#syscourse related

[happytrials]

My stance on everything? Anti-harm.

As long as you're not harming anybody with your actions, views, even the labels you associate yourself with

I genuinely do not care

Do whatever

I don't care how much I disagree, if you're not causing any harm I'm gonna mind my own business.

[plural-blocklist]

https://www.tumblr.com/lambiieslilmeadow/787897046663315456/hot-take-anti-endos-shouldnt-use-simplyplural-or?source=share Thoughts on this? Personally as a pro-endo it kinda rubs me the wrong way but maybe this is just me being sensitive.

We have had a bit to think on this and honestly, to us, it shouldnt matter who uses an app/bot/other assistive or useful thing.

We can also understand the anger behind it, some anti endos truly do want endogenic systems out of all plural spaces, regardless of if that space was made by inclusive or endogenic systems. We can understand wanting to turn around and tell them to leave if they dont want us around, they can make their own, etc. To us it sounds like a reversal of roles.

Pluralkit and simply plural were built for all systems and that won't change, it's up to each individual on the other side if they're willing to accept that fact and still use it.

I* wouldn't dwell on it too much more to be honest. Syscourse and what comes with being a part of these spaces is exhausting and at times infuriating. Either way people seem to want other people out of spaces, we just opt for curating your own space :)

[cambriancrew]

I find it oddly hilarious that people are harassing and reporting others for using the "transphobic" term sysmed... Which was literally coined by (and is primarily used by) trans systems.

Like... be upset by the comparison all you want, but it's not hatred or oppression or whatnot of people who are trans, whatsoever. Reporting it as such to Tumblr is only going to waste their time and maybe even get them to mute your reports entirely. And then encouraging people to harass and mass report them for using it? That's more likely to get YOU banned than the people you're reporting! Especially when you're doing so IN the thread you're reporting!

Idk I just find it kinda funny when people aim for someone else and end up only hurting themselves like that.

[cambriancrew]

I (Librarian) just can’t quite accept that we-Willow could be traumagenic because... seriously? Parents divorcing, dad and baby-me moving around a lot, severe enough trauma to cause us to become a system? It wasn’t even enough to give us CPTSD - that only came as a result of things that happened later; or rather, the early stuff made a shaky foundation that the later stuff built a wobbly broken house on top of. If not for both, we facets wouldn’t have CPTSD parts.

Yes, it was trauma, yes it affected us. But honestly it’s laughable to me to even consider that it would be enough to make us a traumagenic system. Our early years were mostly just confusing. Yeah there was neglect, yeah there was occasional verbal and physical abuse. Yeah there was things little me couldn’t handle. But not enough to split into parts over.

We facets don’t feel like we’re one person split into parts. Not like our CPTSD parts feel. We feel like... well, facets. Parts of a whole that belong together as parts of a whole, perfect just the way they are. Not a shattered mirror - the CPTSD parts being like cracks in each of us’s mirror-self. But we feel like the facets of a gem, one overall identity, shining through several different faces and mini-identities. Cut and polished and sculpted this way, not broken this way.

I don’t want to say that this wouldn’t be trauma enough for someone else. Please don’t read this and think that I’m saying that. If it was trauma enough for you, it was trauma enough for you.

I just can’t believe it was enough for us. And. It just didn’t affect us in that way - we were and are the way we were and are because that’s just how we experience wholeness - through the lens of multiple facets of self-hood. One Willow trunk, multiple little branches of self.

When we were little, we moved into a house that had two apple trees in the front.

One tree had been cut in half by lightning; neither side died, but both were weakened, and you could clearly tell where the lightning had hit and split the trunk. The edges were jagged and rough, too, and it took a long time for bark to grow back in the seam.

The other tree’s trunk split more naturally halfway up, making perfect smooth little ledges for sitting on and waiting for the school bus.

Our CPTSD parts feel like the first tree. The edges are sharp and ragged, the emotions that trigger those parts raw and painful still.

But we facets feel like the second tree. The edges between us are clean and smooth and natural feeling.

