Increases in multiple systems over years and some what-ifs.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Why are systems increasing in number? Assuming you don't count the Gerasene Demoniac, there are reports of systems with over 200 to 5000 members. We ourselves are one, and we are curious as to why these increases are occuring, and a good old-fashioned what-if. If Sybil had never been written, and Billy Milligan had still come along, what would have happened for the pictures of Multiples? Might we intsead of  3v1l p$ych0t1c hysterics have been plagued with a deluge of males who are uber-violent? Is there a connection between the gay community and the multiple community?

Comments

[kangetsuhime.livejournal.com]

I must have missed the "3v1l p$ych0t1c hysteric" train. Last I checked the only people who tended to *really* fit that were random case studies who probably were never multiple to start with, or were brainwashed into being a way they weren't. I think there's maybe a handful at very most in this community? I know these 'popular' figures seem to have an influence on what 'fakers', or shrinks, think multiples should be like, but they seem to have little influence on the phenomenon as a whole.


The same thing I always say Re: gayness and [insert 'subculture' here]. People who can accept one 'off the mainstream' thing may be more receptive to others. Someone happy with being pagan may be less likely to worry about sexuality. Someone ok with voices in their head may have less inhibitions about their preferences.

[catskillmarina.livejournal.com]

I was at a pagan gathering several months ago and i asked how many
people heard voices in the form of a narrator. I think there were 4
people there. No one thought much of it.

--- Miri

[kaikaitalktalk.livejournal.com]

kai think you right! kai know you right. we like all.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

The question is are they actually increasing in number, or are we just getting a different picture now that we have some (however small) ability to self-define courtesy of the Internet, instead of having our public image entirely controlled by professionals?

We do, actually, still think there are a lot of smaller systems out there, but I think one reason for it could be "counting the NPCs"-- that is, if you experience a subjective place or world, and count everyone in it as being a system member or potential system member, regardless of whether or not they've fronted. We often go back and forth ourselves on whether we should count people who only have potential fronting access but haven't used it, as numbers can be misleading, and people will tend to assume that whatever number you give is the number of people who actually front on a regular basis. (Which tends to lead to such comments as "that's impossible, no one could have that many.")

But it is true that after MPD became a big diagnostic fad, the average number of reported "alters" per group did increase, although people were still saying in 1987 that 92 for Truddi Chase was too many. I think "reported" may be key here, however-- these were the numbers that the doctors were *saying* were there, and for a while some of them seemed to be keeping up a competition to find "freak shows," so to speak. Artificially inflating the system numbers could be done by something as simple as deciding that someone who age-shifted was actually several different people, or if you asked who was fronting and got "no one in particular" for a response, they'd decide that was actually someone's name and basically force you to make up a "No One In Particular."

We think that both over-estimation and under-estimation of system numbers probably happened, actually. And the idea was that the number of people you had was directly correlated with the amount of trauma you'd experienced, so if you got into the hundreds, they figured that something really unbelievably horrible must have happened to you, and then of course you couldn't leave therapy until you had "revealed" it. So some people may have kept quiet deliberately.

-a bunch of us

[vinik.livejournal.com]

In addition to what you just said, a few years back, I do remember there being a lot of folks around online who claimed to have high numbers of people. We had over a hundred at one point, but for us we think it was because we were connected with either another where or a hell of a lot more walk-ins. Since we 'moved' our primary residence in our other world, we've had significantly less people walking through and we're still not quite sure why. But it seems to have a lot less strain on the body, which is probably good for us.

-Morgan

[pthalo]

Counting the NPCs is why we're never sure how many there are. We have two worlds, but one isn't ours, just a place some of us can go to (children), and the other is our house. We don't count the inhabitants of the place the children go to, because they don't have access to the body, though they're quite real. We don't have a headcount at all for the house, it's mostly "i know about 30 people" "I know about 20, but not the same ones you know" etc. "i know 5 or 6 of people really well, but i've seen about 40 or 50 on the other wing but they dont hang out with us much us from our wing." We don't even have a headcount for people who front most, though i think "6" might account for 98% of the body time.

--several of us

[kaikaitalktalk.livejournal.com]

kai think you no know what say.

[netdancer.livejournal.com]

We 'count the NPCs'. (*giggling over it, that's a great phrase!*)

So we're at around 350, with 20 that Front and 10 that Front 'often'.

The numbers increased over about ten years as we felt safer about being multiple and started exploring the Inner World, and as people came out of hiding to say "Hey, I'm here too, I'm real."

13 to 25 to 50 to 100ish to 200 to 350.

We've got worlds inside, and we really should be writing about it.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Well, that can be hard to write about, definitely. And we, pretty much, raised our numbers also when we decided that a bunch of people we had previously been relegating to "just aspects/metaphors" or "characters we roleplay/write about" were just too much, well, people in their own right to be denied that status. I mean, they could front, they could learn the ropes, they could do things as much as anyone else. So we no longer saw any reason to think of them as being any different than others.

[kangetsuhime.livejournal.com]

I'm plenty sure that some gay people just wouldn't want to get the New Crazy Smell on their coats by associating with us.

This is the kind of thing I tried (and failed) to get through the skull of the person who made up the term 'Anderens'. That autistics and gays and otherkin and otakukin are not all going to magically support each other just because a random otherkin thinks us 'weirdos' should band together.

