The Road Goes Ever, Ever On (Theta's Journey)

As we come upon one month on this forum, I thought I would create a true journey thread. As I said before, I am Vi. Collectively, we’ve become known as Theta. The title is a reference to The Hobbit, incidentally.

Trigger Warnings Apply.

I’ve started to realize just how much this wears on me. I think it might be a bit worse since I don’t have any real ability to retreat fully into my Inner World unless something triggers me. I also am trying to sort out who I am as opposed to my alters.

I have a few answers to my initial questions. One of these is that the system I’m part of seems to have evolved through latching onto familiar stories as this was a large part of our childhood. I read constantly and buried myself in stories. My autistic fascination has always been with stories. I saw myself as non-human, and so each of us did too.

There is also a pattern to our protectors as opposed to our memory holders. The fae alters are pretty much protectors, as are my dragon and valkyrie. Each has their own ‘specialization’. Beth is our caregiver while Kei is our internal protector and Sele is our ‘witch protector’. Our memory holders are largely demons. I seem to hold the positive memories. Pippa and Lilith hold memories related to two different periods of sexual assault in our collective life. I suspect that Angel holds memories related to the bullying we went through.

We also know now that the reason why we cofront isn’t just to keep Marcus from hurting others. We cofront because of the fear of how those around us would feel if we changed a lot. We got punished for changing as children without our parents understanding that was happening. Beth and I are the most similar. Cofronting means that I filter out the differences. As we’ve never lived on our own, this was an important survival mechanism. I’ve also realized that there’s a lot of passive influence. I'm finding I don't always remember or have control even if I'm aware. Social Media oddly helps fill in the gaps.

As each of us has spent more time cofronting or even just being close to the surface, we’ve developed more as individuals. This may include asserting interests such as Pippa’s obsession with music, which had always been a more passive influence in the past. It actually explains why pinning down the autism was so hard initially. It only was possible to pin down after I worked to kind of filter out everyone else.

As for the system, there have been ups and downs. Each of us has our issues and right now it feels almost overwhelming to try and deal with all this trauma, but we’re working on getting everyone to work on it slowly. Pippa is still easily triggered, but that may be something that is life-long. Angel is afraid that not conforming to the majority of our system means he/they will be problematic for our system. I don’t think I can force him to decide to stay male of form if that is truly what Angel wants to do. Lilith is still scared and in pain. We’re working with her slowly too.

The one thing that we still don’t understand is why we seem so willing to see ourselves as a system. I mean, with the exception of Bri who demands total understanding, why are the rest of us willing to see ourselves as a dissociated whole? I wonder if it has something to do with how our inner world is structured and maybe my alters don’t really realize we’re all in one body.

I still go through phases when I feel like people don't believe me or that I'm making things up, but this seems to be fading with time. I also hope I haven't been a huge bother with my crises. I still don't know if I want to post a full list of my alters.

Thank you all for your help over the last month.

Vi and the whole Family.

So, tonight was a bit weird. A while ago, I began running into a few other systems on Discord and we've been able to talk. There's a bot on there which allows different alters to speak under their own names. I tried using this to hold a conversation with both Lilith and Gia. It's a bit weird going shallowly back and forth. I think what I did was mostly just record the conversation without thinking too much about what was going on.

Thing is, it worked. It felt weird, but it worked.

Trigger warning beyond here

Lilith finally made it clear to me that the rape she remembers from our childhood involved more than one person and happened repeatedly. The men who assaulted us forced us to do several things including forced oral sex. Lilith feels corrupt, awful. She wants to gag and throw up when she thinks about what happened.

Trigger warning ends.

It's weird that the conversation worked, though. It's easier than trying to write things out by hand.

I'm glad for you that you found a way to better communicate with each-others.

Thank you. Right now, Beth is kind of a strong presence inside trying to keep things calm. I think Queen has been struggling because, for so long, everyone was dormant and quiet.

In other news, I found myself referring to Angel as 'she' today. I'm pretty sure that means that Angel decided that need for the system to have a reduced amount of triggers outweighs being male, which truthfully she was more feminine anyway. Maybe this is a response to her being out more.

So...Gia is starting to get a bit more vocal. She still struggles with her words and goes silent but present for long periods of time. Marci is still asleep.

One of the things that I hadn't expected was having to go through grieving for someone over and over again from different perspectives. Our mother was very much our mother. Thing is, she passed away two years ago. Some of us didn't know that she had passed. A good chunk of our system didn't know, and now as they come forward, they're having to deal with that absence.

things are quiet again. A person who had begun to become toxic is not out of our life for now, and that's reduced stress on the system as a whole.

