D.s don’t just expire or vanish – so if she is no longer claiming to have this degree, there must be a reason…

What it suggests to me is that Judy Keith probably wasn’t a Ph.D. at all – but she was claiming that she was in order to receive the status and benefits of the advanced degree, and someone caught her at this fraudulent game.

I believe this because it makes the most sense, given the evidence available to me.

For anyone unfamiliar with the process – if a licensing board is alerted that a degree is being fraudulently claimed, the person is given a certain amount of time in which to remove the fraudulent reference from all advertising and business-associated material. I can’t think of any explanation that better fits the fact that Judy Keith was a Ph.D. on Friday, and on Monday she was just a plain old MA.

Criminal charges may also be filed in connection with this kind of misrepresentation, depending on the degree of the fraud involved.

Why are the penalties so harsh? Well, consider the implications…

If “Doctor” Judy’s claim of possessing a valid and relevant doctoral degree is fraudulent, then countless survivors — both at Timberlawn and in her private practice — have been defrauded. This is definitely the case in terms of self-representation (it would be hugely unethical for this woman to represent herself as a doctor if in fact she was not one), but possibly financially as well. Higher degrees command higher fees — what if she’s been charging rates commensurate with the possession of a doctoral degree that she doesn’t have?

And this so-called “doctor” has not only been misrepresenting herself to her clients; she has also been acting as supervisor to licensee candidates or newly licensed counselors, all of whom also believe they’ve been working with a doctor. They too have been defrauded – but even worse, if this woman has based her entire career on a lie, then what has she been teaching to the younger generation of counselors who have worked with her? One can only hope that she has not been teaching them to follow in her footsteps…

And what about the fact that she has been claiming a doctoral degree in connection with her work at Timberlawn – didn’t they check her out? Maybe not well enough… but regardless of the errors made in their background check, the hospital would still be a victim of this woman’s pervasive fraud.

This suggests a really important (but often neglected) step for anyone who is seeking a new therapist: confirming the credentials of a prospective therapist is an easy and non-intrusive process. The state licensing boards for the various mental health professions maintain online and publicly available rosters of their licensees. It is perfectly acceptable to ask prospective therapists what license they hold — and it takes only minutes, once you get home, to double-check the rosters of the appropriate licensing board in the appropriate state and confirm that what you were told is true.

Most of the time, this check will come back clean – most people don’t lie about their professional credentials, precisely because it’s so easy to check them out – but obviously, some people do. So we really shouldn’t rely on anyone’s word, or trust that someone else (like a hospital) has done our checking for us, especially not when it’s so easy to do ourselves.

Our therapist is someone who might well end up learning profoundly personal and painful information about us… but how would you feel if you were one of Ms. Keith’s clients? I think we can all afford a few minutes out of our lives to spare ourselves the possibility of ending up in that kind of situation.

This is a simple way that we can keep ourselves a little safer — not from any big bad evil, but from the smaller and pettier wrongdoers and self-promoters out there in the world who might try to take advantage of our vulnerabilities. Being a therapist is no proof against being a self-interested fraud, but our therapy is the last place in the world where we want to be subjected to that.

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 IV

Every relationship is a two-way street.

This statement is such a cliché that you’d think it would be self-evident – but all the same, it took me some time to understand it.

Where I came from, the imbalance of power ruled everything. There was no such thing as equality – there was always one person with all the power and one person with none. And no relationship in that world ever required effort or work. None of them were a choice. They simply were. They were functional and purpose-oriented. People were tools – you used or you were used, and the relationship was the medium of use, nothing more.

But in this world, things don’t work in quite the same way.

Out here, relationships are choices, they require a lot of effort to make them work, and the effort must go both ways.

Both people have to be willing to compromise for the sake of the relationship, to consider the other equally with themselves or sometimes even ahead of themselves, to find the balance point between relying on each other and relying on themselves, to blend dependence and independence successfully, to work out conflicts between themselves in a reasonably healthy manner, to respect each other, to be considerate of each other, to sometimes be the bigger person and be able to rely on the other to sometimes be the bigger person, to trust each other, and on and on… the list is truly endless, and none of it is easy.

If neither person is willing to put the effort into the relationship – or even worse, if only one side is expected to do all the work while the other side does nothing but receive what they are given and expect more, then the relationship is doomed.

