Well, we've done it again...

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

Got another one we've discovered. The interesting thing is, she's limbless! No arms, no legs. Alixx has always had some body image issues, and this many be the source.

This is gonna be really interesting. She wants to do a lot, like posting or whatever, but we're gonna have to figure out a way.

Anyone else have people in their system disabled like this? How do they deal with the fact that the body has limbs or abilities that they don't? Cause it'll be interesting if she decides to front.

I'm just excited to finally have a girl about my age to talk to tho. :D

Comments

[pthalo]

I haven't met anyone inside without limbs, but we do have someone who is disabled in some way. Lydia's mute. Her hearing is fine but even when she's in the body, she can't work the mouth. We all know sign language so it's okay, but none of the people we know in real life know sign language so she gets frustrated with not having anyone to talk to. She can write though and she's updated the journal a little.

If she comes front, I'd say get her to try to use the arms and legs as if they were prosthetic limbs, but if she can't work them, then maybe she could type with a pen in her mouth?

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

She's not the first person in here who is disabled, Ali is severely austistic and lately has been almost catatonic. I just wondered how this works out for other ppl. We know another person OL who has a person in her system who is armless but not legless as well. Just curious how anyone else dealt with it.

I guess I could facilitate for her like I do for Ali. Damn I'm a busy gal!

[garden-keep.livejournal.com]

Our new girl doesn't talk either. I'm not sure if she won't talk, or can't talk. We watch her like a cat at a mousehole when she fronts though, and she seems to be interested in speech (she moves her mouth but can't seem to sync the vocal cords with it). She can make noise, like squeaks or hisses. I don't have any experience with mute or deaf people, so I'm not familiar with ASL. I don't think she knows how to read or write. Any tips on how to communicate with her?

~Janessa

[pthalo]

You could try speaking your language to her (English) and hope that she'll learn it. Maybe use simple sentences if she doesn't seem to understand longer ones. Keep in mind she may understand full well, just be unable to talk (like Lydia). If you don't know ASL and she doesn't seem to know it (she hasn't tried communicating with it) then your learning ASL will be a new language for her to learn or not learn, as the case may be. But you can try gestures, the kind of gestures that make sense to you and you would understand if someone made for you. You might check out a book on babysigning from the library. They have simple signs for mothers to use with their babies. They find that babies usually can repeat these signs after five months (instead of starting talking around 8 or 9 months) and use sentences earlier. Those books tend to have the kind of signs a mother would need to communicate with a child, but it's very simplified and may make things easier.

Our mother was an immigrant child who came to the United States when she was almost four. She entered kindergarten not knowing English (her parents, who didn't know English spoke to them in Hungarian at home). She says her kindergarten teacher was very nice and got the classmates to help teach her English by showing her things and telling her the English words for them. You could try something like that as well.

Hellen Keller's teacher fingerspelled words (using the ASL alphabet, which is not hard to learn) and also printed words for her in grade 1 braille and just kept teaching her words for things until one day when the kid was seven it finally clicked that the word that was being spelled into her hand, w-a-t-e-r was equivalent to the stuff her other hand had been placed in and once she understood that (she had never been able to communicate before), she learned a lot of other words quicker. It took a while for her to understand what the teacher was trying to do, but once she got that she was being taught a language, a way to communicate and be with other people, she was unstopable.

Just some thoughts.

Pthalo

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

yes! actually Helen was communicating even before Annie arrived... she had sixty signs that she'd made up herself, which the family understood. She had been starting to talk when she had the illness that took her sight and hearing, and the one word she was left with was "water", which she pronounced "wah" and kept as a spoken word until that day at the well-house, about four months after Annie began working with her. She writes about this in her book (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html). Letters from Annie about how she taught Helen are also in there. Samuel Gridley Howe had used a similar method with Laura Bridgman fifty years earlier only he used little keytags and cards with raised letters on them and pinned them to objects.

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

With Ali, she pretty much is a "binary" type, meaning she only gives us "yes" and "no" for the most part. Rana finally got her name out of her by basically going through the alphabet letter by letter and getting a yes or no from her on each letter. It's a long process, and she doesn't like to do it for very long before going back into her catatonic state. But if your new girl can hear, you might want to try that, asking yes or no questions and getting her to nod or shake her head.

[spare-parts.livejournal.com]

It was a bit awkward at first, but I can use the body's limbs about as well as I use my prosthetics now. If that's too difficult for her, she could always work on learning to type using a stick in the body's teeth, as some people do, or one of you could type for her.

