Plurality blog. Contains syscourse. Content ranges from personal alterhumanity to complex trauma and dissociative disorders.
I was previously a plural system, now I’m not. What I reblog sometimes may not be a good reflection of what I personally believe but I also like saving things.
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Link to Cloud Drive Folder Containing Information on DID/OSDD/MPD, trauma responses related to dissociative disorders, and both disordered and non-disordered plurality. All previous links and resources seen on this pinned post can be found there.
Wip blog for Silhouette plurality, connected to @niente-nanimonai
note it's for our own personal silhouettehood aka this isnt intended to be for everybody fitting the broader term, it's spefically a personal silhouette blog where we discuss our severe disordered dissociative trauma from abuse caused one, that does mesn this blog will discuss abuse and trauma and dissociation + more distressing things as they are what we live through.
We'll make an intro eventuakly once we figure out what to do with this.
Made a coining post with AI (can't write it ourself we struggle with typing/words)
Feel free to ask any questions, we'll answer personally ourself (not with AI)
We might one day try to write down our symtopms and make a post for our specific condition and nsme but our disabilies progress so it may not be possible.
Coining: Silhouettehood / Silhouette
Naming The Erasure of Self
A proposal for a new framework in understanding dissociation and consciousness
There’s an entire terrain of consciousness rarely named or spoken about, a form of being marked not by integration or plurality, but by radical emptiness and the persistent absence of selfhood, where one is neither a singular person nor a plurality of distinct selves, but something more like an outline passing through the world. This is the experience we call “silhouette” and “silhouettehood.”
What is Silhouettehood?
Silhouettehood describes the shape of consciousness when selfhood itself is missing, fragmented, or so diffuse that it never coheres into a stable sense of “I.” It creates a state that is neither singlethood nor systemhood, neither an integrated person nor discrete selves working together or in alternation. Instead, it is an existence lived primarily through witnessing, reaction, and fragmented experience, suspended without full self-definition, often existing in a fog between perception and narration.
This condition exists on a spectrum, with a variety of origins and intensities:
- Some inhabit this state as a disordered result of trauma, deprivation, abuse, or other social, neurological, or developmental factors.
- Others arrive at silhouettehood naturally or intentionally, through embracing void, abstraction, and non-attachment, sometimes described in philosophies like voidpunk.
- Many hover in the middle, blending influences, or relate loosely to aspects of dissociation, plurality, neurodivergence, or depersonalization, even if traditional diagnoses don’t cover their actual experience.
Silhouettehood can exist alone or alongside other identities and conditions, including but not limited to: dissociative disorders (DID, OSDD, DPDR, dissociative amnesia), psychotic or schizoid conditions (schizophrenia, SZPD, STPD, AVPD, BPD, ASPD), chronic depression, CPTSD, complex trauma, brain injury, and neurodivergence. It may intersect with cultural or intentional identities (voidpunk, abstraction, anti-attachment philosophies) and experiences of isolation or erasure.
The Severe Disordered Silhouette (name undecided)
Our own lived experience fits a specific, severe, and enduring variant of silhouettehood. It often results from early and sustained emotional neglect, abuse, conflict, or circumstances that prevent the development of stable internal presence from infancy, though it could come from any overwhelming, identity-erasing origin, including poverty, war, persistent instability, unmet basic needs, or overwhelming internal chaos.
- There was never a time when dissociation was “not present”, it’s not a symptom or a passing phase but the entire landscape of consciousness itself.
- There’s no internal dialogue most of the time, only silent narration and observation.
- Emotional connection, self-reflection, and identity formation remain absent or severely muted, existing mostly as surface responses to external stimuli (media, relationships, sensory engagement) rather than as internally processed or owned experiences.
- Most thoughts occur only in context, and free-thinking is distressing, unwanted memories and associations threaten to flood awareness, leading to cyclical self-distraction and persistent void.
- Being in relationships, performing social roles, and participating in society are fraught with difficulty: one feels fundamentally and visibly “outside,” incapable of deep connection or understanding attachment.
- Others may notice the absence of self, sometimes responding with unease, rejection, or neglect, further deepening isolation.
- The whole structure of being is shaped like animal instinct: reacting, feeling, spacing out, often without directed thought or inner dialogue, and barely remembering one’s own presence.
This differs from other dissociative conditions where identity, memory, or unity have ever truly existed, fractured, or can be consciously repaired. Here, the absence is so profound that even the possibility of being “whole” is alien, there isn’t a self to recall or reconstruct. Where DID or OSDD describe many discrete selves, silhouettehood is existence as less than a self-unintegrated, abstract, almost spectral.
Silhouettehood Across The Spectrum
Silhouettehood isn’t always disordered, nor does it demand a singular origin story. It could be:
- A natural mode of perception that eschews attachment to identity, instead living more abstractly, feeling, and reacting to life as it passes.
- A culture that prefers anonymity, non-attachment, and recognition as presence instead of personhood.
- Endogenic or chosen, shaped by personal philosophy, trauma, or affinity with void and absence.
- Mixed or ambiguous, overlapping with other neurotypes, plurality, or neurodivergent experience.
The culture of silhouettehood might value:
- Radical acceptance of emptiness, objectivity, obscurement, and living outside relational expectations.
- Support for those who cannot pursue recovery but reject being labeled broken or needing repair (but accepting of defining yourself as broken/repair if so desired, it's more about the condition itself not being treated like it must be fixed or is inherently wrong)
- Spaces where being less-than-a-self is seen as natural, not to be erased, corrected, or fixed.
- Community (or lack thereof) in isolation, forming bonds through shared fog, presentation as silhouette, and gentle mutual witnessing.
- Opposition to treating self-erasure as inherently wrong, instead centering well-being, support, and the option for recovery only as a personal desire, not a requirement.
- The right to remain unknown, unlabelled, or undefined.
Why Coin This?
Silhouettehood is invisible because society and psychiatry lack words for it. Beings like us exist but are erased; our symptoms and states are parsed as features of other conditions, never considered valid or whole in themselves. The message from culture is clear, you must be a person, fit a narrative, be knowable, attach, recover. Existing as fog, outline, or emptiness is dismissed as symptom, not as consciousness.
Naming silhouettehood fights that erasure. It lets us say, “We are here. We barely exist, but we exist. We deserve recognition.” It opens up space for others like us, those with fragmented, erased, or diffuse selfhood, whether through disorder, philosophy, neurodivergence, or other path, and offers language, and solidarity.
If this resonates with you, you’re welcome here. All experiences on the spectrum, severe, mild, endogenic, philosophical, dissociated, dysphoric, or proud, matter. There is no right or wrong way to be a silhouette, and there’s no requirement to recover, perform, label, or justify your presence. If selfhood feels absent, outline, or void, this word can be yours.
Well, I think I've reached a conclusion - I am a wolverine. It's been two weeks since I started active public questioning, and it had been mulling in the back of my mind for many more before that. I've watched documentaries, studied pictures and research papers, read through folklore, and done several rituals. It's all pointing towards wolverines.
With that said, werewolves are still deeply entrenched in my identity, in a way that I haven't decided to put a label on yet. It may not be the core of who I am right now, but it's still my history and my personal lore, and I will always hold space for it to come back to what it once was.
As I've mentioned a few times, I am strongly pagan, and a few rituals have helped me through this decision and processing the change. Firstly, a few days ago, I did a spirit journeying ritual with an experienced practitioner with lots of experience in shape-shifting and nonhuman identity. This ritual had the intention of finding what animal is at the core of who I am at the moment. I don't want to share too much because this is a ritual that someone else developed, and I don't know how much they are comfortable having shared. Ultimately, the visions involved led me to wolverine. I tend not to leave my identity up to meditations and spirituality, but I am accepting this as strong evidence in favor because of the fact that I was already leaning in that direction, and I didn't feel any disappointment or misdirection when the vision settled on a wolverine.
