What Is The Difference Between Did, Complex Did, And Highly Complex Did? Where Would A Small System W

Trans Ramcoa

I dont want to make this a habit however, when looking for terms to reclaim, I came across a post that made me recoil in disgust. @ cincinique made a post defending the not reclaimed term Trans Ramcoa and I would like to bring this to people attention so they can block the people interacting with this post and defending this term. I would like this to be perfectly clear, if you use the term Trans-Ramcoa or similar Trans-id terms, you are:

Defending Child pornography

Romanticizing Child Prostitution

Romanticizing the torture of Children

Defending Child rapists

YOU. ARE. BORDERLINE. PEDOPHILIC.

Not in a million years will these people understand what we went through as a child, all the abuse and torture we experienced at the hands of the people who were supposed to love us. To call this a kink, to say its just you being "kinky" is you getting off to the idea of child torture. You calling this a kink is you pushing people into dangerous situations were they will be abused and tortured. What you post matters. What you do matters. Do not make your legacy online supporting child rape and child torture.

Coping Mechanisms Masterlist

Thoughts to break the cycle

this is temporary if I believe it is

I AM NOT my perception, or my thoughts

I am the observer of the thoughts

my mind is protecting me and is stressed from not knowing how to fix it. Thank you for protecting me but it will be okay

the negative thoughts are just a symptom of depression, dissociation/dpdr, c-ptsd, or anxiety or all of the above

thoughts are just like another one of the 5 senses. Like how you can perceive textures, smells, tastes, sounds. Your thoughts allow you to perceive an experience. But you are not your nose. You are not your mouth. You are not your ears. You are not your hand it’s just a hand that’s connected to your body. And so You are not your thoughts. You’re the one experiencing these sensations you are not the sensations.

Even if you genetically are predisposed or your genetics or brain chemistry has caused the issue. Especially in this case your thoughts do not define who you are they are just a reaction your brain is creating to protect you from something it thinks is a threat.

self hate and depression is a coping mechanism: your body wants you to be better, to be perfect to avoid something negative that hurts and self hate is the way it decided to go but it doesn’t have to be that way. Tell your mind “thank you” and “I love you but it’s okay.” “We are safe” and “I am enough.”

I try to remember my goals: how I want to be happy, the things I want to add to my life that will make me feel calmer and happier. (If you don’t have any goals or ideas think of anything you want in this world to achieve, or learn, or earn and write it down and imagine how it would feel if you had it right now. It helps push you to realize you can shape your life how you want)

that someone in this world loves you. If you can’t name anyone. Your own body loves you. It keeps you alive and gives you the ability to experience things like eating yummy food, being able to pet an animal and feel how soft their fur is, being able to look up at the sky and see stars or clouds. Simple every day things that we take for granted because we get so stressed out from life and drama. Sometimes we forget we could lose our eyesight and we wouldn’t be able to see things or people that we love. We could get injured and never be able to walk, run or jump again. We could lose our ability to breathe and be hooked up to a ventilator. I like to write down anything I can think of to be grateful for everyday in my journal and it makes me feel less depressed, less anxious,and excited to be able to just .. be alive especially when I want to not be alive anymore

I remind myself that when I was a baby I didn’t have any thoughts I didn’t know shit. The way I grew up and had to experience life made it so I perceive life the way I do. I like to imagine if I was a blank slate what are the different ways I could look at my life? What are the ways I can decide to look at situations or myself? People don’t just wake up and love themselves they were taught to feel loved. Just like how we don’t wake up with these negative self hateful thoughts. We got them from somewhere. We can choose if we want to still believe our perceptions or not. But learning to be happy and to love ourself is like a skill. Just like how learning to hate ourselves took time and repeated experiences.

