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

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.

Read an article about repressed anger and I'm kinda just messed up because I checked all 15 boxes.

Here's 15 signs you may have repressed anger:

1. You are busy all the time. Keeping busy is a sure fire way to have no time to feel things. This might include being quite codependent, taking care of other people’s issues instead of your own. And it often includes being a workaholic.

2. You are never angry but have constant mild depression. The problem with blocking one emotion is that it often messes up or blocks our ability to feel other emotions, too, like joy and excitement. It also takes a lot of psychological energy to keep things repressed in our minds which can leave us feeling drained, leaving some to call depression ‘anger turned inwards’.

3. You are known for your sarcastic humour.Repressed anger often parades as sarcasm, meanness, or an apathetic ‘I don’t care’ attitude.

4. You self-sabotage often. Perhaps you are always late getting to work, are a student who skips classes, or don’t respond to opportunities you want until it’s too late and you’ve missed the boat.

5. You hate rejection. The habit of repressing anger often stems from growing up in a household where showing emotion led to being silently ostracised. This can leave you a grownup with a deep fear of being rejected that surfaces in your relationships. It can also show up in your work environment, where you might get told you are oversensitive to criticism.

6. Little things really bother you. Perhaps you are the one in the office always complaining if someone puts back the milk carton into the fridge with only a drop left in it, or the one at the gym who feels really upset if someone doesn’t wipe down equipment they have used. This is because bigger repressed anger is seeking an outlet and it comes out in the form of frustration and annoyance.

7. You suffer muscle tension. Anger has to go somewhere, and often it goes to our body, leading to a tense jaw, sore upper back, or a constant tense stomach that can lead to ulcers (if this is you, you might want to try progressive muscle relaxation).

8. You suffer from ongoing fatigue, many colds or flu, or perhaps chronic pain. As well as muscle tension repressed anger can lead to anxiety, which affects sleep, which then lowers your immune system. As for chronic pain, some specialists believe that psychogenic pain (physical pain caused or exacerbated by mental and emotional factors) can be a distraction to keep oneself away from repressed emotions, although this is still considered a controversial theory.

9. You have nervous habits. Things like nail biting, chewing the inside of your mouth, orpicking at your skin can all be signs of repressed anger.

10. You struggle with addictive behaviour. It doesn’t have to be drugs or alcohol. It might be that you are a shopaholic, a love addict, an over-exerciser, or a food addict. Addiction is often a way to distract ourselves from things that feel painful, and if we are in pain over something, we are often very angry about it, too.

11. You need to be in control of your life. If we are controlling emotions, it can lead to a desire to also control our exterior environment.

12. You’ve been accused of being passive aggressive. Passive aggression happens when instead of expressing our anger directly we do it indirectly. This can include things like being nice to someone’s face but gossiping about them behind their back, or telling a partner we aren’t angry about something important like how they spent the month’s budget but calling them lazy for not putting the rubbish out.

13. You have trouble saying no. As healthy anger is what leads us to set boundaries, never showing anger often means never saying no or even realising that you can.

14. On the rare occasion you do get upset, it tends to be a blowout. You might only get properly upset once a year, but it tends to be explosive and something others live in fear of. This is what happens when there is a build up of emotions.

15. You feel happy all the time, just pure peace and love. This kind of belief about oneself generally points to some deep-rooted denial. The human mind and emotional system is not one-sided. Nobody feels great all the time. If we did, we’d never learn anything, as we grow from being challenged and by contrast – which includes not always liking what other people do and say.

Me& seeing your latest posts & then realizing we& have a sidesystem: o h.

Bc like, we're& not aware of a lot of the older system members that must've formed earlier in life & any system members who're usually older aren't speaking so I'm& presuming memories are being hidden from me&. I& get like. These flashes of younger child me& dissociating tf out & my& main abuser ( there were multiple perpetrators ) more or less called forth — I& suppose these were introjects fronting or at least co-fronting at the time, I& suspect that if these introjects were programmed it was because I& really liked the characters they were introjected from, I'm& not entirely sure — who'd I'd& thought formed much later in life, among other flashbacks that are just confusing to me&. So like. It's really confusing. Idk hopefully I'm& making sense.

