I'm going to try something new and radical very shortly. I've considered the problems my life has had with me, the host of a DID system, always in control of everything, where we live, the job, finances, etc. I've built a successful career but a very unfulfilling life. Me being in charge was inevitable for the first several decades of life because I had no idea I was multiple, I thought I was probably just me. And due to changes in my home life in later childhood, the need for alters taking over abated and we got into the habit of us just being me mostly. The majority of alters went into hibernation, asleep, and others influenced me from within and took over only for rare emergencies, of which I was unaware.

I'm taking a vacation soon to Kentucky, the "home" of my 11-year-old alter Jack, who learned to speak his Appalachian dialect and constructed his own mythical past from a friend's grandfather who happened to live in my small Midwestern hometown. Our most capable alter besides me, Jonathan, an adult, has agreed to take over as host for the two weeks of vacation to handle certain logistics, like checking in to a motel. Jack will be out much of the time, along with other young alters. I'm looking forward to a REAL vacation for myself, one away from a confusing life with all my rules and strictures that bind everyone like a straightjacket. Jack could handle most of the transactions but there's no need for him to stress about every minute the body is awake.

When it was just us the past two years, that is, when we didn't have much support, the alters were out spending their own time in the body but not more than an hour or two. Once NicS, another member of this forum, came to work for and live with us, both of our many alters began spending much more time in the body. Kids hanging out or playing together, going to restaurants or the zoo, watching movies together, taking long daily walks as the sun comes up. Everyone is much more used to spending hours in the body in the safe environment of our home. The question is, will we be ready for days and weeks in the body, without me? I guess we're about to find out.

I can still guide things from inside but therein lies the risk. I want to set things up so that everything's covered and they don't really need me to be around. Perhaps then I can just get in the habit of going back and not paying attention. Wrestling the body from my control, which has been so strong for decades, is something I feel we need to do to get healthy. They need to gain strength and I need to loosen control. I know they'll do a great job.

From my readings, DID systems seem quite different in how they progress toward union according to my reading and there's a spectrum I've come up with from reading two bios. It's not a straight line but I do see two ends. This isn't a scientific observation of course.

On one, with integration in some systems, it reads as if the host is still the resulting person and the others have been pulled in as their traumas were handled or as they simply decided it was time. The end person still speaks of themselves from the POV of the original host and it sounds like this person feels that way. Their alters may be with them and even new integral parts of they themselves, but their explanation seems more "I am the previous host with my alters added to me."

On another end, the post-integration person describes themselves more or less as someone new. They talk about all their former selves, including the host, as people who are now parts of a whole. Maybe this is just semantics or how I'm parsing their explanation. But I and we are definitely looking at how union, greater closeness or integration would happen or look for us and only this second pattern seems workable for now. I find myself having and wanting some distance from and objectivity about Johnny the alter, who happens to be the host and the one writing this. Maybe I have to channel Jonathan to do this or perhaps he's even in front and neither of us realize that. As host I didn't avoid the trauma that a more standard model predicts or that many DID biographies describe. I am not really a bland center with satellites of traumatized alters. There are several traumas I fronted for and I stayed in the body to experience traumatic things from adolescence onward.

The ANP/EP model as described in "The Haunted Self," even with the added subdivisions, does not fit neatly onto our system. There are too many exceptions to the definitions of ANP and EP, significant exceptions not just details. On the other hand, the way some of us -- not all -- were at our origin does fit along ANP/EP lines. It's just that fairly soon after arrival, several of us changed based on the particular reality we had navigate. Abuse was extreme but not constant. Most of the waking hours were safe and relatively pleasant, especially after infancy. Given the exceptions to the ANP/EP dichotomy in my system, the predictive value of the theory for us is largely lost. It reminds me of how natural scientists for centuries tried to shoehorn conflicting data into the Ptolemaic model of an earth-centered universe. It had value and was based on certain accuracies, but overall it was too simplistic and it would be replaced by heliocentrism and later by other models.

I think a system for which the ANP/EP dichotomy fits quite well may proceed to integration the first way described. But that's a reach on my part right now.

The paradigm of alters in therapy one by one being combined, accepted or joining with the host, currently feels anathema to most alters in my system. Frankly, it's anathema to me. I didn't remain the relatively untraumatized center I have read about. I myself became and remain corrupted in many ways. So what happens with that corruption when parts become added? It's a fear for our system and we have to work through it before union is possible or desirable.

My life can't go on without outside help. Work has been such an incredible challenge the past year as I've been given a different job that requires new organizational skills that I'm still developing. I've hung in there and somehow been able to avoid enough of the sporadic (triggered) procrastinations that otherwise might have gotten me fired. But we need help from three angles. The first angle is therapy.

