Programming

As of January 2026, we understand our system to be programmed - that is, that many aspects of its structures and headmates were put there by an abuser via abusive methods, and we were trained to switch or do things in response to cues.

We didn't really suspect programming at first, despite how complex our system was. We knew that systems are usually only that complex with programming or similar forms of abuse, but since our therapist believed that, based on what we'd told her of our childhood, it was unlikely we'd experienced organized abuse, we didn't think about it much.

However, a few headmates that we recovered 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 characters he made up, then acting out those stories and treating us as the character.

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.

However, we believe our experience was as close to "textbook programming" that you can get from an untrained person acting on their own, such that we feel justified in saying we are a programmed system - or, more accurately, that large parts of the system are programmed.

Because our abuser's plan did not involve anyone in our system having a full picture of what was really going on, there was never a moment where he sat us down and explained, in full and honest detail, exactly what his methods were and what he was trying to achieve.

However, due to the fact that one of the headmates he made us split was an MK Ultra scientist who made drugs and that we remember him (or at least our internal handlers) using the words "program" and "script", but that our abuser was not a government scientist in any way, it is believed that he was basing what he did off of MK Ultra methods without being trained.

We believe he got his information mostly from the internet. The internet was full of conspiracy sites in the old web days when this would have taken place. It was less regulated, too. While programming is not a conspiracy in and of itself, it is a part of many conspiracies. This includes some of the connections between the supposed Project Monarch and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, which happened in 1998 and therefore when I was young and my programming would first be happening.

Furthermore, our abuser was old enough that he would remember when MK Ultra was in the news. He therefore would have conceivably been able to connect some of the MK Ultra experiments with the realization that his child had a dissociative condition, which is what we believe influenced some of the online research he did following our psychological incident.

While some of our programming is identifiably the same as certain alphabet programs, or could be considered "types" of alphabet programs, our headmates who were connected to the programming and know the names of the programs usually remember our programs being given different names, often references to literature - works like Les Miserables and Lolita.

Some of the programming was done through Trauma-Based Mind Control, but a good amount of it was Drug-Based Mind Control in particular. The drug used was alcohol, which explains surface memories of somehow knowing as a child what alcohol tasted like, before getting back hidden memories of these events.

The cues in question were intended to trigger different headmates in the system, but what happened was that it created headmates with subsystems that were different "versions" of the host of the subsystem and often had varying degrees of amnesia concerning the abuse. These are the stage-structured subsystems we talk about, where headmates with varying levels of amnesia switched during abuse that took place in "stages".

Since our abuser was acting alone, his motivations for why he did all this were personal and not generalizable to the reasons programming was created, per se. However, we think his reasons are pretty self-explanatory if you know the details: identity control, and personal pleasure.

The thing about the programming is that the childhood psychological incident that clued our abuser in to us having a dissociative condition, was that it was connected to another incident.

As a very young child, we expressed to our adoptive mother that we wanted to marry a girl with a specific name, which was not the name of anyone we knew at the time. It was, however, the name of the fictive who wanted to be treated as her source. We didn't have a crush on the source character, though, so we think that was us talking about an in-system relationship (which is part of why we think we are partly endogenic).

The thing is, we were being raised as a girl by conservative Christians, so this was obviously not an acceptable thing to their ears. Our adoptive father decided to deal with the situation through corrective sexual abuse. That incident of abuse is what caused our fictive to take over the system for an extended time.

While we eventually "went back to normal", it was a highly unusual event in the eyes of the adults around us, and while they never talked about or acknowledged it going forward, we believe it's what caused our abuser to realize we had a system, start doing research that took him to programming, and came up with his plan.

Our abuser's programming was very sexual in nature, so the entire thing will not be explained on this site. However, it involved him, with faulty 1990s conservative concepts of queerness, making assumptions about our identity and trying to influence parts of us that he assumed existed (correctly or not, it can never be known).

The parts that our abuser was influencing with programming - including programs intended to make the victim submissive to masculine people and behave similarly to a housewife - were intended to become the main parts of the system someday, or possibly even the "only" part left over after a final fusion that isn't inevitable for systems but that our abuser may have thought was due to consuming media about systems that DOES end in final fusion (e.g. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho).

The idea was that, while the identity of the main/final parts did not have fully normative identities in the innerworld, they were people who wanted to present themselves in a way that WOULD be considered normative relative to our outerworld body.

However, our abuser put a lot more sexual and kink-related things into the programming than would be strictly necessary to enforce some of these identity standards, so we think that part of what he did was just for his own pleasure.

