We're in the part of spring where my apartment reaches 30 degrees celsius as soon as the sun is out so here is a painting uncharacteristically nostalgic for winter.
first of all: huge fan, LOVE yalls stuff, we didn't realize this account was medleyofmind and got scared shitless when we looked closely. like...Hhey...!
second of all: yall may enjoy a pinned post...? on this blog for sure, just to have a functioning link to your main, but on your sysblog as well to have like. an alter guide and stuff
(halfway through writing this i realized this could have been a DM. oops!) (also...hope this isn't too presumptuous >_> #autism)
-🍏
ohhh tysm :-]] this is a rly kind ask.
i could do a quick pinned post, i like to be pretty private w/ who/what my alters are for anonymity sake but a basic intro could be rly nice
i'll link the two together as well like u said, it's a good idea
thank u i hope that u are doing well i enjoy your posts and drawings a lot
You have a brain radio? We request ... elaboration, please.
There is almost always a song playing inside our head. One of our system members happens to primarily interact with us through changing that song. As they appear to us as our childhood radio and communicate through music, we call them our brain radio (or just "the radio" for short).
It took us a long time to realize the song choice had meaning. Nowadays, we're pretty good at picking up on the general message of it, partly because the radio has gotten better at picking songs, and partly because we've learned how to translate songs into meanings more accurately.
A handful of things that I can remember about it off the top of my head:
It has a handful of songs it reaches for to convey certain things. "it's okay to be afraid" by Saint Slumber gets played to either alert us that we're feeling fear without having noticed it, or to reassure us. This song largely replaced "Afraid" by The Neighborhood, though the radio still reaches for that one from time to time.
It also makes use of song clips as needed. That one musical "noooo" meme was picked up to answer questions. I've yet to actually identify the source of its "yes" sample, but "maybe" is taken from "Maybe" by Bring Me The Horizon.
It's looping "Hook Me Up" by The Veronicas right now. I think that's because we're bugging it for other song examples.
It has a sense of humor. Aside from rickrolling us and blasting meme audio at unexpected times, it likes pulling unexpected songs to get a laugh or distract us. It's also fond of looping "Rasputin" (the funk mix), but specifically an audio edit version we made to replicate the way it used to fill in the lyrics we didn't know yet.
It has a tendency to mash songs together when there's nothing that needs communicating. Some of them are good. Some of them are horrible (bass-boosted "Thomas the Tank Engine" layered over "Carameldansen" at 2 in the morning. Why). Some are cursed because they work better than they have any right to. I keep having to give it points for creativity.
It seems to associate us with our favorite songs, which is sweet. I've caught it trying to trigger switches by playing songs associated with specific people once or twice.
We have a tag for posts about it: brain radio.
And here's the Rasputin mix that the radio tends to loop, for your audio displeasure.
Weird question but is there a way to kill off one of us? That one's existence is unwanted both by self and the rest of us, and that one doesn't care if death is achieved just for self or by axing the body (and therefore the rest of us). We want to live.
Let me answer this with a story.
Warning for self harm and suicide discussion.
Folks in the comments, please be nice to this anon. They're in a hard place and compassion is what helps.
When we were newly discovered as plural, we weren't doing well. On top of dealing with major depression and struggling with "panic attacks" (flashbacks, in retrospect), a lot of us feared or hated each other. Infighting was a major problem.
In particular, most of us disliked Ann.
Ann used to threaten us, insult us, and otherwise harrass the rest of us constantly. She did quite a lot to hurt us and the people we loved at the time, physically and mentally, and I'd rather not go into detail beyond saying that even Ann will admit that she was an asshole at the time. She regrets a lot of it nowadays.
None of us liked her. She didn't like herself. She wanted us dead, and we wanted her gone. It felt like the only way out of the situation would be to get rid of her.
So, we tried to get rid of her. If I could go back in time and undo any one decision in our life, that would be the one.
Killing her didn't work, and it's something that I have a lot of retrospective grief for. We know why she felt and acted that way now, and she didn't deserve what we did to her. She deserved help and care.
She wanted us to die because she hated herself, and because she held the anger we'd dissociated away for most of our life, and because no one had taught her how to cope with the pain and rage and self-hatred. She hurt us because she thought that no one would ever pay attention to her unless they were angry or scared of her. She hurt us because she was in pain.
And instead of helping her, we tried to kill her. When that didn't work, we tried locking her up deep inside our head so that we could forget about her. It did keep her out of front for a while. But it wasn't worth it, and it didn't help her in the slightest. It just made everything worse when she broke out.
Don't lock up your headmates as a long-term measure. Don't lock them up at all if you can avoid it, but at the very least, have a concrete plan for getting them the support they need to safely come out of containment.
Imagine being stuck inside your head, unable to live your life, unable to do much more than stew on all of the pain you've experienced, fully aware that the people in your head think you should die or go away forever. Whether or not you want to die, it doesn't help to know that the folks that are supposed to be there for you no matter what would prefer that you stop existing.
She was stuck in a box inside our head for months. And then she got out, and she tried to kill us, and I don't blame her for making that choice. I'm just glad we all lived.
I don't know what I would do without Ann nowadays. The exact reasons that we all hated her are now the reasons that we're glad she exists. That pain and anger and sharpness turned out to be important. She turned out to be important. There's so much that we would never be able to do without her.
Please. I am really, sincerely begging you: do not try to kill or bury your headmates. I know it's scary, I know there's risk, I know they're suicidal or angry or controlling or traumatized. There are better ways to handle their behavior than trying to get rid of them, and they have more to offer than pain and harm.
