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Nov. 23rd, 2006 05:21 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
dacnomaniac.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
multiplicity_archivesETA: I forgot a couple of important aspects. I have no idea how I managed that. Fixing now. Also adding some thoughts about our... well, no, maybe not. Should I make a new post for new thoughts or add them to this one so as not to clutter the community with our chaotic denial-busting? (As that's what it really is... we're realising we've been plural much longer than we thought, even before we stopped being just normal contextual personality modes and started being 'aspects', AKA one whole made of seperate parts, in denial about it. We're not as seperate as many of you seem to be, but there's us, the parts of the totality that is Me, and then there's My characters. Until I learnt the concept of 'plurality' as opposed to the pathologic DID [and yes, I believe both exist and that they're two entirely different things, one healthy and natural and one pathological; I don't understand the anti-psychology theme I get from so many multiplicity communities, as the problems with it are due to abuses, misuses, and misunderstandings of the discipline both by 'professionals' not deserving of the title and by others, and not the discipline itself, but that's another post altogether.] I was not aware that my characters were different from the normal writer-character paradigm, but according to that alone, I've been plural for years now. This is just the shattering of the last barrier to my conscious acknowledgement of the fact that I'm not one multifaceted stone, I'm a mixed-media art piece. If that analogy follows. I actually feel more like one soul being expressed simultaneously through several different, self-aware minds, but I'm not sure if that's what's actually going on. Okay, I'm rambling. Back to the post. --'Cet
------
Okay, things are getting a little out of hand here, so I'm going to step up, take the reins, and type out our 'minutes' so to speak, to help us finish working our shit out and also to keep the peace steady.
To start off, I'm 'Cet Diamorphine, AKA 'the Walking One' in our internal parlance. Delve, 'the Dog', and I are pretty much what's left of our 'source' -- who we were when we were one functionally as well as essentially.
What's happened, we figure, is this. We-as-I have always had a habit of intense self-examination, analysis, and, most relevantly, compartmentalisation. We understood ourself in the context of different self-parts, which evolved into what the source called aspects.
We still ultimately feel like 'I'. All of us is 'I', the same essential I. Deep down, we're all part of one being. But we're also individuals, and while most of us had been content to live in, well... okay, shut up, Fog. Fine. We were in denial. We insisted upon unity and being one nondivided individual, with subtle nods to the truth in the form of acknowledging 'mutable self-aspects', because it was simpler, and safer, and, most importantly, more controlled. All of us have differing levels of control issues; that was one of I-as-we's biggest things, so all of us have it, just like all of us have a sweet tooth for opioids even if that sort of thing wouldn't normally be relevant to our individual paradigms (like the Storm Warden, who's a shadow of one of our past lives. Dragons don't have poppies, but he's just as obsessed with them as the totality is.)
The totality, that's a good word for it. I just thought of that.
So, anyway, we've been more or less in denial. But the seperateness was growing, boundaries were being put up semiconsciously, and the alpha-aspect (whoever was on top, that is -- Delve or me, most of the time) was becoming rather panicked about it because we still had that strong sense of one-self and it felt like we were sort of falling apart. Does that follow? It sounds weird to me. But everything sounds weird.
You've probably seen the other post. Delve made that one, I think, but the difference between me and Delve wasn't so clear-cut then. I don't know. The Shattering was pretty sudden.
Oh, right, I meant to say. That's what happened. We were exploring the idea as one person with aspects, and then all of a sudden, the delusion just kind of, well, shattered, and there we were.
It's all Blood-in-the-Fog's fault. He shattered it. He made a bid for power, because when we were aspects, he wasn't the dominant paradigm often. He's about blood, primal instincts, violence. Which is fine in its place (I'm a predator myself) but not useful when opposable thumbs and civility are needed.
What's funny is how many lines we've split along. Fog and I are two parts of what used to be one aspect. It was that minor splintering, the Predator breaking into me, into Fog, into... another one. I'm not sure. We haven't all 'stood up to be counted'.
Delve is afraid. Delve must have been the biggest part of the source, because he's *really* unhappy about this. I guess he can just deal with it.
