This transcript is from a presentation by Jean Riseman at The Fifth
Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference,
August 9 - 11, 2002 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Windsor Locks, CT. Some of
the topics discussed may be heavy for survivors. Survivors may want to
read this with a support person or therapist. The conference is
educational and not intended as therapy or treatment. All accusations are
alleged. Our providing the information below does not necessarily
constitute our endorsement of it. This page has been put on the web by
S.M.A.R.T., P O Box 1295, Easthampton, MA 01027 E-mail: smartnews@aol.com


Jeannie Riseman MSW, is a retired clinical social worker, an RA/MC
survivor and a grandmother among other things. She is the content owner of
the "Ritual Abuse, Ritual Crime, and Healing" home page
(http://www.ra-info.com), a Board member of Survivorship, and the editor
of Survivorship's publications. (http://www.survivorship.org) The title of
her presentation is "Simplifying Complex Programming."

Simplifying Complex Programming
Jeannie Riseman, MSW

S.M..A..R.T. Conference, August 10, 2002

I was surprised when Neil asked if I would be interested in speaking
today, because it never occurred to me that I would have anything of
interest to say to you. When I think of mind control survivors, I think of
people who were subjected over and over again to near-fatal torture and
whose programming is extremely deep, highly complex, and very, very
difficult to work with. I am in awe of your intelligence, strength, and
courage, and I feel totally out of my league here. After I got over my
initial shock at being invited, I realized I do have things to offer.
First, I am source material for a chapter in the early history of mind
control experimentation. Second, I have lit upon some rather simple and
easy to use methods of working with obscure programming. They might or
might not work for others, but I believe they are worth considering and
may inspire some of you to create your own simple -- or simpler -- ways of
dealing with very complex issues.
Let me start with the historical part. I am almost sixty-five. I was a
mind control guinea pig in the early to late forties. My generation, by
and large, either didn't ever remember, or started remembering in the late
eighties, along with so many others. I believe that far fewer children
were experimented on back then than after the sixties, simply because the
"technology" was new and there weren't that many trainers available. So we
are relatively rare, and because of our age, we are dying out. What little
knowledge we have of those early days will go with us unless we record it,
or unless we suddenly discover a warehouse full of lab notebooks.
I was not trained for any specific purpose. Rather, my mind was used as a
prototype to study what kind of internal structures could be created. I
think of myself as a sketchpad where my trainer could doodle freely
without having to justify using valuable material for no useful end
purpose. (A couple of other older MC survivors have told me that they were
also experimented on in this sense of the word.) In talking to other,
younger survivors, I have discovered a couple ofways in which the
prototype structures were later used.
I'm going to share with you in some detail the first structure I
discovered. There are some diagrams on these handouts. Be careful -- I
imagine that some of them might be quite triggering if you have similar
constructs internally and have not yet worked through them. Remember to
breathe, and remember that we are here to share knowledge and promote
healing, not to harm anybody. Do whatever you need to stay okay -- move
around, jump up and down if you like, leave the room. I'll understand.
Okay, here we go. How did I find this structure? Interesting story. I was
totally stuck in therapy, no new memories, no motion, no nothing. (At that
time I didn't know I was multiple or that I had an MC background.) I
finally remembered a simple writing exercise that was presented in a group
I had attended years ago. We had been asked to pretend that we had been
molested and write about the experience in detail. Some amazing things
came out, because the "it's just pretend" framework helped by-pass the
inner censor. So I said, "I'm going to pretend I'm multiple and draw my
system." Simple technique, but the system was so complex it took three
months to get all the information. Here's some of what came up for me.
Figure 1. [A circle with five lines ending in smaller circles] There is
an inner circle I call a node, with five lines ending in other circles, or
nodes. At first I thought the inner circle was my original personality
that had been split into five parts. Who knows, it might have been, but
those weren't the terms I found myself using. I think of the nodes as
neurons, with the straight lines being dendrons. You might find it easier
to think of a TinkerToy structure.
In Figure 2 [The original figure with five lines out of each small
circle, ending in smaller circles.] we have the process expanded outward.
This is really a three dimensional structure, but it's far easier for me
to draw the nodes and their connections in a circle than in a sphere. If
