We met Scott a few nights ago. We were on the bus and read the name Butters Stotch, which got mispronounced inside as butterscotch. Moments later when we got off and headed for home, someone slipped forward and took over the body.
We know the experience well now and if someone, especially someone who feels young, wants to take over the body, we allow it if we're in the right situation. Walking home from a couple blocks away is the right situation. And we're all co-conscious so even a very young alter is safe.
We were trying to figure out which of our known littles it was. He had stopped us right away in a corner formed by a building and a mailbox. Odd behavior for us. As the moments passed, it was clear he wasn't going to budge. He stopped there and that was that. We realized this must be someone new. Our gatekeeper always recognizes when it's someone new but this time we didn't hear him pointing it out, we just got the realization. That may be a sign the mind is changing, communication is better, the dissociative walls are lower and don't require us to use distinct words to get the message through.
The name Scott rose up, as usually happens when a new alter appears, and that confirmed he was newly known. We looked for an age and 4 felt right. But why were we stopped and why there? We started to encourage him to move but minutes went by. We finally convinced him to take out our phone and look at it, even though it was off. An adult standing there doing absolutely nothing, well, we thought it would look weird.
I guessed he had just picked the name Scott because we read it, but someone recalled that wasn't the name we actually read. We always try to figure things out and wait for a feeling whether we're right or not. Now that idea didn't seem right so I guessed his name was Scott and he was triggered out because he heard his name. But Stotch isn't Scott. So I figured again he liked butterscotch and his name was already Scott. Yep, he was triggered out by our thinking about butterscotch. When very young we had a friend named Scott and we have another alter with that friend's last name so it makes sense that he always had the name Scott.
I'm not positive how we came up with this, maybe images we got, but we knew his job was to stop whenever the mother wandered away in public during childhood, which Sphinx tells us happened quite often. She had DID and she would switch to an alter who didn't have or like children and she would just leave us alone somewhere. Henry, 2, also came because of this behavior.
I think every child is told "if you get lost, stay put, right where you are, and I'll come find you." I was. So Scott's job was to stay put. I can see how that would have been easier for a new alter, one whose job was that over everything else. There was no competing desires, no other worries, no hesitation for him. Staying put was the right thing to do. To stay calm, he would think about good things, things he liked, like butterscotch!
To get him to move, we had to convince him to take a single step. A minute later two steps. He listened to our telling him the mother had died and our home was just down the street. We sent him images of it. So he finally headed there, unsure, but willing to be led.
When he arrived home, one of our adopted son's little girl alters was out watching TV so he got to introduce himself to another child and they watched TV a while, a nice welcome to his new home.