I’m A Man Of Many Questions

Why do you use the term system, or use other terms meant for CDD systems? Why not make another separate word?

I’m honestly overwhelmed a little, but I think that’s part of learning new things. As nerve wracking as it is to say it, I am pro endo now. I’ll probably have to hide that from my friends until further notice.

I’m disappointed in myself for falling down a transmed-esque pipeline again, but I’m glad I got out a lot faster this time. I’m starting to join more pro-endo spaces, and starting to avoid spaces that aren’t.

My current plan is to, if prompted, tell the anti-endo people in my life that I’m going back under the rock I was living under because syscourse is tiring. Which I kind of am, but they don’t need to know that a change of opinion is part of that.

I want to tell them the truth, that I’ve grown and changed and believe different things now, but I risk losing them if I do. I’ll just have to be careful, I guess.

Thank you guys for answering my questions. I appreciate it a lot and I think my life will be a lot easier now that I’m not wasting energy hating people that did nothing to warrant it.

I might as well reveal my identity now. I don’t know if tagging it will reveal anything to my friends who follow me, and the blog can’t be searched, so here’s the url. If it doesn’t work I’ll just tag it idk.

Do you talk to people offline about being endogenic? Do you talk about being a system at all?

I've gotten an answer to this question via an answer to the previous question, but I'd love more perspectives on it because I always assumed it was an online thing but now I've learned otherwise.

due to system related shenanigans, we've been in two different psych wards. the first one being where we actually got our DID diagnosis.

our current therapist who has work with people with DID before is pretty supportive of our nontraumagenic origins. like, whether or not we become a singlet is irrelevant to her. people are allowed to be odd. she's moreso aiming for us to not be disordered, and encourages us to use our nontraumagenic stuff to heal the traumagenic disordered stuff.

which, has been working quite well. recovery has ups and downs, of course. but we've made a lot of real improvement after embracing our nontraumagenic origins stuff alongside us having DID.

it's also one reason why we won't ever turn our back on created systems. although the origins of our system initially is paragenic and traumagenic, willomancy has helped us out by leaps and bounds.

I do think your therapist has an interesting method, though, and if it helps you that’s good. I might talk to my therapist about it, but apparently there are therapists that disagree so idk.

I also have DID and think I have mixed origins/alters of other origins. I tend not to tell people at work about the system as the times I did I was treated differently and I don’t wanna deal with that. Not that they don’t, but that’s for other reasons.

So for endogenic headmates specifically. We form them unfortunately very easily. Most of them are directly related to our autism(specifically hyperfixations and learning about the world through introjection whether that introjection results in headmates or not). They still appear in the complete absence of trauma. We absolutely avoid headmate creation guides because simply learning about them has been known to split headmates and simply thinking "I wish X existed for X reason" is enough for it to exist within the week. If our brain thinks we need it even for a mundane reason we will split it. We simply split without distress too easily(which can honestly be distressing to try and figure out who are all these new people). We are at this point approximately 50/50 as far as trauma formed to endogenic headmates.

Your perspective on autism induced headmates is actually very interesting as antis don’t think it exists and believe it’s just fragments latching onto things. I think both are possible as I’m also autistic and have introjects from things I was interested in that have little, if any, association with trauma or stress, and am polyfragmented so there are a lot of fragments that could latch onto an interest of mine. I have my doubts that the subsystem of mcyt alters formed from that one incident alone, especially considering we’ve never watched the series they’re from.

I definitely see how after a certain point the origin of a headmate doesn’t need to be the priority. It never was for me because I was taught that all of them Must be trauma or stress induced, and even the thought of anything else was not allowed and would be punished if found.

Every memory of us past that is all four of us Willows together. We grew up with a lot of teachings about what we thought was like us - be the same person throughout the week as you are on Sunday, don't be double minded, listen to your inner child, etc. We thought we recognized several similar things in our parents and friends - they're in their emotionally fragile part so that's why they're so touchy and angry about nothing right now, etc. We fought and blamed each other a lot growing up, until we went through some pretty severe trauma at age ten and banded together: there's nothing wrong with us, it's THEM that are wrong.

At 15, when we started writing, we created a character and muse, Jas, who we spent thousands of hours talking to. We believed she was just a character. She believes she has always been real. We created other characters who had the same sense of realness, but drove most of them away by treating them terribly.

At 26, we stumbled on the tulpa community and realized (after some denial) that we'd done on accident what other people did on purpose to create tulpas, after an argument with Jas where she refused to take back something she said or let us imagine her not saying it. We realized that our headmates are full people, 100% outside of our control. We apologized to Jas and worked on rebuilding our relationships and doing right by our headmates.

We still believed we originals were one person, until after trying to learn how to switch. It felt like part of "me" was stuck in the body and kept rubberband snapping us back into the body. We talked about this sensation with friends, and one, a DID system, mentioned median systems to us.

Turns out that no, people aren't being 100% literal when they talk about arguing with other parts of themselves as if they're real full people, or their inner child, etc.

The fact that our headmates didn't have this kind of separation should have been a clue. (Jas has an inner and outer self, as the things she thinks are often very different from what she chooses to do but she's still in control of both parts of herself. Doc is close, as he has an awareness of his previous incarnations, but it's still different.)