Self care / Self love activities

imagining an older version of myself comforting present me. And imagining myself currently to comfort past me during traumatic moments

bubble baths

napping with soothing audios, or sleep meditations

walking outside

calling a friend

visiting a family member or friend

Write yourself a note when you’re happy to yourself and read it when you’re upset

Make a voice memo give future you a pep talk, positive affirmations, or even guided meditations and listen to it when you’re upset

lighting a candle and writing down an intention and meditating or you can pray if you believe in a god or have a religion. Or if you just believe in the universe and law of attraction

journaling

cleaning or tidying up a little

eating a yummy but healthy snack

cooking or baking

(if I’m severely not okay) holding an ice cube, running my hands in cold water and splashing the water in my face, taking a cold shower, taking a rubber band on my wrist and snapping it back

reading a book

watching my favorite tv show or movie

watching a comedy

playing music and forcing myself to dance (when I’m alone of course 😅)

yoga

exercising

watching cute animal videos on YouTube

Singing in the shower

Adult coloring books

some type of video about philosophy that reminds me that I’m not alone and we are all lost

some type of video that reminds me how beautiful life can be

some type of video that reminds me that I’m not in control of my circumstance, my genetics, or the world but I’m in control of how I react that I’m the one that gives power to my thoughts

Breaking thought patterns, bad habits and doing self care every day helps immensely. Over time it gets easier and easier to feel okay and to even feel happy. But never stop doing these things for the rest of your life. You either feed the negative thoughts or you feed the positive. You either feed the negative habits or you feed the bad. You get to choose. Seek help, and be gentle with yourself. Healing isn’t linear.

hey there! if you dont mind me asking, what does programmed mean coming from a traumagenic system? ive only ever seen endos use that one so im curious what it means to someone who Legitimately has DID. /gen thank you! :-)

Hi, I'll answer this the best I can.

Programmed means that someone has undergone trauma programming. It's not exclusive to dissociative systems either - a singlet can also be programmed.

If you've been trauma programmed it just means that somebody has purposely used a more "organised" form of abuse to change or control you, and it leaves an imprint on who you are.

In systems this can mean having alters who behave in a way / have an identity that suits an abuser's preference, but it can also be done to singlets in small ways such as an abuser programming you to have a phobia of something.

But essentially, it's when an abuser has purposely used abuse and/or stressors to change the way you think or behave.

Honestly I don't know how an endo could claim to be trauma programmed bc that would mean they're not endogenic. To be programmed you literally have to undergo immense trauma that's how it works. But that's what it means anyway.

- Leo

Always judging

Satanic Panic, The False Memory Foundation’s Shaky Origins, and Why You Should Believe RAMCOA Survivors

(TW: mentions of RAMCOA, False Memory Foundation, child torture & death, cults, trafficking)

Pretty disappointed to see a fairly popular and well known blog on tumblr is encouraging the idea that RAMCOA doesn’t exist. Just came across this post and was pretty bummed to see the comments too.

For those that agree with them (most of my followers won’t but who knows who will stumble across this), please know that RAMCOA has been going on for much longer than the Satanic Panic. The Satanic Panic was fabricated in an effort to discredit RAMCOA survivors. It was supported by the False Memory Foundation, which was created by a man (and his wife) trying to prove his daughter’s repressed memories of trauma involving him did not really happen. [Explained further in the third article further down in this post]

For the record, false memory/planting false memories has been disproven, it’s not possible to fully plant false memories in patients. Some memories can be altered to an extent because memories can be disjointed and influence from others can cause memories to shift slightly, which is why it’s not encouraged for trauma patients to share exact detailed memories with each other. For example, if two trauma patients were abused by their father and had a similar situation happen and patient A spoke about their experience in detail, if both fathers wore glasses and patient A describes their father to have black rimmed glasses, patient B’s memory might shift to believe that their father also had black rimmed glasses, even though his glasses were gold rimmed. However, it’s not possible to fully plant memories that do not exist in a patient’s memory. The “base memory” so to speak has to be there in order for any alterations to occur, and those alterations that are possible are often rather minuscule, such as glasses or whether or not their abuser had facial hair or not, or the color of the person’s eyes. Not an entire scene of RA. [Again, explained well by the third article below.]

Repressed memory has been proven to exist. (Though it’s more accurately called dissociated memories by clinicians) It can even exist in people who have traumas that happen in adulthood. Pieces of a traumatic event may go missing in a patient’s working memory, and they may not retrieve it until they are ready to process the memory and all the emotions and information that comes with it. However, it still exists stored in the brain, just in a different area than working memory. It’s why triggers to the traumatic event (that the patient may not even realize are triggers until they occur) can cause flashbacks and memory resurfacing during said flashbacks.

