What is "I"?

I didn't relate to TheCollective's post anywhere near as well when it was posted as I do now so thanks for replying to it. I often have no clue who "I" am. I discovered myself as an alter just two months ago. This sounds ridiculous but we have at least two hosts who shift back and forth so smoothly that neither of us had any idea we are an "us" as hosts. We had a couple clues, such as no one bearing the body's original name John (I'm John and this is not a universal rule by any means), the name Johnny not feeling right to the host sometimes, and particularly my frequent observation that I had these effective social skills which I myself could sit back and marvel at or have judgmental thoughts about like "what a phoney."

In our particular system, when alters are discovered, we know their name and age. We have a sense of why they arrived in the body (role, purpose, initiating trauma) and at what age. We know their gender and can identify, if not immediately, that they're a distinct alter. This feels lucky for us because it doesn't happen like this for everyone with DID. But the clarity of hosting, that's gone from "not a problem, we have one host" even a year ago to who the heck is the host, how many of "us" are there, and where did John, me, come from, at what age did I arrive, and what was the cause?

More confusing than that, I have had some doubts about my gender or maybe my original gender. We haven't yet identified any female alters, even though having both male and female alters is way more common in DID than just one gender. Given our abuse from a DID mother who had one or more alters who hated little boys (or all males), having a female alter would seem almost a given. What we suspect now is that there are one or more hidden female alters who have or have had a strong feminine influence -- motherly or grandmotherly to be more specific -- on at least me.

Nondescript wrote:One of the therapists I interviewed, I asked her about this problem, and she encouraged me to define myself based on my life roles and relationships, external things, rather than internal qualities or subtle existential issues. I liked this therapist, but we were a bit skeeved by the idea of defining ourselves as what we are on the surface.

I think my T has brought up this line of thinking as a way of grounding me when I feel like a small nameless rowboat with a slow leak floating adrift in unknown waters in a dense fog. I just made up that analogy but it feels like that sometimes. She reminds that I do have identity, I still know how to function in many areas of life, so who "I" am is being discovered, which is different from there is no "I" or questioning whether I am even real. It seems your T may be saying something like that?

The fluidity that MultipleMinds talks about is very confusing for us. Too much of it going on too long is unsettling. It's much more comfortable being able to identify specifics like "hey, that's Brody who just switched in" or "oh, this Is Carter out right now and he's triggered so he's not acting like he usually does." Oddly, I'm much more secure in identifying who we are as a collective (my homage to TheCollective for starting this thread), rather than who I am as an individual alter or host.

We really like this thread. For one thing, a number of us are interested in this sort of existential stuff. It's also gratifying to see that not only other people think about things that are important to us, but they share our basic view to some degree.

Let us first say that we mean no disrespect to anyone who identifies as a host-based system and experiences life as such. But we have strongly believed from the outset that this paradigm does not work for us. We identify as a group of people, formed at various times from the existing whole, and who experience selfhood as 47 individual "I"s sharing a body and a life.

But we have to deal with the necessity of the legal "I," the social "I," the physical "I," and any other "I"s that come with being a member of contemporary human society. The legal system, our employer, and most of the people we deal with on a daily basis don't know we're multiple, and they wouldn't care if they did know. To them, "I" is the one person, the whole person, and that's all there is to it.

The chasm between our many "I"'s and the singular "I" seen by outsiders can seem enormous to us at times--annoying, frustrating, even maddening. But the rest of the world isn't going to change to accommodate us and others like us. All we can do is the best we can, and give ourselves credit for that.

MDs

I think that TC might be way more compartmentalized than what the person who wrote this OP was aware of at the time, more than what we want to admit even now.
There are more of us who struggle with this issue.
We strongly suspect that at the times when we cannot identify the front, or "the I", either
-an alter who is still in hiding is on front, while the known similar alter is very close behind them, or
-the similar hidden alter is very close to the known fronting alter, confusing and influencing the front, or
-the known alter and the similar hidden alter are co-present.
-???
Very similar to your confusion, Johnny-Jack, described in this post : http://www.psychforums.com/dissociative-identity/topic148170.html.

English still isn't our mother tongue, so I don't know how well I can explain myself here.
I don't know if I could do a much better job in my mother tongue though, because it is so confusing and it feels so hard to grasp. It is hard even to hold on to my own line of thought.

Lately I have been getting better glimpses of all the alters that are similar to those that are known.
When this happens, it still feels just as confusing as it did when this post was written, and I dare say it happens daily. I think probably because those alters are officially still in hiding even though some are becoming clearer.

