Yo. (Intro/Question)

[kaesesandwiche.livejournal.com]

... but a crappy intro, cuz I'm shit at defining myself. I'm August. I'm 23, kind of, exept for I'm a vampire so maybe I'm a shit ton older than that. I suck at figuring out how to explain ages when you're multiple anyway. I curse too much an Im horibly dyslexic AND I suck at spelling/gramar/language in general so SORRY in advance. I'm the 'gatekeeper' or whatever you want to call it for our hours. I run things, only i'm an anarchist (an so's a lot but not all of my headmates) so it is less 'running' and more 'reluctintly accepting that our brain somewhy gave me extra power/authority over the others that i dun realy want and try to use as little as possible so we can stick to doing things consensusfuly'.

Anyway i got a questoin that we been trying to figure out, and its hard, cuz I hate with a passhin the jerkoff people who are like "Yah right multiple people in one head you are faking it it ain't even real"; most of us do! and so most of us hate accusing people of lying or trying to make them justify theirselfs cuz its shit having people tell you you ain't a real person an you don't exist.

But have y'all ever had to deel with pluralpeople who reelly, reely, reely, you just -- can't. fuckin. believe? Cuz we're in a situashin like that right now with a person we live with, who has a long history of just exagerating/making shit up/tendincies towards being a drama queen who just likes to piggyback off  other peoples pain (like if something bad hapens to someone they GOTTA jump in with this story (that are ocasionaly horribly implausable) of how they had it SO MUCH WORSE), and after a longass time of dealing with their dishonesty on a ton of different levels it is just. Hard. I frankly don't believe shitall that comes out of their collective(?) mouth half the time, and the whole thing with them being has just been -- I don't know. It is hard to be like YOU ARE LYING I DON'T BELIEVE YOU EXIST but I dunno what to do. They are dishonest about half of everything else in their life, and half of everything they ever have telled us since we met them, and they only even telled us they was multiple after finding out we were (but not in a way that was like they felt safe to tell us once they knowed we was or anything like that, cuz i get that. it was morelike they learned we was, and then asked a shit ton of questoins about it, and then a while later came out with "oh hey by the way i am too and suprise suprise half of everyone in my system is like a carboncopy of someone in your system that i just hapened to be fasinated by yesterday")

Anyway the hole thing is frustrating and annoying and i really aint sure what to do, cuz normaly i dont got no problem with calling people on their lies and bullshit, but when it comes to questoining someones existence it is something i reely hate people to do to us, or any multiple, but, yeah. It sucks.

(Thankfully we're moving out of the apartment we shares with them next month, moving out of the entire city actully, and a MAJOR part of the reason is cuz we can. not. live. with. them. anymore without many in our sistem wanting to shoot them or maybe ourselfs, but still I dunno how to deel with this issue.)

Comments

[netdancer.livejournal.com]

Hi! Welcome! (You play Kingdom of Loathing?)

Yes, I know people like those you're speaking of. How one handles them depends on how attached one is to them, really. If you& feel a strong need to stay in touch with them/ maintain a relationship with them, you use one set of behaviors. If not there's another.

Assuming you want to ditch and avoid: You're already moving, that's a plus. Change your Net ID -totally-; Username, e-mail, anything that could be Googled to track you down. Don't keep the same phone number, change your cell number if you have one. The idea here: Drop off the earth to that person. The hard part is avoiding the temptation to re-contact them later or 'check up on how they're doing'.

If you want to stay in contact with them it's harder. Especially if you really care about them and you know or strongly suspect that pretty much everything out of their mouth is BS. It can be really tiring to try to sort out what's 'real' and true from what the person makes up.

Our solution might seem goofy, but it's one that works for us. We don't question. If you tell us (insert horrible story here) and tell us that's what really happened to you, we nod and accept it. Even if the Protectors say the BS meter is *pegged* we nod and accept it.

See, in some cases it's true that a person is making crap up just to grandstand and get attention. In some cases the person is so screwed up they /believe/ what they're saying and telling them "You're full of crap." is going to do tremendous harm and maybe make it so they'll never listen to anyone asking "Ah, are you positive about this?" again.

So we have what might be called "A Subjective Reality Filter". Things we pass through that filter may have never happened in the Earth-world. But maybe to the person speaking they're as real as we are. So we treat them as if they were indeed real, but in a 'one step removed' kind of way. We just don't let *our* emotions get dragged out and involved and entangled. We become the Patient Listener. We listen and watch and say quiet things like "We hear you."

First, do no harm. Old oath. :)

[kaesesandwiche.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the advice! (And ya, I love KoL. I'm Kaesesandwiche there, too.)

It is made more hard i think by the fact i do care about them a lot, i just dont trust 90% of what they say about there past and/or being multiple cuz the longer i know them the more it is obvius how much they just steal stories from other people they know or even books they read or stories they hear.

And it is so hard to tell. Sometimes it seems like they just want atentoin and sometimes it seems like they been sticking to a certin lie for so long theyve started to believe it.

For me, personaly, I -- used to get a lot more pissed, and then frustrated, and now I just dont care as much as I did, exept that some of the others in my system DO still get really either angry/stressed/upset over their behavior, and even if i cuold put up with it myself i don't like staying in situashins that is unhelthy for the others.

So maybe I can try a combinatoin of things -- get out of here first like we are doing, and then see if it is easyer for everyone to be detached when we are not having to live with them an see them every day.