Secondly, last night I held a ritual with a good friend of mine in the forest underneath the full blood moon. My intention was to thank the wolf for all its years as my primary identity and for everything it brought me, dedicate an item to keep on my altar to it, and then to welcome the wolverine and experience a deep shift to sort of settle that identity into my mind. I would say it was a solid success. To represent my history as a werewolf, I chose the double necklace I made for myself when I first joined the community, made of a moonstone pendant given to me as a small child, and a vial of black wolf fur. I separated the two, keeping the moonstone on myself to represent transformation and history since I have used it since I was seven, and moving the wolf fur to the altar to represent letting that part of myself go but keeping it close at hand. At that point I induced as much of a shift as I could, and donned the pieces of wolverine fur ritual wear that I have in a mirroring of the legends of shape-shifters putting on their animal skins to transform. Bittersweet, but comforting, would be a way to sum up my feelings about this ceremony.
Anyways, say hello to the new me guys!
I will be going through and updating stuff on my account soon. Though you should still expect to see plenty of werewolf stuff around, and I very much still consider myself a werebeast. I actually am really feeling connected to the term "turnskin" ever since I found it while making my server.
On the appropriation of trans narratives by therianthropes https://web.archive.org/web/20230315165132/https://akhila.feralscribes.org/2013/on-the-appropriation-of-trans-narratives-by-therianthropes/
The Use and Misuse of the Term Transspecies https://youtu.be/miSyXSesyzw?si=rweVVN-B7UKeaM9d
Transspecies: Two Flags & an FaQ https://sundragon.allium.house/creations/transspecies_flag.php
Why do people call themselves ‘transspecies?’ https://web.archive.org/web/20230319163121/https://blog.alt-h.net/post/613417803862720512/why-do-people-call-themselves-transspecies
Transspecies: crossing the cultural boundaries of species. https://web.archive.org/web/20230329170617/https://trans-species.carrd.co/
I’ve realised there actually is some remnants of plurality I still experience. There is something that involuntarily stops me from speaking when I want to and it feels distinctly separate from me. It reinforces a feeling of that I have basically stolen my own body because it makes the most sense to me to frame this as ‘my body did something.’ Living in this body feels like a ‘I am trapped in here with you’ experience but I don’t know what or who ‘you’ is.
Can someone explain why a system might want to fuse into one person again? Does anyone have experience with that? Do headmates actually want that in some cases? Is it only because they hate being a system or because they hate each other?
Because any time we see someone talking about fusion it's from anti endo DID systems who hate each other and think being a system is awful. And we kind of really hate that.
We don't understand why headmates might literally want to stop existing. It doesn't seem healthy. But we also don't want to judge people without trying to understand.
Well, to start, I/we certainly don't hate each other nor hate being a system. I am personally of the opinion that healthy, loving fusion can't really happen if systems hate each other/themselves so much that they try to make each other stop existing because I see fusion as a relationship and that's no way to treat a relationship partner, but that might just be me.
For context, I am a fully fused DID system. (plus my parogenic headmate, Fennel!)
Fusion, to me, isn't about parts not existing anymore - rather the opposite. Each of my parts feel more real than ever as fused, more full and more themselves. More ourselves. More "me".
We just exist in a different form than we used to.
I watched Steven Universe a lot when I was younger, so please excuse the reference, but there's a character in that show (Garnet) who is a fusion of two other characters (Ruby & Sapphire). She isn't "less" when she's just Ruby or just Sapphire, they're their own individuals too and sometimes they exist separately, she just... prefers being Garnet. Garnet is an expression of Ruby and Sapphire's love for each other. I relate to that a lot. I could be my individual parts, but I prefer being Rainii. I prefer being the fused whole. It's an expression of self-love and the love my parts have for each other.
This is something that every part of me chose and very much wanted and continues to want. We all worked towards it together, we all have been very excited about it (and sometimes a little nervous!). Ongoing enthusiastic consent is incredibly important for fusion!!! Fusion is something we all very much are happy with. Our fusion would not hold otherwise. If we didn't want to be fused, we certainly wouldn't be!
I/we love being fused because it's incredibly intimate, it's passionate, it's awesome. It's a relationship with myself between all my selves. I think that's super cool! I feel really lucky to be able to know myself and care for myself in this way.
Thank you for answering! If you don't mind, can I ask a follow up questions?
Since you mentioned Garnet, my understanding of her is that while she's a fusion, Sapphire and Ruby are still present and somewhat separate as there seems to still be a continuous inner dialog.
So does this mean fusion is less like actually being only one person and more like two people working together to control one form? If so, is it really much different from being individuals?
Also just another curious question: does integration make you more of a singlet and not really a system anymore?
These are actually very complicated questions that a lot of the late-stage DID recovery folks on tumblr have been grappling with for a while!
Short answer: It Depends. It will look different for every system.
Long answer: Whether you're still individuals or one person or a singlet or a system all depends on your own views on selfhood - This is what a lot of us mean when we say "functional multiplicity and final fusion are not opposites but rather a difference in perspective/two sides of the same coin."
Once you reach a certain point in DID recovery where all of the dissociative barriers have come down and there is no longer anything keeping each of you separate, whether you are still individuals or whether you are one person is a matter of how you see it. Multiplicity or singularity becomes a matter of choice, more or less. (This is also how it is possible to be fluid between the two or be both functionally multiple & fully fused simultaneously - it's all a matter of perspective rather than a hard line between the two.)
Basically, what does it mean to be a person? To be a part? To be an individual? To be a system? All of these questions' answers will differ from person to person, there's no right or wrong answers, and so each experience will look different. Likely, you can ask 5 systems that have achieved some form of CDD recovery the same questions and you'd get a different answer from all of them, and they would all see their recoveries and systems differently.
All this to say, functional multiplicity & final fusion are not and never really have been a hard binary with no overlap. It's complicated and there's infinite nuance to it.
For me, my experience now as someone who is fully fused who still regularly engages with myself as parts as a form of self-expression is very different from how my experience was as an un-fused DID system, so I would say there is a difference between un-integrated individuality & integrated, though not necessarily a difference between functional multiplicity & final fusion beyond the words I myself choose to describe what I'm experiencing.
I'm more or less "one person" (plus Fennel) & I consider myself a fused system rather than a singlet. It feels wrong to call myself a singlet because that would, to me, be like disregarding everything that came before this point. My experiences are not comparable to someone who never was a system in the first place - my experiences are unique to going from multiple to fused, ie a fully fused experience rather than a singlet experience.
I view my selfhood as something very fluid and something I create and bring into existence, and whether that selfhood is really just one singular self or many selves is determined by however I feel it is in that moment. And that's what feels right to me.
I have some more posts in my pinned where I talk all day about my final fusion & my system and the perspectives I have on DID recovery, if that interests you. @system-of-a-feather has a ton of posts about it too.
Can someone explain why a system might want to fuse into one person again? Does anyone have experience with that? Do headmates actually want that in some cases? Is it only because they hate being a system or because they hate each other?
Because any time we see someone talking about fusion it's from anti endo DID systems who hate each other and think being a system is awful. And we kind of really hate that.
We don't understand why headmates might literally want to stop existing. It doesn't seem healthy. But we also don't want to judge people without trying to understand.
Well, to start, I/we certainly don't hate each other nor hate being a system. I am personally of the opinion that healthy, loving fusion can't really happen if systems hate each other/themselves so much that they try to make each other stop existing because I see fusion as a relationship and that's no way to treat a relationship partner, but that might just be me.
For context, I am a fully fused DID system. (plus my parogenic headmate, Fennel!)
