[tw for looots of talk of abuse. it's not like The Topic of the bitching but it's important to The Topic so i can't really leave it out. sorry]
my host genuinely hates me. and i do not know what to do about it.
okay, hold on, context: i'm part of a sidesystem. by "host", i mean host of the sidesystem. the "leader", the top of the hierarchy, the... blah blah blah. we'll call her BD. i'm at the very bottom of the hierarchy. the hierarchy stuff is mostly related to unnecessary-to-mention stuff, all you need to know is that she's #1 (the very top, obviously) and i'm #6 (literally the very bottom. there's only six of us.), and this hierarchy wasn't created by us, but BD is perpetuating it.
it's at least fond of everyone else. it thinks of itself as their protector. their knight in shining armor. everyone else tends to side with it (or at least, don't argue against it) because of its position in the hierarchy. they're used to it, they're scared of change, blah blah blah--i get it, i'm fine with them. but they avoid associating with me in entirety because of how much BD hates me.
i love them all. i love BD. BD would label me as a persecutor, probably. it says i'm evil, that i'm irredeemable, that i'm a shithead, that all i do is cause problems. it makes fun of me for being upset that it sides with our abusers (who we haven't even been in contact with for years, mind you! and also, it gets upset when i point out that what they did was abuse!) over me. it says i'm a freak, worthless, that everyone should avoid interacting with me because i'll ruin things. it calls my infodumps about our functioning (particularly when i mention that she and i mirror each other and are basically twins) "inane rambles".
it has been trying to actively turn its friends against me. purely because it personally hates me.
i still love it. i know, i know, i shouldn't. i have every reason to hate her right back. but i know she is very much hurting. she's gotten our sidesystem into... a particular community, cough... saying it's "harm reduction" (because the system as a whole gets urges to go back there, because the community mimics the abuse we faced). it's retraumatization, plain and simple. i'd share more details about why, but i fear getting too specific, especially for mainsys' sake since they absolutely do not want to be associated with that community for A Lot Of Reasons (not least of which is the whole "they mimic our old abuse" thing).
i just. being her mirror, i understand why she does what she does. it frames itself as "loyal" and me as "disobedient". i characterize it as "fawn response" and myself as "fight response". when it would get punished, its reaction would be to accept it and to heel, in hopes of our abusers forgiving it (even though they didn't like it, either). when i got punished (which happened often, since i was actively trying to get us away from the abuse, and i was this close to succeeding before we went dormant), i fought back and doubled down on my "disobedience". i can see why it would think i was the problem, and not our abusers, or the abuse itself.
i just. fuck! i love her. i love her in part because she and i are, in many ways, the same. and she hates me. and she's doing this whole thing that's just going to retraumatize us and make things worse, and i feel so fucking bad for her because she feels like she has to. like she has no other choice. like doing this is the only way for it to be good.
i'm working with the gatekeeper of the main system to try and like. figure things out. BD's been pissed at me lately because i ratted our existence out to the main system (because they'd already figured there was a new sidesystem because of sudden blackout amnesia lasting 5 hours, which only occurs with whole sidesystems, not individual headmates for us, + the fact that BD tried to make absolute certain they wouldn't know we were here while also being very sloppy about it. hey, i just took advantage of what was already there!), but it's been good. it's been an objectively good thing that we're in contact.
i just. aagh. i can't throw up my paws and go "well i hate you too lol!" because i don't! i love her! but it refuses to listen to me about anything because i'm at the bottom of the hierarchy, because i'm "the bad one", because... whatever reason it's picked to be mad at me this hour. and then with this whole "harm reduction" (retraumatization) thing, it's only been getting support for how it's treating me because of the kinds of people it's surrounding itself with. literally 0 push back. and it's not like the rest of our sidesystem will go against it. and it refuses to listen to main system, too. so i have no clue what i'm supposed to do to try and get her out of this hole she's digging herself (and, consequently, the rest of our sidesystem and potentially the entire system if she's not careful enough) into. deleting the accounts she's using to do this would just piss her off and make her hate me/us more, but she's not going to listen to anyone who tells her that she's doing something bad, because all that matters to her is that it's what our abusers would have wanted for us. it doesn't recognize what happened as abuse, because it was convinced it was normal and good, that it was our fault if we were hurt.
Wow, I am. SO sorry, anon. This is an incredibly rough situation but I would be lying to say we hadn’t had a similar one
Had a few sysmates another didn’t want us to get fakeclaimed over and tried forcing them to be people they weren’t to appease someone not in our life who’s never even known we’re a system. Our situation is obviously a lot tamer, but still. It took a while of talking to them, and having them talk to other people, but eventually we got them to calm down a little, or at least they stopped voicing their anger/upset/stress to the sysmates like they were before
It definitely didn’t help them that OUR host at the time was repeating the behavior to that sysmate, which is I’m certain where they picked it up from, and if our host hadn’t acted like that towards them, we wouldn’t’ve had to deal with that
