lifelongthing- at the risk of forming a continuous loop, heh, thank you again.
cassie: those threads are really interesting, thank you for posting them. I wasn't really able to parse things yesterday (and am still having trouble today), but I think I get the general idea.
Actually, question for everyone before I go on - would it be better for me to resurrect one of the older threads, start a new one, or continue in this one? Because I think I may be veering off a little and I'd like as much input as possible.
So I get that the theory (if I'm understanding it) is basically that splits as they're generally defined don't happen later in life (after early childhood), that it's more failure to integrate to begin with in early childhood and development of unintegrated/unaccessed parts later on, right?
Well, I'm having a little trouble reconciling that with my personal experiences. We haven't sorted all of it out, but there is at least one alter who definitely remembers being formed in our early adolescence because of a need. And the "splits" I'm aware of recently - I know why they happened and who they're off-shoots of. Is that just our perception? Is that more our mind's way of defining the further development of already existing parts? It is true that the recent adult "splits" are more fragments than true alters. They feel separate, though. I know that the mind is capable of viewing things in many different ways, though, if that makes sense.
An analogy and a couple of specific examples, if that helps:
So development of an alter. Like I said, it feels like it meets a need, but is that more a development of a latent capacity? Kind of like learning multiplication or learning to play an instrument. The capacity was there before, but it didn't happen/develop until it was needed/accessed?
Example of later "split" (I'm going to stop using " " because it's annoying, but that's what I mean): Morgan seems to be a sociopath. (I won't elaborate for triggering reasons and because it's not really important). Rin has always been wary of her and afraid that Morgan will take over and hurt the people we care about, so she kind of became Morgan's keeper (making sure she couldn't do harmful things). Rin has issues with severe depression, though, that result in her not being able to be present at times, and she (and others in the system who were concerned too) were afraid that she wouldn't be able to keep Morgan under control because of that, so that evening/night, Liana was formed. It feels like she kind of sprang from Rin, like Rin carved part of herself off. They don't feel connected to each other anymore or share emotions (they seem to behave separately) but it does feel as though Rin lost a bit of herself and that Liana isn't a full alter. It's hard to explain. Liana does have a range of emotions and opinions/desires, but she doesn't feel like a fully 3-D alter. (Rin still does, though).
So are Rin and Liana still basically the same "part"? They just kind of function separately, kind of the way adding and subtracting are separate functions but they have the same mathematical origin? We're still trying to wrap our brain around it, so I hope I managed to make sense.
We're all pretty new to this DID thing and hadn't really examined things this closely before, but now that I think about it, that makes a lot more sense. We never really understood how an alter could be created out of thin air just because there was a need for it. So it's really good to learn that that isn't the case.
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