6-30-26
Today is the last day of Queer Pride Month, and tomorrow is the first day of Disability Pride Month. My system is in both these demographics. Tomorrow and the day after are also the two days of Half Years, a holiday celebrated by my system. Half Years is called that because it occurs at the halfway point through the calendar, and it is largely based on reflecting on the first half of the year while preparing for the second.

There is much for us to reflect on, and I will likely make a more general post of reflection tomorrow and/or the day after, but for today, I would like to talk about something my system discovered early this year and that, in a manner of speaking, involves me coming out as something.

The thing as which I am coming out in this post is not a queer identity and it is not a disability, but our status as this thing results from and affects our queerness, and it has left us disabled, so I see now as the most appropriate time to do so. It's something I began to somewhat suspect in December of last year and fully confirmed in January of this year.

My system is programmed.

You, the reader of this post, may or may not know what that means, and you might have some preconceived notions of what that means. I'm going to explain it in this post as though you don't know what I'm talking about, while trying not to sound condescending to anyone reading this who DOES know what I'm talking about (assholes with shitty opinions notwithstanding).

Programming is a term used by the plural/system/DID community in reference to a form of abuse in which someone is intentionally traumatized and then mentally conditioned to follow certain cues or commands. Because this involves extreme trauma, people who experience programming usually end up with DID. Their abusers usually know their victims have DID, and in many cases, programmers (as one calls the people who perpetrate this abuse) intentionally cause their victims to split certain alters, whom the programmers then abuse individually.

There is a lot of misinformation surrounding programming, and while programming is something that happens in real life, it features in a lot of conspiracies, such as those about Project Monarch. Those claims assert that programming originated as part of Project MK Ultra (which is not a conspiracy and did happen in real life). MK Ultra did not necessarily involve programming in the sense that most programmed systems have been programmed, but it involved the government doing experiments with something that is now known as drug-based mind control/mental conditioning, also known as DBMC.

DBMC involves someone drugging you with any kind of psychoactive substance, and then mentally conditioning you in some way while you are under the influence. Being under the influence can make you more suggestible, and it can contribute to amnesia, including forgetting that you are being abused. Drugs are also used to induce a form of state-based learning, in which drugging the victim again helps them better recall instructions or lessons given while drugged earlier.

My case involved DBMC, but also TBMC. The T stands for "trauma", and TBMC is much the same thing as DBMC, but the intense dissociation from being traumatized by an abuser on purpose is used as the state for state-based learning instead of being drugged. TBMC is somewhat more common than DBMC, but my programmer most likely chose DBMC because he was an alcoholic and thus already had plenty of alcohol onhand. While some people and especially groups that use DBMC use research chemicals, the ends can be achieved with just plain alcohol.

Some contexts in which programming occurs include cults, abusive schools, and trafficking rings. The word "programming" also refers to cult indoctrination, and arguably any kind of mental conditioning done as a part of organized abuse. "Organized abuse" is a term that refers to certain kinds of abuse and is best thought of as being like "organized crime". Just like how organized crime is crime that occurs on a group level instead of just an individual level, organized abuse is abuse that is perpetrated by a group. All of the contexts mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph count as organized abuse.

My programming did NOT occur as a part of organized abuse. Some people, including those really uptight anti-endo DID systems (you know the ones), would find this claim very controversial, because many people think that programming can ONLY occur as a part of organized abuse, and in fairness, the term ORIGINATED to describe cult indoctrination, which IS a form of organized abuse. However, if you believe that programming exists as a process of mental conditioning in which specific commands are implanted into a person's mind and they are made to follow cues - which, conditioning of this variety does very much occur in real life and the people who do it usually call it programming - there is no real reason to believe it can only occur in certain contexts, especially if, like in my situation, the abuser was directly using the word "programming" and was in contact with other people who were using the term.

