We are a polyfragmented multiple collective. Diagnosed once at 17 with MPD (DSM-III was current then) and again ten years later in 2001 with DID (DSM-IV was current). Bodily we are 50+. We are a Ritual/Religious Abuse survivor. Went through eight years of (broken up) trauma therapy and hospitalizations. For various reasons we have not been in therapy for over twelve years. Our current system estimate is over 750. This is a conservative estimate.
We are also diagnosed with bipolar (with psychosis), PTSD and GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). We deal with autism and ADHD issues (currently undiagnosed and likely to stay as such). We also deal with chronic illness. We have a number of diagnosed health issues (lupus and fibromyalgia along with a TBI) and an even larger number undiagnosed. We are mostly writers and sometimes wanna be artists. We are on SSI disability and have not been able to work for years. We tend to be fairly jaded and cynical.
EDIT: We tend to avoid syscourse when possible. We support ALL systems. You can send us asks. (No anon.) Don't DM us bc we likely won't reply.
We formerly were known as Collective Dreamscapes (as well as Shadowscapes Collective).
CDDs do not own the word "system". there are many definitions and hundreds of use cases for the word.
Just like the respiratory system is not the same as the political system, nondisordered endogenic systems are not the same as traumagenic CDD systems. but they are all still systems.
weary: tired, worn-out, beaten down, exhausted, in need of rest. they were weary after their long journey. wearily, she sat down on the couch and kicked off her shoes. he had grown weary of this conversation.
wary: guarded, cautious, on-edge, careful. they were wary of the approaching stranger. warily, she poked at the dark shape in the corner of her room. he paused, wary, but nodded anyway.
"Hey this blog is a safe space for any and all real systems with a CDD 😁"
.......
"Pro-endos DNI by the way!"
We feel as if we have seen an uptick in these posts/blogs recently. They're in the CDD tags, saying that they're safe for those with a CDD, while simultaneously saying that those with a CDD who have different opinions, are fake.
screenshots i had of a conversation with florality staff.
screenshots are in lightmode as that is what i use but i will include alt text, and even ignoring syscourse i want to point out how rude the staff was the entire time. i encourage you to read over this no matter your stance on syscourse, and make your own opinion on whether you wanna support florality or not.
DO NOT HARASS, INSTEAD BLOCK THEM, AND DO NOT ENGAGE PLEASE, i am posting this for awareness, not as cancel culture, alright? thank you and enjoy
the announcment i saw forwarded in another server, the reason i sent proof in the first place. here for context.
both documents i linked to them: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bLejRXsgJ3NRlHQOeXUe3lPtnBJ8qYj3Ope0-8QTRFY/edit?tab=t.0 and https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FetfQO-EeQZcol0bDxG75kHXyPPBPgg4YwlWJOipwwk/edit?gid=0#gid=0
the attached screenshot:
the link mentioned by ark https://did-research.org/did/history/
note the putting down of looking at your system as multiple people, something those WITH cdds commonly do to heal. also, by this logic, then claiming to be multiple people would count as a totally seperate thing than did (being a fragmented state) but they contridict this later
jamie is refering to the first screenshot they attached, the things i linked; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/27/majority-of-authors-hear-their-characters-speak-finds-study and https://lithub.com/lessons-learned-from-a-year-listening-to-the-fictional-octopus-in-my-head/ (which.. do somewhat prove endogenic plurality, in a specific context)
they seem to agree that multiple people in one head 1. is not what a CDD is and 2. occurs outside of did YET believe being a system/having alters is something only someone with DID or OSDD can do/have. that is a contridiction, no?
link i used: https://did-research.org/did/basics/dsm-5/ (note this is from the same website source ark linked earlier)
note i said i do experience the one criteria that describes HAVING ALTERS which they previously said can only happen with a system. they ignored that completely and instead chose to call me a singlet.
"stop romanticising a disorder." a disorder i had said multiple times i did not have and did not fit any of the criteria of except for one.
so, apparently, despite perfectly fitting the criteria that says you have alternative states, just because i dont have distress, i dont count as having those alternate states. this makes me question how theyd react to DID/OSDD systems who no longer find it distressing, but yk.
another headmate switched in at the last point, because he was a bit mad about being told he wasnt real (same, haha) so you can skip over it as it was over the conversation but you can also keep it in mind for your opinion on us. (name of another headmate censored for my privacy)
asked on the distress part:
ark then said "i dont see where im contridicting myself" and banned me. read and see what you think, i hope you all come up with your own opinions (even if that is thinking im the ass here, because thats equally as fair) but if youre supporting florality just like. keep it in mind
^ my ban message. the "lack thereof" part is quite rude in my opinion.