It’s not just that the trauma doesn’t seem enough. It’s that the trauma doesn’t seem to have broken us four apart from each other, nor put enough stress on us to keep us from integrating. We grew bark between us because we grew in different directions, not because something sharp and painful hit us and split us and forced us to grow bark to protect ourselves from the elements.

What hit us were little stresses. Enough to fray the edges of our branches of self, but not enough to pull us apart at the seams.

And trying to make myself believe otherwise would be like trying to make myself believe we’d been struck by lightning. It just wouldn’t jive with what we remember and how we are.

We’re four people in one brain, sharing an overarching, gestalt identity, (and sharing a body and brain with a handful of others separate from us Willows.) That’s just who and what we are, not because of trauma, but despite it.

And I'll fight anyone who dares try to pressure us into believing otherwise.

[cambriancrew]

It's simultaneously fascinating and frustrating to be an endogenic system with such a significant trauma history - to the point that we have CPTSD even. Like... It definitely hurt us and affected us pretty strongly. We can pinpoint exactly where and how it did. Each of us facets has their own cptsd parts.

But we facets are not ourselves cptsd parts. Nor are we OSDD-1 alters either. We're, as far as we can tell, plural the way we are because it's how we were meant to be. How we grew. How we would have grown with no trauma at all. And explaining that to anyone who believes that trauma = the only cause of Real Systems™ is next to impossible. It feels a lot like trying to explain colors to a blind person.

How can I explain that feeling of belonging together the way we are? Of rightness and comfortableness and quiet euphoria from being plural the way we are? Of the wrongness and distress and quiet panic that comes from contemplating us NOT being an us anymore - or of being much more separate than we are now?

Sure it's not always easy. It's often not, in fact. But it still feels just... Right. Effortless. Easy. Natural.

We're not one person who was meant to be one person until Things Screwed That Up. In fact, trying to be just one person is the quickest way to dysfunction for us.

We were never meant to integrate. No matter what our early childhood might have been, we-Shea belong together as a median system, NOT as a singlet. We're not a broken singlet. We didn't have this way of being forced on us to cope with trauma. We were this way, and we went through everything we went through this way, and ended up being this way just the same.

We're not ego states of a child that never integrated due to trauma. Each of us has and has always had their own ego states. If anything, each of our own set of ego states didn't quite integrate fully and that resulted in our cptsd parts.

But that's cptsd parts. Not a traumagenic system - because those parts aren't separate enough to be anything more than traumatized parts trying to cope in different ways. They don't manifest as different people. They manifest as things like Monk's spaciness and their general lack of a connection to our body, Baby Bear's escapist tendencies and use of fantasy as a coping mechanism, my argumentativeness and desperate need to be understood, Mama Bear's overprotectiveness and disregard for our personal safety, etc. We each have several different parts with different reactions to things that remind us of our trauma. But we each still have a core self. We can each integrate those broken parts back into ourselves, with help from our therapist.

What we can't do is integrate the four of us into one person. We're as close to being one person as we'll ever get. We have a shared name - well, technically a few shared names if you count Shea and Willow and our legal name. We have a shared group identity. We present ourselves to the world at large as one person. But on the inside, we're pretty close to being completely separate, but coconscious, individuals. Sure we don't make a big deal of it in day to day life, but it's still a factor in everything we do these days. We make an effort to work together like partners and equals.

Because that's what we are. And that's just the way it is.

[cambriancrew]

I'm shaking after having written this. I'm anxious about how it'll be taken, that's part of it.

But for the most part I'm just... Triggered. Remembering childhood verbal abuse. Remembering being demeaned, devalued, deemed less than human. Sometimes in deserved anger. Most often not.

I remember with shame the time when a group of friends and I turned on a bully and bullied him back. It was very mild, we didn't call him less than human like he did us, didn't threaten physical harm. But we were terrible to him, and I wish I could go back and stand up to my friends, tell them we can stand up for ourselves without being like him.

