#inner worlds

[darknessknowsmebyname]

Give me one good heart over a thousand fake ones.

[theweightofdivinity]

Real love is not self-centering.

It’s not about who hurts more or who speaks louder, it’s about presence, reciprocity, and humility before each other’s inner worlds. Love is energy in motion, an alchemy of two frequencies learning how to coexist. It expands when tended, contracts when neglected. We forget that love should expand both beings. That it’s purpose is not to feed the ego but to stretch the soul, to make us gentler, wiser, and more aware of the divine current that flows between two hearts.

Love, in its highest form, is a sacred exchange, a mirror that is meant to awaken, not consume. It is there to remind us that connection is a spiritual practice, not a performance.

[vanpeltfoto]

Exploration is essential. But why do we always end up in the deepest recesses of our minds?

(Photo: d.)

INSTAGRAM

[seraphite-system]

Not many people talk about how the inner world is a visualization tool used for coping through stress and trauma, but I do think it is something worth talking about.

For so long, my inner world was treated as a real place somewhere out there in the vast infinite space, that even after leaving the relationship I was in that forced that ideology on me, I still kind of treated it that way. I knew it wasn't something out there in the universe, but I still treated it as something that was 100% real, just to me and me alone.

Though I did come to realize, through about three years of being in a healthy environment and relationship, that the inner world is not an actual real place. It is just a visualization.

Thinking about it too hard, I don't understand the logistics, and it can make me lose my shit sometimes. It makes no sense to me if I think about it too long, because how can an alter be hurting another alter and they both know they're hurting/being hurt, but it's not actually happening?

It's not something that is real-real, but it is something that that individual system does experience and visualize. It helps cope with trauma or stress or just real life things. It can mirror it, or it can be better than it or worse than it. We can't control what those visualizations do, which makes it even more real to the said system.

It's a very complicated thing to think about and process, and again I don't like thinking too hard about it. We have an alter who did unspeakable things to others in our headspace, things that still effect the alters that harm was caused to, but this is where it gets complicated. Because did that alter actually do it? Or was it just our "imagination" in a sense? But why do both alters remember it and remember how they felt during it if it was just a visualization?

These are the kind of thing that keeps me up sometimes, and even when I tried to make sense of it with my fiance, they also said it's not something they can think about either because they just drive themself insane, too.

It's a lot easier to pretend it is just a real place inside your head; it makes it a lot less complicated. It made it a lot easier for me to not process real life and just be able to do things inside my own brain. But the truth is, this disorder is complicated. It doesn't make sense all the time. And this is what differentiates it from being this sort of roleplay like thing that some people like to act like this disorder is.

[thehyperspacesystem]

I (🍉) was just settling in to the fact that i finally have IW access and I had a really terrifying hostile IW experience. With the road we were riding escooters along turning into broken edges of fractured reality and then a tunnel of hellscape grinder teeth. I freaked and fronted, opening my eyes.

This was triggered by me attempting to move in to the neighborhood with the rest of the gang. The IW itself will not allow that.

I tried to go back in and was eventually met with a really hideous alien creature who was hard for me to look at, but i managed to cope ok, the creature gave me my starship back. Explaining that this (the starship) has always been my home in the IW.

Don't know quite what to make of that, but clearly our IW is alive and has it's own ideas about how things should be. This happened to Elise too, but i don't know what the trigger for her hostile experience was.

Once I accepted the starship as my IW home, i was put right back where i was originally as if nothing had happened.

I'm still pretty shaken up by how scary the IW can make itself if you do something it doesn't like and afraid to close my eyes, which is bad timing because i was trying to go to sleep when this happened.

[asapbarti]

I didn't miss them.

And that crushed me.

I expected guilt, sadness, nostalgia — but instead?

Nothing. Just utter silence.

And in that silence, the truth hit me: the "warm bond" I thought we had only existed in my head.

Most of my struggles weren't even mine.

"Money is always hard." "Love is sacrifice." "Don't stand out."

These weren't just phrases — they were chains I never saw. Until they were gone.

And when their voices disappeared, I realized how many of my battles were fights I was never supposed to be in.

I saw how much of my life I lived just to earn their approval.

The career I chose, the clothes I wore, the people I dated — all shaped by the need to make them proud.

But pride is not love.

And I'd been starving my whole life calling it a meal.

Without their constant presence, I finally started hearing myself.

My own thoughts. My true ambitions. My real boundaries.

For the first time, I wasn't just someone's child — I was a man with his own path.

Scary, yes. But also liberating.

And here's the hardest part:

Family can say "I love you" while destroying who you actually are.

They can hug you and still teach you fear.

They can call it "care" while building the very walls that keep you small.

And if you never step away, you'll never know where they end and you begin.

Silence doesn't destroy relationships — it reveals them.

And sometimes the only way to heal is to step back far enough to finally see: what you called "love" was actually control.

[unique-plural]

Our "innerworld" is basically just a set of recurring locations in our imagination, not like an actual consistent place in our mind. Like we communicate by thinking at each other, and while that's mostly verbal, it can also be visual. Visual communication often involves thinking of actions (e.g. closing a door, hugging someone, punching a wall), and logically those actions have to take place somewhere, so our brain fills in the blanks with whatever it can think of. These actions are figurative, representing emotions in a similar way to reaction images / GIFs.

There are no consequences to what we imagine, therefore, we don't consider events that happen in "headspace" to be real. The way we treat each other is what really matters.

This makes it really hard to relate to most systems, but also to those with aphantasia, because we do have a visual imagination, just not a real headspace.

-@the-fermi-system

We are one of those hypophantasiacs that can't relate to the locations thing sadly :( closest we got to having a headspace was drawing ourselves interacting on a whiteboard... which wasn't in our head. But the thinking at each other is a bit familiar!

Since we have no headspace (no structures in our mind, can barely remember layouts visually), headmates talking to me or each other usually end up like thought bubbles over some guy in a comic. Not literally, but like in a similar way, since they're not actually visible thought bubbles.

(And we have our own appearances, but that's not really dictated by whether we can rotate us in our heads, it's like looking a way you want to look. And also fictives coming with intense staring at source helps a bit to burn some details into muscle memory when we draw...)

We're not even really sure what to tag this with to help get reach to others with unconventional innerworlds, since we don't even know anything about conventional ones in the first place-- so hopefully knowing there's more variety to headspaces from our experience helps out ^^'

uugghhgh brain stuff is hard.... i might've misunderstood u Fermi... and i don't think i even conveyed well how communication in here works.

and i'm tired! i'm gonna sleep! goodnight day afternoon what have you. if i made another gibberish sentence someone'll fix it when we open this later