Some thoughts about multiplicity and human (or otherkin?) rights

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

A few weeks ago, we (amorpha) were talking to a friend who we had recently come out to. She said our coming out had caused her to think about a lot of things-- it seems to have that effect on a lot of people-- and that she had recently been talking to another friend of hers who had mentioned that she sometimes felt like there were other people inside her.

"What do they do?" our friend asked. "Do they ever come out or do you try talking to them?"

"No," she replied, "I just try to push them away because it makes me uncomfortable."

And our friend said that made her feel really uncomfortable, so soon after she had gotten to know us as -us-. She said she was genuinely bothered by the idea that there might be others in there with her friend, but she was denying them their right to exist simply because she was uncomfortable with the idea of not being the only one in her body.

Truddi Chase said she saw integration as being equivalent to murder in their case. I feel that it would be in ours, too (if it would even be possible, which I doubt given past experiences). But it also makes one wonder, if one person insists on being front all or most of the time, is that also a violation of the rights of the others in the system? What if some people are forced into playing a niche role, being able to do one thing only, because psychological dogma says each person in a system can only represent one thing?

I'm curious about how many other systems are out there-- we know at least three other systems who had this experience, but I'm just kinda curious-- who had one person as the main front when they became aware that they were multiple, through whatever means, and that person thought they were the host or the original or 'real' person, and it later turned out that there -was- no such person in the system. We've moved from a situation in which one person was up front 90% of the time (because she'd held the front for three years, and was having difficulty accepting the idea that there had been others before her) into a more egalitarian one where several of us share time equally, with no one person dominant. Azu still has to be persuaded to let go of the front sometimes, but I think that's a reflex that our brain is starting to undo.

I guess I'm just thinking-- even though there really are some systems where one person is central (that was what was behind the median concept we came up with in Pavilion), is it potentially dangerous for a system to try to decide who's the host or the original person when it's just barely becoming selves-aware? Could it result in the suppression of others who could have been full people like anyone else, just because one person who's held the front previously is laboring under the idea that they have to be central to it? I admit I'm pretty biased in this matter because if Azusa had not been able to let go of her view of herself as central and step back, I wouldn't have gotten a chance to, well, be a person, or at least not a very well-rounded one. But still. Is it morally wrong to try to suppress impulses of otherness simply because the dominant front is uncomfortable with the idea of not being the only one in their body? Or to force others away from the front because someone believes they have to be the host or the center of the system? Just some thoughts, and I was curious what others' opinions on this were.


Anthea

Comments

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

I do not think dangerous is the word, but it might be unwise. Society wants to see one person in any case, and the question "who's the real one" or "who's the main one" is asked so often as to become a cliche. On newly discovering oneself to be part of a group, one may indeed be anxious for there to be a "main one" for frame of reference, if nothing else.

To focus too much attention on such a thing at a fragile time may very well be to the detriment of the rest of the group; it makes them, in a sense, second-class citizens. It could, indeed, have a suppressive effect on them.

"Is it morally wrong to try to suppress impulses of otherness simply because the dominant front is uncomfortable with the idea of not being the only one in their body?"

I believe that it is, but unfortunately earth world conditions often cause it to be necessary; this is why we must take action to effect change.

"Or to force others away from the front because someone believes they have to be the host or the center of the system?"

Again, I believe it is. If someone's presence at front is detrimental to the earth life, that's one thing; simply to keep others from the front because of a belief that there should be only one frontrunner is to deny the reality of the system itself. Yes, the earth world demands consistency, but one should take the time to find places and occasions where uniform behaviour is not necessary. One reason for coming out to family and friends is so that one can relax on matters of frontrunning in the privacy of one's own home.

[emploding.livejournal.com]

i dont think its dangerous as such, although it can become dangerous because by pushing alters away, and denying their existance, they tend to do things ot be notices, which can be harful to the body, and often other people. (in my experience anyway).

i also thought i was the original personality born into the body, but i only came into hosting about 5 years ago. id always called myself by a different name than to what the body is called, but i didnt think anything weird of that.
over time ive taken on the bodys name as my own, and there is someone else who shares the hosting with me, but it was weird to find out i wasnt the original.

