Connundrums?

[linnai.livejournal.com]

Started out seperate but neither cooperative nor co-conscious in any way.

ONE person and then someone else REPLACING them and no one knowing about anyone else except for hindsight.

Existed as a hive mind, for lack of a better term from the age of about 9 to about two years ago, at 19-20ish. All sort of blended and half integrated. Seperated but NOT ENOUGH, if you get the idea.

Two years ago plus about a month, introduced to the idea of multiplicity and there was a forced split of all into seperate spaces, no more blending, no more coexistence, singular thought reigned.

For awhile it was OK and the last months, about six or eight of them, have just been so horrible, so chaotic and lacking in any form of cooperation it's just been a mess...

Recent count had frontspace up to around 10-12 active fronts, none of which were getting along well. The overall total is a helluva lot higher, ranging in the 60s for fronts, over 200 for "soulbonds" or other members and others unnumbered.

What do you do when you finally come to terms with the fact that you DO work better with fewer parts? Things got totally out of hand.

Partially to blame is some sort of innate ability to identify active perspectives of humanity in general, and society around the body and it "calls up" fragment-parts that have voices, that either fade back away pretty quick and leave a gaping hole or stick around, but are amorphous and not quite whole enough to really work together with anyone else...

Looking into perspectives. We're already working out some sort of... method for ourselves. Condensing where it's possible and organizing, sorting, getting things to work out. But looking for perspective... needing to see if others have had the same issue(s) and how they've worked with them/resolved them?

Comments

[linnai.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between the Muses, who are real and the characters from the stories. They all make noise, but only some of them actually have voices.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Okay, a couple things I can think of:

-For some systems it's normal to create "temporary people", who fade into the background soon afterwards, or after they've done whatever task they were supposed to do. We've done a bit of this ourselves, we call those kinds of things shells, as we don't experience them as being parts or pieces of others, just as temporary constructs.

However, be careful when you decide you've found someone new that they actually are autonomous, and not just someone you already know of who's age-sliding or in a slightly odd mood. There actually are some therapists who do this, who label it someone new every time they perceive you as acting even slightly different, and this can make the system seem a lot larger than it is.

-My experience is that the way the dynamics of large systems tend to work is that there can be a huge number of people, but there's a limited number of people in the "working crew" at any given time, who do most of the fronting on a day-to-day basis. If we counted the numbers of *everyone* past and present in our group, and those who've never even fronted at all, people would probably wonder how we could "function with so much chaos," when, in fact, the number of us who tend to work with things on a daily basis is usually anywhere from 5 to 10 people. We had an ex-friend who wanted to "help us discover new people" (I'm not convinced all the ones she "found" were real), but then continued to insist that *all* of them should be available at the front at *any* time. This resulted in things being way more stressful than they would have been if she'd left us alone.

[linnai.livejournal.com]

Part of our problem really is that the working crew got way too huge for our life. We had 10 or so people working and it was just... too much. Overloading us and taking us to 'bad-blendy' in the process...

I suppose another part is just that there are a lot of people with a lot of reasons to WANT to be around the front, now that we're able to function as individuals constructively. A lot of people that had good experiences at the front and who want to experience it again?

Maybe... there are a lot of echoes in here, but a lot of them seem to just stay around, even after whatever reason they seem to have had for coming around LEAVES...

[kangetsuhime.livejournal.com]

A lot of people that had good experiences at the front and who want to experience it again?

Rota? Timetables? Just "taking time" for it? A lot of people can be very considerate of the system's needs, if the system is reasonabley considerate of theirs.

Lead pipe works for those who are less considerate ;)

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

I worked with Iris and used my diary. I was working solely from the MPD/DID model from the literature. Having read Truddi Chase, I assumed that my people all originated in a single mind that divided or gave birth to others; but that even if they had started out that way, they were now persons in their own right.

So I didn't exactly proceed from the usual assumption that multiplicity arises either from dissociation or from the splitting-off of emotional reactions. More like being under stress as a child induces the birth of other minds. My biggest mistake was failing to take into account that one person may have many different moods. Also, by misunderstanding them all to have arisen from my own personal experiences, I tried to catalogue phases of my own life as different persons who I felt I "was" at that time. Anytime someone, me included, behaved a little differently, I would think it might possibly be another person and note them down.