What amuses me is that there's not a chick in the lot of us. You'd think, with our body being born female, there'd be at least *one* female archetype. But not a damn one. Son of a bitch.
Shit, I think I've pretty much exhausted myself here. I have no idea what else to say. Guess I'll catalogue the known emergents so far and then split.
Delve says: This has been an *extremely* educational 24 hours. I don't think I'm happy about it. But, fuck it. Nowt to be done about it. I'm going to get stoned as fuck and pass out.
Taking the keyboard back... He'll get over it. Anyhow.
'Cet Diamorphine, the Walking One: Me. I'm a splitoff from the Predator mingled with Drrkhn's essence. I'm essentially a blend of the draconic and civilised/domesticated archetype. My purview in the past was mainly drug and street culture so I'm guessing I'll mainly be 'fronting' as you guys say in those situations. But, frankly, I'm enjoying being alpha to Delve's omega right now. I guess we've been in a power struggle longer than we realised, huh? Hah!
Delve C. Jones, the Dog: Is the original 'Coydog/Middleman' aspect, a collection of smaller archetypes rather than a specialist like me. I don't know how it is that he and I were roughly equal in the previous hierarchy of fronting-time, it just was. He was always ultimately the top man in some ways, I guess because I'm a compromise with what we used to be and he's the middle-form of what we are now. Or that's how it used to be. Some of those lines are being redrawn and altered it seems to me. Point is, he's a coydog, half-wild half-sickeningly domesticated. Oh, was that condescending? I think it was. I think I'm too sober to give a rat's ass. I respect him, I really do -- he can float in levels of society I have no use for and don't understand -- but, damn, his morality complex is obnoxious.
Knife-Smile, the Moon-Beast: Knife-Smile was originally a little bit of Delve, a bigger bit of me, but Predator all the way through. Knife-Smile is the werewolf self, the beast-unleashed bad-moon-rising kind of archetype, but at the same time he's also the natural-wonders type, the primal-heritage normal-wolf as much as the raging werewolf monster. I sometimes wonder if he's not destined to split in two, but he's showing his teeth and threatning to throat me if I keep jawing about him. I know better than to agitate a guy who can shapeshift into a five-foot-at-the-shoulder hell-wolf, so I'll move on.
Blood-in-the-Fog, the Killer: A splintered bit of Knife-Smile that festered in the side of the Watcher and grew. He is the raw urge to violence. He claims he's a spirit that's not really part of US, but is because we generated him with our raw displays of predatory emotion. He says because Delve and I prevented Knife-Smile from acting on his predatory drives and hence venting the energy, all that psychoemotional energy built up and eventually coalesced into an archetype, namely him. I'm not sure I buy that, but he's here and I sure as fuck didn't spawn him, so who knows.
Drrkhn, the Storm Warden: Drrkhn was the first exposure we had to our 'otherness', the first thing I figured out about myself concretely. I've always known, on some level, that I was a dragon. I have *never* identified myself as human. Humanoid, certainly, but regardless of the mirror I always sensed my inner animal nature. It took a long time to figure myself out (and obviously we're still in the process of it) but basically, Drrkhn is the part of me that remembers being Krros, a specific species of dragon from a different place. Drrkhn is the most disticntly seperate of the inherent parts, as it remembers a lot of things on a deeper level than most of us have access to and so has a deeper individual 'base' than many of the rest of us have.
White Light, the Ur-Predator: Blood-in-the-Fog didn't start out an inherent part of us that split away, so until it fully manifested as a bound but individual spirit, it had strong connections to many different aspects and there was a whole lot of blurring. Now that it's settled, though, the boundaries are clearer. White Light is an aspect of Knife-Smile; they're two sides of one coin. I mentioned that Knife-Smile is both the raging-beast-under-the-moon and the Ways-of-Nature aspect, which isn't entirely true. Knife-Smile is, basically, the Defender of the Ways; White Light is the Keeper of the Ways. White Light is a ur-predator, a shapeshifter, a distillation of the concept of 'predator/animal' blended with the ways and traits of all natural, normal predators without corruption by human ideas, positive or negative, mistaken or accurate. White Light takes the form of normal predators, though in deference to Knife-Smile's fairly fixed werewolf self-image his form is usually a wolf. He also appears as a coyote or a tiger in response to influence by My totems, and he has a strong shark influence as well. His 'default' form is as the ur-predator, formed of many different animals. More than being merely another iteration of predator nature, though, White Light is the seat of my powerful sense of spirituality. He is my shamanic self, the spirit-walker, shape-shifter, dream-mage, et cetera. When I draw wolves and werewolves, Knife-Smile is the brown-and-black or golden-to-brown-to-black one (his pelt looks different in different forms,) White Light is brindled black, grey, and white (like in the icon.) When Knife-Smile and White Light cofront, they sort of 'merge' into one aspect we call the Hunter, a balance between them.
