- angry syskid who actually knows about mental health activism, plural history, and trauma and plural psychology

[Warning: this post does mention some abuse that has happened in our life.]  

Discovering we were multiple is a slog of dismissal of symptoms and denial up until our early 20s. During our late childhood we had some vague sense of something being at play in our mind but we didn't understand what we were experiencing. We did experience amnesia, had extreme trouble communicating with another, and few of us were on friendly terms making our lack of understanding even worse. As with our autism and early symptoms of severe gender dysphoria our symptoms were dismissed and ignored or we were actively punished (physically and verbally) for not conforming to what family expected.  

 As a teenager our multiplicity became more and more apparent with every passing year but our need to 'appear normal" out of fear of punishment lead to us to hide our deteriorating mental health due to our lack of cohesion and our untreated dissociative symptoms. This added to our continued lack of support for gender dysphoria, autism, childhood trauma, and depression did not help our mental and emotional health in the slightest. Around age 16 (2005) we gained access to the internet and stumbled upon the concept of multiplicity and related topics some months later. Our realization started off well at first as we quickly started matching symptoms and experiences as we read more and more. However, fear and anxiety lead to us panicking and rejecting the idea that we could be multiple because we *had* to be normal because anything else would lead to punishment.  This lead to a period in our life when our mental and emotional health hit an all time low. The tiny spark of cooperation that had tentatively gotten people within our system just starting to not flee from each other, was destroyed. People started proclaiming themselves the "real one" and everyone else was imaginary, and worse still people actively tried to wipe others out of existence. All for a false ideal of being "normal." It nearly killed us. The internal assault only ended when everyone but Earth Listener hid from everyone else, leaving her the sole person who would front. Soon after  a few brave souls poked their noses out of where they had been hiding in our mind (Lunatani, Cavern-Risen, and Kardegray), and it was quickly realized how wrong things had gotten. How badly things were.

It took most of our early 20s to start recovering. First we had to recover from the worst of what we had done to ourselves. Only then we slowly started working on everything else. With the tentative acceptance of our multiplicity we slowly began accepting other aspects of ourselves. Things we thought we couldn't accept about ourselves.

 During this time, when we were 23 years old we were sexually and emotionally abused by both our new "stepfather" and someone we thought was a friend. Both had discovered our being asexual and non-binary at the time and wanted to turn us cis and straight. (Our stepdad also hated us for being pagan [as well as being autistic] and threatened to kill us on numerous occasions including one time tossing gasoline on us  and threatening to toss his lit cigarettes at us, but that it another story.)  The added trauma lead to more emotional and mental complications including the creation of new alters. People were slowly coming out of suppression and hiding as well. So building trust and communication was paramount around this time.   It wasn't until we hit 26/27 we really started settling in to a normal. We had been seeing therapists for a while at this point. Our multiplicity was no longer hindering our mental health and together we started tackling what to do with our depression, gender dysphoria, phobia of sex and pregnancy, anxiety, and other things hindering us thriving. Now we are 31 and things have settled down even more. Our multiplicity is just another part of everyday life and we are continuing to work on our mental health.