A Watcher's Archive

one who obviously cares more about hating endos than supporting pwCDDs.

Median love! 💞

I guess it’s really that simple sometimes…

back in the days when we went through syscovery the attitude was not “have an idea for a headmate? fuck it, make them now!” but “if you’re going to create a headmate, you need to be absolutely 100% certain beforehand that you’re going to respect them regardless of who they turn out to be & whether or not that aligns with your expectations, even and especially if they’re a fictive who ends up nothing like the character they’re based on and/or completely disconnects from them, 100% certain you’re going to be able & willing to give them time in the body [if switching is possible, and back in those days it was heavily desired and encouraged for those who couldn’t switch to build the skill], 100% certain you’re going to spend the necessary time and emotional energy engaging with them, fleshing them out until they can figure out the rest, interacting with them even when you get no responses back for hours, days, potentially many months without giving up and allowing them to dissipate out of frustration, 100% certain you can handle the new existential ramifications of your own new existence as a headmate,” etc etc etc. if you were flippant about thoughtform creation you would get downvoted or disliked into oblivion, some of the comments would be calling you empathyless, akin to a murderer if your thoughtform dissipated because of you

there was definitely a time when willomancy was seen as risky, a HUGE life decision that should be given the same consideration as having a real, physical child (this was a SUPER common talking point), and that wasn’t necessarily better than some of the more relaxed modern attitudes because it had the effect of scaring people away from willomancy who may have benefitted from it but it also meant that a lot of the systems who DID get into willomancy did so with a good sense of the gravity of the situation, acceptance of any and all deviations, with a lot of thought already put into it, a lot of time + energy set aside, a lot of care already generated for a being that didn’t exist yet and may not exist for months to years. you didn’t usually find willo-ed fragments because if you intentionally left a thoughtform half-complete that’d be really frowned-upon (as a thoughtform who remembers bits and pieces of the time other alters were creating me i can attest that this is not a fun state to be in)

but now i do see some willo-ed fragments around who barely are allowed to front or further develop themselves outside of picking stock traits from curated lists online and i feel a bit sorry for them. there are probably some oldheads out there who hate the idea of BAH blogs and i don’t agree, i don’t HATE them, but i do feel iffy about the idea of that being the only method some people use for willomancy and/or fleshing out traumagenic fragments. because even for those of us who do have those traumagenic fragments, trying to flesh them out by choosing to label them aliengender or aggressive or whatever is only going to help you so much. what are the nuances of their aliengender identity? under what circumstances are they aggressive, what triggers do they have, how does their aggression manifest, why & how is it such a fundamental part of their person that they’re labeled an “aggressive person?” if you’re a system with low communication that makes this process much more difficult if not impossible. if you decide a fragment should be a traumaholder and they weren’t before, you could open them up to being exposed to memories & experiences purposefully hidden from them. these are all questions and considerations old school willomancers would make, write both long lists of traits AND explanations/descriptions for them, put their willo in various hypothetical scenarios to test & figure these traits out more intuitively.

i’m worried that we’re becoming a bit too lax about willo creation and that the resultant thoughtforms & systems will suffer for it. i have no way of knowing how people are using these blogs or any of the popular willo methods, and of course there have always been people who didn’t take it seriously and ended up hurting their thoughtforms & themselves even back when we were warned over and over and over about it, but with the modern attitude of “just make your head blorbo, don’t worry too much about it!!!!” i find myself wondering if there are more willomancers like that today than before. who are struggling or maybe should never have become willomancers in the first place because they don’t have the adequate resources to manage the process and weren’t warned about it or encouraged to give it some more thought.

while it’s a net positive that plurality is gaining acceptance & being seen as less of a life sentence of misery and more as another way of life that can be miserable but can also be desirable, fulfilling, satisfying—i don’t think we should allow it to be seen as something super easy, risk-free, harmless. because it isn’t. it isn’t like raising a real-world child but it is like taking care of and nurturing a whole new person, and if you don’t pour into them what they need to grow, they’re going to stagnate and that can cause a wide range of problems for yourself and/or the rest of your system.

