fun fact! the sysmed notion that "most endos have trauma they don't remember" is genuinely fucking disgusting.
here's some horrid things that little piece of sysmed rhetoric causes, in no particular order:
- self doubt
- looking for trauma that isn't ready to be remembered yet
- self harm related to the previous point (repeatedly engaging with the trauma to be "valid" despite how much damage its causing)
- looking for trauma that isn't there (and getting distressed when none is found)
- faking (in relation to the prior point; faking having trauma to be "valid")
- system repression/denial/etc
- "taking away resources from traumagenic systems" (aka... you prompted the endo in question to go to therapy that they didn't need for trauma they don't have)
We were trying to have a chill day today. Listen to music, scroll Tumblr, be silly. And we were also planning on washing the dishes tonight.
But then... the soup struck. :0
Bluefire got into a bit of an argument after being stuck in front a bit longer than he wanted. And afterwards he, an extravert, was trying to take our introvert time like we'd planned. I have no idea if that's what caused it or not, but the moment he was able to switch out, SOUP!
Headspace soupified and everyone was just floating around in our head. Prenzie the clown floated by at one point to remark that it was indeed "get'in a bit soupy, innit?".
So what I'm saying is, when you have a dissociative form of plurality, sometimes you can make really good plans, but sometimes the soup just strikes and you gotta ride the waves until someone floats to the front and sticks. :> (It's me, I'm the one that stuck. We thought of a song I really related to and I actually managed to front.)
I'm not making light of this at all by the way, I'm just... amused by calling it soup. It's accurate, you know? Just feels like a bunch of identities swirling around in liquid, and the bowl is your skull.
(A more serious note below the cut, with some venting. Serves as a system update I suppose. Discussions of dormancy, integration, and fracturing/identity loss. -Beccs)
OK, more serious tone now. Thing is, for us, this usually means there's too many headmates for our brain to keep up with and people are probably gonna start going dormant to compensate. Luc did a headcount today.
We have 178 active members at present. Around 180 was when we started running into trouble last time, when our system entropy multiplied. 54 are dormant, others have integrated, just to keep us functioning smoothly. 231 alters total exist at present in our system.
When we have THIS MANY headmates, new alters form, but they start to affect the system in a way that just isn't good. They tend to be fragments themselves, with varying degrees of distinctness, and when they split from the others, the others start to lose defining traits that make them who they are, which we personally call fracturing.
In these cases reintegration works for both parties. Some people don't want to integrate, so they go dormant for the health of the system. Some go dormant for their own health and reassemble into more complete people while under, a process we call "cooking".
Dormancy manifests in our inner world as stasis pods btw, so we're not too daunted by dormancy. However I become concerned when we put a headmate into stasis to "cook" and they just... don't cook. There's one young woman in particular that split from Derek roughly a year ago, she's been "cooking" for months but she's so fragmented she's basically just a shell, and she's been through some of the most painful memories we have.
It's... hard to talk about Petra. Really frickin hard.
She has people outside of headspace who are concerned for her as well, and as her "Mom" I'm concerned too. I just don't know how to help her short of integrating her but she just won't wake up, so she can't exactly give her input. She can't even work through the trauma she's holding.
I'm not quite sure what to do about her.
Gosh, I wanna get back to talking about lighthearted stuff on this blog so bad, but I detest dishonesty and I do value authenticity over silliness. Thanks for reading this and sticking with us if ya did. ;0;
Good morning to everyone except people that hear about plurality and immediately want to make systems into one person to “fix” them even if said system doesn’t want that.
was poking around in a library today, found a book about multiplicity written by an integrated system. didn't know they were integrated until i read the foreword by their psych, and like... it's not a big deal, i know a lot of systems integrate and it's a valid path, but it was still sort of jarring. the beginning of the foreword was about how he didn't want to treat the sysmates as less important, how he treated them all like individuals and they were happy with that, but then it ended in (paraphrased) "as time went on, the barriers broke down and down until we were left with one whole person, [name]"
i guess it was the way the beginning let me think it was going to end in nondisordered multiplicity, combined with the way it seemed to present singlethood as the only valid way to be a complete person despite that, that just kind of hit me in the chest.
i know there's other books, but it just hurt a little bit personally. just a little bit.
What if we just...split an entirely new host and all went into dormancy so the new host wouldn't know about the system? Or maybe if we all integrated instead of going dormant they'd get some executive function from me and energy from the kiddos. Then maybe the new host could live out the rest of the body's life in peace without knowing about anything that happened before...
Drew this yesterday almost all on one layer for some reason- Also!
Context I can turn into a bird because brain made me an integration with someone else. So, hence the talons ya dig? Otherwise I’m still good ole me.
Anywho thanks for tuning in and get plenty of rest y’all!
hiya, feel free to pass on this ask if its too personal but i was wondering if you told your psychologist about your system before you had an official DID diagnosis? we're not really sure we actually fit the diagnostic criteria of DID or OSDD, but we're very sure of our existence and would well, yknow, like therapy and all that lol. Just a little terrified of how it'd go telling a therapist/psychologist about our system without actually having a diagnosis ^^"
We told our psychologist before we had a diagnosis, yes. I mean, at some point, you'd have to explain your system without having a diagnosis to even get one in the first place, right?
We basically explained it to her as you'd explain it to a singlet who doesn't know what plurality is. We said that we're multiple people in a body--some here for different reasons than others, some here for no reason at all. We explained that we want to be treated as separate people when we go see her and we will tell her who is fronting when we start the session. We also explained that we're happy being multiple people even if some issues arise with it and we don't want to fuse or integrate. We got the diagnosis from our psychiatrist after explaining the same to him.
You basically need to explain what you want your psychologist to do with the information you're giving, otherwise they might assume wrong. Do you want a diagnosis? Do you want to be treated as separate people? Do you want them to ask who is fronting? All these things and more need to be mentioned as if they don't know what a system is, because chances are, unless they're a specialist, they have very little experience with systems of any kind--and even then, different systems want different things.
hey this might be a really dumb question, but i'm curious and want to ask anyway
is it possible for a system to temporarily form to help deal with an event, and after control of the event has been gained, for the system to disappear almost entirely? i'm sorry if this is stupid and/or offensive /gen
There's no stupid or offensive questions when asked in good faith, anon. It's better to be educated than confused!
That being said, systems can definitely go dormant and/or integrate or just go quiet after the event that caused them to happen is over/dealt with. We're not too sure how common it is, but we've seen it happen multiple times and for some people, it's a normal part of how they function.
