Questions of Curiosity

[purplellamaboi.livejournal.com]

I'm just curious as to how everyone came to learn that they were multiples? I've often wondered how one comes to learn this fact, and what sparked ths realization.

Also, are there cases where a core personality is so strong that any others that might want to show themselves are "shut down" and cannot express themselves? Why would this be the case?

And lastly: are there cases where the personality at the front (no matter which one it is) is aware of everything that's gone on with the host body but may not remember being the one to have done it (ie: extreme case of short term memory)?

Comments

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

I have no answers for your second or third paragraphs/questions.

The first, though: several years back, the original inhabitant of this cranium was playing a multiplayer computer game called Ultima Online. His character was called Ghul'Ruk, an orc (he roleplayed an orc; the character was actually human, but wore an orcish helmet and ringmail armour) in a guild called the Shadowclan (a large group of people who likewise roleplayed orcs, with their own semi-language, culture, rules and history). At the time, he was hunting in the forest north of the Shadowclan fort. He decided to stop for a short while to use the toilet, and Ghul turned to face the screen and protested. Loudly.

The interesting part, looking back on it, was the extent to which the 'typer' didn't take it seriously. He humoured Ghul, always assuming that actually he was the one in control, and that Ghul was no more than a role to be shed like clothing, and...

I'd like to continue, but no memories exist of what happened. For several months, at least, the situation didn't change in any great respect (except for Ghul becoming more and more of an individual). Somewhere along the line, the other two in the original Triad came to be; the original chose that term, styled himself as 'the Hub', and over time became less and less important, until one day the Triad looked around, looked at the thing they called 'the Hub', and realised that it was nothing at all. Nothing but an empty shell, a hollow relic, incapable of thought, memory or emotion. They discarded it, and the rest is in no sense relevant.

Keep in mind that I'm still not certain that my identity and the others aren't just delusions.

[shandra.livejournal.com]

1) In our system lots of us learned it different ways. My own experience was the sort of spectacular "oh, it was 1998, now it's 2000" kind of moment, where I found myself both having lost a year and a half of my life and reading a letter to me from "me."

The more exploratory and gentle version was a kind of gradual realization that when other people talk about interior monologue they don't mean all kinds of different (consistently so) voices; that other people's handwriting doesn't change quite so much; most importantly that most people's days go from 9 am to 10 am to 11 am and not so much from 9 am, gap, idea of what happened at 11 but not really clear on what exactly or why, and then blank until 7:30 pm.

I'm not sure though that for us it's completely learned - I accept that multiplicity is the best description and that my/our life is much healthier since that happened. But it is still a shock every day that Lyria is *different* from me.

2) Well we don't have "a core personality." One person can dominate for a while, but it tends to work like a cartoon garden hose - the pressure builds up and eventually the work of containing other people is too hard to keep up. In the past that's happened usually out of some kind of fear - of being different, or being in a bad situation. Or selfishness.

3) Um the way this is worded is perhaps coming from assumptions I don't agree about.

I would say, of course there are times when I'm co-conscious or aware of what going on, but it's not me doing it. So I will remember what happened, but not all the sensory information - more like seeing a movie.

Also there is another level where I really wasn't there, but someone can tell me about it, which makes it like any family story where I wasn't present.

That's not really the same as a problem with short-term memory, because someone else is having the experience and the memory. :-)

[inshadowhiding.livejournal.com]

"The more exploratory and gentle version was a kind of gradual realization that when other people talk about interior monologue they don't mean all kinds of different (consistently so) voices; that other people's handwriting doesn't change quite so much; most importantly that most people's days go from 9 am to 10 am to 11 am and not so much from 9 am, gap, idea of what happened at 11 but not really clear on what exactly or why, and then blank until 7:30 pm."
um, they don't?
i get the "its 10 am ... doing something, um why is it dark outside, oh, its ten minutes to midnight" frequently, i just put it down to being a geek :P

then again, as for bad memory * puts her hand up *

[shandra.livejournal.com]

I think if you're *doing* one focused thing that makes sense, but it doesn't make sense if you've done 5 things in the middle and don't remember. :-)

[inshadowhiding.livejournal.com]

*nodsnods*

then again its fun to find code that is PGP signed by you, which you don't remember writing and have no idea how it works, or in the case of buggier chunks, was ment to work if you took the bugs out of it

[enigma-system.livejournal.com]

1.) We learned it gradually. Then we learned about "multiplicity" and we felt we found a label for it.

