Tonight we met Luke. We've had a nauseous feeling a few times this week, which felt like a signal of something to come. Not true nausea, a queasiness with a wanting to be able to vomit to get rid of something. Tonight IMing with a friend, it came up further. We wondered before about one of our uncles, whom we knew was bad. The friend used the word uncle in the IM and it felt uncomfortable. I avoided this uncle starting after the father's death when we were 12. The feeling was dislike, mistrust and an unidentifiable antipathy toward him. It may have been based in part on my parents' comments about him being self-centered, stingy, immature. But now we know something else about him. He did something to us. I'm not entirely sure what it was. It doesn't seem quite as bad as some of the other abuse and Sphinx confirms this, if I can trust him. But it was enough to create Luke.

The intense rising and then surfacing of negative emotions which have no identifiable source tips me off that there's someone new, a new alter. I know I need to stay open and pay attention, lest I hurt them or not meet them. I spent too many years ignoring what I sensed and squashing all otherness that scared me and made me fear I was crazy. I'm not falling into that senseless pit anymore. It cost me too many years of my life.

Tonight Dan took over walking home and was doing a good job of it. At some point though, the feelings started coming and we chose to let them. They were real and raw. The body froze at some point and became flooded with fearful, hurt emotions in a public location close to work. This never happens because our system is careful about the job so we knew something was really off. A bit further, someone else was clearly in control of the body, a younger guy but not extremely young like so many others here. I had already had the name Luke float up into consciousness earlier but it seemed to be 'selected' somehow, as if other names were around. But once a name like this floats up, we can almost count on there being someone new. And I had a sense of farm-ness, an affinity for farms, images of specific farms we used to visit.

Before I left work, when I felt something coming and it felt associated to the uncle, I asked Sphinx if the uncle had done anything to us. I got conflicting stuff, as if telephone signals were crossed and I was getting interference that garbled the words. It was hard to stay focused and I nearly blanked out.

Once Luke was in the body, he began hyperventilating from fear. He looked around, had no idea where he was, he was very upset, scared. He took the body off the main sidewalk into a fairly dark area and stood there crying, wimpering and holding on to a tree for quite a while. The tree he understood but I could feel his unfamiliarity with tall buildings that I have seen and walked by a thousand times. We tried talking to him but he just got scared and confused. After a while, he addressed us as the voice. He had heard one before obviously, that of Sphinx. So we stopped trying to explain what was happening, it was too much for him. We kept the comments very simple the way Sphinx did in childhood. "You're safe, it's okay." "We can lead you home." And other reassuring things.

He carries the body differently from everyone else, kind of loping, lanky and off kilter. We asked his age and he said eight. When he arrived home, he wouldn't go up on the porch. He didn't believe he lived in this strange building he'd never seen before. I could feel the foreignness of our familiar house. We told him he had keys in his pocket. If they worked, it was proof he lived here. He did all this very slowly but of course the keys worked. We had to keep coaxing him to enter, "it's your home, it's okay." "You grew up and you live here." I think he started feeling something was familiar but he kept worrying that whoever lived here would find him in their house. "Somebody lives here," he said. He...

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Chronology of arrival of alters
as far as can be reconstructed
Suggests who was derived from whom

AGE.............ALTERS.....................................ARRIVAL #

..0................ADAM (core)..................................1.....
.3 mos............|.....\..............SPHINX*..................2....
.4 mos............|.......ASHÁR.................................3....
.8 mos...........LITTLE JOHN..................................4.....
..1.................|...|.........\......................................
..1½...............|..Edward....\...............................5....
..2.................|................Max...........................6....
..2½...........JOHN (host).......................................7...
..2¾........../.|.|.|\..\...\..........................................
..3.........../..|.|.|.\...\...Carter.............................8....
..4........./....|.|..|..\...Quato, Hansel, Johann....9, 10, 11..
..5. Chase.....|.|...|...\........................................12...
..6..JONATHAN..|....|....\.....................................13...
..7.................|......|...JACK...............................14...
..8.................|.......|.....|......................................
..9.................|........|....DAN.............................15...
10..................|.........|...........................................
11..................|..........|.........................................
12...Marc-Dominic...........|...................................16..
..................................|.......................................
44.............................Aaron...............................17..

