note it's for our own personal silhouettehood aka this isnt intended to be for everybody fitting the broader term, it's spefically a personal silhouette blog where we discuss our severe disordered dissociative trauma from abuse caused one, that does mesn this blog will discuss abuse and trauma and dissociation + more distressing things as they are what we live through.

Feel free to ask any questions, we'll answer personally ourself (not with AI)

We might one day try to write down our symtopms and make a post for our specific condition and nsme but our disabilies progress so it may not be possible.

Coining: Silhouettehood / Silhouette

Naming The Erasure of Self

A proposal for a new framework in understanding dissociation and consciousness

There’s an entire terrain of consciousness rarely named or spoken about, a form of being marked not by integration or plurality, but by radical emptiness and the persistent absence of selfhood, where one is neither a singular person nor a plurality of distinct selves, but something more like an outline passing through the world. This is the experience we call “silhouette” and “silhouettehood.”

Well, I think I've reached a conclusion - I am a wolverine. It's been two weeks since I started active public questioning, and it had been mulling in the back of my mind for many more before that. I've watched documentaries, studied pictures and research papers, read through folklore, and done several rituals. It's all pointing towards wolverines.

With that said, werewolves are still deeply entrenched in my identity, in a way that I haven't decided to put a label on yet. It may not be the core of who I am right now, but it's still my history and my personal lore, and I will always hold space for it to come back to what it once was.

As I've mentioned a few times, I am strongly pagan, and a few rituals have helped me through this decision and processing the change. Firstly, a few days ago, I did a spirit journeying ritual with an experienced practitioner with lots of experience in shape-shifting and nonhuman identity. This ritual had the intention of finding what animal is at the core of who I am at the moment. I don't want to share too much because this is a ritual that someone else developed, and I don't know how much they are comfortable having shared. Ultimately, the visions involved led me to wolverine. I tend not to leave my identity up to meditations and spirituality, but I am accepting this as strong evidence in favor because of the fact that I was already leaning in that direction, and I didn't feel any disappointment or misdirection when the vision settled on a wolverine.

Secondly, last night I held a ritual with a good friend of mine in the forest underneath the full blood moon. My intention was to thank the wolf for all its years as my primary identity and for everything it brought me, dedicate an item to keep on my altar to it, and then to welcome the wolverine and experience a deep shift to sort of settle that identity into my mind. I would say it was a solid success. To represent my history as a werewolf, I chose the double necklace I made for myself when I first joined the community, made of a moonstone pendant given to me as a small child, and a vial of black wolf fur. I separated the two, keeping the moonstone on myself to represent transformation and history since I have used it since I was seven, and moving the wolf fur to the altar to represent letting that part of myself go but keeping it close at hand. At that point I induced as much of a shift as I could, and donned the pieces of wolverine fur ritual wear that I have in a mirroring of the legends of shape-shifters putting on their animal skins to transform. Bittersweet, but comforting, would be a way to sum up my feelings about this ceremony.

Anyways, say hello to the new me guys!

Might Update

On the appropriation of trans narratives by therianthropes https://web.archive.org/web/20230315165132/https://akhila.feralscribes.org/2013/on-the-appropriation-of-trans-narratives-by-therianthropes/

The Use and Misuse of the Term Transspecies https://youtu.be/miSyXSesyzw?si=rweVVN-B7UKeaM9d

Transspecies: Two Flags & an FaQ https://sundragon.allium.house/creations/transspecies_flag.php

Why do people call themselves ‘transspecies?’ https://web.archive.org/web/20230319163121/https://blog.alt-h.net/post/613417803862720512/why-do-people-call-themselves-transspecies

Transspecies: crossing the cultural boundaries of species. https://web.archive.org/web/20230329170617/https://trans-species.carrd.co/

For context, I am a fully fused DID system. (plus my parogenic headmate, Fennel!)

Fusion, to me, isn't about parts not existing anymore - rather the opposite. Each of my parts feel more real than ever as fused, more full and more themselves. More ourselves. More "me".

We just exist in a different form than we used to.

I watched Steven Universe a lot when I was younger, so please excuse the reference, but there's a character in that show (Garnet) who is a fusion of two other characters (Ruby & Sapphire). She isn't "less" when she's just Ruby or just Sapphire, they're their own individuals too and sometimes they exist separately, she just... prefers being Garnet. Garnet is an expression of Ruby and Sapphire's love for each other. I relate to that a lot. I could be my individual parts, but I prefer being Rainii. I prefer being the fused whole. It's an expression of self-love and the love my parts have for each other.

