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Programming: Taking the Wind Out of Its Sails For those of you who do not know me, I'm not thrilled about speaking with a mike in front of people, even people I know will understand if I goof. I also get very spacey afterwards, so if I don't recognize you, don't take it personally. It's just that I'm elsewhere. Today I'm going to try and demystify programming and share with you some of the techniques that have helped me make my programming more manageable. I don't expect them to be useful to everybody, for we are all so different, but I hope that many of you can pick up some ideas that will be helpful. I get easily overwhelmed when I think about programming. It seems so large, so invincible. Over the years, I have found that one of the things that helps me break through the over-whelmedness is to over-simplify the subject. If I can reduce it to simpler terms, then I can get a handle on it. I can understand how it works, and get ideas on how to work with it. Later I can add in some complexities, if I need to. So today I'm going to use that mental technique and over-simplify the subject of programming for you - and, of course, for me, too. Another thing that happens to me is that I become very trancey. I stare off into space and stop thinking. My mind becomes passive and receptive because I'm in a hypnotic state. I'm sure this will happen to me several times as I speak today. When and if I catch it, I'm going to do some little things to help me break the trance. If my support person, Jan, sees me drifting off, I hope she will say, "Jeannie, come back to earth!" I invite you to join with me as I do these trance-breaking tricks. None of them are very fancy and none hurt me or frighten me. I doubt if they would hurt or frighten you-all. You don't have to, of course - just because something is a good idea for me doesn't mean it's a good idea for you. But if you would like to try, I would like to share. Here's an example:
This works for me because holding my breath is something that induces a trance. Universality Okay, here we go. The first thing I want to talk about is that programming is universal. Let's call this kind of programming "conditioning." It's how we transmit our culture to our children. Conditioning is value-free, neither good nor bad. It just is. Children in China are conditioned to use chopsticks, children in America learn to use knives and forks and spoons. Both ways of eating work just fine. You can think of thousands of examples of this kind of cultural conditioning. Conscious versus Unconscious Conditioning I began learning English before I was a year old, French when I was six, and Latin when I was twelve. Guess which language I'm most fluent in? There's another factor at work here. I spoke English every day but I only spoke French to certain people in certain circumstances. And of course I hardly spoke Latin at all. I "practiced" my English a lot more than I did the other languages. Constant conversation in English guaranteed that I remembered words and grammar. When I was eighteen, I spent a year in Italy after studying Italian for only two semesters. During that year I only spoke Italian, and it rapidly became far better than my French, although I had studied French for twelve years by then. It was the repetition that did it. It's been years since I spoke either language, and both have faded. But if I had lived in Italy for forty years, I am sure I would have forgotten a lot of my English. It was already starting to happen in just one year. That's something to tuck in the back of your mind about programming -- if you don't reinforce it, it fades. Changing Conditioning Much of my conditioning is helpful to me living in the country I was born in. It helps me fit in socially and guarantees I won't be hit by a car because I walk on red, not green and I look first to the right before crossing the street. . But there are some things that I learned when I was very young that I do not like now that I am adult. Take prejudice, for example. We are all prejudiced, more or less, against just about everybody that is less than "main-stream ideal American." I'm ashamed of being prejudiced. Rationally, I know it's not my fault, because I'm a product of my culture. But I don't like it and I certainly don't want to act on it and hurt others. There are three steps I take to weaken the force of my prejudice. Simple to say, sometimes hard to do.