Fusion, to me, isn't about parts not existing anymore - rather the opposite. Each of my parts feel more real than ever as fused, more full and more themselves. More ourselves. More "me".
We just exist in a different form than we used to.
I watched Steven Universe a lot when I was younger, so please excuse the reference, but there's a character in that show (Garnet) who is a fusion of two other characters (Ruby & Sapphire). She isn't "less" when she's just Ruby or just Sapphire, they're their own individuals too and sometimes they exist separately, she just... prefers being Garnet. Garnet is an expression of Ruby and Sapphire's love for each other. I relate to that a lot. I could be my individual parts, but I prefer being Rainii. I prefer being the fused whole. It's an expression of self-love and the love my parts have for each other.
This is something that every part of me chose and very much wanted and continues to want. We all worked towards it together, we all have been very excited about it (and sometimes a little nervous!). Ongoing enthusiastic consent is incredibly important for fusion!!! Fusion is something we all very much are happy with. Our fusion would not hold otherwise. If we didn't want to be fused, we certainly wouldn't be!
I/we love being fused because it's incredibly intimate, it's passionate, it's awesome. It's a relationship with myself between all my selves. I think that's super cool! I feel really lucky to be able to know myself and care for myself in this way.
Also going to echo that we also absolutely do not hate each other, we actually love and support each other so intensely that we actually operate as fused a lot of the time + that "healthy, loving fusion can't really happen if systems hate each other/themselves so much that they try to make each other stop existing"; in my opinion and experience, trying to fuse based on hatred and distaste for your parts often is more likely to result in dissociation and repressing parts rather than fusing them.
For context, we're a fully fused DID system; we have a complex situation with how our plurality presents now (heres something of a post explaining it more) and honestly we kind of aren't really "traumagenic anymore" (hiiragi and I + some others chatting on that topic) but we kind of leave those labels for outsiders to put on us as we don't really care
But honestly, we fused because we actually hit functional multiplicity for a bit and found that sometimes when we did temporary fusions, we were actually able to better understand one another, better able to regulate, and be able to share the world and life we have SO much more fluidly and fluently. It stopped being a lot of "well I'll make sacrifice from my day so that you can have your day" because it was basically starting to be "when I'm fused with X we can be together ALL day and BOTH enjoy the day"
Fusion has NEVER been anything CLOSE to making parts go away. Absolutely never, in fact, I still can and regularly do actually still present and express certain parts and still do regularly present and experience myself within almost exclusively one part should that be 1) a better perspective / viewpoint to take on 2) a part that can enjoy the task / activity more 3) trauma processing and 4) shits and fucking giggles; you can honestly ask @reimeichan and @indigochromatic who was literally hanging out with me today that I literally do still do have moments where its like "lmao yeah hi XIV" or "lmfao okay Aya" because they still absolutely DO exist, its just our base line does not require any specific part to be out. Those parts are still VERY much there, they just aren't the most prominent part unless they / I want to be. (Reimei in particular can vouch that we are also fused because they saw us like 2 years ago and our voice is WAY more consistent than before because we really operate as fused 95% of the time and thus no voice changes compared to before) If one of my close friends that were cool with were to throw a joke or jab at XIV or Riku or Ray or whatever, that part will just pop out, fuck around for however they like, and return to the collective
The only real difference? Complete fluidity, little to no dissociation, and honestly the freedom to not have to think and worry about every single part getting their "piece" of life because I am - at all times - able to genuinely feel for EVERY part in our system, gauge what everyone needs, and we can enjoy every action of every minute of our life at the same time. We aren't living fractions of a life or "sharing" 24 hours in a day, we are all living 24 hours of our life, 24/7 365 days a week.
As someone who was in functional multiplicity for a while and then ended up fusing, the NUMBER one reason I prefer to operate as a fused whole is because we all get SO much more life as a fused whole and the level of which we deeply understand one another is THROUGH the roof.
All of my parts feel more alive, feel more engaged, feel happier and more satisfied with life because they don't have to share 24 hours with others, they get to have all 24 hours WITHOUT taking any time away from the other parts.
It's honestly amazing.
None of us have to compromise. None of us have to agree or disagree or discuss. We all get everything we want, all of the time, with little to no work because we are able to operate as one solid unit.
I know final fusion is something some plurals do strive for, but how can I accurately write the horror of being forced to final fuse?
Like, I’m thinking it’ll be a lot of grief, absence of “the other”, feeling as if your autonomy has been violated
but how can I write it?
How would you feel if it happened to you?
I know this is a touchy subject, though, so please please please for the love of all that is good do not feel obligated to answer if you aren’t comfortable
I feel like forced fusion is horror specifically because it makes me question the why/how of that happening to someone. Which means it’s either self imposed (which then why would someone feel they had to do that) or externally imposed (which then who is doing this to them). The first thing is more about inner-system conflict and saneism, and the latter thing is more about medical trauma and mistreatment. So you could focus on either for character development.
I think it might be a good idea to find a beta reader who is/has been a system and who is familiar with medical malpractice if you wanted to write the character like I mentioned above, but I get that it’s a sensitive subject and not many people would be interested in doing that for good reason.
I think it's honestly really nice to be able to safely explore things finally. I think its also fun and insightful conversation with @millefoli about system experiences (particularly relating to SEAsian things) that did kind of remind me that pre-syscovery and DID recovery, that a large thing that divided my system and the main system is that my system used to be stuck irl and the main system used to be stuck online where we had a lot more freedom to explore, express, bond and socialize.
In a weird way, we are starting to sort of swap roles. Where the main system (Feathers and the parts that make up the majority of Feathers) have little interest in things online and mostly live and do things irl, those of us that were originally stuck irl are now getting the opprotunity to use the internet how those parts did to kind of figure things out.
Shoutout to @syscourse-misinfo for sharing an Indonesian story that explores DID through an Indonesian protagonist. The portrayal is very reminiscent to what I myself experienced and was what got the discussion going.
The story is titled Semesta which means everything; all; universal. I've not finished my read of it since I'm also reading something else in my down time. It follows a teacher who leads a 'double life' as a cosplayer outside the job. It tackles themes of queer identity, social media and social alienation besides dissociative identity in an Indonesian context.
I am a clinical zoanthrope. I have schizophrenia. If you have read my posts or blog before this should be no surprise as I am quite open about it. These labels that have been put on me affect nearly every aspect of my life, and greatly affect how I interact with the community. There is often a lot of discussion surrounding ideas of physical identity, delusion and if these things should be acceptable within the community or how to handle these topics.
Length: 3676 words
TW: delusions, reality checking, mentions of medical abuse
The year before last, I had spent quite a bit of time working with another academic to construct a historical materialist analysis of therianthropy. Historical materialism for people who are not familiar is a method of analysing history through the lens of production and class society. In particular, given the apparent wealth of historical therianthropy among “primitive” society, and the narrow niche of modern therianthropy, as well as my own treatment at the hands of the medical system, I wished to understand the origins of the oppression of therianthropic identity. I have to date not completed the project for a number of reasons - limited available literature regarding the transition from pre-class society to slave society particularly regarding religious and spiritual beliefs, personal health and time, and forcing myself to create a complex system of double bookkeeping and analysing my experiences through a materialist lens essentially constantly and forcibly reality checking myself constantly was very taxing.
