Do you have Teen alters?

Hi Everybody,

There are lots of hosts writing about having Little alters but not much about Teen alters. Do you have any Teen alters? Our system has a lot and we're pretty much doing things all the time. I guess I'm just trying to figure out if we're normal or what.

Host says he'd like some ideas about dealing with teen alters. He gets kind of frustrated with us sometimes.

Thanks for your help.

Iain (I'm a 14 year old Teen alter)

we do
I am trying to treat them like adults in many ways and share responsibilities while supporting them.
Annett is chief of defense and she is taking more and more responsibility with the littles as well as other tasks of daily life. we need her to balance the hosts and she is important in therapy. D is chief of finances, she has a knack for it we others dont have.
we find that it is important that they have important roles for the system. and that nothing bad happens if they need support with their tasks. we are basically trying to raise them to become responsible adults. we do the same with the littles by the way, just teaching them age appropriately...

our teens spend quite a bit of time with each other instead of the adults. it gives them time to talk teen stuff. they get their time for fronting like everyone else. there are guidelines on how to spend time in a safe way though. we dont push anyone here and we dont punish, but we expect people to clean up the mess they have made in relationships.

some teen topics, when it comes to puberty, are things we are learning to handle. we have agreed that the adults wont complain about unclean skin after a teen fronted for a while. it happens all the time, but its not their fault and they dont enjoy that either.
we find it slightly unnerving when our teens are interested in outside-world teens. with an adult body that just looks creepy... ( in some ways an adult bodied person playing with outside-kids is more normal than them being interested in hanging out with teens?)

Even though the body is an adult, the teens used to run this system. Our hosts were 15 & 16 and my 16-year-old brother and I backed them up. We felt threatened when the adult alters started to introduce themselves, but it's okay now. Our old hosts aged-up 4 years each and it seems each age group is fairly represented in the front.

- Cullen

Hi Iain and birdsong and Cullen,

I'm Kat and I'm 12 years old. I am the current host of our sytem (although I stepped out a little these last weeks).

We had adult hosts before all the time. But something happened in spring and since then I am the host. I seem to be better at delegating stuff and taking myself back and let somebody else do the stuff I can't handle. And I know that we are a system and accept that - the adult hosts always fight against us others.
birdsong, I like what you said about handling your teens and kids - that sounds like something we would our adults to be like.

Edit: And Cullen, I understand that you and the other teens felt threatened - I still get anxious when the adult system members try to interfere too much with me. I sometimes fear one day they'll say: "this life shouldn't be led by teens we'll take that over now" or something like that and then I#ll be bannished or something .

I also have other teens around me that help me and I feel closer and safer with them than with the adult members of our system.

There are J (15) and JJ (13) who are my brothers. J helps me all the time with stuff and gets me to our appointments and what not.

And there is A who is our cook and she's 15-17 (ageslider).

Oh and there is Thirteen (yes, that's her name) and she's 13. She gets really angry with the world and everyone. We get anxious when she's near but I try to understand her anger and let her have safe outlets. And I am not as stu**d as our adults - they forbid us to scream and rip and destroy things even in safe environments like our own home - but I allow Thirteen to scream and rip paper or cloth and she's allowed to hit pillows and stuff that's safe when we are at home.
So we try to give her safe outlets. And she's a real champ when it comes to reading people and their intentions and inner functions - so she now has the task to scan our environmet and keep us safe and warn us from unsafe persons like narcissists.

So you see at the moment our system is run by teens I guess.
We have some adult helpers though - they mostly step in when I or another one is clueless about something.

I don't know any tips for your host I guess - I'm sorry, I'd like to help!
For me the adults are nice but very often they made sensless rules for us in the past and that made everyone sad and mad and we didn't function good as a whole system.
And we often disagree on opinions about politics and stuff that makes it hard.

Do you know why your host gets frustrated, Iain?

I try to look after the younger kids and toddlers but that's really hard cuz sometimes I'd like someone to be there for ME and I have always to be patient - that's hard.

