(no subject)

[jew87.livejournal.com]

I'm doing an artwork at school about DID. each work is on a different alter so they all get to contribute. Anyway, a girl in my grade asked me what my work was about so I gave her my planning diary and let her read it. She came up to me later on in the day and goes, "I didnt know you had DID. Welcome to the club." I freaked. I've never met another multiple before. It scared me so much. Everyone is yelling and going crazy. I dont know what to do.

Comments

[myorp.livejournal.com]

i'd say try to calm down! i mean... just think of it like meeting any group of people. granted, its alot stranger but in a way the one group i've met face-to-face is easier to be ourselves with because of it. and that's already alot in common.

[jew87.livejournal.com]

thanks.
Its just so weird for all of us.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

There are more of us than you'd think. We're out there, Mulder... just in the closet most of the time.

We used to correspond with a girl from a high school in the South. She said she wanted to get an online plural recognition group started, to stop some of the prejudices going around. Kind of a proto-Pavilion (http://www.tanuki.cx/pavilion).

There were several other people at her school who were multiple -- I don't know whether these were self-identified or diagnosis/therapy types. Probably a few of both. None were interested in writing anything on the multiple experience to clear up stereotypes -- even for an anonymous online group. They were all too busy with tennis, or being in the library club or playing chess or whatever.

What gets me is the letters we receive from singlet high school or young college girls "doing a paper on this fascinating disease". They don't want to know any real plurals... what they ask us for is things like photographs of Sybil. All we have to do to get them to never write to us again is to send them a polite paragraph or two explaining our position and suggesting that they report on healthy multiplicity.

If there are so many multiples (self-identified, diagnosed/therapy, whatever) in high schools, it must be frustrating getting misrepresented all the time, but coming out is way too risky these days. You guys got lucky.

[tir-nan-og.livejournal.com]

Thank you for turning me onto the Pavillion! Last night I was lurking on Astraea's Web. Today I checked out this link to an odious discussion about multiples, by people who obviously were not, and the ammount of ignorance just floored me.
I suppose this isnt necessarily the time and place for a comment of this sort..sigh.
Forgive me for what I am about to say. I dont want to aggravate people who have enough on their plates anyway.
It really saddens me to hear young multiples adopt the term DID, because it seems so invalidating. As I currently understand it, the term suggests that whoever is treating you has decided that..you need to be cured of the ILLUSION that you have more than one self.
If you have a therapist who uses this term, you have to wonder..what are the protocols he or she will use when treating you? What is the long term goal?

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

No, you aren't wrong... someone dug up a rather yecchy comment re that last night from Peter Barach, the now-president (!) of the ISSD. He says that no one should really say they have multiple personalities because "although it may seem as if they are to a multiple, they are not really separate people, just dissociated areas of memory." (That's as close as I can remember it, anyway.) Now even granting that there really exist systems where people are merely memory holders or fragments, where does that leave a co-conscious system like ours if someone in a system is nothing but a "dissociated area of memory?" We'd probably just be told we're roleplaying or some similar rubbish, and, either way, aren't real...


Anthea

[tir-nan-og.livejournal.com]

ye gawds! What a yecchy quote! How does his theory wrap itself around the fact that many multiple systems share memory? Or that some people in a multiple system lead 'inner world' lives, and do not at all function as holders of some nugget of repressed memory, because they have rarely ventured out into the social world at all?
Then again, I suppose we wouldnt want to argue that point with this fellow at all, it sounds too blatantly psychotic.
What, by the way, is the ISSD?

The ISSD is...

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

http://www.issd.org and Barach's position is, and has been for some years, the official one. He's one of the academics who got MPD changed to DID. And he'd probably think you were psychotic if you insisted on that other-world stuff.

Can't blame Barach really, for a lot of his attitude.. he used to hang out on alt.support.dissociation. I can think of no worse place. We did a two-year hitch there. I can't even begin to describe what it was like. Rational discussion was impossible. The one-upmanship on the abuse stories reached the most outrageous extremes we have ever seen. Drama queens were an everyday event. People writing snarky comments or actual flames (there is a difference) and then immediately following it up with "Oh, I'm sorry, that was my MEAN alter and she didn't mean to hit send, she was just letting off steam". Like hell. The concept of rogue protectors evolved there. Many posts were nearly illegible for all the spl*ts, and the lils were still getting triggered! We never understood the rationale for trying to have a "safe" place to discuss such deeply personal matters on Usenet anyway... probably the worst thing about a.s.d. was the rampant paranoia and suspicion. Many of the people on a.s.d. were probably not multiple at all, but had been diagnosed as such. Many of them had been in therapy with Braun or his trainees.

So no wonder Barach had a bad impression... and no wonder he went into this crusade to stop the runaway train of the Braun / Ross MPD ideas. Braun was the founder of the ISSD (originally the ISSMPD) and it's possible Barach wanted to "rescue" the organisation from its increasingly outlandish viewpoints. For a while there, the gospel of MPD according to Braun and Ross was really the Shaver Mystery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth_theory) of modern psychiatry.

Re: The ISSD is...