[ladydancerhouse.livejournal.com]

Well, this is the line that'll be trotted out in general. It really depends on the system. For us, it's not so much dangerous to try and figure out who the "real" person is, as it is a dead-end street.

We did that runabout, though, and we went through the period of time when we believed that there had to be a purpose behind every person. There were holes in the knowledge, gaps, things that didn't fit, and so finally we had to come to terms with the fact that we were different from what was trotted out as the normal.

I mean, you have to deal with the discomfort of the person who's fronting, but I don't agree with suppressing otherness because of it. I do think that there should be an easing of said person into the idea. However, it also depends on the resistance they have to it. I mean, Teresa was pretty open about stuff, and she was always aware of others, and she thought it was normal.

Well, it was. For us. *laugh*

For us, it's more dangerous to actually have one person fronting, which might be something related to this topic. We find that when one person is fronting all the time, it locks out everyone else to the front, and it becomes an impossible situation, with the person just trapped there, and nobody else being able to display much at all.

Ugh.

Starr

[36.livejournal.com]

We certainly work on the principle that everyone deserves time and deserves to have the things they want as long as that doesn't cause anyone else to have the things they want.

I would like to think of it as a right, I certainly feel extremely uncomfortable around plurals who talk about 'controlling their alters' or people who express the idea that they 'would be multiple if they let things slip'. To me this seems like dominance by power: suppressing other people's right to make their own choices, or have their own existance, because you can.

Systems which have some sort of median configuration where only one is 'a fire' and the others are 'fed by that fire' are something else and I don't believe the systems that have made me uncomfortable fit that model.

-David.

Possibly something contraversial, they I may get yalled at for later...

[ques-nova.livejournal.com]

I think that because all the others in one's body, came from one soul to begin with that supressing one, is jus like surpressing a part of your personality. For instance, take one "normal" person who has a problem with being too harsh with people and one multiple who has a personality that is too harsh; if the "normal" person were to supress that harsh behavior wouldn't it be the same as the multiple supressing the harsh persona? Their behavoir has jus taken on a more developed form. That other persona however, is still a part of the original soul, so why should it be treated any differant than a behavoir or tendancy? Please, before taking too great of offence to this, understand, I'm not the original/ main front for this body and would say this of myself as well. Were the original to decide she wanted me out, I'd go, having served my purpose.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Why should we take offense? What you're saying is most insightful. It occurred to me yesterday that if Sherry Turkle is correct in her theory of singlets as having suppressed any aspect of their own personality that doesn't fit with a single, consistent self, this implies that singlets, not multiples, are the ones who are dissociating in the older sense of distancing from what they wish not to acknowledge in themselves.

I'll see if I can find the exact quote.

The difference as I see it has to do with the fact that an aspect of one's own personality is that; an aspect. A person in one's system is a person. You're assuming that a person in the system who is "too harsh" is only that, and not anything else. They're rarely as one-dimensional as that, even when they originate within one soul. There may be a good reason why this person behaves in a harsh manner, and when that's dealt with, you may be surprised.

Perhaps the soul is holographic; every division creates another soul, not incomplete bits. Think of it as like an amoeba, rather than puzzle pieces.

Also, for an individual to "suppress" an unwanted trait is not always a good idea, as it can lead to other psychological and even physical problems. It is best when such traits can be put to some useful purpose.

See? You've given me much to ramble think about. ;) Thank you!

Chiu Merophei Saibiyaaram

A little more for you to ramble/ think about lol

[ques-nova.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I still think that the original/ main front should be able to make the decision. Like I said, if the original of my body wanted to take over I'd step down as would most of the others here. We are here because she couldn't handle certain aspects of life and she created us to protect her. Were she no longer in need of that, then we would have served our purpose and be re-integrated back into one soul.
I see what you mean about there being a reason. One of the others here (her name is Lily) is ridiculkously violent. She generally only takes over to cause serious physical harm on others. The reason Lily was created was because the original was physically and emotionally abused for 2 and 1/2 years of her childhood. When Lily was first "born", she took over and fought back, leaving the guy who abused our original so f***ed up that I'm fairly certain he'l never have sex again, much less force himself on someone again. Lily does have a reason for her violence but her judgement hasn't always proven trust worthy. We supress her to keep this body from being arrested, thrown in jail or at least having charges brought up against her. None of us know how to deal with Lily and if this body is in mortal danger, she quite often takes over despite our supressing her. She however is very dangerous, so we have to do our best to supress her.
I do disagree that we are separate souls. I still see myself as a piece of the original. All of the personas here see themselves as such. We know we were simply created to protect her and once she can handle life again, we'll re-integrate.