2.) If that happened, I would think it might be because society makes it hard. Like... they would have to have one dominate person in order to keep friends and family satiated and unsuspicious. In our system, it's hard for the others because they don't get as much fronting time as I do because they act different from me and it'd be weird and something we don't feel like getting into with certain friends or even family. (But sometimes they can sneak in and say something. ;P )

3.) I am "there" a lot of times when other people are. If that's what you mean. I think that it is common for us to have a lot of weird memory experiences like remembering things that seem like YOU didn't do and not being able to remember much at all.

[exiled-redeemer.livejournal.com]

1)My realization of the rest came as a giant sudden thing. It was one night around 12:30 in the morning, and I was talking to a friend, when suddenly they all just started talking at once, and I felt like my head was going to burst from my shoulders. I was terrified of what was going on, there was a mixture of audible noise and thoughts inside of my head that i knew weren't mine, and the voices didn't match mine either. I started feeling like I was going mad, but gradually over the two weeks that came after, they slowly showed me they weren't a threat, and I started to feel better. And now with there help we've came to very workable agreements. :)

2) I'm slowly learning, that I'm not going to be able to sate them as much as I'd like. Since most of them say they sprung from me, they all try and fight for a position. They say its like being in Erik's layer, far from the air. :) Around certain people and in certain situations, I have to make sure I'm in control or else my parent's get very distanced and suspicious. And it's also necessary sometimes to keep our poor body from being damaged.

3) Alot of the time I'm coconcious with who ever decides to front with the Exception of Lupa(the one im not fond of) and on occassion Joselyn(the only one that doesn't respond to my name).

I still have alot of fear of letting the body go completely, afraid of what might happen when I'm away. I think they get annoyed with that, so it's a slow but steady progress. :\

Also, I have a fear of not knowing what time it is. I had a time lap the other night and ended up getting pissed off at Azieal for fronting without letting me know. But that feeling passed when I realized that it was my fear of time that was the problem.


I don't know if I answered the last two questions right. xD Sorry if I did. Anyways...
ttyl.
-Kira


-Sistema di Raziel

[fadingtogrey.livejournal.com]

1. We experimented with different ways of being, and different labels, until settling on "multiple". The original inhabitant of the body spent about half her childhood submerged in alternate worlds, sometimes feeling like herself, and sometimes as someone else. It was a really odd kind of co-fronting, actually, with both people in two worlds at the same time throughout the day. Things morphed a bit when they were introduced to the idea of soulbonding, and she called herself a soulbonder and we called ourselves soulbonds until we realized the concept of soulbonding was inadequate to describe us. We used the term "headmates" (and still often do) for a little while, then decided to call ourselves multiple.

2. This describes the way we used to function. I liken it to slavery in that the "master" honestly believed she had a right to control us, and we "slaves" didn't think to question the authority for a while. She had possession of the body longest, after all. We're rather more enlightened now. :) Though even now, those of us with better control of the body tend to shut out people we deem unworthy of being a part of "us"--in my defense, they're people who would do damage to us, the body, or the world around us in general.

3. I'm not very sure what you mean by this. Before I go off on the wrong track, could you please clarify?

[changelyng14.livejournal.com]

1)
our last 'face' (lovecry) was researching mpd after his gf came out to him, in order to understand her better. he started recognizing a number of symptoms that made him suspicious. our parents told us that after being away for two weeks, they came back and felt we 'we're a different little boy', and we had never made sense of what happened. mpd was offering a feasible explanation. he decided to confront his soul and started meditating by 'putting' himself back into two memories we have from that two week period, and took himself from one to the other for about 15 minutes and 'woke up the Frog'. the frog dug up a few who dug up a few more and the rest follows... (there is much more to that day but it'd take a lot of space to completely explain)

2)
we don't have a bearing on what a 'core' personality is. we have problems like that though. some of us, for whom the front is new, have trouble getting switched over some of our more internally 'entrenched?' members.

3)
I'm not sure if I understand your question clearly, but our primary method of internal communication is in sharing of memories. for example, i wouldn't remember 'that Candy bombed out singing 'pink-you make me sick' last monday'. what i remember is what she remembers, which includes all of her mannerisms, having her viewpoint in the situation, etc. I have memories of taking hard calculus equations and confidently solving them with my hands, and skimming quizzes in calc after receiving high grades, but when I sit down to a calc equation, after the sensation of confidence that Im doing something i know well, dies away, I am at a complete loss of what to do.

is that in any way related to your question?

