here for the plural folk.

A (proposed) new system symbol!

I wanted to make my own symbol for systems for a while now, and I finally came up with one that I liked. It’s a center point (or circle, if you prefer!), with 8 outstretched “arms” that either spiral in on themselves, or dip back into the middle (as shown in the second row in the middle). It could be called a plural sun, or a plural spiral.

This is the same general design with some variations, because it can really be drawn in any form that you want. The inspiration primarily comes from how octopus have 8 outstretched limbs, each one with a mind of its own to the point where they often work independently of the central brain. I was also partly inspired by the Sun, because of how stars have multiple layers inside of it and work together internally to function throughout its lifetime.

we are subscribers to the belief that persecutors are misguided protectors.

We never want to encourage people who have no reason to believe they have trauma to go down wildly speculative roads in order to disprove a negative (ie: the absence of trauma). That said, we worry that the DID/OSDD-1 communities and the non-trauma multiple communities are so separate that many people might accept non-traumatized multiple identities without exploring possible warning signs of trauma. If this doesn’t actually happen and it’s just our vain worry, then that’s great. In case it happens, here’s our post.

The most commonly accepted and most widely known explanation for multiplicity is that you (or perhaps others in your system) went through trauma. The concept of endogenic multiplicity is somewhat new in popular conception, and unfortunately psychology does not seem to have had a real look at it yet. Psychology’s lack of awareness does not make endogenic multiplicity invalid, but it does suggest that we presently do not have any stable, set-in-stone criteria for distinguishing DID/OSDD-1 from endogenic multiplicity. This is especially true if you consider that some self-identified endogenic multiple systems have members who have been through trauma (but see the trauma as unrelated to their multiplicity), and some DID/OSDD-1 systems believe the true source of their multiplicity came before the trauma or is somehow separate from it.

There are some situations where people have thought through their conditions and concluded that they fit neatly into the traumagenic or endogenic category. While this opinion is controversial among DID/OSDD-1 people, we believe it is possible for multiplicity to exist without trauma. That said, we imagine the multiplicity would look quite different from DID or OSDD-1. Many people we’ve met have experienced things that psychiatry does not quite account for, and they believe these experiences (and not physical or emotional trauma from this life and plane of existence) produced their multiplicity. Some say they co-incarnated with other spirits or are hosting walk-ins from other worlds. Others describe experiencing past-life trauma that split them on the level of the soul. We’ve also encountered people who believed that their multiplicity was a hard-wired neurodivergence rather than a developmental condition.

We don’t have any particular problem with non-traumatized people saying they’re multiple. However, we get worried when we see people claiming to be 100% trauma-free while showing symptoms and behaviors like:

Black-out level dissociation.

Difficulty communicating with alters that is significantly more intense than the struggle you had to get along with a fussy roommate in college.

Serious walls or barriers preventing fluid communication between system members.

Trigger responses to topics like sex, sexual abuse, genitals, members of a specific gender, certain relatives, child abuse, or other subjects that are commonly triggering to survivors of abuse.

System members who seem like they stopped growing/aging/developing at a certain point in the body’s life.

The presence of alters who deliberately emotionally, physically, or sexually harm other alters as if it is their job to stifle your progress and make your lives difficult.

Not every DID/OSDD-1 system will have these signs, but I sadly have seen many of these in certain endogenic systems I’ve encountered. If you are experiencing these things, the following are not conclusive proof that there’s no trauma:

“Between the five of us, none of us remember any abuse.” Basically the whole point of disorders like DID and OSDD-1 is concealing trauma. If you are sure there are exactly five people in your system and there is no one who suspects or remembers any trauma, then it might be reasonable to conclude that there isn’t/wasn’t any. However, there are a couple things to double-check for before you conclude that. First off, are you absolutely sure that you five are the only ones? If not, make sure you haven’t been neglecting any dark/foreboding/unpleasant parts of the system where members may have different stories than the ones you five know. Second, are you sure that members of your system cannot disconnect from certain unpleasant emotions, memories, or experiences without fully switching? Sometimes individual alters will split or simply lose touch with memories, feelings, and emotions in response to trauma. This can leave five separate people who are each convinced there is no trauma even though they all went through trauma.