To name a thing is to take away some of its power. A name is like an anchor in my mind. Labeling a thought "prejudice" clearly brackets the thought that I find undesirable and separates it from the "me" that I value. It is now something that was put into my mind without my permission, not my own thinking. Steps two (not acting on it) and three (letting it go) are weakening the prejudice by not reinforcing it. Refusing to act on it, to tell mean jokes, for example, is obviously avoiding reinforcement. But refusing to brood on it, to beat myself up over it, is equally an avoidance of reinforcement. If I spend three days agonizing over having had a sexist or racist thought, that is three days of driving that thought deeper into the grooves of my mind. Note that this is not the same as denial. I'm not shoving anything under the rug. I acknowledge it, deal with it and move on. The result of applying this to a suicide program was compelling:
My mental attitude changed from fighting suicidal impulses, trying not to think those thoughts, to curiosity about the past. Which was great, because trying not to think something is a losing battle, and consumes a vast amount of energy, besides. Step two. I gave my kitchen knives to my best friend to hold and re-committed myself to not acting on suicidal urges. Just let them be. If I act on them, I will never get a chance to understand where they came from and what they mean. I'm sure I would have experienced some relief if I had cut, but I chose to stay with the thoughts and feelings and see what happened. Step three. After I labeled the suicidal thought as programming, I turned my attention back to every-day activities. No point in hanging on to it, for surely it was going to come back by itself. Meanwhile, might as well get something accomplished. Some of you might recognize this as a basic meditation technique. When you are concentrating on your breathing, or on a mantra, sensations, emotions, and thoughts will inevitably distract you. Don't bother worrying. This is normal. Just label them and let them go, turning your attention back to your mantra. With practice, the mind calms down. Now I know that meditation isn't a positive experience for many people. New-age cults, especially, use meditation to bring people into a compliant trance state. And "emptying" the mind can be frightening if it results in flashbacks. But turning my attention back to dishes, feeding the cat, or editing didn't have any adverse effects for me. And so I "out-Zenned" the program, rather than fighting it, and it ran its course and faded. I emerged from the situation feeling more empowered. There was more of "me" and less of the programming. The next time a suicidal program kicked in, it was less intense and lasted a shorter time. I then proceeded to fine-tune this simple technique. I tried talking to the program as if it were an alter. I praised its strength, intelligence, and sophistication. I could almost feel the programming smile. (Of course, I wasn't really talking to the program, I was talking to the alter or to that part of my mind that had learned the program.) I also spent some time telling that part that nothing bad would happen if we broke the rules now. I explained that there was nobody around to enforce the old rules, and so they didn't really apply any more. They had stopped being rules. We were free! I walked around my home describing all the things that were mine. "This is my refrigerator, and I can buy and eat anything I want now. I don't have to eat what I am told to, like in the old days. I can eat spaghetti or ice cream for three days straight if I feel like it, or I can stir-fry spinach with olive oil... (section missing) Control Through Violence The tremendous fear engendered by violence creates what has been called a "terror trance." It's an altered state of consciousness, and what is learned in this state is driven deeply into the psyche. People are much more vulnerable in this state. When violence is used to control behavior, I stop calling it conditioning and start using the word "programming." Perhaps that's arbitrary, perhaps it's a useful distinction. But I do believe that something very different occurs. When I spoke about conditioning, I hope I made it clear that this is something benign that happens in every-day life, among all families, all cultures. Now I want to talk about families that shape their children's behavior using fear and force. Sometimes this is normative in the culture, sometimes it isn't. If it's normal in the culture, the children will show the effects of being raised with violence, of course. They may be fearful, insecure, or alienated. But since this happens to all kids, they won't stand out as much as abused kids in societies that don't condone violence. By the standards of their own culture, they won't be socially different as adults. If, however, the family uses lots more violence than the other families in their community, their children will soon act, or at least feel, different. They will be more fearful, more anxious, or angrier than their age-mates. They may act like their parents and be violent or bully weaker kids. (This is an example of the famous and misused phrase "acting out." They are showing in their actions what is happening to them, rather than tattling on their folks and telling in words.) They may become so fearful that they flinch when somebody touches them or hide under their desks at school. Afraid to try new things, afraid to make friends, afraid to stand up for themselves, they attract bullies because they are an easy target, which makes them even more fearful. Or they may consciously or unconsciously realize that their parents are violating society's norms. In this case, the kids will protect their parents by hiding the violence at home. They will also try and hide their symptoms and attempt to appear "normal," like the other kids. (That's mainly what I did.) They will be ashamed of their symptoms, of the effects the violence has had on them, and will probably blame themselves, either for being so "bad" that they deserved the violence, or because they believe there is something wrong with them because they are not like the other children. Or both. Any of this sound familiar? Factors that Increase the Trauma of Violence on Kids Now I would like to discuss some of the factors that increase the trauma of violence on kids. These factors serve to increase the force of programming. In