As mentioned before, programming features in certain conspiracies, such as the conspiracy about Project Monarch, which originated only one year after I was born. Conspiracies were a big part of old web communities, and the old web was a lot less regulated than the current day web. Even with how regulated the current web is, there are still plenty of communities on it run by and for predators who discuss amongst themselves how to hurt people and trade advice on how to do so. It is our system's belief, backed by memories we have of our programming, that our programmer, who was our adoptive father, learned about programming by way of conspiracies he saw on the old web, and he joined communities online dedicated to programmers discussing the best way to abuse their victims.

The reason our abuser programmed us was twofold: sexual pleasure and identity control.

We have memories that appear to be our abuser creating and possibly even distributing CSEM of us (albeit on his own, so it wouldn't be organized abuse). Even before we knew of the programming, we knew he had a history of acting sexually/romantically inappropriately with us, so the sexual side of the programming was likely an extension of that.

As for the identity control, we were raised as a girl (despite being intersex and having XY chromosomes), and our adoptive parents were very conservative Christians. At a very early age, I announced that I wanted to marry a girl when I grew up, and while my adoptive mother gently told me this wasn't possible because I was a girl, she told my adoptive father, who was not as gentle. He physically sexually abused me as a corrective act, which caused me to have a breakdown in which a fictive in my system (as I believe I was plural before this point) took over and wanted people to treat her as her source, including my adoptive parents.

While plurality is not the one and only reason a child would want the people around them to treat them like they were a fictional character, it is one major reason, and it was the correct reason in this situation. Our adoptive father accurately deduced this, and it is our belief that he used the internet to search for information about Dissociative Identity Disorder. I believe it is possible he came across content concerning programming in these searches, as programming usually involves DID and is often simplified to a process in which someone is traumatized into having DID. "Traumatizing someone into having DID" is an accurate way to describe many cases of programming, but it is also possible to program someone who is already plural, which is what happened in my situation.

Much of what my abuser initially saw was likely conspiracy content, but the thing about posting a story online is that, while this hardly makes the story true, it means people are in a position to read and believe this story, and if they believe the story is true, that affects what they think is possible and therefore affects what actions they take in real life.

I have complicated thoughts about how many things about programming do or don't originate from conspiracies. While I obviously do not think programming is entirely a conspiracy, I'm under the impression that I think more things ABOUT programming originate from conspiracies than many people in the community wish to acknowledge.

However, if you accept that programming is MENTIONED in conspiracies (which it is), I think it is reasonable to believe that many abusers who remember the early days of stories about Project Monarch or similar conspiracies may have believed those conspiracies, believed the government was running programs in which children who were traumatized into developing DID were being manipulated in certain ways, and then proceeded to traumatize their own children and manipulate them the same way.

I am aware that talking about my programming puts me in a position to be discredited or disbelieved, but I honestly don't care. At this point, I am confident enough of what happened to me, and being open about things like my plurality and my trauma keeps me from going in denial of them, which keeps me from becoming dysfunctional due to these things.

I have been reasonably open about my programming on Discord and a few select blogs until this point, but I didn't know if I should post about it on my websites yet, because a lot of people also treat it as dangerous to talk about your programming publicly. I have personal issues with the notion that this means you SHOULDN'T talk about your programming publicly, but I don't want to make that the focus of this post when I have an entire page on my main site explaining what I think the relative risks and benefits of me talking about my programming publicly would be.

That page is part of a larger section of my system's main site, available here. This section is completed as of tonight, but it will be officially launched (i.e. mentioned in the updates section of that site and linked on the system info page of that site) tomorrow in observation of Half Years and Disability Pride Month.

Today, however, I am making this post and declaring officially that I am a programmed system. In the future, I will likely edit this site to reflect this fact, not to mention make more blog entries about it, as I have a lot of thoughts about programming and my experiences that I want to share.

For the time being, however, consider this me coming out as a programmed system and disclosing one of the last real secrets I had left to disclose.