Well if you poke around on the net long enough you'll find any number of annoying opinions really.
I wouldn't say Pat Stubbs is a fraud; she's a survivor with strong views about what multiplicity is and is not.
But fortunately no one person gets to define everyone else's experience. I think many if not most multiples have times when they're sensitive to outside criticism or negating remarks, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) learning to deal with them is pretty essential.
The "imaginary friend" argument has always struck me as rather silly because most multiples wish like hell they could make their "imaginary friends" do what they want. :-)
And the "attention getting" argument is also somewhat silly although I think there's a kernel of truth. There are a few, rare people who want to be special and who may feign multiplicity, but the vast majority of both multiples and err - feigned (?) multiples - will probably find that the attention is often negative and unhelpful.
So really there's not a lot of payoff in it, and when people say that someone's pretending to be multiple to get attention I usually find it's pretty easy to ask (mildly) what attention that would be? Because most of us are not raking in the big bucks for being non-singletype. :-)
For the actual fraud involving Qwillpen, this is one of the problems I /personally/ have with online "support" groups; people get pretty enmeshed in trying to help each other and these kinds of exploitations can happen. This is one reason that I prefer discussion groups that offer experience but don't try to make-things-okay for people. What disturbs me in the whole thing (besides the fraud which, let's face it, is shitty behaviour) is that no one seems to have said "well why were we sending this woman hundreds of dollars to pay her phone bill anyway?"
Not to blame the victims; they have a perfectly valid reason to be angry - but - but - but - have some sense here, people, too.
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I wouldn't say Pat Stubbs is a fraud; she's a survivor with strong views about what multiplicity is and is not.
But fortunately no one person gets to define everyone else's experience. I think many if not most multiples have times when they're sensitive to outside criticism or negating remarks, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) learning to deal with them is pretty essential.
The "imaginary friend" argument has always struck me as rather silly because most multiples wish like hell they could make their "imaginary friends" do what they want. :-)
And the "attention getting" argument is also somewhat silly although I think there's a kernel of truth. There are a few, rare people who want to be special and who may feign multiplicity, but the vast majority of both multiples and err - feigned (?) multiples - will probably find that the attention is often negative and unhelpful.
So really there's not a lot of payoff in it, and when people say that someone's pretending to be multiple to get attention I usually find it's pretty easy to ask (mildly) what attention that would be? Because most of us are not raking in the big bucks for being non-singletype. :-)
For the actual fraud involving Qwillpen, this is one of the problems I /personally/ have with online "support" groups; people get pretty enmeshed in trying to help each other and these kinds of exploitations can happen. This is one reason that I prefer discussion groups that offer experience but don't try to make-things-okay for people. What disturbs me in the whole thing (besides the fraud which, let's face it, is shitty behaviour) is that no one seems to have said "well why were we sending this woman hundreds of dollars to pay her phone bill anyway?"
Not to blame the victims; they have a perfectly valid reason to be angry - but - but - but - have some sense here, people, too.
Anyways, mini Monday rant.