Be kind to them. Make deals. Make contracts. Give them something that they want in exchange for staying alive, or teach them coping skills, or find some safer way to meet their needs. Listen to what they're feeling and thinking, and listen for the reasons that they're doing this. Suicidal or homicidal ideation doesn't happen in a vacuum. Something is driving that behavior.
Being rejected or abandoned when you're in pain doesn't make the situation any better. Being supported does.
We have a book chapter on all of this that goes over ways to deal with headmates that hurt or threaten you. I keep meaning to port it over to its own article, but until then, here's a link directly to it: when your system hurts you.
DID is (approximately) as common as autism; 1-2% of the human population have it. That means every 100 people you meet, one or two of them are likely to be autistic, and one or two of them will likely have DID. This means that, statistically, you will meet up to 100 systems across your life (and that’s only the ones from DID!) And that’s just based off the average number of people you meet (10000); you will likely see significantly more!
DID is not rare, and even if you don’t have it, someone you know likely does.
They may even have an autistic friend that you can meet.
It's such a good reminder that DID is way more common then people think. That learning about it is good because like people with other conditions it's good to be prepared to be gentle with people from all walks of life.
I'll add a few things I know from therapy and reading. Just a heads up, I talk only about traumagenic dissociative disorders because that's what I know, that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge the existence of other forms of plurality and system origins, I'm just not able to talk about it.
According to my psychiatrist, who is not specialized in DID but in trauma disorders, DID/OSDD/pDID and other forms of traumagenic dissociative disorders are present in between 1 to 2% of the population.
It doesn't need to stem from "extreme" trauma but from repeated trauma mostly, no matter the severity of it. Things as "mundane" as loneliness or emotional neglect can cause it because it is most and foremost a coping mechanism. If you are more enclined to dissociate to cope, you are more enclined to develop DID even from "mild" experiences. As shown in the book "The Body Keeps The Score" about PTSD, two people can experience the exact same traumatic event and one is going to dissociate to cope, while the other will not.
That's why some people will go through extreme trauma and not develop any dissociative disorders, while some others will experience milder experiences and develop DID/OSDD. It's kind of a matter of how your brain responds to things more than the events itselves.
Still, according to my psychiatrist, the issue with DID/OSDD, etc, is that it is WILDLY underdiagnosed. People love to say that "everybody has DID," but in fact, psychiatrists are absolutely not trained to diagnose these disorders. My therapist told me that she had to educate herself and that she wouldn't have even thought of doing it if she wasn't specialized in trauma disorders. They don't have any classes about it in school, or barely so, and most of them don't have any tools to diagnose nor treat these disorders. So, the people who are the most likely to actually get diagnosed are the most severe cases who are going inpatient or are hospitalised because they can't function as they are.
That doesn't mean that a system that is functional is less valid than another that has to be in and out of treatment. It just means, like any other illness/disease, that severity is on a scale, dissociative disorders and trauma disorders are a spectrum, and it fluctuates.
We knew we were a system years even before we stumbled upon the online DID/OSDD community. Some other systems are not aware they are one until they get a diagnosis. It just depends. At the end of the day, all you really have to think about is being able to live your everyday life without it being a constant struggle. That's what matters. But saying that DID is an "extremely rare disorder" caused only by "absolutely horrific extreme unfathomable traumas" is false and contributes to the underdiagnosis and, therefore, lack of care that people with these disorders face.
The lifetime prevalence of OCD is 2.3%, and you never see people call OCD "extremely rare" and saying it's statistically unlikely for someone to have it.
But because dissociative disorders are so much more mystified and stigmatized, a similar rate for them is apparently "extremely rare".
It's not even like actual information on it from professionals and researchers is particularly difficult to find, either. This article is literally the first Google result for "is DID rare" (and the Google overview that pops up BEFORE it even staight up says "no, it's not"...)
By the way, DID is more common than schizophrenia (0.75%), and yet you're more likely to be questioned for claiming to have DID than you are for claiming to have schizophrenia.
"I just find it hard to believe some people who claim to be systems. why do all their alters have strange names and unique appearances and weird mannerisms?" queer people are disproportionately at risk of experiencing childhood trauma. autistic people are disproportionately at risk of experiencing childhood trauma. there are countless studies on this if you want to hear it right from the source. childhood trauma is the driving factor behind a massive majority of DID/OSDD system formations. I trust that you can connect the dots here!
if you intentionally choose to disregard peoples' existences based on their appearance or behaviours, you have biases that you absolutely need to deconstruct before people like me can ever feel safe around you.
you can start by saying nothing about how you "just can't believe it" when someone you don't know exists as a system where you can see. you can keep going by trusting the people in your life when they share extremely vulnerable information about themselves.
telling someone that you're part of a system feels like exposing your soft underside. I've cried from terror almost every time I've had to reveal it to someone I care about, and I don't cry easily. if someone tells you they're part of a system, they're placing a monumental amount of trust in you.
actually, another thing!!! you are seeing systems who:
1. actually know that they're systems (this is rare. being online makes resources on figuring it out WAY more accessible)
2. happen to exist in the same online space as you, the tumblr user reading this
3. are, as a result, usually younger and/or autistic and/or queer, which are all factors that can influence individual alters' identities.
so of COURSE you think we're all like this. you're looking at one damn tree instead of the whole forest!!! there are systems who are 60 years old and never had the resources to figure out what was going on. there are systems who are 30 and barely use social media for personal reasons. there are systems who are 20 and don't tell anyone because of the cruelty they've faced every time they try. there are systems who are 15 and are SO relieved to have answers to why everything felt weird and wrong their whole life, so they shout it from the rooftops. your limited interactions with systems in specific online spaces does not represent the majority of systems on earth.
even if it did represent the majority of systems on earth we STILL deserve to be treated like people. this should not be something I have to beg for!!!!!
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