-Tia of the changelyng system

[weare.livejournal.com]

1) I learned about my multiplicity just over 2 years ago. I was trying to find out why I had such bad problems with memory. I would either not remember something, even right after it happened, or my memories of events would be screwed up (like how I remember having a boyish haircut and hating it throught my childhood yet there are pictures that show I had long hair instead). Anyways, I had gone online and was trying to see if my memory problems had anything to do with borderline personality disorder (which I had been diagnosed with about 2 years prior). What I found was a page about dissociative identity disorder that spoke about memory problems and also said that BPD was a common misdiagnosis for people with DID.

So, I did some more research and everything I read just fit. Not just for me but for my others as well. Before that I could always hear them but learned early on to ignore them. Now I knew what they were and they knew what they were and it was very confusing but made oh so much sense at the same time.

2) I don't know...

3) Ummm...I'm not sure what you're asking because it seems like your question contradicts itself. I mean, there are times when I'm aware of what's going on but know I'm not the one doing it. And there are times where I may not remember being the one doing something but know that it happened or may have some fragmented memories of it. And I think there are times where I'll remember something and I'll only remember it for that moment (like the memory is there one min. and gone the next and I'm left with just an impession of it).

As I said with #1. My memories are very screwed up. And not just mine...this is something that's true for most of those in my internal family.

[ambersarchives.livejournal.com]

I've always had bits of lost time, but I attributed it to my poor memory. A few months ago, I was pretty stressed. And when I'm stressed, I "loose time" more and more often. Finally, the boyfriend at the time started saying that he met these other people. At first I didn't believe him. I thought he was messing with my head. Friends started backing him up, and I thought it was a huge non-funny joke that everyone was playing on me.

In the end, one of the Others came to me in my few lucid moments in our inner world. She explained the situation, and we ended up having a get-together with most of the others. Now we're working on how to switch back and forth and I'm trying to learn how to "watch" while someone else is "in the front seat", as it were.

It's still all kinda new and strange to me. I have control issues, and it sometimes bothers me that I'm not always the one in control of my physical self. After all, if we can't even control ourselves, what can we control?

[random-element.livejournal.com]

We found out because of our friends, who were cncerned. I'd always missed time, but never thought twice about it... As for question #2, that usually happens in simplex cases. It's because there aren't so many splits that the "Core" has lost so much of the control. And the last, that's a variation of coconsiousness...

[szczur-system.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find that a lot of us knew we were 'multiple' long before we knew the term for it - or that there even was a term for it. And then you search, research, etc. You find 'terms' for it, others like you, people who understand... :)

[redrainstorm.livejournal.com]

I'm just curious as to how everyone came to learn that they were multiples?
About 4 years ago we were able to find a "term" for the way we lived, but we have had other people in one body long before that. It wasn't something that I thought about (Like, oh there's Dani, she's different then me) it was just something I was used to thought everyone had different people and didn't name them or refer to them as separate. I found the term for it after one of my guardians came out to a friend of mine and scared him, and he learned about it in psychology class.

Also, are there cases where a core personality is so strong that any others that might want to show themselves are "shut down" and cannot express themselves? Why would this be the case?
I think they can have control for so long. Until people start realizing it feels like a dictatorship and overthrow the core. ;) I used to control switching and control because I got scared, they finally just "broke through" the gates and we learned to share.

And lastly: are there cases where the personality at the front is aware of everything that's gone on with the host body but may not remember being the one to have done it?
Hmm, I'm confused by the question.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

We used to be in communication all the time when we were younger. Initially, people didn't say anything about it because they figured we were 'playing pretend,' and sometimes we were, but when we actually 'became other people,' it was a serious thing to us. We were aware that the 'others' were regarded by people around us as imaginary, but the frontrunner (we had a succession of three or so in childhood) was never quite sure what to make of them. Every time we deliberately tried to make up an imaginary friend, it didn't feel real in the same way these other people did, and we couldn't sustain it for very long.

