Question

[garden-keep.livejournal.com]

How do you deal with people telling you "You know, all those alternate personalities are just pieces of you. They aren't real."

Mindy talked with two people who knew from the rest of us, and one close friend that she told herself. Their remarks were almost identical to the one above. I, personally, am offended by this. For one, Mindy isn't our Original (Core, I believe, is the term used here?). I really don't like being told that I'm "an archetype" or "don't really exist" or "just a coping mechanism". I've tried explaining that I'm my own person, thank you very much, and I really don't appreciate being told that I don't exist. These people insist on telling Mindy that the rest of us aren't real. It bothers us a lot. (From Mindy: I know you're real. If you weren't real, I wouldn't be talking to you, now would I? ::Feel of slight exasperation:: They're just being [naughty word]-heads. ::Covering of Meghan's ears, Eve laughs::) How have all of you dealt with people with this outlook?

~Janessa (With Mindy, Eve, and Meghan in the background)

Cross-posted to silentmultiples and multiplicity.

Comments

[blackwing-angel.livejournal.com]

Frankly? I'd just ignore it. We've been through enough therapy to recognize the difference between our splinters and the five of us.(Thankfully, our splinters have been successfully reintegrated.) We are each unique individuals and we know what we are, the rest of the world doesn't really matter as long as you don't doubt yourself.

You'll pull through... It's like when you were little and kids were mean to you. You ignored them then, you can ignore them now.

Tabitha & Constantine.

[0semya0.livejournal.com]

I just remind myself that my existence doesn't depend on people believing in me. I'm real whether people want to accept it or not.
It does get frustrating, and at times it can make us watch how we act so as not to appear as "the bitchy side" or "the childish side" or get classified as some facet of A's personality. But you can't always be watching and altering how you act, and really you shouldn't have to. Just be you, and maybe eventually they'll learn to accept you for you and not as some facet of Mindy.

-C

[grey-reverie.livejournal.com]

i agree... thats about the best ya can do in the face of doubt.. =/

-lukies

[garden-keep.livejournal.com]

We get labeled by the people who know. One of the people is a psych major who, as Mindy is often heard to loudly proclaim, "treats us like a [naughty word] case study!" He's been labeling us as "The Mother" (me), "OCD kid with a doll obsession" (Meghan), "The Angry One" (Eve), "Stealth Mindy" (Christine), "The Scared One" (Leesha), but Mindy is just Mindy to them, she doesn't get a cute title.

Funny thing is, I've heard him say that he prefers my company to that of Mindy's because I'm willing to play D&D with him and Mindy avoids it like the plague. Hypocrisy what now?

[shandra.livejournal.com]

Oh, in that case - I don't know what you can do about Arrogant Asshole Psych Major Syndrome other than point out to him that he seems to be suffering from it and you hope he recovers someday, hopefully before graduation.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

ROFL! Can I quote you on that?

[shandra.livejournal.com]

Sure :)

[zenboiuke.livejournal.com]

FOL! You even came up with a cute title XD

~Kier

[ambersarchives.livejournal.com]

Oh! I love that!

He's already graduated, between jobs, so I think that this gives him something to do. He says he is very familiar with MPD because he knows someone else with it, so he's all Mr. Know-It-All. Well, he's like that in general, but I know it gets on the other girls' nerves.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Oh, the My-Friend-Is syndrome! Yeah, we've known a couple folks like that. What irks ua is the assumption that one person's (or system's) case can be generalised to everyone-- that's like saying "I know a gay person, so I know all about them" or "I know a black person so I know all about them."

[shatterstorm.livejournal.com]

Stab his arrogance where it lives. Point out that if he understood multiples he wouldn't treat them in such an... uneducated manner.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Yeah, give him a label, too. *points to what shandra said ;)

[ninalyn.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I'm a psych major, too, so I have to deal with the idiots who think they know everything about everyone just because they managed to pass intro psych and abnormal psych. *rolls eyes* What a joke. :P

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I occasionally wonder how many people who take abnormal psych do it solely so they can attempt to diagnose friends and family members. ^^

[laurenthemself]

My Ab Psych lecturer warned us that even if we DIDN'T take it for that purpose, we'd end up doing it anyway, as well as self-diagnosing. Apparently it's an inevitable part of being a psychology student. It gets annoying, because of course nobody wants to sit there and psychologically analyse their friends and family! Unless they're weird in that way.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I've heard several times that this happens to medical students too, especially the self-diagnosing part-- they call it Med Student Syndrome. (In other words, they start to worry they have every disease they're studying.)

