Question

[joyless-abyss.livejournal.com]

What is median and mid-continuum? I've often wondered about this, because I've heard that it is like multiplicity except centered a lot around one person in the system.

I'd like as much info on this as possible, and I'd greatly appreciate any help I can get on this.

-Andy.

Comments

[moonfroggy.livejournal.com]

http://www.asarian.org/~vickis/continuum.html
is our favorite web page about mid continuum stuff, and vickis is some of our best friends, and yeah,w e think of it more as co consius multiple, like being so aware of each other thoughts that it's easier to pretend to be one person when needed, sometimes we are like that, lately we are not though

[joyless-abyss.livejournal.com]

That sounds quite a bit like our situation. We're mostly co-concious. I'll take a look a the link right away. Thanks.

-Andy.

us too

[kaleidescope.livejournal.com]

i don't really understand the concept. i mean, to me being multiple means you have more than one person sharing a body. and a lot of multiple systems and people in multiple systems go through self-doubt and self-exploration where they think the other people in there are just feelings or fragments of people somehow or whatever else besides people. and the therapist community, in my opinionated opinion, really promotes a very one-person-centered idea of multiplicity, where there's one "real" person and everyone else is their "alters" or there's one "core" person who "shattered" and nobody in there is a real person, or whatever. and i think it really confuses things to the point that "mid-continuum" is a totally meaningless term to me.

i don't think that was a very helpful response on my part :) i think it was mostly about the idea that multiplicity would be different if it were centered around one person. just that i think a lot of information out there tries to force systems to be centered around one person or think of themselves that way and it's really difficult to know what the difference is or what those terms mean in those circumstances.

a lot of systems that i've seen identifying as mid-continuum are describing things that definitely sound like everyday multiplicity to me but that seem so different to them because they have so little information available about the wide variety of different ways and experiences of being multiple. but then i wander into the dangerous territory of judging what other people are for them. aie!!

Re: us too

[joyless-abyss.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. Gives me some food for thought. I hate to say it, but our system is mostly centered around one person (well, at the moment anyway). But yeah, when people try to categorise eachother into labels things get out of hand. I guess the thing I was finding difficult was working out the difference between median, mid-continuum and multiplicity. A lot of it sounds the same to us.

-Andy.

Median info

[ninquelote.livejournal.com]

http://www.tanuki.cx/gathering/nexus.html is the site that originated the 'median' definition. The term 'midcontinuum' was originally coined to refer to people who felt they were more than one, but didn't have all the classic Sybil symptoms (blacking out, etc). The median concept was created because the group that originated it (of which we were a part, but we didn't actually invent the term or do much of the work on it) felt that it would be more appropriate to define the multiplicity 'continuum' based not on severity of some arbitrary set of symptoms, but rather on how many people were responsible for handling day-to-day life. In a way, the typical median structure (as we envisioned it) is actually closer to the psychological concept in that there is one 'main' person, with others who play roles of lesser importance. It doesn't mean the other people are any less real or valid. A fully Multiple system, by contrast, would be one in which several people played 'main' roles, with no one person as central (at least not permanently). That was our take on it, at least-- the concept is still in development, and, I'll warn you, the site needs -major- updating, not only in terms of material but also in terms of how our theories have progressed. As such, we definitely welcome feedback, especially from systems who feel they fit the concept of median. ^^

Re: Median info

[joyless-abyss.livejournal.com]

In that case I think our system must be Median, as mostly it seems centered around Andy (well, not all the time but more often than not). The rest of us are independent but don't interact with the outside world as often, hence making our role in the system seem less important.

Thank you for the information, we have found it to be very useful, and we will certainly take a look at the link a.s.a.p.

[kiya]

New person about, reading back entries before joining community . . .

I experience being median as being . . . there are thirteen of me, but we're all me. Most of the time we're co-conscious and co-front in various combinations (usually two or three of us), which means that most of the time we feel essentially singlet. I pulled out names a long, long time ago, and used them for trends, experiences of different flavors of my own consciousness. When I started pondering whether or not I might be median, I pegged those names to my separate selves.

We're all me. But we have different skill-sets, different means of addressing situations. And there are times (generally high-stress ones) when either only one can front at once, or (under different forms of stress) when nobody really fronts, because nobody can figure out who should be handling a situation.

I figured I had to be something when I was in a full-up seeing-red rage, went into a hyperventilation state, one of my other selves backstage noticed I was hyperventilating, started analysing it, and *snap*, I shifted front. The rage and the hormones were someone else's rage and hormones, just someone else who happens to also be me and live in this body. I've seen similar things since and have been learning to manipulate front consciously, but that was the dramatic thing that settled the question for me.