endo systems are valid 💖

[plain text : aww, did the little sysmed realize that they have no proof ?? awwwww 🥺🥺]

like im sorry do NOT be commenting on our posts if you dont wanna catch these hands (and by hands, we mean peer reviewed, published papers about non disordered plurality from respected doctors that specialize in dissociation, OSDDID, and trauma)

so uhhh,,,, if you wanna get a sysmed to leave you alone, just tell them about dr. eric yarbrough, or dr's nijenhuis and van der hart, or the ICD-11, or the DSM-V-TR, or dr richard loewenstein, or a paper published by zarah eve, kim heyes, and sarah party called "Conceptualizing multiplicity spectrum experiences: A systematic review and thematic synthesis" ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cpp.2910 ) or the acedemic article dating all the way back to 1991 that talks about non-disordered plurality (ross. 1991), or like. just reference the lived experiences of hundreds of people and ask them why they think their opinion is more valid then peoples lived experiences

The way you're told by people that you literally cannot and do not exist. The way that you go years tearing yourselves apart and desperately fucking trying to force yourselves to act like one person because you don't even know there's any other way to exist. The way so every system I've known personally has either been suicidal in the past or still is suicidal now. And the way that so many of us were threatened with or forced into hospitalization when our masks started to slip. The way that the leading (ex) psychiatrist on treating the disorders they forced on our community would love nothing more than to massacre us. The way that we're robbed of our very names and identities. And the way that outing yourself as plural is becoming a stranger to your community.

When you mock any aspect of a systems existence you're reminding them both that you dislike their existence and also of the violence and ableism they've faced. Like I need you to realize how grotesque this ableism is it isn't even a micro aggression when y'all mock us it's cartoonishly evil and so absurd.

If the only way you know how to interact with the system community is to mock us for "cringe" aspects of systemhood (having a huge system, an inner world, fictives, having different accents, in system relationships, etc.) then I would rather you shut up about systems forever we don't need your opinions and none of our existence or community is for you

We don't really ID as endo OR traumagenic, but we definitely don't ID with DID or OSDD. And like honestly if we were to somehow be magically convinced or coerced into believing our experience was more along the lines of DID/OSDD? That...would be a huge identity crisis or "sense of reality" crisis for us.

I mean we're confident in our own experiences so I don't think that's a huge risk for us, but just. Stop & think about what you're doing for a second. A lot of younger and/or newly discovered systems might be way more vulnerable to that sort of thing.

You're not their therapist. And any good therapist - anyone with even the most bare bones knowledge of mental health!! - should know that anything that might REALLY destabilize someone's mental health state...should be handled very carefully in a safe setting with a trained professional, and only at a pace the person is able to handle. Not some rando online who really won't give a shit or be able to help (let alone want to) once they've set in motion something that...could really hurt someone. Could really do a LOT of damage.

I don't want to go into much detail on public, but we consider ourselves a mixed origin system. We do have some members who fit the traditional/medical DID/OSDD model, and we can tell which members those are, but most of us are here for other reasons.

And I know for sure I don't ever want to be thought of in that way because it just doesn't apply to me. It also causes a sort of identity crisis for myself. I know that's not how I got here. It's obviously valid, I love our system members that did form that way, but it invalidates me and is incredibly anxiety-inducing.

As a whole system, we don't know if we're endo or traumagenic because we don't know what happened first, but we identify with both, probably would be diagnosable for DID, and also do not and will not ever feel comfortable around anti-endos. I imagine we would have struggled a lot (and would have had more stress and less functioning than we do) if we had first learned about systems from people like that.

Each system member is an individual.

(Disclaimer: This is only meant to apply to us in the Galaxy Collective (Star system & Sol system -aka @inkedacrylic ). Other systems may have different preferences - best policy is to simply ask.)

Just as much as anyone else you meet, system members who all happen to share one body are full-fledged individuals with their own preferences, relationships, personalities - and most importantly, names & pronouns!

These names & pronouns aren't "preferred" - they're required.

We recently saw an excellent metaphor about a group chat - in a group chat, you have no problem referring to each person by their own name & pronouns. It's a no brainer.

It should be no different for plural system members. We should be treated just as you'd treat any other people around you - as individuals and not all as the same person, despite sharing a body.

