I'm fucking sick of looking at plural communities or plural tags and seeing people talking about forcing their headmates into dormancy. "I want to force my persecutors into dormancy" "we forced our old host into dormancy" "can we force all the non-helpful alters into dormancy" "I don't want to go through the effort of establishing healthy communication with the whole system can I just force some of them into dormancy" "We forced an alter into dormancy and he came back and hates us all, any advice" "If you're dealing with a persecutor and they won't listen to reason you should try forcing them into dormancy" "I forced my alters into dormancy but it didn't make them go away what should I do" " This alter was annoying me and so I forced them into dormancy lol" "We don't bother giving our fragments identities we just force them into dormancy" "This alter triggered another alter's source trauma so we forced them into dormancy" I feel like I'm on the fucking truman show what the fuck are you talking about? What the hell do you mean? Why are you all so fucking obsessed with it? What is wrong with you guys? Don't you understand how fundamentally fucked up that is? Hello? Am I talking to myself right now?
I have enjoyed reading y’all’s posts and stuff. It’s been good.
I feel like there is some things I can relate to and that brings some comfort.
I was wondering, the author of the intro post mentioned one of the old hosts integrating most of the then system members or shaping them to their liking. Any tips on how NOT to do that and how to, like, walk that back?
See, the old host died randomly one day in January 2015 and I kinda replaced her. From then on I’ve been pretty much alone to my knowledge until like 2023, which makes sense because I did not really come together as my own person until 2022.
I think my original purpose was mainly just masking and filtering what came out into the world because I keep doing that. I keep accidentally finding my way into embellishing, filtering, curating and modifying what others want to actually say or who they actually are, which is bad, and I want to stop doing that because I think that might be the main reason there’s so few of us and why the others’ grasp on the front, their identity and their choices is so weak.
Could also be that the first permanent resident was born the day before Christmas eve.
But still.
I don’t know.
And I thought maybe one of you would know?
Sorry if this is inappropriate.
- Eddie
Hello, Tulip here. Firstly I'm gonna have to be completely straightforward and say that, since I'm not in your head, any advice I or my headmates give has a chance of not working at all. But, this does give us the opportunity to talk a bit more about the situation I mentioned in the intro post. I hope what we share is helpful to you in some way. :)
(Answer below the break. Contains discussion of forced fusion and willing fusion/unfusion, and references to bullying and forced dormancy)
All right. To our recollection, around 2013, an alter by the name of Susan began to take on a more executive role in headspace, much like the role Russet currently has. She called shots from behind, all with one purpose in mind: "Look as quiet and intelligent as possible around our classmates, and don't get bullied." She was definitely a filter/mask alter for high school. At this time she didn't really hide the system from the hosts, but the hosts seemed to think everybody had conversations with multiple voices in their head anyway. Why hide? (Amazing the things we used to think.)
She was decent at her job for a while, but around 2017, she became susceptible to cringe culture, and decided to start outright CONTROLLING things and hiding the system from the front. She began curating alters together into groups, and fusing them over the course of a couple years, until she got the host we call Beccs.
Susan forced other alters into dormancy if she didn't like them or didn't think they were necessary to form Beccs. She also tried fusing other alters together that she found too strange or cringe for her liking. This ended up creating an amalgam fusion (we called it the Formless) that we WERE able to disassemble upon discovery due to how unstable it was. She forced it into dormancy as well, after what I can only imagine was a pretty massive "oh crap" moment.
So, in dealing with the Formless. Firstly, it was obvious it didn't want to be fused and shouldn't have been fused in the first place. I believe how we let it unfuse was: We let it front and let it start talking itself out, all of its different feelings. Since it was composed of such different entities, with such distinct voices, it was relatively easy to distinguish the individuals within. From there it was like peeling back the layers of an onion. The most prominent speaker unfused first, and from there it was one after the other, alters popping out of each other like nesting dolls.
If alters wanna be fused, there's not anything we can do about that, no matter how much we might miss someone. I myself am composed of a bevvy of willing individuals who are at total peace with this form. But if they don't wanna be together and they're given the opportunity to be distinct, and are allowed to have that for themselves, the unfusing happens pretty naturally for us. We find that having an idea of an identity to grasp onto, like a faint memory of who one of the individuals in the fusion used to be, or a strong sense of one's own emotions and/or thoughts, can be enough to help a separation begin.
(I must reiterate, this is all just stuff that's worked for us personally.)