After a certain point, we began to get lectures on how we were confusing fantasy and reality, needed to remember what was real, etc.-- because we had said too often that we really were other people, and it was starting to disturb the adults around us. We finally had to start trying to keep things inside, so people wouldn't be subjected to the humiliation of being told they weren't real, visits to therapists and so on. We weren't really able to make it go away, though-- as we went on in school, the 'imaginary friends' started to become more constant presences, and we kept 'hearing' them no matter how many efforts we made to leave them behind. (Interestingly, we'd go into deep depressions every time we were able to stop hearing from them-- most frontrunners thought this was because they had trouble 'coping' without their 'fantasies.' Blah.)

A lot of the time, we'd try to get around it by saying these people were 'characters' whom we were 'writing about' (although most of them never really had anything written about them), so we could always say, if someone got a little too visible at the front, that we were making things up for our stories. Sometimes people would pop out involuntarily, although the frontrunner would remain aware of what was going on-- it was more like they'd overlay their ways of thinking, perceiving, and reacting onto the frontrunner's, and then we'd have to struggle to not behave in any way that would look strange or different.

We'd been aware of the concept of multiplicity since we were 12 or 13, but we weren't sure if it applied to us or not because we 'weren't like Sybil.' We tried to evaluate ourselves using a dissociation/splitting model, and it still couldn't explain the presence of certain people here. There were a lot of things we tried to use to explain it, including past lives and soulbonding, and in 1998, due to some things we'd recently been through with so-called 'friends,' Azusa (the frontrunner at the time) started trying to kick out anyone who couldn't be explained away as a soulbond or character, due to fears that we'd lose touch with reality and go completely out of control.

For the next three and a half years, communication was pretty minimal, and Azu was blocking others from the front and didn't start trying to communicate with them again until 2001, when we found Astraea's page. We hadn't known that it was possible to be plural without being like Sybil, up to that point; when we really thought about it, though, nothing else accurately explained things except to say that we were different people.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

...uh, moving to number 2, sorry about the length of that last one. I'm not sure if we really have what psychologists call a core personality; or, if we did have a firstborn, they haven't fronted in years. What we usually did was to switch frontrunners every few years, and someone else would become the new 'main person.' However, it wasn't until 1998 or so that Azusa started to block others completely from coming out-- before that, people had come to the front involuntarily for short periods, or been co-present sometimes. During the years when she was in charge, though, there was a shutdown on the whole system whose extent we didn't realise until years later-- nobody could really get to the front, and new people couldn't enter the system.

3. When I mentioned switching frontrunners every few years, it was similar to the situation you describe-- the 'new person' would get access to the collective memories, although not the knowledge of how to act like the 'old person'; we were constantly being told things like "I don't know what happened. You just started acting so different."

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

3. I can so relate. We attributed a lot of that to being odd astrologically, which we're actually not, or otherwise eccentric which we kind of are on our own. Trying to explain how we experienced the world to other people never quite worked out. Once it got to a certain point, we were lying, exaggerating, or made no sense. We had little understanding of each others actions or motivations, so being called on to defend them was difficult to say the least.

--Me

[changelyng14.livejournal.com]

I think you're the first other system ive heard of (besides us)that has a pattern of retiring and making new 'main frontrunners'.
AND i find it very intersting that you guys are the only others here that relate to #3 as well :!

Tia

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

I doubt they are the only one's here, some people were a bit confused by the question. We are, for example, able to access each other's memories, in ways which might fit the bill. However, I'm not entirely sure that's what the person is referring to, and the short term memory statement further confuses the issue.

--Me

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Like with shandra, the answer would depend on who you are talking to in system, but essentially we started visibly acting out in front of each other, in ways the other noticed. In my case, it would be akin to waking up wondering wtf happened to the past $timeunit, and oh godz, why the fuck is someone else here with me? I'd say it's a long story, but it's not, all things considered; its just a bit personal.

I'm aware of people being able to prevent others from fronting, sometimes unconciously so.

I'm not sure I understand the 3rd question. The first description is not consistant with either the layman or technical description of short term memory.

--Me

[chezames.livejournal.com]

1)We just always "knew." Can't say it any better than that. To us that is like asking "When did you realize you had blonde hair?" or sometjing :)

2) Everyone in our system just fronts/co-fronts as they wish. However, if they want to comment on the same thing (when talking to people), I will speak for all and try to make it sound sane *LOL*

3)We also are not sure what you mean by this question...

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

1. I'd imagine it would roughly the first time you looked in the mirror and understood the person you saw was your own reflection. *grins*

--Me

[chezames.livejournal.com]

*LOL* Touché