Some sources explaining the False Memory Foundation and the harm they’ve caused: [a good overview of a woman who was major in the development of the idea of repressed memory being a myth, by a researcher of child psychiatry], [while this is a psychology today article, I think this explains well how misused the idea of FMS - false memory syndrome - is.] [A comprehensive article explaining the roots of the FMF and how the studies used to “prove” false memory are terrible and easily debunked, with several assertions from professionals in the field.] I want to add that while the FMF has dissolved and rightfully so, the British False Memory Society is still alive and well, as well as the Satanic Temple’s Grey Faction, and both groups still cite False Memory Syndrome as being real and claim that RAMCOA survivors have false memories of their abuse.

However, before Satanic Panic happened, people were starting to actually believe in the existence of RAMCOA and the concept of DID was brought into the mainstream. A survivor on tiktok has a very good video on this situation. And that scared people, especially the abusers themselves who didn’t want to get caught. That’s when the False Memory Foundation stepped in on the heels of Satanic Panic and literally rewrote the textbooks therapists learned from, and basically taught everyone that repressed memory doesn’t exist. Any therapists that spoke about their patients’ experiences with RAMCOA were sued. Therapists stopped wanting to treat RAMCOA patients for fear of being sued and/or losing their license or being told they planted these memories in their patients’ heads and possibly losing their licenses. It led to generations of old therapists not treating RAMCOA patients and generations of new therapists learning it doesn’t exist.

But it does exist. To outright deny that child torture cannot exist is absurd. 1-2% of reported child abuse falls under the definition of child torture. [source, TW: photos of children with serious injuries from torture included on page 7 of this document] For the record, my abuse was never and has never been reported, and most survivors—RAMCOA and non-RAMCOA, whose trauma falls under the definition of torture—never reported or plan to report.

Even if you find the mind control aspect to be far-fetched, ritual abuse most certainly does exist. I’ve seen videos on the surface web on fucking tiktok of all places of child torture and ritual abuse. Organized abuse such as sex trafficking and labor trafficking does exist. Two out of those three things in the acronym are well documented to exist. And for the record, ritual abuse and cult abuse even in adults can cause extreme mind and identity alteration, upwards to the point of nearly being mind control. Look up OSDD-2 in the DSM-V. Look up just about any cult survivors testimonies and hear how they talk about how they nearly became a different person within their cult, how the cult uses torture and mind altering drugs to get their initiates to commit terrible acts of violence to each other. Now imagine if that same stuff were happening to a child whose mind is significantly easier to mold and change. Even if the child RAMCOA survivor does not develop DID, it can cause extreme conditioned responses in which the child (or now grown adult or teen) will still do the responses even now because as a child they were threatened with torture or death if they didn’t do it.

Mind control is essentially an extreme form of conditioning, and with the plethoras of research on DID and how it functions, it’s not even a difficult concept to grasp that a cult member might learn how to split new alters in a child via torture and then manipulate those alters to do what they want individually. Anyone who knows fuck all about DID knows that alters can be triggered out via positive and negative triggers. All mind control programming is, is creating a specific trigger for a specific alter and then when that child is exposed to that trigger, that alter comes out and does the task it was taught to do—usually via torture, manipulation, and threats of harm to the child or those the child loves. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, and with how long TBMC (torture based mind control) programmers have had to perfect their work, it’s no surprise that they’ve learned how to make alters do extremely complex tasks or hold onto specific functions, always at the ready for their specific trigger.