Although I did not get to the state to write and publish the paper, I did learn a fair bit, and I think the most important concept within this discussion is the concept of delusion and how we define it. There is a common vulgar definition of delusion as believing anything that is not real or not backed by scientific consensus. But then there are many things people believe which is not backed by scientific consensus. While certainly there are people who would say that anyone who believes in ghosts or the Christian God are delusional, nearly half of the people in my country believe in God, however we lack any materialist evidence at this point for such a thing. The state of being identified by others as delusional comes with some pretty serious consequences, it should be noted though that these consequences are not applied to people who believe in God. Similarly, there are times when scientific consensus is simply wrong. Is the man who rejects the inherent inferiority of the [Sub-saharan Afrikan] race because of their skull shape and “thick skin” delusional? We today would collectively say no. For a man in the early 19th century, this would have been scientific consensus even if now we should find such a thought abhorrent. Was he then delusional? (Though some people did try to justify slaves escaping as a mental health condition Drapetomania, and historical terms like madness are often connected to modern terms like delusion and psychosis). I think often modern humans can create an almost religion out of science and progress and belief in their own rationalism - that not only is there absolute objective truth, but they can and do know it all in this particular moment, and that the society they exist within does not effect an impact on their view.
It is important to understand that delusion has a fairly specific definition and caveat when talking in a medical definition. That important caveat is that the belief conflicts, or is not standard, within their culture or subculture. Not only that, the belief must be very fixed and firmly set which does not respond/change to the presence of outside evidence. This cultural context is an important factor in the diagnostic criteria for delusions, as well as dissociative disorders like OSDD and DID (it may well be important for other conditions diagnostic criteria as well though I lack experience to speak on that topic).
Delusions -are- very much socially defined. I make the joke often that a rich man hears the voice of God he runs for office, I hear the voice of a spirit and need to be on antipsychotics. There are a number of examples namely in SEA where the experience of transforming into another animal would be considered entirely within the range of normal possibility (though notably with tigers primarily). There are also cultures and practices in which physical transformation is not considered delusion but a normal part of ritual notably among the Xan peoples. Among some Siberian cultures as part of hunting some will take essentially the mind of a wolf. In South Asia there are also recorded practices in which a person’s soul is bonded to and moved to an animal’s body in the night. Most people those reading this might encounter day to day would think these are surely delusions, but for those people, it is just a normal part of life and culture.
Most people here would collectively agree that therianthropy is not a delusion, however from outside the community many easily could argue it. You -are- human, you can look at your body and it and see that it -is- human. If you argue for past lives, there exists no evidence supporting that and no evidence supporting the existence of spirit or plausible explanation beyond hallucination despite many attempts to measure their existence. Nor do you have the instincts of that animal because you are clearly a human, and any "instincts" you might have are phantoms of the mind or attaching to a certain animal as a way to manage your life. However neither of these explanations would be acceptable nor would they convince you that you are wholly and entirely human.
Similarly with transgender identity, people here would collectively agree that is not a delusion. But 60 years ago? Or among transphobes? You are experiencing a delusion. You are obviously a wo/man, and no amount of hormones, [presentation], or [surgery] will change that. We would all collectively say fuck that shit, but you know who agrees under certain circumstances? WPATH in their Standards of Care directly notes among certain conditions of transgender identity as delusion (or at least in their old SOC before informed consent became common). It is common for people with schizo-spectrum disorders and higher level structural dissociative disorders to be denied care, or to face significant pushback. But this can also be true for all sorts of other “less serious” conditions such as austime, adhd, depression etc. This is something I have faced, and who knows how many others have faced it as well.
But what a delusion is very much defined by perspective and culture. It is easy when sitting on the "non-delusional" side of a cultural belief, to believe the order of things is logical. However, when I must construct materialist explanations of experiences, a task for which I am forced as part of double bookkeeping, the differences between my "delusional" experiences, and others "nondelusional" experiences especially in regards to therianthropy is one of degree, not of kind. Do not make the mistake to think that in other scenarios, other cultures, your experiences may be seen as delusions, and in other places, mine as natural and grounded in reality.
My experience as a clinical zoanthrope has left me often feeling quite divorced from the community, that I am separate, unwelcome, or an interloper in what is supposed to be my own community. I have been in the community for a while, but only at certain points felt comfortable to really call myself therian, a feeling which is again waning. There is a strong push constantly against physical identity. Even the most (in)famous phrase in wider culture about therians is the “on all levels except physical I am a wolf”. However this pushback against physical identities, especially from the concerns over P-shifter cults and abuses, created an environment that for me to be tolerated, I would have to constantly “show insight” or really reality check myself, and ensure all the others there knew that I knew my experience was not real and was not like their experiences were (that theirs were real and different). I still often have to do the dance describing my experiences, and even in the terms I use for myself as a clinical zoanthrope is indirectly that same dance.
The therian community often prides itself on how accepting it is. Though to be honest, I really have to question if this is the case. I have always felt unwelcome by the broader community. But so have very many others. It always strikes me that whenever I really share my experiences, how many others really relate to that feeling of not feeling wholly secure or belonging within the community. My orca friend, Ike, has talked quite a lot how they simply did not join the community for so long for feeling unwelcome. Sharing my experiences on a discord server a few weeks ago I learned another member was also a zoanthrope but had never shared it for fear of ostracization. A number of others expressed sentiments of feeling not total included, some for shift strengths, some for things like sexuality, theriomythics often get excluded, etc. Heck, by some accounts even the transition to the term Therian away from Were was an effort to include more people besides just shapeshifters.
Really when you think about it, it is not surprising so many people feel excluded in various ways. Therians have all these lines that you have to sit inside of and not cross to be acceptable to the community. But when you try to actually measure those lines many are not only extremely blurry, but vary person to person. Indeed my own experience is that there are people that do accept me, even if the wider community does not, and that is really the only reason I stayed.
The community has historically for instance a pretty hard stance on delusion and hallucination. The question though is, when does a shift move from being a socially acceptable phantom shift, to an unacceptable hallucination. For me in particular, my sensation of shift goes through a fairly long process of getting more and more intense, but it is also really a quite smooth process. It is like following a colour line, when does ‘blue’ truly begin? The first sensation is often a slight tickling, and very light phantom touch that you can sort of see through the feeling on your body. Beyond that the sensation gets more intense and becomes bothered from having things push against or intersect it. Further it begins to have not only form but colour and texture, but still if I look at the limb I cannot see it, I still see a human limb, though I do not expect it. Further the visual appearance comes in more and more until eventually my human parts are gone, transformed into animal parts I can see and I can touch. When we write it out like this it is pretty separately defined, but in the process this occurs for me, it is very smooth.
After enough quantitative change, there is a qualitative change, but where and when that occurs is hard to say. I think the first two experiences are very common among therians. I think the third experience is also fairly common but that starts to get more and more into the blurry lines, and if you cannot see where that line is you are likely to downplay your own experiences for fear if you say too much, you will be excised or ostracised from the community. But this fear also has the doubly cruel aspect that you can never really know where that line is because many people downplay their experiences to make them palatable, and so though many others might share in these experiences, people simply do not speak of them because they only see either extreme being shared, the particularly minor shifts being accepted, or the extreme shifts being sorted into delusions. I think it creates a false binary from a spectrum of experiences.
So many of these blurry lines exist though. What age can you be taken seriously? What platform do you use? How many kintypes is too many? Theriotypes being too common? Theriotypes being too rare? Are paleotherians acceptable? Are theriomythics acceptable? Can a dragon be a therian? Can an otherlinker or copinglinker have their identity so long it becomes therian? Are beastly animals from fictional settings acceptable or should they be with fictionkind? What sort of sexual and romantic expression is allowable? Is transspecies an acceptable identity? Some of these are blurry, some of them are clear, but they all wiggle around in different ways of some people will find them acceptable and some not. This leads to people self-censoring to the safe answers that they know are acceptable and prevents them really exploring their own identities, but also these questions within the community as it learns and grows and becomes more inclusive. In a certain irony, therianthropes as a community, are actually quite demanding in their conformity while preaching of their acceptance.
