Being An Autistic HC-DID System-or Really Any Part/person That Experienced Torture And Is Autistic-is

Things we as a RAMCOA survivor want non-survivors to know

This is going to be emotional but this has also been a long time coming. Most of our 34 drafts on this account have been on this topic and today something happened that was just the last straw for us. If you are not a survivor sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. It's our turn now. You are privileged comparatively on this regard- whether you like it or not.

Do not silence RAMCOA survivors in favor of people with "false memories"

I have no idea why this is something that needs to be said because you would assume it would be common decency but apparently a lot of non-RAMCOA survivors seem to be completely unaware of how fucked up it is to say.

Not only has false memory syndrome been thoroughly debunked- but the only time someone has anything close is when they have a disorder that makes them prone to delusions. In which case that is a delusion. Stop blaming survivors who are working to recover and possibly save the lives of others who currently as you read this are actively being tortured, for a disorder that most people are born with and has literally nothing to do with us. Stop using "some people have delusions" as a backhanded way to harm RAMCOA survivors.

I am sick and tired of people making it clear they care far more about people with "false memories" than they do for real torture survivors.

Do not tell a RAMCOA survivor to their face you have had false memories of the torture they actively endured. It is incredibly insensitive and is a mockery of the torture they experienced.

And if one more "person" makes the claim that RAMCOA survivors talking about our experiences, the things that were done to us and others, is putting people with a disorder we didn't cause in danger- I will snap. We didn't give anyone a disorder- we didn't manifest your fucking delusions. You can work through your delusions in therapy- we have physical and mental injuries that will never fully heal from our REAL experience. It is such a disgusting and selfish thing to do. You are not allies- you are harming all survivors.

Stop telling RAMCOA survivors to never look into things

It's funny how this is often done in order to try and aid and help us, considering not having the terminology almost got us killed.

Non-ramcoa survivors telling RAMCOA survivors that talking about RAMCOA is dangerous and they should never look into it are actively harming programmed systems by triggering silence programs and making them self-destruct and get less access to aid, community, and terminology to be able to explain experiences to a medical professional and there has been little to no proof that learning about RAMCOA has ever killed a RAMCOA survivor.

People who push this idea that "it's too dangerous for you :((" and shut down all ramcoa survivors and then try to destroy our community terms like HC-DID (highly complex; this is used to described programmed systems that are polyfragmented and their complex structures) because of some idea of being a glorious savior to us- are just being incredibly selfish and insensitive. It has never been about helping us, not ever. It has been about you and people like you wanting to feel like you're oh so cool and good and special. That you "really care" about the likes of the poor weak incapable RAMCOA survivors.

We don't need to be babied. We fucking crawled out of the bowels of hell itself and have been through things that people often don't survive. Some of us have to fight programs every day- before and after knowing about our survivor status. Omega programming didn't start when we learned about RAMCOA- it first kicked off when we were nine years old. You failing to educate yourselves on the way programming functions yet insisting on speaking for us and people like us is infuriating. We are not children and even the ones that are do not fucking need you to baby them.

The only people we have ever seen proclaim talking about how "speaking on RAMCOA is bad and dangerous!!!!" are one of two groups; Non ramcoa-survivors speaking for us, and RAMCOA survivors with a program actively causing them to say this. In case you don't know much about programming, there is programs that make you try and silence both yourself and other people. This is one of the most well known types of programs. I am sorry to say this but we genuinely believe that most if not all RAMCOA survivors saying this are having a program run.

People pushing this message onto us literally triggered our silence program for so long we couldn't say much to our therapist until we learned terminology. It took that for us to be put on a disappearance watch list. This community idea could have gotten us killed. We were in literal danger because we could not manage to tell our therapist about our experiences because others had said the very same words our abusers did. "Don't tell anyone."

RAMCOA perpetrators do fucking everything they can to make sure we never speak. You are aiding abusers by contributing to our silence and you are possibly sending people to die. This is not a thing I can be lighthearted about. This is something that has made our system have alters that deeply hate and despise anyone who contributed to it with us and the same to anyone who may have done so to others.

Edit: For those who struggle to interpret this- no we never said you should randomly spur of the moment look into RAMCOA with no safety nets. That should be common sense. We also literally never said that anywhere. I don't know why people are so incapable to read what we say. We're autistic we say what we mean.