RAMCOA research doesn’t exist in mainstream spaces because it’s nearly impossible to be taken seriously because of people who claim it doesn’t exist when it’s not even a complex topic to understand. They just don’t want to accept that it exists. The concept is terrifying, harrowing, and at some times almost absurd—and that combination makes it easier for people to put their blinders up and decide it doesn’t exist. [Edited to add: On top of this, what little research is done on it is steeped in conspiracy theories that often have roots in antisemitism. While I’ve asserted that Miller’s deprogramming books are good reads for RAMCOA survivors, she does often sound conspiratorial, and quotes Svali, a known antisemite. While I don’t think RAMCOA is exclusively related to the Illuminati stuff she often talks about, Miller’s work cannot be completely discounted because of her beliefs of where the abuse originated. Where it originates matters much less than the fact that it happens. However, not from dark, underground, secret societies—but from normal places like churches, children’s own homes (yes, RAMCOA can be done by a single parent to a single child, it just may look different than say, a trafficking ring), trafficking rings, militaristic groups, political cults, etc. I wanted to put the above put there because I know someone is going to come at me and try to say the researchers who talk about it were conspiracy theorists. Yeah, they were. Maybe they were the only ones willing to talk openly about it because of the fact they’re conspiracy theorists? I don’t know. However, I think it should also be noted that just because the researchers sucked doesn’t mean the information taken from them isn’t useful when you weed out the conspiracy stuff. For example, a LOT of modern understanding of medicine was taken from Nazi and Japanese experiments during WWII. Arguably some of the worst doctors on earth. Do we discount everything we learned because they were horrible, evil, people? No. While those who studied RAMCOA went about it in shit ways, that doesn’t discount the information learned completely. Likewise, much of modern psych understanding came from roots that included incredibly unethical experiments that would never be allowed today. Do we throw out all of that info too? No, we don’t. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hold these people accountable, I’m saying we cannot throw out all discussion of RAMCOA because the doctors who talked about it were shitty people.]

I wish I could decide it doesn’t exist. I have permanent scarring that proves what happened did happen. I have doctor’s visits that prove I am disabled because of the traumas I went through. I have a DID specialist who didn’t even know programming to our extent even existed before our parts started telling her what they went through and she heard it from our own mouth. She had to learn how to deprogram us on the fly because she’d never done so before. So fuck off with your “oh, RAMCOA patients only have RAMCOA because they’ve been influenced by their therapist to believe they do” bullshit.

I relive my traumas in flashbacks and nightmares daily. There have been periods in my healing process where I couldn’t leave the house without someone with me for months. I couldn’t hold a job for nearly a year. I didn’t know any of this happened to me until I was in my 20s. I thought my memory was just bad and the only parts of my childhood I remembered were little blips of good things, usually involving my parent that was not involved with the cult or memories with friends at school or when I was hanging out with my sports teammates. Living with this stuff is hell. You think I want to live with this stuff? If I could permanently erase it all from my memory forever I would. But I can’t. I don’t have that luxury.

It happened. And I’m not the only child it happened to, both in the area of my country I live in and in areas all over my country and the world. This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is more common than anyone tends to realize (though still rarer than most DID cases, thank fuck). I was lucky to survive. I survived because they wanted me to. I saw a lot of children, teens, and adults who were not as “lucky” as I was. If you won’t respect survivors and their stories, at least respect the ones who didn’t survive. They didn’t deserve their final moments to be so full of pain. All of the children in these groups deserved to be loved and cared for and treated with softness and compassion. So do adult survivors like me and many others.

If I could end on one thing, it would be to urge the doubters to have some fucking compassion and empathy for people who have been through things they cannot even begin to understand. My past feels like a nightmare I will never be able to escape. I cannot erase it. I can only try to heal from it. So heal I will do, and in the process I will continue to speak the truth of my experience as safely as I can.

You want proof it’s real? Survivors are your proof.

WE are the proof.

[Edit: changed some wording for clarification + added a section after rereading a couple hours later]

[Edit 2: I realized I said my abuse has never been reported, I meant my RAMCOA related abuse. Want to make that clear. I reported sexual abuse done by my church to CPS and nothing came of it. CPS actually wrongfully claimed that since they had no reports existing of that church harming kids they wouldn’t pursue it since it happened so long ago, when a cursory google search of said location shows they’ve been reported multiple times and all reports were dropped. Why, I’m not sure.]

Fun Trauma Things :)

Feeling betrayed when people defend or sympathize with your abuser(s)

Severe abandonment issues

Constantly questioning if you deserved the abuse

Am I actually a terrible person or am I just internalizing things my abuser(s) have said to me??