[tatteredscars.livejournal.com]

i second what netdancer said. just remove yourself from it, don't let it infuriate you.
as kids, my best friend was a compulsive liar. oh, it would piss me off so much! i'd just roll my eyes when she wasn't looking and say, "oh yeah?" she once told us that her uncle had dozens of alligators in his pool. (we lived in louisiana.) i just said, "oh, okay. whatever." just in a neutral tone.

it's hard for me to not get angry about stuff like that, too. i take everything way too personally. (me and rabbitt both.) but practice stepping back and half-way ignoring the person. at least until you get out of there. then it will be much easier. plus, if you don't give them much of a reaction, then they don't have much to feed off of.
~alison

[kaesesandwiche.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Some of their others have changes, but the thing is that the others who might seem to be different people are all ridiculusly exactly like people in my house who they was interested in before they 'came out' to us as being multiple. So it is like they just made up these people that are exactly like some of our kids.

Then the only one who doesn't seem like a copy of one of our household is completely 100% indistinguishable from the 'host'. And he was 'born' under circumstances that weirded me out, too, so it is hard to know.

[seaclans.livejournal.com]

I know when we first came out to each other inside there was a while there when a lot of stuff had a layer of imitating one thing or another. I'm not sure if it was a matter of in order to be "real" it had to be like something else or if it was a layer of masking. I was sixteen or so at the time, so imitating "trying things on" is probably partly a developmental thing back then. We grew out of it thankfully.

I don't know if this is similar to the state your friend is in or not. If she's just having an obsessive "me too" thing, it'll probably pass eventually.

I did have a young friend who started talking about multiplicity and having distinct people who suddenly changed her mind. Sorta the opposite situation from yours since her people seemed distinct, and not copies of us, and real and she suddenly decided they were not.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Some people don't even have that. There's always a certain amount of "normalflage".

[heyyy-sunshine.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I'm in the same exact situation. I've been in another before also, and jesus christ it's infuriating.

In the first case, the girl listened to me talk about it, slowly said that's how she was, and starting beating people as her "other personality." After a while I made up some really extreme false shit about being a multiple to see if she agreed. Of course she did so I knew for a FACT she was lying about it. I dumped her ass after a while because she did that with people's pasts as well. I confronted her time after time about everything and it never seemed to be any good. Every now and then I'd say "okay, fine. I know you're lying and you refuse to stop so you're going to have to stay out of my life until you do." After that she admitted to lying but still continued to do it. She was an absolutely horrible person and needed to be told that that wasn't acceptable behavior. She still hasn't changed, but after everything that's happened, she's straightened up a little. The plus side is that even if she's doing that to other people, at this point she wouldn't dare do it to me again because I refuse to give her the authority to do so.

However, there's a good friend of mine that's doing the same thing right now. She asked me TONS of questions and all of a sudden had other personalities. This type of person is a little bit more complicated... She lies about her past as well (or at least I think she does, I try not to judge). She's really sensitive so anything could set her off. She needs more of the caring friend approach to dealing with stuff like that. I've told her that I love her but that if she's lying to me she needs to tell me now because she's caused a lot of inner conflict that I'd really rather not deal with. She still thinks it's a possibility, but she's straightened up and apologized for everything.

Situations like that are REALLY complicated. You have to handle it according to the person's personality so you don't hit a wrong nerve and cause a lot of drama that everybody could really use without.

I think that you should see if there ARE any real differences. Sometimes it's really hard because everybody has different sides to themselves that can sometimes be viewed as something else. If that doesn't work then tell them something completely false about being a multiple and see if they agree. I always got "Yeah! That's how I am!" So it really helps you avoid a lot of analyzing things.

If you REALLY think that they're lying, confront them. Ask them about it. I know that you'll probably need the right amount of evidence to make you being suspicious "acceptable" or else the person will completely dismiss it. But if you never say anything and they ARE lying, they'll never stop. The moment you get away, they'll turn to someone else. All they're doing is hurting all of you to get their kicks. I know that sounds messed up, but sadly it's true if they are lying. Don't give them the permission to do something like that. I'm still friends with both of them, but over countless conflicts about their lying, the tend not to do that to me or close friends to avoid the confrontation. They just do it for attention and if you give them what they want, they never freaking stop. Wow, this ended up a lot longer than I thought it would. Good luck with everything though, seriously. Stuff like that is the biggest bitch to handle.

[kaesesandwiche.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I realy hate lots of drama. But its just getting ridiculous. Plus some of the people's stories that they coopt and start saying like they actually went through things are -- well, they're real traumas that happened to real people that we realy know, and it makes it that much more like WTF because making a farce out of real shit that people have had to go through is just not cool.

[weirdiguess.livejournal.com]

Short answer: Yeah, we have that happen.

There's plenty of people we don't believe everything they say, plenty of people we don't believe most of what they say. Some we think are lying, some we think are kinda trapped in their own made up stuff, but yeah. It happens. We just keep our mouths shut about it, not really our place to shout about something we can't prove and doesn't matter anyway.

If we were around them a lot, we'd let them know. The girls have done that with their friends before, been up front about what they believe and what they're not sure about. Honesty seems to work out pretty well. If they were as bad as those guys sound... I think the girls'd let them know, and either way we'd be out of there too. Couldn't really live with someone like that.

[shade-durza.livejournal.com]

I cannot stand people like that and that was also the reason I lurked here for such a long time. All of us are very distrustful because of people like that. It seems like this person is a real attention-seeker. You don't need drama in your life nor does anyone.

Everyone experiences being multiple different but sometimes you hear stuff that just makes you go "okay...". My alarm bells usually go off when somebody has something to gain with it like getting attention or a safe way to behave like an ass and say "hey it wasn't me".