hello! this is an anonymous question because ive been looking into polyminds and find it interesting and a bit relatable but im nervous to involve myself in spaces i dont identify with 😅
would you be okay with sharing how you figured out you were a polymind and what distinctions helped you come to that conclusion?
ive felt disconnected from my personality for almost my whole life and i was wondering if discovering being a polymind came with any identifiable factors? can you talk to your sub-personalities? can switches completely change how you act or is there always a part of someone else/the body? how do they affect how you like to be perceived? what are different ways minds can be created? i know this may vary based on who i ask but answers from people with experience help me alot
you dont have to answer all of these (or any) but i'd love to hear a firsthand response! i find this all very insightful and the community seems quite positive :) thank you!!
AHAHHAHA YES YES YES THANK YOU I WILL ANSWER.
It's important to note my parent ego state seperated when I was 4, so I've been polyminded for AWHILE.
Basically for me, I thought I had PDID. At seperate times it felt like I was being kind of controlled, or influenced. But I don't have any other symptoms, and also my country doesn't use the ICD. So when I found out what a polymind was, it was like everything in my life just clicked.
Basically, if sometimes you feel like you're being influenced by someone not you, but someone part of you, then yeah I'd say thats polymindence. But again this is my personal experience and others may experience it differently as it's a very broad label.
My minds are my ego states and fear responses (the other 3 are copeIDs, identities I "made" to cope). I have noticed that I'm abnormal in the community, as most polyminds minds are more general, mine are very specific.
I also very much do talk to my minds! It's more I'm verbalizing what that part of me is thinking, if that makes sense. So if there's a decision, I'll "talk to myself", lets say I want to do the thing, but my fight fear response is against it, I'll talk to my fight fear response to figure out why.
Personally we are also plural (2 main personalities), but with our minds it is very much there's me AND the mind, not just the mind taking over. But I can definitely feel and act different depending on which mind is active with me, especially when a mind is mindbound (forced to be active).
We generally have one overall identity that stays fixed, but depending on whose active, it just "highlights" part of it. Like while "Mom" uses she/her and collectively we don't, when she's active we don't feel as much dysphoria so we're much more okay with being misgendered. Again, I'm pretty abnormal with this, my minds are all freeform, meaning they're not based on anything specific, so depending on the mindset the answer will be different.
Personally mine seperating we're kind of accidental? But also a little on purpose (when I was younger). I was just kinda like "huh, I don't want this to be me, goodbye" and then they weren't me (hyperbolic and being a little silly).
Thank you for asking though, I'm pretty abnormal in my polymindence so I probably wasn't a lot of help. This definitely inspired me though >:)