Purposefully seeking out toxic relationships to further destroy your mental health

Restoring to destructive coping mechanisms because you never learned how to self-soothe

Having a panic attack when someone raises their voice at you

Constantly reinventing yourself because you’re paranoid about turning into your abuser(s)

Never being completely certain which memories are real

Difficulty creating and maintaining close relationships due to trust issues

Tons of uncertainty regarding your religious identity

What if I’m just faking everything for attention?

Fluctuating between hating yourself and hating your abuser(s)

Hypersexuality and other forms of sexual dysfunction

Craving abuse and mistreatment and despising yourself for it

Denying yourself love and comfort because you want to suffer alone and you don’t even deserve it anyways

Picking up on the slightest change of tone in someone’s voice

Projecting the mentality of your abuser(s) onto everyone you know, because if one person who you’re close with can hurt you, so can every other person too!

Maybe I was the abuser all along? Maybe I’m just being manipulative and selfish and I’m actually a horrible abusive monster??

Minuscule, insignificant things reminding you of The Bad Memories and inducing a mental breakdown

Wishing your abuser(s) had just killed you instead of leaving you alive to suffer for the rest of your life

Dissociating for weeks on end, then suddenly having an explosive meltdown because you spilled your cereal

Feeling angry at everyone around you for never noticing the blatantly obvious symptoms of early-onset trauma

Persistent feelings of worthlessness, because if your abuser(s) don’t love you, it must mean you’re completely unlovable

Connecting the dots between traumatic memories and mental health issues you have while psychoanalyzing yourself in the shower

Inescapable suicidal thoughts at all times, always

I have a question, for systems whove never switched before/have someone frontstuck, how do you deal with that? Like how do you get them unfrontstuck? Our host has been frontstuck for two years and we dont know what to do and we’re desperate at this point

here's some resources for switching:

https://plural.systems/posts/switching/

https://www.feathersong.org/plural-howto/feathers-guide-to-fronting-and-switching/

https://gist.github.com/Xe/b97203769acb3dfa761f#malfaels-guide-to-switching

https://write.as/within/switching

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/1cigb6/selfawarebots_switching_guide/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/2f7ysm/guide_so_you_wanna_switch_do_you_really_might_be/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/5gaqye/a_quick_switching_practice_selftest_miniguide/

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/plural/comments/gk4a0z/learning_to_switch_voluntarily/

a lot of these are for tulpas, but should still work for any system

Disorganized Attachment and Dissociation

As promised, Anon, here’s a VERY quick and dirty rundown of disorganized attachment and the role it plays in the development of dissociation. Sorry it took so long ;–; This doesn’t even begin to cover it, but I hope it at least gives people a basic understanding.

Please remember, this is so incredibly brief and barely scratches the surface. It’s a really interesting field of research, and it has a lot of important (and good!) implications to therapy techniques and models. I highly encourage people that are interested to look through some of the below resources, or make a request for any specific aspects you want discussed further. Apparently, left to my own devices with a broad topic, I fail to be coherent.

What is disorganized attachment (DA)?

There are technically 4 types of attachment between a child and caregiver, differentiated by response patterns. The first 3 types (secure, insecure-avoidant, and insecure-ambivalent) are considered forms of “organized attachment”, despite the negative behaviours associated with it, because even if they’re not “secure”, the behaviour patterns are still organized and, more importantly, consistent. In other words, in all 3 types of organized attachment, the child knows exactly what they need to do to meet their emotional needs, and the patterns in their behaviour are considered organized.

In DA, though, the child is confused, and there’s no pattern to their behaviour. They’re torn between wanting to flee to, and flee from the caregiver. When a caregiver is unpredictable and traumatizing, the child has a difficult time establishing a consistent view of the caregiver, and of themselves. In other words, the caregiver is both needed, and someone to be avoided, and the child may not understand what makes them a “good” or “bad” child, as the caregiver’s behavior is often confusing and unpredictable.

It’s summed up quite well in this image:

What causes disorganized attachment?

All the same standard things you would already know about. Abuse, neglect, behaviour that’s frightening, intrusive or insensitive, and disrupted affective communication, but it really boils down to, “A parent’s consistent failure to respond appropriately to their child’s distress, or by a parent’s inconsistent response to their child’s feelings of fear or distress.” And this happens in childhood. The way a baby or very young child form attachments are the base building blocks that a child will use to build their relationships with people in the future. 