Yeah stuff like this can be super weird to realize. I wouldn't know for sure how your own system would function but that sounds plausible. We also know a lot of other systems who have certain sections of their system have little to no communication with other sections which may also be why you don't see them as speaking- or they're just choosing not to which also happens sometimes. As long as a part was fronting at a specific enough time they may be programmed.

We also had stuff like programmed fragments fuse to be an alter and then said alter who in our case is often an introject- is programmed.

clones and splitting -nightmare (but pink helped at the end)

Hand Knitted Crime Scene Caution Tape

I am seriously thinking about making a big post about this

Can people stop pushing the idea that you shouldn’t share information about RAMCOA at all? Yeah, sharing detailed information about programming publicly or with people who don’t need it can be dangerous, but it’s already such a taboo topic to the point where a lot of survivors feel like they can’t even speak up about what happened to them. And they have the right to, they endured it.

If you’re saying “be careful how much you share about programming” that’s valid. I’ve seen a lot of people saying that and that makes perfect sense. But “don’t talk about RAMCOA” do people not realize that’s what many of the perpetrators of this type of abuse want? They want total silence. They go to insane lengths just to ensure survivors can’t talk about this. They thrive off secrecy. They’re protected by people’s ignorance. This is a widespread issue that requires a societal effort to put a stop to. How will that happen if people aren’t educated on the fact that this happens, at the very least?

I know a lot of people can use this info to hurt people or get some sick pleasure from hearing about the abuse. But that doesn’t take away the need for this to be heard and known about. Stop silencing survivors.

Rant

CW: This post will discuss RAMCOA (not in detail) and the mistreatment of RAMCOA survivors in the OSDDID community. Please read with caution.

RAMCOA survivors are treated terribly in the system community. Your trauma is seen as larger than life, not real/fictional, or too bad to talk about. Hell, I'm nervous to even mention this kind of thing because it's so heavily seen as taboo and dangerous to talk about to other people. We're not allowed to share our stories because our trauma(s) are "too severe" and "dangerous" that we're not allowed to share what we went through. I have seen people say not to Google it, and if they do that they'll be more likely to be a victim as well. Which.. just isn't true. Apply that to any other trauma where Googling the definition makes it more likely for you to experience it. Make it make sense! You don't have to share your story in any case scenario, but why are we not ALLOWED to? Why is our trauma that different? It's isolating us, which is what my abusers would've wanted. I've been told that my trauma is fake, and no wonder! We're not allowed to talk about it. Ever. Let us talk about it if we feel comfortable to, it's not your choice, it's OURS.

What counts as TBMC? Ex-Pentecostal wanting to know because I never really see clear and concise definitions on these things and trying to research RAMCOA gives me a lot of dodgy right wing rhetoric which I don't want to keep having to comb through for my own sanity.

TBMC is known by as two things. One: trauma based mind control. Two: torture based mind control.

Most survivors we've also ran into prefer the former because it tends to include things that are less extreme and not everyone feels their trauma went far enough to be considered torture. It's also unfortunately true that a lotta alt-righters tend to get into mind control in a more co-opting nature, which is ironic given the group that did that to us was alt-right. Honestly we find the TB to be unnecessary given mind control is always traumatic and is inherently horrific.

What counts as TBMC?

TBMC is something done primarily through abusive means to induce a dissociative state, in which one becomes more suggestible. This can be done in order to intentionally create parts/alters (when done starting on someone as a child in rare cases) or just to make someone behave the way you want them to. This is why sometimes people who are abducted by other countries as agents betray their old group and join in with their abusers. (For an extreme example). Other ways the dissociative state is achieved is through putting people into forms of trances. This can be done with meditation or mantras, forced hypnotization, and at times substances.

We've got a good mixture of both mind control and conditioning. The conditioning is done more via Pavlov's Dogs type experiences and "training" and is less tied to TBMC and typically easier to train out of. Mind control- especially in those raised with it- is driven into a part of their personality. It becomes an essential piece of the whole identity and it is not something that can be taken away without proper aid and therapy. You cannot deprogram yourself from mind control the way you can "uncondition" yourself, so to speak.