other words, the more factors are present, and the more often they are used, the more "effective" the programming. I'm sure there are more, but these are important ones. Later I will go through the factors and apply them to kids raised in cults. Violence is unexpected or unpredictable. Say a kid is quietly playing and singing, and uses a phrase that shocks and offends the mother, who suddenly slaps the child's face. The kid is hurt and totally bewildered. "Why? It makes no sense. Why did she hurt me? Why now? What did I do? How can I avoid it happening again? I can't. It was just out of the blue." The child's sense of thre and spending a tremendous amount of physical and psychic energy trying to avoid or at least lessen the violence. Life itself is lived in a terror-trance. That's going to be an adult who is constantly looking over his shoulder, constantly braced to duck a blow, or to run, or to fight. It's sort of like drinking. If you consume a bottle of whiskey over the course of a year, it isn't going to affect your life much. But if you drink a quart a night, well, that's a whole different story. Violence is bizarre. By the time children are in school, they pretty much know what is usual in their community. They see what happens to other children when they misbehave and they see how adults treat each other. They also learn lots from television. In some communities the adults say "please" and "thank you" and children are punished by having privileges taken away. In other communities, kids see gang fights, drug deals gone bad, shootings, and other kids being smacked right and left. They compare what they see to what happens at home. Of course, "socially usual" violence is going to have a deleterious effect. But it's the unusual forms of violence that really make children feel ashamed and different. And remember that in our society, sexual violence against children is still considered unusual. It's only been a few decades since we were told (and we believed it) that incest only occurred in one in a million families. Honest. That's what the textbooks said when I was growing up. With 77 million households in the US, that would give a grand total of 77 American incest survivors! Violence is done in secret or denied. This is a biggie. Consider the magnifying effects of threats to a child for telling. Imagine the reaction of a five-year-old whose father says "If you ever tell anybody, I will take you up to the top of that mountain and spank you one hundred times and leave you there." Imagine -- well, you most likely don't have to imagine -- being told "If you tell, you die." Told this over and over. The child is left all alone. Can't talk to anybody, can't be comforted, can't be rescued, can't even get ideas on what to do. Absolutely alone. If the violence is flatly denied, kids learn to doubt their own perceptions. In addition to being absolutely alone, they lose faith in their own minds, in their sanity. "Everybody says one thing, I think another. I must be wrong." With no faith in their ability to assess reality, they are wide open to accepting other's views: that is, to being programmed.
The child gets a reputation within the family of having bad dreams, of being crazy, of making things up, or of being a malicious liar. And thThe gentle family dog is tortured to the point of attacking. Nothing is consistent, nothing is what it seems to be, nothing can be predicted. There's no solid ground to plant your feet on. Violence is common Take your typical satanic cult. There are eight major solar holidays in a year, twelve or thirteen lunar holidays. That's twenty. Then the major Christian holidays. Say five or six. Twenty-five. Another five or six secular holidays or long weekends -- thirty. A few special things like demon revels, your birthday, the leader's birthday. Forty, and that's conservative. That's hours and hours of terror and violence almost once a week, year in and year out. Not to speak of the training sessions, the preparation of the child for the rituals. And not to speak of any family violence that occurs outside a cult setting. That's practically constant violence. Ack! I just set myself off with a couple of weird things I remembered. I need to break my trance, leave those past images and feelings, and come back to the present. Time for cold water on my face -- works like a champ for me. Wakes me up and reminds me that I have a real live body in the present. Ice cubes are even better, but I don't want to go fishing for them. I don't think I want to give any examples right now, for fear of triggering myself again. I think I can just say that lots of things that happen in cults are extremely bizarre, and leave it at that. Violence is a secret Even in abusive groups that are out in the open, the abuse is most often a secret. I'm thinking of certain fringe Christian groups, white supremacist groups, and certain fraternal societies. Everybody knows they exist, and often everybody knows who belongs. But what happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors. But it's also common for ritual abuse survivors to have been abused in groups whose very existence was a secret. The kind of group that elicits comments like "They don't exist." "I've heard of them, but we don't have any in this state." "They are very rare -- and usually it's not a group, but a lone loony." They are very good at hiding. And they make sure their children won't give them away. All four of the factors that amplify the effects of violence are heavily present in cults. No wonder the programming is so strong and goes so deep. Violence, Conditioning, and Programming Okay. Under cult conditions, children are going to be programmed as well as conditioned. What I mean is that they are conditioned in all the usual societal ways -- gender roles, etc. -- and they are also programmed to follow the norms of the cult. Sometimes the two reinforce each other. My cult, for example, was highly patriarchal. So was my family. So was society in general in the forties and fifties. Both the day life and the night life taught me that mena terror-trance endured in the cult environment is what you learn in the "real world," then it's going to be like two mirrors held up to each other, the hidden reflecting what's in sight. But if what you are taught in a terror-trance is the opposite of what is learned the rest of the time, there is going to be a tremendous split. Like a two-family house, with