It’s important to note that it’s not just abuse that can cause a child to form DA. Sometimes loving caregivers who have experienced trauma themselves can behave in confusing ways toward the child, especially if they are suffering untreated PTSD or DID themselves. This happens because of the caregiver’s own inability to control their emotions. Traumatized parents can have a difficult time managing their emotions and providing a sense of security for the child even though they are not abusive or neglectful. Anger or fear can erupt unexpectedly and traumatize the child. 

As well, “Disorganized attachment is often the result of intergenerational parenting patterns. This means parents are responding to their children in the same unhealthy ways their own parents responded to them when they were children.”

What role does disorganized attachment play in dissociation?

This one is… A bit tough. There’s a lot of factors in play and so much ground to cover.

First, when discussing dissociation, it’s talking about it in a general sense. Everyone is capable of dissociating, and it’s simply when you become detached from reality in response to trauma– at any age, for any kind of traumatic event.  It’s also important to note that without a secure attachment style, an overwhelming event is more likely to be perceived as trauma. Basically, though, dissociation is a general symptom in this regard, not specific to any single disorder. DA is linked to dissociation, and from there, combined with other symptoms someone may be experiencing, it can become problematic and be assigned to specific mental disorders. 

So, the child needs to maintain a relationship with the caregiver– they have no one else to turn to, so the child can develop dissociation as a way to make sense of themselves, and to maintain a child-caregiver relationship. They may “forget” the abuse, or deny it. “It is an adaptive and defensive strategy that enables the child to function within the relationship, but it often leads to the development of a fragmented sense of self.” This fragmented sense of self may or may not develop into something worse– namely, BPD and DID based on severity, frequency, and whether there was any sense of reprieve (i.e. a child can avoid the worst of dissociative symptoms if one of their parents was more supportive, because it helps them build some positive attachments).

Children with DA and suffering from abuse “are likely to generate two or more dissociated self states, with contradictory working models of attachment,” in order to handle their confusing relationship with the caregiver. From there, “It is proposed that the propensity to react to traumatic events with dissociation is related to disorganization of early attachment and its developmental sequelae.” This is fundamentally the basis of why DID can’t form once the child creates an integrated sense of self. It is theorized that DA and dissociative disorders are inexplicably linked together. You can have DA and not develop DID/OSDD, but you can’t have DID/OSDD without DA. 

A lot of new research is suggesting that it’s not so much trauma as we know it (physical and sexual abuse) that is linked to dissociation, but that trauma is something that is far more discrete and insidious (longterm inconsistent and confusing parenting styles linked to DA) and that it’s only part of “a complex web of environmental, societal, familial, and genetic factors that are all likely to interact in ways that we have only begun to understand.” This is something I firmly believe in and attribute to a lot of the endogenic claims of having no trauma (and under this theory, “overwhelming events” also constitute trauma). 

Interestingly, it’s theorized that different types of attachment are linked to different mental disorders. “Attachment insecurity can therefore be viewed as a general vulnerability to mental disorders, with the particular symptomatology depending on genetic, developmental, and environmental factors.” Going back to the 4 types of attachment, the 3 insecure types can be linked to basically all types of disorders. They are all linked to depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, eating disorders and suicidal tendencies, but those with anxious attachment are more likely to develop things like DPD, HPD and BPD and are drawn to co-dependent relationships. Those with avoidant attachment are more likely to develop things like SPD and APD and form addictive habits, and those with disorganized attachment are more likely to develop DID/OSDD. 

Sources:

Identifying Attachment Problems

How Disorganized Attachment Can Lead to Dissociation

Disorganized Attachment

Disorganized Attachment, Development of Dissociated Self States, and a Relational Approach to Treatment

Trauma, Dissociation, and Disorganized Attachment: Three Strands of a Single Braid

From Infant Attachment Disorganization to Adult Dissociation: Relational Adaptations or Traumatic Experiences?

