Under Construction

Hello all! Our name is Sprites and we're conducting a survey regarding the existence of, and the relationship between, fictives in fandom. We're a system primarily made up of fictives and were inspired after talks with @thesaltinstitute to make a survey to discuss this topic. We're curious how it'll turn out! Please feel free to reblog this and share this in other spaces off of Tumblr to anyone who may be interested in this!

Description: We are conducting a survey regarding the relationship between fictives and their thoughts/engagement with fandom at large (either for their source's fandom or different fandoms they are not related to.) Please try to fill it out once per body/system (as there's options for multiple choice answers and spaces to elaborate on inner system differences.)

Timeframe: We'll leave this open for a year (end collection in the beginning of April) and then it should (hopefully) take only a month or two to go over results and post them.

Take the survey here!

If you are interacting with plural systems, you should be, at a baseline, expecting different system members to behave differently.

This means calibrating your expectations differently for each headmate, which then requires some effort to figure out or ask who you're talking to.

The most common way to encounter this reality, tends to be with fronts that are ruder or more aggressive than average. While it may be important to respect the boundaries of whoever your system interacts with, sentiments like "I don't like that alter they're scary/mean/rude" or "i miss the other you who was more affectionate" from bad allies, are frequently a result of simply failing to do this calibration.

If you learn what it means when a colder, more standoffish headmate speaks to you - which of their sentiments express genuine affection. If you learn to understand rudeness or playful ribbing as a sign of trust and friendliness. You can map the different expressive ranges within a system to the same sets of things they communicate.

These are even the same skills you should learn meeting new people. If you can, for example, come to understand someone's autistic affect as not simply disinterest and don't abandon those connections.

The cases where plural exuberance oversteps other's boundaries are all very visible failures though. What often fails less visibly are the ways allies failing to calibrate properly can hurt a system.

Many systems have alters who front to handle conflict (either voluntarily or not), but might work to hold their less confident fronts for longer periods and teach them those same skills. Other systems may have less control over their fronts, or even have more fragile and vulnerable headmates triggered by conflict.

What this means is you also need to be able to step down onto a gentler level for interacting with these headmates. Trying to have the kind of heated argument you might expect to function with another adult, with a younger or more emotional part of a system, can easily turn one sided, leaving them feeling distressed or abused. Long term damage to relationships can happen in these spaces, e.g. "i thought they wanted to see me so i fronted, but then they told me off and i shut down and don't really trust them any more".

While it's inevitable to hit some front mismatches, or miss a switch that required a change in behaviour or attitude, these small missteps can usually be easily rectified (honestly just talk it out). What is essential is learning how to adjust your expectations, and not carrying the same expectations onto every system member long term.

Plural self advocacy is exactly what it says on the tin: plurals taking control of our own lives and being in charge of how we’re represented. It’s what happens when we speak for ourselves instead of letting singlet academics do it for us. Plural self advocacy has a long history that stretches before the existence of the internet, and it has made a difference. Here are some notable milestones, and what they’ve done for us.

1987ish: Truddi Chase is giving interviews (x, x, x), very openly insisting that her headmates are real people and that integration is not a solution for them.

February 1989: The first issue of Many Voices is published. This newsletter for and by trauma survivors with dissociative disorders is likely one of the first places that plurals could speak about their experiences on their own terms. It would run for over 20 years until 2012, when it was bequeathed to the ISSTD so that the issues could be made publicly available.

1993: Richard P. Kluft’s ‘Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder’ mentions Truddi Chase’s outspokenness against integration, disdainfully. ‘Some perceive the alters as real people’, it says. This paints a clear picture of how multiplicity was perceived at the time.

1995: Astraea’s web is created. This site continues to be one of the biggest plurality resources out there, and Astraea themselves have had a wide reach in plural activism - they’ll come up several more times in this article. They have curated a wide selection of sources on early accounts of plurality, plural involvement with legal issues, and the struggle against psychiatric abuse by all kinds of neurodiverse people, not just plurals.

