It's strange to me that people think that endogenics have an unclear understanding of who they are. I'm very clear on who I am. I've been the same me for 35+ years. So have the other Willows. The rest of our Crew have been themselves for the decades they've been with us. That's one of the things that makes us very clearly a system: we're many very distinct, independent people.
We Willows can look back at any of our memories and recognize which of us was doing what. We remember the arguments we used to have, and the spirited debates over values and what to be when we grew up etc. We remember jostling for control, and struggling with things like personality tests: are we introverted or extraverted? What kinds of things do we value most? What do we most want? Those answers changed based on which of us took the test, which, depending on the length of the test, could have several of us answering at different points in the test. But if we focused on just one of us answering at a time, the answers were very consistent and persistent.
We weren't all four of us equally present in our life. Crystal, who did most of school, homework, and our main hobby of reading, handled somewhere between half and three quarters of our life between age 10 and 28-ish. But the rest of us were still there. Still took time fronting. Still wrestled together with important aspects of our life.
Embracing our plurality has actually increased our clarity on who we are. We understand ourselves and each other better. When we have mixed emotions about a thing, we aren't dividing them up by "parts" - mixing our individual parts up with each other as "parts". Rather it's easier to recognize things as, this emotion comes from part of me and this other comes from this other part of me, but this other tangle of emotions comes from this other Willow who isn't me, and this is why those emotions are present etc.
And each of us Crew has, historically, had an easier time figuring out things about each other than about our individual selves. Being able to really clearly describe objectively what each of us sees in ourselves only subjectively, has helped a lot with our personal growth and healing.
Which isn't to say it's easy, or that we're anywhere near "done" healing and growing. But it's easier, and we've all done a lot. And that's only been possible in the breadth and depth that it has been, due to our clear understanding of ourselves as plural.
One of the reasons parts work helps so much in people with CPTSD and IFS is that, by accurately describing a part, you begin to better understand why they are the way they are. And that better understanding leads to better and more positive communication which leads to better inner changes towards healthier patterns of belief and behaviors, which leads to personal growth.
We're not making up fake personalities and therefore confusing who we really are. (And even those people who do make up fake personalities aren't typically confusing who they are: look at actors who do that for a living.)
We're accurately describing our interior workings, and therefore understanding ourselves better, and becoming more fully our best selves.
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Sorry for how disjointed this is, we had a lot of thoughts together on this, though Crystal took point on writing it for the most part.