This is a lesson I learned primarily through observation – it took me so long to figure it out that I haven’t really gotten around to giving it much of a test yet, except within the relative security of therapy.

The rules of successful relationships apply to therapy too.

Regardless of everything else that makes therapy unique and different from any other relationship we might ever have, it is still based on a relationship. As such, it is subject to the same dynamics that positively or negatively effect the other relationships in our lives.

And yet, because of the unique role that the therapy relationship holds in our lives and the unique way in which that relationship is structured, the complications are more obvious, and seem more obstructive, than they usually do.

I am among the one hundred percent of the therapy consumer population who has invested the role of “therapist” with a full load of expectations and projections and assumptions. And I am among that same one hundred percent in my tendency to lose sight of the person beneath the role that I created for them.

Learning to separate the role I created from the actual person was a very important part of keeping the therapeutic relationship a strong and viable part of my healing.

It was so easy for me, as it is for anyone, to get caught up in my own needs and my own expectations and what I believed a therapist should do for me, not to mention my own projections and trauma-related issues and misconceptions and negative assumptions – and to lose sight of the fact that none of these were actually relevant to that particular relationship. They were all products either of my own fantasy or my own history. They were not things that had grown from the actual relationship that I was trying to build with this actual person.

In fact, I had so many things clouding my vision of who the other person truly was, that the person I ended up relating to, reacting to, responding to, was almost entirely a figment of my imagination.

I was forever comparing the real actions and interactions to the “golden ideal” in my head, and responding to the difference between the two instead of evaluating the real action on its own merits. Or I was making automatic connections, so lightning quick that I didn’t even realize it was happening – this turn of phrase, that fleeting facial expression, a particular emotional response, dragging up history to taint the current day – and yet, I never saw that this was about my issues. It always seemed to be about what someone else (and most specifically the therapist) said or did in the current day.

It was exceedingly hard to see through my own automatic preconceptions and assumptions and faulty connections. It was a major challenge to sort through events and emotions to see where I had gone off track, where I fell into incorrect assumptions or carried a historical reaction forward into the present. It was another thing I could never have done alone, because it took a long while for me to learn how to do it at all, even with guidance.

But it was a crucial problem to resolve, because although it tends to be most obvious in therapeutic relationship, I was making the same kind of automatic assumptions and carrying the same kind of preconceptions in every other relationship as well.

Seeing a therapist – or any other person – only and entirely in the role we create for them can lead to some very strange and unreasonable abuses, and it can lead us to neglect or ignore or assume on the underlying relationship in some extremely unhealthy ways. Learning to see past the created role was essential – but not easy.

I had to learn to treat the therapist with respect, even when I was angry or hurt. I had to learn that, if I want to keep a person’s support, I probably shouldn’t lean on them so much that their willingness snaps under my weight. I had to learn how to resolve conflict without running from it or triangulating other people into it or making it all the other person’s fault and then waiting for them to repair it. I had to learn to ask for and accept help, but also to maintain my independence despite having help available, and when to do which.

I had to look at all the things happening between me and the therapist, in the space where the relationship was being built, and at how various actions or interactions affected that. I also had to look at the negative things I was contributing to the relationship – and I had to face some uncomfortably shameful and embarrassing and hurtful truths in the process.

It sucked to learn those things about myself, and it was humiliating to have someone else point them out to me. I tended to want to blame the therapist for that, to kill the messenger and hope the message died too, but it turned out that that wouldn’t work. Apparently plenty of other people had already noticed these things about me too. The only person who wasn’t seeing it was me. And ultimately it was more embarrassing to think that everyone else was seeing this when I wasn’t, than it was to face it and deal with it so that it was no longer there to be seen.

Relationships can be changed for good as well as bad.

The mutability of relationships was a point that was obvious to me from the start, but it took a long while for me to see that this could ever be a positive thing, or to realize that I wasn’t a helpless pawn of fate waiting to see which way things would go.

At first, my assumption was that change in a relationship was uniformly negative – relationships would inevitably go from “I like you” to “I hate you”, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t have a lot of experience with relationships, but this was my natural assumption.

But it left me feeling like my relationships were an unsteady tower of cards, and I was perpetually waiting for them to collapse. And it made me long for the relative security of the relationships with my abusers. I never felt like those relationships were going to collapse at any minute. Those relationships were bars of steel that surrounded me and kept me close, whether I wanted to be or not.

