"RAMCOA & OEA isn't real; it's fake or exaggerated for attention online. We'd see a lot more cases if it was."
Except you do see us.
We're on the front page of your favorite porn site. We're the tweaking homeless person you pretend not to look at on the street. We're your favorite political talking point. We're the infant in the emergency room screaming from a pain they can't comprehend. We're the black lines in classified files you make jokes about. We're buried in the backyards of farmhouses that have long since returned to nature. We're the ones who sold you drugs in high school. We're the classmate you bullied for growling and barking like an animal. We're the product of a $200 billion industry. We're the blood on your favorite politician's hands. We're alive and dead and existing as fragmented states in between.
You just refuse to look too closely because it makes you uncomfortable.
"You don't smell good" Thanks our programming that causes severe depression and rapid splitting/switching got triggered and we can hardly do anything but I'm glad you noticed how we smell ! (asshole) -Husker
for people saying RAMCOA/OEA isn't real because "It's all conspiracy", there are actual records of places that use those abuse methods, and no not all of them are some big scary cults (while they very much are real, and you can simply look up famous cults and get a butt load)
these things can be schools like the troubled teen industry, most known to me are Ivory Ridge and School of Élan. both abused the kids enrolled there, gaslit and manipulated them and their parents to convince them they committed bad things to get the parents to spend more money on tuition, and that they were bad kids who deserved to be there, Élan literally had a "bully" ritual where they'd pick a kid to be a "bully", and students surround them and one other student and force them to fight until one gets knocked out or until a staff member calls it off (which these were always started by staff members, sometimes for no reason). Students were forced to carry around degrading signs on themselves, some were forced to live in a dumpster for around 30 days i believe?
Ivory Ridge has a whole documentary you can watch on Netflix called The Program, where they even show a whole shed filled with files from the school.
In both of these schools, students behaviors were heavily monitored and their access to the outside world were extremely limited, if they wanted to write a letter, it'd be screened before sending out to make sure they were trying to tell parents what was happening inside the school, and when it came to phone calls, they were heavily monitored and the line would be cut off if you tried to call for help and your calling privileges would be taken (which were very difficult to even get)
these same schools also had hierarchies to climb, and rules that were impossible to follow (things like no smiling, no singing, no making eye contact, no talking to someone on the same level as you, no looking at the opposite sex, no pretending to sleep, 5 minutes showers, etc) Not to mention the staff here had lack of qualifications to be saying they were offering therapeutic care for these "troubled teens"
this abuse is also in underground trafficking rings, which i feel like i don't even have to explain how those can be organized abuse.
no RAMCOA/OEA isn't with the intention of "making a system", but it definitely can be a cause of it if a child were to endure these things, or someone who already has DID/OSDD were to be enrolled into the troubled teen industry and worsen their mental state.
if you look into these things and proceed to say RAMCOA/OEA isn't real, then you're being willfully ignorant.
syscringe users will be like “you don’t have DID just because your mommy yelled at you. DID is caused by experiencing Unimaginable Horrors in childhood” and then when u say you have DID because you experienced unimaginable horrors they don’t believe you
being a ramcoa system sucks because as soon as you even talk about ramcoa/oea as a general topic, at least one person has to mention the satanic panic. and if you say youre a survivor, youre immediately hit with encouraging the satanic panic, spreading misinformation, lying, stealing, getting fake claimed, etc. and on the other side, some people will start treating you like a child, like you dont know what youre talking about, like youre stupid. and the third reaction, which is my least favorite personally, is people who pry for answers to their questions. no asshole, im not gonna explain to you how programming works and how my programming specifically acts.
One of the worst parts about being a ramcoa survivor is that once you disclose that you are one, no one will act normal around you ever again.
I saw a post that disgruntled me enough to want to talk about this, so here we are. There seems to be a heavy amount of misinformation on what "counts" as OEA, often excluding adult victims and non-programmed victims. So, within this post, we'll go over what the terms "OA, MC, and RA" mean, as well as commonly construed myths.
Organized Abuse
all-encompassing.
Organized abuse is a wide term that includes experiences of ritual abuse and mind control but is in no way exclusive to them. Often, only organized child sexual abuse is mentioned, which leaves out a lot of experiences it includes.
The most simple definition of organized abuse is "Abuse that involves a number of people doing something together in a pre-planned and/or structured way, rather than acting alone." In short terms, abuse done by multiple people in a planned way. [1]
All groups under the RAMCOA/OEA label will fall under this category. This includes, but is not limited to, Cults, Trafficking Rings, Labor Camps, "Troubled Teen" Camps, Intra-Familial Organized Abuse, and other experiences that fall under this definition. This includes victims indoctrinated into cults, trafficked, or otherwise abused as adults, as well as children born or brought into it. Location of the abuse (at home, in a church, at school, at a daycare, etc) doesn't matter, and someone does not have to go through ritual abuse or mind control to have experienced organized abuse.
Ritual Abuse
not inherently satanic.
Ritual abuse is a term often confused with SRA, or "Satanic Ritual Abuse," an outdated and often harmful label for forms of organized extreme abuse. Not all forms of organized abuse are ritual abuse.