Can you explain what a shell alter is and what their purpose is? /gen

Shell alters are a dissociated system member who is fronting all the time, or almost all the time. They often lack elaboration. Shells work as an interface between the rest of the system & the outside world by never leaving front, and having the rest of the system either blending with them temporariality or being forced into co-consciousness. This serves a few purposes; make the system more covert, mask inter-switch amnesia, blunt or filter out emotions/urges/etc. from the rest of the system, and more. It's uncommon, but there can be multiple shells one system, serving different subroles.

In some cases of OSDD-1a, the shell is the "unified" identity. Think like, if the system is made up of "angry Sarah", "scared Sarah", "work Sarah", etc., that shell would be the "Sarah" identity.

They're most commonly seen in OSDD-1a, but can come up in other forms of multiplicity, like DID, but typically when RAMCOA is in the picture. Although it can be daunting, healing with a shell is possible. You can reached out to them, they can be integrated, they gain more elaboration, etc etc. Whatever healing path works for you.

We don't have a shell, but I'm sure some pwDID/OSDD on this hellsite (affectionate) have talked about their experiences with them more in depth. There isn't a ton of research on them — many sites point to Alison Miller's books, but there's no actual like, raw data, just summations of what's she's found in her practice/case studies — so take that as you will.

Each shell is a different, and different systems may use slightly different definitions. Hopefully this was a good overview. -Aisling

I am just going to say this outright and bare with me until the last paragraph. The idea that "the few people who are faking this disorder aren't actually hurting real people with DID or taking away resources" is demonstrably false. I check around sometimes for other people looking for dissociative specialists and ever since ~2019/8, if I call and ask a therapist if they have experience with DID their questions are "does this person spend a lot of time on social media" and "have they actually been diagnosed with DID before." I've met therapists who took their dissociation specialty off of their websites because they kept getting tons of calls from people who were seeking a diagnosis and they could not keep up.

This trend where large amounts of people are claiming to have RAMCOA and polyfragmentation within the past few years, which a significantly smaller number of specialists believe in and treat, IS going to detrimentally affect survivors even quicker and harder than general DID where there are a larger amount of people involved both professionally and not. I called this a few years ago that sometime in the future polyfragmentation would be commonly considered a "fake marker" (just as prior community trends turned into "fake markers" like introjects and kid parts) and that's already started.

We need to be able to talk about community issues like this from a practical perspective for people who need those resources, without it turning into a validation discussion or a discussion about malingering or pointless discourse. We need to step away from "shoulds"--yes it is true that practitioners should not let these things affect their overall care, but it does and simply saying it should not be that way doesn't fix anything. We need practical discussions that say "We are at this point. Now what?"

MARCH 2022

Read:

Changing Your Mind Can Make You Less Anxious

Life in the Stacks: A Love Letter to Browsing

Excerpt from We Learn Nothing, by Tim Kreider

World wide open (How deep brain stimulation changes a person’s sense of confidence)

How to gain more from your reading

Assertiveness is a virtue that anyone can develop with practice

Lies and honest mistakes

The Pandemic Did Not Affect Mental Health the Way You Think

The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know

“Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” is an actual science paper accepted by a journal

Imagine you could insert knowledge into your mind: should you?*

Want to know, even if it hurts? You must be a truth masochist

Mental disorders are brain disorders - here’s why that matters

Forget morality

Unlocking the ‘gut microbiome’ - and its massive significance to our health

Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility

In praise of habits - so much more than mindless reflexes

How Social Media Shapes Our Identity

The Forgotten Women of the Antibiotics Race

Diagnosis as Detective Work: Lisa Sanders and the Art of Not Knowing

Do Brain Implants Change Your Identity?

The Promise and the Peril of Virtual Health Care

Adam Savage on Lists, More Lists, and the Power of Checkboxes

What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion

How to find focus

Biotechnology Greed Is Prolonging the Pandemic. It’s Inexcusable.

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid

In praise of possibility

Empathy is, at heart, an aesthetic appreciation of the other

‘I Can’t Stop Trying to Be Perfect!’

Reports of a Baleful Internet Are Greatly Exaggerated

How to Unlearn a Disease

Can Reading Make You Happier?

