hi and pointers wanted :-)

[halcyon-bliss.livejournal.com]

I'm more or less singlish myself, and in a longtime relationship with six people in one body. So I'm looking for any resources for partners, and any pointers from others living in/with multiplicity...



1) my fear/stress relating to encounters with aggressive/volatile fragments (increasingly rare, but more likely when my partner-system is under acute stress and the people who handle security get tired out). I don't feel physically endangered, but it is hard to not be a totally guarded person when I sense stress and volatility. My distance at such times grieves a number of the people in there, creating stress... downward spiral.

2) jealousy among my parner-people, my own (inevitable) preferences for some of them at certain times (they vary considerably in kindness and caring skills). This hasn't been major, but it has come up... my response has been "it is natural for you to feel jealous of ___(another person in the system) because he has skills that you want; I think you can learn them too if you choose, and I do love you both". It is interesting that it ~doesn't~ work just to switch who is frontrunning, because different people personally want intimacy, and have different skills and deficits, and are not happy to let someone else run the show while they are passively present.



OK, a third issue. Most of our relationship problems have been related to a state they (my partners) call "liminal". Nobody is really in charge (no frontrunner) and the body's behavior becomes erratic, unpredictable, and unkind... also, memory losses/lack of accountability. I have learned to sense this state, and sense when the system is heading to that state (whoever is frontrunning becomes erratic and increasingly less coherent) and ask that either someone show up or else the system withdraw/journal/meditate until someone gets their act together to come forward. Lapses into this state are a cause for concern for all six people-- they are very motivated to avoid them.

One of my partners wanted me to ask about this, is the struggle with the liminal/nobody-frontrunning state familiar to any of you?? What are some of the factors that make this state worse and is there anything else (besides having me point it out, timeouts and meditation and journal-writing) that helps make it better? (A no-stress lifestyle doesn't seem to be in the cards!)

Thanks for any help--

Halcyon

Comments

[ques-nova.livejournal.com]

We've got a "frontrunner" persay, but I'm not actually the original host, so it does become an issue when one of the others decides they can do it better, especially as one has a tendancy to pretend to be everyone else (*glares at Chay*) though we've not had that problem in a long while. Sadly, it something that needs to be worked out within the system. Once there is a set of established rules and consequences for breaking those rules, it becomes much easier to interact with a multiple.

[halcyon-bliss.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I am seeing how the clear expectations and consequences is really important.

[voyager-system.livejournal.com]

ps; it did to us. lol. :-P

[halcyon-bliss.livejournal.com]

Thank you, it was helpful.

More work to do. Breaking stressful situations down and figuring out who does what seems to be resulting in progress. You and the other poster stressed planning... I am starting to get it that if a typical situation still feels too hard, probably not enough planning/problem-solving has been done.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

"is the struggle with the liminal/nobody-frontrunning state familiar to any of you?? What are some of the factors that make this state worse and is there anything else (besides having me point it out, timeouts and meditation and journal-writing) that helps make it better?"

Yes, when the body is extremely tired. We do not become erratic, unpredictable, or unkind. We lose the ability to track. Asked a question, we'll answer as if an entirely different question had been asked. We speak very softly and cannot make ourselves understood. Timeouts, meditation, journal-writing make no difference. We must sleep.

[halcyon-bliss.livejournal.com]

I've noted the loss of tracking as well... it is less threatening to me than the other behaviors so it didn't occur to me to mention it. Thank you for commenting.

[unshrunk.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this will comfort you or not, but we never had a 'core' personality and still don't, so that feeling is very VERY familiar. It used to be a lot worse, but we learned a few ways to cope, like trying to run songs through our heads or something, or get into some sort of an emotional situation (eg: reading the newspaper) to trigger some sort of kick out of it.

What you express as liminality, we experienced as being unable to move on a couch in a therapy group for hours, with noone noticing, even after the group broke, that we were paralized for hours -- or they did notice but figured it was faking.

Sometimes the system, as a whole (and I don't usually use or like to use the whole multiplicity lexicon, but I'm feeling ornery right now for whatever reason) just... I dunno, has no where to go, and no way to get there. This drives the current shrink a bit crazy, and it drives us crazy because no matter who we are or what we intend to try to talk about, something in his office starts that frozen thing, more often than not.

I always just believed it is because we DO NOT have a core (your words: front-runner). There was no static base to break off or away from, just a constant rippling out.

But that's our experience.

Yet it does make it exceptionally difficult to imagine we could ever be integrated, despite our feigned attempts at normalcy and our hours of journal-writing to try to cover up for lost time and keep the confabulation to a minimum.

Limininal. I like that word.

Anyway, my suggestion to you is to bring a walkman with a cd for each person. For some reason I've noticed that music is the most powerful shock out of the paralysis.

Hope this helps (and hope you don't mind me calling you sweetie -- I have no idea what is possessing me to want to do that, but I can't seem to make myself mark it out either. *Sigh* shrugs.

Take care.