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.
This page focuses more on my programming than on my shaping that wasn't programming, because my programming impacted me more, I know more about it, and my non-programming shaping still largely involved the programming in certain ways. However, my experiences as a programmed system are just as much what led me to coin "shaping" as much as my non-programming experiences were.
The actual programming itself was done by an older relative whose end goal was basically conversion therapy through sexual abuse. However, he had already abused me with such intent without programming, and not only had it not had the results he wanted, it resulted in a mental health event that clued him into the fact that I had a system.
While he never sat me down and explained to me where he learned all this, I believe, based on the types of programming I have and what was available at the time, that he researched DID using the best information he had at the time, and then researched MK Ultra because he remembered hearing about MK Ultra mind control tactics when it was newly known to the public and remembered dissociative conditions were a part of it. The information he found about programming likely came from a mix of books about MK Ultra as well as websites on the then-current web about conspiracies, Project Monarch, and related topics.
Some of the programming he gave me is the kind that you will learn about if you research the different programs there are. Some of it is based on scripts that he came up with entirely on his own. Some of the sources he uses for the scripts are ones you would expect for him, but some of them are things no one would ever associate with him. He made the scripts intentionally outrageous so that nobody would believe me if I told someone what was happening.
Some of the conditioning was meant to make me believe that I was somebody else - someone who my abuser felt it would be easier to turn into the kind of person he wanted his child to turn out to be. Some of it was also enforcing amnesia between subsystem parts in one headmate, where different parts were programmed to front during different phases of repeated abuse that took place as a sequence of events that ramped up in intensity.
It is unclear to me how much of what exists in my system and my innerworld was put there precisely and how much of it was the unintended consequences of my abuser attemping programming while not being trained, not working with someone else, and having a subject whose system wasn't being created through programming but who had rather already displayed plurality that likely had its own functions unrelated to the programming.
However, it is clear to me that my abuser knew I had a system and intentionally caused me to split certain alters, which he then psychologically conditioned to be easier to abuse, where that abuse was intended to have an end goal of altering my identity. Given that he was most likely literally basing his methods off of MK Ultra and some of my experiences are textbook programming outside of the circumstances under which it was done, however, it is extremely fair to call it programming.
At the same time, though, I also discovered memories of abusers online once I was a little bit older, and these abusers ended up discovering I had a system too, and they exploited my system similarly to my offline abuser in my family. Some of their exploitation of my system was related to the programming (i.e. they wanted me to do certain things during programming that would cause me to split programmed alters they wanted me to have). Some of it was not about the programming but some of it was similar in that they tried to get me to split alters who were easier to abuse. Some of it was just being abused as a system.
When I asked, results were more mixed as to whether these online experiences counted as programming. However, they felt related to the programming that my offline abuser was doing, in the sense that they were the same "kind" of abuse to me. But "programming" isn't an umbrella word like how "emotional abuse" is, or even a very broad word like "gaslighting" is. I therefore realized words like shaping and plural abuse were necessary to describe what had happened.
I'm not sure what my entire history with online plural abuse is, but I do know that much of it was taking place at the same time as my offline programming, and some of it likely took place after I escaped my offline abuser in 2015. Either way, I am now away from all my abusers and am recovering in a way where it is very unlikely I will get myself into a situation like that, nor have my programming accidentally triggered in a way that can hurt me or anyone else.
I am therefore in a position to process my experience and call certain parts for what they are but also recognize that certain parts don't have an adequate name. That's what this site is for.
I went about my life not really worrying about it but also not really healing from my trauma. Due to certain things including mistreatment from a therapist, I became convinced that very little of the abuse happened that couldn't also just be described as a general bad upbringing.
Then, two years ago, I connected some dots about some childhood memories, as well as learned from my therapist that some of my trauma fit into categories I didn't previously realize it fit into. This wasn't when I discovered I had been programmed, but it is the beginning of where I begun to suspect that my memories with that relative were more intensive than I knew.
Last year, a series of events happened, pretty much by chance, that I found incredibly triggering, but I didn't understand why yet, because the bad parts of the situation were nowhere near as bad as I felt like they were, and even the good parts basically made me have a breakdown. I later realized it triggered some of my programming due to how it fit in with part of the storyline I had been shaped with.
Due to my programming being triggered without me knowing it, I started getting back old memories and old alters, some of whom I now realize are programmed, as well as shaped through means unrelated to programming.
Some of my memories were very similar to programming, but due to an inadequate understanding of the term, I thought it didn't count. Then someone I knew who had been programmed under less ambiguous circumstances straight-up told me my experience was programming after all.
I looked into it and talked to more people. Some people said my experiences were definitely programming and they told me about their experiences that were very different from mine but that they claimed were programming. Some people, however, said that while my experiences happened if they're what I remember and do count as conditioning, they weren't programming per se, because my abuser most likely acted on his own and did not have training in any of the things he did.
It is clear to me that the term "programming" has a lot of misinformation and conflicting information surrounding it, and it is therefore difficult to be sure what fully "counts" as programming outside of very specific experiences.
My conclusion is that some of what I went through counts as programming because, even though my abuser was untrained and acting alone, he was definitely using the actual techniques of programming, under those terms. However, some of the experiences I had, particularly online, that were similar to programming in that someone was abusively affecting my system, probably did not count as programming, or at least should be given alternate language in case "programming" turned out to be inaccurate.
The more I thought about it and the more I talked about it with my therapist, the more I realized that "programming" is a specific experience that fits into a broader spectrum of experiences of abuse in which the victim's plurality or potential for plurality is relevant.
Therefore, I coined shaping/forcishaping to describe a form of abuse in which someone with a system has aspects of their system coercively affected by an outside party who knows about or suspects the system, and I coined plural abuse to describe any type of abuse of a plural or a system where the fact that they have a system that was known to the abuser is relevant to how the abuse happened.
Both of these are intentionally broad terms, and programming is a specific experience that fits under both of those terms. However, many things that are not programming fit under both those terms. Those terms can also be used to describe experiences where you're either unsure if they were programming or not or where you were programmed but don't feel like it "counts" fully.