New system, hello! Struggling greatly.

I have found that finding something, anything that a challenging alter contributes, and thanking them for it cuts through the animosity more consistently and more quickly than anything else. It may not work the first time or even first few times.

If you can only see damage from an alter, you can at least thank them for trying to help in their own way. You can be sure, 100%, that from their point of view they are trying to help. They most certainly were originally. And they are probably very alone and lonely.

When someone, an alter or an individual person, receives gratitude for what they think they are doing right, it can come as such as surprise they can't help but listen. When you get thanks or a compliment from someone, since you want that thanks to be for something genuine and you want the compliment to be true, there's at least some part of you that listens, that wants to validate that gratitude or observation.

The only detail is that your comment has to be genuine, to come from a genuine rather than a manipulative place. They will know. After all they share headspace with you!

Johnny-Jack wrote:I have found that finding something, anything that a challenging alter contributes, and thanking them for it cuts through the animosity more consistently and more quickly than anything else. It may not work the first time or even first few times.

THIS! And on this note, too, being respectful of their differences, needs, and desires ALSO has been something that's helped me, and our system.

The simple truth is that EVERY part of the system exists because you, as a whole system, NEEDED each and every one of you. For better or worse, and there is ALWAYS both in all people (same is true for alters/systems), they were and are essential and necessary parts of who you are...

Perhaps the hardest part is understanding how & why for the "bad" elements of any given alter. But we've found focusing on the good and realizing even if we don't see it, it IS there... and that we all existed for a purpose and need... it's helped us, especially me when it came to the system basically being half females (a SHOCK and difficult point for me for a good year or two, at least)... that acceptance and coming to the whole with a sense of thanks and gratitude for helping ALL OF US survive, did a TON more than struggling to assert JUST my thinking on everyone.

I know that may not be YOUR struggle entirely, but I sense, too, as Johnny-Jack mentioned, that being more open to them, and understanding that they are all essential and core to who the whole of all of you are, is so much stronger and better a position to work from. It makes everything easier (from our experience).

-Zor