Relationships in this world, on the other hand, felt flimsy. Unreliable. Too unpredictable to be trusted. They were influenced and affected by so many different factors, I could never control all of them. And least of all could I control the other person or their feelings – therefore, I couldn’t depend on their feelings remaining constant. Even if all my actions within the relationship were technically correct, that was no guarantee. Maybe tomorrow they would decide my shirt was ugly, and they couldn’t tolerate such deplorable fashion sense, and the relationship would be over regardless of what I said or did.

It felt that arbitrary, that final, and that uncontrollable to me.

It took some time for me to realize that it wasn’t that uncontrollable or arbitrary – the success of any relationship really is dependent on what each person is (or isn’t) contributing to the bond between them. Disaster is not brought by the random finger of fate, but by the people involved, who are not building or maintaining that bond.

I realized that, in a way, the foundation of a relationship is created anew every day. Every day, there is the possibility that something might shake an apparently solid foundation to the ground, recasting everything that went before it in a new and different light. But every day, we also have the opportunity to shore up an unstable foundation and to help a relationship grow stronger, or to do things that will add to the strength already there.

Just another thing that I thought was entirely outside my control, where it turns out that my own choices make all the difference.

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 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 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.

Taking Control of Triggers

Triggers seem to be part and parcel of every trauma survivor’s experience. Any survivor of any trauma can be triggered into post-traumatic flashbacks – and for dissociative survivors, navigating potential triggers can sometimes be like trying to cross a demilitarized zone… although the land looks peaceful and quiet and empty, any move we make could touch off an unseen and unexpected explosion, dissolving the apparent peace into a chaotic nightmare.

Identifying and learning to manage triggers can absorb a big chunk of therapy time. We learn about being mindful of what leads to a trigger, and we learn grounding techniques to employ if we are triggered. We learn about relaxation and self-soothing and “acting through the fear”. We learn about biofeedback and how to breathe through anxiety and panic attacks and how a support network of other survivors can help us to feel more validated and less like a freak.

All these things are very helpful in terms of managing triggers – but is that good enough? What about defusing them so that we are no longer plagued by their intrusion into our lives?

Defusing a trigger is a difficult, but at the same time fairly straightforward task in cases of “simple” PTSD  –that is, PTSD that arises from a single or short-term trauma such as being mugged or raped, or being in a war zone for a period of time. These things are undeniably painful and traumatic, but the fact that the trauma is a discrete and easily-defined event makes it that much easier to identify where triggers are coming from (because the number of potential sources is much more limited), and easier for the survivor of the trauma to make the connection between the trauma and the trigger.

In the complex post-traumatic morass that is DID, where there are frequently decades of abuse and hundreds or thousands of individual events from which to choose, identifying the source of a trigger can be much more complicated. And it is extremely taxing on a survivor’s strength and energy to withstand the distressing images, the terror, the rage, the physical pain or other feelings – in short, all the elements that can comprise a response to a trigger – let alone to do anything more productive than get through it.

However, it is worth our time and energy to analyze our triggers, and here’s why.

Our triggers are often (although not always) linked to definable phenomena. They might link to a memory or event that we aren’t ready to deal with yet – and if that’s the case, then we’ll simply have to cope with the trigger until we are ready to deal with its source – but there may be some triggers whose sources lie in things we can deal with right now.

It is therefore worth listening to what our triggers can teach us. If a specific activity triggers a particular memory, then look at as much of that memory as you are able. If a feeling is triggered, follow the feeling, define it, link it to other times when you felt the same way, follow the chain back through however many events it takes until you arrive at the source (or sources). (Please note that I am not at this point discussing programming getting triggered – that’s a completely different subject. What I’m saying here refers only to PTSD-related triggers.)

PTSD triggers spring from the rejected or denied or repressed elements of our own experiences and memories.

Consequently, being able to face and accept our own truths is what takes the power away from these triggers.

If we can accept our truths, learn about them, talk about them, feel the feelings in connection with the right event (instead of having them triggered by fifty other similar-but-different events), express what needs to be expressed – process the memory, internalize it and connect to it, and begin to actually heal from it – then the triggers that were once associated with that experience or person or memory will fade away.