Many of TC are barely starting to come to terms with actually realizing that this DID belongs to them. How can you just allow this to get any more complex by admitting to these alters? I don't know how I could even keep up with knowing and remembering and getting to know, separating all these different similar people.
I think though, that if we would be making it up, it would have subsided by now because we have been actively ignoring it and not feeding it. It is also consistent. So I guess one day we would have to admit it?
It is so very confusing to have categorized a certain character trait, or a need, or desire, to a certain alter but then it turns out that it doesn't exactly fit. You get all these contradicting messages from seemingly one alter that do not exactly fit or that the known alter does not exactly own up to, or you confuse an alter's intention or expertise so you ask for the wrong one, etc.
It would be easier for the long run to be able to accept it, TC!

It might be worth noting that we have gone through this same thing in the past with many different alters and ALL of them turned out to be separate alters.

The semi-official count is now at 16. But if we would count all the others we'd be at at least 26.
There are at least 3 alters hiding behind Chris/Eric, at least 2 hiding behind Jessica, 1 hiding behind Jenni, 1 hiding behind Jennifer, 2 hiding behind L.. Guess we should start grouping them instead of naming them lol.
It might also be worth noting that Chris/Eric, Jessica, Jenni, Jennifer and L. are all, or have all been hosts, supporting my suspicion that all hosts eventually get worn out and split.
Thanks for reviving the thread I guess. It is something we've been putting off way too long. Maybe this will make me budge. You might have inspired me to finally try and make that new system map.
-Many of us, if you couldn't tell yet.

MakersDozn wrote:The chasm between our many "I"'s and the singular "I" seen by outsiders can seem enormous to us at times--annoying, frustrating, even maddening.

So how do you deal with that?
It is maddening indeed. If you do not have a host, (how) do you hide that you are different from the I that outsiders have come to expect? I wonder, is MDs big on dividing roles, getting the right person out for the right situation?
We are like that too. Or I wish we were lol. If the right person is not out for the situation, well it's a mess. What we need to do for TC is properly identifying everyone and then finally learning how to switch reliably.

MakersDozn wrote:But the rest of the world isn't going to change to accommodate us and others like us. All we can do is the best we can, and give ourselves credit for that.

True that.
Some people do know about us though. But we still really don't think that any of it should be their problem. It is nice at those rare times when we are seen and accepted for who we are instead of for the skin that surrounds us.

TheCollective wrote:

MakersDozn wrote:The chasm between our many "I"'s and the singular "I" seen by outsiders can seem enormous to us at times--annoying, frustrating, even maddening.

So how do you deal with that?
It is maddening indeed. If you do not have a host, (how) do you hide that you are different from the I that outsiders have come to expect? I wonder, is MDs big on dividing roles, getting the right person out for the right situation?

Good questions.

First let us clarify what we meant when we said that "from the outset" we knew that the host paradigm would not work for us. It actually took a couple of years to figure this out. In an effort to conform and be a "good" multiple (whatever that is), we thought at the beginning that every system was supposed to have someone with the body name.

So in our mind we figured that there was actually a system member named (Bodyname). We also thought that there was a person named (Middlename) who was an administrator. We never actually met them, and over the course of about two years we realized that these two never really existed, and we mentally "released" each of them from the system.

Another thing we've learned is that it's counterproductive for us to think of each other in terms of roles. It pigeonholes us and creates expectations that may not necessarily match our totality as individuals. We find it more productive to recognize each other's talents and skills, and take these into consideration when deciding who handles a specific situation.

TheCollective wrote:We are like that too. Or I wish we were lol. If the right person is not out for the situation, well it's a mess. What we need to do for TC is properly identifying everyone and then finally learning how to switch reliably.

Our switching has always been fluid. Sometimes we don't notice it until after it's happened--for better or for worse.

TheCollective wrote:

MakersDozn wrote:But the rest of the world isn't going to change to accommodate us and others like us. All we can do is the best we can, and give ourselves credit for that.

True that.
Some people do know about us though. But we still really don't think that any of it should be their problem. It is nice at those rare times when we are seen and accepted for who we are instead of for the skin that surrounds us.

Yes. We're grateful that we have our T, and a couple of close friends who are aware of the real "us." And we have this place and a few other places online where we can interact with other multiples.