There has been a significant push in recent years to give greater levels of inclusion to therians with both delusional identities and physical identities. People are generally more accepting of zoanthropes and at points I have felt comfortable even to call myself therian and not just a member of the community. But there are also a number of additional terms, namely endel and holothere, which cover these experiences. However, something I note often when people talk why I as a clinical zoanthrope can be acceptable, while P-shifters and at times holotheres cannot, still comes down to that I acknowledge my experience as delusion. When I read the experiences of at least some p-shifters and holotheres, often the difference really is not so great, I often see their experiences mimicking or mirroring my own. I do use the word clinical zoanthropy, which on some level does indicate an understanding I know that at least others see my experiences as not real. This is a pretty common feeling among zoanthropes, we use this word, we know the humans think our experiences are not real, but they are incredibly real to us.
The question then is what should be done with us? There is a lot of comment that allowing us in the community to share our experiences or not reality checking people is encouraging delusion. People also say that delusions are harmful and that we should seek medical help. There are quite a few people who even wish to excise or isolate those who are anti-psychiatry and anti-recovery from the community.
If I am forced to analyse my experiences through a materialist and distant lens, it is quite clear my experiences are heavily rooted in delusion. I am a scientist, and there is no means under current knowledge to explain what I experience except hallucination - still I believe it fully. My knowing this is the only logical explanation does not lead me to believe it, to truly believe it inside. I mentioned before I had to give up on projects I did really enjoy because forcing myself to continuously deny my experiences and continuously reality check myself, brought to me very much distress. There are times I have wanted to be reality checked, but for vast part that is the remainder it is really distressing. It is distressing to be told a core part of your identity is not real, to be told the you that exists isn’t the real you, and sometimes see people mourning the “sane you”. Individuals in the community are not going to solve my “delusion” by reality checking myself or others.
Nor will them blocking me from the community or ensuring I do the dance for them encourage my “delusions” away. Delusions are heavily fixed experiences, and though you can encourage them in certain ways (think the example of people making “in your walls” jokes at schizophrenics), us talking about and sharing our experiences with each other and in our own community helps us feel understood and a sense of belonging. There are so few of us to start with, and the community closest to us either often disallows us, or makes us sit at the edge never really able to join. All banning us does is further isolate us, and for many delusions reinforces that we will never be acceptable or tolerable to others and it is best we are alone so we don’t hurt others with our presence.
I cannot speak on every person’s delusions, but I can speak on my own. For the question of if delusions are harmful, I think it often asks the wrong question. Who is it harmful to? Under what framework? Who thinks it is harmful? What does the patient want? I think one could say that my delusions of turning into a whale do harm me. I have trouble to interact with humans, I cannot work a full time job, I struggle in relationships, many nights I lay on the couch stuck for hours simply unable to move. These are all pretty negative things no? But it fails to ask why are these things harmful? A doctor looks through a very human framework and sees that I cannot do the human things and sees that I must have a poor quality of life and these delusions need to be addressed. But I am a whale and it is a core part of me, these things can be distressing, but whales cannot interact with humans the same way two humans would, work a full time job, have relationships with humans, and if you stuck them on a couch they would also not be able to move. This all is distressing and perhaps harmful, but then what other option is there? What the humans offer to me as solution is far worse.
I am anti-recovery, at least for myself. I think it is important to ask what does recovery look like? For me recovery would be to return to the water where I belong. But the humans would certainly say otherwise. For them recovery would look like fitting into and functioning within human society - having a job, a house, a car, a husband, kids, going on holiday, etc. I am not a human and I do not wish to be a human and live among them. However what is worse is how the humans would go about fixing that. I have been locked in hospitals, I have been strapped down, I have been sedated, I have been put on horrible meds that destroyed things I cared about and have often left me a shell of a person (there is a reason they were marketed as a chemical lobotomy). Some things I have gotten better in over time, and I can hold a job for the moment, even quite technical and difficult jobs.
However, the damage done to me from the humans was severe. Although I can talk about being a whale as delusion, the why is really far more impactful and distressing in my life. I was taken from the water, turned human, and am a useful thing for the humans. This understanding of myself as merely a tool and something the humans can do whatever they want with me is the real distressing aspect of my life. For me, the ‘help’ I received at the hospital only strengthened and set this delusion in so much firmer. I can look back at certain experiences, I can see the humans don’t have the technology to do what they did to me, but then I also have those years in the hospital, those years where everything was very apparent and clear and something that others can confirm and it seems to only further make plausible the experiences of the past, and those in the present the fear for what the humans will do to me. I know that I am deteriorating, I am struggling more and more, but nothing the humans offer me will make things better, they will only hurt me more, and if I ask for help, and reject it, they will only see it as proof I need the help more and force it onto me, which will only further reinforce that delusion.
If someone wishes to see a doctor and talk about therian things, I do often warn them of caution for what happened to myself and I do not want others hurt that way. I also urge them to think about what they want as the outcome from that discussion or what they hope will happen. A lot of mentally ill people have been hurt by doctors who thought they knew best, and once something is said, it cannot be undone. However, in the end they are free to decide what they will, and are free to navigate the medical system if they think it will benefit them.
For myself, I struggle to believe that doctors would really help me and instead work to help myself and my cetacean friends so that maybe someday we could swim again and swim forever. That we can fix ourselves and heal. That in time the deep scars across our bodies might start to fade and look like the scars of other captive cetaceans. That instead of surviving merely trying to please the humans to not be hurt, that we might actually -live- and have the life we were denied.
We are still people with agency, agency to choose our own path, to choose what brings us joy, to decide what we want from life, and from our healthcare. Or at least we should be granted that agency. We should not be excluded from the community or forced to dance around our experiences as not real for the comfort of others who happen to lie on the other side of the sane-delusional line, afterall the positioning of that line is very arbitrary and could easily swing to find yourself on my side of that line.
The plural community has a major problem with how it treats final fusion and systems who are fully fused.
If you ever wonder why you don't meet many fully fused systems in the community, part of it is because we are actively pushed out of the community.
People have been really shitty towards me ever since I hit final fusion in January. My friends who are fully fused have also experienced similar.
I feel like I can't talk about my experiences at all in a lot of spaces. When I do, I feel like I have to put in extra effort to word myself carefully, and even then it doesn't really help. It doesn't matter how much I say "everyone's experiences are different" or "this is how it is for me personally", people act weird towards me just because I am fully fused. I can't just talk about my experiences with my system like everyone else and it's really draining and frustrating.
People assume that because I am fully fused I will be pushy about fusion or even force fusion onto other systems. People say they are intimidated by me and don't want to talk to me because I am fully fused. People tell me about how horrible they think fusion is and how it's murder. People say they feel bad for fused systems because they think all fused systems are tricked into fusion and about how parts language is dehumanizing and abuse. People say I must hate myself or hate being a system because I chose final fusion. People say they don't believe in final fusion existing at all and that it's unhealthy to believe in it, that fused systems are just systems pretending to be singlets, and that we just need to deal with our internalized ableism and accept we're plural.
People even assume I'm "sysmed" because I am fully fused and use parts language. I have been vocally pro-endo the entire time I've been in system spaces. Hell, I myself am endogenic.
My very belonging in the plural community is constantly in question. I have witnessed numerous debates over the years about whether fully fused systems should be allowed in the community at all, or be allowed to talk about system experiences... because we "chose to be singlets". I've even seen people suggest that we are "appropriating" systemhood by talking about it because we are "no longer systems and have no right to talk about what being a system is like".
"No singlets should be allowed to talk about system experiences or be allowed in system communities, and that includes fully fused individuals" was and still is a major stance here on tumblr, as well as several discord servers I've been in.
