I'm gonna say something about RAMCOA as one of the first blogs to get big talking about it on here and you all have to shut up and listen.
if you've been on the system side of tumblr for a long time you've probably seen my profile photo before- that profile photo is a photo I took of myself in 2022 that I used as the icon for the blog bad-dogs-system. that blog had around 1000 followers and was at the top of all of the system tags for around a year.
I fully believed I experienced TBMC (trauma based mind control) and I talked about it. a lot. many other people started talking about it following my blog getting the attention it got. TBMC was not the only thing I talked about but I talked about it frequently enough that I believe I had an influence in the wave of people who would go on to believe they experienced TBMC.
I, and I cannot stress this enough, was deep in a delusion.
my brain was on fire. I was in the middle of an episode of a form of encephalitis that causes psychosis without realizing it because I had not been diagnosed yet. my brain made me paranoid and I took the very real gaps in my childhood memories and spiraled on them until my brain settled on a story that did not happen.
looking back, things don't add up. my story wasn't straight because it wasn't real. there were glaring inconsistencies in my experience because I was responding to something that did not happen while I fully believed that it did.
delusions do that. paranoia does that. delusions and paranoia take grains of truth (I was abused, I was raised in a cult, I experienced religious abuse in that cult, I have gaps in my childhood memories) and twist them into an entirely different story. delusions and paranoia make you very prone to falling for conspiracy theories and what I fell for was a conspiracy theory.
I did not believe in a lot of the more obviously conspiratorial beliefs like the government being involved etc. but I still created my own organic conspiracy theory based on these conspiracy theories.
TBMC is a conspiracy theory.
(I'd recommend reading through these for more, I'm just talking about my own experiences đ)
and it's not your fault if you fell for it.
when you have gaps in your childhood memory, as many people with DID do, it's natural to wonder what's there. many of us have experienced things like severe abuse, sex trafficking, religious abuse, etc. so we know that what's in those gaps is likely unsavory. our minds have closed those doors for a reason, to protect us, but that doesn't stop us from wondering what's behind them.
the TBMC conspiracy theory invites people to create stories about mind control inside of those gaps. it offers to explain real and well documented responses to trauma like trauma bonds between children and abusive caregivers as TBMC even though these responses are well documented in people with a wide variety of traumas.
when you are suffering you want to know why. you want to know why you feel the ways you do, why you do the things you do, and for so many people with DID these answers are missing. it is normal to want an explanation and TBMC conspiracy theories are so easy to use as a filler for those gaps because they are very versatile. almost every normal trauma response can be altered to be a TBMC response making the signs fit literally every single person with trauma and DID.
when I decided I experienced TBMC I was truly at one of the lowest points in my life. I was deeply depressed, I had just gotten out of the abusive home I grew up in and was experiencing that "I'm no longer in the original survival mode so here's survival mode part 2 electric boogaloo" shock, I was stressed with school, I had just picked up self harm, and of course my brain was on fire. I was suffering. I wanted a why. so I sat there and spiraled until I came up with an "answer."
"why am I so miserable and so out of control of my life?" and I decided that I had experienced mind control and that's why I was miserable and that's why I had no control over my life. I decided that instead of looking at the facts I already had: I was in a depressive episode (famous for making you miserable) and I have DID (famous for making you out of control of your life) I experienced some bizarre fantastical abuse with no proof behind it.
and I was so invested in my confirmation bias. once I started centering my identity around being a TBMC survivor I started looking for evidence that I was, in fact, a TBMC survivor. I started gathering evidence (I had a notebook) and using that to justify my claims. I took little things like thinking there was a basement in the church and confirming that there was a basement in the church that I had foggy memory about but made me feel bad to mean that I had been programmed in the basement of the church and had been forced to forget it. instead of asking myself "huh? I wonder why that place makes me feel bad?" I worked backwards because I was looking for evidence of TBMC.
in reality, I now look back and know that I'd try to hide there from church service frequently and my dad would hit me when he'd find me hiding there because he wanted me in church service. that's it. classic, standard physical abuse. I'd also try to hide in places like the library and the coffee house and the bathrooms and experience the same thing. no conspiracy there. it was just ordinary physical abuse.
there were so many pieces that were real. that was one of the hard parts. people in the online TBMC community that was starting to form would engage with me and encourage these delusions. I'd mention things like the [now former] pastor being caught selling CSAM and other people online would say "look! you're right about TBMC! that's evidence of TBMC right there!" even though christian pastors selling CSAM is not particularly out of the ordinary or proof of TBMC, it's proof that your pastor is a child predator
and I was so isolated. I found community online while I was busy being paranoid that my best friend was a mind reader out to kill me offline. I had just moved to a new city for university and the only person I knew there was my best friend from highschool.... who I thought was part of a separate conspiracy of mind readers that wanted to kill me. I didn't connect with many people because I thought I had a superpower of knowing who is and isn't a mind reader and many of the trans people on campus were mind readers.
I was very lonely. I wanted to have people to talk to and the people I talked to also thought they were TBMC survivors! we all fed into each other. without people who knew me offline to fact check me I was weaving a fantastical tale that wasn't at all grounded in reality. because every single person I knew online was also deeply mentally ill we would vent a lot and point out to each other how we were right about our conclusions about TBMC.
perhaps the scariest part is how real it was. I fully believed that I experienced TBMC so I experienced the pain of it too, without it ever happening. it drove me much deeper into depression. I spent so much time dwelling on my trauma (and the trauma I did not have) that it became the center of my daily life.
and then.... it stopped. I received treatment for my underlying autoimmune disease and over the 3 months it took for my symptoms to die down I started realizing I was wrong. I started unraveling the pieces of my story and weaving a new one based on evidence. it has taken years to undo the damage of this conspiracy and I'm still doing it.
I didn't tell anyone about this. this is my first time mentioning it to anyone but I needed to get this off my chest. I see so many people talking about TBMC now that I'm returning to the system community and it pains me to think of how I've been part of this.
I'm sorry. I wish I could have known what was happening to my brain so I could have avoided sending so many people down a conspiratorial rabbit hole. it's honestly one of my biggest regrets even though I wasn't really in control of it.
I just hope this post can reach people questioning whether they're TBMC survivors and encourage them to ask questions about the validity of the idea of TBMC. not everyone who falls for this conspiracy theory is delusional but I do thoroughly believe that everyone is wrong.
I've been there. it's not your fault. it's not your fault but you should change now before it hurts you more.