you imagine any generation of nodes in three dimensions, it looks like an
orange with cloves stuck in it. That's Figure 3. [Circle with small black
dots all over it.] (We used to make those and hang them inclosets to smell
good and repel moths.) As you go out, there are more and more nodes, of
course. Five here, twenty-five here, one hundred twenty-five here, and so
on. Rather like an onion, with layers that are built up as the system
grows. Have I lost you yet?
Now here's where it gets interesting. Each connection, each TinkerToy
stick, has a meaning: the nodes have no meaning; they are just connecting
points. The original five sticks are death, sex, deceit, money, and cover
activities. The next five sticks get more specific. Sex with self, men,
women, children, animals. It's sort of like playing twenty questions - the
further you travel down a TinkerToy path, the more specific the
information. So this structure can be seen as an information storage
system. Information storage is important for mind-control programmers. But
this structure can also be used to carry out tasks.
Each node is assigned a numerical code. If three or more nodes are
brought together by calling out their code names, they form a temporary
alter. (The nodes do not have to be adjacent) The information on the
TinkerToy sticks that lead to each of those nodes, when put together,
constitutes the instructions for that temporary alter. When the task is
done, the temporary alter dissolves, the nodes go back to their original
place, and each node divides into five. The node that divided cannot be
used again, but any of the five new ones can. The numerical code that
calls the nodes together is made by dividing the sphere into sections
using lines like longitude and latitude. When the nodes are latent, just
sitting there doing nothing, no node on the surface layer is connected to
any other node. They cannot communicate, they cannot exchange information.
They only behave like an alter after they have been called together.
An interesting aside. Any person who knows the meaning of the connecting
sticks can, effectively, read a person's history embedded in the structure
because tasks that have been done several times generate dense clusters of
nodes. I wish I could see where the clusters were and read my own history,
but I can't. I can't see the clusters. My hunch is that it wouldn't be
very informative, because they only made functioning alters often enough
to make sure the technique worked, and then went on to fiddle with
something else.
A couple of years ago I shared this by e-mail with a younger MC survivor.
I was told that this looked like an early version of something called
"blizzard programming" which was and is still used in Europe. In blizzard
programming, the alters come together like snowflakes to form a temporary
alter to do the task, then melt apart. The theory is that since the alter
that did the job no longer exists; it is impossible for any part of the
system to remember what was done or what happened. Total safety for the
programmers and handlers.
Figure 4 [Square with a triangle over it and an X inside.] is another
structure whose eventual use I just learned about this spring. It looks
like a child's drawing of a house, and you can make it without lifting
your pencil off the paper. I used to doodle this figure a lot when I was
bored in school. I also used to draw it in three dimensions. A survivor,
again younger than I am by at least twenty years, told me that it is a
house. When you rotate the "X" a quarter turn, the door opens and the
alter who lives there can come out. This survivor has a system with many
houses, each of which has a numerical code, like a complicated address. In
each house lives an alter who has been led to believe he or she has a
specific history that is completely different from the body's real-life
history. The alter's programmed past can be manipulated to make that alter
do what the handler wants. It's a way to tailor alters to specific tasks,
to motivate them to do those tasks, and to keep them isolated by locking
the doors of the house. Again, I don't think I have a whole lot of houses;
just enough for my trainer to play around and see that it could work.
Other structures are sketched out in Figures 5 [A three-dimensional
pentagram with black spots on it.], 6 [A series of adjoining triangles],
and 7 [An eye with iris and pupil]. If any of you have these and know what
they are used for in your system, I would really appreciate it if you
would mention it during the question and answer period or come up to me
afterwards and we can talk about it. They are obviously common occult
symbols: One is a three-dimensional pentagram, which looks like a starfish
with little bumps on it. I think that, functionally, it's just a variant
of the sphere, and that the bumps are nodes, but I am not sure. Another is
a series of triangles that resembles a spider web. Again, it can be made
in 3-D. And then there's the eye, which somebody or something inside me
says holds meta-information, such as the history and purpose of the cult
or project, how to remove amnesia, and training techniques. It also
contains meta-rules for the programming.