Re: Possibly something contraversial, they I may get yalled at for later...

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Oh, BTW, I should state this so no one gets offended: I do not believe that systems where people DID split from an original person are less real or valid, or that the people in them can't go on to become full well-rounded people, than systems where there was no original person. Same with people who are deliberately created for a specific reason. It's not so much where you come from as what you choose to make of yourself. Within a system, what you're 'born' with doesn't necessarily define the limits of what you can end up being.


Anthea

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

And you can't get consensus?

[ahiruko.livejournal.com]

We already know that the eldest personality, the one that would have to be considered the core, is actually richardmars, not me. But he prefers to be co-conscious with me rather than being up front by himself.

Co-consciousness is really how we do things. It's always either me and Richard or me and Doyle up together; the only time that someone drives alone is during a crisis.

I do sometimes think about Joel, the closest thing we have to a "buried" personality. He's so underdeveloped and simplistic, and so close to the border of being a dark insider ... we don't let him up because we can't really trust what would happen if we did. Sometimes we try to do things that he'd enjoy doing, even if the rest of us hate them, but that's about all we can safely do.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Well, we have a story about someone who we initially took for a dark/immoral/dangerous person becoming an important part of our 'governing body,' as it were. I'll only tell you if you want to hear it, of course, as it's rather long ;)

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

Whenever it is practical, I drive a little car with a small 4 cylinder engine and a stick shift, but when I need to move something that will not fit into the little car, I use a pickup truck with an automatic transmission.

If I "step on the clutch" when driving the pickup, I make a very sudden stop because I will actually be stomping the brake pedal all the way. And if I do not step on the clutch when stopping the little car, the engine will stop. In a sense, I have two dissociated driving patterns, one for the car and one for the truck.

Such dissociation is part of being a reasonably versatile human being, and I do not need to switch personalities to drive one or the other. When, however, dissociation is needed to survive repeated, shattering abuse, as happened to me when I was seven, the same mechanism that works for ordinary versatility may be used to avert suicide; provided that the dissociation is sufficient, as it was for me (plural).

I decided to be out some years ago. Being out means, for me, telling people about being multiple, about being autistic, about having Gardner's Syndrome, about belonging somewhere among the transgendered, about responding to morphine given for post-surgical pain because of surgery to prevent cancer from Gardner's Syndrome with a severe psychosis that led to some three years of intensive psychiatric hospitalizations.

I am not proud of the above, neither am I ashamed. I find myself (plural) to be a very ordinary person about whom nothing worth noting is particularly special. I happen to have gathered a Ph.D. in bioengineering and am a licensed Professional Engineer whose research interest is in searching for optimal ways to design social structures in the interest of public safety. Multiple personality systems fall within what I regard as social structures.

For some, being integrated may well be the best approach, although I never met anyone who was multiple for whom that was so. Like Truddi Chase and many others, I am solving the lost time thing with co-consciousness, which I continue to build.

For me, having to find or make a host would be about as destructive as being integrated. Again, I can speak for no one else, and I allow that some may find having a host very beneficial. Not, however, me (plural). I have willfully chosen to be true to myself (plural) and to allow whosoever is most comfortable or competent or whatever to be out and some of me (also plural) are often out together. Yes, the voices were deemed schizophrenia by the medical community, who were intent on denying the reality of all of us. But I finally understood this as stark denial on the part of the psychiatrists of their experiences of abuse and their dissociation.

If I and other people similar to me are not really multiple, then the psychiatrists can continue to pretend that their notion of what I (plural) need is better than my understanding of my needs, and that allows me to be subjected to yet more unwitting or witting abuses.

