Creator Alters and Body Alters

I am glad for the work of those who developed the Theory of Structural Dissociation and wrote The Haunted Self. If not for their work, I would probably still not know what is wrong with me. They made up the categories of "Apparently Normal Parts" and "Emotional Parts" to describe what they had observed about traumatized people. ANP and EP describe their fixations: either they are haunted by trauma or they are avoiding it.

A lot of people object to the terms because people are more complex than this. But I find the categories useful for understanding our orientation in the world. However, the psychologists who described trauma systems were looking at us from the outside and they described what they saw. I would just like to share some things I have observed about the inner world and its structure.

I see the mind as divided into several layers. Even singletons know a conflict between "heart and mind." There is the conscious mind, the dream mind, the emotional mind and the body mind. There could be sublayers within each layer as well, especially in a DID system. Our existence as humans and also non-human-identified ones who live in human bodies, is a combination of any or all of the minds.

The dream-mind is a bridge between the conscious mind and the emotional and body minds. Some alters exist in the dream mind especially EP. A creative ANP or EP can tap into the dream mind to produce works of art, etc. that also express their feelings. Deep in the dream mind there are also creator alters who can transform or translate information between minds. They create to make their world make sense and to make the pain more bearable. They can create other alters and inner worlds.

I have some knowledge of a body alter or system who can control muscle tension. My systems were created entirely from emotional abuse, I mention it because it seems relevant. The first thing the body alter said to me with words was, "are you sure you want to remember that?" I was in a half-sleep state and so they're connected to the dream mind. They used physical sensations to remind me what it feels like to hate.

The body alter causes muscle tension in my neck, shoulders, etc. which I learned is a common symptom of PTSD. The body alter can create flu-like muscle aches or headaches. They have demonstrated, but they are benign. I imagine they could also produce very painful contractions anywhere in the body if they had the will to do so. But they have hinted at their role as
a dissociative support system in the body. They support hard and rapid switching without headaches, and contain poisonous hate. They aren't just unconscious bodily functions that cause somatic things to happen. They are systems beneath systems.

Thanks for the link. I see the mind as three - lower, middle and higher self, is how I see it. Body being part of or a layer of the lower self.

That tension and flu like muscle aches is what I had yesterday and still mildly today. As I'm typing about it it feels worse. I put it down to an alter holding that memory of how I would feel every morning waking up and the sleeping in a damp room for years. I guess it's not a massive leap to round patches coming and going on the skin with a different alter. I've felt intense burning feeling too, the feeling of being burnt which again is a fragment. The fragments are body memory or stuck in whatever happened to them. When my arms swelled that was the muscle tensing painfully until it eventually went down.

It's also interesting that you talk about hate. I've thought that hateful people often have body and joint pain. I felt hateful yesterday as part of that emotional circle. Hate is poisonous. But it seems like I have hate now to a degree but I can't feel it as an emotion, it's a body feeling, my body feels sick with hate, like it could throw up.

I'll try talking to the body memories. Thanks.

I did talk to them. They said "you had a narrow escape" but I'm not sure what they were referring to - could be a few things. And when I said "can we put hate back in the box for now till we work out how to use it constructively" hate went back in the box and the body pain sick feeling left with it. I've had a Pandora's box internally for a while, I don't know how long. Peter looks after it along with other emotions that float around in a desert while we relearn them in a more healthy way. Jealousy and rage we're dealing with so I don't think we can deal with hate too right now.

Then I managed to speak to the overlord. I didn't understand how he can be the result of all the abuse if the fragments hold the abuse and mouse is all the fragments together. He explained it. He's like a cloud storage, can upload and download. Mouse is like a hard drive. The fragments are individual files. Paul knowing some fragment stuff made those files available to all parts and he wrote them on the actual computer so now those fragments, sock girl, dog girl can come in and out the body preferably not alone though.

Because of how he explained our mind, the storage system, it also explains to me how I can grasp computer concept without studying it. I don't know it, couldn't do it or work in it but when people talk about it or I read something I understand it quite easily and that makes sense now I know how I've been storing things in my own mind. I guess the functioning alters are like aps or programs. They open up when needed and I am gaining more communication and more access to them now. It doesn't feel so overwhelming.

Thanks for linking this I found it very helpful.

Wow, very detailed. Thank you for sharing. I'm glad you found the information helpful.