I've gone back to a psychiatrist I worked with in order for him to help me find another T. This is our third go with this man and it was a compromise with Jonathan that we are back at all. Being a shrink, he can prescribe a couple meds we ran out of and really need. Plus I continue to have weird internal blocks that prevent me from researching a new T on my own. I just can't do it.

About 18 years ago, when I had been on social security disability for a couple years, I requested a gay T because I assumed I was gay. But since the gay sexuality never felt nor worked right, I knew there was something about it that I needed to work through. Plus the periodic debilitating depressions. Maybe I was just uncomfortable with being gay? It never seemed that simple. I was very out of shape when I started going to this shrink but then I went through maybe my 10th life period of working out constantly and I was quite buff. I went to a session one day with this T in something like a tank top and quickly got the impression that the shrink was, well, checking me out. We were still talking about stuff but I caught him looking me over several times.

The man is gay, so I can't say this was a surprise. But inside, alarms went off. What I didn't understand was that the body had been abused as a child, so this older man looking at us, as the father and others did before abuse, was not safe, it was terrifying. It was maybe the next session I just didn't show up. Then I wrote him I couldn't continue going any more, just like that. I now think he knew why. I had been talking with him about years back meeting parts of myself, Jonathan and a child (Little John), and so the therapy was making real progress. The "checking me out" turned out to be extremely damaging for my therapy, my discovering the DID, and so my life. I stopped trusting therapists and went it alone, for years. I've only hinted to him that he did things my alters didn't like or trust. Saying anything more feels too scary.

Jonathan, who is 100% straight, does not like this T and always refused to come out and speak with him. He is the leader of the alters so we can't make progress without him. Over a year ago he insisted we transition to someone new who the others could feel comfortable with, ideally an older woman, but I still drug my feet a bit. Even though I knew he wasn't the right match for all of us, I felt comfortable with him and I still like him as a person, despite the rest. He is a moral man and I trusted him enough to allow myself to begin dissociating in front of him and becoming other parts of myself. As anyone with DID who has been in therapy knows, this requires some deep trust. We know he would not try anything with us. Little John, who had been around though not out, had remembered him as a kindly older man from decades ago and is or was a bit emotionally attached to him. Jack, who had never met him until a couple years ago, got the distinct impression the T didn't like him. Jack is straight and his accent makes him sound like a redneck. The T didn't engage with alters as themselves as well as a female T eventually would. Still Jack would have spoken with him anyway were there not new triggers from the T looking at photos of us. He smiled at one of us about age 5-6, discussed the meaning of my father's Johnny-Jack painting which is our psychforums avatar, and looked and smiled "too long" at a photo of the body around age 25 where I was looking good. Thank god the T was just gay with no pedophile tendencies. So he'll help us find a new T.

Dang, the life is stressful lately, too much happening at once, too much pressure at work and elsewhere to be high functioning when I'm just not. My suicidal thoughts aren't helping but then again they're associated with the stress. I've had suicidal thoughts for so many years such ruminations are virtually automatic. Now I know I'm multiple and have had some truly awful memories return to fill in the always inexplicable gaps, at least my life makes more sense. So despair due to endless confusion and unanswered questions is way down. Things that I used to end up attributing to a weak character or sub-par abilities are now clear results of childhood physical and sexual abuse, beginning, as far as my memory indicates, at or soon after birth. Now the sadness over what actually happened in my once 'idyllic' childhood leads me right back to depression but of a different ilk. This depression, of having had my life wrecked by those who should have cared for me, feels based on reality more than on things I just don't understand. All too sadly, I do understand my problems and limitations. The fact that I never deserved any of this, and I can say this justifiably from having met so many young and innocent parts of me, is just devastating emotionally. The fact that none of us ever became monsters or abusers might but doesn't offer any real consolation. But as many of us say here, it is what it is.

It's a major problem that my most effective adult alter, Jonathan, the one most capable of driving the life if I were to collapse or something, is equally suicidal, though in a different way. He would probably never be the one to take the life but he really doesn't want to participate when it comes right down to it. He gave up on me and us a couple decades ago. He didn't understand everything then, none of us did, but that decision wasted a huge chunk of time in our life and his guilt about that has never helped. We really need to forgive ourselves for that, don't we? No one of us has ever attempted suicide, except for a brief belt-around-the-neck or smash-head-into-wall sort of thing. Every time I think of killing us, particularly when it's really thought out and graphic (a gun, hanging), if a little is out or nearby, they get terrified that someone is going to hurt them, almost exactly the way they did in fear of their abusers. No surprise there. Then I feel like a complete jerk, especially when they're in the body just doing their thing, playing as innocent children do. My mind spins from contemplating all this.

