#omen-system

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“personal nonsense;;”

Omg we have the exact same thing! And restless legs are a bummer but sometimes stretching before bed works for us? Or kicking really aggressively for a while haha, I think it's another panic response, the body wants to run away so moving a lil bit can fool it sometimes. -Enne

There’s no known root cause for RLS, but known causes of RLS are:

increased caffeine intake

too much exercise

not enough exercise

old age

genetics

pregnancy

iron deficiency 

Parkinson’s disease

peripheral neuropathy (the damage of nerves in the extremities)

diabetes

sleep deprivation

alcohol

kidney failure

anxiety medications or SSRIs

cold/flu treatments

damage to the spine or spinal cord

dopamine reuptake disruption

renal disease

smoking

antinausea medications

stress

It’s not so much as the body wants to “run away.” It’s the overwhelming urge to move. Sometimes it’s just an overwhelming itch, or burning, or crawling sensation, that can only be dispelled by movement. Scientists can locate potential causes within the brain and chemical balances in the body, as well as some physical disorders that cause nerve damage (subsequently, RLS), but there’s no known “this is the reason, 100%. This little part of the body causes all that” answer.

And moving your legs around can help, yes. But for us it just gets worse the more we move them. One of the treatments is, yes, stretching. Some exercise, some cut down caffeine and sugar (we did, no caffeine 5 hours before bed), some by taking iron supplements (also us, but didn’t do shit), and some by taking a prescription muscle relaxer/sleep assisting drug. 

Before we knew what caused ours, we’d wrap cloth around the parts of our feet that get the most wiggle urges. (We can’t wear socks to bed. We just can’t. Bad stim.) Having that pressure on those areas actually seemed to help some. Others were strange rituals we caught our brain doing whenever our feet twitched: not letting our feet face opposite directions when we lay down, not letting them lay on top of each other, keeping our knees bent...somehow those things also helped. 

Unfortunately, our RLS is caused by our anti-anxiety medication, Cymbalta (or the generic, duloxetine). Medications like Lexapro (escitalopram), Prozac (fluoxetine), Lamictal (lamotrigine), Thorazine (chlorpomazine), Halix (haloperidol), and other medications that mess with dopamine and serotonin, or are anti-psychotics/anti-nausea/antidepressants/anti-anxiety/mood regulation, ALL can cause RLS, because they affect the part of the brain -- the basal ganglia -- that receives the most dopamine. Dopamine is involved with fine motor skills as well as mood regulation. Iron deficiency in the brain (specifically) can also cause muscle spasms or urges. 

And as much as I’d love to try another medication for my anxiety, this? This is honestly the best fit. I’ve tried several different non-lithium SSRIs in the past and my god the spectrum of strange and unrecorded side effects I had are more than enough to put me off trying any more. 

Luckily, the true ‘cure’ for my RLS lied in something that you can buy from Walmart for cheap, and it’s so powerful even some PTSD sufferers use it to help them sleep and cope with nightmares: Valerian Root.

You wouldn’t think it. But this stuff is Gold. Move over, melatonin. 

Before my psych gave me Trazodone (which is a prescription that does virtually the same thing, however Trazodone is more for anxiety-induced sleep disorders in general), Valerian Root saved me so many sleepless nights and stress overloads from lack of sleep.

So that’s been our cure, the Valerian Root and Trazodone. (I usually don’t take the Valerian Root unless it’s a really bad night.)

To avoid my anxiety jumping to PANIC! mode because of my slower heart rate (and to keep it from going PANIC! as cortisol reenters my system as I wake up), I take my Vistaril (hydroxyzine) which is anti-anxiety. I call it my ‘chill pill.’ Cause that’s exactly what it is. And I’d never part with it.

So in total I take like 4 pills before bed. But in all honesty I’d prefer 4 pills before bed and having a good 10 hours of sleep, uninterrupted, with almost no wiggly legs, than trying to do only one or nothing and using other remedies that maybe get me 4 hours of sleep tops.

Anyway now you know how I usually cure that RLS problem.

Hey if nothing else you can always chat with us! We don't understand the aggressively anti-endo bullshit either to be quite frank

If you looked back about...two, three months on this blog?

You would find the same behavior from me.

Would it also surprise you I was Mod Smeargle, on altercourse?

The treatment I gave to first order system is nothing short of uncalled for and wrong. I recognize my mistakes. I won’t pretend to be a hypocrite, either, and say “I don’t get it.”