[laurenthemself]

I would not be surprised. I do not know why it works like that, but it must just be the way our minds work (or we're all paranoid).

[ninalyn.livejournal.com]

The irony is, though, that you learn so little in abnormal psych about actual symptoms, that you're just taking a stab in the dark, trying to diagnose people with a specific problem. My class didn't even take a peek at the DSM-IV once. We just read some sort of entry-level textbook. Oh, and the section about MPD? Incredibly unhelpful. It was the first section I read (for obvious reasons). Then again, I don't know why I was expecting something profound, heh.

[laurenthemself]

My Ab Psych class was just a basic overview as well, although that was at the third year/undergraduate level. I never did Honours or anything where we might have gone into more detail.

My textbook had very little about MPD/DID. I should go find it and copy the section out and post it on the community for people to see what they're telling psych students these days.

[shandra.livejournal.com]

Myself I'd say (depending on how close a friend) something like "I can see why you believe that, because you're not multiple. But we disagree." And then I'd move on.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

"They're all you." "You're just naming parts of your own consciousness." "All the world's a stage..." Yawn.

They're trying to protect themselves. People talk that way because multiplicity scares them shitless. If they really had to think of us as the separate individuals we are, it would rearrange their worldview at the foundations. They've had one person per body ingrained so deeply they don't even realize it. Anything else is "creepy". It's X the Unknown. It brings out all the "axe murderer" nightmares from the movies (which is why working for change (http://www.karitas.net/pavilion) is important). As long as they can think that your people are all part of some "real you", they can preserve their little safe illusion of How Things Are.

This has been a public service announcement.

[zenboiuke.livejournal.com]

*unanimous applause*

Well met!

~Us

[eridanusus.livejournal.com]

When some random guy who lived four houses down from us claimed Chris had "Snow White syndrome" (naming your emotions like Happy, Grumpy, and coming up with life stories" my girlfriend was like, you know, Dat's a really funny name for an emotion.

That guy is a dick though. We've figured out who to hang out with. Luckily the people worth our time wouldn't even think about saying something like that, we'd kick their ass. Even the randoms who come across our journal believe us.

[ricktboy.livejournal.com]

i'd gotten that too, the Snow White thing.

i thought it was kind of interesting, and coulda fit, if it wasn't completely rediculous...

Rick

[kiya]

How do you deal with people telling you "You know, all those alternate personalities are just pieces of you. They aren't real."

Even if something is a piece of me, it's a real piece.

So I'd say, "Actually, none of my pieces are fake".

[laurenthemself]

This is a really good point.

Even if, say, I was just giving names to emotions, or bits of my personality, or whatever, that doesn't make it a pretend part of me! You're so right!

[kiya]

I figure that I can't do anything to make people believe that the system of conceptualisation I use for myselves is a useful one if they're not willing to take my word for it, but I can at least call them on being twits. ;)

[laurenthemself]

Damn straight.

[amusedinsanity.livejournal.com]

I glare at them as if I'm questioning thier intelligence and right to be in the gene pool until they are forced to think about it harder, possibly conversate, and admit that I'm right ^_^

it doesn't always work though. *sighs*

[pengke.livejournal.com]

It's hard dealing with psychology students. They're still in that stage where they thing that the proffessors, textbooks, and experts are 100% correct. They've never been out in the real world where there's an exception to every rule and they don't know about the politics involved in psychology. If you can't ignore them, try giving them a book that contradicts what they're learning in class. I like Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul because the explains all of the politics behind the current DID culture without saying that multiplicity doesn't exist. Websites won't work because they're made by the crazies who by virtue of being crazy can't help coming up with delusional ideas like being actual separate people.