I'd like very much to meet her when she decides if she wants to use LJ.

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

I've told her I'm willing to type for her, but she's stubborn like that. Wants to do it herself. Silly girl.

[echthros.livejournal.com]

Eh, it's understandable. I mean, she's going to have to get used to the body eventually anyway, she might as well do it as soon as she's comfortable.

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

True.

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

Nice to meet you! We've decided that if I want to chat or do LJ while the body's at work, I have to let Rana type for me, but when we get home I get to do it for myself. *smile*

-Carrie

[spare-parts.livejournal.com]

Hi. I'm glad you're getting to type for yourself, it really is different speaking for yourself than having someone else take dictation.

[saturniakitty.livejournal.com]

It's not quite the same, but one of us is physically unable to speak for some reason, and so whenever she's at front the idea that the body can speak doesn't even occur to her.

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

She says that she knows that the arms and legs *should* work, but since she was born this way, she hasn't the faintest idea how should we go about using them if she fronted.

[shatterstorm.livejournal.com]

hrm... if some of you can share the front with her, she might be able to learn more about using the limbs by experiencing you using them...

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

That's a thought. We're still having trouble working out "co-fronting" though.

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Evil?

--Me

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

We are so lucky that we haven't really run into anyone in here who is "dark" or "evil" really. Jaysin would be closest, I guess, but he's not really dark, just emotionless.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

For us, people who are disabled in our system don't often front, because nothing whatsoever of their own disability translates over to the body (we kind of used to fool ourselves into thinking that it did, but that was just, I think, born out of paranoia that we weren't real and desperate searching for proof) and a lot of the time it's very disorienting for them.

[aliasalixx.livejournal.com]

So you're saying that when a disabled member of your system fronts, they are no longer disabled? Hmm. Cause Connie says that the one time she tried to front, she had no access to the arms and legs at all. Luckily we were lying in bed at the time.

I guess it's just different for everyone.

[kuwaizair.livejournal.com]

these kinds of things i think make people not "think good" of the situation

I know from seeing things here or in otherkin and soulbondging the soul ins't as perfect as people thing. god lies.

for one, you'd think "when this shell dies i'm cured", but then somone talks about a blind wizard as their "spritual guide", blind wizard is a spriit.

if here, I have another person in me aside from myself, a spirit with a problem, then what? going back to myself when I die "i will still have sociloisis?" i can't deal with that idea.

so i wonder where these instances come from. try to see where i'm coming from, I'm not trying to troll or flame. I'm trying to discover "what consitutes as person" so one has an image personality and a mind. thats people. then i guess those who sit and froth and don't exibit thigns aren't any more either. well thats "matters of the body"

this is somthing greater. so we are all our image? maybe peple want to be some way. why fight for a magic cure. if somone's soul wants to be bone less let them?

wait so if i had somone non-disabled in me frount I won't have "my learning diablities? they could do my math for me?

thats what I've gatherd in the past months of reading these journals.

i'm confussed.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

With us, the brain we share has the autism. Anyone who fronts has to deal with it, along with the body's physical conditions, which currently include Cogan's dystrophy in both eyes, arthritis and sciatica.

There has been a great deal of nonsense talked about "the limitless powers of the mind" to accomplish the impossible and overcome physical limitations; particularly where it concerns multiplicity. One of the reasons I do not front more often is that I am, in my own person, a dancer, and I don't fancy the body's restrictions on my activities.

Also, if the body were that pliable to the mind's desires or will, we'd produce a great deal more testosterone than we do.

I'm going to try to find you some more texts on what various scholars, philosophers &c. have said on "what constitutes a person".

[kuwaizair.livejournal.com]

yeh ok....that sounds good.

you know again, its just I'm reading stuff people say and they make it look like that, or somthing may of miss read on your or somonoe's site that made it look like, one somone" didnt have epilepisy when so and so frounted" that just seemed odd to me. it then was if "epilepsy was a person thing, nothing physical".

blinking text for everyone huh?

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

nooo no blinking text! arg...

"Displays the symptoms of epilepsy" is not the same as "has epilepsy" -- that requires EEG monitoring and a lot of other stuff to determine. Even then it's hard to tell, look up epilepsy on line, there's tons about it.

We do have a couple of people asking questions in the FAQ about this but you can see that we give them the facts. Some groups do have people who really do have different reactions to medications. That would need to have a physician monitoring it though, to see what was causing the different reactions. In any case it wouldn't be magic, it'd be something biochemical. We're convinced all this stuff has an explanation.