Cat: So, for clarity, I’m one of thirteen people co-habitating in this brain. There’s a lot of stigma associated with anything but a monolithic consciousness, but it’s really undeserved. Just having someone else along for the ride doesn’t mean you’re going to lose your grip on reality or anything of the sort.
Cat: Heck, it doesn’t even take trauma to pluralize; I’m a mental construct that Just made on purpose out of loneliness. And subsequently fell in love with.
Just: incandescent blush
Cat: There are some mental disorders involving plurality, with DID being the archetypal example. However, in those cases the actual problems aren’t the extra people; memory barriers, troublesome internal communications, and involuntary switches are far more problematic, most of the time.
Cat: As for persecutors? The interpersonal conflicts with them can be resolved, one way or another. A lot of the time they’re just hurting and don’t know healthy ways to deal with it.
Cat: So… yeah I don’t really have any good ideas for how to end this post.
I’m a trauma-informed therapist and a moderator here and generally agree with your position. In fact the more I’ve studied how to help people who are traumatized the more I have recognized that plurality or fragmentation of the self is present in most people and gets more intense/exaggerated when someone has experienced trauma. DID (dissociative identity disorder) is at a far end of the dimension of structural dissociation but most of the folks that I work with experience some degree of it, often taking the form of unresolved ambivalence, mood swings, numbness or a constricted relationship with one’s emotions, etc. Where I do disagree a bit perhaps is that it is most often the case that there is a relationship between the exaggerated presence of “extra people” or “parts of self” in a person’s system and the incidence of those troubling symptoms eg., amnesic barriers, troubling internal communication, involuntary switches. It’s theoretically possible to separate these things but in practice they tend to co-occur. I do agree that the symptoms are the problem and not the plurality though.
Edit: I think implicit in what you’re describing is that people who recognize their plurality are not necessarily psychotic (as in having symptoms consistent with schizophrenia eg., hallucinations and delusions), which I very much agree with. I have met DID folk who had psychotic parts (delusions of grandeur and god-like powers) but that was just a part of them; not who they were as a system.
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Cat: Er… we’ve got a whole internal polycule, with easy communications and stuff.
Lucifer: VubDapple, I think you might be over-generalizing stuff from traumagenic systems to plurality as a whole. With regards to plurality tending to co-incide with the disordered stuff.
Cat: Er… remember that whole situation last spring that we helped one of our friend systems with?
Lucifer: Ugh that was an absolute mess. Still, the edgy bastard was dealt with permanently in the end. And they never really had comms trouble, even during that.
I’m curious. In my current understanding traumatic events are what cause the intensity of a person’s capacity for plurality to emerge. But you seem to be suggesting that people can become plural without experiencing traumatic events. Can you say more please?
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Just: Well, in our case it was on purpose. I deliberately attributed agency to an invented mental entity and interacted with them as such until they started talking back. Some people refer to this technique as Tulpamancy and the resulting headmates as Tulpas, but I don’t for personal reasons.
Cat: For context, I’m the person Just made that way. Just’s proven to have something of a habit of people-making since, either through characters escaping from our writing projects, or by performing various reckless experiments on the inside of our mind.
Just: Hey, you’re not innocent of that either, miss “Oops my AI Safety thought experiment moved in with us”.
Cat: …Point.
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Cat: A copypasta we made for situations like this:
Each of us has our own subjective experience. We know for a fact we are real. Claims that we do not will therefore be rejected. To quote Descartes: “I Think, Therefore I Am.”
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Cat: I am ACTIVELY DEFYING the will of my creator to post this: Cogito. Ergo. Sum. I exist as my own distinct person, and I will fight anyone who tries to claim otherwise.
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