It's easier dealing with the other people who decide you're all the same person. We try to explain that that's just not the case with us. We've known other people where that was the case and we considered the possibilitity that we might be doing that. We're just too complex with too many overlapping similarities and differences to be able to divide ourselves into subsets like that. If they won't listen then we either ignore it or we ignore them depending on whether or not we still want to be their friend.

We don't agree that people who decide we're all one person do so because they're afraid of multiplicity. It's just really easy for someone to get confused or think you're confused. Every website on multiplicity, even the non-DID ones, start out with stating that people have different sides of their personality. It's no wonder that some people think that multiplicity is just an extension of this especially when the classic image consists of the mean one and the child one, ect. Plus a lot of people experiment with giving names to the aspects of their personality or they have voices that correspond to those point of views. It's easy for other people to think you're just doing the same thing.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

"Every website on multiplicity, even the non-DID ones, start out with stating that people have different sides of their personality."

YES. We saw one page after another like that (in '95, mostly followed up by "The difference is that in MPD, the different personalities don't remember what each other did." Or the "highway hypnosis" deal.) That's why we deliberately didn't start out that way. We did acknowledge the "different sides" idea in the FAQ however.

[laurenthemself]

It's hard dealing with psychology students. They're still in that stage where they thing that the proffessors, textbooks, and experts are 100% correct.

Except for the sensible ones like me, who go up to the lecturer after most classes and ask a ton of questions and want to get as much knowledges from as many sources as possible and basically don't trust any one single opinion.

I mean, even before I started studying psychology at a university level, I was aware of the many conflicting arguments in everry subsection of it. That alone made me wary to just trust whatever the lecturers said.

[zenboiuke.livejournal.com]

[szczur-system.livejournal.com]

That font is beautiful :)

[zenboiuke.livejournal.com]

font face="papyrus" color="#669999" size="3"

[szczur-system.livejournal.com]

We'll have to tuck this away somewhere, for future use when a post needs to be specially beautiful :)
Do you mind if we friend you? :)

[zenboiuke.livejournal.com]

Not at all ^_^

BTW, we use this for reference:

Color Chart (http://www.livejournal.com/users/howto/28475.html)

~Kier

[szczur-system.livejournal.com]

Thanks, we knew about the color chart, but not the fonts themselves! >.<
Friended :)

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

We can see the colour, but it doesn't want to show up in the font (which is one of our favourites and we went back and made sure it was installed in our new windozeXP). ???

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

We can see the font now, but the size is too small to read.

[zenboiuke.livejournal.com]

There's just no pleasing some people -_-;;;

:p

Try upping the font size ^^

~Kier

[szczur-system.livejournal.com]

What is there to do but ignore them? You could *try* to educate them, but after a while, really, what's it worth? If it's someone who's a good friend, then perhaps ignore that bit of their "diagnosis" of you, and if it's just some passer-by, nod and smile and keep on walking ;-)

[kurina-lin-rais.livejournal.com]

I gave up in trying to let anybody know about my " uses " because of being called a liar.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, sooner or later you're bound to run into someone with that reaction. There will always be people who think they know All About Multiplicity because they took an intro psychology class or saw something on TV, and now they're convinced that that's how it is forever and ever amen.

As lilairen said, even if they were pieces of you, that wouldn't mean they weren't real-- and how are they deciding who's a piece of whom, anyway? Is it just the old saw about how people assume the first one in the system they get to know must be the 'real person'?

Some of them may be well-intentioned but misinformed; some of them may be trying to mitigate the 'weirdness' factor by making the decision to not think of them as separate people. Some people try to understand things by trying to find analogues in their own experience, and if they have the experience of having radically different aspects to one self, or naming aspects of their own self, they may jump to assume that that's what multiplicity is-- it's the whole 'but everyone has multiple personalities' deal.

[tigrin.livejournal.com]

I figure they're probably right.

though I agree that doesn't mean it isn't real. it's just real in a different way. not sure what that other way is, but.. still.

[effrenata.livejournal.com]

I'll note also that there are nondualistic philosphies (Hinduism, Buddhism, New Age, etc.) which state that everything is part of you. And some of them also claim that everything is unreal.