So that's the historical part of my talk. Let me turn now to the
techniques I use to deal with what I discovered. This programming
initially frightened me. I thought it was so exotic, so other-worldly,
that I didn't have a fighting chance against it. It didn't help that the
system contained no recognizable alters. How could I unravel it is I
didn't have the codes? The codes would let me remember, but I had to
remember to get the codes. Impasse.
I soon realized that I was thinking using the premises of the
programming. It had been designed to block me, and as long as I thought in
its terms, I was, indeed, blocked. I had to think outside the box. I have
come to believe that it doesn't work well to use the perpetrators'
framework. By doing so, you are buying into their belief system and
reinforcing it. Just like I can't see how to teach children not to hit by
hitting them. Or teaching people not to kill by killing them. All it
teaches is that the strong get to do what they want to the weak. Besides,
if I use the perp's weapons, I feel like a perp myself. I don't like it. I
usually feel miserable enough as it is without purposefully adding to
those bad feelings.
It dawned on me that a sentient part of me must have been present when my
mind learned all that mysterious math junk. I decided to work with the
part or parts of myself that had learned all this stuff. Back then, I had
been an every-day child, with likes, dislikes, fears, dreams, head colds,
and much-hated brown socks. I might not have the vaguest idea what to say
to the programming, but I sure as hell know how to talk to an eight year
old. I started to talk past the system to the child I had been, and still
am in some frozen part of my mind. "Of course you are scared. You'd have
to have rocks in your head not to be scared. It's okay to be frightened
now. There's nobody around who will hurt you. They hurt you back then, but
now is real different. They aren't here anymore." And for the very little
parts, 'Bad guys all gone bye-bye!"
With my biological kids, especially when they were young, I would
over-simplify whatever I was talking about. As they caught on, I made
things more complex, matching my explanation to their developmental stage.
I figured that it was worth a try working with myself and assumed that
there were parts of my mind that were still operating on a child-like
level. Even if it didn't work, I was convinced that the very fact that I
was using common-sense things that any teacher or mother knows
instinctively would help me cut the mind-control programming down to size
in my own mind. I was no longer paralyzed when thinking about it. I had a
plan and some hope.
Looking back, I see that instinctually I did three simple but effective
things.

1. I set the stage for respectful internal communication.

2. I educated myself internally about the present and about the past and
its effects.

3. I offered opportunities, but did not try and change anything
internally.

Step One: Setting the stage. I start by giving permission to my parts to
learn, without being coercive. "Anybody who wants to listen can. Nobody
has to. Anybody who isn't listening can ask others inside about what I
said. And I will explain again, too, in case you want to listen later on."
I've snuck in the idea of freedom of choice. "Anybody who objects to or
doesn't like what I am saying can let me know if they want to. Anybody who
wants to give me information may, as long as it's okay inside." I try to
keep it casual. I don't want to sound frantic and scare my parts or make
them feel like I have a heavy agenda. As an aside, I had a friend who
spoke to his alters like this, "Listen up, ass-holes!!!!" He didn't get a
lot of internal cooperation by being rude. Exorcism doesn't encourage
internal cooperation, either, in my opinion. It just scares alters and
sends them into hiding.

Step Two: Then I educate and explain in simple language. I explain that we
were raised by people who liked kids to obey and liked to hurt kids. But
those people aren't around anymore. We don't have to follow their rules.
We don't have to agree with them any more. We can make up our own rules.
We can change our rules any time we want. I steer away from words that
have a weird connotation to me. "Safe" for example, means to many of my
parts that I am locked up, and that therefore I cannot hurt anybody or
anything. I am "safe" because I am imprisoned. This is not a message that
I'm trying to convey inside, so I avoid the word and find words that
weren't used back then. "Okay" is a fine substitute, as my perps were too
proper and snotty to use that word. If I find that I'm getting anxious or
panicky, I take a look at the words I have just used and apologize inside
and ask if I need to add to my list of double-meaning words.
I describe my present life. "This is my bed. These are my sheets and
pillowcases. I bought them myself because they are pretty. I sleep alone
in my bed. Nobody comes to my bed to bother me. Never! Those days are all
in the past. I can sleep with stuffed animals if I want. This is my purple
frog. I can go to sleep whenever I want and I can sleep as long as I want.
I can get up in the middle of the night to pee if I want. I don't have to
ask anybody's permission."
I explain all the psychological things I have learned about PTSD and
dissociation. I explain amnesia, alters, and flashbacks. Again, I keep it
simple. The young parts can understand, and the older ones won't be
offended, because they know I'm simplifying things for the younger ones.
And they might just pick up some ideas along the way. "This is a
flashback. It feels yucky. It's something we are remembering. Once long
ago we forgot it, and now we are remembering. It isn't happening now. It
just feels like it is because the memory is so strong. But that's okay.
It's like the mind is burping up a memory. Burp! Feels better after you
burp."
I do this at random times during the day when I'm relatively calm, as
well as in an emergency. Years ago, when all this was new to me and I was
flooded, I held a stuffed rabbit and patted it, saying, soothing things.
Day after day I repeated the same calm messages. In time, with repetition,
it got through. My feelings had been normal, there was nothing wrong with
me, and I was in a different situation now, one where I could feel my
feelings.