Connecting to our own experiences means that our mind will no longer need to use subconscious tricks to catch our attention and remind us of our secrets. If we know and connect to the truth of why we feel or act or react a certain way, then we will no longer be caught off guard by our own spontaneous cross-association. There will be no more uncontrolled linking of our pain to every similarity we meet because we are unaware of the one thing to which that pain actually belongs. We will be aware, we will be connected, and the mystery will be gone (as will the trigger).

Ignoring the truth of our histories, however horrendous they were, will never undo what has already happened. Pretending or denying or ignoring reality is not, in the end, in our best interest. We already know the horrors that are there – we have already seen and experienced them, and we have already survived them. It is doing ourselves no favor in the current day to encourage ourselves in the belief that the one thing we can’t handle is to remember them. Such a belief is a denial of our own strength and potential; it suffocates us with our own unnecessary defeatism.

If we truly want to heal, if we truly want to feel better in the long run (and not just run from bandaid to bandaid in a quest for immediate short-term relief) – then we will need to stop running from ourselves and our truths – we need to stop giving in to our irrational fears that we are too weak to remember what we were already strong enough to survive.

Bandaids are easier, but real healing is worth every tear we shed to achieve it.

The 50-Minute Hour Is Not Enough

Lack of sufficient time in therapy is a frequent complaint. For dissociative clients, the 50-minute hour is an unproductive limit – it’s just too short a time within which to arrive, get acclimated, get into something serious, do some work on it, and then to get reoriented enough to go on with the day.

Many therapists have also recognized the inefficacy of the 50-minute hour, and they have responded by providing 90-minute or 2-hour sessions. There are even some therapists who will go beyond that. And many dissociative clients who are in therapy attend sessions two or three times a week.

Considering the amount of psychic energy required, that’s a lot of time spent in therapy – so then – why is it still not enough?

And clearly it isn’t – dissociative patients remain locked in uncommunicative darkness within their systems, they continue to go in and out of hospital programs, they continue to struggle with suicidal or self-injurious urges, eating disorders remain trenchant, flashbacks and phobias maintain a dominant interference, memories plague them without being processed – and this is often just as true for survivors after five or ten or twenty years of therapy as it was when they began. Despite the vaunted treatability of dissociative disorders, they somehow appear at the same time to be singularly resistant to treatment. Why is this?

I believe the the problem lies in the unspoken expectation that therapy can do all the work for us. Please note, I did not say the therapist was doing all the work – I said therapy. It’s not that everyone expects to just show up and have that be enough, or that they aren’t willing to do the work required – there are plenty of people who work very hard at their healing when they are actually in a therapy session.

But what about all the hours and hours of time that we are not in session? Are we using those hours to continue what work we can do on our own, or are we wasting them in “just getting through” until our next therapy appointment? Do we talk to other members of our systems and work on building relationships with them ourselves, or would we prefer that they just do all their talking to the therapist? Do we work to find ways to reach all the members of our systems, or do we prefer to stay with the “nice” ones – the helpful adults, the least broken of the children, the least aggravating of the teenagers?

The 50-minute hour of therapy is not enough – in fact, no amount of therapy is enough – to make up the lack if we are not working with our systems on our own time. And, it is not enough for the members of our systems to talk to only to the therapist – in fact, it’s not even practical to assume that this should be enough for them, or to imagine that healing can be achieved this way.

Take your system as you know it – if you don’t know your system very well, multiply the number of members you do know by five (that’s a very conservative estimate), and if you think you know your system pretty well, multiply the number you know by two – then multiply that number by 500. That’s a rough (and again, very conservative) estimate of how many therapy hours it would take for each person to introduce themselves, get to feel comfortable, share even a few of the secrets and the traumas they have experienced, and barely begin to heal from them. How many years of therapy does that end up being for you?

And those hours do not account for the challenges that might still lie ahead and which might, when they happen, need to occupy the therapy time for a while.

Those hours are also not taking into account all the little day-to-day issues that will be presented to your therapist for resolution if your group proves unwilling to handle them internally.

How many people have had a sad or sulky child part or an irritated teenager firing off embarrassing emails to the therapist or occupying actual therapy time getting answers on simple issues like “I want time to do this and so-and-so won’t let me” or “why can’t I have that thing I want” or “she won’t listen to me” or “she hurt my feelings” or any one of a hundred other similar things?

How much of your therapy time has been wasted resolving issues that could have been resolved just as easily – more easily, in fact, and with a lot less embarrassment too – if your group just settled it themselves? I mean, do you really need your therapist to explain why your child parts can’t eat cookies if the adults need to stay on a healthy diet, or helping to establish rules to keep the tweens from driving, or soothing someone’s hurt feelings, or mediating every dispute that comes up? Is that really the best use of that time and that resource?