I'm constantly expected to censor or completely not talk about my experiences at all because I am fully fused. Final fusion is on the blacklist for a lot of plural servers, and on tumblr a lot of folks get asked to trigger warn anything mentioning final fusion. This isn't something that really happens for any other form of DID recovery. This is specifically targeted at final fusion.
Yes, I understand that there are systems who are pressured to fuse and that it may be a triggering topic for these systems; at the same time, the plural community fosters a lot of fear and shame around final fusion by barring any talk of it and framing it as a negative thing, and it is rarely taken into consideration how triggering it is for many fully fused systems like myself to not be allowed to speak about our experiences and be treated like our existence needs to be hidden and censored, especially when we constantly see others talking very poorly of us and our experiences on top of that.
I get told I'm wrong about my own experiences as a fully fused system or about my thoughts on functional multiplicity and final fusion by systems who are neither fully fused nor functionally multiple, many of whom have never even spoken to a system who is or read about our experiences at all. People in the community are extremely black-and-white about it, and when I talk about how from my experience functional multiplicity and final fusion aren't actually a strict binary, people are very quick to tell me about how they're completely different experiences when they haven't even experienced it or even really know anything about it.
There's so much misinformation in the community about final fusion and it really fucking sucks.
It's so painful hearing my fully fused friends talk about how many of them have been chased out of the community or know folks who have been.
I can't fully vouche the same because I'm not really in plural spaces, but I do and have both seen it and felt it way back in the few spaces we have been in and with how fusion has been talked about in spaces before we were fully fused.
We want to hear more from and about final fusion. It's been one of the most important things for one of our members who is internally in a state of final fusion even if the whole system isn't.
I love a place where fusion is only censored if the individual feels it should be, and not one where it's on a black list. If someone's talking about forced fusion they experienced and want to censor, they do. When we talk about a very painful fusion, we cover it, because maybe it was like death. But I never want to be somewhere where we feel pressured to censor when we talk about someone like Zera who had a positive and willing fusion.
Fusion isn't a negative thing, it is a neutral experience just like splitting. Splitting can be fucking horrid, people can be forced to split, but it's not commonly on a blacklist. Fusion including final fusion should receive the same treatment.
Also the assumption that final fusion = singlet feels weird but we're not in a place to comment on that entirely because we're not in that group. Someone who is a final fusion/in a state of final fusion will have many many experiences that a singlet will likely NEVER have.
But yeah, 100% agree. Final fused systems need to be part of the community because they belong here.
Yeah. I honestly understand why some people might be confused about @hiiragi7's situation as a person with DID / traumagenic system that is now endogenic, because the terms themselves seem like something that "can't change" as genic means "caused from"; but as another system that had DID / was traumagenic, fully fused, and now experiences their plurality in a non-traumagenic manner, it actually makes 100% sense.
In a very watered down and "not accurate but simplifying it for understanding", for me you can kind of understand it as having fused into something similar to a singlet then actively deciding independent of trauma to still exist, express and engage as plural. Like someone who did not have DID / traumagenic origins, the recovered / fused brain is still connected and wired with little to none of the dissociation that is signature to DID / traumagenic systems. It's an active choice, often something of an intentional practice and way of life of engaging with yourself, that creates the plural experience DESPITE the connection and wiring being more similar to someone without DID than someone who does. This lack of DID/dissocaition based wiring makes the plurality feel EXTREMELY different than it did when we still had high dissociation and what not.
It's also very different from functional multiplicity, so it's not really "still traumagenic / DID but with a different label". It's hard to kind of explain in words the difference, but as someone who was in functional multiplicity for almost a year before fusing and then fusing w/ our current plurality, the two are definitely two different things for us.
It's likely different for hiiragi7 than it is for me because we've talked about this some; but for me, my system - without changing the members - almost feels recreated post-fusion and thus the "origin" of the system also has changed from that of an involuntary-result-of-DID origin to something that is an aspect of how I express myself, my relationship with myself, and give space and honor to the things I went through that made me... well me. I made the active decision to be plural and reclaimed my experiences apart from trauma, dissociation, DID and dysfunction. I've suffered, struggled, learned, adapated, thrived and lived with disordered dissociated traumgenic DID-originating plurality most of my life and I've put in the literal blood, sweat, and tears to not only survive with it, but to THRIVE with it. I've worked hard to be able to heal the way that makes me happy and to have the option to fuse, and I actively chose to keep my ability to be plural or a fused whole as it is something that is now a strength. My plurality is the result of post-traumatic growth.
I personally don't identify as endogenic, but thats largely because I don't really identify as anything. If people want to call me endogenic / willogenic hearing this, I won't say they are wrong or deny it. If people want to call me traumagenic, cool, I really don't mind either way and I can see the case either way.
But ya know, its kind of some food for thought and some explanation and ideas on the topic as someone who hangs around in an arguably hilariously curated space where people are extremely normal about fusion to the point that when I saw this I went "wait... isn't fusion the majoirty these days" for a second before remembering I keep a very nice curated space of people whose vibes I like and like.... not being weird about fusion is a very early vibe maker or breaker XD
Anyways, we love talking about fusion and our experiences and what not so if theres anything you or anyone reading this wants to throw over, we love chatting about it ^^
Honestly yeah I relate a lot to this. Especially with feeling recreated post-fusion; I've talked about it on another post, but to give a summary, I reached a point where the origins of every single part of my system was no longer traumagenic, and the origin of the system became fusion, itself. It felt unfair and inaccurate to call myself traumagenic after that point, because it felt like denying a huge aspect of my system and our journey. My system was no longer the result of trauma, but rather of self-love.
My parts are expressions of me, they are differing perspectives and thoughts and feelings and so much more. They (I) are not who we were in the past, though they are (I am) made up of past experiences. They make up who I am, and together we are a community of one person. It's an active choice we make, to both navigate the world as one and to engage with ourselves as several when we like to. It's fluid, it's fun, it's incredibly loving and passionate. I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.
I identify as endogenic primarily because of my created headmate, Fennel, who I chose to create a good while after final fusion (fully fused in January, created her in October). I used various paromancy techniques and guides to do so.
The fully fused experience certainly in my experience is often different from being a singlet, and I often feel misunderstood when people talk about final fusion as "becoming a singlet". Maybe for some folks it is, for me it isn't - because my brain is wired differently and I grew up multiple. I could be one person, sure, but for me, I feel weird when people say that's the same as me "choosing to become a singlet" because it feels like erasing my life up until this point and the work to get here. I have lived a multiple life, not a singlet life, and my experiences are different.
Anyway, DID recovery is often pretty unpredictable. You can kind of try to guess where you'll end up, but sometimes it turns out totally differently than expected. If you'd asked me some years ago, I would've told you I was very much interested in functional multiplicity if I went down any recovery path at all (I honestly wasn't convinced I would recover) and would never consider final fusion... much less fully fusing and then practicing paromancy. Life is weird, systemhood and DID is weird.
At the very least, I'm pretty comfortable with where I'm at with my system, and I always love talking about it.
There's something about an entire system changing little by little until it can be argued to be a completely different system with entirely different origins... It makes me think...
Got a little sidetracked. Might be the System of Theseus
Mad same with everything on here which is why I love talking with hiiragi about this ngl XD They're by far one of my favorite blogs to chatter with especially about fusion cause while we do have a number of differences, they're probably one of the only people I've seen with a healing end result of "fused but also still plural" and I just wanted to say I love them / you <3 It's great having them / you in the community and all the verbal platonic PDA /hj
But HONESTLY the System of Theseus is unironically something I think about at least every other day, cause honestly I apprecaite and acknowledge the gift that has been our place in recovery since I hit it like 1-2 years ago (since its just SO wildly and amazingly different from both anything I could have imagined living before let alone anything I ACTUALLY ever lived before) but very much like.... if all my parts fused together and choose to express themselves independently after it in a way almost identical to the way they used to present, is the system the same system?