(*) gatekeeper/observer, not a regular alter
CAPITALS: Alters always known to gatekeeper Sphinx

Months ago, these blog entries were still editable, so whenever new alters would become known to us, that is, come out of hibernation or wake up, I would go back and add them. So I add something about Carter and Max here, #15 and #16.

Carter had stepped into the body months before I recognized him as an alter. I foolishly figured he was some young version of me (which he is in a way, of course). Why I didn't recognize him as a previously unknown alter, I don't know. It became clear that Carter was an alter when he appeared in therapy around the issue of quitting, which certainly included suicidal thinking, which is the ultimately quitting. For months after this spring, he was often the first to step into the body when I vacated it. This virtually always happens when I go out walking and always happens when I walk home. It's like a ritual. I leave work and at some point, often before I even leave the building, someone steps forward. Carter is six and he either wasn't quite as traumatized as some others or he was in the body often enough as a child -- from age 2 or 3 to age 6 -- that he developed some perspective. Also, age six is barely old enough to have a sense of things. He's a great kid and it makes me like myself when it dawns on me that he is simply part of me at that age. He has good instincts and is able to feel happiness.

Max arrived sometime in late summer or early fall. I have it recorded somewhere but don't recall right now. I recognized he was someone new because he was very young but felt different from everyone else. Plus the body is quite different when he is out. The hands are clenched very tight, not out of anger but fear. When he walks, he is terrified of anything coming up behind him. He will freeze and stop, waiting in overwhelming fear that someone is coming to harm us. But he feels so helpless that he just stands there, unable to run or turn to defend himself. This is quite absurd to me when I find that the person who passes us when he stops is a small female. He still doesn't recognize he is in a large body, not when the fear overwhelms him. It wouldn't matter if he did because he has no idea how to defend himself.

Whereas Carter arose to defend the body from the mother, Max came to endure part of the father's SA. He clenches the hands, I'm afraid, because that's what the father tried to make him use. Very nasty. Max is very, very afraid much of the time, though the more time he spends in the body, the less afraid he becomes, in general. He has taken over the body while walking home, even in the dark at night, even when it's very cold and I haven't brought along gloves or a cap. This makes me think of him as rather brave. He is terrified of the dark, uncomfortable in the cold, and very upset but he keeps walking. Perhaps he doesn't really understand yet that he can just disappear, i.e. go inside or ask for assistance to go inside. Max likes cartoons. He's the same age as Little John but fairly different. He likes trucks and machines and things. Little John likes animals, especially cute ones. Some of the others have tried to talk to Max and eventually he has listened. But he didn't have any idea where the voices were coming from at first. He looked around in the dark and got scared. We all want to take care of him, he's so little and fragile. The father hurt and frightened him very badly.

Knowing how Carter and Max fit into our life fills a big gap for what happened between the age when I arrived, two and a half, and age four when the twins and Quato arrived. It didn't make sense that I could have remained alone to face both parents for that year and a half. I knew that the father began SA before I even came because of Little John's memories of him trying things. The mother was cruel and vicious and I was sure we couldn't stop her until we were quite big enough to fight back or run. So Max coming to endure the father's abuse and Carter coming to endure the mother's make the outline of our life make...

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"Inside" was a place in the mind we could identify where alters went when they weren't out in control of the body. Inside was also the place where the host would go when he wanted to "go away," leaving a shell of himself in the body. That is, when John would dissociate while he was somewhere he didn't really want to be, like a dentist's office. Something happened in our system in early October 2011 that in hindsight seems to be a step towards integration.

Early one evening, reversing months of shutting him out, I expressed a very spontaneous appreciation and love for Jonathan, for all that he had done for me over the years, for sacrificing his own desires in service to mine. I knew his self-denial was his design but it had been extremely difficult for him as he is a unique person with his own needs that frequently ran counter to mine. Shortly after my communication, we discovered that our inside, our safe place of retreat, had collapsed. The dissociative walls had crumbled, though not entirely. But they were now more like borders between us than high, impenetrable walls.

Jonathan somehow led the pack away from our own individual spaces. He himself stepped out of his box into the more common space, so to speak, and because he is powerful internally, the natural leader of the alters, everyone followed. All except one.

