Please check the about and the questions page for more information about this site and about what this site, the terms on it, and the experiences it describes are and are not.
Shaping can include the following experiences:
* making someone create new parts via abusive means or with intent to abuse them
* abusing someone in certain ways with the intention to cause their system to split certain parts
* abusing someone with the intention to cause them to have a system
* abusing an already-existing non-disordered system with the intent to give them a dissociative disorder
* abusing a disordered/amnesiac system with the intent to give them a level of dysfunction/amnesia they did not already have
* influencing what parts someone gets with malicious or selfish intent, or through abusive means (e.g. making them split parts that are easier to abuse)
* psychological manipulation and abuse of individual alters in someone's system with the intent for specific outcomes
* enforcing amnesia in order to abuse somebody
* abusing an amnesiac system by influencing them to develop patterns of amnesia about the abuse
* abusive psychological conditioning that is done on different parts of a person's system, as opposed to conditioning done to a perceived singlet
* abusing an individual headmate in a system with the intent to cause them to split a subsystem
* taking advantage of someone's plural-related amnesia to gaslight them or get away with manipulative acts
* helping someone create a system who has consented to the creation of the system but not to the tactics you use to help them create it, which are more intense/distress-inducing/etc. than was covered in what they consented to
However, the term is intended to be very broad, as well as a description of a type of abuse one has experienced. Forcishaping is not done with consent and is not the same as helping someone split a system with their consent through non-abusive means. It is also not the same as when someone unintentionally only abuses certain alters because only certain alters front during abuse.
This term refers to a very broad variety of experiences, but it is not as broad as plural abuse or system abuse. Forcishaping, however, is a form of abuse, because it is either accomplished through abusive methods or is done with an end goal in mind, where the end goal is something that constitutes an act of abuse.
This term comes from within the plural community, as opposed to having been created by an abuser for abusers to use. There are no guides on how to forcishape someone, at least not in those terms, because the term comes from a survivor for survivors to use.
Forcishaping is a description of a type of abuse. However, the coining of the term "forcishaping" is not why shaping exists, any more than the coining of the term "gaslighting" is the reason that gaslighting exists. The term "gaslighting" was coined for survivors to use to describe their experiences and is thus a description of an experience, giving words to something that happened.
A victim of shaping would say that they are shaped, or forcishaped. Forcigenic is the term for when your system (or a structure within your system) came to exist via shaping, and this and related terms are defined on other pages.
A shaped system is a system that is impacted by shaping in some way. This can be a system created by shaping, a system subject to conditioning as a consequence of shaping, a system with a lot of headmates who were forcibly split by someone else, or something else.
A shaped part is a part of the system - a headmate, a facet, a sidesystem, an amnesia cluster, etc. - that is affected by shaping in some way. This can be a part of the system that exists due to shaping or has conditioning from shaping when that doesn't apply to the rest of the system.
However, the coiner of shaping is unsure if Pluralpedia's criteria that programming is done by a group is always accurate. The coiner also has doubts of some people's claims that programming can literally only be done by trained people or in groups, as this basically says "if you don't have special skills, you are incapable of even attemping to commit this type of abuse". This seems wrong to say, especially if someone without special skills attempts programming based on information using those terms and is successful in a lot of what they try. I don't know, something about gatekeeping the ability to abuse behind training - or gatekeeping the application of certain terms for abuse that are fundamentally the same but were done by untrained people - that just doesn't seem right.
That said, it's clear that there is ambiguity online about what programming is and isn't, and it's also clear there are a lot of experiences that are a lot like programming but may not be exactly the same. Therefore, "shaping" is a term that covers programming but also things that are similar but not the same, as well as even sometimes things that are not similar to programming except superficially.
Furthermore, shaping is inclusive of certain experiences that are definitely not programming but that might feel adjacent to programming. For example, programming is usually thought of as having an end goal, whereby a programmer causes somebody to have a certain alter or subsystem that follows certain cues, i.e. to be abused in very specific ways. However, shaping in the sense described by this site doesn't always include implanting commands in someone's mind, nor changing their system's structure outside of how anything about how they function or experience their alters is their "structure".
A forcigenic system is not the same as a willogenic system that had someone help them create the system. While "abusive" can be a relative term because some extreme things (e.g. physical assault) can be done non-abusively if there is consent (e.g. BDSM), someone is not shaping another person's system if they are using non-abusive methods to consensually help them develop a system, if the person being acted upon has genuinely expressed that they want this person's help in becoming a system or forming new headmates.
The terms "shaping" and "forcishaping" are not the terms used by the abusers. There is no one consistent term for forcishaping that is used by the people who do it. While programming is a form of shaping, not all shaping is programming, and not all shapers use language like "programming", or any particular language at all, to describe what they are doing.
Shaping is not necessarily associated with extreme abuse, ritual abuse, or organized abuse. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. While programming also doesn't have to be associated with those things, programming is heavily associated with the term RAMCOA, which is more associated with the previously-mentioned things.
As a result, this can make it hard to find information about programming that does not assume it took place in the context of those things (e.g. one person abusing a child into having a system on purpose to make them easier to control, but not in a group setting and not via ritual or anything one considers "extreme"). It is therefore debatable if certain experiences actually do count as programming or not, while being much more similar to programming than not.
Therefore, forcishaping exists as a term that has never been intended to be associated with extreme abuse, ritual abuse, or organized abuse from the onset. While programming does exist and is an acceptable term to use, and those who claim to have survived abuse should be listened to, there is also a lot of misinformation about programming available, and the term "programming" is therefore associated with a lot of things that are exaggerated, sensationalized, or completely untrue. That, and the fact that a lot of people do make assumptions about organized abuse when they hear that someone has been "programmed", someone may therefore prefer to use language like "shaped" or "forcigenic".
However, care should also be taken to emphasize that shaping is not just a synonym for programming or a replacement term, because this site does not believe anything is wrong with the term "programming". It does, however, believe programming has a fairly specific definition (even if it can refer to a rather broad range of experiences). While I understand the desire to use a certain word because you have experiences in common with people to whom that word applies, that's not always the way to go, and that's typically the case with words that refer to abuse.
That said, some people might want to describe themselves as "programmed" even if they don't meet the criteria for that term, or aren't sure if they're programmed or not. They should still have a word for their experiences, and since plurality is not all that well-documented in in-depth sources like individual websites, there are not necessarily as many resources out there about different types of abuse of systems.
Therefore, the term "forcishaping" and the related terms on this site are intened to give words to certain types of abuse that are experienced by systems - outside of necessarily just the abuse that causes some traumagenic systems - that they may not have necessarily had and that they only lacked previously because the plural community is still very new in many ways.