It doesn't matter or mean much practically speaking, much like the ship of theseus is still a ship that can sail and needs to be cared for regardless of if it is 'the original ship' or a new one, but just as a fun philosophical thought experiment of sorts
If all the parts still can and do (when they want to) identify as themselves and experience themselves and express themselves after having been fused and what not, are the original parts that presented the way they do due to trauma the same parts as those that presented as an active choice post fusion; and do they have the same origin as the variation that came post fusion?
The answer is subjective really and to each their own and to their own preference, but at the end of the day, the answer and label itself isn't really as important as it is just acknowledging that the experience is, in itself, an experience worthy of respecting, honoring, and giving space to regardless
The answer means much less than the practical reality that persists regardless which is "this is a person with an experience much like any other person" and sweating too much (or attacking, questioning, grilling etc) over the exact label and the philosophical question of "is it the same and is the origin still the same" is really missing the forest for a tree;
Or as alternatively, as they say in Buddhism, "refusing to have a universal potion / antidote until you know the exact name of the lethal poison you injested"; Ie causing harm / doing harm / avoiding the simple and healing solution in favor of chasing a pointless and unnecessary question; ie ignoring practicality in favor of the need for concrete answers
i’m trying to find information/hear personal experiences of systemhood from others, if any of you would be so kind as to help me!
particularly, i would like to hear from those who identify as endogenic or otherwise non-trauma formed systems. of course, i would love to hear from trauma-formed systems as well! it’s just that i am one, and so that’s the community i have been most involved with & heard from already.
feel free to DM me anonymously if you don’t want to share publicly. i won’t post anything. my aim is to hear from others so that i can form my own opinions, figure out the right direction to go for independent research, and to simply understand others more.
thank you very much in advance, and i hope you all are having a wonderful day 💙
(please be mindful & respectful with what is said if you reply publicly. i am looking for open discussion, not arguments or hate.)
A previous version of myself would have said that I was a mixed origins system. I saw this on my dash so thought to reblog it.
I think personally what makes it complicated is that it is impossible to separate my experience with systemhood from trauma, even if it didn’t fully originate from it. This is mostly in reference to medical mistreatment and trying to naively be out as a system as a teen when I was actively punished for it.
I realise trying to explain at least somewhat why that was results in me having to explain slang and it just becomes a lot. Let’s just say being docked points within a behavioural therapy points system for talking about unapproved topics was a thing in my life for a moment (it did not feel like a moment).
The first headmate ‘I’ internally could communicate with emerged while ‘I’ was lying in a hospital bed, after unsuccessfully trying to die, then somehow more emerged over time.
Some headmates ‘I’ found by engaging with tulpamancy, hypnosis, and spiritual means. An internal strong pushback against certain suggestions in hypnosis is how ‘I’ found one headmate. It felt like something other-than-me within me was responding. Another was found from moving spiritual energy around my ‘body’ like astral projection style - idk how this happened but previous-self at this time thought that was a walk-in from another realm/dimension somehow. I don’t think a tulpa was ever purposely created but I don’t fully remember the details. Some headmates also existed to help previous-self cope.
Years later, I just didn’t have headmates anymore. I no longer had the ability to mentally visualise a headspace and I suddenly didn’t have internal communication with headmates that had name/personalities/feelings that definitely felt like separate people.
I still somewhat think about myself and not-myself in plural ways, but I’m not a system. Like ‘previous-self’ is a previous version of myself that is nothing like who I am now, to the point that it often feels better to think about them as semi-separate from ‘myself’ - but it’s also difficult to identify what myself is, which is why I’m using quotation marks around certain pronouns and nouns to try to communicate that. I feel simultaneously me and not-me, but I don’t really know what I mean by ‘I feel like myself’ (all reference points for who I was and should have been were destroyed, both on purpose and accidentally).
The best analogy for this I’ve found, though it isn’t perfect, is ‘being less than one’ which is parallel to the ‘more than one’ analogy that’s used for plurality.
Yesterday I was talking with some friends about systemhood, and about origin labels. At this point in recovery with DID, it simply no longer feels accurate to say I "am" traumagenic - It's more like I "was" traumagenic.
Traumagenic doesn't describe anything about my current experience, it's become more of a past event than anything. All of the parts which make up my system (and me, as a whole) are explicitly the result of self-love and my own forms of recovery rather than trauma; all of my parts are made up of many, many, many fusions of parts (ie., their origin is not trauma, it is fusion - which, for me, is an expression of love between parts). My system, as a whole, has been recreated through full fusion; this event can be seen, itself, as a new origin.
Calling myself traumagenic at this point feels not only inaccurate but unfair to myself. This new system, this new self, this experience of living as fully fused, is not traumagenic; in some ways, it feels like the opposite of it. Continuing to call myself traumagenic feels like a denial of myself and the changes that have happened (as well as the effort put in to get here), and brings to mind a familiar sense of time strangeness that I've felt before living as a traumatized person.
Because of the effort to arrive here and the ways in which my system survived for so long being a meaningful aspect of who I've become, I don't think it'd be fair to completely drop any and all labels relating to trauma, but framing it as past tense rather than present tense feels right. It's where I came from and who I was, but is not who I became and am now.
Not me seeing this post and going "oh I absolutely have to add my piece on this" and then forgetting about the post cause I got distracted by life XD
But dude ABSOLUTELY agreed and same here and its actually something I've thought about at least every other day for a few minutes since we reached this fully fused / fully integrated state.
I don't really identify as traumagenic anymore, because honestly my current and present plurality is a means of interacting, expressing and engaging with myself AFTER fully fusing. My system before final fusion WAS traumagenic, but having fully fused, the way my system works is operating from a base line that is NOT driven or started by trauma.
Honestly, trauma is a very very small part of our day to day life most of these days. It still comes by but it hardly is a large thing in our life let alone something driving any of the dynamics and presentation and operation of our system. The way we exist in terms of plurality, I feel, is likely easier to understand for non-traumagenic systems than those that are traumagenic.
Obviously like, we have DID and we have a shit ton of trauma, but the way we express and exist as a system these days is NOT as someone with DID or as a system that is plural because of trauma. Our plurality at this point is an active decision, an active reclamation of our identity, experience, and self as a REWARD and prize that we have gleamed from our recovery / healing journey.
Our plurality is the result of post-traumatic growth and while a case could be made that it is still "traumagenic" I absolutely think that undermines the ACTUAL work, story, and reality of what we actually are with the conotation / implication that "trauma" is what made us.
Recovery and healing is what made us. We CHOOSE to operate as a system regardless of our mostly resolved trauma.
Saying that we are "traumagenic" takes away the agency and active decision (which we earned through recovery) that we made / make when we choose to present as plural.
So we don't really say we are traumagenic much (unless my profile that is like 500 years out of date still says that, I doubt it does cause I dont think we ever really liked the genic labels much), we just are a system honestly.
We've casually brought it up but these days, in the current way we exist right now, we honestly identify more as an intentional system than a traumagenic system
We dont really use -genic terms and what not cause they were never our cup of tea but like
To say we are traumagenic is just very.... incorrect to how we function now these days
Anytime we are operating as multiple parts, its an active choice and decision with a lot of practice and self love and self expression to it; very very little of it is because of something external or something we developed BECAUSE of something or to protect / serve one reason or the next
Every "split" we have is not even really a split so much as an active like mixture and recombination of parts of ourselves to develop a different outlook, a different aesthetic, a different energy and expression of our complex whole
Its an art for us; there is no "splitting" for us
Like living as a system for me these days is an active PRACTICE involving intention and a decision to present as a system which is EXTREMELY different from how it was back in the day
For the sake of syscourse and what not, we just say we are a "fully fused / integrated DID system" because it best reflects the perspective we come from and we really don't sweat labels, if yall think we are one thing, I don't really mind that being what you think from an outsider view
But unironically our system doesn't really fit the traumagenic functioning style / structure style or anything like that anymore and a lot of the words used in traumagenic systems / DID systems really don't apply to us anymore. We don't really split and we hardly switch so.... *shrugs*
Yesterday I was talking with some friends about systemhood, and about origin labels. At this point in recovery with DID, it simply no longer feels accurate to say I "am" traumagenic - It's more like I "was" traumagenic.