I do get it.

It starts with ignorance and ends with fear. Fear, and blame, and anger. 

Nobody wants to be a system. But having someone to blame for our suffering makes everything easier. 

The jump from “I don’t understand your experience, because the book says this, and I experience this, which is nothing like that” to “you’re obviously a fake, the book says so, and I say so” is very, very short. More like just a few steps apart.

When the truth is? The only reason the book says those things, is because that the (VERY) small number of researchers and psychologists who have studied DID, have only known of it for the thirty or so years it’s been prominent. Hell, before Sybil, we were not known except to each other as plural entities. Did we know what the hell we were doing in those days? No. We weren’t the professionals.

And as much as I preach on the DSM V, it does have its problems, and its addendums. Edits and omissions to the book are viewable on their website, but there has been no changes to the Dissociative Disorders entries since its print. Before the DSM-V, there was no requirement for trauma. But a recurrent trend has been that most case studies of those with diagnosed DID/OSDD has been those who did have some traumatic, or highly stressful, experience in their early youth.

But that is not always the case.

And honestly, our best resources? Come from some of the most heinous doctors. Ross is not the lone perpetrator in forcing people to believe they went through trauma.

Though you won’t see any anti-endogenic blog acknowledging that. 

Ross has a special facility and method of recovery stationed here in Dallas. But I’d rather be dead than ever go there. I’ve heard enough horror stories from those who’ve gone, or who have been under Ross’s recovery structure with other therapists.

With that in mind, think of this: Of the small amount of doctors, do you think any of THEM have any idea what an endogenic system is?

If you try to Google research on endogenic systems, you’ll find none. A few endogenic system blogs on here have a source to one, but I don’t keep that at my side. I’ll believe it when the results come out. I’m sure the tumblr community won’t be quiet about them. 

And the idea that the plural community existed before DID came along? No. DID was always there, it just wasn’t a disorder. It was a community. It was a group of individuals who share a common experience. There was no ‘traumagenic vs. endogenic’ back then because that wasn’t the point. The point was alters. And systems. That’s it. It wasn’t about where you come from, it was about what you are now. 

Which I find that such verbally abusive endo-criticals tend to ignore the fact that, in most cases? Endogenic systems simply identify as such, because the DID description doesn’t fit them. That’s it. The only thing they are missing, is a trauma source. Dissociation? They have it. Switch headaches? They have them. Introjects? They have them. PTSD? A lot of them have it. Amnesia? Most have some level of amnesia. 

Literally the one difference, is that they do not have a recollection of early trauma.

Yet, much like those who enforce the belief that they MUST have been abused or traumatized onto their patients, these people insist there is no other way to be, than to have trauma. 

That, in and of itself, can cause great distress. Enough to split. Let alone, the formation of false memories of abuse. Have they considered such? No. Not in the chats I was involved in.

Am I saying these endo-critical people are as bad as Ross? God, no. Heavens, no. Please, don’t ever think they’re remotely close to such a monster. They may be verbally abusive, threading the line between cyberbullying and outright hate speech, but my god I’d never think of that and I implore no one else think so either. But I can see how the impressions of Ross’s ‘you can only come from this, you just don’t remember’ ideology came from the DSM-V’s rather flawed entry. 

The other thing I know they have most anger about, is the spiritual persons within people’s systems.

I still do not feel comfortable with tulpas, or alters that did not split from trauma. I am especially terrified of soulbonds. Before, when I was still strongly endo-critical, I believed these things had to be delusions, or the alters’ false belief that they came from beyond, when in reality, those were pseudomemories. I still hold onto that, but much more leniently. I’ve now learned, rather frightfully and painfully, that this belief came from a cult that used these very same concepts, but twisting them, to affect and even control its victims. Me being one of them. And because of that, I can never trust the honesty of not coming from splitting through stress. 

I’ve lost the plot here so let me go back.

Endo-critical individuals make up their own reasons for things endogenics do/are, because hearing their side takes more critical thinking than they might have been taught how to do. They try to make a simple explanation for the way non-trauma systems are, but that’s the thing: There is no simple explanation. This diagnosis, this disorder, is still in its infancy. So little is known, and the facts we do know, come from rather questionable sources, but those sources are all we have right now. To use them as gospel, is dangerous. The truth is, there is no truth. There is no ‘this is how it is,’ because we still don’t know. We don’t know. We are only just now looking at the broader picture. We are only just now beginning to ask, “what about systems without trauma?” When not long ago, that was never a question anyone would have posed, and didn’t, until the requirement was added to the DSM.

