Systems, be kind to your âproblematicâ alters. No, I donât mean donât give them consequences for their actions, and no, I donât mean just let them wreak havoc on your life. But I do mean try to work with them instead of against them.
We have one of these problematic alters. Her name is Nyx. She holds a lot of the trauma and holds a lot of mental illness symptoms and addiction problems. She embodies some of the worst parts of our abusers. Nyx has intense emotions that she canât always control, she can be manipulative, nasty, mean, she takes front and suddenly weâve been on a bender for four days and sheâs been a total bitch to everyone who loves us and who we love. She self-harms, sheâs the reason for a lot of our near misses with suicide. When we say she can be problematic, we MEAN IT.
Weâve spent years fighting with her, trying to keep her in headspace, treating her coldly. She always breaks out of containment. Sheâs weirdly good at it. But recently weâve started thinking that Nyxâs propensity for breaking out is, in part, our brain trying to tell us something. Because after years of fighting against her, we decided to try something new. We saw her being angry and bitchy about a particular guy our partner was talking to, and instead of condemning her and locking her up, we asked her why.
Nyx didnât know the answer at first, so we waited with her until she figured it out. She then explained that she feels like expressing her needs makes her a bad person (which is almost definitely an internalized message from our abuser), but circumstances around this particular guy were making her feel really insecure, and in the absence of being able to talk about what her actual feelings are, she tried to get rid of the threat by being overall angry and negative about him. In essence? Nyx feels like she canât express needs because she feels like she should be able to meet them independently. So, the needs go unmet, and she ends up resorting to underhanded tactics to meet them, which doesnât always work because people canât read her mind, and then it builds up into a much bigger problem than it was originally.
And you know what? Thatâs something we can work with.
In one of our first acts of real system cooperation, we coaxed her into talking to our partner about how she felt, and she did, and she even wound up apologizing for her behaviour, on her own, without any of us making her.Â
We decided that instead of locking her back up, weâd give her the grace of letting her have a little freedom, and asked her not to go on a bender or self sabotage relationships. And you know what she did with front the next day?
She put on a cute outfit, put temporary pink hair dye in our hair, had a drink and a smoke at dinner with our parents and brother, and went to see the Barbie movie with our mom and nana. Not exactly the unhinged behaviour weâve come to expect from her. The most unhinged thing she did was the hair dye, and honestly? The colour is temporary and it looks good on us. She showed off the outfit to anyone who would give her the time of day, and it was honestly adorable. She was so happy and excited to feel like a cute girl! Itâs a very different side of her, but one thatâs been here the whole time.
And all it took was offering her some understanding, teamwork and trust. She hasnât gotten better overnight. She still has a lot of problems. There is still work to be done with her. But you know what did happen overnight? Sheâs agreed to work with us at all.
So yeah. Be kind to your problematic alters, because thatâs the first step of cooperation.
