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"You're quieter than usual."

"Are you feeling okay?"

"Quite the chatterbox today, aren't you?"

"But you said (x opinion) earlier!"

"You don't need to use big words, you can talk like you normally do."

"You're too old to play pretend."

"I thought you liked/didn't like (x)?"

"What's the occasion for this sudden fanciness/attention to detail?"

"When did you gain such an attitude?"

"You're such a strange child."

"Your demeanor changed."

"It's like you see (x) and a switch is flipped."

"Don't act like you're a little kid."

"What's with the sudden accent?"

"Are you alright?"

"Talking like a Victorian child now, are you?"

"You're so... quirky."

I look back at the posts we’ve made just here on tumblr and it hasn’t even been a year since we’ve had the app and I don’t remember making 95-98% of the posts.

Any social media comments, all the captions I’ve written, hell even looking back at my phone gallery it’s like, damn— I’m sure this happened but I don’t have any memory of it happening, I can’t replay the memory in my head I can’t think back.

I found a video of us goofing around in class with a friend and she put something in her mouth to pose with it and it was all fun n games. If it weren’t for the video i never would’ve known that happened.

It’s just tiring. it’s so tiring to not remember anything sometimes, it’s like my memory is a video reel that’s burning as it leaves the recorder (idk the term but it’s the 🎥 🎞 this thing)

This is a topic that's not talked about often, and when it is, it's only talked about feeling shame about not being able to handle your trauma. That's absolutely a valid feeling, but I wanted to talk about all types of shame when it comes to being a system. This is purely from personal experiences, so yours are likely very different.

Trauma

The one part of shame that is talked about when it comes to being a system is trauma. I feel upset and guilty that I couldn't handle my trauma and my brain had to turn to a system to cope instead. I feel shame around my abusers, that they were once (some still are) a part of my life. I feel shamed that I can't handle normal things anymore and not dissociate because of trauma. I feel shamed that I couldn't take care of myself (or anyone else take care of me) enough to prevent me from needing to resort to being a system (even though being a system is me taking care of myself). The lack of the ability to help myself makes me feel guilty, like I should have been able to but I couldn't and it broke me (quite literally in the sense of being a divided conciousness).

Amnesia

I feel guilty whenever I don't remember things. When a friend mentions something and I don't have a clue what they're talking about. I feel shame when I'm supposed to write about something in my past but I can't remember. I feel shame when my partner mentions something from our past but due to the nature of our trauma and increased memory blocks, I don't remember what they're talking about. I feel shame whenever I have to reask teachers on how to do something or what I'm doing because it wasn't me fronting and I barely remember. I feel shame knowing there are things in my past that parts split from that, even though on a normal level I remember a little, I have complete blackouts whenever they front.

Identity Alterations

I feel shame whenever I have to correct the people around me on my preferences because another part told them theirs. I feel shame whenever they change because people try to keep up with it but it gets difficult, especially with so many of us. I feel shame whenever my needs and boundaries change depending on part and people have to adjust to accomodate it. I feel shame whenever our friends notice we're different even when we mask, because it means they notice how different we really are from them.

Not Being "Body's Name"

This may be one of the ones I feel the most shame around. I hate whenever our friends start talking about times with the previous hosts and I have no idea what's going on, it feels like they want me to be a singlet and like I shame them. I feel shame whenever the body's family stops by and I pretend to be part of their family, even though I feel as though I have no relation. I feel shame whenever our teachers talk to us and how it increases dissociation. It's just.. hard.

Treating alters as ignorable parts can just cause worse dissociation and leads you back to square one. You're not a singlet, just learn how to accept that.

Final fusion isn't bad either, if you're doing it right. But if you're going into it with the mentality that you could be a singlet, it's not helpful. It will cause you more pain, especially if you're not ready to accept all the trauma you went through.

It's okay if you don't feel like a whole. It's okay if you don't feel like the same person. It's okay, you don't have to be a single person. I need people to stop forcing that onto systems. I'll never reach final fusion, because we don't want to. Don't force that onto other systems.

No system has to prove singularity to you, they're not problematic when they're inconsistent. Please respect systems, no matter how healed or unhealed they are. We literally have complex post traumatic stress disorder. It's built into dissociative disorders. No system needs prove wholeness or singularity. Stop making that the goal.

The goal is to accept trauma, to work together. You can't do that if you're ignoring your own damn needs.

Depersonalisation:

It feels as if my whole life was a dream

Or a game in which a player makes choices, but I'm not the player, I'm the character that's being controlled

Hands, arms feel very heavy, but not like physically? And also as if there were prostetic which I do not control, just look at what they do

When I touch my face it feels as if it was paralyzed like after the visit to the dentist

When I look at my body, hands, I feel as if I was looking at hands of a person sitting next to me. I don't feel any connection to them

The line between what's my body and what's not is very blurry - it's hard for me to understand that my arm and foot are me, but the table, cup or a pen are not

I don't recognise myself in the mirror, it's as if I was looking at somebody else's picture/video

Derealisation:

It feels as if the whole world is made of cardboard. I don't believe that the objects have a solid form, only the outer layer

Words don't describe objects and objects are as abstract of a concept as words that we assign to them

The whole world is fake, arbitral and there is no reason why it looks... like it does

Trauma hides from you. You can forget that you forgot, you could just think that nothing happened to you, because you, as an alter, is unable to access that memory.

I recently found out that I repressed a memory that I'm unable to place at the moment, and other ones. I have so much that I don't remember, because I repressed it.

And dissociative amnesia isn't always recognizable, there's 5-6 different types of dissociative amnesia. And, not being able to recall memories is just one part of it.

You don't need to have blackouts or possessive switching to have dissociative amnesia.

The reason why trauma isn't on the symptom list, is because you probably won't find out about it until you're in recovery, until you already know about systemhood.

I'm still grappling with the fact that I thought I was OSDD-1b all this time. Just think about how a polyfragmented system, thought they didn't have amnesia. That's fucking scary.