The Watcher: Creeps me out. Not the same as the rest of us. He'll never take the keyboard and I don't think he's able to. In fact I don't think he's really a he. He's a pure archetypal sort the same as Fog, but also not the same. He just... watches. And comments, too, but not always. When the rest of us are drunk or fucked up, it isn't. It's always totally seperate from the rest of us. I almost wonder if it wasn't the first to really make the break and the rest of us are just like the last cracks in the iceberg in comparison. That made no fuck sense. Oh well.
This is weirding us all out now, with obvious exceptions. I think I'm gonna go lie down and wait for the dragon seeds to sprout. We need some spirit-walking time. (And maybe time in his own element will make Fog less hyper.)
Sorry about the last, confused post, by the way. That was Delve's last grasp at supremacy/unity, we think. (He disagrees. I'm not listening.) I'd get rid of it save it's against community rules. The last instants before a big change are always messy, though. Discovering our non-feminity wasn't pretty either, so why should this be? Still a bit of a pain in the ass.
You have any advice for us? Delve wants to know what other primaries (he wishes) did when their other selves (hah) first manifested, how they dealt with it, and especially when it happens. He resents the fact that this took 22 years to happen. I keep telling him, not everyone starts as kids, but he's not listening to me and he won't take the keyboard.
Screw it. Time for massive self-indulgence! Or not. Not works. (Puritanical queens.)
--The Walking One
------
Okay, things are getting a little out of hand here, so I'm going to step up, take the reins, and type out our 'minutes' so to speak, to help us finish working our shit out and also to keep the peace steady.
To start off, I'm 'Cet Diamorphine, AKA 'the Walking One' in our internal parlance. Delve, 'the Dog', and I are pretty much what's left of our 'source' -- who we were when we were one functionally as well as essentially.
What's happened, we figure, is this. We-as-I have always had a habit of intense self-examination, analysis, and, most relevantly, compartmentalisation. We understood ourself in the context of different self-parts, which evolved into what the source called aspects.
We still ultimately feel like 'I'. All of us is 'I', the same essential I. Deep down, we're all part of one being. But we're also individuals, and while most of us had been content to live in, well... okay, shut up, Fog. Fine. We were in denial. We insisted upon unity and being one nondivided individual, with subtle nods to the truth in the form of acknowledging 'mutable self-aspects', because it was simpler, and safer, and, most importantly, more controlled. All of us have differing levels of control issues; that was one of I-as-we's biggest things, so all of us have it, just like all of us have a sweet tooth for opioids even if that sort of thing wouldn't normally be relevant to our individual paradigms (like the Storm Warden, who's a shadow of one of our past lives. Dragons don't have poppies, but he's just as obsessed with them as the totality is.)
The totality, that's a good word for it. I just thought of that.
So, anyway, we've been more or less in denial. But the seperateness was growing, boundaries were being put up semiconsciously, and the alpha-aspect (whoever was on top, that is -- Delve or me, most of the time) was becoming rather panicked about it because we still had that strong sense of one-self and it felt like we were sort of falling apart. Does that follow? It sounds weird to me. But everything sounds weird.
You've probably seen the other post. Delve made that one, I think, but the difference between me and Delve wasn't so clear-cut then. I don't know. The Shattering was pretty sudden.
Oh, right, I meant to say. That's what happened. We were exploring the idea as one person with aspects, and then all of a sudden, the delusion just kind of, well, shattered, and there we were.