I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be like my abusers who, in their anger, turned towards insults and demeaning, debasing language. (Accompanied by physical abuse, hence the extreme trauma reaction.)

I don't want to be part of a community that supports doing that. For my own wellbeing, I can't. The rest of my Crew aren't affected as strongly as I am, but we can't have part of us be in the community and me not be.

So anyways. No, I don't judge anyone who uses the term. And I'm not saying Don't Be a Angry. Yes! Be angry! Defend yourself!

Just... I really want people to not do to them what they do to us. I know we are strong enough to not need to do that in order to defend ourselves.

And honestly, "plurscum" isn't even all that bad... But it strongly implies, at least to me, that the person you're calling that is less than human. That they're worth as much as pond scum - as dirty algae.

Maybe to other people it implies more just a crummy person. Idk. I grew up fishing, so pond scum has the strongest association with that word.

And it's nothing compared to some of the ugly things I've been called.

But... It's still an ugly word. Whether they've earned it or not, it's still not a good word to use.

Yeah. It's nothing compared to death threats etc. Not even close to just being hated, or even merely invalidated.

But even mild abuse is still abuse. Even mild bullying is still bullying. Even mild insults are still insults.

And I cannot support even mild versions of those kinds of tactics.

There are much better, more effective tactics anyway.

[cambriancrew]

On our origins and why we'll always consider ourselves endogenic

Even if tomorrow we-Shea became convinced that our early childhood life instability caused us facets to form the way we did. It's obvious to us at least that that's not why we stayed separate. We could have integrated when things settled down. We tried BEING integrated - all of us considering ourselves to be just part of one person.

But we didn't. We CAN'T. And not because of trauma, but because of who each of us integrally are at our core: too stubbornly independently minded, each of us holding and very committed to holding our own very different, albeit complementary, mindsets and perspectives.

We are plural because we are our own selves, and see no good reason not to be.

If that isn't quintessentially endogenic, I don't know what is.

And.

Even if we could become convinced that despite that, that we facets are actually traumagenic?

We still have four other Crewmates who are definitely not.

And even if we did not. The four of us may definitely be affected profoundly by our trauma. We have cptsd and are working through issues each of us have with our traumatized internal parts. But we're not dysfunctional because of our plurality. Not anymore. Not since a long long time ago, when we were trying ever so determinedly to be one whole person.

And as such, we have more in common with our endogenic system friends.

We are definitely traumatized, but certainly not traumagenic.

We don't belong in the traumagenic community.

But despite efforts NOT to be, we are without a doubt, definitely plural.

Does that mean we're never going to have our doubts? Of course not. Especially with Librarian around - give her a chance to and she'd doubt whether grass is green and if 2 plus 2 is really 4.

Does that mean we're going to stop poking and prodding and looking intently at our trauma? Of course not. It affects us practically every day and we've got a long ways to go until it doesn't, and ignoring it won't make it go away.

But is any of that likely to make us change our minds on who and what we are?

We're 32. We've been doubting and poking for over two decades now. If it could have, it would have by now.

We're going to continue to change and grow as people.

But that part of who and what we are? It's never going to change. No more so than grass will stop being green, nor 2 and 2 stop adding up to 4 - the four of us facets will always be essentially endogenic, and always, all ways, be plural.

[cambriancrew]

Not all who have childhood trauma that causes did integrate. VERY few do.

Yeah, I know. I'm not sure why you might think that I don't?

Is it maybe because of that most recent post where I said we could have integrated but we didn't - not because of trauma keeping us separated, but because we are just too very different?

If so, I didn't mean to imply that traumagenic systems integrate or tend. I meant that the reason they don't (or at least, one of the biggest reasons, at least, as far as I know) is rooted in their traumagenic origins. Which is a big complicated topic in and of itself and not one I'm suited to discuss.

We didn't. And per the theory of structural dissociation, everyone starts out with different parts that usually integrate by age 6 or so unless there's trauma to make them need to be separated. But that wasn't why we didn't. We didn't because we're just too stubbornly independent and different.