I saw a post in the tags about exotrauma, and so I wanted to write some thoughts about it from our experience. So without further ado, on the topic of exotrauma...
(DISCLAIMER: THIS IS BASED ON OUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE)
Firstly, we discredit the concept of exotrauma in relation to otherkin, fictionkin, and spiritual shit. If you had trauma in a “past life”, whether your beliefs are real or not, they do not stand to THIS life trauma, are not comparable and do not give you a pass to speak over people that have experienced in first hand in this life. You also can not form a system due to exotrauma. Exotrauma =/= Trauma. In every case, exotrauma should never be compared to or used to talk over people who have actual lived - in this world, this life - trauma. If you do so, you are a fucking asshole and really being a huge fucking dick. If the body hasn’t lived through the trauma *personally* you have no right to act as though you know what it is like because your brain generated memories and filled in the gaps. Inherently your understanding of that abuse, if you haven’t gone through it, will be wrong and built off of common knowledge from media, websites and information you read online, and stereotypes, none of which are anywhere good enough of a depiction of what it is actually like.
Also on the point of exotrauma, I / we personally hate the term when used for systems. There is no “external trauma” or trauma from “somewhere else.” It is a term very heavily associated and seen in fictionkin / otherkin communities and “faith” or “spirituality” based things rather than a function of DID. We aren’t going to say people who use it in a genuine way as their preferred term is wrong, but we personally really dislike it.
With all that being said, I will be moving forward using the terms I prefer for the topic, which are psuedomemories and substitute beliefs. Psuedomemories can include stuff that feel very real as past experiences and they can include things that the brain perceives as traumatic.
Having psuedomemories that carry “trauma” that the body didn’t live through or - more often than not - that carry trauma that the body did live through, but warped and/or repainted to make it easier to cope with, digest, understand, or conceptualize are real and they can greatly affect the part that has it.
It’s been on my mind a lot since I’m a part that has “trauma” from “events that didn’t happen” that are very real in my memory and as far as shit goes for processing it, it is very similar to how our *real* and genuine lived trauma is processed. Mine is a very light repaint of what the body went through, but how I perceive it is absolutely disconnected from our real life and it is my experience and unique to me. Other parts hold the same trauma, but they hold the “original” and “real” version.
Still, the aspects of what I went through in my psuedomemories fuck me over regularly. Innately, my feelings towards them and my actual trauma response is coming from what the body went through, and the emotions that we had when we went through it, and it is internalized and redirected to what I now experience. This is why I will still have flashbacks and panic responses to my “psuedomemory” shit because my false memories have substituted and rewritten over our experiences without changing the feelings with it.
Similarly, the other part in our system that has both psuedomemories and trauma-related emotional responses to it is similar. With that being said, they have not lived through everything that the brain has repurposed to be their false memories. Some of the trauma they lived through in their psuedomemories did not happen to this body. As a result, they will not act as if they actually know what it is like in the real world or try to talk over people. It would be very fucked up for them to act as if they know the horrors genuinely in first hand experience, because they do not. Their feelings and emotions about them are still valid and genuine because it is internalized from trauma that is similar and how that trauma was experienced, but they do not have the right to talk publicly about the altered / substituted version of their trauma because that would be overstepping what is okay and what is not.
Additionally, Riku, the host, has psuedomemories from their source, though despite there being many things that should have theoretically been “traumatic” (considering they come from a high combat source), they don’t have any psuedomemories that are perceived as traumatic. That also happens and exists.
Not all psuedomemories are traumatic, not all traumatic psuedomemories cause trauma responses, but some psuedomemories can still elicit trauma responses, and with the nature of psuedomemories, they feel very real and personal - even if they had “never really happened.”
Also, as I said in another post, psuedomemories, substitute beliefs, and “exotrauma” aren’t exclusive to introjects. Riku and the other part mentioned in this are fictional introjects; I on the other hand am just alter, and not an introject of any form.
Substitute beliefs and psuedomemories happen and it isn’t abnormal that when they happen to have emotions that were found in real life experiences the body went through to be attached to them, especially if the psuedomemories and substitute beliefs closely resemble what *actually* happened to the body.