There are a lot of things that the system members can mediate, explain, teach, or resolve themselves. They can soothe and comfort the children, they can establish and maintain their own rules for how to function safely and responsibly in the outside world, they can devise a fair schedule around the constraints of the outside world for members who want time of their own, and they can take care of the supervision of children or teenagers during their outside time, among other things. Some memories can be processed even without therapeutic assistance, and the group can brainstorm for new ideas or new solutions where needed and then experiment with implementation themselves. Therapy work doesn’t have to end when the session ends. But all of this is only true if the group is working together.

If being “in session” is the only time we interact with our systems, if the system members don’t talk to each other in between sessions (or talk to each other at all), if we’re waiting for all the work to get done in therapy… then therapy will go on forever – literally.

And no matter how long we go or how often we go to therapy… if we cling to the belief that anything can compensate for our own lack of internal communication and cohesion, then we will still be presenting an insuperable block to our own healing.

Effective Alternatives – A Personal Example

One method to help with finding effective alternative activities for resisting behavioral urges or to help your group learn new concepts is to adapt current activities already enjoyed by your group into teaching tools.

Are there any activities that are enjoyed by more than one member of your group? Do several of the children particularly enjoy cars or blocks or drawing? Do any of you enjoy the same sport? Are there any shared interests? Are there any shared hobbies? Or, do any members of the group want to try something that someone else already enjoys doing?

Looking for existing commonalities, or creating commonalities of interest, can provide a good place to start as far as introducing options to those parts who don’t yet know what they like or what they want to do. They are also good choices as alternatives to help the group to resist behavioral urges, whether programmed or not – the more people who are interested in the alternative activity, the stronger the resistance will be. These activities can even provide a concrete means by which difficult abstract concepts can be taught.

Lacking any better way to explain this, I will provide a personal example.

Several members of this group share a consuming interest in computer and video games. This interest is not by any means universal – some are much more interested than others, some will try any game while others stick with their few favorites, and some are merely tolerant of others playing. However, given that a number of group members already share this interest, it tends to be one of the first activities we use with those we’ve just met or those who are ready to try safe or fun activities for the first time.

It hasn’t been universally effective, any more than the games are universally enjoyed, but it has proven to be useful in some surprising ways.

• For some group members, a new game is a powerful attraction, and their desire to stay present and playing can be of immense help to the group as a whole in resisting certain programming – especially if obeying the programming would put an end to the game play for any reason.
• A game that involved the concept of moral choice in an appealing setting helped one particular person learn some of the nuanced differences in these choices. The manner in which the game responded to his choices helped him to understand in a very visual and immediate way how each choice was viewed in a social context.
• One person has learned to accept imperfection through being rewarded for outstanding (but not perfect) skill in a game.
• Another found, for the first time, that he could release some anger in a way that fit him without being harmful to himself, the body, or anyone else.
• It has provided a corrective learning experience to several — that virtual media can be interactive without being painful or traumatic, that they can participate without being forced to learn anything or do anything, that virtual “death” can mean nothing worse than starting over, and that it can even be sort of fun.
• Two parts whose relationship had been strained for years were able to establish a more cooperative bond through their shared interest in two specific games, which they played together.
• The distraction and absorption of a game which requires detailed planning and micromanagement can, for us, compete with the obsession of self-injurious or suicidal urges and help us to combat them.
• A game that demands a lot of focused attention but not a lot of thought can help us to get through any stretch of time where we don’t have the energy to think about a game, but we don’t want to listen to our own thoughts either.

Who would have thought that video games could be so useful…

What does your group enjoy doing? What other group members could be invited to try those activities, and what new concepts could they learn through their participation?

A sport could help to release anger, or teach concepts like leadership or teamwork or persistence. Playing a musical instrument can teach physical control and coordination and the value of regular application and practice. Enjoyment of the same toy or game can teach the children how to accept each other, share with each other, respect each other, and work with each other. A shared interest in music or cars or photography or anything can help to build a connection between people who might not have realized they had anything in common. It can help the development of tolerance and reduce conflict and tension within the system.