With all offence intended towards the florality staff speaking here (please don't harass or engage with them), this is by far one of the most stupid arguments we've seen to date -_-
Like, for one, we were NEVER covert. It’s why we were first diagnosed at 17 in 1991 ffs. When one of your primary abusers is ALSO multiple, being covert doesn’t get learned the same way. We LEARNED to be covert after LATER abuse and non acceptance from the ex, after we were diagnosed the SECOND time, ten years later.
For two, we have ALWAYS identified as “separate people” even before we knew what was going on. And we, personally, for ourselves, resent being called a “state of consciousness”.
Every argument made by these people we BREAK. And we’re not even endo. (I think someone in the past here decided that mixed origins fit our understanding of our system, but mostly these days and those around now just ignore the origin labels.) We never experienced “distress” over being multiple, though yeah the other stuff they listed did cause distress.
But what I don’t get is why they stress that DID is not an “alter disorder” when 1) it’s one of the criteria and 2) going on to say you can’t have alters without DID. Like which is it, my dude? Pick a side. It either is or it isn’t but it can’t be both.
This whole thing is just really frustrating for people like us, systems like us, who don’t fit their very narrow view of how we’re supposed to just exist.
I high key hate the idea that having systemmates is inherently distressing.
Can it be? Of course.
But having them can also be a huge source of comfort, joy, support, love, and the deepest level of understanding that any human can ever get because who else can literally feel what you feel and see your thoughts and understand those thoughts through your own perspective?
And for many systems, that's the baseline. Of course there's times when you won't agree or get along, but that doesn't make it *inherently* distressing.
Think about it as a parallel to family. A lot of people have dysfunctional, abusive, toxic family. But that doesn't make families in general an inherently dysfunctional thing. Because it's not always that as a baseline, standard thing.
This post is also NOT talking about this not-inherently-distressing thing as an exclusively endogenic nonCDD thing. For a lot of CDD systems, the distressing thing is the trauma and the general dissociation and depersonalization and derealization and memory issues, while their systemmates are what helps them the most with those things.
Also? I don't imagine that being told you're inherently causing distress feels good to hear as a systemmate. Might even, idk, make you feel distressed.
Years ago, when we first were coming to terms with being multiple, the main fronter at the time came to a similar conclusion. She felt strongly enough about it that she wrote about it and posted it on our website.
The thought was basically “yeah, the trauma crap sucks but the being multiple is not a horrible bad thing”. Now, we also recognize that we are nothing close to a “typical” system (if such exists). They had pretty good communication from the start (not always “agreeing” just they didn’t have to work at it like some people did) and most of the system was willing to do the work to get better. Plus they had to learn to be covert. (Their first diagnosis was at 17 which was 1991, when the average length of time to diagnosis was about seven years.)
They had decided and we’ve all agreed that for us, being multiple is literally the reason we are even capable of being functional. Between the neurodivergent issues and chronic pain (which started when the body was 12, the chronic pain not the neurodivergence) and all the physical and other psychological problems we have, being multiple gives us a chance at a kinda “normal” life we wouldn’t have otherwise.
And don’t get me wrong, we’re still disabled. There’s still a lot we missed out on and can’t do. But those things aren’t being hampered because we’re multiple. They’re being hampered by everything else. But if we couldn’t switch and painblock we would be bed bound. We all handle pain differently. We all handle our various physical and psychological problems differently. Some of us are better at it than others.
Is everything sweetness and light? Good gods no. Are there system mates that are problematic? Hell yes. But we are still here long past the time we thought we wouldn’t be bc some of us were willing to fight when others had had enough.
Being many people in one body can cause problems, but it’s not THE problem, you know? It’s just, how we exist.
As a (mostly) traumagenic collective who doesn’t fit stereotypical presentation, we’ve always been kind of on the fringes and not really fitting in anywhere. Back in the day, we had “too much trauma” for some spaces and “too much weird” for other places. It’s one of the reasons people here liked the DP list. They could just exist there without having to explain themselves.