a day apartment and a night apartment side by side. Except when you are in one apartment, you don't know the other exists. Deliberate Mind Control Now I'm going to talk about deliberate mind control, which is at the far end of the conditioning-programming spectrum. Once again, there is an abrupt change, and we are talking another quantum leap here, not just a little tiny change. I think that if you are a survivor of mind-control experimentation and have a resulting complex internal system, you will easily follow what I'm going to talk about next. If you aren't, what I say may be confusing, or you may have to stretch to understand. If you start to get confused or overwhelmed, remember that there is a safe room available, or look at your "Note to Myself" sheet for other ideas. I wish that we used language that distinguishes between conditioning, programming and mind-control. But we generally don't. I try to use the word "program" only for mind-control programming, and I use "cue" instead of trigger for setting off a mind-control program. This helps me separate the two concepts in my own mind. There are two words that come immediately to me when I think about mind control: "deliberate" and "complicated." All abusive groups, in one way or another, use mind-control techniques. Isolation of the victim, control of the setting by the perpetrators, and control of information by the perpetrators, are all basic mind control techniques. So are fear, pain, fatigue, hunger, and thirst. So is unpredictability, as in the "good cop, bad cop" technique. These are the techniques that are used in all forms of brainwashing. Some groups aren't really aware that that's what they are doing, others (or at least their leaders) are very aware of it. In other words, groups, and individual members of a given group, are more or less cynical about their methods. But what we are referring to when we talk of mind-control experimentation is the deliberate and skillful manipulation of parts of a person's mind so that is becomes, and remains, under the control of another. The experimenters, trainers, and handlers have a particular goal in mind and they select the techniques that will enable them to achieve that goal. They are familiar with many different techniques, and when they aren't satisfied with the results, they modify their plan. They are thorough and systematic. They know what they are doing. The technology they have at their command is much more complicated and sophisticated thaization, with a CEO, advisory boards, etc. Sometimes the pattern is more like a video game, with castles and dragons and all sorts of tricks and booby traps for the unwary. Handling mind-control programming It's this kind of programming which really frightened me for a long time. I thought it was so exotic, so other-worldly, that I didn't have a fighting chance against it. It didn't help that my programming didn't seem to contain any recognizable alters. Everything was geometric patterns and mathematical codes, and I had no idea how to talk to non-Euclidean geometric figures. What could I say? "Nice figure! You are really flexible!" I was totally snowed. Finally it dawned on me that a sentient part of me must have been present when all that mysterious math junk was put into my brain. I decided to work with the part of myself that had learned all this stuff. Remember how in the beginning I said that it worked for me to over-simplify? I figured that it was a try, at least. I decided that I would design an extremely simple technique and see what happened, just as I had in working with my prejudice. ven if it didn't work, I was convinced that the very fact that I was using common-sense things that any teacher or mother knows instinctively would help me cut the mind-control programming down to size in my own mind. I was no longer paralyzed when thinking about it. Again, I broke it down into simple steps.
Step One: Setting the stage. I start by giving permission to my parts to learn, without being coercive. "Anybody who wants to listen can. Nobody has to. Anybody who isn't listening can ask others inside about what I said. And I will explain again, too, in case you want to listen later on." I've snuck in the idea of freedom of choice. "Anybody who objects to or doesn't like what I am saying can let me know if they want to. Anybody who wants to give me information may, as long as it's okay inside." Then I educate and explain in simple language. I explain that we were raised by people who liked kids to obey and liked to hurt kids. But those people aren't around anymore. We don't have to follow their rules. We don't have to agree with them any more. We can make up our own rules. We can change our rules any time we want. We can choose! We are free! I steer away from words that have a weird connotation to me. "Safe" for example, means to many of my parts that I am locked up, and that therefore I cannot hurt anybody or anything. I am "safe" because I am imprisoned. This is not a message that I'm trying to convey inside, so I avoid the word and find words that weren't used back then. "Okay" is a fine substitute, as my perps were too pgs had been normal, there was nothing wrong with me, and I was in a different situation now, one where I could feel my feelings. So it worked in an emergency. But it works equally well for me when there isn't an emergency, and it helps lessen the panic when the next emergency comes along. I've put a framework in place for my parts to understand and cope with whatever comes up. Within this simple framework you can add almost anything you can imagine. Some people make an internal "healing pool" for newly-awakened alters to wash away the hurt and pain. Some make a special place where there are kind and competent alters to take care of the wounded ones. Some find relief in making small internal changes, like laying an hourglass on its side or giving a frightening fire-breathing dragon the job of lighting a fire for coffee every morning. The number of ways you can adjust things to suit your system is limited only by your -- and your therapist's and friends' -- imagination. So that's basically how I work with my system. Start simple, see what works and what doesn't, and then tweak my technique. Accept. Educate. Work with, rather than against, my parts and my programming. Now if you want to, we can jump up and down some before the question period.
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