Our Programming: The Risks

While we know some people would disagree with us talking about being programmed, we've considered it and don't consider it nearly as dangerous or harmful as some people would think.

While it is possible to talk about programming in a way that feeds into or spreads conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, programming is not in and of itself a conspiracy, even if some of the methods that people use in the service of programming originate from conspiracies. The "ritual abuse" in the phrase RAMCOA does not refer to Satanic Ritual Abuse (which IS a conspiracy, often indeed an antisemitic one); it refers to any form of ritualistic abuse that can be carried out by any organization or belief system (or lack thereof), including Christianity.

It is true that our abuser was copying information from conspiracy sites, but this does not mean we think the conspiracies themselves are true. We believe programmers give their victims screen memories - false memories intended to help them get away with what they do, which usually break down over time into the real memory - that include things that sound outrageous or pin the blame on Satanists, the government, or anybody other than the actual abusers.

We have screen memories that, if we took them at face value, WOULD have us talking about Satanic Ritual Abuse. Our programmer programmed us with a story about a Satanic church that was abusing people, especially children, in ways that are consistent with conspiracies. However, our abuser did this to deflect the blame from himself and from the Christian church to which he was taking us to abuse us, and to make us sound disreputable. Because we know Satanic Ritual Abuse is a conspiracy, we can see our screen memories for what they are, and we talk about the stories of a Satanic church as just that: a story, and not one that is fully true.

While someone putting a story on the internet does not make it true, it can influence what people think is true - for better or for worse. What people think is true influences what people think is possible, and that influences what people do. We therefore believe that, even if the information our abuser was using was inaccurate and conspiratorial, enough of it was able to be replicated by him such that he replicated ELEMENTS of the conspiracy being given as truth.

Some people don't mistake the existence of programming for conspiratorial misinformation, but they do believe it is incredibly dangerous to talk about, such that no one should ever talk about being programmed ever, or only do it in very private spaces.

We have a lot of issues with this way of thinking, even when it comes from a good place.

Firstly, it encourages the stigmatization of discusssions of programming by saying that some trauma is "too extreme" to ever be talked about. It makes victims of programming feel that they are so broken and damaged that their trauma is inappropriate to even acknowledge.

Secondly, it isolates survivors by turning their trauma into this taboo that they can never ever talk about. Communities to discuss programming are incredibly hard to come by, and many of them have rigid rules that require you to be in certain forms of therapy, or require you to be against endogenic systems (even though some programmed systems are endogenic). If we are allowed to talk about programming in general system spaces, we are more likely to find support and even other people who were programmed.

Thirdly, this line of thinking is very reminiscent of people who tells trans people to detransition and go in the closet because society is hostile to trans people. The reasoning is that, if you "choose" not to be trans, or to hide that you're trans, you won't be hurt, but this is an incredibly transphobic thing to say for any reason whatsoever unless you are privately validating the individual decision of a person who is confident that they want to detransition. If telling trans people they should pretend to be cis is wrong, then telling programmed systems to pretend not to be programmed - which is what you are doing when you allow us to talk about some trauma but not the programming - is just as wrong.

It is true that there can be some dangers to discussing you were programmed if you go into too much detail and/or if your case was part of an organized abuse situation. However, we do not talk about what our trigger phrases are to anybody, and even if we did, we've accidentally seen our trigger phrases over text, and they don't trigger anything in us that leads to actual harm so long as we're away from our abuser, which we have been for over a decade.

While some aspects of talking about our programming can be triggering, or seeing reminders of the programming can cause us to be triggered in the emotional sense, we do not consider being triggered to be a form of being in danger, so that in combination with the fact that we do not put ourselves in danger in when cues are triggered means we feel it is completely safe for us to attempt to explore our memories.

As for the likelihood of our abuser finding us and retaliating and/or doing anything else that would put anyone in danger, this too is very unlikely. He is around 80 at the time of writing, maybe older, assuming he is still alive, which he may not be. He is, for the most part, not very plugged into the internet. The exception is if he is using the internet to achieve a specific end that nobody offline can help him with, but knowing him, I cannot imagine any of his currently-desired ends would take him to my internet presence.

Our abuser almost definitely no longer has access to children, nor does he still have access to any of the locations he took me to abuse me that made it easier for him to get away with it. He therefore would not be programming anybody again, so he would not find me while looking for information about programming, as that is no longer something he does, and as someone who knew him, I can't imagine him wanting to revisit the topic if he couldn't actually do it again.

I personally don't feel that sharing details about your specific scripts is always as dangerous as people say, especially since, in our case, our abuser got his scripts from the internet, and our scripts are not tied to a specific organized abuse case or geographical area (not that we still live in the area where we were raised). It's not hard for us to talk about these events in a way that doesn't give out details that would make us identifiable as an IRL person.

The truth of the matter is that disclosing an abuse or trauma history is ALWAYS dangerous and risky, no matter what. This includes saying that you are a traumagenic system or an abuse survivor. Those things ALWAYS make you easier for an abuser to exploit, even when they don't know what your trauma is.

However, we don't think abuse survivors should be stigmatized by treating their experiences as being too triggering to even allude to, which is how some people treat abuse and even more people treat programming in specific. We also believe there is inherent danger in doing just about anything at all, so disclosing you have an abuse history is not uniquely dangerous. This includes disclosing programming.

Furthermore, the sad truth of the matter is that not disclosing your programming doesn't mean people can't and won't take advantage of it. We had more than one person take advantage of our loyalty programming before we even knew we were programmed. There was no way they could have known we were programmed, and at least one of those people never ever would have thought of programming as a possibility. However, they still took advantage of us and even abused us because of our programming.

Part of why we make our system such a big part of our internet presence is because we are a lot more dysfunctional when we are in denial of the system, and the more public we are about our plurality, the harder it is to go into denial. While programming is obviously a more sensitive subject than plurality in general is, we apply the same logic to how open we currently are about our programming. That is, if we are open about it, we will not go into denial of it. We will be aware that we even have program responses that can be taken advantage of, as opposed to believing people are treating us in a normal way and things are happening for normal reasons. It will be easier to resist program responses if I can recognize them for what they are, like how, personally, I could only recover from my personality disorders once my therapist told me I had them and I could call my symptoms for what they were.

My approach to programming is very recovery-oriented, and while some people with very rigid ideas about programming might see the way I talk about it as rather backwards, this level of openness is part of what recovery looks like for my system.