That said I do think there's a correlation, but mostly because of what shandra said, which I didn't really clarify in my comment. If you're a straight woman, and you end up with a head that includes bisexuals, and men, and aliens, 'overall' the body isn't going to sound so straight, and it may make the person more likely to be ok with any homosexual leanings they feel (if any).

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Haha, yeah-- "if we could just get all the weirdos to unite, we could have a chance against them!" Works well in theory. Same as "if we could just get all the oppressed classes to unite, we could have a chance."

My admittedly pessimistic take on it is that it'll never happen, because people always talk about wanting equality, but in reality, most people want a slightly bigger piece of the pie to themselves. Not important whether the pie is money, power, representation, or the right to be considered sane and left alone. And a lot of people think the way to get what they want is to point to someone else and say that person is the one who doesn't deserve it, so you can get nice and friendly with the people who have the power. "No, we're not really that different, see? We both agree that *that* person, over there, doesn't deserve anything at all."

[terendel.livejournal.com]

*laughing* Well, send 'em to me. I am the "gay man in there."

*ponders* On second thought, maybe not. We have anough annoying people to fill our days. :-0

Richard

[shandra.livejournal.com]

As far as I know there is no real longitudinal study showing how many multiples there are and how many people there are in their systems.

But there very definitely was a feel in the literature (note that the literature does not represent the reality really - because who chooses to publish when is so subjective) up to a certain point that "more people = worse trauma or = weak minds. I remember one book (not the title) where the multiple's husband had a long afterword about "how strong and brave" his wife was to only split into three people, the minimum needed to deal with abuse. Under that kind of pressure lots of people may stay silent (or conversely, exaggerate).

I do think there's a connection between the multiple community and the gay community because if 3-10% of the population is gay, if you have many people in your body, the chances of having a gay, lesbian, or bisexual member of your system just plain statistically increase.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

I have been making that connection for many years. As a gay man, I have taken particular notice of our struggle for acceptance relative to how we are portrayed in news and popular media -- which especially since the 1950s have been the barometer for the general public to what is normal and acceptable, particularly but not limited to quotes from mental health professionals.

On television, gays were virtually invisible (of course, if you knew what to look for, some characters were gay, but it was all very circumspect). In popular books and film, homosexuality was portrayed either as a thing of the antique and corrupt past, or as a mental illness almost invariably connected with crime. It was worse for Lesbians -- God, those pocket novels of the fifties! Still, many gays accepted these things, because it was the only visibility at the time. If you want to know what it was like, watch The Celluloid Closet and read a book called Screened Out. Psychiatry had a softer approach; first people were told that homosexuals should be pitied, not feared, because they had a mental disease caused by "strong mothers and weak fathers" (thus keeping women in their place; if they sought a career, their children might catch the gay!). Then under pressure from gay rights activists in the 1980s they revised it. Now it was only a mental disease if the client was unhappy being gay.

People often, unwisely, believe what they're told. If they are told enough times that something is so, they will accept it -- easier than checking the facts for themselves. In the 80s and 90s, they were sold first one myth about multiplicity, then another. The first was accepted because it was portrayed in terms of the obscurantist myth that "the mind can do anything if it believes". It seemed as if some lucky persons out there had managed to transcend reality and achieve a higher level of consciousness. (Remind me to rant sometime about perceived parallels between violence against children and shamanic initiation.) It is no coincidence that belief in this form of MPD peaked at the same time as the latest wave of popular/commercial interest in New Age subjects. In both cases, the appeal was in achievement through means other than ordinary work. A sizeable number of people wanted to be multiple, and many professionals were only too happy to oblige them. Later, when it became obvious that the thing had played out and was beginning to make the psychiatric industry look ridiculous, the script was rewritten so that multiplicity was at best a delusion, at worst an iatrogenic hoax. During MPD's popularity and again during its decline, alleged experts informed the public "what science now knows" about multiplicity and the mind. Psychiatry always had the upper hand; it was important to keep people believing that mental health professionals know more about you than you can ever know about yourself. And none of this was fair to people who actually experienced classical MPD and sought help.

In both cases, the news media presented conjecture as if it were fact; film depictions never got farther than the abysmal nonsense you've described. Television gave us Herman's Head, which was originally written explicitly about multiplicity; even though it quickly sank into routine sitcom stupidities, for a time it was almost our Will & Grace. I am certain that if Sybil had never been written and if The Minds of Billy Milligan had been the first modern impression most people had of multiplicity, more systems would either have patterned themselves or been patterned by their doctors on that model.

Until very recently, knowledge of what was and wasn't possible in multiplicity was based on what doctors were willing to report. Thus, plenty of high-number groups may have existed and been overlooked. Also, keep in mind that multiples fit themselves into social paradigms other than mental illness and therapy; I suspect plenty are to be found in the New Age paradigm, particularly gateway systems. It's all in what you choose for self-definition. My objective in writing the stuff I do is to let people know that multiplicity can and does exist independent of therapy culture.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This system has itself established a public self that is gay, and this is due to the fact that our system itself has a high number of gay selves. However, we are not effeminate, and instead are a more masculine form of homosexual. As our two most influential Xganitiri (the Underlanker term for gay men) say, "The only thing that makes us different from the herd is that we dig dudes and the rest dig guys. However, because we live in a town where fundamentalism is strong, we are closeted.