this isn't targeted towards you (i felt the need to make that disclaimer because this is about polyfragmented systems and you are one) and more of a general question likely related to other answers you've given in the past. i haven't had a chance to scroll through your replies in their entirety but thank you for being one of the few sane people on the system side of tumblr :)
anyway, what are your thoughts on the prevalence of polyfragmented systems on mainstream sns? as in, is polyfragmentation as common as it seems? i've taken it as people either with factitious or malingering osddid disguising a long kin list (since many of these people also claim to be introject heavy) or people with genuine did confusing slight differences noticed for new alters when really it might be an exisitng alter choosing to act a bit weird or having kins of their own as parts with agency... would of course have agency?
also what are some polyfragmented experiences you have that either pushed you in the direction of discovering this label or have helped you understand it when it was applied by a professional? are there any tells one can look for in themselves that might indicate polyfragmentation?
okay this definitely got long as usual, but this is an interesting subject that i have a lot of personal experience with, actually.
are there people mistaken on the experience of being polyfragmented?
the short answer is yeah, i definitely think there's a lot of people who are mistaken about their experiences, either because they're mistaking their genuine experiences with DID out of misinformation/confusion, or because they perhaps don't have DID at all and instead have BPD or a different, but severe, dissociative disorder. but i don't say that to be mean or because i think it comes from intentional malingering, or even from alters lying intentionally about stuff. in my experience, when you have lived like this for your entire life, it is genuinely difficult to tell alters apart. i've known about my DID since i was, like, 15, and it all still feels like mush to me. it feels like i'm trying to pick out individual grains of rice in a rice pudding. granted, i only moved out recently, and many of these people are still living with their abusive families, which can make things really difficult, but i know people who have known about their DID and been diagnosed for several years, away from their families, and are still confused about how it works.
what nobody actually realizes is that one of the reasons i discourage something like self-diagnosis (for the purposes of joining communities and individuating alters, at least) while you're still living in your abusive situation is because you won't be able to get an accurate baseline of your experiences due to living in survival mode. how are you supposed to figure out the individual identities living within you if you're constantly so dissociated just to stay functional? it doesn't make sense, and that's why everything about my experiences before moving out was so difficult. if you're living in your abusive home still and you can't make sense of your DID, this is why, and attempting to individuate alters is going to be next to impossible in that situation at best, and outright dangerous at worst.
not to mention that even outside of that, it's genuinely incredibly difficult to figure out what's an alter, what's a switch, and what's what i consider to be dissociatively identifying with something in a way that isn't an autonomous part. especially if you're doing this on your own, without external help. many people, particularly within the realm of self-diagnosis, are very confused and they aren't really aware of it. many self-diagnosers are not doing the research they should be, or taking it nearly as seriously as i did, and that inevitably leads to a lot of confusion about their experiences whether people want to admit that or not.
you can read below for the long answer but that's the basics of it. im not putting this under a cut because of my tendency to change my URL a lot so just scroll for the next piece of bolded text for the answer to your other question.
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a lot of these people have unintentionally come up with factitious experiences because they don't understand things like what an alter or a switch actually feels like for them. and i don't say that to be rude or condescending, i say that from personal experience not understanding what alters and switches feel like for me. in my experience being in and out of DID communities over the years, having met malingerers/people with factitious DID, people with genuine DID, and people with genuine DID coupled with factitious features, a lot of people do not understand what an alter or a switch actually feels like, even years into therapy/diagnosis. it's not something that someone else can just tell you about how it's "supposed" to feel, it's incredibly subjective and you really do have to feel it out yourself. words fail.
and to be clear, that's nobody's fault. that's not a flaw. that's a feature of the disorder. but i do think it has lead to a lot of people inflating their alter count quite a bit, and thinking they're polyfragmented when they aren't. there was a point where i thought i was getting fictives for every single new media i was getting into simply because i was getting stressed out about stuff and dissociating, and because i was actively being traumatized at the time, and now i have plenty of reason to believe that isn't true. the introjects (or introject-likes) that i have don't come from media that i've only passively liked or even briefly hyperfixated on, they come from stuff that has been incredibly significant to me and has been with me for a long time; often stuff with traumatic associations or stuff that makes me hurt to think about now (not that this necessarily has to be the universal experience, but the core i'm getting at is that these things are significant to me, and if you have fictives/introjects, that theme will probably be the same with you).