One problem I had was that because I had to co-front with Beth most of yesterday, things got muddled. My medicine sorter got reversed for some reason. Beth and I don't talk as easily as Pippa and I or me and any of the demonic alters.

I hope people are having a good day
Vi.

Sometimes it feels like I'm just numb and don't feel much of anything. I'm starting to understand just how traumatic life has been for us as a whole, and that 'no, it hasn't been dealt with.'

Possible trigger warnings

I realize that, despite the fact that I tend to discount it, I was involved in a long distance relationship. What I now see is that relationship was abusive in nature and involved cooersive sexual situations which still hurt and scar to this day. I didn't feel the pain of them so I figured I had dealt with the issue. No I hadn't. I mean, I went through therapy twenty years ago and thought I had dealt with it, and with the rape trauma that Pippa holds onto.

I thought because I didn't feel the pain anymore it was gone.

I'm starting to look at how to deal with the traumas, but I also realize that without my alters dealing with the trauma, it isn't going to go away. I also see now why I doubt that fusion will ever work for me is that I get too overwhelmed by emotions and that will cause major problems down the road.

I hope one day to get each of us to discuss on here the different traumas we've endured.

End Trigger Warning

Last night, Pippa was out for ages. She co-fronted for nearly 12 hours and all I have are little flashes of when her emotions were at their highest. I know she got to see her favorite artist playing her live stream, so it was a good night for her.

So...right now, it appears that our system project is understanding the whole thing of 'ANP's and 'EP's. It sometimes feels as if we're having to learn a whole new language when it comes to DID. We're also, slowly, working on traumas.

Bri stressed the system out trying to reconcile the whole thing surrounding ANP and EP. She tries very hard to put everything into logical order. Thus, we're trying to work it out. For now, the system maps she likes to draw out are split between Memory/Trauma and System Admin.

By and large, things are okay right now. Pippa is out in the world a lot of late, but I've also talked to most of everyone lately. It feels like everyone is adjusting to the Inner World and settling in finally. Pippa still gets easily scared and has to hide away from friends sometimes. She was also aware that one of our friends made a joke regarding a certain forbidden subject. Luckily, she wasn't there when it happened and he's been chewed out over it by his girlfriend already.

It's still stressful dealing with most of our relatives. They don't seem to grasp a lot of how things are for us as an autistic person. This is why I haven't even told them about the DID. One of my aunts knows, but only in relation to the past not the present. She's one of the people who confirmed an historic pattern. None of us deal well with Father as he doesn't communicate well, doesn't talk to us very much, and we often get the impress that he really wishes he had a son and not a daughter.

I'm not sure there's much else to say. I hope people are doing well.

One thing that helped me understand ANPs and EPs is to think about them in terms of functions not alters. "Function" can be either a behavior, an emotion, a memory...

An alter can contain more than one function.

ANPs are functions tied to everyday normal life aspects. EPs are functions tied to trauma and survival.

A lot of complex DID systems have a lot of mixed alters containing both EPs and ANPs because the stressful events happened all the time, so the brain could not put "everyday life" on one side and "trauma" on the other. As an example, the ones of my alters who formed during my childhood are sorted out by context (school, home, grandparents...) rather than by type of content. Meaning that the school alter contains both traumas from school and normal aspects of school life such as learning, studying etc.

Rather than using the technical terms of ANP and EP right away, it was most helpful for me to list all of the examples of ANPs and EPs on one side, and list all of what each of my alter does on the other side, then compare both lists. (Do not hesitate to use different colors to better visualize everything - avoid the green/red dichotomy though because it can give the false idea of "good vs bad".)

Hope this helps you too!

We only counted 'Thea' and 'Maddie' as proper ANP's by the definition because they had never had any knowledge of the system whilst hosting, had never lived inside, carried no trauma memories and were basically like 'social masks' for specific situations. (mainly college, work)

Everyone else who has acted as host have also been an 'insider' at some point and knew there were others. Although they still didn't necessarily carry trauma memories.

I guess our EP's would be one's like child Bobby, Kit, who really struggle with living on the outside as soon as it involves relating to outside people.

One's like 'Little Susie' is a mix of both..originally in childhood she was the child host but stopped at some point as we grew and changed...Now the body is adult she never appears in front of RL others and shows evidence of some traumatic memories - both from early childhood and from the stroke event.

Thank you both for the advice.

There's a lot of complexity to sorting things out. Bri is still kind of sorting things out on that, and we're talking to each other on our Discord server. One thing we don't understand is why some of us aren't really ANP or EP. We have one or two who just seem to exist just to help the system function without having any memories other than to make sure that we're either safe internally or able to function. But that may just be that they haven't told us about their memories yet.

Thank you again!
Pippa.