Question

[uforeah.livejournal.com]

Hello,

I am new to this community and I had a question for you all.

How do you know if you are multiple? I realize that it can vary depending on the person and the situation but I would really like to have some insight.

I am fairly certain that I am, and that the people I hear and see in my head aren't fake but I would like to know if there is any sort of checklist (for lack of a better word) that can help me see.

Also, if its not too personal to ask, how did some of you discover what you were?

Thank you!!

All of me.

Comments

[kasiya-system.livejournal.com]

basically all I'd say for a criteria would be if you believe there's more than one of you.. everything else beyond that varies for everyone...

kasia

[uforeah.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm I guess that makes sense

Kind of like the logic that you have to treat people in certain situtation not by what actually happened, but by what they think or remember happening.

[mercuryisme.livejournal.com]

If you look back in the entries here, just do a little digging in the archives of this community, you have a lot of system's "coming out" stories, realizations, diagnoses. A couple of people have asked this question before.

[changelyng14.livejournal.com]

hullo.

people here have debated a good checklist alot and all anyone can come up with that noone seems to dispute is this:
if theres more then one person in your body then youre multiple.

we were a self-unaware system till a couple of years ago.
you can check out our story if you check our journal. theres only two entries, the bottom one includes how we found out.


these are some cool links, that address myths of multiplicity among other things.

http://www.karitas.net/blackbirds/layman/term.html
http://www.dreamshore.net/amorpha/myths.html
http://www.astraeasweb.net/plural/

cool ta meetcha

Candy of the Changelyng system

[luwana.livejournal.com]

The voices might not be real. They might be real but not inside your body. They might be real and inside you.

It's a matter of faith. With me I simpley talked back until we determined whether the voices were in or out. Dealt with my doubts as up frontly as I could.

[annabellelaw.livejournal.com]

I knwe that I was different from Ash before he knew about me. I didn't split off suddenly... I kind of peeled away. I'm a girl & Ash isn't so every time he was told "No, you shouldn't do that... only girls do/think/say that" I became just that little bit more distinct, like a photgraph developing.

I can trace my earliest memory back to the bodys early childhood... sitting in school assemby behind another girl & wondering why mummy wouldn't let me have long hair, wishing I had yellow ribbons and a nice dress too. I have other memories from then, making daisy chains at school, that kind of thing.

I guess for most of my life I was asleep, occasionally popping up to say 'Hi' to the world. I only propperly woke up a couple of years ago... which came as a shock for Ash. He'd always talked to himslf before but had never had anyone answer back to him.

Thank you all

[uforeah.livejournal.com]

Thank you all so far for the help

I am really kinda thinking I am one, just didn't know the title.

I will post an intro in a little while.

Thanks again!!

All of me

[shandra.livejournal.com]

We have one version of our selves-awareness story at the link below. (It's a little obsolete in the terminology we use but is still accurate.) My own experience was - dramatic. Since I was the killed person in the story.

But one question we get a lot is how do we know we're not just talking about characters, made up ones. Our flippant yet true remark is that a made up character never goes shopping and spends our hard-earned money on clothes they love, but everyone else hates. :-)

Anyways: http://www.multiplicity.ca/essays/mushessay.php (http://www.multiplicity.ca/essays/mushessay.php)

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

We 'heard' from people constantly, from the time we were young-- not as voices coming from outside of us; every once in a while we have auditory hallucinations when we're extremely tired and we know the difference; but as voices or thoughts inside the head. The frontrunner would 'hear' their own thought, and then someone else's right after it, sometimes. We weren't really sure what to think of them as-- we didn't know whether they were real or imaginary, whether they were imaginary friends (we thought of these people as our friends, but every time we deliberately tried to make up an imaginary friend, it didn't feel the same and didn't seem as real). Sometimes we would think we had made someone up, but then we'd start to feel their presence 'inside,' and know what they were thinking about what was going on around the body. We don't remember ever being scared of them.

We switched 'main frontrunners' every few years from 5 or 6 onwards-- we didn't think of it as being that at the time; when we were older, we started to think of it along the lines of "I completely changed who I was"; but other people did comment on how we had become so different in a short amount of time with seemingly no explanation, as if we had become someone else.

The most difficult thing was having to suppress others who got too near to the front.

The first time we read about multiplicity-- in the form of MPD, of course-- was in a magazine or newspaper article somewhere; I have no recollection of what exactly it was. We immediately saw the similarities to what we were doing, but we didn't have the 'symptoms' of blackouts, finding things you didn't buy, etc., and we didn't have the kind of background of very extreme repeated abuse that the articles and books all described. Later on, when we got ahold of "Sybil" (insert barfing cue here), we could relate to the way her people conversed internally, but not to much else.

We spent a fairly long time in our late teens/early twenties on an email list for writers, where 'characters talking to each other' was a fairly regular feature of discussion-- more the kind of thing you see on soulbonding-- and for a while, this gave us a legitimate cover to have each other's presence without having a 'disorder.' It didn't occur to us for a long time that just because doctors said one required certain disordered symptoms in order to be multiple didn't mean that their ideas were The Word Almighty.

In early 2000, the then-main frontrunner began to take a more serious look at the others-- instead of trying to view them as characters or as representing specific aspects of herself-- and came to the conclusion that, actually, these were people. They had independent senses of self, they thought of themselves as being separate people, they were capable of feeling all the same emotions that she was, they had distinct reactions to things which weren't always the same as hers, they were capable of coping with new situations they'd never encountered. If they had had their own bodies, they would have been basically like anyone else. It actually took a while from here to thinking of ourselves as multiple, per se-- there were a lot of complicated issues with the frontrunner not wanting to give up control, and insisting for a while that the others "prove" their reality by immediately being able to come up front at will and do whatever they wanted (we had... somewhat unrealistic ideas for a while). But she calmed down about that, and so did everyone else-- more than anything, our fears were always that the others *weren't* real, not that they were.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Additionally, regarding 'how do I know if it's really real': It's a difficult question, but the best advice we've ever really been able to give on that is that someone who's acting will start to get tired over time of maintaining a facade of being someone they're not. To quote a system we used to work with a few years back, "Being oneself does not take effort." It's true that some systems do have changes in dynamics, with new people showing up and others deciding to spend more or less time at the front, but that's not the same as someone just getting tired of acting or pretending.

[stealthdragon.livejournal.com]

The day to day thing that reminds me I'm not alone in here is other people fronting. We have good co-consciousness, and it's fairly obvious when someone elses' will is directing the body about our daily tasks.


My brainmates and I seem to have grown out of eachother. The latest point anyone can remember feeling like there was a single person inhabiting our body was when it was about twelve. Over a period of years, voices coalesced into people. We weren't aware that multiplicity was considered a 'mental illness' until some time afterwards.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

*points to what sethrenn describes* Very much like that. And annabellelaw for the men and women wanting to wear their own attire, particuarly in high school!