#system resets

Most systems have the same alters around consistently but there's nothing saying this is going to be case for every system, right? Genuine question btw, if I'm mistaken then I want to understand why

Be me, a teenager in 2015, discovering the online plural community for the first time. Looking at a bunch of popular plural blogs. One of them is called thatmultiplefeel, a submissions style blog where people send in ~ relatable plural things ~. The blog also doubles as a beacon of plurality advice. Most people refer you to it if you have questions about being a system. So, I go there.

This is where I first see people talking about their systems resetting. This is where most people (at the time) first see anything about "system resets."

--- TW for the concept of alter death/murder/suicide ---

According to TMF, the entire system (or sometimes just one alter) is erased. If they're not seen as dead, they're just magically gone forever. They Will Never Return. Then, the system splits and repopulates itself with new alters to replace the old ones. Usually TMF said this happens due to stress, but they also said it can also happen just randomly. In fact, they said it happens to most systems at least once. So now you know you are not safe from the reset.

Sometimes they describe it as a good, perfectly healthy way to manage your CDD. Don't like your alters anymore? Reset them! No longer want to exist? Reset yourself!

You scroll through their blog and see actual detailed GUIDES on how to purposefully disappear your system and replace it with a new one.

Now, people are terrified of this happening to them. You see people flooding system spaces with posts like "our alters haven't talked to me for 1 day, did we just reset???" and "our persecutor is threatening to reset us, please help!!!" and "our partner system says they'll reset if we don't have sex with them..."

Then there come a slew of people saying this isn't possible. Seriously, please stop scaring everyone with this. This concept has harmed them. Or it is kinda possible but not like that.

There are clinically recognized experiences that kinda mirror aspects of TMF's concept of system resetting. Alters going dormant, splitting off copies of previous alters, and temporary loss of communication. Epochal division as described by Kluft is one of the closest things that come to TMF's concept. Some or all alters are 'recreated' in the system. But even here it's explained that the previous alters are not truly gone, just dormant or more covert. They can return and often do.

So, yeah. AFAIK, "system resets" originated from TMF. They admitted to coming up with the term themselves, and I have never seen it used anywhere else before them.

I sometimes see people nowadays use the term to describe epochal division. Personally, I don't really care if that's their preferred term, but WOW does it draw up memories of the time the system community was in full Panic Mode because of the scary, unpredictable, system-killing Resets.

-- end TW --

Also, (sorry for sending two asks in one) we also saw people talk about system resets and we think that happened to us (our gatekeeper/host was feeling very stressed and horrible and they made everyone in the system disappear, other than the protector, aggressor, and me, and now we have a lot of new alters) but we can't find a lot of resources about it. Could you guys maybe explain it a bit? Thanks!

📡: Hello, For us Autism & ADHD play a huge role in the functions of our Plurality; after we were no longer in traumatic environments a lot of our new members / returning members have been cropping up in relevance to our special interests and hyper-fixations. This is quite common and even comes with a few of its own terms: Fixabased, Fixagenic, Spingenic , Spinbased As for system resets, they often occur (as you expressed) in times of great stress. Sometimes it can be on the account of the mindscape (the system resets itself) or by the hands of someone with the authority to do so (like a Gatekeeper/Admin +etc). The phenomenon is usually a last-ditch effort, more or less: a survival instinct of sorts when things get too overwhelming (typically over a long period of time).

*nods* Yeah this is all sounding like what would happen if a system reset were to happen. Certainly frightening and involuntary. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but I’m glad you all function better now.

Thanks for your input. I’m sorry you had such a negative experience. :( 

Ahhh. That explains it. I’m so glad they stopped trying to give advice because it was awful. We’ve gotten some input from people who have said they’ve had system resets and they were scary and bad, so I’m thinking that like I hypothesized earlier, they might happen when a system is under excessive stress and something just goes wrong. But chosen? Certainly not.