i don’t think this means traumagenic & disordered systems should avoid willomancy or endo spaces though. we went through syscovery mainly in willo spaces, working together to build a couple thoughtforms before discovering both long-buried and quietly active traumagenic alters & getting diagnosed. i’m grateful for that because it allowed us to explore ourselves without feeling the shame a lot of syscovering disordered systems feel. systemhood was destigmatized for us way before we discovered we were a system ourselves and we have willo communities to thank for it. that being said, should most traumagenics & disordered systems who already know they’re a system be extra careful about willomancy? fuck yes. we inherently have less resources to dish out and many of us who don’t have well-functioning gatekeepers or gatekeepers at all will have a hard time intentionally allocating body time for the willo. you’re taking the chance that this willo will turn out to be some sort of person who’ll cause problems with other alters, not just whoever they meet outside the body. if you’re very destabilized internally attempting willomancy can further destabilize you.

I have a best friend who I came out as a system to about 2 years ago and I can tell she just straight up thinks I’m lying.

Ontop of that, a lot of my headmates have very complicated relationships with her, our protector has a strained relationship with her because she dosent believe us and she frequently can’t tell when he’s fronting even though by now it should be very obvious or even when he tell her he is. our youngest headmate is mad that she’s no longer a child and feels as though her best friend is gone, the one she remembers. No other headmate bothers to interact with her and gets embarrassed at the idea.

She’s my best friend, she’s been my best friend quite literally since birth and she will continue till we die, we are sisters. But I can’t drop this one thing that’s been nagging me for 2 years now.

She will be nice and polite, I can talk pretty freely about my system hood stuff but I know in my heart that she thinks I’m total bullshit.

She’s a extremely sceptical person that I understand but this is such a major part of myslef that it feels like a kick in the gut to not be believed, it takes a lot for me to tell someone about our system hood, and the only person I can be completely unmasked with is my girlfriend. I just want my best friend to know who we really are.

Endogenics are not claiming to have a disorder due to their plurality(except in cases where they have trauma they typically fully remember to back up actually needing treatment). It is focused on non-disordered experiences of feeling like you are more than one regardless of autonomy of parts. This includes things like parts work, code switching/masking, delusions and a natural lack of stagnancy of identity that comes with other identities or disorders. If it makes you feel like you are more than one and benifits you to identify as such its plural(a term coined explicitly to be pro-endo). It is regularly a theraputic coping mechanism for adverse experiences as the majority of endogenics have significant trauma(many significant childhood trauma) alongside multiple disorders(regularly developmental and/or trauma based) that they report and makes day to day life naturally more difficult for them.

And willogenics specifically? Are actually the least like other created plurality types as it developed as a practice in the plural community instead of the singlet one. It is more often used to create headmates in already existing systems over creating plurality from scratch. Its also commonly used for traumagenic parts such as with elaborating fragments or aiding in difficult traumagenic splits. Yes one can be both traumagenic and willogenic at the same time without it contradicting one another. When you go "I wish x could exist to help me cope with this trauma"(whether consciously or subconsciously) and an alter that is x forms to deal with said trauma that falls under willomancy per the community definition(doesn't not mean you have to see or identify yourself as such with how common an experience this is just that some with that experience will identify it as willogenic as it benefits them to do so and fits the definition).

Now radqueers... We need to acknowledge that there is a distinct difference between radqueer experiences and radqueer community. Because the community 100% is harmful and breeds potentially dangerous situations but the experiences themselves are regularly normal trauma responses that have been demonized outside of the community. I don't touch the radqueer community but of the few transDID folks I've met all of them are OSDD-1 systems who have atypical dysphoria and feel less valid due to the community treating DID as the more valid disorder. TransTrauma? Is commonly those who don't feel like their trauma is enough(usually again because it has been invalidated) to justify the trauma response they experience. Demonizing radqueer experiences when they are in that community due to having their normal experiences demonized only exacerbates the problem. Using their experiences to demonize others who have a completely different experience exacerbates the problem.

CW for slight cursing

below the cut is a comic of an interaction between Citrine (🍊🧡), our host, and Yarrow (💛🌼), our system manager, who tends to be more logical rather than comforting at times. (plus featuring a few other headmates)

if anything is hard to read, please let us know, and we'll work on changing the colors, font, or anything else to make it easier to see.

Better than nothing I guess