I can’t say there is a universal, concrete truth that fits every single scenario poised at it. I’m saying we’re too early in the game to talk like we have one yet. And trying to say ‘this is the only way, we know everything now, we don’t need anything else’ is absolutely useless, and completely giving into beginner’s bias -- thinking that, because we only know what we think we need to know, or what we think is enough, that we must be able to know everything else. When, in reality, we’re only just stepping into the water. We don’t have a single clue what’s in the ocean of answers as to how multiplicity comes to be. We can pretend we do, we can cuddle up with our books and our research and say we have definitive proof -- but those samples are so small. And the research is so new. And the psychological community still sees us as controversial in the kindest word. 

We are far, far too early in the learning process to declare we know everything there is to know.

It took twenty years before Generalized Anxiety Disorder was recognized enough by the psychology community to be given as a diagnosis to my father, in his 20s. That was in the 1980s. They didn’t have a pill to offer him until the late 1990s. It’s now the late ‘10s, and we still don’t have all the answers. We still don’t have the cure-all medication -- just a growing study of which work best for each individual. We still don’t know what causes it. But it’s been sixty years and counting. 

It’s irresponsible, and shortsighted, to go “the book is perfected! The answers are here!” 

Multiplicity is not something that can be measured, or fit into boxes. One size does not fit all. It wasn’t long ago that trauma was not required for a diagnosis. 

Back to these endo-critical people and the folly in their thinking, besides it coming from outrage, PTSD (anger and outward-directed hostility is a symptom of unprocessed or badly processed trauma), the Dunnung-Krueger Effect they suffer from, and the intentional misunderstanding of endogenic systems, making up their own narratives and generalizations for a group that is far more diverse than they might feel comfortable wrapping their mind around -- besides all that, I think it’s the sense of community. This website, and if you have observed the outside world enough, survives on us vs. them idealism as means of survival and clan belonging-ship. Taking a neutral, or swaying seat, is uncommon and in some areas, unheard of. Exclusivity, and echo chambers, coupled with confirmation bias and some traces of cognitive dissonance, group superiority, and intentionally (or unconsciously) spinning the other side’s words and even disagreeing facts to further one’s predefined beliefs, is a pandemic in society, and these individuals are a great example of this. 

And I’m sad to say, not all of them will come to this conclusion, that what they are doing is serving no one. It’s harming, and is self-serving, and is correcting nothing. 

I used to be intensely and vocally anti-endogenic, because my traumatizer was an endogenic system that made me deeply question my own authenticity as a system, but also because in the past, I and my multiplicity was made to be a spiritual ‘gift,’ and exploited. You can see my cognitive dissonance and back-and-forth arguing in my older posts. It wasn’t until I was isolated from these echo chambers, and given a chance to really reflect on who I am, and what’s made me who I am today, that I could really come to realize that what I was doing was the result of my own pain, and my frustration that nothing could be done about it. I didn’t hate endogenics -- I hated the belief that they could be this way without the trauma I suffered from. I was envious of that. I thought them being multiple, without trauma, was a mockery of mine -- but in truth, I just wanted to be able to say ‘I wasn’t hurt, or used, or abused,’ and have it be true. I didn’t want to be a victim. And I didn’t want to acknowledge that there are endogenic systems who DO have trauma. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case for a lot of them, as well.

All this said, what I’ve done is done. I’ve left those hateful posts up, because while I am ashamed, I shouldn’t hide them. I refuse to give people the false idea that I was always this moderate. People who’ve known me, know the truth of that lie. And people who don’t know me, deserve to know where I came from. Whether or not my past actions affects their perception of my character is up to them. But I’m always earnest to encourage others to give me a second chance. 

But I refuse to be a hypocrite. I will not denounce the verbally violent actions of others, if I myself claim that I have never done so. Because I have. I definitely have. And you, and others, deserve to know I used to be like that. But people can change. And I’m hoping I’ve distanced myself, and grown, enough to make it known I no longer wish to behave in such a manner, and do not approve of it. (But I’m definitely not proud of myself for it. Changing yourself is nothing to boast about. Growth involves integrity and humility, not to be used as self-promotion.)