Almost anything that your group enjoys doing can be adapted to the purpose of helping you build strength and learn new concepts – the things you’re doing already might have a lot of helpful potential if you look at them from this perspective. And in addition to everything else that can be gained, this particular approach fosters the development and growth of relationships within your system, which alone makes it worth doing.

Healing from our various histories is largely about reuniting our selves into a cohesive group (rather than simply a matter of spewing trauma memories until we run dry). Whether or not “group cohesion” leads to “integration”, our lives and our minds and our worlds can only heal if and when our systems can come together as a team.

I imagine that none of us would get very far in therapy if our therapist treated us the way we can sometimes treat the members of our own systems – but the fact is, if we are treating our system members in any way that we would not find acceptable from our therapist – then we are doing just as much damage to our own healing as a therapist would if they treated us the same way.

Focus on the person who experienced the trauma, instead of the trauma alone, and the memories will emerge at a natural and manageable pace – and in the meantime, you will have gained something a lot more valuable than another bad memory. You will gain relationships with the parts who experienced those memories – in the most fundamental sense, building a relationship with yourself.

So – what kinds of things do you and your group need to work on? How can you adapt your everyday activities, or the activities you enjoy, so that the things you do are also helping your healing? What interests do you share that could help your progress? You might already have some very effective tools for relationship- and skill-building just in the things you’re doing already.

If we work together...

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.

…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.

Imperfection Deserves Forbearance

Today I’ve been considering this contradiction:

On the one hand, people tend to have this idea that their therapist’s life is “perfect” — perfect kids perfectly raised, happy marriage, everything organized, no crises, no trouble, no trauma. Some people believe this to such an extent that they can’t cope with any evidence proving that the therapist is actually human. They feel betrayed and angry if their therapist’s imperfect life interferes in any way with their idealized vision of who the therapist is and how they live.

On the other hand, many DID people are drawn to enter the “helping professions.” (I’m putting that in quotes because, although there are a few exceptions, the vast majority of DID people I know who are or want to be mental health professionals have absolutely no business being anything of the sort.)

Sometimes the people who can’t tolerate disorganization or personal crises or anything more than the most minor imperfection in their own therapists are the same ones who believe they are (or would be) fantastic therapists themselves.

hmmmm…

Am I the only one who thinks that doesn’t make sense?

How can any person whose own life is complicated by the ups and downs of DID (in addition to the random vicissitudes of life) imagine themselves as a therapist — and yet be unable or unwilling to tolerate it when their own therapist is not constantly available, constantly supportive, constantly attuned to them, constantly able to meet their needs and wants regardless of what might be going on in the therapist’s own life?

If someone is already feeling overwhelmed dealing with their own marriage, job, children, or life in general — if sometimes the chores and errands don’t get done, the bills don’t get paid, the kids aren’t attended to as well as we might wish, or the crises and emergencies and troubles are just piling up faster than we can handle them (and anyone who says they don’t have those periods of time would be lying, it has nothing to do with being DID, it’s just how life goes sometimes) — then where would a roster of needy clients fit in to all that?

Would we make a good therapist if we allowed any other demand to take priority over our own families or our own health?

Would we want a therapist who didn’t make their self-care or the care of their families a priority?

My answer is a definite no…

But then… is it fair to be unforgiving or intolerant when our own therapists need to put their priorities somewhere other than on us for a time? Or is it fair to expect that their personal troubles can always be left at home and never interfere with our schedule or our time or our wants?

I don’t think that’s reasonable.

Therapists are human. They are imperfect. They have lives, families, marriages, children, which are no more perfect than anyone else’s, and they are as likely to have a personal crisis as anyone else on the planet. They are subject to the same universal laws of humanity as the rest of us.

So when it happens — I think it behooves each of us to extend to our therapists the same grace, understanding, and forgiveness that we want them to extend to us when we make our inevitable mistakes or have our own inevitable family crises.

This is still true when our therapist’s crisis inconveniences us, or when it means we don’t get what we want, or even when it means we have to weather our own crisis of the moment all by ourselves. Most of us who are in therapy somehow survived the last two or three decades or more without our Magic Helper of choice, so we can probably make it through a few days or even weeks without said Magic Helper now.

It is basic courtesy and respect, and I think it is part of what we owe to our therapists — because being a paying client does not entitle us to have unreasonable expectations of perfection met by our therapists, any more than we would be entitled to expect perfection from anyone else. Including ourselves.

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.

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.)