Step Three. Without trying to change anything inside, I offer
opportunities. "Would anybody like to learn how to make an omelet? There
is a pretty nifty omelet maker around here, and maybe that omelet maker
would enjoy teaching you-all. Nobody has to learn, but you are welcome to
watch and learn if you want." "Anybody there who never got to choose what
kind of ice cream to eat? Yeah? How would you like to choose what kind
we're going to buy today?" I think what I am doing is expanding the number
of jobs and skills each fragment has, without challenging their
fundamental sense of self.
I also explain things to my drivers. "We are going to the supermarket.
We'd like to drive so that we don't scare anybody. Don't want to scare
ourselves, don't want to scare another driver or a pedestrian. We
especially don't want to scare a cop. We want to watch the traffic lights
and the traffic signs." And I thank them afterwards and say it was a great
job.
This worked with my biological kids, by the way. If they knew how they
were expected to behave, they did, as long as there weren't any
disconcerting surprises. It was usually ignorance and confusion that made
them behave inappropriately.
I've been talking about building relationships inside. Let me give you an
example of the growth of a friend's cult-identified alter in relationship
to an outside person, namely me. I'm still rather in awe of what happened.
This alter's job was to perform the sacrifices and make sure the holidays
were observed. When my friend stopped going to rituals, he would come out
and cut. The only time a non-cult outside person had spoken to him was
when my friend was in four-point restraints. Everybody was petrified of
the poor guy. He came out (it wasn't a holiday, so he wasn't cutting) and
we talked about his job. I mentioned that some of the things he described
were done differently in my cult, and soon we were discussing comparative
religion. No four-point restraints, no lecturing, no trying to talk him
out of his identity. Just a normal conversation.
Over time, we became quite fond of each other. And curious about each
other. He had a friend for the first time ever. He started showing an
unexpected softness. Once he told me "I dreamed of you sleeping on a bed
of tulips." And the shock of learning that different branches of the cult
did things differently opened up all sorts of possibilities to him.
Eventually he decided that he didn't have to perform the rituals or
observe the holidays anymore. All this happened simply through our
relationship. That's what I am aiming for inside, that kind of miraculous,
seemingly effortless, growth.
Okay, Let me summarize how I work with my parts. I talk to myself,
respectfully, reassuringly. I educate. I open doors to new experiences and
viewpoints. And I try never, ever, to be coercive, or know-it-all, or
bossy. I want to be as different as possible from my perps. I try to
accept and work with, rather than against, my parts and my programming. I
did this before I had any idea that I had conventional people-like alters
inside, and I still do it. It doesn't seem to have done any harm, at least
so far.
Here's another very simple technique that I often use when I don't have
the faintest idea what is going on. I adapted it from a technique I
learned in meditation. If a thought, emotion, or sensation appears during
meditation, name it and let it go. When I have thoughts or urges that seem
cult-related

1. I label it as soon as I become aware of it.

2. I refuse to act on it.

3. I let the issue go - I don't brood on it.

To name a thing is to take away some of its power. A name is like an
anchor in my mind. Labeling a thought "programming" clearly brackets the
thought that I find undesirable and separates it from the "me" that I
value. It is now something that was taught me without my permission, not
my own thinking.
Steps two (not acting on it) and three (letting it go) are weakening the
programming by not reinforcing it. Refusing to act on it, to cut, for
example, is avoiding reinforcement and avoiding buying into the perps'
value system. And refusing to brood on it, to beat myself up over it, is
equally an avoidance of reinforcement. If I spend three days agonizing
over having had a suicidal thought, that is three days of driving that
thought deeper into the grooves of my mind. Note that this is not the same
as denial. I'm not shoving anything under the rug. I acknowledge it, deal
with it, and move on. If I slip, I make amends to myself and move on. But
I don't solidify the programming by thinking about it all day and all
night.