For many years, many of our alters were forced into very narrow niche roles, but that had the effect of, many years ago, my getting an A in college physics while getting an F in calculus when high calculus skills were needed to get the A in physics. The one(s) who were willing to take calculus tests had never studied calculus, the one(s) who were willing to take physics tests had. I am not sure that failing calculus was exactly dangerous, but it surely was inconvenient.

Some six months after the shattering abuse stopped, one of us (Briana) took upon herself to coordinate who was out and when. I began building co-consciousness before I was eight. But it is now more than 55 years later, and we are still finding significant fragments. If I had chosen to have a host, I doubt that much of what I now know of my life experiences could have surfaced.

Oops, left something out

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

Some years go, when I was a psychiatric inpatient most of the time for about three years, and was in a psychiatric intensive care unit, the head nurse there decided to try to teach me how to put my life together. She had often objected to what she described as jumps in what I was saying.

She told me to sit down on a couch and she got a chair and sat in front of me and, whenever what I was saying seemed, in her mind, to jump, she brought me back to the task she had in mind. I decided to try to do what she wanted, and was so successful that, at the end of our "conversation," she told me that what we had just done was the first real conversation she had ever been able to have with me, for I finally had been able to "stick to the subject."

I told her that I was very grateful for the experience, for I now clearly understood why what she thought was best for me was terribly wrong, and why I needed to avoid, to the limit of my ability, doing as she wanted.

I said to here that the jumps in thought to which she objected were the bridges I needed to become whole (not integrated), and that, if I did a she told me, then I would forever be condemned to my psychiatric illness. I told her that I would not do that, no matter what. I told her that I would continue to jump around in topics as much as I needed in order to find a way to make sense of the way time so often made no sense to me.

I was deemed, by that nurse, to be defiant. Being defiant was what led to the shattering abuse in second grade. Only, how can I change my genotype so that I am not autistic? That still seems impossible to me. Rather, I have set out to learn how to be a constructive member of society as a system that is both autistic and multiple and more. And, at the pace I can go, am doing that.

William Glasser, in his book, "Control Theory," wrote, (page 85 in the paperback edition fourth printing), "...those who believe in a system always proselyte for their beliefs. They feel a loss of control when they see people, especially those who seem to be in good control of their lives, following a different system. But even this they seem able to accept -- these people at least have a sense of values. What bothers them most are people who seem to be 'free" of any system and still get along well. (paragraph) Therefore, the most serious and often fatal flaw in any value system is that they are always destructive our out need to be free."

For that to make sense to me, Glasser's use of the word system is about value systems and not about personality systems. To believe that what works for me will work for you may be quite dangerous, for you are not me. To be free, I need all of me. And that rules out my having a host or being integrated.

Re: Oops, left something else out

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

During my first psychiatric hospitalization, which came shortly after being given morphine following major cancer preventive surgery, it was noted that I was psychotic. During that same hospitalization, I started talking about being multiple. But the psychiatrists and other staff members there "believed in a system (system in the sense used by Glasser, above) in which being multiple was a false artifact of improper therapy methods, and so concluded that my claim of being multiple was part of my delusional psychosis instead of, as I now know is so, the core reality of my life as one who survived terrible abuse.

While the abuse was happening, I was in second grade at Marshall School, in Eureka, California. My teacher, Josephine Hanson, and the Principal, Ellen Knudsen, both believed that my autistic self-stimming was a willfully and intentionally defiant behavior on my part, and paddled me, time after time, all the way to my becoming catatonic, in accord with their sincere, terribly misguided, belief system that was obviously strongly grounded in the behaviorist pedagogy of the era (the mid 1940s).

When I asked Miss Hanson what I was doing wrong, she would tell me that I knew perfectly well what I was doing wrong because she saw me do it. So I never got a clue, not until something like fifty years later, when I finally remembered going to sleep during the time of the abuse. I would lie in my bed, throwing my head from side to side as hard as I could until I lost consciousness. If I simply tried to go to sleep, before I could fall asleep, as my brain went into sleep mode, the terrors of the day would cause me to scream aloud.

