#mike posts

Hey!

Checking out the criteria for DID/OSDD/UDD in the DSM or ICD might prove useful to you, to tell if you have disordered symptoms within your system.

Here's some parts of the DSM! Note that we've only shown the criteria here, and not the extra parts within the entries.

Though, to be disordered, you don't need a specific disorder. You don't need any particular label like DID or OSDD, because being disordered simply means that your plurality is experienced as disruptive/harmful/etc in some way. It doesn't even have to be all the time or every aspect of your plurality--everyone has bad days and good days, and different symptoms affect people differently. If you get distress from it, it can potentially be counted as disordered.

A lot of common symptoms that could be considered disordered are:

Dissociation that's disruptive or upsetting.

Amnesia/memory loss/gaps that disrupt you or upset you.

Headmates causing distractability that upsets you, such as getting in the way of IRL tasks or general downtime.

Switching during inapropriate times/places without being able to stop, such as a child headmate fronting at a business meeting and therefore not being able to properly attend the meeting.

General distress related to your plurality in some other way.

Being disordered is generally about the impact it has on your day-to-day life and how you feel about it emotionally.

That could be a lot of things.

Maybe otherhearted could fit? From the wiki page I linked:

"The nature of the connection has been described in a variety of ways, including seeing the being as family, wishing or aspiring to be the them, being "almost" one of them, or feeling like they ought to be one but are not."

If you'd like to become that creature, though, consider otherlinking!

This is a common thing for tulpamancers to do, and one of the main reasons people get into making tulpas or other headmates. This can absolutely be effective, but there's some stuff you need to keep in mind.

Your privacy. You're planning on making a whole new person to share your entire life with--this includes private time, your day-to-day activities, etc. They're in your body and your brain, so they'll likely be able to know a whole lot about you. You need to be ready for this.

Your headmate might not stay the way you plan. Even if you have a sort of "template" for the person you plan to make, they're still a person that can do whatever they want once they achieve sentience, including... Things you don't want them to. They might end up not liking you too much, and trying to push them in directions they don't want to go might make it worse. This will be a full, whole person in your brain, and you need to be as ready for this as you would be for a roommate to be basically chained to you forever.

Once again, your headmate will be a person, which means they might want to front a lot. You might end up needing to split your time in half between the both of you, so you have equal fronting time. You also need to be ready for this possibility.

If you've decided that you'd like to make a headmate and you're ready for any outcome, looking up tulpa forming guides could help a lot. There's guided meditations and such too, last I checked. You could also try soulbonding, or even daemonism if you'd prefer. A daemon might be a better option for a first attempt at plurality, as a daemon is essentially another train of thought, but still yours--just projected as another entity, in very simple terms. This site by old-daemon-farts here on Tumblr might be of use.

Overall, yeah making a headmate can be great! A friend you can rely on at all times, someone to always be there. But as with any other person, they might not be who you want them to be, or they might have arguments with you. This isn't all horrible and doom forever of course, you just need to be realistic about what you expect out of creating a headmate, and know that you should treat them as a real person with wants, desires and rights.