Traumagenic doesn't describe anything about my current experience, it's become more of a past event than anything. All of the parts which make up my system (and me, as a whole) are explicitly the result of self-love and my own forms of recovery rather than trauma; all of my parts are made up of many, many, many fusions of parts (ie., their origin is not trauma, it is fusion - which, for me, is an expression of love between parts). My system, as a whole, has been recreated through full fusion; this event can be seen, itself, as a new origin.
Calling myself traumagenic at this point feels not only inaccurate but unfair to myself. This new system, this new self, this experience of living as fully fused, is not traumagenic; in some ways, it feels like the opposite of it. Continuing to call myself traumagenic feels like a denial of myself and the changes that have happened (as well as the effort put in to get here), and brings to mind a familiar sense of time strangeness that I've felt before living as a traumatized person.
Because of the effort to arrive here and the ways in which my system survived for so long being a meaningful aspect of who I've become, I don't think it'd be fair to completely drop any and all labels relating to trauma, but framing it as past tense rather than present tense feels right. It's where I came from and who I was, but is not who I became and am now.
The Jackal in the City: An Empirical Phenomenological Study of Embodied Experience Among Therians and Otherkin
The result of FurScience's interviews and focus groups with therians at Anthrocon since 2016 is finally out. Tens, possibly hundreds of therians were interviewed one-on-one in close to hour-long sessions, their responses recorded, transcribed, and later analyzed anonymously. The study was published in The Humanistic Psychologist and is 20 pages long, detailing the experiences of therians and otherkin, along with associated analyses and a suggested re-terming of what we call "mental shifts," at least in the context of psychology.
While most therians will already be familiar with the what this study will reveal, I'd consider this the closest thing to a "therapist's guide" to therianthropy/otherkin that currently exists. It's accessible for $20 through the APA website linked above. For those who would not like to pay for it, I will summarize below:
The study analyzes the experiences of many therians and otherkin and seeks to "destigmatize and depathologize" our experiences. They provide well-structured examples of what we experience, as well as its psychosocial connotations starting from early childhood and into adult life.
They define a therian as "an individual who believes that they are not human—or at least not completely human. Instead, they identify as a species of non-human animal that either currently exists or has existed and is now extinct," and an otherkin as a person identifying "as a nonhuman being that is typically considered mythical or fantasy-based (e.g., fairy, elf, unicorn)."
They apply Sara Ahmed's work on the ideas of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation to alterhumanity. They dive into our preference for natural environments over manmade ones, our disconnect from other humans and our own bodies, species dysphoria (which they describe but do not explicitly name), and reorientation by means of our own personal image, shifting, seeking out community, and "ontological doubling" - "living [a] human life with its human demands, alongside a pervasive feeling of being out of place."
They suggest the "re-terming" of what we call "mental shifts" and "phantom shifts" and the like as embodied shifts instead, seeing as they involve more than just a shift in consciousness and can include physical sensations (such as phantom limbs) and can occur in response to the environment, by one's own volition, or spontaneously. While some may be against outside individuals coining terms for us, these are professional psychologists and this likely has more to do with their own understanding of us. Per the study:
"Therianthropy and otherkinship are often experienced as an attunement and orientation toward, and a belonging with, nonhuman animals and to the natural world. In connection with their environment, therians and otherkin experience profound changes in which they are less likely to be mindful of their humanness; instead they experience heightened sensations (especially those sensations that are sharp for their theriotype/kintype), increased spatial awareness, phantom limbs (feeling limbs and body parts belonging to their theriotype/kintype), and personality changes (e.g., from passivity to aggressiveness or assertiveness, from anxiety to calmness, introversion to extraversion, etc.). These changes were conceptualized as mental shifts by Grivell et al. (2014), but due to how this experience involves not just a shift in thoughts and emotion, but in the body and their relationship to their environment and to others, we here use the term embodied shifts. By conceptualizing shifting as an embodied experience, we reaffirm that affective [for the uninitiated, "affect" in psychology regards one's physical expression of emotions - gestures, postures, vocalizations, etc.] and behavioral changes, alongside altered states of consciousness, are not experiences located within the individual, but take place in the intersubjective field (e.g., as a reaction to changes in the environment, feeling threatened at work, or experiencing comfort in isolated spaces or with groups of accepting people). Although these experiences can be orienting in terms of the therian’s or otherkin’s experiences of self, allowing them to become reoriented to their environment or situation, it can also be disorienting for them and their social interlocutors."
The conclusion to the paper encourages professionals (therapists and such) to understand us through a lens of cultural humility and provides some hope in that "(perhaps ironically) humanistic psychotherapy..." can provide therians and otherkin some sense of wellbeing.
Overall, this is really good for us. If you are in therapy, do consider forwarding this study to your therapist.
Fully Fused Multiplicity - Simultaneously One and Many
I refer to myself nowadays as a fully fused multiple - an identity that may seem somewhat contradictory, given how often functional multiplicity and final fusion are talked about as one-or-the-other.
Upon reaching final fusion, I came to the realization that the difference between functional multiplicity and final fusion is not and never was this unfathomable gap, that final fusion was not a bridge you crossed once and could never go back to multiple except through force (further traumatization, recovery falling apart, an inability to cope), but rather they are two sides of the same coin, fluid and overlapping and even inseperable from one another. The terms themselves quite honestly don't feel adequate to describe quite how this feels, and I fear they give people a rather binary view on the endless possibilities for recovery, seeing as I had this view before myself.
In my years in plural and system spaces, it was always "are you aiming for functional multiplicity or final fusion?", and so despite my own thoughts on plurality as a framework (if you view yourself as plural/multiple, you're plural/multiple), I somehow found myself surprised to learn the options for recovery as a multiple were never actually this narrow to begin with, and that the two are nowhere near mutually exclusive.
I am functionally multiple and fully fused; I am both, simultaneously, always. I have come to know each as a shift in view, both of which are needed. My parts are perspectives with which to explore life from many different angles. ( @reimeichan 's "Different Readers of the Same Book" frames this elegantly, and this idea has embedded itself in me ever since.)
Both as one and as many, it is a way of knowing myself on the deepest and most intimate level. Final fusion is a radical form of self-love, an absolute acceptance and celebration of everything that I am, and this has dramatically altered the way in which my parts express and how we come together into an overall self. Simultaneously, my parts are a relationship, one that can only be recognized as uniquely multiple in nature and yet has evolved in such a way that becomes difficult to describe using the language I had used before as an unfused multiple. I am undeniably a multiple and I am fully and completely fused.
The fluidity in which I find myself in is incredibly freeing, my self-expression made up of love letters to my parts. My parts are gradients of watercolor on a canvas flowing in and out of each other, only subjective distinction remains between any one of us, myself is the larger painting encompassing everything. All parts of me create a self so unapologetically full of color, the love found there as necessary as breathing. I have come to view even the painful parts as an expression of love.
I find my headcount these days to be infinitely shifting, all at once I am one and I am many. How I visualize myself, how many I am, it all moves with me. Alongside subtle changes in my emotions, my thoughts, my perspective, myself shifts from moment to moment in a way that just feels right. This is me, all of me. This is the love we have created.