It's all Blood-in-the-Fog's fault. He shattered it. He made a bid for power, because when we were aspects, he wasn't the dominant paradigm often. He's about blood, primal instincts, violence. Which is fine in its place (I'm a predator myself) but not useful when opposable thumbs and civility are needed.
What's funny is how many lines we've split along. Fog and I are two parts of what used to be one aspect. It was that minor splintering, the Predator breaking into me, into Fog, into... another one. I'm not sure. We haven't all 'stood up to be counted'.
Delve is afraid. Delve must have been the biggest part of the source, because he's *really* unhappy about this. I guess he can just deal with it.
What amuses me is that there's not a chick in the lot of us. You'd think, with our body being born female, there'd be at least *one* female archetype. But not a damn one. Son of a bitch.
Shit, I think I've pretty much exhausted myself here. I have no idea what else to say. Guess I'll catalogue the known emergents so far and then split.
Delve says: This has been an *extremely* educational 24 hours. I don't think I'm happy about it. But, fuck it. Nowt to be done about it. I'm going to get stoned as fuck and pass out.
Taking the keyboard back... He'll get over it. Anyhow.
'Cet Diamorphine, the Walking One: Me. I'm a splitoff from the Predator mingled with Drrkhn's essence. I'm essentially a blend of the draconic and civilised/domesticated archetype. My purview in the past was mainly drug and street culture so I'm guessing I'll mainly be 'fronting' as you guys say in those situations. But, frankly, I'm enjoying being alpha to Delve's omega right now. I guess we've been in a power struggle longer than we realised, huh? Hah!
Delve C. Jones, the Dog: Is the original 'Coydog/Middleman' aspect, a collection of smaller archetypes rather than a specialist like me. I don't know how it is that he and I were roughly equal in the previous hierarchy of fronting-time, it just was. He was always ultimately the top man in some ways, I guess because I'm a compromise with what we used to be and he's the middle-form of what we are now. Or that's how it used to be. Some of those lines are being redrawn and altered it seems to me. Point is, he's a coydog, half-wild half-sickeningly domesticated. Oh, was that condescending? I think it was. I think I'm too sober to give a rat's ass. I respect him, I really do -- he can float in levels of society I have no use for and don't understand -- but, damn, his morality complex is obnoxious.
Knife-Smile, the Moon-Beast: Knife-Smile was originally a little bit of Delve, a bigger bit of me, but Predator all the way through. Knife-Smile is the werewolf self, the beast-unleashed bad-moon-rising kind of archetype, but at the same time he's also the natural-wonders type, the primal-heritage normal-wolf as much as the raging werewolf monster. I sometimes wonder if he's not destined to split in two, but he's showing his teeth and threatning to throat me if I keep jawing about him. I know better than to agitate a guy who can shapeshift into a five-foot-at-the-shoulder hell-wolf, so I'll move on.
Blood-in-the-Fog, the Killer: A splintered bit of Knife-Smile that festered in the side of the Watcher and grew. He is the raw urge to violence. He claims he's a spirit that's not really part of US, but is because we generated him with our raw displays of predatory emotion. He says because Delve and I prevented Knife-Smile from acting on his predatory drives and hence venting the energy, all that psychoemotional energy built up and eventually coalesced into an archetype, namely him. I'm not sure I buy that, but he's here and I sure as fuck didn't spawn him, so who knows.
Drrkhn, the Storm Warden: Drrkhn was the first exposure we had to our 'otherness', the first thing I figured out about myself concretely. I've always known, on some level, that I was a dragon. I have *never* identified myself as human. Humanoid, certainly, but regardless of the mirror I always sensed my inner animal nature. It took a long time to figure myself out (and obviously we're still in the process of it) but basically, Drrkhn is the part of me that remembers being Krros, a specific species of dragon from a different place. Drrkhn is the most disticntly seperate of the inherent parts, as it remembers a lot of things on a deeper level than most of us have access to and so has a deeper individual 'base' than many of the rest of us have.