We understand that at least with our systems, referring to each system collectively can be hard and confusing, since even we haven't figured out a good way to do that yet (beyond system names, which can be awkward & clunky in normal conversation).

But please refrain from treating us all as one person or referring to us as the body's name (if you know it), except in mixed company.

~☆~☆~☆~

We're gonna be fully vulnerable and open for a minute here.

Coming out as plural is legitimately terrifying. When we get treated as though everyone who happens to share each body is just one person, & called the body's name, we feel frustrated & dismissed - invisible. Like us coming out was pointless, and like we're sort of being shoved back into the closet.

It's still pretty hard to be fully ourselves & talk about our plurality even with our most supportive friends, who always make it super clear they have no problem using our correct names & pronouns & do so regularly! But with people who don't address us properly, who have never talked to us about it beyond the initial acknowledgement that they now know & are (seemingly) totally cool with it, & who have never let us know they want to know anything about it or use our correct names etc, & who continue to talk to us as though we're all the same person & call us by the body's name...well, it's even harder to be genuine.

Its okay to make things for your system

Its okay to function perfectly as a system

Okay.

I'm just going to focus on the bullet points here...

The blatant disrespect towards Buddhists and Buddhism.

The main point here is that an English word was created as a loose adaption of a foreign concept, and then the meaning of that word further changed a lot over the years until we got to where we are now.

That's how etymology works.

I don't really care about the word, TBH. I would actually rather something more psychological and less mystical in origin, but the few academic studies into endogenic systems have used the tulpa community, so this is the name that's going to stick.

Ultimately, a word is just a word. My existence isn't less valid because we don't like the common term for it.

It is neither scientifically nor neurologically possible to create consciousness.

It's difficult to nail down what human consciousness even is or how it works.

How about this: We experience plurality as two voices or "aspects" within the same head. We communicate with dialogic inner speech. We each have our own identities, individual and often contrasting emotions, as well as our own separate autobiographic connections to memories we've formed. Each "aspect" is capable of taking over the body separately, or even possessing individual parts of the body such as an arm. We also can also each can influence the imagination/headspace.

Is this a separate consciousness? Who knows? We'd have to decide what consciousness is first. But this is what and who I am.

(most academic literature I’ve seen refers to them as a form of induced hallucinations, as does one of the wikis; induced hallucinations is what you can safely say they’re most likely to be)

This is conflating two different things. Imposition is an act of imagining something so thoroughly that it is indistinguishable from something real. A tulpa can project themselves this way in the outside world. Disordered systems with good communication can likely learn the same skill if the alters wished. As can singlets who just want to imagine things really vividly.

The tulpa is not a hallucination. The image of the tulpa is a hallucination.

I want it understood clearly that you cannot hallucinate something in your head. You don't hallucinate thoughts. You think them. You don't hallucinate feelings. You feel them.

Internal experiences cannot be hallucinations.

Systems are not multiple consciousnesses in one mind - rather, they are one consciousness that has split off into separate parts/alters. Comparing cases of multiple consciousnesses to cases of separate parts of one consciousness is damaging to systems as it plays into the old stereotypes and outdated information surrounding "Multiple personalities”, a misconception that systems are trying very hard to get away from due to the stigma surrounding it.

Don't you hate it when the part of your consciousness that is literally an anime character breaks off and starts thinking for itself, complete with false memories of its source?

Why is the narrative of what DID is being written by singlets who, like the Chair of the DSM IV taskforce who named the disorder, often don't even believe it even exists and would rather it be removed as a diagnosis altogether. Like I said before... consciousness is a hard thing to nail down. You are never going to find any studies confirming that headmates aren't separate consciousnesses because we don't even know what the consciousness is.

If you'd like to view headmates as aspects of a single consciousness, you're welcome to do that. At the very least, it is true that they're part of the same biological organism. But at this point in time, theories of "consciousness" are more for philosophers than psychologists.

There are many disordered systems who choose to view their alters as their own individuals, and invalidating them seems unhealthy.

My personal view is that the brain is a computer capable of running multiple programs. Each program can think for itself and communicate with other programs internally, but they operate on the same hardware.

online Western Tulpa communities will often rope in lonely, depressed or anxious young people and will convince them that this will help them with those things or even fix their problems.

