I've never really understood endos and willows and, while I'm not a system or plural in any way, I am curious about what they are and what the issues are with them. Your blog has already been really helpful in understanding some of the arguments for endos, and I was wondering if you had any resources or even just a simple explanation? Tysm!
To start off: What are endos, and what are willos?
-Someone who says theyâre endogenic is claiming to have formed a system that is not a result of trauma. The term âendogenicâ is an umbrella term for a lot of subsets and âoriginsâ they have created. Pluralpedia has a load of them if you ever need a good laugh, there are gems on there such as âMcDonaldsgenic,â âFakergenic,â âCybergenic,â etcetera.
-Then, willogenics are people who claim to have deliberately made their own system. Basically, from what I have seen, a lot of them advise to âfake it until you make it.â
How are CDDs formed, and why is being endogenic not clinically possible that we know of or at all?
-As a child, you are born with separate ego states. These are fractures of a personality that over time will fuse and integrate into a whole. This happens before the age of give or take 9 years old, though some studies claim younger, some claim as old as 12. To form a CDD, you need to have significant dissociation between these parts. Dissociation is a trauma response. If the parts are separated by dissociation, they canât fuse together, and will instead develop separately into entirely new personalities.
-So, without trauma to cause the dissociation, and thus cause the system, it isnât possible. The inability to fuse ego states is a catastrophic thing, and there is simply no viable reason or way for the brain to do that naturally.
-Now, the willogenics. A lot of these people are minors, the most I have seen are between 13 and 16. At these ages, your ego states have fully fused. In order to create alters, you would have to separate them, however they already formed into a singular personality. Think of it like a group of colors that over time become mixed together into a new color. You cannot separate them again once theyâre fully mixed.
The people attempting to do this are damaging themselves. Attempting to form a system like this can cause this and more:
-Dissociation (standalone, unable to separate ego states, so this isnât producing the result they desire. However, this dissociation can result in dissociative amnesia, which may convince them that they succeeded as amnesia is a big thing in mainly DID systems.)
-Psychosis if predisposed
And several mental health issues.
The origins of the endogenic movement: The Natural Multiplicity Movement
Anti-willo-sollivan had a huge post about the origins of the endo movement, though sadly their* blog got deleted. I will try to explain it the best I can.
The very basics of it was that the endo movement started with the Natural Multiplicity Movement. They had the goal of completely demedicalizing systemhood, which of course was about CDDs. This is a problem because CDDs are disorders that can be significantly disabling, and demedicalizing them would prevent systems from getting treatment for their condition. They generally viewed being a system as a neutral, if not healthy or even desirable thing. Because of their goal of completely demedicalizing systemhood, theyâre widely regarded as a hate group by a lot of anti endo systems, as their goal would inflict significant harm, including lack of treatment for trauma, lack of treatment specifically for CDDs that teaches coping skills, internal communication, and could result in healing through final fusion or functional multiplicity. The lack of treatment can cause worsening mental health, and could lead to suicide. All because this one group wanted to lump themselves in with people with CDDs.
Now, the current endo community is less made up of adults, and a significant part of them are children. They donât all seem to agree with the NMMâs goal, though thatâs hard to tell since not many talk about it.
The current endogenic movement and why they are still harmful
Endogenics today generally donât seem to be as actively focused on demedicalizing CDDs, though they passively engage in it still. However, there are still major issues to address.
-Transphobic and ableist slurs.
Two of the most notable ones: Sysmed and Traumascum.
Sysmed is an abbreviation of âSystem Medicalist.â This is derived from the word Transmed or âTrans Medicalist,â which is a group of people who claim that gender dysphoria is a strict requirement of being transgender. This is incorrect because gender isnât a binary thing you can place in boxes. Furthermore, they are comparing an identity label, gender, to a group of medical disorders.
Traumascum is derived from the term âtruscum,â which means the same as transmed. Now Iâm sure itâs quite obvious why calling people âtrauma scumâ is ableist.
-Impact on actual systems and diagnosis of CDDs.