But on the outside I can appear really adulty I think - one only might notice that my face moves a lot more than same-body-age-people's faces (body is 29yrs) because I am bad at holding my face still like adults do. And I guess sometimes my expression looks younger than the body's age.
It is a lot harder for me to manage my emotions anyway. The adults are better with that.

But on the other hand I am really empathetic and a lot of our adult outside friends talk to me about their problems. And then I and one of our adult system members (X) help them figure out solutions. In that team-up we are like a therapist for a lot of our friends cuz I can feel myself into their situation and then X is very good at logically finding solutions.
And I can do most adult stuff outside when I need to. I don't like to be in adult areas though - like in bars or beeing out after 7pm or going to the insurance or university. If I have to I'll do it but it'll cost me a lot of energy and I'll get tired easily.
J (15) is better with that: he'll meet our friends in the evenings and goes to bars with them and what not.

Hmmm...so for us it is normal to have a lot of teens and we are runnning things

Sorry for the long text. I guess I wondered myself if our situation is normal - I mean the situation that a lot of/mostly teens run the day-to-day-stuff in a system.

Ok I hope this readable...my English skills are mostly from movies ect.
Have great day everyone!
Kat

Hi everybody. Yes, as a group, our teen alters have "exploded" onto the scene recently, in our awareness of their presence and influence.

For a few years after discovering the DID, we knew of only 2 teens: Quato, barely a teen at 19, and Dan 15, who had aged from 9 to 15 while deceased ("killed" inside at age 9) and not fronting, to our knowledge. Though he seemed very much his age, Dan hadn't become a teen while the body was one. Still, we had the experience of an influential juvenile or teenlike stubbornness long before we realized we had DID.

We are now at 14 teenagers and have discovered half very recently. At least 8 are complete country boys, whereas our life has long been adult urban professional, so that's different! Most of these fellows have been out tenaciously doing things that have little to do with adult goals. Their frequent evening/weekend fronting kept us from achieving so many life plans that we mostly stopped planning. Instead, we developed tricks, like when we remembered some adult thing we needed to get done, like buying a condo, the adult in front would drop anything he was doing -- including work -- and take immediate action towards that goal before "losing steam," which may have meant a teen was becoming bored with it.

We have one very responsible teen, Calvin, 15. He's positive and host-like. There's a distinctive hoarse quality to his younger-sounding voice which we only recall hearing the past few years, so we thought he just became active recently. But I don't think any of us were in the habit of talking out loud to ourselves before we knew we had DID, so maybe he's been around a lot more. Also many teens were sort of melded with an adult so that body movement was adult-like and they had access to adult knowledge. We feel Cal may be key to our healing. He'll certainly be critical to working with his age cohorts.

We have few memories of our teen years. Or the rest of our childhood or past really, but going back and walking through our former high school with friends from that time was like visiting a country I'd only seen in videos. Was somebody else the host? No idea yet.

Despite the challenges, we like our teens a lot. One advantage is that they're still kids but can explain or try to figure out what's going on pretty effectively. From our adults' perspective, it's great being around young people, whether they're internal or external.

Hi kat, birdsong, Cullen, and Johnny Jack

OMG!!! Johnny Jack you are totally right!! Host never realized that 'losing steam' on boring adult stuff is because we get bored. Who wants to do the freaking laundry!!!

Cullen you're right too! We just never trusted adults and then one day Host wakes up and says 'I'm in charge' we're all like 'No you aren't!!'. We had to learn that Host is a good adult that really tries to take care of us even though he's pretty clueless sometimes.

Wow Kat!! Teens running the system. We mostly stayed in the back and influenced or came out when Host wasn't looking. Now we're sharing more and it's kind of weird.

When we went to college Iain was in charge because he was the only one that could do it without getting too mad or weird or something. But that was hard on him because he's only 14 and everybody else was tons older. He did ok until we got Host to do it.

Cody

Cody wrote: When we went to college Iain was in charge because he was the only one that could do it without getting too mad or weird or something. But that was hard on him because he's only 14 and everybody else was tons older. He did ok until we got Host to do it.

Yes. My former co-host, Evan (girl), struggled as a 16-year-old in college. She had no idea why she felt like a child amongst adults, even with those younger than we were physically. We haven't finished college due to health issues, but I imagine school will be easier now that we're aquainted with one another and adults come out now.

