liminallair

[liminallair]

if you are a cult survivor or a victim of ritual abuse, mind control, or organized abuse, please know that we see you. we believe you. your pain is real and your trauma is real, even if it is masked with programs, pseudomemories, or dissociative barriers. you deserve a future filled with rest, joy, and recovery. you deserve a community that believes, supports, and cherishes you.

it’s okay if you want to be open and candid about your trauma and experiences. it’s okay if you don’t want anyone to know about them. you are allowed to reclaim agency over your own history. we hope that you can do this in ways that are uplifting and empowering for you.

we feel for you. we care about you. we believe you and we believe in you. your experiences will never be questioned or trivialized here. you are allowed to exist as you are. your strength and resilience does not go unnoticed.

[liminallair]

last week in therapy was the first time we managed to describe what we went through as ritual abuse.

which came after describing the very complex nature of our experiences. inwardly and outwardly. it felt weird at first. acknowledging it. it’s not an easy thing to say. especially with the general consensus of ritual abuse being “made up.”

it was a huge relief saying it and getting it out. and for now, that is enough.

[liminallair]

Dealing With Executive Dysfunction - A Masterpost

The “getting it done in an unconventional way” method.

The “it’s not cheating to do it the easy way” method.

The “fuck what you’re supposed to do” method.

The “get stuff done while you wait” method.

The “you don’t have to do everything at once” method.

The “it doesn’t have to be permanent to be helpful” method.

The “break the task into smaller steps” method.

The “treat yourself like a pet” method.

The “it doesn’t have to be all or nothing” method.

The “put on a persona” method.

The “act like you’re filming a tutorial” method.

The “you don’t have to do it perfectly” method.

The “wait for a trigger” method.

The “do it for your future self” method.

The “might as well” method.

The “when self discipline doesn’t cut it” method.

The “taking care of yourself to take care of your pet” method.

The “make it easy” method.

The “junebugging” method.

The “just show up” method.

The “accept when you need help” method.

The “make it into a game” method.

The “everything worth doing is worth doing poorly” method.

The “trick yourself” method.

The “break it into even smaller steps” method.

The “let go of should” method.

The “your body is an animal you have to take care of” method.

The “fork theory” method.

The “effectivity over aesthetics” method.

[liminallair]

Can we talk for a moment to mention how scary it is to dissociate in public and the people you're interacting with stop looking like people? It's terrifying to be trying to be polite but the person you're being polite to doesn't look real I don't have the words to describe what it looks like besides it just looks like a dream.. or maybe AI art where something is off you just can't figure out what

[liminallair]

You are not what they did to you. You are not the things they’ve said about you. You are not the things they think about you.

You are you.

And you are wonderful

[liminallair]

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.]

[liminallair]

Stop treating Simply Plural as a system social media app, it's not

And worst if you put a lot and detail information about you, your system and alters, that can be very dangerous for your integrity

Is ok wanting to have more friends and see other's people systems and alters, but you really have to be careful to who you give your simply plural, people online can be shitty some times and you don't know what will they do with your information

So please, don't use Simply Plural as a social media app, and also don't ask for a chat between systems function, that could be very dangerous for systems

If you're gonna pass your Simply Plural make sure you know the person you're giving it

[liminallair]

C-DID culture is having such a complex system structure that you can't even put words to it or for that matter, figure out your structure (bonus points if when you even think about your structure you dissociate too much to think about it)

[liminallair]

WHY AM I STILL SCARED?

(Don’t remove caption; give credit if you repost elsewhere).

[liminallair]

TW : death, loss

our brother died almost a week ago. we still don’t have any words really. this is the first time we’ve lost someone really abruptly and we’re not sure how to handle it. it sounds bad but this is one of the only times I’m glad we have DID bc our ability to just not feel things is impressive. without it we would not be able to house all this grief and still survive.

[liminallair]

if some of you would actually take the time to read the scientific literature you claim to adhere to, you might realize that a core feature of complex dissociation is denying, minimizing and straight-up forgetting trauma. and if you think with your brain for five seconds, it may also occur to you that if you have complex dissociation, it means your experiences were "enough" to cause complex dissociation!

if you put these two ideas together you might even come to the logical conclusion that it's fucking useless at best to argue about what's "severe enough to cause a system" and what isn't!

