"Atypical" Headmate Roles
See, a lot of people know the common headmate roles. Persecutor, protector, caretaker, etc. Not everyone has em or subscribes to that framework, that's fine. We've used roles like that for ourselves for a while, and in recent times we've ended up finding it even more useful. Especially as our dissociation seems to worsen between headmates. It's been a whole process really!
Previously, we didn't understand more niche roles or why they needed terms. We figured, why do you need a role for "artist" or for "gardener", or other interest based roles? Aren't those just normal person traits? But back then we were really in a more medicalised view of our own roles internally, even if we actively tried to afford our own headmates personhood beyond their role archetypes. Most roles were the result of our trauma and therefore, the ones we had made sense and there was this underlying self-motivation to perform them well. We were fitting ourselves into the common view of how they work and not questioning it further. This had led to burnout, guilt among protectors and caretakers who "fail" (aka those who get burnout, understandably!) and motivation for persecutors to continue getting worse. It didn't work, it was digging us into a hole in the ground. Our roles weren't serving us, it was more like we were serving them.
But here's the thing that's really kickstarted the whole "roles" thing into helping us more. Just like "guy who protects you" (protector) and "guy who takes care of you" (caretaker) can be roles, so can "guy who sleeps good" or "guy who really loves organising stuff". They don't need to be your basic common functions you see. They don't need to be critical to your survival. If it's helpful to find a word and use that to describe something as mundane as "guy who draws art good" then you can just.. do that. You can define yourselves or your skill set in any way you please, it doesn't have to fit inside the common idea of what roles are. Roles don't have to be a huge deal.
Of course, at the same time, roles can be complicated and the idea itself can fall flat. You often are more than your role and you're not stuck in it forever, they can change and grow with you. It doesn't have to be your whole entire thing. There's something to be said about how sometimes you can over-classify people using role frameworks and how it can be more harmful than helpful--after all, singlets can do all of these things and their personality isn't described as an inherent role about it. You don't need to label each and every tiny aspect of your identity, you shouldn't have to. It can make you feel picked apart and classified like you're something being studied. For a lot of folks it's redundant or overly invasive. It's not for everyone! However, we've found that expanding what "role" can mean to us into more mundane things is actually helpful in our daily life, and in breaking down that "I'm (role) so I have to (action) perfectly forever" mindset.
If your role can be "guy who sleeps good", it's a little harder to get into a complex about how you're doing your job properly or not than if you restrict "role" to mean things like a protector, roles where folks actively depend on you in critical situations. If most of your only roles you define are things critical to your survival like that, it puts a lot of pressure onto folks because it feels like a category of Super Important Tasks we Can't Fail At Ever, in our own experience. But it doesn't have to be that way. I'm just the guy they call when we need to go to bed and they need to trust someone to actually do it. Others might be the guy they call when we need to go do photography, or finish a commission, or relax and watch movies. Protectors, under this idea, are just guys who they call when some shit is going down and we need a guy to be cool about it. They already were that anyway, but having a little more variety seems to take the pressure off and make it all feel more casual.
If anything, nowadays it's a really quick and easy way to categorise our skills, as opposed to innate personal traits, and then be able to stay up to date on who can do what and who to call for help. Honestly maybe we'd be better off calling them "skills" instead of "roles" overall, internally at least? "Skills" feels less like a designated task or career sort of thing than "roles" does, it feels like there's more implied choice and room for movement there. More emphasis on a thing you can do well, less emphasis on you being required to play your part. It definitely feels more humanizing to think of it that way, and man it's been helping.
Now that we do use more niche roles for ourselves, when we need to sleep and we're struggling to do so for instance, we're able to search up "sleeper" (the role) on any of our headmate documents and get a list of who to call. We don't need to sit there and try to think through walls of dissociation trying to figure out who the hell that guy is, the one who sleeps and actually feels rested in the morning. We don't need to just stay up all night because we can't sleep and can't do anything about it. We don't need to scroll though our system documents and try to find anyone we know of who can sleep well. We can just know the word, and look the word up, and man it's so damn helpful.
Maybe this is just a thing we've struggled with and other folks don't really relate. Maybe this will give some folks some insight about the whole thing. Who knows. I wanted to get our experience out there though--roles are a big part of how a lot of plurals perceive themselves and there can be a lot of good and a lot of harm to come from them. Plurals are so, so diverse and sometimes you really do need to carve out your own little way to categorise yourselves, so I wanted to share ours.
