A New Start (the way forwards)

Occasionally through all the muddled memories and brain fog I can see myself as I am now. I can look at the body and see what others see ....a 54yr old disabled woman. I can see that the 'other mes' were essentially past me's that were what other people saw when they saw us as 6yr old, 15yr old, 21, 30 etc.

However Kate and Jess are still seperate to me and are not 'versions of me'. It feels like there's 3 of us. ... Kate, Jess and 'a version of me' present at any one time.

However when the others do come forwards they still believe they are individual. for example. Little Susie (LS) at 6 doesn't see 'this me' as a version of her. I am just one of the many she lives with and ...our insiders be they changeling, Tulpa or NPC types (that only exist within a set holodeck program) are as real to her as I am to the rest of the world seeing 'this body' in front of them.

Bobby also strongly believes in the inside world and see's them as equal and 'as real' as the outside world after all whose to say we're not all really only existing in someone else's virtual reality? (something to do with one of B's fav Star Trek:TNG episode's apparently)

Anyway...as 'this-me' ...I feel I've moved on beyond being just 'Teen S' with the other integrated fragments that I have. Kate and I don't feel we have to age-slide down to 15 to 'pretend we're still twins' but we acknowledge our soul bond and the belief the soul is eternal and 'special bonded souls' can indeed find each other in every lifetime.

We both believe Jess is the soul of a past pet given she more naturally takes animal or hybrid form, (though it seems she has only 'learned human-hybrid form' in this life through films like Avatar - the Na'vi, and us playing video games such as Skyrim with the Khajit in it) we believe she originally was the spirit of our pet dog.

She says has memories of being a small Jack Russell type dog whose job was the catch rats and stop them coming into our house when we were twins in the war, and then came back for each our lifetimes to be ...a dog my mum grew up with, the little dog my mum adopted when I was a teen and then our last dog (not our current 'Mr Woof')

I see nothing wrong with spiritual beliefs we don't tell anyone in the real world about them but if 'NT people can go to chuch every week and worship a guy (or 'entity' depending on their religion/culture) they never actually met and still be considered 'normal' ...whats weird about continuing to love and honor a spirit/soul you did actually have a relationship with in real life at some point in your past? why does that make us 'mental' or 'deluded' but them still considered 'normal' and just 'practising their religion'?


Yuna

That's a very good question! A lot of psychological and religious studies ponder over this.

From the little I've heard about their general thought, it's "pathological" when it's hurtful to you and/or others. If it keeps you from having a ""normal"" life and taking care of yourself and interacting with others in an adapted way, it's "pathological".

As long as you are happy and healthy and can function properly, it's just "super weird but whatever, humans are weird, weird is their middle name". It will not always be socially accepted by everyone, but as long as it hurts none and it comforts you, well, not weirder than praying Sky Daddy and sharing a cracker with him on sundays I guess. (I hope the blasphemy is okay)

whoever they are.. (I'm still not sure whether from a medical viewpoint they would be considered an alters or whether we accidently created Tulpa before any of us knew what one was) but I have read many personal accounts of 'walk-in spirits' and find the concept comforting. They also believe they came to us as spirits. They can both front but seem to prefer to help either as a co-host or internal helper rather than 'take over' and there's 2 way communication with each.

As far as 'sky daddy' goes I don't think any of us actually understood most of what they said in church so none of us are really religious in that sense.

About tulpa: one of my close friends is a tulpamancer and from what I understand of the practice, either you are dissociated and you create an identity that a dissociated part fills in and uses as theirs - or you are not very dissociated and you train your brain to use this identity to express subconscious things a bit like in ego state therapy.

"accidental tulpas" are indistinguishable from dissociated parts/alters in how they function. The only difference is the way the identity was influenced by how you behaved, by your beliefs, etc. And even there the difference is foggy. Or maybe it's me who does not understand the subtleties.

"walk ins" are a comforting idea. They are indistinguishable symptoms-wise from alters who are very dissociated from the rest of the system to the point that they believe they are completely separate (illusion of separatedness) so they explain their presence here by "I walked in from the outside". Some of my alters used to explain their presence here this way. With integration the point of view shifted to "we separated so we could better take care of each-other" which is still comforting, just different.

We find comfort wherever we can. As long as it does not stand in the way of therapy, it's a nice comfort. Feeling that there is "a higher power" taking care of us and lifting us really helps in a lot of therapies, it gives hope, it helps fighting against despair and relapse, etc.

ArbreMonde wrote:About tulpa: one of my close friends is a tulpamancer and from what I understand of the practice, either you are dissociated and you create an identity that a dissociated part fills in and uses as theirs - or you are not very dissociated and you train your brain to use this identity to express subconscious things a bit like in ego state therapy.

I would say we certainly fit the 'dissociated brain' description! ..we have never spent hours 'training our brain' to create the inner world or the others they 'just happened' or appeared to 'have always been there' for others that came later.

ArbreMonde wrote:"accidental tulpas" are indistinguishable from dissociated parts/alters in how they function. The only difference is the way the identity was influenced by how you behaved, by your beliefs, etc. And even there the difference is foggy. Or maybe it's me who does not understand the subtleties

what do you mean by this? ..."The only difference is the way the identity was influenced by how you behaved, by your beliefs, etc"

ArbreMonde wrote: "walk ins" are a comforting idea. They are indistinguishable symptoms-wise from alters who are very dissociated from the rest of the system to the point that they believe they are completely separate (illusion of separatedness) so they explain their presence here by "I walked in from the outside". Some of my alters used to explain their presence here this way. With integration the point of view shifted to "we separated so we could better take care of each-other" which is still comforting, just different

Now this is the thing... I feel I was 'the self' that disappeared after our mums death as I knew she could exist in the inner world as I was one of the few that knew about Bobby and the inner world from an early age. But she originally only existed as I knew her (ie as my adult mother) and only within the inner world to talk to.