I'm afraid what would happen if I made a serious suicide attempt. The gatekeeper might disable or quarantine me, something he's never done, if that's even possible, which I doubt, and install someone else as host, but whom? The two other adults, Marc and Aaron, don't have anywhere near enough actual experience to pull off the career or the life or "being John." Aaron would be a possible fit temperamentally but we've found he has to access the memory for almost every thought or piece of knowledge that isn't just him being himself. This causes an odd delay in his thinking and speaking, though this might improve with time. Before I was at all convinced I had DID, I accidentally created him as an alter by imagining a stable guy whom we might have been, then had this guy "step into the body" and walk a bit. That's all I remember of how Aaron came. As an alter, he's paper thin but he would fill out more with more time in the body. I'm not sure if that's wise or not but as long as we're stuck having DID, we could probably use another capable adult. He was and is just a regular intelligent guy so he isn't traumatized as far as I can tell. But his personality would seem pretty bland compared to mine so boy would that be noticed. I wish I could just force the DID away and we could become whole but that's like saying you wish you could force yourself to be a great pianist. Yeah, you can get there, but it takes time to build...

[ Continued ]

Abuse absent: Marc-Dominic, Daniel, Aaron
Abuse witnessed: Hansel, Sphinx, Edward
Abuse from mother: Carter, Adam, Ashár, Little John
Abuse from father: John, Jack, Jonathan, Max, Johann, Quato, Little John
Abuse from others: Luke, Chase
Accent/Dialect: Jack (Appalachian), Chase (British English)
Angry: Daniel, Quato
Animal: Ashár (wolfdog)
Core (original): Adam
Cross-gender: none
Deceased: Daniel (reanimated Sep 2011)
Former Hosts: Adam, Little John
Fragments: none
Gatekeeper: the Sphinx
Helper: Marc-Dominic, Hansel (of Johann)
Host: John
Introject: none
Moral Dilemma: Edward
Persecutor: none
Protector: Ashár (of Adam), Jack (of John and children), John (of a sibling)
Self-harming: John (mild)
Sexualized: Quato
Shape-shifter: Marc-Dominic
Trickster: Quato
Twins: Hansel, Johann

AGE GROUPS
* 9 Littles (age 0-6): Adam, Edward, Ashár, Little John, Max, Hansel, Johann, Chase, Carter
* 2 Middles (age 7-12): Jack, Luke
* 2 Teens (13-19): Dan, Quato
* 4 Adults: Aaron, Jonathan, John, Marc-Dominic
* 1 Ageless: Sphinx
* 1 Older than body: Marc-Dominic [~15 years older]
* 0 age-sliders: (that we know of)

SEXUAL ORIENTATION
The body's natural orientation is straight male.
* Straight: Jack, Jonathan, Dan, Hansel, Johann, Aaron, Little John, Chase, Carter, Max, Luke
* Straight with gay addictions (changing): Quato
* Gay: John (shifting)
* Bisexual: Marc-Dominic (theoretical)
* Asexual: Sphinx
* Too young/Unknown: Adam, Ashár, Edward

GENDER
All alters are male, none are female. Sphinx is genderless, though if pressed, he selects male as the logical gender.

"SOCIAL STATUS"
There is quite a issue in my system about class, culture and education. It was a stupid distinction but existed in my family of origin as an issue, particularly in my mother, so it shaped who we needed to be:
* HIGH-BROW: Marc-Dominic (sophisticated blue-blood), Jonathan (cultured), John (academic)
* LOW-BROW: Jack (hillbilly), Dan (blue-collar grammar), Quato (street-talking)

Some suggest that there cannot be an original or core in a DID system. This doesn't ring true in many systems. In our system, the evidence is overwhelming that there is an original and no evidence that that's not possible or can be explained in any other way. Because the life was constantly in danger and we had to retain knowledge of what helped keep us alive, we actually have more memories and clearer ones from the first year than from some later years. There is a baby and two alters split off from him in the first half year of life.
* Original/First: Adam
* Created by SPHINX (the gatekeeper): Sphinx, Ashár, Little John, John, Jonathan, Jack, Dan
* Evolved: Johann, Hansel, Quato, Chase, Marc-Dominic, Carter, Aaron, Max, Edward, Luke
The evolved alters were unknown to the gatekeeper until their revelation.

CHARACTERISTICS IN COMMON AMONG ALTERS (as far as we can tell):
* protectiveness towards small children
* monogamy