Content warning: in system violence, self-harm, child sexual abuse, child sexual exploitation, organized abuse,
I feel that we need to be more able to speak on what we are and what has happened to us. Though spilling words into the screaming void of the web is certainly not the safest way to go about it, I feel it will make it harder for others in the system to deny if it is said publicly.
We refer to the system in childhood as "the children", because no alters that were active then are active now. So saying "us" does not feel accurate.
The system was first discovered(at least in the context of dissociation, it is likely that the children had some sense of their multiplicity that was attributed to an active imagination) in May of 2022, about a year and a half into therapy, the first alter count was six. We discovered the system because a friend pointed out our symptoms, the main host at the time, who thought he was the "original" and considered himself the most important alter. We knew the the children had experienced, some degree of, child-on-child sexual abuse from a best friend. In addition we showed many signs associated with post traumatic stress, so the question of being "traumatized enough" to have a system wasn't dwelled on much.
Early on the host spoke purely in hypothetical terms about the existence of our system. Nearly every mention was paired with a disclaimer about what he said being just what he thinks is likely true. He began to describe his experience as likely being Other Specified Dissociative Disorder 1, with distinct alters and no significant amnesia, often called OSDD-1B. He became more comfortable with the idea of being part of a system in the following months, and uses the disclaimers of hypotheticality less and less. We also discovered and formed a few more alters as time went on, with our count being ten in August of 2022.
By the end of 2022 our numbers were thought to be 12, I had recently come out of dormancy from late 2019. The host at the time reacted very negatively to my presents, he treated me rather poorly in the months after my reappearance. I reacted in kind, there was a tension in the system due to our conflicts, and increasing frustration as there could be no winner nor truly escape from the other.
I started my relationship with my, out of system, lover in January of 2023. This increased the conflict between the main host and I, due to the fact he felt like the body was his and did not like the idea of someone (else) having sex in it. And I was not just going to end my relationship because of his self-centered attitude. Around mid 2023, the main host and I finally began to respect each other more. He realized he was just "being an ass" because he was confused and scared, and that taking that out on me was both cruel and a waste of time. Once he stopped treating me poorly I became more cooperative in the system.
We experienced a major (external) social falling out near the end of 2023 which less us feeling numb and heavily dissociated when going into the new year. We ended the year with 13 known alters. Around then is when the host realized he was not the "original" host.
In February of 2024 after much pondering, I realized that I am in fact part of a subsystem, the alters within alters type. I had before the realization though my feelings of inconsistent identity and experiences of inability to control my actions was due to me having more symptoms of the brain's borderline personality disorder then anyone else. However it became apparent that it was indeed a subsystem. There was, and still is much violence within the subsystem, it is rather unstable, which likely is actually related to the BPD. The subsystem had three other alters in it, four including me, making our understanding of the total system number 16.
I stopped seeing my lover consistently in February as well. Which though unrelated to my subsystem, certainly felt related. This left me feeling abandoned and further destabilized the whole system. This destabilization led to our amnesia to become obvious, which we had in fact always had, we just forgot we had it. We had in fact been experiencing daily life amnesia basically everyday for the entire time. Our period of full blackout amnesia typically only lasted for a few minutes, but they and other forms of dissociative amnesia were aspects of our everyday experience.
In March of 2024 we first consciously encountered an alter by the name of "The Administrator". At the time we thought it was a newly formed alter. It seemed to have more control over the inner world and system functions than any other alter.
In April 2024 we start to remember some more psychological elements to the peer abuse the children experienced throughout the system's whole childhood. Shortly after, we start to learn about systems structure and functions associated with programming, and see a disconcerting number of similarities with the way our system functions. However because we only know of having experienced peer abuse, with the oldest person involved only being three years older than our system's body, we know programming isn't accurate to describe our experience. So we use the term "conditioned", to get the point across. Pretty much right after he made the connection, the primary host gets locked in front with no communication with the rest of the system for ten days. As he tried to get unstuck, The Administrator "turned off the lights" in the inner world, because it knew the primary host was scared of the dark. The host was only able to get unstuck after an alter from 2019 came out of dormancy and "punched the door down".
In June of 2024 we realized that we often form large groups of tiny fragments when faced with distress we can not manage, and that this qualifies as a "complex splitting pattern". That, as well as us having formed another subsystem, made us realize that complex/polyfragmented DID was probably an accurate description of our system, despite our current count of non-fragment alters only being around 35. In September, we realized that the system had at least one more layer than the one that is attached to front, likely more as we did not know any alters that were from where the abuse happened.
In March of 2025 the host experienced a single image flashback of a camera lens accompanied by the feeling of being naked and exposed. Shortly following the image were persistent somatic flashbacks of types of sexual abuse that we had no conscious memory of. We, most of all the main host, had the belief that there was no way the memory could be true. We tried to think of every possible innocuous explanation for the experiences. He ultimately settled on the idea of it being a mix of multiple different non traumatic memories, that just got mixed into the most disturbing possible combination. However the somatic flashbacks continued.
In May of 2025 we learn that our system's layers are in an overarching greater structure, with a central control area in which front access is controlled by an animal alter that has no idea what her actions actually do. This realization made it clear that we have quite a few more layers than we had guessed, that our system is far more complex than we thought, and that The Administrator is specifically an administrator for just one layer and therefore not the most powerful alter in the system.
In October I was journaling and suddenly began to hear distant screams of a little girl from inside the system. I said to her "show me", and she did. She showed me 1 to 2 seconds of video-like memory of the body being sexually abused by an adult man, his face not visible, in front of a camera. As such I no longer doubt the possibility of a history of being used in child sexual exploitation. A month later a different child alter fronted and some of her memories stuck around after she left, they include multiple adults, both men and women still no faces, and specific acts that we had never read about in other survivors accounts. This made it clear to me that the children had indeed experienced organized abuse, and the fact the memories included specifics that we did not read in others experiences made other alters in the system more willing to believe the memories. In December(this month) the host has started disclosing about the memories to people other than our therapist, and the fact the that is what we have been struggling with this year
Our current count for full alters is around 60, however it is unlikely that we will ever have a truly accurate count, so we care less about trying to count. We have four named subsystem, and four named layers, through there are certainly more of both.
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