White Light, the Ur-Predator: Blood-in-the-Fog didn't start out an inherent part of us that split away, so until it fully manifested as a bound but individual spirit, it had strong connections to many different aspects and there was a whole lot of blurring. Now that it's settled, though, the boundaries are clearer. White Light is an aspect of Knife-Smile; they're two sides of one coin. I mentioned that Knife-Smile is both the raging-beast-under-the-moon and the Ways-of-Nature aspect, which isn't entirely true. Knife-Smile is, basically, the Defender of the Ways; White Light is the Keeper of the Ways. White Light is a ur-predator, a shapeshifter, a distillation of the concept of 'predator/animal' blended with the ways and traits of all natural, normal predators without corruption by human ideas, positive or negative, mistaken or accurate. White Light takes the form of normal predators, though in deference to Knife-Smile's fairly fixed werewolf self-image his form is usually a wolf. He also appears as a coyote or a tiger in response to influence by My totems, and he has a strong shark influence as well. His 'default' form is as the ur-predator, formed of many different animals. More than being merely another iteration of predator nature, though, White Light is the seat of my powerful sense of spirituality. He is my shamanic self, the spirit-walker, shape-shifter, dream-mage, et cetera. When I draw wolves and werewolves, Knife-Smile is the brown-and-black or golden-to-brown-to-black one (his pelt looks different in different forms,) White Light is brindled black, grey, and white (like in the icon.) When Knife-Smile and White Light cofront, they sort of 'merge' into one aspect we call the Hunter, a balance between them.
The Watcher: Creeps me out. Not the same as the rest of us. He'll never take the keyboard and I don't think he's able to. In fact I don't think he's really a he. He's a pure archetypal sort the same as Fog, but also not the same. He just... watches. And comments, too, but not always. When the rest of us are drunk or fucked up, it isn't. It's always totally seperate from the rest of us. I almost wonder if it wasn't the first to really make the break and the rest of us are just like the last cracks in the iceberg in comparison. That made no fuck sense. Oh well.
This is weirding us all out now, with obvious exceptions. I think I'm gonna go lie down and wait for the dragon seeds to sprout. We need some spirit-walking time. (And maybe time in his own element will make Fog less hyper.)
Sorry about the last, confused post, by the way. That was Delve's last grasp at supremacy/unity, we think. (He disagrees. I'm not listening.) I'd get rid of it save it's against community rules. The last instants before a big change are always messy, though. Discovering our non-feminity wasn't pretty either, so why should this be? Still a bit of a pain in the ass.
You have any advice for us? Delve wants to know what other primaries (he wishes) did when their other selves (hah) first manifested, how they dealt with it, and especially when it happens. He resents the fact that this took 22 years to happen. I keep telling him, not everyone starts as kids, but he's not listening to me and he won't take the keyboard.
Screw it. Time for massive self-indulgence! Or not. Not works. (Puritanical queens.)
--The Walking One
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 12:58 am (UTC)Lu's been interacting with spirits and such her entire life. To our knowledge there is no time in our memories when it wasn't so. I was the first to take up residence, which I did when she was 17, having been around for a fair time previously.
(woot werewolves)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 03:01 am (UTC)And then this whole business is really... weird. This is from another comment I just made in this post:
"This is very complex shit. Sigh. I still feel like a singlet, except I know I'm not one and I also feel each distinct aspect very individually. Does that make sense? Is that how you experience it? Regardless of who's fronting I always feel like 'me', just a different sort of 'me', and yet as noted, I can also talk to the other 'me's as though they were seperate, and they interact without 'my' urging, 'I' don't control them, and... well, fuck, they're not the same as 'Me'. But I'm still ultimately one being. Is this a normal manifestation of plurality or am I just extremely confused?"
no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 03:13 am (UTC)Either way, I'm not questioning whatever SBing you may or may not have done, only this more recent event. I'm curious about it. I'm not sure timespan would mean anything, but eh. It's still interesting in some way.
From your latter description, you are not currently experiencing multiplicity as we(our system) experience it. Some would regard it as all normal manifestation etc, you'll get plenty pat-on-the-back comments if that's what you're looking for. My personal opinion is that I wouldn't call you multiple because... if they're all you, then it's not 'more than one person'. I'm only going by what you're telling me though.