My parents were able to arrange my transfer to Franklin School in Eureka before the end of second grade, and, within a few weeks at Franklin, where I was never paddled or otherwise abused by the teacher or principal because of being autistic, I regained the ability to fall asleep without having to "knock myself out" first.

My parents then arranged to move about half way across the country to get away from the Eureka school system, for they feared that another teacher in Eureka later on might resume the abuse process.

From the back cover of Alice Miller's Banished Knowledge, paperback, Alice Miller's words, "It is not true that evil, destruction, and perversion inevitably form a part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that we are daily producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is absolutely avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, and end can be put to the production of evil."

Supposing that Miller is basically correct, it is through the telling of their stories by those sufficiently abused as to have become multiple in the full clinical sense that the end of shattering child abuse can happen, so I have come to observe. Hence I am telling what I can. And I am doing so in the interest of authentic respect and kindness, as best I can.

Re: Oops, left something else out

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Our thanks to you. We are going to keep these lj entries in text form for our personal reference in the future.

What you describe is extremely familiar. Being punished for behaviours that are normal for autistics, multiples, etc., of course still happens. You are extremely fortunate in having had parents who did not concur with the educational establishment that your autistic behaviours were misconduct. We join you in recommending Dr. Miller's books to everyone.

Re: Oops, left something else out

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

There is a reason why my parents understood me so well. They both easily met the criteria for Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. I grew up in a home in which the communication was unlike that of any other family I knew in childhood. Not that we had poor communication, far from it. What I find is now deemed nonverbal communication seemed to me then and now as a form of collusion through unwitting consensus to not communicate with either accuracy or detail. As I ran into difficulties in school, I told my parents what was happening and they worked with me to find ways for me to deal better with other people, based on their childhoods and later experiences.

The central problem at Marshall School in Eureka was that the teacher and principal blamed my parents for my autism without realizing that being autistic was not a choice for any of us. For what it is worth, in passing, my late brother, also autistic, got his Ph.D. in sociology studying grass roots political action organizations. I grew up in a family where being autistic was both entirely normal and, for the four of us as a family, profoundly beneficial.

Note that none of us "had autism." We had, from time to time, colds or flu or even stomach upsets. Those illnesses were not essential to our core natures. Autism was and is. But if you believe that autism is a willful flaw of character, as seemingly did that teacher and principal, then what was done to me would be deemed helpful and not massively ruinous. Alas, the teacher and principle did not know any better. But my family and I did.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I think it's great that your parents understood you so well. Some parents who have asperger's are in denial themselves of their condition, unfortunately.

When autistic persons are high-functioning enough (generally meaning 'verbal enough') to live independently, and/or to live without significant special assistance or modifications to their daily life, it becomes easy for those around them to go into denial, to dismiss the autism as being merely symptomatic, like you said, of some character flaw: poor grades blamed on laziness, lack of social life on 'oversensitivity,' fixation on certain things and insistience on routine as immaturity, like a child demanding to be read the same bedtime story every night. The kid is -normal-, just bad and lazy, and could act "proper" if they really wished to, or if we show them that this kind of behavior won't be tolerated.

Childre with high-functioning autism are often discouraged from self-exploration well into adulthood. Thou Shalt Not Defy Our Decree That Thou Art Merely Lazy And Oversensitive And Need To Try Harder. The children are told that autism is a 'cop-out,' an excuse for lifelong failure, and that 'real' autistics are those loony people on TV. It's getting easier to be taken seriously nowadays, although there is still some godawful publicity out there ("cure autism" ad nauseum), but in our case, it came down to choosing between being true to ourselves and being true to our family. Considering how many years we've faked over our family of origin by acting as a singlet, it wasn't a hard choice for us to make.


~Azu

Re: Oops, left something else out

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I started talking about being multiple. But the psychiatrists and other staff members there "believed in a system (system in the sense used by Glasser, above) in which being multiple was a false artifact of improper therapy methods,

And they didn't even ASK you? That's hideous. We have been in therapy for issues unrelated to multiplicity (we had to get past the idea that it was 'shameful' to admit one needed help), but we discovered we were we on our own, completely independently of any therapist, from webpages and communication with others who had had similar experiences to our own.