1998: The Vickis begin to compile experiences of the ‘midcontinuum’, giving us the first terminology to describe median experiences. This is also, as far as we’re aware, the origin of ‘plural’ as an umbrella term.

2001?: darkpersonalities publishes ‘why we are not MPD/DID’, generally regarded as the first known instance of a system explicitly separating themselves from the ‘disorder’ definition. The empowered multiplicity movement grows from this. While many people take a cynical, bitter view towards people who still identify with their diagnosis, it begins to be associated with more sympathetic stances as it develops (x, x, x). Many of us look back disapprovingly on darkpersonalities’ attitude towards triggers and survivorship, but their role was still foundational to the concept of empowered multiplicity.

2002: Tim Bayne writes on the moral defensibility of forced integration, laying out a grounded  philosophical argument for considering non-host plurans autonomous people. It’s unknown what influenced him to write this paper, or whether any plurals were consulted.

2002?: The activist group Pavilion is formed. Their activities include outreach towards mental health professionals and academics, interviewing for radio stations, creating informational pamphlets and compiling resources for plurals and interested singlets.

2003: Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order, acknowledges Astraea and a plural friend-of-a-friend for introducing him to natural plurality and the idea that plurals don’t have to integrate, inspiring his book.

2011-2013: The Coalition for DSM-5 Reform writes launches a campaign to urge the DSM taskforce to change much of the proposed writing. This gets a lot of attention from plurals, and as such the DSM-5 revises its definition of DID to include distress/impairment, and for the first time accepts the self-reporting of plurality as valid evidence (x, x). It’s worth noting that this is an incredibly small step - as Astraea’s web says, ‘It was not proposed because therapists are beginning to recognize that non-disordered multiplicity exists; it was proposed in order to accommodate members of cultures and races where being more than one person is contextually normal.’ But it’s a step, nonetheless, that begins to recognize that plurals are the ultimate authorities on our own experiences of ourselves.

May 11, 2015: VICE interviews systems including Astraea and Oure Gaiya for a piece questioning if plurality is always a disorder.

2016: The plurality playbook is published internally at Google. It covers advice for plurals on succeeding in the workplace while dealing with the specific challenges that plurals face, and advice for singlets on respecting and assisting their plural coworkers.

January 18th, 2019: The Double Gears system (well known at the time as streamer and speedrunner protomagicalgirl) disclose their plurality on Hbomberguy’s DK64 stream for Mermaids. The hashtag #pluralgang trends on Twitter as a result, encouraging many people on twitter to come out as plural and many more to realize they’re plural by being introduced to the concept for the first time. #pluralgang has been a consistently active hashtag for the year since its inception and continues to be used to share resources, organize meetups, promote activism and generally remind plurals that they’re not alone.

The plurality playbook is also publicly published around now. In the new foreword, the Lizzes cite the activity surrounding #pluralgang as their motivation for this.

March 2019: The first Plural Positivity World Conference is held. It was created as a counter-conference to the one hosted annually by the ISSTD. The fees for attending the World Congress on Complex Dissociation and Trauma start at $200 for just one day, making attending near-impossible for the lay person. As the Crisses put it, “The ISST-D holding meetings, disseminating information, creating policy, teaching new standards for treatment, discussing new options, or sharing their research findings about us should not be done in a place that by design excludes us.” The Plural Positivity World Conference will run again in 2020.

December 25th, 2019: Power to the Plurals announces The Plural Association, a peer network for plurals which intends to provide phone, email and live chat helplines.

To this day, the overwhelming majority of plural activism has happened outside of the medical model. Improvements in the treatment of plurals have come from us being seen as people, and singlets seeing us as people has come from us viewing ourselves that way - by making spaces for us to understand ourselves and create narratives that aren’t bounded by pathology. Even changes within psychiatry have mostly been motivated by pressure from plurals demanding fairer treatment. It is good, and necessary, for us to speak for ourselves. We have done so much, and still have so much more to do.

This month’s article was written by Joey, one of our community mods and volunteers, and voted on by our Patrons. You can write for us by applying through our volunteering page, and decide what ideas we tackle by pledging $5 or more a month.