I tend to be one of the people here who sticks to the 'more than one person' qualification more rigidly than the rest, so you may or may not want to ignore me.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 04:48 am (UTC)I made a reply to this but it got insanely long, so I'm going against my hesitation about cluttering the community and posting it as an entry. :p Sorry. My coyote-side lends itself to hyperverbalism, especially when I'm... agitated, and since 'Cet took the co-pilot's seat because he wants to rest...
Man, this is so damned confusing. I'm frankly afraid of it, even if I'm the only aspect that is. I wonder if it's really only my fear that's creating uncertainty... but I'll get to that in the post.
Is it really so unusual for members of a plurality to all think of and refer to themselves as 'I', though?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 04:55 am (UTC)I suspect 'I' would be more common in systems resulting from a partial or complete 'split', which we are not.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 05:02 am (UTC)Re: Compromise
Date: 2006-11-24 02:59 am (UTC)Anyhow, in case you didn't see it:
The problem with letting Knife-Smile, or Blood-in-the-Fog as it's his gig too now, have free reign to act on his impulses is that, quite frankly, they'd make a serial killer of us. In fact that's what this journal was, and still is, about -- where I write down and hence acheive at least a certain amount of catharsis for those drives, needs, impulses, emotions, et cetera. All of us are of that nature, as it's a fundemental aspect of the I-that-we-are, but Knife-Smile, and now Blood-in-the-Fog, are the aspects that have either the biggest share of that trait or the 'source' of that trait, not sure which it is.
And I wasn't forced to acknowledge it by having others come in, exactly... what happened was I was already sort of slowly creeping towards acknowledgement (when I say 'I', it means the group of us all 'co-fronting', I guess you call it, with Delve in command, 'Cet in second, and the others clustering around and watching -- that's why we think of ourselves as 'I' more than 'we', because the puzzle we're pieces of is actually assembled most of the time... the difference is just we're now acknowledging that we're an assembled puzzle rather than one picture that's been heavily creased and maybe torn a bit.) And then, impatient and greedy for the primary-control-time he almost never gets due to our fundemental desire to not hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it but, almost more importantly, to stay out of jail so we don't miss an opportunity to take down someone who very much deserves it (we have our eye on serial rapists in our general area, those who've never been prosecuted or who've only gotten slaps on the wrist.) Knife-Smile is a werewolf, not a wolf (there's a big difference, which is actually personified in us by the difference between him and White Light) but he's also of Predatory essence and hence has a lot of self-control. Blood-in-the-Fog is a concept-spirit; 'impulse control' is not part of his paradigm. After all a spirit is purely its identity, and identity comes from what one feels and does. So until we manage to slowly, carefully adjust Fog to encorporate more of the natural predator into his personal symbolism (he's more of a humanlike serial killer with strong bestial aspects right now) he doesn't get to hold the microphone much, so to speak, because I simply can't afford that kind of behaviour.
Which he resents deeply. He's far more complex than a simple impulse towards destruction, of course, but the only times he really comes close to the fore are when I'm in that kind of aggressive predatory mood, and especially when I'm feeling misomanic and/or extremely misanthropic. I didn't really think of him as a seperate being with front-time needs until, well, today, though... he was just a very impulsive aspect of my personality. (Which he still is, but I also acknowledge his nature as a concept-spirit with his own pocket identity in addition to his role as part of the puzzle.) So earlier today, while my unified identity was rather fragile and I was still trying to figure out what the fuck 'Me' constituted and all that, he shattered the last bits of denial by literally snagging the reins and running off.
Fortunately he basically just ran around commenting and posting on LJ until 'Cet got a handle on himself and took control of the situation to help settle the rest of Me down.
This is very complex shit. Sigh. I still feel like a singlet, except I know I'm not one and I also feel each distinct aspect very individually. Does that make sense? Is that how you experience it? Regardless of who's fronting I always feel like 'me', just a different sort of 'me', and yet as noted, I can also talk to the other 'me's as though they were seperate, and they interact without 'my' urging, 'I' don't control them, and... well, fuck, they're not the same as 'Me'. But I'm still ultimately one being. Is this a normal manifestation of plurality or am I just extremely confused?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-24 09:56 am (UTC)