ghosts in a machine

... they really do be out here reinventing plurality for schizophrenics and seemingly it helps?

I can't say I'm that surprised, in a way? The definitions of "auditory hallucination" vs "hearing voices" vs "in-system communication" are extremely poorly delineated in a lot of research we've been looking through. Several authors seem to note that directly in passing and then never question it again or really interrogate what that might mean.

Recent therapeutic approaches to AVH have gained attention by encouraging voice-hearers to talk to their voices. This may involve “empty chair” work, role-play, or dialoguing with a computer simulation of a distressing voice. Such techniques exploit person-like qualities of AVH and treat them as entities that can be conversed with meaningfully. Talking to voices has not always been encouraged for various reasons, including fear of reinforcing beliefs about the reality of the experience. However, promising results in long-term voice-hearers suggest that dialogue may be considerably beneficial for some.

We've done some more digging since. More detail about these therapies is given in Relational Therapies for People Who Hear Voices (Thomas et al., 2025). There's Relating Therapy, which:

[…] involves the longitudinal exploration of the client’s “relational landscape” and identifies patterns of non-assertive relating […] and in-session role plays are used to practise assertive ways of responding, in which the therapist may play the role of client or voice.

There's AVATAR Therapy, where:

[t]he voice-hearer is supported to create a digital representation of the embodied voice (ie, the avatar). […] They then engage in a series of dialogues with their avatar which is voiced by the therapist using real-time voice-transformation.

And then there's Talking with Voices, which:

[…] considers voices as representations of parts of self with a psychologically protective function underlying their often negative content. Therapy involves psychosocial education and coping enhancement, an exploration of voice identities and characteristics in relation to life history and significant real-life others, and in-session voice dialogue exercises in which the client focusses on the voice and verbalises what it is saying to allow the therapist (or “facilitator”) to directly question it.

(Special shout-out here to the Hearing Voices Movement, which we first encountered via Sarah K. Reece when exploring our own plurality and trauma history.)

The important bit here is in the TwV approach and how it considers voices "representations of parts of self with a psychologically protective function".

This is the same base assumption underlying the theory of structural dissociation (yuck), but if you reframe it a bit, it also underlies various people's conception of plurality:

voices represent parts of the whole,

the parts want to protect the whole,

you can converse with them for the benefit of the whole.

So once the daddy schizophrenia research and mommy attachment theory like each other again and start talking to each other again (it is bewildering just how few cross-references there are between the two areas, given that both experience voice-hearing), we might finally start seeing some official therapy guidelines that recommends treating "parts of the personality" as autonomous beings with beliefs and motivations.

for the record, i get why we're doing the blog rebrand thing, but also i think it's dumb and we should keep the old theme, even if we do make a separate nsfw side-blog. it looks better, it fits us better, i think we were making good progress past infantalizing ourself when we came up with my sona, now it's kinda like we're back to square one, like who tf is this cutsey blobby rainbow ghost-amoeba-alien thing? yes it's a cute design and looks nice but that's not us, ok maybe it's kind of some of us, but i don't want to be represented by that. i thought the ghost idea was fine at first but I thought it'd be cooler. Maybe if i take the little uwu :3 mouth off again. I know they added it to make the pfp look less sad or whatever but like :/ come on...

It's already hard enough being a chubby 5'3'' trans guy with long hair and a somewhat higher voice (in most social situations). I hate when people see us as cute or innocent or whatever. Like the person in our ornithology class a couple years ago who was surprised we smoked weed (we don't smoke often but even at that point we'd smoked more than them).

Ok slight side-tangent, we've been on T for 2 years now and even with visible facial hair, pronouns on our nametag, and absolutely nothing about our appearance being fem (accept maybe just having medium-long hair? and having tits? bc we do too much physical work to safely bind + it's too hot for that shit anyway), we're constantly misgendered. Even by volunteers who i've been working with for like 3 months now (though to be fair they misgender my nb coworkers a lot too :/ ). I'm tired of it. top surgery can't come soon enough. and hopefully oneday speaking in our new natural lower register will come more naturally. I think i'm better at it when i'm fronting, the others aren't. Esp at work talking to the guests and stuff, our default is to go higher, "customer service voice" and all that, because we don't want to sound "rude" by not having enough inflection or sounding unenthusiastic or whatever.

ok back to the original topic- haunted-hoard was the one blog name I kinda liked because at least it's partly dragon related. I get that it doesn't match the new sona as well, and paranormal-petridish is a good name, it's winning on the poll for a reason, and the mad science fucker loves it ofc 🙄, i just wanted one thing on the blog tied to me (and AJ! not that he's been any help.. 😑)

The premise is that, through a series of mysterious circumstances, Rylan comes to be possessed by Vex's ghost. The two can swap who's in control of the body at will with their eyepatch (yes I more or less stole this from Theseus' Guide, everyone go read that fanfic now), and will eventually learn to basically co-front and share control of the body (as soon as they learn to get along).

Vex was a necromancer in life, but suffers from amnesia post-death and doesn't remember all the Horrible Shit he did. Rylan is an Oath of Redemption paladin who originally wanted to give Vex's soul a second chance, but didn't plan to get stuck with the guy in his head forever. They have a complicated relationship.

Anyone who knows us probably knows how important D&D is to us, but our system has trouble sometimes with playing consistent characters when we can't control who's fronting from session to session.

These guys are our solution to that!

lord help us both

edit:

In all honesty, I still don't know for sure that my parts are part of a dissociative disorder. I have no diagnosis (even though I don't truly believe in the necessity of diagnosis), but I am believed by my therapist. Me and my therapist have agreed for years now that I experience C-PTSD, but again I do not have a diagnosis on paper.

Ultimately, I don't know how to parse a lot of these things. I don't like putting labels on any of it, so I don't. I know it's not just flashbacks because I don't just feel like an earlier version of myself. I know it's not just being genderfluid or having a fluid sexuality because it's much more than my gender identity and sexuality that changes. I know it's not just my mood for the same reason. But I don't know if it is the symptom of a dissociative disorder, either.

I'm just me. All of me, every part, even if they're different and even if they don't get along. I still experience denial sometimes, though. If you experience denial, I urge you to consider why. Not to say that you are wrong about what you are experiencing, but instead that examining what is causing your doubt can help you solve it.

Sometimes that means you were wrong, other times it's insecurity, other times it's just another part of what you're experiencing. There is no shame in any of those things. Self exploration is important, identifying who you are and what makes up you is important even if those components are or are not separated by dissociative barriers.

I am cautious to tell people that they should accept the existence of their parts with no question because it can be harmful for some. Not all, of course IFS exists and can be beneficial to people without dissociative parts to understand the inner workings of their mind, but for some it can do more harm than good.

Be careful approaching the idea of having parts too quickly. I approached it very, very slowly, and only recently have I come to accept that I cannot go back to believing I had a whole and integrated identity. I, however, am still functional knowing that I have parts.

I also do not want to entirely pathologize the concept of being distinctly faceted. Not every person who has parts of themself that they can distinguish is experiencing a disordered condition. Human beings are complex, and we should be allowed to experience our lives and ourselves how we choose to. But we don't need to label any of these experiences to understand them. Words are constricting, they create a structure that is not always congruent with every experience. As much as people like to say that words can be fluid in meaning, I do not agree about all words.

At the end of the day, just listen to yourself and examine what makes your experience yours. Don't worry about what to call it UNLESS you are in distress and desperately need professional help. If you are functional and uninhibited day-to-day, I would not worry about diagnostic labels.