Ashar is mute and has no command of language, so he didn't understand what was going on and remained in hiding. The only way we realized he wasn't with us was that Adam came into the body panicking and crying. We couldn't understand at all at first but began to sense that he was worried about the wolfdog, his young protector. We recognized he hadn't come out near the front with the rest but remained inside, perhaps trapped. Without waiting for a decision, Jack went deep into the mind to find the remains of inside. Once he found it, he felt as if the portal to it was closing. So he reached inside grabbed Ashar by his legs, and "flung" him out into the body. With Ashar suddenly in the body, in a sort of flashback, we didn't realize immediately that the final existence of inside had now disappeared, we soon understood, forever.

We realize this sounds quite bizarre but the experience felt extremely real to us at the time. We were in terror that we might lose not just one but two alters to the collapsing inside.

I've never read of anything similar but something radical definitely happened. After the collapse was complete, there was no longer a place deep inside to escape to, for any alter. By analogy, if we used to live in a vast twenty-floor apartment building, so large we didn't know at any moment where anyone was, we were suddenly all evacuated down into the lobby, the elevator was permanently shut down, then the upper levels simply vanished.

A working definition of BLENDING in dissociative identity disorder would be a state where two alters are in control of the body at the same time and there is some mixture between them. CO-PRESENCE would describe when two alters are simply present. The experience of blending seems to vary among people with DID but the effect is usually some combination of the characteristics of both alters. I'll describe my system's experience with blending below but first, here's a thread of this phenomenon: http://www.psychforums.com/dissociative-identity/topic69907-10.html

In my system, blending has happened accidentally. Only once did I deliberately try to blend before I even knew what it was. Jack was in executive control and I tried to step forward with him. Both of us immediately felt this was very creepy and less than a minute later, I stepped back. It felt like we were pressed up against each other, or I was hanging around his neck or something. Not pleasant.

Other than the time just mentioned, when blending happens, whoever blends also gets stuck together. Trying to unstick usually results in a DID headache but in any case, separation isn't successful and it has to just kind of dissolve. If the blend doesn't involve me, the host John, I get pushed back further than when just one alter is in executive control. Sort of like the consciousness has only so much space. Five or six alters out at the same time, or even all paying attention at once, feels like an impossibility in my system, at least for now.

When two non-littles are in the body at the same time, there's a recognition of a need to cooperate. But the littles don't quite get that so blends with them can be kind of "messy" and feel random. The body control is not very good when we blend with a little.

John and Jack. Because Jack has a strong accent, the first accidental blend of both of us was very disconcerting. We often speak aloud to communicate to one other and we did that night. The accent was literally halfway between the two. The grammar, however, was mostly one or the other and usually matched with whoever's thought was being voiced. We were afraid we might stay blended. We were both concerned the weird accent could stick and how could I possibly explain that where I work. We were both there as separate individuals but it was hard to determine whether some sentences were said by one or the other. We could also pretty much talk back and forth in real time. Him commenting how weird it was, me wondering aloud what we were going to do. Thankfully, it only lasted a few hours.

John and Jonathan. Strange blend but we're not radically different people. Due to his past behavior of influencing me, it wasn't so terribly disconcerting to have him so near me, squished next to me. Considering I am gay and he is straight, however, we found that while we were blended we really didn't have much sexual response at all, as I recall. It was as if our opposite sexualities cancelled each other out for the time being. It was probably best that happened because Jonathan is normally very upset by my random background gay-oriented thoughts when he's out. We got stuck together for many hours and eventually went to sleep blended. In the morning only one of us was in the body by himself, so that was a relief.

Jack and Little John. What a giggle-fest that was. Jack described it as a funny little kid crawling all over him. He laughed and laughed, and Little John was overjoyed to be so close to someone who is protective of small children and has proactively stepped in when a little gets upset. Also, Jack is about the age that an older cousin was when Little John was host so he seems to have trusted him from the start.

Jack and Adam. Due to something I had been reading, Adam slipped alongside Jack when he was getting coffee for me one morning on campus. He still doesn't like to drink it but knew I did. Jack said he felt like a drunken sailor because Adam couldn't really walk at that point...

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