We’re not saying the DP list didn’t have its problems and drama. It certainly did. But certain of our system mates that had no real place anywhere else found camaraderie there.
We’re kind of leery about the “modern” plural community bc we’ve seen so much more rabid infighting and bad takes. People seem so willing to throw other people under the bus for not being multiple “right”. So much energy seems directed at hating on people that could be better spent doing something constructive. I/ we don’t understand it any better now than we did then.
And it still leaves people like us kind of…on the outside looking in. Wondering if this is as good as it gets. Wondering if we’ll ever fit anywhere.
undiagnosed autistic people will be like "I don't get upset when my routine changes though!!" and it's because they've built a set of if-then loops in their head to pick from one of 6 different strict routines and they do get incredibly upset when they're unable to keep to any of the 6 scripts. I'm john normal
This is called a fault tree. You will always know how to act if your fault tree captures all possible scenarios. In NASA Mission Control during mission critical events like landings there are huge binders with fault tree protocols, kind of like choose your own adventure books except you’re not the one making the choices, the universe is making them for you and you’re just trying to keep up.
The engineers who develop fault trees, I am told, often imagine new ways for their precious spacecraft to die (new branches on the fault trees) either while in the shower or lying awake at 3am, because human
Was just thinking about this the other day. Yeah I have a favorite seat on the bus (middle of the bus, near the back doors, slightly elevated, facing forward), but I don’t get upset if someone is already sitting there, I just pick one of my other favorite spots. Then I realized that most people probably don’t have a favorite bus seat, let alone a series of backup favorites.
I am winning at socks by never wearing them if I can at all help it and if they're necessary I only wear super thin very soft low cut ones. Or if on the very rare occasion my feet are cold (maybe twice a year) I wear super soft fluffy socks and then the second my feet are warm again those are getting flung off to god only knows where.
And they cannot be covered at night. The running joke is my household is that it is absolutely imperative to Free the Feet!
So I spent some time on pluralpedia the other day and it got me thinking about how we use words. Not just things like choosing to use headmates or system mates but just basic plural language I guess. And I wondered how many people use words differently like we do.
Like some are the same. System is a collection of system mates. But we use “collective” to refer to different regions of the system. Like each collective has its own geography and its own… type? Of people. I don’t know if type is the right word. I think side system would be the best equivalent? But we don’t really like that term.
We have the base system, which includes most of the other collectives, and the current fronters , who are part of the last collective which also functions as a DMZ so we have a neutral zone. And of the current fronters most of us are also systems.
We have clusters, which we just call groups, clans or crews depending on what they prefer. I think gang and faction is also used? They’re mostly tied by personality, though some are tied by function. We only really use the word “cluster” for specific groups of similar people. Like the Sams, who are split into four different clusters.
There is a core, but it’s not the typical meaning of core. It’s not a person so much as a place in the center of the system, so I’m told.
We have splits, which are usually from trauma. Then we have creations, which are people who are just made not split from someone, and can be trauma or just a situation no one knows how to handle. And then we have walk-ins.
I dunno. I guess I just wondered, about that last paragraph, if other people had that. We mostly hear the term “split” and we think “but not everyone is a split,” you know?
ID: A tiktok of a person saying "What's a word you pronounced incorrectly one time and it still haunts you to this day?" Justin Timberlake stitched the video and replied "Umm, me."
our pet peeve is people assuming every plural/system has a host!
we've had interactions along the lines of: "which one of you is the host?" none of us, there is no host "oh... um, okay... but which one of you is the main one" no one...
like there is no host!! there is no main!! stop assuming we have to have one!! please!!
headmates who don't front, for whatever reason, are just as much of headmates as those who do front. whether it be because of dysphoria, lack of interest, or whatever else, you don't need to front to be an authentic headmate.
for fictives that feel guilty about their source actions, please be gentle with yourself. at least for today. you are not doomed to repeat past mistakes and to be who you were in source. it's okay to own up and move on from source actions. it's going to be okay, i promise.
please love the plurals of color in your life when you can, especially the queer and disabled plurals of color. life is already so hard, please make sure they know that they're loved and wanted. don't assume, make sure you know for certain.