Personal Example

Here's how I used the technique to a cult-implanted "don't talk" program.
At one point I told my therapist something I was never supposed to
remember, let alone talk about. The internal backlash was something
fierce. I was haunted by strong urges to suicide, usually in particularly
revolting ways. So I tried thinking "Programming" every time I spotted a
self-destructive thought. What happened? For starters, it seemed like
every third word I thought was the word "programming." I had no idea that
the "kill yourself if you tell" program was that compelling. "Wow! They
really did a number on me, didn't they? I wonder how they did it." My
mental attitude changed from fighting suicidal impulses, trying not to
think those thoughts, to curiosity about the past -- which was great,
because trying not to think something is a losing battle, and consumes a
vast amount of energy, besides.
Step two. I gave my kitchen knives to my best friend to hold and
re-committed myself to not acting on suicidal urges. Just let them be. If
I act on them, I will never get a chance to understand where they came
from and what they mean. I'm sure I would have experienced some relief if
I had cut, but I chose to stay with the thoughts and feelings and see what
happened.
Step three. After I labeled the suicidal thought as programming, I turned
my attention back to every-day activities. No point in hanging on to it,
for surely it was going to come back by itself. Meanwhile, might as well
get something accomplished.
And so I "out-Zenned" the program rather than fighting it, and it ran its
course and faded. I emerged from the situation feeling more empowered.
There was more of "me" and less of the programming. The next time a
suicidal program kicked in, it was less intense and lasted a shorter time.

I then proceeded to fine-tune this simple technique. I tried talking to
the program as if it were an alter. I praised its strength, intelligence,
and sophistication. I could almost feel the programming smile. (Of course,
I wasn't really talking to the program, I was talking to the alter or to
that part of my mind that had learned the program.) I also spent some time
telling that part that nothing bad would happen if we broke the rules now.
I explained that there was nobody around to enforce the old rules, and so
they didn't really apply anymore. The rules had stopped being rules. We
were free!
Educate. Accept. Don't arm-wrestle with programming. Work with, rather
than against, my parts and my programming. Cool.
I'd like to quote one of my heroines, Cheryl Beck. She wrote about
dissolving a complex mirrors/everything backwards/matrix program by
talking past it to the underlying parts that had been programmed. I'm
paraphrasing from her e-mails with her permission:
"I had a diamond matrix. The front side opened like butterfly wings. This
was the open access side, which I could enter easily. It was composed of
RA stuff like complicated belief systems such as the Kabbalah. I could've
spent a lifetime confused and lost trying to figure it all out.
"The ever-present threat looming in the background was Draco the Dragon
that patrolled the ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ the backside of the diamond
where the real MC programming was stored. The rest was just a cover. This
part of the matrix fell under ‘Draconian Law,’ death to me and my family
if Draco reported disobedience by me to my MC handler. Draco was the
ultimate internal perp. There were also others like the Iceman, who froze
me if I got too close to an MC memory.
"The facets of the diamond were mirrors which multiplied one image and
made them into dozens. This was all meant to confuse and overwhelm. In
fact, the mirrors were alter fragments doing a job to keep me safe, to
keep me away from the MC memories. What worked for me was simply to
congratulate them on a job well-done and to find something else for them
to do. My fragments usually just threw away their jobs and blended with a
protector alter.
"The need for backwards communication and pairing of opposites was also a
way to keep me safe by confusing me and leading me away from the MC
memories so I didn't have to be accessed and re-trained by torture. I
communicated internally that I was a competent adult, free from the
cult/MC world now, and I had no need for that type of ‘safe communication’
anymore. I promoted those fragments from that type of confusing
communication to straightforward reconnaissance. Whatever the fragments
understand and desire to become, works.
"After a while I 'got it,' from head knowledge into my very 'knower.' It
was my mind that created all this. They didn't insert a matrix into my
brain. All material constructs and figures and images were actually little
kids. It is a series of triangles that resembles a spider alters or alter
fragments imitating perps, dragons, colors - all in the interest of
keeping us safe from further harm or torture.
"When I got it on a gut level, the construct came to an end quickly. It
literally blew up and freed all the alters, instead of killing them in the
explosion, which was the lie they had believed. "Lying fuckwads."
It was very reassuring to learn that the same technique worked for Cheryl
and for me. Maybe my instincts were right after all! I just knew in my
bones that it wasn't necessary to get all fancy and complicated to deal
with programming, no matter how complex it might be. It just felt right to
use simple, proven, every-day, common sense techniques. It also felt
instinctively right to use love and respect and friendship to counter the
mind-fucking that had been done to me. Look at it this way: I spent many
long years of hard work learning Latin, which is a highly complex
language. I learned it very well, too. Got straight A's. But I don't have
to think or speak Latin today. Just 'cause I learned it doesn't mean I
have to use it. I prefer to speak English. Of course, the difference is
that no part of me ever believed I had to use Latin for the rest of my
life, while many parts of me believed that I could never escape the cult
system and way of thinking and behaving.