So when we were trying to switch, we weren't getting all four of us Willows out of front at the same time together. Once we realized though, it was easy to get us all out and for our headmates to front without us Willows being in the way.

We're 38 now and there's 12 of us altogether now, and we literally don't know how to NOT be a bunch of people sharing a brain - it's all we've ever known.

We know we are arranged differently from traumagenic systems - while we all have trauma, none of us are traumaformed. We could write another five page essay on why we know that, but in brief we have thoroughly examined ourselves in comparison to several different trauma models, and we don't fit any of them.

We've also been in therapy off and on for over ten years for our depression and ptsd, and every therapist and psych doctor we've seen in that time has said we're obviously different people - once you know us and know what to look for, it's pretty recognizeable - but we don't fit the criteria for a dissociative disorder because we don't have issues with general dissociation nor do we struggle to function due to our plurality, and we don't have memory issues outside of specific physical health conditions (fibro flares and migraines, both of which mostly manifest as expressive aphasia - difficulty being able to put our thoughts into words and forgetting words.)

The only professional we've seen who disagreed was a pastor and counselor who didn't know it, at the time, hadn't been called Multiple Personality Disorder for well over a decade, said we couldn't be plural because God breathed into Adam and Adam became one soul, wanted to help us "heal" by getting rid of everyone else other than the "real" us (we never did get the chance to tell him we originals are a median system lol) and many other stupid things like that.

Our case was even discussed with Dr. Richard Loewenstein, who used to run a trauma and dissociative disorders center in Baltimore and has written dozens of papers on CDDs and has been referenced in hundreds. He said that so long as the others in our head aren't causing us distress, we don't have DID. There's also an episode of a podcast called Reply All that has an audio interview with him, courtesy of the same journalist Laura Klivens. There used to be a decent-ish transcript of it up on Gimlet Media, but it's not there anymore, and the Spotify transcript is pretty terrible.

I don’t know much about tulpamancy other than that it’s considered a closed practice. I don’t know who’s allowed to use it or if you’re part of that group but that’s honestly not my business.

What antis would usually say to this is that it’s either repression or a different mental illness. I think repression is the more likely of the two, but I’m not going to put a label on you because that’s not my job or my business. I’m opening up to the idea of neurogenic plurality I think.

I can state this a million times but I don’t wanna be repetitive so I’m going to state that what I say is not something I’m assuming is 100% true because it’s 1. Not my business and 2. I’m not a professional I’m just a stranger on the internet. I think a lot of people tend to forget that that’s the case for them, as well. Even if I were a professional I don’t know you and I can’t diagnose you with anything if I don’t know you, especially with a typically covert disorder.

You did refer to your first step”mother” (that’s an earned title) as stepwitch, which usually implies trauma or at least sone sort of bad relationship, which can be traumatizing and permanently damaging to a child whose ego states haven’t fused yet. A person who’s done more research and is more prone to butting into people’s business might be more willing to make guesses on that. The point is that that implies the possibility of being traumagenic.

So repression is a possibility but it could also still be a religious/spiritual practice, and I’m not going to try to prove you wrong because that’s not the goal. If anything the goal is to change my own mind. I also don’t practice tulpamancy and I don’t plan to as I follow different beliefs, so it’s not my place to say anything on it.

In the research paper it says that you told your partner and other people in person, which is another question I wanted to ask. I always wonder if people talk about being endogenic offline or keep things on tumblr where you can basically do whatever you want because the general populace doesn’t use it. I always assumed it stayed online, but I also know someone from my high school who faked having DID, albeit that’s a completely separate thing from this. If you were doing that, you’d call it DID, and you’re specifically not doing that, so I’d be an ass to say otherwise.

I think the issue antis have is the term “system” being used for non-traumagenic plurality. I’ve also been of that opinion, and sometimes I can’t tell who made some terms because antis tend to reclaim terms that are not made for them, so I know you guys have made words for yourselves. It kinda bothers me that people who want a CDD-only space are punishing others for having their own space by taking their terminology and causing problems intentionally. I will admit I bothered someone on my main in the past and I regret being aggressive, though we did have a good conversation.

What I’m realizing with this post is that people care way too much, and that includes me as well, which is why I made this blog. I’ve been “if everyone consents, it doesn’t affect me, and it’s not morally wrong I don’t care” with everything else but this and I’ve been justifying my hypocrisy by making blanket statements about things that no two people experience the same way. It sucks that I have to limit the people who know about this blog, because I think a lot of my friends could learn from being willing to ask questions and listen to the answers they get, too, but I guess that’s how echo chambers are.

The spread of misinformation is also an issue for antis, but I don’t know much about that because I don’t read much of the research stuff and tend to avoid endo spaces. I prefer to stay in places that I’m comfortable in and avoid things I’m not, and I think a lot of people forget they can do that. I’m choosing not to do that on this blog as the one issue with that is that you surround yourself only with people who agree with you and you don’t learn and grow, and I want to do that because being normal is better and more enjoyable than being a hater towards people who didn’t do anything to you.