Only after the NDE when I was left stuck up front was I left with the memory that her reincarnated spirit (ie ..she'd had another life after leaving me originally which was why she was only 15...an age I'd never known her as ..as I wasn't born until she was 24!) had actually come back into our body with me as I didn't want to 'come back' without her again.

A similar thing happened with our (last) dog...originally she was more like an NPC placed in a holographic 'rainbow bridge world' for Maddie .. who was unable to cope after her death. After Maddie has completely disappeared and then the brain knowing (or believing) 'walk in companions' were possible .... 'Jess' also took a more permenant physical ..erm.. form?.. within the Inner world in the sense of being able to exist 'outside of the holodeck' as a changeling in the form of a guardian spirit/Tulpa. We're using Tulpa here in the sense thats she's a 'non-human' form as opposed to an alter which in our system are 'human versions of me' forms.


A while back now ..I found a page on 'Inner Worlds' of people with DID and this part described our inside world just when we were doubting if we were DID.

"Others might have small towns that may even be filled with static "NPCs" (taken from the roleplaying term "non-player characters") that can interact with alters but themselves are more similar to imaginary constructs than to actual alters or fragments. Even more expansive internal worlds can result when highly imaginative or dissociative systems use their inner world to retreat from the outside world and so play out entire stories within their mind. Alters may be perceived as having internal lives when not active in the outside world, and these inner lives may involve travel to other internal locations"

(Quoted from https://did-research.org/did/alters/internal_worlds)


This describes 'Bobby' to a tee! We believe they were the creator of our Inner World originally.

Due to them intensely disliking change but yet being fascinated with Star Trek from a young age...we have 'Holodecks' ...there's a central hub that never changes to provide security when everything around us is changing (usually outside world of which they had no control over) but within that secure environment are Holodeck Suites (rooms to go into) to recreate fav TV programs (and now video games) but still when they were done....and come back out of that room ...the hub was unchanged. (there is a version of our home as it was in the 70's perfectly re-created in the hub).

I believe all of us that became social hosts were 'created' to protect Bobby, seen by our entire system as 'the original child' For reasons I'm not sure of ...the ones we call on here Jay, Thea and Maddie never had access to the inner world originally, they seemed to 'sleep' in pods until 'triggered' by 'the demand for NT interaction' to deal with stuff like being in class, or going to work, going out with friends etc. They never carried any memories of being 'home alone' because of course we always switched so one of the insiders could get time out! but we rarely got as much time out back then...for many of us our 'inside life' was our only life...until the body became more severely physically disabled and becoming housebound was 'an acceptable option' for us to get more time at the front without the outside world realising someone else was 'in the driving seat'!


Sorry that ended up way longer than intended!!


Yuna

One thing I have noticed about our system is that we have a thing about changing our name and believing that makes us a completely different person.

I don't know if thats because there's another alter inside we've missed and they try to influence us passively to change our name..to a name they identify with so they can then come out and 'be that host' ..or whether existing alters feel something about the external host needs to change to go up to the next level/cope with a chage/future events and believe any change means that we're no longer the 'old host' so therefore need a new name/identity??

I think this is maybe why 'identity confusion' is a big issue for us? . ... the system is over compartmentalising each job/trait and assigning a new name each time an existing alter changes to accomodate new circumstances???


Yuna

The name thing is certainly a possibility. We have had 5 legal names. Our first name change came about as a kid and we can place it to the year our "origanal" (in the sence that she is named after our birth name) stopped fronting. A similar major shift has happened with the system each time, sometimes it is the appearance/disaperance of an alter, sometimes it happened right before a fuge.

Our current name is the only one that was deliberately chosen, it is bigendered (not gender neutral rather it is heavily gendered one of 2 ways depending on which culture is using it so our fem alters can go " it means xyz from hindi" and the male alters can go " it means abc its an old Jewish name")
We chose it collectively as we have 5 regular frontiers all of whom need some feeling of connection with a name that didn't belong to anyone.

Hi

We have only changed our legal name once in late teens but our internal names have changed several times despite being really late for most of us knowing we were a system and that there were 'others'.

Sometimes we have tried having a different host name for a specific combination of alters co-hosting or attempting to integrate but it hasn't always worked if they split again they go back to using their individual preferred names ..like what happened with 'Host Levi' it was Kit, Bobby and Jay but Kit and Bobby have returned inside and Jay is now integrated within me (Yuna).

In the outside world we answer to the legal name, though its often the same one's at the front for any face to face interaction with others anyway, as some won't come near the front unless we're alone.


Yuna

I have seen other dissociated persons change their online or other social name often, because the system is still shifting a lot inside and the "balance point" changes a lot. So the social name changes a lot.

From my observations and experiences, the more integrated the system becomes, the more stable this "balance point" becomes and the social name becomes more stable too.

Hope this helps!

ArbreMonde wrote:I have seen other dissociated persons change their online or other social name often, because the system is still shifting a lot inside and the "balance point" changes a lot. So the social name changes a lot.

From my observations and experiences, the more integrated the system becomes, the more stable this "balance point" becomes and the social name becomes more stable too.

Hope this helps!

What do you mean by 'balance point'?


Yuna