this is because i was mistaking dissociative experiences i had with kinning (as kinning and dissociation are deeply intertwined for me; it's not spiritual for me like it is for others) with the presence of new alters. i imagine these experiences could be really easy to confuse for a lot of people who are already severely dissociative. for example, it's notable that the DES and other markers of dissociation talk about how absorbed somebody gets into television or a book and other things like that. if you're severely dissociative and already use fiction to cope, especially coupled with something like BPD, it's pretty easy to get so absorbed in a piece of fiction that it feels like everything in it is happening to you personally (clinically documented), or to completely dissociate away from your own life so severely that when you step away from it to do something in the real world, you're confused and disoriented. this happens to me alllllllll the time. i'm sure many other people can relate. and when you're fixating on a piece of media at the time while being the kind of person who uses media as an escape from reality already, it's probably pretty easy to continue dissociating into it because you're bored/stressed/etc, even when it's not in front of you.
this is something that could be leading a lot of people to think that they have alters that aren't there. i definitely feel like this was the combination of factors leading me to believe that i had tons of fictional introjects that i didn't have, especially coupled with misinformation from system spaces i was in at the time, (and this was before 2020... some of these ideas have persisted for a long time).
the important thing to distinguish here is that factitiousness is not the same as malingering. malingering is explicitly done on purpose, for personal gain. in other words, malingering is lying directly. factitiousness could have a subconscious desire for personal gain of some kind, but it's not understood to be done on purpose. a person may be confused about their symptoms and what they're doing, and think these are genuine experiences of a specific disorder when they aren't. for example, instead of being about the fictives themselves, it could be that they understand that polyfragmentation tends to come from trauma that is more interpersonal & inescapable, & lasts longer than the kinds of trauma that causes other "flavors" of DID (confirmed by what little research we do have on the subject) and it causes them to feel a bit more valid in their traumatic experiences if they were to present this way.
i'm not pulling that out of my ass--years ago i helped take down a discord server that was practically full of teenagers grooming each other (in terms of how they manipulated each other) into believing they had all gone through extreme forms of organized abuse, programming, and similar forms of long-term traumas and that they were all polyfragmented, when what they had actually gone through was domestic abuse. one of them repeatedly claimed to have been programmed online, in chat rooms, which is impossible. they were spreading severe kinds of misinformation on these experiences that i now see in so many places online. i don't know if this server was the source, but it was definitely a part of this trend. i have seen people desperate to have their experiences labeled as RAMCOA because it makes them feel better about their trauma, makes it feel more "valid" to them, and i'm sure survivors of RAMCOA have seen this to a much worse degree than i have.
some people are absolutely exaggerating some of their experiences online because it makes them feel like their trauma is more valid, because of the constant downplaying of what they did experience. i'm not saying that to be mean, but it's objectively what they're doing. no, this is not a free pass to fakeclaim people at random or based on whatever trauma they say they have, you will never be 100% accurate and that only alienates people and causes them to avoid seeking help out of fear. but this is absolutely a problem that occurs within the community, because people downplay their own lived experiences so severely that they think "this could never cause DID" or "[other people will think] i'm faking if i don't have real trauma, and none of this is real trauma". this is a completely normal feature of DID & being a survivor of severe childhood trauma in general, but this insecurity has lead to a lot of misinformation within online communities, like the constant claim/implication that it's trauma olympics to say that DID is caused by severe trauma, or that polyfragmentation is caused by things like lifelong abuse.
DID is already associated with long-term, inescapable trauma, and polyfragmentation is associated with trauma that goes further into that extreme; abuse that lasts well into adulthood, incest (experienced as particularly inescapable betrayal trauma), abuse that starts very young (younger than the starting age of 5-6 for typical DID development), and severe physical abuse. it's also why polyfragmentation is associated with DID and doesn't really show up in OSDD--polyfragmentation is essentially an 'extreme' form of DID due to the sheer levels of dissociation involved in its structure. (but i've seen polyfragmentation, as a descriptor and not a diagnostic term, be applied to people with OSDD before by professionals who interpret the symptoms of their patients differently; it's not something i care to police or whine about online and i'm not saying this to fakeclaim people, i'm discussing the literature i've read & people i've spoken with).
i can't say anything about exactly how common polyfragmentation would be in comparison to other presentations of DID, but regardless, there is a trend of people claiming this experience when they don't have it because they don't understand their own experiences, let alone the experiences of polyfragmentation, and it's both sad and frustrating, especially when many of these people are outright resistant to reading any kind of clinical literature on the subject. but there's not much i can do about that other than try to spread information as accurate as i can on the subject myself.