“Sure, we were pretty unhappy as young kids, but nothing we experienced was ‘bad enough’ to count as abuse.” A lot of systems who say this eventually reveal that they were seriously emotionally abused, that they were neglected as young children (but not sexually abused), that they experienced sexual abuse they consider “less serious” than experiences they’ve read about on survivor blogs, that their parents hit them in a “normal” way, or that they went through something else shocking and personally violating like terrifying and painful medical procedures as young children, losing loved ones at a young age, etc. ISST-D says that DID can come from physical, sexual, or other trauma inflicted in childhood. This leaves a wide range of possibility for what could “count” as “enough” trauma.

“Our parents were good people.” Having good parents does not guarantee that you were not traumatized. Were you ever alone with people (of any age) who were not your parents? It is also important to realize that many dissociative systems have members who idealize their parents and other caregivers after dissociating from trauma. It’s not necessary to investigate your parents if you all feel there is no evidence that they physically, emotionally, or sexually abused you (and this includes times when it “wasn’t that bad” or “was normal” or when they claimed it was somehow your fault). It is, however, a good idea to make sure that you are safe.

“My therapist/dad/friend/cousin/psych professor/etc told me I seem normal.” This was one of our reasons for doubting there was early childhood trauma. It’s pretty common for everyone to think they’re an expert when it comes to other people’s trauma and health in general. However, even a therapist cannot know you better than you know yourself. If you are showing signs of trauma, it may be worth exploring those regardless of what this person thinks or thought.

When we first became aware of each other, it was 2008 and the schism between traumagenic and endogenic online communities didn’t exist yet. We felt free to explore our origins, and as a result went from assuming we were endogenic to confronting the trauma. We were surrounded by a very supportive community who were accepting either way.

The moment you argue that a particular logic overrides these rights, that In This Case The Ends Justify The Means, you have opened the door and let abuse enter the discourse, because now it’s Okay to insult, control, and coerce people In The Service Of Pure Ideology. It’s not far from there to an entire community stepping over the missing stair.

As Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” When the methods used to Protect Abuse Survivors are this similar to the methods used to abuse them in the first place, they’re the wrong methods.

DO NOT REPOST THIS COMIC. IF YOU WANT TO SHARE IT, PLEASE DO SO FROM THE SOURCE.

Here is my submission for @zakeno’s Mental Health Zine to help fight stigma in the professional field. My contribution is about my experiences with Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is sadly highly stigmatized and misunderstood, even within the mental health field (despite there being tons of concrete research to support it). Coming out about having DID is a thing that makes me very nervous, admittedly, but I want people to know that Dissociative Identity Disorder is very real and we deserve to be acknowledged and not feel like our existence has to be hidden or shameful.

I’m posting this comic in full is because DID deserves so much more recognition than it gets, but please go check out the kickstarter for the full zine and consider supporting it:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1056477701/the-animated-brain-mental-health-in-the-animation

Since I was limited to 5 pages for this specific project, this is only the very bare bones introduction to DID, and there is easily a million more things that can be talked about in how it presents and affects people individually, but hopefully this is a comprehensive introduction based on my personal experiences.

Even though this is only 5 pages, it was one of the most difficult projects we have done and took a few months because trying to get everyone as an alter to contribute when they were fronting to show our range in skills was a waiting game. Sadly, we were running out of time so sort of just had to have whoever was out at the end finish it (which was mostly Devyn).

Like briefly talked about in the comic, DID forms in response to repeated childhood trauma (generally by ages 6-9) when failing to integrate a singular sense of self is needed for survival. This failure to integrate experiences, memories, etc. leads to these self states being able to function independently from each other and control the body at different times with varying levels of amnesia between switches. As time goes on, the more each part experiences different aspects of day to day life, the more and more differentiated and developed they can become from each other. Even though alters can be highly distinct and can function as if they were individual people (and boy can it feel that way on top of a lot of us preferring to be acknowledged as separate from each other in our body), the reason it’s called Dissociative Identity Disorder and no longer goes by its outdated name, Multiple Personality Disorder, is because alters aren’t actual separate fully-fledged personalities, but instead a single individual’s life and experiences split up from each other in a bunch of dissociated self states.