Expert by Roger Kneebone

Watched:

Vaccines & Freedom

Succession - The Toxic Culture of Success

the problem with plastic surgery

L to the OG: How Succession Uses Music**

Peaky Blinders (S6)

Dopesick

Listened To:

I’m still going round the same playlist as last month

Went To:

Life Through A Royal Lens @ Kensington Palace

Swan Lake @ Royal Opera House

rusalki are not mermaids. stop translating the word "rusalka" as "mermaid" and stop calling rusalki "slavic mermaids". it's confusing, it's misleading, and it's simply isn't true. the association of rusalka with a western mermaid and undine began in 19th century, when russian empire poets wanted to adapt a popular western motif of a sorrowful water maid that is unrequitedly in love with a mortal man. this literature character of rusalka has nothing to do with actual rusalki folklore and cult.

rusalki are natural undead spirits that are connected to slavic ancestral worship. they don't have tails. they are not in any way connected to the sea: only lakes, ponds, and rivers. often, they're not even connected to water at all: there are forest rusalki, field rusalki, meadow rusalki, etc. they are in close relationships with their human kin: during the spring and summer, they are used in agricultural rites and are believed to help with farming and raising crops. rusalki were sacred to slavic people. the "week of the rusalki" festival, when rusalki are believed to walk on earth and visit their relatives, is celebrated to this day. to call them "slavic mermaids" is very diminutive of their actual role in slavic cultures.

Thank you for running this blog. I was held in troubled teen industry facilities for all of my teenagerhood, and am severely traumatized as a result, and it's been extremely hard to find words to describe what I went through to other systems or to trauma therapists.

It feels "too much", like there's no way this could all have happened to me, and I've been accused of lying about the organized abuse that went on there. Sometimes it feels almost like i AM lying, though I know I'm not.

Although feeling like I have "too much" trauma is something that I have to continue working on personally, I want to say thank you for pointing me in the direction of a framework that I can research and use that fits me more than any other one I've seen before.

I wish that none of us went through the horrors we went through, but I'm glad that there's a community out there and people talking about the things that have affected me. Thank you again for what you do running this blog.

Before anything else — thank you. This is an incredibly kind message and I'm really glad that you could find solace in this blog. I aim to provide resources that may not be (physically or emotionally) acessible otherwise, and highlight lesser-discussed aspects of RAMCOA.

The troubled teen industry is definitely part of the wider picture of organized abuse, and I wish it was put in that context more. Unfortunately, most discussions of RAMCOA focus on early childhood manifestations, and situations primarily focused on adolescents, adults, seniors aren't as referenced. Basically, the older the victim, the less likely it is to be included in definitions of RAMCOA; which is a shame, because those perspectives are crucial. Abusive care homes & inpatient facilities, prisons, and yes, troubled teen facilities are all forms of organized abuse in my mind, but the strong correlation with pedophile rings and cults has... Alienated? Many people from describing their experiences as OA.

I totally understand the feeling of having "too much trauma", and I feel like many survivors in general, not just ones of RAMCOA, can relate to that sentiment. "It's just too unlikely for all these things to have happened," I'll say to myself, "I must be exaggerating." Something that's helped me is the idea that some predators can smell blood in the water, and if all you know is hardship, it's hard to break out of hardship. Experiencing layers of trauma isn't... Rare, and you're not lying about it.

Once again, thank you. If you need any resources specific to the troubled teen industry, let me know. There's not a ton of research on it in the context of RAMCOA like I said, but I'm sure I'll find something of use.

Wishing you a gentle and fulfilling recovery. Aisling

Halloween has rolled around, and that means an inevitable rise in “Halloween is bad because of SRA” stuff, and while the temptation to joke about and poke fun at that type of content is overwhelming, I think it is a great opportunity to draw attention to how many RA awareness efforts center around a Christian narrative. People see RA as a spiritual issue and not a physical one. RA is an issue that comes from a need to control people through brutal methods as other people in power selfishly turn their backs on the well-being of children and abuse victims. The guilty protect the guilty, and this involves a lot of people who are powerful, wealthy, and well-respected (although it is important to avoid baseless accusations against anyone – looking at those of you who find random Democrats to shit on and decide they are Satanic ritual abusers because their pupils looked weird in a video). But the rise in SRA accusations in the 80s and 90s poured fuel on an already existing widespread panic about Satanism, leading to everything from Dungeons and Dragons to furbies being declared as part of the problem. Instead of focusing on the pervasiveness of institutional and cult abuse as well as the corruption of people in power as the problems that are central to RA, Christians began to view Satanic and occult influence as the problem. They heard the “Satan” in Satanic ritual abuse and decided that was the main issue. Essentially, Christians were using the problem of ritual abuse as a tool to push their own religious beliefs, as they do with many other things.