This took a lot of straightening out later. Oh, ghod, we did the lists of names and jobs and everything. You know, like "Faith holds the anger." uhh, no, she just gets pissy. We did the whole "mapping your system" thing, too.

I had no idea about the nature of the gateway back to our world -- except as a vague concept I thought was a metaphor for the kind of creative visualization you're supposed to do in therapy (you know, "visualize a safe place where your alters can meet and talk") until sometime in '99. I still don't claim our world has any kind of objective reality -- I can't, there's no evidence. My subjective experience of it is what changed.

[linnai.livejournal.com]

We don't have a true clue about what model we can work from. We work from both, neither, some self-invented model. That's not a problem. We're ok being different than the "models".

For us, we wrestle with... sort of assigning or assuming that different people ARE different because, in the mind's eye, in the Inside or whatever, they LOOK different, FEEL different. It's really confusing at times because we're wrestling with all of these things that should identify DIFFERENT PEOPLE...

And that might necessarily not be the case?

We've done summaries of people... but not as per 'jobs' though the desire to do that was there, a little... we CAN'T map the system, it doesn't WORK and we can't figure that out so that was abandoned...

And some of us ARE solely from a singular period of body life... or at least originated there.

I don't know, thank you. I feel like we felt we had done so much good work and shit and all of a sudden, two years of work just... was hardly touching the surface or it just complicated things MORE... forcing us to do and develop in ways so we seemed more functional when we were just compartmentalizing in bad ways. Again.

[kangetsuhime.livejournal.com]

If you work better with fewer parts... have people step back and let the system run properly? There's no crime in realising how your system works best. We don't tend to bring up and lose people fast, some people do. Whatever works, works.

Any more than just me and Lu as main front runners would put too much of a load on us, since being so prominent in the body seems to eat up a lot of energy and mental effort. Anybody else who ever turns up will have to deal with that, unless we somehow manage to up our ability to withstand higher numbers of people.

Partly this is because we don't just kinda, 'switch front'. It's like having two people trying to be The Real One, the original, whatever. I figure that's heavier on the brain than just switching around like the other headmate(s) here do.

If we ever needed to cut down, we would.

[linnai.livejournal.com]

It's hard to discuss it in a diplomatic and still clear way. We're uncomfortable with the notion of integration but it isn't like that... it's more like... recognizing and rejoining all the parts that aren't WHOLE to make a few whole people who work. Because not working is really annoying.

[kangetsuhime.livejournal.com]

If the parts that aren't whole protest, maybe they have a point :P I don't tend to think of 'bits' as being things that can argue back. If they can argue back, they're a lot more than just a bit, and deserve a degree of respect for it.

If they they seem incapable of being bothered by it, then there's probably no harm. Probably. Lol. I could be being really immoral here.

If people are bothered by full integration, perhaps something midway? We blend a lot, and I tend to think of her past as my own, so in that respect we've come a lot closer together. We're not far away from seeing ourselves as one person, TBH, though I'd rather never reach that stage. There are degrees of 'integration' or merging, depending what you're ok with.

[linnai.livejournal.com]

We aren't forcing anyone to comply. Those of us who are seperate are remaining seperate because we don't agree with the idea of integration. It's the ones that have no whole identity... the ones that always have to ask or reach for IDENTITY....

[inner-clique.livejournal.com]

do what works better for you I guess
LeAnne

[kalli-moon.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that to. haaaa!XOXOXOXO Kalli

[linnai.livejournal.com]

Sorry. I thought we made it clear we were ALREADY doing what worked for us to resolve the problem. We were just wanting to know how other people may or may not have handled similar situations.

[inner-clique.livejournal.com]

no biggie :p
LeAnne

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) 'forced split': how was that accomplished? *curiosity*

[linnai.livejournal.com]

It's hard to explain really, unless you were there but the way we worked... it was one person at a time and we really didn't have communication with one another.

And Anja took over and for a good several years she was the ONLY ONE, we didn't have any communication and it was just... her.

Only she had some instabilities that just got worse. There was a crisis and she couldn't do everything anymore and a few of us had to force through and take over so she didn't have to deal with it anymore...

