I’ve seen some posts lately about little alters, and I think we’ve also made some, but I’m making another post about it. Specifically, this is about how littles are not a monolith. Even within the same system, littles are not necessarily going to be exactly the same. Different alters form for different reasons at different points of life.
Below, I’m going to list some I guess categories(?) of littles within our system.
There are littles who are straight up just little kids. They act like little kids. They want to do little kid things.
There are alters who were dormant for a long time, and still have the kind of mindset we had as a kid. Mostly these are trauma holders trying to catch up on lost time, but still act childish. (Honestly, most littles in our system are also trauma holders.)
There are alters who are age regressors or age sliders that mostly have the mindset of a child. A lot of these alters are aware of newer things or whatever, but still childish.
Overall, even within these loose categories I listed, there is a lot of variation in how much little alters will understand “adult” thing. I think part of it has to do with how, collectively, we don’t really understand “adult” things anyways. Responsibilities are complicated, and constantly having to do things mostly on our own, and barely even knowing what we’re supposed to do is hard.
Being a system is like having a collection of perspectives to try and cope with the world, but with a general lack of understanding, there’s only so much we can do.
I feel like I derailed my own post, but hopefully it was not too confusing.