While we don't remember our abuser ever explicitly explaining what all his kinks were, it's easy to guess what they were, given that kink or kink-like situations were a major part of the scripts in much of the programming.

However, knowing he was in a conversative Christian community where he tried to present as a pillar of the community, he almost definitely didn't have any outlet for his kinks, especially since many of them involved things that were already inherently taboo to most churches of the time and place. Programming me the way he did gave him his outlet.

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 but rather tied to a historical event that is proven to have happened (MK Ultra).

Furthermore, our abuser WAS copying information from conspiracy sites, but that does not mean we think the conspiracies are true. We're not even entirely sure what conspiracies or content he saw.

Rather, we think that people who think certain things are true are more likely to do things that assume certain things are true and possible. This is one reason we sometimes say our abuser was "copying programming". Most conspiracy theories about programming claim that large organizations, groups, currently-running businesses, or famous individuals are doing it, but all we claim is that one abuser copied the concept of programming for his own selfish ends.

While 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 or if your case was part of an organized abuse situation. However, we do not talk about what our cues are to anybody, and even if we did, we've accidentally seen our trigger phrases over text, and they don't seem to trigger us. We think that only our abuser or our internal handlers can set off the cues at all, which is possible.

As for the likelihood of our abuser finding us and retaliating, this too is very unlikely. He is around 80 at the time of writing, 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, 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.

While there are some details I could give that would be identifiable to our family or our abuser's specific scripts, I don't have to put those details on the public internet, and I and feel reasonably safe sharing some of them on more private parts of the internet.

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.

While this is just speculation and doesn't affect whether our experience happened or not, we personally feel that experiences like ours are a lot more common than some people might think. That is, we feel people who were programmed or semi-programmed by amateurs working outside of organized abuse contexts and using internet resources (particularly older conspiracy sites) - including ones who were working on a child they suspected was plural - are not exceptionally rare.

While not all of the "information" surrounding programming is true, especially things that are written like guides for how to program someone, much of what's in said information IS replicable in some way.

It's likely you would have to be trained or working in an organized setting in order for things to turn out EXACTLY as you want them to, but you do not need special training at all in order to condition somebody to make them easier to abuse. That's one definition of grooming. It thus strikes me as doubtful that you need special training to at least attempt to COPY programming in a young child victim you have total control over, especially if that child has already displayed signs of plurality. While attempts at amateur programming on someone who is not already a system could result in a system, it would likely be easier if the child were already plural.

Not all systems were plural from an early age, and not all of those report anything from their childhood that they feel would have clued others into the fact that they were plural. But there are also plenty of plurals who DO remember showing signs of plurality from an early age, including in a way that others would have noticed. And disordered traumagenic plurals - that is, the ones who typically have amnesia of the sort that abusers could exploit - are usually plural from an early age, often due to the actions of the people who have the most control over them.

If it's possible for someone to recognize, in hindsight, that a certain thing they did seemed to indicate plurality, it doesn't seem like a wild assumption to say it's more common than people might remember, that the adults around them might suspect that plurality. Some of those adults may not do anything about it, but some of them may try to take advantage of the system, including through methods like programming.

Furthermore, most sources on programming seem to agree that programming tends to break down around 30 years old. That is, if you were programmed but did not show signs of it before then, you will start showing signs around 30. Interestingly, it was around the 2020s that programming became more talked about in the general system community. 2020 is 30 years after 1990, the year the internet became public and that programming a child using internet resources would have even begun to be possible.

However, programming breaking down around 30 does not always translate to finding out about your programming at 30, like how you don't always get properly diagnosed right after displaying symptoms of a disorder. We were 29 when our system started getting more complex, 30 when certain "perception filters" around odd childhood memories lifted (that is, we were able to realize certain things were questionable that our adoptive father did that went unquestioned before), and 31 when we figured out it was programming.

Many people we encounter in the plural community are younger than 30 but still in roughly the same age range as us in that "the old web" with all its conspiracy sites still existed when they were born. While it's true the old web was likely full of information about programming, and it's true it's hard to find information about programming on the general internet nowadays, it's not impossible, and if anything, it may have gotten easier for people to share advice on programming other people in a completely private and under the radar way, thanks to the invention of things like TOR in 2002.

This is not to say that I have a conspiracy saying that amateur programming was definitely common thanks to the advent of the internet, but that's all to say that I simply don't think stories like mine are all that unusual or likely to be rare, and with all of these considerations in place, I think we should be more willing to accept the idea that someone can be programmed by an amateur working on their own, in a way that either IS programming or is so functionally similar to it that it warrants being called by the same word.