And this pattern continues to this day, with people deciding that Satanism and the occult are the main sources of danger, not the systems that were built by and for abusers and actively work against victims. Instead of fearing abusers, they fear Halloween, heavy metal, and plastic devil horns from costume stores. All of which are pretty fucking awesome.

If the people who were targeting Satanism targeted these issues instead, more people would be aware of and care about RA, and so many victims wouldn’t go unheard. Make no mistake, it is Satan they fear, not child abuse. And the way they are fixated on Halloween and Satanic imagery in music videos instead of bringing about real systemic change and drawing attention to evidence…that is proof.

**This is not at people who genuinely struggle on Halloween or are triggered by the holiday**

As a RAMCOA survivor I don't feel safe in the CDD community or the plural community. Both sides villainize us while also doing performative allyship and pretending to care about survivors. We're evil if we come forward and save our childhood friends and loved ones. We're evil if we share information to help survivors know why they're experiencing what they're experiencing. Our therapist is supposed to magically figure out what exact symptoms were experiencing without us ever voicing anything because we don't have the language to explain it. We're always told to shut up and be quiet and then non-survivors get to walk all over us and speak for us without ever considering that maybe it's not their place to EVER get involved in any form of discourse around what we can do or not. Quite literally this is a case of oppressors speaking for those they oppress. Broader society also wants us to be silent because we're seen as too depressing. Too much. It's seen as normal and okay to encourage survivors to let their programming fully take them other as long as it's not the ones that hurt others or dares to make people see scars on you. Then that's a problem but people like us should just disappear and stay silent like our programmers wanted. That's the message that is given so often when people talk about us. The other message is we would be better off dead than dare speak.

do not know how to word my feelings on your post, but it feels very strange to say that because your DID experiences are misery, that means DID itself is miserable, and to imply that non-DID-having bodies can't experience being a system is weird.

yes, what you went through sounds awful, and yes, DID to you would be miserable, but DID does not mean misery. it means (some level of) disorder. for people who are polyfragmented (especially through things like RAMCOA/TBMC), yes, this CAN mean a LOT of misery, but us systems who do not suffer with that same level of misery aren't less of a system because of that difference.

while you can explain your experiences as more painful in your perspective, playing trauma olympics and denying other people's own experiences is weird. it's heavily invalidating, especially as someone who would probably fall under a disordered traumagenic diagnosis, and who loves their system and who sees it as hope and not misery (as it is the light in the darkness, the company that protected me through terrible things. that is not misery for me)

(also, most endogenic systems are not claiming to have DID, not self diagnosed or professionally diagnosed. it is a different kind of plural systemhood that is not connected to having DID. so to say that being endogenic is taking away "everything that DID is about" is just... strange.)

I am not playing the trauma Olympics by saying that what I went through makes me miserable. For you to suggest acknowledging my existence as a trauma survivor is invalidating is really not good.

Also I should clarify: you can love parts and even most of your system, but you cannot deny the fact that it is born out of misery and so it is not all sunshine and rainbows. It comes with PTSD, or one of its forms.

Also, endogenic is taking away everything DID is about because the only scientifically recognized way to be a system is with either DID (or a variant like HC or C), OSDD-1, or UDD. And these, like all dissociative disorders, are trauma disorders. To me being endogenic has always meant cherry picking a glamorized version of the symptoms of these disorders, as I said in the post.

Some explanations about dissociated parts and memory, information from The Haunted Self and paraphrased by yours truly.

Every part deserves to have their piece respected, even if it doesn’t seem to fit in neatly with the others, even if you think it’s weirdly shaped, even if it just seems scary. 

And remember: Puzzles are put together one piece at a time.

[Check out my DID/OSDD casually explained masterpost for sources and more infographics!]