An attachment perspective on psychopathology

Fragmented Child: Disorganized Attachment and Dissociation

If you're going to be "transRAMCOA", I'm going to demand that you start by paying reparations to all the real survivors out there.

My therapy with a DID and RAMCOA specialist (very hard to find, btw) costs me almost $7000 a year. Let's start there, shall we? That's almost $600 a month. Just on therapy. That I am incredibly lucky to have access to. Most survivors are shit out of luck and have to try to heal without a specialist.

I've lost untold amounts (hundreds of thousands at least) in lost income opportunities because of how disabling being a survivor is. I can't work a regular full time job and will probably never be able to. I've been "working" (read: pimped out by my own parents) since I was a little kid but the skills of a child sex worker aren't exactly transferable to the normie world, y'know?

I get by with a lot of help from some understanding roommates and friends that I'm lucky, VERY lucky, to have. This is to say nothing about the *quality* of that life (not great) beyond what capitalism or money cares about, because of course I'm constantly Experiencing Symptoms. On account of all of the trauma.

I can't even go to the bathroom like a normal person because of how much the constant rape fucked everything up downstairs. There is no fixing this. I will deal with many of the medical and mental complications for the rest of my life and this is just one of them. (Does it still sound like a fun thing to roleplay?)

The first ~20 years of my life were a living hell beyond what most of you can even imagine. My life is also statistically likely to be much shorter than the average person's. What kind of price can I even put on all those lost years? I can't. But you could pay me enough to not have to work for all the years remaining to me. If you want to pay me, say.... $100k a year for the rest of my life so that I can live what little is left to me in peace, then I would be happy to consider you an honorary RAMCOA survivor. I'll even write you a nice little certificate you can frame. I'll give you regular updates on how my therapy is going, so you can (sort of, not really though, you could never understand if you haven't lived it) experience this mAgIcAL hEaLiNg jOuRneY vicariously through me.

Go on, then. You want to be us so bad? Find a REAL survivor, and pay up. Otherwise get the fuck out of my community and stay out. Surviving RAMCOA is not a fun little identity label for you to play around with, it's REAL shit that ruins the lives of REAL people every day. I live with this, EVERY day. It's not a fun little game I can stop when I get tired of playing. This is my LIFE.

So pay up, or fuck off.

i’ve been told by a lot of people that robot alters who do what they’re told are from programming only. this is really scary to me because i did not experience that despite having an alter like that. i think if i had heard this as a younger system it would have made me very scared and convinced me of things that didn’t happen. can you share your thoughts on this?

Hi,

Blaming any presentation of DID or alters strictly on programming is a horrible idea. You're right that these kinds of claims are a major risk for false memories of ritual abuse, especially for young, newly diagnosed systems who are struggling immensely, still coming to terms with their symptoms and abuse history, and might be overly quick to take anything that older and seemingly authoritative systems claim at face value. I've heard of these types of claims going around for polyfragmentation, subsystems, internal worlds, and non-human alters. None of them are true. 

There are many reasons that someone could have a robot alter that does what it's told. It could be a metaphor for feeling like one's parents treated them like a robot instead of a child. It could have arisen from feeling like one's parents would have loved them more or punished them less if they were an obedient robot instead of a disobedient child. It could have been influenced by media that struck a cord regarding how robots were shown being treated or viewed by society. There's no reason whatsoever to assume robot parts or any other type of part automatically indicates any organized abuse, let alone programming.

There is no single or even combination of factors that can definitively indicate that someone experienced ritual abuse, programming, or any other type of trauma. Only actual memories (preferably continuous or spontaneously recovered, not recovered through hypnotherapy, creative writing, dream interpretation, or other potentially suggestive processes) or external corroboration of abuse can be trusted. No one should ever retroactively make assumptions about one’s abuse experiences based on adult symptoms, and no one should ever deny or downplay adult symptoms because they don’t have any of the causes that the individual has come to expect. That isn’t how mental health or DID/OSDD-1 work. That is how the Satanic ritual abuse panic got so incredibly out of hand. 

I’m glad that you were able to recognize that your robot part doesn’t indicate programming, and I appreciate you alerting us of this and giving us the opportunity to debunk it. 

I hope this helps,

Katherine