I think assumption rarely fails to reveal the depth of 'professionals' ignorance.


Anthea

Re: Oops, left something else out

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

They did not know how to ask me, so I have come to believe. I cannot reasonably expect of people that which they cannot do, or I find myself unable even to respect myself.

I had major surgery to prevent colon cancer in the summer of 1996, and began psychiatric hospitalizations that September, telling the psychiatrist and staff that I was multiple. I even wrote a short "poem" about being autistic, and that was also summarily dismissed as a form of resistance on my part to divert attention from my "real" issues.

Alas, autism and morphine-induced psychosis and what happened to me that I had to become multiple to survive were the real issues I faced. After two years of extensive hospitalizations in the Chicago, Illinois, area, I went to Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for some nine months. At Riggs, there was no effort made to persuade me that I was not multiple or autistic. There, for the first time, I came under the care of a psychiatrist who quite fully respected my understanding of my life to that point and shared with me ways to find the fragments of my life and put them together. That psychiatrist said to me that, if it was helpful to me to believe that I was multiple, that was just fine with him; and that he would take no issue with that. There are some people who do forms of psychotherapy that are truly helpful. I worked with one of them at Riggs.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I'm just kinda curious, and I may be just being ignorant here-- if you don't have a host why do you call yourselves alters? I always thought if you used the word alter it implied there was a host who they were all "alternate" to. But I could be wrong.


Anthea

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

My alters are alternatives to one another and not to a purported host. Furthermore, I have no one particular personality that is dominant over any of the others. This was not always true, however. But the personality that was dominant prior to 1986 was not in any way a host, having developed when I was twenty following a near-fatal drowning incident in a college swimming class.

In common usage, perhaps the term "alter" always means an alter to the host. But that model presumes the existence of a host, and the presumption, like the model, is not always right.

I do not call myselves alters in my internal communication, I used that term only because I think others tend to understand me better sometimes if I use it.

In early 1990, some 7 months after I left Riggs, I was given a Quantitative Electroencephalogram (QEEG), which spatially maps electrical brain activity. The QEEG was "abnormal...with evidence of marked (spatial) incoherence. That is the most definitive test I was ever given in terms of hard data for my being multiple. I had, by then, developed considerable co-consciousness, and expected those results prior to being tested.

The test brought up what may be one (of many?) flaws in the DSM scheme. Quoting somewhat out of context from the QEEG report, "...this patient is suffering from a severe Axis II disorder rather than an Axis I disorder." But Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)is placed on Axis I, which I think is a profound error for many, if not almost all, people who are multiple.

Putting DID on Axis I of the DSM-IV allows pretending that at least some of the abuse that causes severe dissociation did (note the pun?) not happen, by attributing some of the abuse to the basic biology of the one abused instead of attributing it to actual, intensely harmful events.

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

The way associations work for me, sometimes I do not get said or written what I want because the ones who want to say or write are not out at the time.

After 1946 and prior to 1986, and during the first part of the time I was in hospital, there were "inner conflicts" regarding who would be out at any particular time. What I learned at Austen Riggs was that all such conflicts tend, for me, to be self (that is, all of me) defeating. In 1987, I began working on developing co-consciousness based on the whole of me being of equal validity, and so learning how to avoid having any personalities or combinations thereof acting in ways that dominated any other aspect of me.

I once put it this way. Prior to Riggs, I was somewhat like a classical grade B western movie saloon brawl. Much of the time, my alters were in competition for control. Since Riggs, I function more like a Philadelphia General Meeting Friends (unorganized Quakers) meeting, in which all present respect the others and anyone who acts does so when moved sufficiently strongly (i.e. "quaking") that it would be wrong to not act. Thus, most of the time, the alters who are fully present are merely listening and observing, although fully out as far as I (plural) are (not a grammatical error) concerned.

[starsandfishes.livejournal.com]

We used to refer to each other as "alters" for a while, because we just didn't have another word for it ("non-soulbond member of my system" sounds a little clumsy), until we realised that it was so closely tied in with the whole clinical model...