If anyone is interested in knowing more about DID, I always recommend this website as a great source: http://did-research.org/

I’ll also throw in the Myths and Misconceptions page: http://did-research.org/did/myths.html

Spoilers: No people with DID don’t have secret killer alters and are no more dangerous than literally any other person. DID is a defense mechanism/way you develop to navigate your environment, and for us specifically, we continued to be victims of abuse and mistreatment even until recently due to our amnesia and lack of awareness hiding the knowledge when people were harming us.

Ehhhh…. No.

Here’s the thing.

You can have a mental illness or neurodivergence (autism is most emphatically not an illness) and also have a system.

Your differences can have an effect on you becoming a system.

Some mental illnesses can be so distressing or otherwise contribute to so much distress and even trauma, that especially if they hit early in life, especially if there’s parents or guardians or caregivers who are abusive in their attempts to “fix” you, that they are contributing factors to someone becoming a traumagenic system.

But they themselves do not cause you to become a system. The root cause of the traumagenic system’s multiplicity is still the trauma, not the mental illness or neurodivergence itself. The root cause of the endogenic system that also has mental illnesses or neurodivergence is that it is part of their nature, the way they grew, their beliefs, or any one of a large number of reasons that aren’t trauma - and AREN’T their mental illness or neurodivergence. (There’s almost as many reasons endogenic systems are systems, as there are endogenics themselves.)

So. You can have MADD and also a system. MADD can be a contributing factor to whatever caused your system, whether it be trauma or no.

But it itself does not make someone become a system.

I hope that makes sense.

[Image descriptions: Various screenshots of mental health articles outlining the three main diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia and psychosis: delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking. One explains that delusions are verifiably false beliefs that are not accounted for by culture or religious beliefs. One explains that hallucinations are objects, events, and sensory experiences that are verifiably nonexistent or false. The last defines disorganized thinking.]

Endogenic multiplicity is not psychosis, or schizophrenia.

1. Endogenic systems are not delusional: It cannot be proven that endogenic systems have or don’t have system members. Claiming to be multiple is not something that can be shown to be true or false, and there is no evidence of what does or doesn’t cause multiplicity. Believing your system is endogenic is. therefore, not inherently delusional.

2. Endogenic systems are not hallucinating: It cannot be proven that the system members in endogenic systems are nonexistent; it cannot be proven that their experiences are not real. Communicating with system members is not usually a sensory experience reliant on the physical sensory organs– meaning, hearing system members doesn’t usually involve the body’s ears– so the accusation of psychosis/schizophrenia on the merit of “hearing voices” is usually moot. While some auditory hallucinations do take place “inside the head”, there is no evidence to prove that system communication isn’t a hallucination when it happens in traumagenic systems, but is a hallucination when it happens in endogenic systems.

3. Endogenic systems do not have disorganized speech: Endogenic systems are not being incoherent or illogical merely by claiming to be endogenic. There is no scientific or psychological proof that multiplicity, as a general phenomena, must be caused by trauma.

4. Endogenic systems are not impaired by their beliefs: While any system type can face distress and impaired functionality due to being a system, the belief itself that one’s system is endogenic does not cause the impairment. Endogenic systems do not face a loss of function merely because they believe they are endogenic.

Disclaimer: It is possible for any system of any type to be both multiple, as well as psychotic or schizophrenic. The two can overlap. This post is merely stating that endogenic systems are not psychotic/schizophrenic just because they identify as endogenic.

Stop saying endogenic systems are psychotic/schizophrenic just because you don’t like or believe them. It is incredibly misleading, and potentially dangerous. There is no evidence that supports such claims.

Sources:

1. Katie Hurley, LCSW, DSM 5 diagnostic criteria. 2018. https://www.psycom.net/schizophrenia-dsm-5-definition/

2. David B Arciniegas (Baylor College of Medicine), MD, article on psychosis. 2015. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4455840/

3. Chandra Kiran and Suprakash Chaudhury  (Department of Psychiatry, Ranchi Institute of Neuropsychiatry and Allied Sciences), MD, article on delusions. 2009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3016695/

4. American Psychiatric Association, article on delusions and hallucinations. 2016. https://psychcentral.com/lib/whats-the-difference-between-a-delusion-and-a-hallucination/

5. Marcia Purse (reviewed by Steven Gans, Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital, MD), article on hallucinations. 2018. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-are-hallucinations-378819