Anything that was driven into you while in a dissociative state (thus highly suggestible) or being actively traumatized that is ideological, personal, an act, behaviors, etc. is typically a form of mind control. A very common example of this is being made to be fully and completely dependent upon your leader/an authority figure. This may result in what is reminiscent of worship of the individual and in some cases leaves the victims incapable of making decisions. To this day we have to ask friends in desperation what food we should eat because the idea of deciding for ourselves is far too difficult. We roll dice connected to numbers to mark our decisions in hopes of having a way to make a choice. (And again, this is but one example.)

Some of the information we have garnered on the subject comes from a variety of sources more heavily focused upon cults as that was what we grew up in and with. We have dug deep into the information on what makes a cult a cult and what signs of specific types of cultic programming we exhibit. Even then programming can be hard to categorize and know what is meant by because it's so personal and specific in its application. I am uncertain if we are of much help- but I will say we personally see no harm in if you find spaces appropriate for it, asking if specific things you expect may be programming or signs of TBMC are able to be labeled as such. That's what we had to do to accept we were a RAMCOA survivor as we originally had less memories of the cult until given the name by our parents (to be clear we did this only because we were already in therapy and part of our recovery and work is being done in order to come out against the group and the leader, and have full legal protections as a whistle blower)

Hey, so definitely don't go into more details than you feel comfortable with but if you can, could you elaborate on systems forming pseudomemories because they researched programming? Like developing completely false memories of programming when they aren't, or?

Hey constellation!

To be completely honest, I don’t know how well I could do that because I’m in heavy denial for the memories I currently have. I often try to tell myself they’re not real/they are pseudomemories so that I can like…feel better, I guess. Lol. Iykyk.

The reason I said that is because of what I read when I looked into RAMCOA, including alllllll of the warnings that were given to me from other victims of RAMCOA and ignored them like a dumbass and researched anyway.

They told me it was super common for non-RAMCOA systems to get pseudomemories. I honestly don’t remember how they explained it, I apologize. Something along the lines of “if you hear about a trauma situation that vaguely seems like it could make sense you may jump to conclusions” sort of thing. Gonna do like a really basic example here:

If you have a phobia of spiders (common in anyone really) but you read about a trauma scenario involving torture with spiders you might be like “Oh GOD! I have a spider phobia! I must have spider related trauma!” And anyone can be good at running with an idea and overthinking and imagining all these horrible scenarios.

HOWEVER

This is not always the case. If you feel you have genuine programming or memories regarding them it’s probably best to NOT fuck around and find out and find a specialist that can treat that because if you poke the bear it can get hella messy. It’s better to be safe than sorry. It’s better to realize they are pseudomemories later than assume they’re pseudomemories and dig deeper to figure out the “real memory” and realize that IS the real memory and massively destabilize the system.

However! (x2)

I stand by my original reply to that one person that if you haven’t already looked into RAMCOA, Don’t. You will not find good things. Whether you have progs or not. It’s not a fun thing to read about.

TW on this next part for what progging would be used for, NOT detailed at all, just be aware that I will be talking briefly about CSA/MC/suicide related things.

Wanna add that not all programming is done the same. I sorta brushed past that in that last reply, but I wanna make it more clear: not all programmers are super skilled or have done it a lot to make a fully programmed system. This sort of thing takes massive amounts of work. YEARS of work. And the stuff that happens is usually massively fucked up. I can only imagine some people not involved in a literal organized cult who specializes in this stuff who try will give up for some reason or another, or may not do it “well enough” or may modify things they’ve learned from other proggers to fit their own needs. Programming/mind control is usually done to fit the abusers/proggers needs, which means one’s programming could be at the level of like “Monarch Program” shit or like, more simple MC/progging for sex-related tasks or compliance or suicide programs for protection of the abusers.

Hope that answers your question. DMs are open, I’m absolutely okay to talk about this stuff carefully.

-Dorian