MDs

In my initial reply to MDs I was going to write that we have been trying to establish a host for about a year now. It is not working. We are discovering the same thing. There has in this body never been an alter with body name or middle names as well and for a while at first we thought there should be but found out there really isn't.
We figured that it doesn't matter what the name is, as long as the person chosen for the role of host is reasonably in line with the life and the body so we chose Jessica for the job and she wanted to give it a try. We have worked hard to achieve her demands for giving this hosting thing a shot, and she has been contributing to life a ton more than she did a year ago.
But she is still not the owner of this life and she's still not "out most of the time". So we are giving up this approach. We do not have only one host. We have many hosts. One is on the front for a few days or maybe even a week, and then another one is out for a time. The others switch in and out all the time, and they can be very close when they are not out.

We do not have distinct roles in the outside world as well. By assigning roles, I meant exactly to identify alters' skills and talents, and to assign a chore, or, a part of life, based on those observations. But since our switching is mostly uncontrollable and indeed, many times not even noticed until afterwards, this is not a very useful approach as well.
We thought that since we didn't have roles, didn't have a host, that this is what causes the mess in our functioning so we tried to make a host.
But then I think, it's completely illogical to have this group, with which to share life, but then expecting a person (or part of a person depending on how you look at it) to do it all alone when it's not necessary to do so.
It's like "accepting who I am", for a multiple that might very well mean accepting that we are a hostless system instead of trying to force becoming it.

The only thing that can really be a bother is switching uncontrollably, or not being able to switch when necessary.

The whole "what's the norm for DID" can lead us down bogus pathways that at the very least waste time and delay understanding ourselves. Not that anyone here or elsewhere is really claiming "this is normal for DID" but even the best scholarly works on dissociative disorders can make statements that strongly suggest norms. I guess I say this for newbies mostly.

How many times have some of us read posts from new members who say they don't have evidence of this or that characteristic, often taken from the DSM, so aren't sure they have DID. Very frustrating for anyone. I spent decades believing that, if anything, I must have had a very mild case of DID because I knew a couple alter-like parts were there but it wasn't anything beyond that. Very incorrect.

Each of us with DID developed in a unique environment and that affected how our minds grew. For my example, I have come to realize that both parents had DID with outwardly abusive parts and my system evolved as a way to navigate and survive their and others' abuse while taking advantage of their decent parenting, when it was there. We are our unique response to our unique set of circumstances and experiences, especially, though not exclusively, in childhood.

Hosts, protectors, fragments, persecutors and other terms are convenient labels for discussion but assuming too much, thinking you have it figured out, can really send you down the wrong path where you can get lost quite a while. So can certain norms about what to expect in DID.

Kind of like not wanting to acknowledge having so many alters because my life wasn't bad enough to have developed so many alters. Or like only acknowledging I-ness for those that really couldn't be denied because of their distinctness. I really am not sure where they all came from.
I have started creating the new version of the system map.
What is up with all the names that start with a J?
So far we have names and/or ages, and/or genders of 26. I am scared to fill in more about them because I don't want to do it wrong again so I'd rather wait. I guess we found that thing to talk about in therapy lol.
I do for the first time feel like TC is genuinely coming out of denial, at least with more of us, since I will not assume that it is gone for everyone. idk if it's the t or what. She has been actively trying to get us to see that having this is not so bad or crazy. Feels good though. I like progress. I do acknowledge that we have already done a lot of work though, on our own but things have been really stuck for quite some time now, so it would be good to finally have someone who could help me figure it all out.

Johnny-Jack, we really like your last post. Spot-on. We wish it could be required reading for the "experts," and more readily available to newly-recognized multiples.

The Collective, your bottom-line view is similar to ours, and we appreciate your clarification. We too have several Js (six), and several As(coincidentally, also six) as well. We also have five Ls (including those who have a modifier before their name; there used to be six (also coincidental), but we changed one person's name.

MDs

I personally am integration-focused, not everyone is, as it's a personal choice. But bearing that in mind, when I say "I", what I mean is all currently active elements in my mind at the moment that I say "I". And I think this is true for everyone, not just people with DID. It's just that for me as a covert DID system, in one way I am much less self-aware due to the compartmentalization, yet in another way I am exceptionally self-aware now that I am aware of the compartmentalization itself. I get the impression that many non-DID people are rarely if ever aware that they hold conflicting views, feelings, etc and so when they say "I" they often mean it as though their entire essence is speaking all at once. Whereas for me, I am often aware that "I" am whatever elements of my mind happen to be active at this exact moment in time. Thus I'm also aware that "I" am fluid to an extent, and furthermore that that is okay. I suppose in a way it's slightly ironic that in the search for a solid identity, I've started coming to terms with the reality that identity isn't meant to be so solid.