[liminallair]

Me, age 6, playing with my imaginary friends (they can take over my body and I don’t remember it)

[liminallair]

poor memory is a huge deal and i wish people wouldn't diminish it by saying "oh yeah i can't remember what i had for breakfast lol."

i can't remember the first 10 years of my life. i can't remember entire days, weeks, months at a time. i can't remember entire people, i can't remember names or faces. i can't remember when things are scheduled for, my calendar app on my phone is booked to the max with reminders and task checklists. i can't remember when i moved into what home when, i can't remember important milestone dates like when i got or lost certain jobs, or when i started a new hobby.

that's what i mean when i say i have poor memory. poor memory is so scary for the person who has it. it's not a quirky thing, everyone forgets small details. memory problems are scary because you can go through entire events or days with no memory, or plan for things in the future that you can't recall ever even looking into or scheduling. it's not a funny haha kind of thing, it's serious, and it affects a lot of people in very unavoidable ways.

not being able to plan for appointments or work schedules, not being able to remember people's names or faces, not being able to recall whether or not you were present for something or whether or not you met someone, not being able to keep track of what's happening on what dates and losing track of items because you can't remember where you put them are all very real problems, and anyone dealing with them deserves to be taken seriously, and not diminished when they choose to speak up about it.

[liminallair]

TW : general tw, mentions of abuse, torture, etc ⚠️

yes. non human alters are real. sorry that seems so “unbelievable” and “whacky” to you but personally the level of dehumanisation we endured during childhood is incomprehensible.

do you think I want parts of my brain/myself to be a dog that only obeys commands? a cat that is only ever sexual or subordinate? a doll that can’t move or talk? a half rabbit, half girl that never speaks? a computer hybrid that only knows it’s commands and has no idea of the outside world because that’s not what it was made for?

some non human parts may form to protect the child from what they are going through. many children find comfort or feel protected by animals, godly figures, dolls, etc etc.

for us, we had no choice. we were tortured into acting as, performing as and believing we were different types of animals to carry out specific tasks assigned to us. to control us. by numerous adults for their own pleasure.

I’m sorry that reality is harsh and seems unbelievable, because it is.

I hope all non-human alters have a great day.

[liminallair]

PROGRAMMING VS TBMC VS CONDITIONING

TW talks of TBMC and programming so one thing i see a lot of confusion about is the difference between programming, TBMC, and conditioning, i hope this post will help clarify the difference between these conditioning is the act of getting someone accustomed to something or to behave in a specific way, this can be done accidentally or intentionally, and it can be positive or negative. this is not always done through abuse and is not always premeditated, this also does not have to be done by a group of people. an example would be if someone is rewarded every time they do a specific action, they will associate that action with getting a reward and be more likely to do it TBMC is the act of intentionally implementing cues (intentionally implemented triggers) into someone to get them to think or behave in specific ways, this is always done intentionally and is negative in nature. this is always done through abuse and is premeditated. an example would be if someone is abused while exposed to a specific phrase and forced to do a specific action, they will associate that phrase with that action and then the phrase will trigger the action to where the obvious abuse is no longer needed to cause the action programming is the act of intentionally creating dissociated states in an individual using TBMC, this is always premeditated and done intentionally. it is always done negatively, and it has to be done by a group due to the organized nature, there need to be multiple people to reinforce the cues. these states will be used as "blank slates" to instill TBMC responses into and get to behave in certain ways, there may be certain cues that are intended to bring out specific states (alters). not all programmers know they are causing DIDOSDD, they just recognize dissociative responses and use these for their own benefit - grey

[liminallair]

You know what I hate about being an alter in a system? I only have so much time out in the body but I have so many hobbies. I can't read every book I want too or play every game I want too because the limited free time we have is split up between us. It's gonna take me forever to finish my reading backlog.

[liminallair]

being chronically dissociated isn’t the most talked about DID symptom but it’s a complete nightmare to live with and i hate it so much.

i’m rarely fully grounded, i always feel like the smallest trigger is gonna send me back to not knowing who i am again. i’m on autopilot a lot, just going through the motions of life, not truly living it. i spend most of my time feeling at least partially out of it and people make a lot of assumptions based on that. it’s also exhausting, and it puts me in… situations. these range from ‘i wasn’t focused on being grounded and didn’t notice the queue moved’ to ‘my younger sibling stopped me walking into traffic because i wasn’t able to ground myself enough to be aware of my surroundings outside’