Our Programming: The Discovery

While we have seemingly gone through periods of being aware of our programming and then forgetting it, we did not become aware of it in "surface memory" (memories that are not forgotten or hidden) until January 6, 2026, in which we told a survivor of programming about our experiences, initially denied that they were programming, and heard him say they did indeed count as programming. While this was when we discovered our experiences counted as programming, we had started to discover the experiences themselves as soon as December 9, 2025, the day of the Unification.

Some of the headmates that were recovered during the Unification, including Vitani, had memories of our adoptive father teaching some parts of the system German while making sure some parts only knew English. Those headmates weren't able to explain why they knew this, since they weren't the ones taught German directly, but they weren't surprised that our father knew we had a system, as there had been an incident in childhood that we now realize was a fictive asking to be treated as their source.

Later, we naturally recovered headmates from a sidesystem that originally spoke German (they have lost fluency over time) that could verify that our abuser had caused us to split certain alters on purpose by way of telling us stories about fictional characters, then acting out those stories and treating us as the character. At first, these parts only remembered him acting out fairy tales like Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, but we have since recovered memories of him acting out other stories, including fictionalized versions of the lives of rock stars. This includes the basis for the character known on this site as Troy.

There were also headmates who remembered our abuser getting us drunk and then treating us like an adult - not just sexually but having adult-level conversations with us - which they believed were not just the abuser treating us inappropriately but rather treating us in a way that was meant to make us think we WERE an adult. While the motivations of that weren't odd - an adult headmate would be less likely to understand what was going on was CHILD sexual abuse - it was still odd to remember, as most systems we meet do not report having parents who knew they had a system, and this behavior seems intended to make us think we were someone else, e.g. influence future splits.

At first, we thought we had experiences SIMILAR to programming but not the same, as we were under the impression that programming ONLY occurs in organized abuse settings. But then we were told by a victim of programming in an organized abuse context that our experiences WERE programming, and that a few other experiences we thought were "just" abuse or grooming could have counted as programming if we felt they did.

This set off a quest to learn more about programming, which was unfortunately frustrated by the lack of non-sensationalized, non-conspiratorial, credible information outside of what comes firsthand from actually talking to survivors, which is much more invasive to do if you don't already know survivors. I learned that there is a lot of debate on what programming is and is not, such that our system does not tend to police other people's use of the word too much, even if they talk about having an experience that doesn't sound much like programming.

To the best of our understanding, the best way to define programming is as one of two things: either any mental conditioning that occurs in the context of organized abuse (e.g. cult indoctrination), OR a specific process of mental conditioning in which trauma, abuse, drugs, and/or hypnotism are used to cause a person to react in certain ways to certain cues (including but not limited to controlling the switches of a system they are traumatizing into forming alters). We were programmed in the second sense of this term.