There really does need to be a word for it... Is there one? A person who is alone in sa's body is a singlet or a singletype or a snarfplat... a person who is not alone is... what? A "multiple" feels wrong, because that seems to refer to the whole system rather than just one of its members. And while just "person" usually works, there are times when we want to specify that we're a person who is part of a multiple system...

-Cait (apologies for the tangent, maybe I should make a new post?)

[starsandfishes.livejournal.com]

When we started to be properly aware that we were multiple (fairly recently - we'd known for years that there was more than one of us in here but since we'd never heard of non-disordered multiplicity we somehow thought "well, we can't be multiple then..."), and to work with that, I kind of assumed that I was the "original". This was partly because I came to it through the soulbonding community and so at first I thought of it as the soulbond/soulbonder model - which I guess has some similarities to the idea of medians and "fires", with one "bonder" and the others sort of all attached to him/her. However that didn't quite work for us either because it was quite clear that some of us were not soulbonds. So we sort of re-defined ourselves as multiple/plural. I still had the idea though, that I was the original person...

And then after a while we started thinking. Our mother has told us before that when the body was five years old we went through a complete personality change almost overnight and turned from a fearless and rather rebellious little girl who always liked to be the centre of attention, into being rather shy and anxious. She says she's always worried that "something happened" to us to make that change...

Well, maybe it did. Don't remember it, and I sort of doubt it, but who knows? But when we remembered this, and started to think about it...

Jasmine is confident, noisy, fearless, and something of a show-off. I on the other hand am rather shy and quiet, especially around people I don't know well. And we started to wonder if what my mother perceived as a change in character, was actually my arrival in the system, and/or me moving to the front...

Well, we can't remember that far back, so we don't know and we probably never will. Thinking about it though, it seemed to somehow make sense to us. So maybe I'm not the "original". It's no longer terribly important to me, since in our system it really makes very little difference how long someone's been around. (Well, I mean we probably wouldn't want someone to go in and sit exams for us five minutes after they arrived or something, but you know what I mean. Once you've been around a few months and demonstrated that you don't actually want to murder old ladies or set our hair on fire or anything, you're pretty much treated in the same way as if you'd been here twenty years...) Certainly, if we ever do figure out who was here first (right now we think it might have been Jas, but we could well be wrong. Perhaps we were born multiple, anyway), it wouldn't give that person any special rights or advantages over the rest of us. In a way, I actually felt relieved at the idea that I wasn't the "host"; it made me feel more as if I belonged with the others in our system, strangely.

Cait (did any of this make sense?)

[bioengineer.livejournal.com]

I have a hunch that there is a very wide range of inherent ability to dissociate, such that some people go through unbearable prolonged torture without apparently developing dissociated personalities while other people dissociate in the absence of anything that would qualify as abuse under current social standards. Like the ability to play music or to win a marathon, there is great variability in human characteristics. It seems to me that, if one can have one's alters function as peers at parity with each other, that can be far more helpful than having a single, dominant host. But this may not be so for everyone who has used dissociation as an adaptive process.

Cait, what you posted makes formidable sense to me.

that was an issue here, I guess..

[toride.livejournal.com]

when things 'out of the acceptable' were ridiculed, there was someone in the front doing all the socializing and all, I suppose she knew that she wasn't alone, but well.. *rollseyes* no, she just had to keep others tightly confined until someone break free and cause havoc ..literally, since it wasn't just our life that was damaged~
she went.. 'unstable' after that, but it's different topic, I suppose~

the good ol' times ^^;.. someone here tried that, and it made things even worse.. we were left without competent frontrunner, and had to makeshift someone into that position~ but afterward~ we generally get along as a community.. :D

- Oz

[kuwaizair.livejournal.com]

heh, I'm not multypul but it seems people have a problem with my personality.

so it hurts even more when I read how cushiney others get with people who aren't themselfs.

sure you likes 'sam' but will you like 'kacj' or "billuboo" surely no one seems to like be, if personality is what people do love (lies lies lies) then what? because i'm me and all, its a problem.

so i say I'm half.
the masses suck and i must emotionaly kill them.