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what are experiences of polyfragmentation?
the only really "official" definition of polyfragmentation is having ~100+ alters. that number isn't exactly hard, though, so you can be polyfragmented with like 80 alters lol, and that number can be counting or not counting fragments, (which are notoriously difficult to count, so even getting a solid number of them can be difficult; hence many polyfragmented people saying a rather low official part count despite functionally having many more). it's just that the thing about having that many alters is that when you do, there tends to be a level of complexity naturally associated with that high part count, (doesn't seem like there is always, i've read a case study in the osiris complex, for example, where a woman's parts didn't seem particularly organized at all but she was considered PF, but there is a general association there). overall i'd say the only two real requirements are a large number of parts, and a large number of those parts being fragments.
complexity includes things like subsystems/side systems/what i like to call "branches", layers or epochs within the system, alters-with-alters, and hierarchies between alters can be common. things i've also heard other polyfragmented people talking about over the years include complex splitting patterns, such as iterative splits, (i.e. an alter splits off of another alter, becomes more elaborated, then splits, then that new alter elaborates, splits, and the cycle continues like a fractal), splitting new alters for similar situations instead of switching (i.e. having alters centered around one abusive relationship, then splitting a new set of alters for another, similar abusive relationship), having complex relationships & themes between alters, (this one is hard to describe but one blogger years ago described having many trauma fragments & protectors for each one that all had to be fused into a larger trauma holder and a protector; my DID seems to have similar themes of duality and "pairs" of alters throughout), as well as splitting multiple alters at once to hold differing conflicting perspectives about a single trauma/event (i think it's important to recognize that this is why splitting multiple alters at once happens; it doesn't happen for no reason).
one thing i experience that i haven't seen other people talk about is that i have alters who exist within what i call "different dimensions"--similar versions of the same alter that exist "on top of" each other, existing simultaneously but in the same way that old school 3D movies do with the red and blue. depending on which dimension is active, the same internal structures might be viewed entirely differently, (not a real example, but what one dimension might understand as a wise tree might be interpreted as a library even though they are both the same internal concept; something that holds information). it's really hard to describe this experience in words, that's kind of the best way i can put it briefly. it's likely something that's metaphorically attempting to represent some form of cognitive dissonance/dissociation related to the experiences i've had with disorganized attachment, constantly trying to re-frame my abuse & unstable living situation(s), etc.
none of this is inherently really backed by much clinical documentation, as polyfragmentation is kind of hard to come by in the field honestly. these are just a combination of things i've read in what little clinical literature i have found on the subject, as well as talking to other people who are polyfragmented.
in terms of what helped me to discover this label personally, it was the number of fragments i can't really identify; they exist within a really nebulous space inside me that's hard to put a fine point on. when i envision "where" they are (at least as the alter that's fronting; this might be different for the others), it feels like they exist within some kind of vague galaxy off of my "planet", floating in space and waiting to crash-land before they depart again. i watched a lot of dragon ball z kai and invader zim as a kid, lol. i get the feeling that the way this is perceived might change depending on which dimension is active at the time*.
(*ive switched since writing this and have no idea what theyre talking about.)
the other things that came along were the levels of inconsistency of alter behavior that lead me to realize that i have a lot of iterative splits, the layers/epochs that i have, the number of alters that i've been able to document, as well as my experience of "dimensions" that have lead me to the understanding that "polyfragmentation" is the best label for my experiences, and it makes sense considering the levels of betrayal trauma and the sheer length of the abuse & trauma i experienced, but the label has never been applied to me by a professional and i don't want to give the impression that it has.
if you're questioning polyfragmentation, experiences like this are the things you want to look at, not something like splitting a lot of fictives. and if you do seem like you're splitting a lot of fictives, personally i think it's worth double-checking that--not because you're lying or faking but because of how much emphasis the community puts on fictives and how that can lead someone to the expectation that they will split fictives when that isn't true. the culture surrounding DID within DID spaces is just as likely to influence you as anything else, and especially if you're not in any kind of knowledgeable professional treatment, trying to figure these things out can be next to impossible without having a healthy level of scrutiny over your own experiences.
if anyone else has their own thoughts to add on these subjects, feel free, whether you agree or disagree. i think starting dialogues, especially on the subjects of factitious experiences & bringing them to light, is important.