And according to the only information we have available at this time, it works.

The science isn't perfect here. More studies obviously need to be conducted. It's not a cure-all, but all evidence we have right now suggests that the majority of people who have made tulpas report positive improvements as a result.

I’ve seen plenty of cases where young, vulnerable systems are roped into this and end up entirely convinced, for months (sometimes years), that they created their system on purpose - this is especially true for systems who do not remember their trauma, which is very common. Once they realise that this wasn’t the case, the damage is done and the system as a whole is much worse off for the experience.

Personally, I tend to see the opposite. I see a lot of healthy systems who are brainwashed into thinking that because they're a system, they must have DID and be traumatized. They know that something is going on in their mind. They know that they have multiple voices in their head. And so they go to the next thing despite not showing symptoms of the actual disorder. (Dissociative amnesia, uncontrollable switching, etc.)

So many of these videos on TikTok are people with no dissociative amnesia and full control over their switching. But they claim to have a disorder despite having none of the actual disordered symptoms. They convince themselves this must have originated from trauma.

In my opinion, pushing the belief that systems can only originate from trauma is going to make a lot of people think they have trauma that they don't have. This is damaging for both the non-disordered systems who are told this, and the actual disordered systems who are looking for support from actual fellow traumagenic systems.

It’s incredibly difficult to accept you’re in a system, yes, but it is much harder to try and pick up the pieces and work on communication after you’ve spent months or years telling yourself that you quite literally made it up.

Wanted to make this a separate post, but I have brought this up multiple times throughout this blog. With most terms that are currently attempting to replace tulpa/Tulpamancy, definitions like parogenic and willogenic miss one crucial fact: not all tulpas are intentionally created.

Even when not talking about these terms, there are sites that mistakenly list tulpas as solely intentional, completely ignoring the fact that 30-40% of tulpas are unintentional via things like the 2018 community census. But to the uninformed, you're likely wondering, "Wait, Tulpamancy's a specific process, right? How can tulpas be unintentional? Wouldn't they just be standard headmates at that point?" which there are multiple explanations for this that I will list below:

Reason 1: Imaginary Friends

Some people keep their imaginary friends past childhood, continuing to interact with them. Eventually, this imaginary friend evolves to be sentient or into a tulpa. This is unintentional because the vast majority of the world does not know what Tulpamancy is or how to create a tulpa. A child who kept their imaginary friends past said childhood isn't aware of what they're doing, thus they created their tulpas unintentionally.

Reason 2: Fictives

A study finds that a whopping 61% of writers feel as though their characters have a sense of agency, as forcing is literally just interacting with a thought or idea until it becomes sentient/sapient. So why is it so far-fetched that a good handful of writers unintentionally created tulpas through their works? Like with imaginary friends, most of these writers have no idea what Tulpamancy is or what tulpas are, and had zero intentions of creating another sentient lifeform by just... writing a story.

Reason 3: Coping Mechanism

Some people who struggle with say, mental illness may come up with the idea of talking or confiding into an imagined form or presence to cope with their situation. And because the simplest way to create a tulpa is to talk to the void until it talks back, that imagined presence or form can also become sentient, maybe even to aid the host with their situation and coping depending on how long the host does this.

These are just three common reasons for an unintentional tulpa to form, but the question remains: how they still tulpas and not just endogenic systemmates? Well, that's easy to answer: tulpas develop through a process and over time. They do not just magically appear out of the blue like other systemmate types. And like intentional tulpas, unintentional tulpas may still have to learn skills like vocality and switching/possession.

As such, a system with unintentional tulpas may someday happen upon a site like Tulpa.info or r/Tulpas and have that moment of, "Oh, THAT'S what you are!" which lots of people have had those experiences.

So, to take away from this post, keep in mind that Tulpamancy is just something humans can do whether they know what they're doing or not. As such, unintentional tulpas exist and make up a large part of the community, and they shouldn't be ignored like the words parogenic and willogenic have ignored them.

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Parogenic literally excludes unintentional tulpas, which makes up over 30% of them. If you want to be inclusive, then stop excluding people who don’t fit with a word you’re trying to use that most of that community doesn’t actually use. I’m legit getting sick of it.