And how to allow alters to be distinct? Shit, it's tough to say. I've seen Justin curating others' thoughts enough times I can at least give some tangible advice on that front. If you're filtering and catching yourself doing it, start by apologizing and reining yourself back. Take ten seconds to close your eyes and take your mind off what you wanna "edit". Give the others the space to breathe and then see what happens.
Anything more subconscious going on (in regards to weak identity) might just have to work itself out in time, or it might just be the way your system is. Some systems just have less distinct alters and that's totally legit.
Well, I hope some of this is relevant or helpful to ya. Best wishes for you and the rest of your system! 🤘
Now that my pinned post is out of the way, I suppose should post something, yes? Allow me to give short reintroduction for those who haven’t seen my pinned. My name is Memento Mori, or just Mori. I aim to discuss and educate systems on dormancy in the hopes of making it less of a triggering and demonized topic.
So let’s begin, shall we? What is dormancy? In short, and by popular understanding, dormancy is when an alter’s job is finished and it is no longer needed by its system, so it stops fronting even when presented with triggers that would normally bring it to front. It does not appear in headspace nor does it exist in co-con. Dormant alters appear to vanish completely from the system. Some consider this to be ego-death or even genuine alter death, but it’s important to recognize that dormancy is not final. Dormant alters can and sometimes do return, oftentimes when the trauma that formed them also returns.
What about medically? Is dormancy even a medically recognized and used term? Well, in this article (🔗), Natalie Frank appears to recognize dormancy, but this is not all therapists and psychologists. In fact, Frank appears to be the only one to speak on it. Similarly to what was explained in the previous paragraph, Frank believes that alters go dormant because their jobs have finished, though their presences or the lack thereof still hold importance. Kind of like haunting the narrative.
What is important to note here, is that Frank and the general (system) public believe that dormancy is a good thing. What is not good, however, is forced dormancy. Forced dormancy is typically found among persecutors, prosecutors, and other harmful alters. Forced dormancy is, as you can assume, when a system forces its alters to go dormant even when their jobs are not yet done. From what has been observed, it can be concluded that forced dormancy is not real, or at the very least, that is not what it should be called by the general system public. Forcing an alter to “go dormant” should be more widely known as suppression.
Suppression is unlike dormancy in that it is harmful not only to the suppressed alter, but the system as a whole. A suppressed alter is still very much present within the system, so it can still influence front. If a system is suppressing a harmful alter, it has the potential to passively inflict intrusive thoughts and negative emotions onto the rest of the system. Those who claim that they need to suppress their harmful alters or “force them into dormancy” for sake of their mental or physical health do not often consider or realize these repercussions until it is already too late. They also do not often seek out other options, and jump straight to suppression upon hearing of it.
For those considering suppressing any harmful alters, please consider the alternatives as well as the repercussions and side effects of suppression. I’ve made a list of alternatives for suppression containing coping mechanisms for harmful alters that you can find here (🔗).
Y'know what I'm about to go to bed. I can be vulnerable on main.
I have very few regrets in my life. Most of the things I've done wrong were either inevitable, not my fault, or led to even greater things down the line.
And this, too, is something I couldn't really have stopped - plurality as a concept didn't exist for me until I was... 15? 16? But I had a system before that.
I don't know how far back it goes. I don't remember anything past 2012. But I had a Protector. I had a girl who saw how hurt and scared and vulnerable I was and stepped out to defend me because I couldn't defend myself.
And she was horrible at it! We were like twelve! Neither of us could tell friend from foe so anytime I got mildly scared, she would wrestle control from me like a mask possessing my body and then she would hurt my friends! And I didn't know what was happening!
So I pushed her down. I shoved her someplace cold and dark and tried to forget her. Tried to make her stop existing. Tried to make it all stop existing. Because normal people don't talk about their emotions like they're separate people, they don't change their name or role-play as 5 people at once to have a dialogue about "<deadname> is sad".
And the others are gone. There's aq ghost in one of the rooms, but I don't know if she's real or just a feeling. An imprint of what was.
But Vy never stopped fighting. She never stopped moving. Even after everything I put her through, everything she's suffered, even as I saw her at the edges of the Void and tried again and again and again to lock her out, she never stopped.
Take a minute to appreciate your headmates. Take a minute to thank them for keeping you safe, regardless of if they're doing a good job or not. They're trying - and that at least should be rewarded.