Did that make sense?

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) Sort of. When Anja had taken over, were you still concious and thinking? (If so: wasn't it boring, not having a say in what got done?)

[linnai.livejournal.com]

It was fucking horrible... we basically got to sit around and watch her destroy herself emotionally. (obviously we were all conscious and thinking) Some of us were nowhere near the front space, though...

Anj has problems with not fitting in, or with people not accepting her because she's "different" and she thought by taking over... and really LOCKING everyone else down and out, she would be more acceptable.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) Ahh.

Thank you.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

N) (Was she aware of you/your thoughts during the locked-out time?)

[linnai.livejournal.com]

Conscious self denial comes to mind when I think of how I might answer that question. Anj says she didn't know... but none of us are sure if this is because she didn't share the same SPACE inside as we do or because she was in denial about what she was actually participating in and being a part of...

A few questions

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

If you already existed, that doesn't sound like a split. More like a change in management.

You say you were not communicating with each other, but were you aware of one another's existence? In the process of taking over from Anja, did you establish communication with each other so it could be a collaborative effort? How did introduction to the idea of multiplicity influence your decision? (My theory is that it catalyses self-awareness.) Where were you introduced to the idea of multiplicity?

How is Anja doing now?

Re: A few questions

[linnai.livejournal.com]

It was a split from the way we originally were, which was a one at a time deal? As far as I know, only Tanz knew about the others as far as Front-line was concerned, and she was around earlier than when Anja took over. Some of the people who were deeper, and who didn't initially surface after we pried Anja off the front, knew about one another and even knew about the front, somewhat...

Splitting was just the best way to describe it at the time... I guess it was more of a breaking off, bringing walls down.... we didn't know about one another, but we all existed in a duplicate of the same basic space?

We did sort of hit or miss get communication going at the beginning after Anja. It was sort of during/after Anja's breakdown (she broke up with her boyfriend and had a serious mental breakdown around the same time) that we indirectly met another multiple and started to really do research. Found a lot of the links that are there on the bio page for the comm and kinda... bounced off from there.

The idea of multiplicity was the best (and some think the worst) thing to get into all our minds. It gave us a place to start a LOT of work from... and start to get organized from, but at some point the front-line had better results with figuring us out independent of other people/groups successes and experiences.

Right now it's really a collaborative effort. We were just really screwed on the organization and the cooperation aspect of it.

Anj is... really reclusive anymore. She'll come around front-line from time to time and generally is OK with stuff, but she's still not the happy, bubbly person that she used to be. Seriously, we miss her the way she used to be. She was good people before.

Thanks for asking. Talking about it helps to keep it straight in the minds of those of us who DON'T have excellent recall.

Re: A few questions

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

You're most welcome. I'm sorry to hear about Anja. Does she understand that she is not alone and that you are her friends?

The way you have described becoming aware of one another, bringing walls down, sounds less like splitting than like what used to be called evidencing. It sounds as if you became aware of one another's existence, but that you already existed, and had for some time.

I wish there were more information on the options people have discovered or created in reorganising their operating systems (e.g., creating "inner world" sorts of spaces, &c.).

Re: A few questions

[linnai.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough we credit Anj as doing the most work on developing at least the START of our place inside and she'd definitely the one that found the gateway to Absence (which is something we've really been looking into lately. We'd always assumed the Muses were ANJA'S and that we should stay away from them... till a few decided they should correct the misassumption and apparently Absence is a lot more developed than our space)...

From what we know, we're pretty much sure that we were all in attendance long before we realized we were. We did a lot of fast development over the last few years sort of... vicariously, through other systems (which doesn't work, believe me) and now we're doing more good on our own, which is better for us.

I think Anja understands we're not here to make her strange or weird or hurt her or anything... but I'm not sure she particularly trustst that it will LAST... We're not sure she ended up being the one with totalitarian control for so long, but it didn't do her any good...

We existed pre-introduction to one another. We're pretty sure we were here together from the start, at least some of us... but others definitely have splitting roots... later.

I wish there was more information too! It helps to chat about it some though, helps to illustrate some things or just make us aware of things we weren't consciously considering and that helps.