I actually have personal experience with this. Ever since the TikTok DID sensationalization trend, and with that, the endogenic movement becoming way more mainstream, both I and many other systems I have talked to have seen a significant delay in diagnosis, and thus treatment. We are less likely to be believed by doctors, because CDDs are stigmatized even within the mental healthcare system, and endos added to that. There are clinicians who either donât believe CDDs exist at all (ignoring mountains of evidence), and there are those who were already skeptical and then pivoted towards not believing in them at all. There are thankfully clinicians who do still believe in the existence of CDDs, but even they have learned to be more cautious diagnosing them due to the large influx of people claiming to be systems and/or endogenic starting 2020.
This has resulted in a several year long wait for my own diagnosis, a total of 5 years after I found out about my system is when I got diagnosed, and thatâs already extremely quick. More often, it takes over 7 years to get diagnosed now.
The endogenic community tends to be pretty toxic, while presenting itself as a positive and welcoming space. Some things that happen are:
-Encouraging people who newly discovered theyâre a system to find out as much as they can about their alters as soon as they can. This is harmful because attempting to do this can and likely will result in trauma resurfacing, and without a professional to help you this can be dangerous.
-Encouraging people to label themselves as systems for completely normal experiences, or if they arenât sure if theyâre a system yet. This can look like several different things:
1: A questioning system who is unsure if theyâre actually have a CDD or not is encouraged to accept the label of plurality, even if they donât know for sure yet.
2: Normal human experiences being labeled as plurality, such as acting differently around different people (think acting as a parent to a child, a colleague at work, a friend in a friend group, etc). They also have this term for being âin between a non-system (singlet) and a system,â which⊠you are either a system or youâre not.
Now obviously, harassment can come from both sides. However personally, I have experienced it more while being openly anti endo as opposed to some previously pro endo alters of ours have (I will come back to one of these alters later).
Several things that happen are: Suicide bait, rape threats, death threats, doxxing, insults and slurs, exploitation of marginalized identities such as being transgender, disabled or a POC and slurs connected to those identities, graphic and violent messages translated into windings font, sending CSAM or gore into someoneâs askbox⊠and probably more I donât know about.
Then, our own alterâs experience. I will let him explain this for himself.
Hey, Iâm Yngve. I used to be both endo and radqueer neutral before becoming pro leaning neutral on endos. I had some pro endo and pro radqueer friends and everything seemed to be going pretty okay for a while, but obviously I didnât tell them that that rest of the system is mostly anti endo. I already knew that wouldnât be safe before even realizing they werenât safe people, so I guess there were signs?
Soooo⊠one day I was having a severe OCD episode. I had made a stain on a plushie and had been obsessively cleaning it for over 30 minutes, while having a panic attack the whole time. So I eventually did something I would never do while lucid and used ai for the first and last time ever to check if it saw a stain.
I sent that into the discord server with those friends, expressed over and over again how horrible I felt and that it had triggered the morality part of my OCD but that I was severely spiraling and about to hurt myself. What they proceeded to do was insult me, calling me a Sysmed, a troglodyte and other things I wonât be repeating. Then they deliberately started to trigger my moral OCD even more by telling me I had directly caused the death of thousand of people with my one message, that I had blood on my hands now, that Iâm a horrible person and a murderer. One of them posted the systems shared tumblr account which is used only by the anti endo alters and harassed me even more. And then they started using my personality disorders against me by claiming I never viewed them as friends at all. They kept harassing me until I left the server, and I ended up spiraling until I attempted some drastic measures. Obviously a traumatic experience and caused more splits of alters.
So uhhh basically they were friendly until I was noticeably mentally ill. Then they turned to a pretty extreme form of ableism.
Obviously Iâm now fully anti endo and anti radqueer (where I had been pro leaning neutral and neutral before).
I hope this post has provided some useful information. I will stop writing now as it is almost 3:00, and I do value my sleep. If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask.
(*: I am unsure of Sollivanâs pronouns, so I used they/them. If anyone reading this knows, please inform me and I will edit this post to the correct pronouns if needed.)