Ritual abuse can be defined as "Abuse that occurs in a context where symbols or activities have superstitious, supernatural, or religious connotations. It is organised, often involving multiple perpetrators, and the abuse often happens as part of a rite or ceremony." Alternatively, the word 'ritual' refers to "a rite, ceremony or pseudo- religious service which involves a series of actions performed in a fixed order and/or at certain times; something that is done in the same way whenever a particular situation occurs." [1] [2]
Because of this, ritual abuse can be defined while including spiritual themes and non spiritual themes. So, many definitions include other forms of abuse that is ritualized/specifically repeated in nature, such as on a specific day or time or in a specific order.
This type of abuse is most dominated in literature by satanic overtones, once again from the term SRA. However, this is not exclusive to satanic cults. Any group based on a belief system or using other reoccurring themes/abuse can perpetrate ritual abuse. Though ritual abuse is also more commonly linked with mind control and child abuse, programming and age have no impact on if an experience is ritual abuse or not.
Survivors of ritual abuse include things like ritualistic ceremonies, games, symbols, set-ups, abuse on specific days/holidays, abuse in a specific order, etc as common experiences.
Mind Control
programming and beyond
Mind control tends to be the term that receives the most problems, as many people tend to only think of programming when hearing it. However, MC is not exclusive to programming survivors, and many types of MC have been recognized.
A good definition of MC is "Methods of thought reform to force submission or information from enemies and victims, or to indoctrinate and increase cooperation in members and captors," and is a synonym to coersive persuasion, defined as "attempts to force people to change beliefs, ideas, attitudes or behaviors using psychological pressure, undue influence, threats, anxiety, and/or intimidation." [3] [4]
Programming is an example of the far end of mind control, a severe form of conditioning. However, things such as cult and religious indoctrination, psychic driving, terrified submission, etc, are all also forms of MC that can occur within organized abuse. MC is not exclusive to child victims, as most forms of MC can be performed at any age.
Thank you for reading. If you have any questions or additions, feel free to send an ask or reply to this post. A reminder that I am not a professional, I am flawed, and I am just doing my best.
A warning for trauma survivors looking for online support
You may have come across the acronym "RAMCOA", which stands for "ritual abuse, mind control, and organized abuse."
If you search the Internet for RAMCOA, you might come across a result like this:
If you click the link, you'll be taken to a site that briefly describes what RAMCOA supposedly is, with content like:
MC - Mind Control. A shortened form of TBMC, standing for Torture Based Mind Control. MC is also known as programming, where victims are repeatedly tortured starting at a very young age to intentionally cause a system of dissociated parts that function perfectly to suit the abusers' needs.
alpha : a base program, one of the very first implemented. it trains the victim's mind to accept every order given by handlers willingly. parts with alpha programming will often have no will of their own, and very little personality outside of following orders.
aiw : alice in wonderland. typically split into 3 different sections : black alice, white alice, and crazy alice. ideally, a system scripted with aiw would have all three. white alice makes sure the system forgets the trauma, black alice makes the system feel like theyll be a danger to others if they remember the trauma, and crazy alice makes the system think theyre making it up or going insane if they ever remember it.
Literally all of this comes from a conspiracy theory - specifically, the Project Monarch alter programming conspiracy. It was developed and pushed by far right conspiracy theorists. Most of what people run into specifically traces back to Fritz Springmeier, a man who claimed in the 90's that the fight for gay rights was part of a plot to enthrone the antichrist in the year 2000. The Project Monarch conspiracy theory was always adjacent to the Satanic Panic, if not a somewhat niche part of it. If you start checking citations, you will find many of these people citing Svali, a conspiracy theorist who gets a lot of her material from Springmeier. (Example 1, example 2.)
This is no accident. The term RAMCOA was created by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), which was created by and for psychologists who believed in the myths promoted during the Satanic Panic.
The RA part comes from "satanic ritual abuse," which was coined by Dr. Lawrence Pazder of Michelle Remembers (cw for descriptions of horrible abuses) fame. Lawrence Pazder is the man who effectively started the Satanic Panic. It cannot be overstated that Pazder, now a known malpractitioner, was considered the expert on ritual abuse during this time.
The MC part comes from "trauma-based mind control," which was coined to refer to the alleged abuses inflicted in Project Monarch. Parts of this conspiracy theory that can't be traced back to Fritz Springmeier can usually be traced back to Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips, two other (really racist) conspiracy theorists.
Ultimately, the entire conspiracy theory is constructed from tropes that go back to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (a known antisemitic hoax), blood libel, and early modern witch panic.
Searching the Internet for RAMCOA resources, ritual abuse, or trauma-based mind control will always bring you to conspiracy theorists.
(Also, the term OEA, which stands for "organized extreme abuse," will lead you to conspiracy theorists as well.)
So yeah, if you're looking for support, be very wary of this stuff. It will absolutely not help you heal; just the opposite.
We think it's kinda interesting that in discussions of RAMCOA, it's often linked to WW2 & the Nazis or Mk Ultra & the CIA, but never to slavery & the colonization perpetuated by Europe & the USA.
A lot of the things that were done by them is incorporated in a lot of RAMCOA practices (at least in our experience)