- Ella

Hi everybody it's so nice to talk to some others my age who share similar experiences!!

I'm learning to trust our adults more - and they are learning to trust us. It was (and sometimes still is) the same for me in that I thought all adults are scary and shady.

Before, when more adults handled our lifes we influenced them a lot and made them loose time (it was not on purpose though).
They were academically more successfull then I can be but I think we made a lot of the day-to-day-stuff harder for them as well.
But on the other hand they have most friends cuz we teens befriended people and are much better in having empathetic relationships. For me it often feels like our adults have no feelings or emotions and are so thrown off if something is out of order - I even suspected some of them to be aspergers.
But I get so easily sad and cry a lot and sometimes it feels like the world gets destroyed by all those adults, robbing this planet of it's health and doing bad stuff to each other and to animals and and and...you know what I mean weltschmerz? I don't know how to deal with that - do you guys have that too? My adults say one has to ignore some bad and unfair stuff in the world to get on in life but I find that really hard and I want to help all animals and people in need and I want to be good to our earth.

Our adults have also the tendency to do things really fast when they front cuz we inside get bored so fast with their stuff. (I NEVER do the laundry it IS so booooring!! - But A. our cook will do it and J also if he has to, so other teens help with that )
I think we'll have to work on that cuz I don't want to be the reason why the adults can't pursue their goals and stuff.

And for me it is hard beeing around much older people all the time. They are not interested in my stuff and talk about scary stuff. But J does that well and he enjoys it and doesn't get anxious or self-concious about his age cuz he is used to it. But he has also a lot of interests adults can't really relate to and it would be nice for us if it was possible to spend time with outside teens.
But as birdsong wrote, we too feel it could look shady or weird if we tried to hang out with kids our age.
Ella, as you wrote, I get a lot of anxiety when I go to university because of that. We had to teach the new students there for some time as a job - had to teach them the basic principals and fundamentals of our course of studies - when I switched out sometimes it was sooooo weird (I don't think they noticed though) because they were so old and I had to explain literature stuff (I knew the subjects) but felt like it was a completly odd situation having a kid teach students the fundamentals of argumentation and epoches and other stuff.

I have a hard time using all the words adults do. I often know in my head which word is right and fitting but I can't really say it out loud cuz long and complicated words seem to get jumbled in my mouth. And then I either struggle to get it out and stumble or I have to paraphrase it with easier words. That makes communication with adults difficult and me self-conscious. Our adults are very eloquent and I don't know like academically inclined and I often fear and worry how outside people percieve this gap in skills from the time to time they meet us.
Does anybody have this problem also? What do you do about it if so?

kat

I’m the only teen in this system. It makes things a bit more stressful on me since the adults have their own way of dealing with situations and the Little’s are too young to really understand the adult stuff we have to do. I just try to pitch in where I can but I get tired really quickly. It’s not easy having to act like Viola does since I am a bit more hotheaded than she is and more willing to speak my mind.

I'm just starting to learn about my system, so yes, there are teens, but I have very few details pinned down yet. I think most of the parts in here are teens and littles. There is only one definite adult that I know about--the one that goes to work. I'm the one that fronts and I feel quite a bit younger than the body's age (50s), but maybe not as young as a teenager.

A couple of days ago, one of the teens "met" my husband--she's 14 or 15 I think. So now I know more about her than I did before. He was very nice, and introduced himself to her (I can't believe how much he is taking this in stride!).

I'm not sure I have advice on how to deal with them--mine seem to be pretty cooperative so far, although if they are the reason that I waste so much time playing games or being on Facebook, then maybe I can use that insight to manage my time better! Also, that 14-15 year old really didn't want to go away last night so we could do more grown-up things that she isn't ready for, but then she did.

I actually found this thread a little overwhelming at first because I don't have a clear grasp on who's who and how old they are, and so many people on here seem to know exactly what's going on inside them. So I had a brief bout of "I don't want to have this and have to deal with it!!" But that's better than denial, and I got past it quickly.