#about plurality

[diuretic-tricks]

what does plural mean in this case? i have a guess based on the normal definition but i wanna be sure lol

for us, we have a dissociative disorder. but we believe there are many ways to be plural.

[corvidiscourse]

The people who push for boxes around systems in general, but especially disordered systems, are enacting the exact same ableism as the psychiatric system that invented the boxes they’re pushing. When people push the narrative that there is only one way to become/develop a system, that there is only one way to recover from any given disorder(s), that there is only one acceptable way to describe and experience and name plural experiences, they are not only harming the infinitely many systems who don’t fit those boxes but preventing the systems who do from having enough breathing room to explore and understand their identities in healthy ways. These are ideas that posit that, for example, systems must be forced to understand themselves as parts of one whole person rather than individual whole people in order to meet some arbitrary psychiatric standard of health and therefore cannot acceptably/respectably consider themselves whole individual people. Obviously, these kinds of narrow expectations only further marginalize already marginalized people by exploiting their vulnerability in order to categorize them in stifling and limiting ways. In this incredibly ableist system, the only way for those who have experienced severe trauma to receive validating care is by seeing their experiences the way they are expected and told to see them, and the alternative perspectives not permitted in the realm of “healthy thinking” are usually the ones that grant such individuals more autonomy than the systems forbidding them to do so in the name of care.

One of the most egregious of all these enforced “healthy” ideas being the implication that system origins can never be mixed or complicated/nuanced in any way, which is often more implied through completely lack of consideration and assumption of impossibility than outright stated. Even if you were to believe (against the word of the DSM, but common among infographics) that systems can only ever form in the context of certain specific trauma histories, maintaining militant boundaries on acceptable ways systems are allowed to describe or analyze these sorts of experiences harms systems that would be considered genuine even under this limited and inaccurate model. What if a system were, as these sorts of ableists claim, “just confused” about their experiences? What if they were (again, as these sort like to often claim) in denial about their experiences? What if it simply made them more comfortable or was a healthier choice for them to not disclose information about the origin of their system? Systems like these get pushed out of recovery spaces that are often extremely important to their health and recovery, simply because they do not conform to standards for being respected as a system.

When I see sysmeds who claim to be, quote, “staying in their lane,” I am relieved that they are not actively attacking systems as some others do, but I am still acutely aware of the harm they do to so many disordered and traumagenic systems who do not fit their narrow conceptualizations of concepts that were already inherently built to marginalize systems. Not naming names, since they’ve been in enough drama already for discussing their experiences, but we know a diagnosed DID system who is not entirely traumagenic and who has spoken to us before about the hostility they often found in survivor spaces, even general trauma survivor spaces that had nothing to do with systems specifically. The truth is that mental health recovery is, quite obviously, inextricably interwoven with mental healthcare systems built upon the inherently ableist system of psychiatry, which then ideologically dominates survivor (and other mental health recovery/support) spaces. When disabled and mentally ill people are made by ableist systems to believe ableist ideas about themselves, they believe those ableist ideas about other disabled and mentally ill people as well, essentially doing work on the behalf of aforementioned ableist systems. This makes it extremely difficult for anyone who does not fit narrow molds of the “acceptable” neurodivergent/mentally ill (note, in this case, systems who are not entirely both disordered and traumagenic, but also other groups like psychiatric abuse survivors) to access the support and general care they need.

TLDR; Sysmeds who don’t actively attack or fakeclaim systems they don’t “agree with” or understand are less ableist than systems who do, but they still fundamentally see systems who do not conform to their standards as either being unreliable narrators of their own lived experience or lying, which is inherently ableist. This ableism is still worthy of analysis and criticism, even if it’s less blatant.