[tir-nan-og.livejournal.com]

Thank you for shedding light on why we have fallen from grace, if indeed we ever had it, in the eyes of the diagnostic world. I shall explore all the links.
*grins*
So it was that bad, was it? People being snarky, and then not owning up because the demonic alter had done it? Yecch. Multiplicity cannot be used as an excuse for not taking responsibility for your actions.
I come from a snarky, bitchy system...at least, we are to eachother. Sometimes my fiance would express frustration with our catfighting style. The only way I found we could deal with the conflict, in a dignified way, was for all of us to take responsibility for EVERYTHING that had been said and done. Its a case of, "I disagree with what she said, but I'll defend to the death her right to say it."
What would trigger a little, by the way? Talking about what flavor ice cream you like? Is trauma generally supposed to trigger littles coming out, according to this community where you used to hang out? I would imagine, if you felt distressed, a child self wouldnt feel safe enough to come out. (Clearly this is another discussion entirely.) I guess I've had child selves come out in pleasant and unpleasant states of mind, depending on the child..but certainly never to strangers I was having virtual interpersonal conflicts with..

[jinxtigr.livejournal.com]

Oh, for pete's sake!
I'm not even multiple and _I_ have parallel processing. I have a 'back burner'. Ideas and things germinate there, like they are simmering or something. Sometimes they become very complete by the time I get to them...
This fellow must be operating on some strange misinterpretation of mind. Makes me want to go *knock knock* hellooo? the brain is not a Von Neumann serial processing computer, what in the world gives you THAT idea?
I realize parallelism is harder to understand (interfacing becomes the problem- hmm ;) ) but that's how the mind works. That's how it HAS to work, nerve impulses are only what, a few kilohertz? The brain CANNOT be a centralized processor or nothing would ever get done. You cannot serially, sequentially process information like a visual image (across countless optic nerves) of a tiger jumping on you, in time to run away or whatever.
With multiples, this parallelism is quite literal. Multiple people, running in parallel. Might use more energy (I'd love to see an EEG, really would- this has got to show in some tangible way) but that's 'all' it is. There's no huge structural difference, there's no specific reason for a brain NOT to develop multiple centers of consciousness. Most just don't, perhaps it doesn't occur to them or their egos are too strong in infancy to tolerate the existence of others. I don't know.
I'm afraid this fellow is talking Lysenko science. He may even know people who do indeed have disassociated areas of memory, and sure, there do exist people who are disassociative. That's not grounds for making the logical jump to his other statement.
If you go to sleep ever, is that grounds for assuming you're not a person? :D

[tir-nan-og.livejournal.com]

My dearest Jinx, you are an articulate and ferocious advocate for us. You would be a wonderful media watch-tiger, sproinging up and educating people wherever misinformation is being spewed on the internet. I'm jealous. Some multiples are incredibly savvy about explaining themselves, and standing up to those who think they're just having some wierd fantasy life or acting out to get attention. Me, I just find it too daunting to be told I dont really exist, and shut up like a venus flytrap.....

[jinxtigr.livejournal.com]

Heh! You jealous? I wouldn't even be here if I wasn't _your_ mate.
And you're getting better. You're gonna be an awesome advocate too. I think we're both gonna end up working with Pavilion- I bookmarked it and am thinking about it.
When you don't have a choice, that's when you see the 'courage'. I have practice since I've had to out myself as an autistic person to my whole disapproving family and all my friends and associates, and stand up for myself as that. I still am. It's just that autistic doesn't mean I'm completely helpless and dysfunctional. I am a pretty functional autistic and that's why I intuitively understand the plight of functional multiples experiencing prejudice.
Also, my autistic brain has gone into heavy background processing several times on the subject of multiplicity, to the point where I was woolgathering and tripping over curbs in the way I do, and as a result, to me multiplicity MAKES SENSE. It's just like an unanticipated application of the concepts of artificial intelligence or AI. It's a picture of how MIND works, and I think this is hugely exciting and important. Understanding multiplicity in a context of functionality and recovery could mean the ability to promise freedom and self-acceptance for people who are suffering a lot. I'm not sure what could be considered more important.

[tir-nan-og.livejournal.com]

Well, judging from what I've been reading, evidently we have our work cut out for us! We seem to be living in very dark times.
yes, understanding multiplicity in a context of functionality could have ramifications for non multiples as well. Many 'normal' people, in my opinion, have very boxed-in, compartmentalized views of how the mind works and what is possible. We need to show that multiplicity is not necessarily caused by trauma, and that those multiples who have trauma in their background, often have the tools to heal themselves right there in their inner system! The mind is an extraordinary thing.
Perhaps our capacity to be self sufficient,to free and heal ourselves, is in some sense, subversive. In that sense, the mental health industry would be, not just a neccesity, but a tool of social control for an unequal and very unhappy society.
Ironically, I've got to get off my soapbox and try to face the disability papers...heaves a sigh...

[shadowechoes.livejournal.com]

I can see where it might be awkward at first, but I'd try to get to know the girl. I think it would be good to have another friend who was multiple and who you'd be seeing often (as opposed to knowning other multiples just online).

~Ash

[jew87.livejournal.com]

We had a huge talk. It was weird. Her alters have all merged into one named shady. Our protector is very much like shady, his name is the shadow...

[toride.livejournal.com]

gotta agree to this ^^ our RL good/best friend is also multiple and it helps a lot when we *cough*I*cough* come bitching about internal issues ^^~

hope it turns out the best for you all ^^b

[epitomeof-crazy.livejournal.com]

When I first saw your icon I was intrigued. No idea why. Now I know where it comes from though! TOOL! lol. There's your random comment from me for the day. ^-^