This is something that every part of me chose and very much wanted and continues to want. We all worked towards it together, we all have been very excited about it (and sometimes a little nervous!). Ongoing enthusiastic consent is incredibly important for fusion!!! Fusion is something we all very much are happy with. Our fusion would not hold otherwise. If we didn't want to be fused, we certainly wouldn't be!

I/we love being fused because it's incredibly intimate, it's passionate, it's awesome. It's a relationship with myself between all my selves. I think that's super cool! I feel really lucky to be able to know myself and care for myself in this way.

Since you mentioned Garnet, my understanding of her is that while she's a fusion, Sapphire and Ruby are still present and somewhat separate as there seems to still be a continuous inner dialog.

So does this mean fusion is less like actually being only one person and more like two people working together to control one form? If so, is it really much different from being individuals?

Short answer: It Depends. It will look different for every system.

Long answer: Whether you're still individuals or one person or a singlet or a system all depends on your own views on selfhood - This is what a lot of us mean when we say "functional multiplicity and final fusion are not opposites but rather a difference in perspective/two sides of the same coin."

Once you reach a certain point in DID recovery where all of the dissociative barriers have come down and there is no longer anything keeping each of you separate, whether you are still individuals or whether you are one person is a matter of how you see it. Multiplicity or singularity becomes a matter of choice, more or less. (This is also how it is possible to be fluid between the two or be both functionally multiple & fully fused simultaneously - it's all a matter of perspective rather than a hard line between the two.)

Basically, what does it mean to be a person? To be a part? To be an individual? To be a system? All of these questions' answers will differ from person to person, there's no right or wrong answers, and so each experience will look different. Likely, you can ask 5 systems that have achieved some form of CDD recovery the same questions and you'd get a different answer from all of them, and they would all see their recoveries and systems differently.

All this to say, functional multiplicity & final fusion are not and never really have been a hard binary with no overlap. It's complicated and there's infinite nuance to it.

For me, my experience now as someone who is fully fused who still regularly engages with myself as parts as a form of self-expression is very different from how my experience was as an un-fused DID system, so I would say there is a difference between un-integrated individuality & integrated, though not necessarily a difference between functional multiplicity & final fusion beyond the words I myself choose to describe what I'm experiencing.

I'm more or less "one person" (plus Fennel) & I consider myself a fused system rather than a singlet. It feels wrong to call myself a singlet because that would, to me, be like disregarding everything that came before this point. My experiences are not comparable to someone who never was a system in the first place - my experiences are unique to going from multiple to fused, ie a fully fused experience rather than a singlet experience.

I view my selfhood as something very fluid and something I create and bring into existence, and whether that selfhood is really just one singular self or many selves is determined by however I feel it is in that moment. And that's what feels right to me.

For context, I am a fully fused DID system. (plus my parogenic headmate, Fennel!)

Fusion, to me, isn't about parts not existing anymore - rather the opposite. Each of my parts feel more real than ever as fused, more full and more themselves. More ourselves. More "me".

We just exist in a different form than we used to.

I watched Steven Universe a lot when I was younger, so please excuse the reference, but there's a character in that show (Garnet) who is a fusion of two other characters (Ruby & Sapphire). She isn't "less" when she's just Ruby or just Sapphire, they're their own individuals too and sometimes they exist separately, she just... prefers being Garnet. Garnet is an expression of Ruby and Sapphire's love for each other. I relate to that a lot. I could be my individual parts, but I prefer being Rainii. I prefer being the fused whole. It's an expression of self-love and the love my parts have for each other.

This is something that every part of me chose and very much wanted and continues to want. We all worked towards it together, we all have been very excited about it (and sometimes a little nervous!). Ongoing enthusiastic consent is incredibly important for fusion!!! Fusion is something we all very much are happy with. Our fusion would not hold otherwise. If we didn't want to be fused, we certainly wouldn't be!

I/we love being fused because it's incredibly intimate, it's passionate, it's awesome. It's a relationship with myself between all my selves. I think that's super cool! I feel really lucky to be able to know myself and care for myself in this way.

Also going to echo that we also absolutely do not hate each other, we actually love and support each other so intensely that we actually operate as fused a lot of the time + that "healthy, loving fusion can't really happen if systems hate each other/themselves so much that they try to make each other stop existing"; in my opinion and experience, trying to fuse based on hatred and distaste for your parts often is more likely to result in dissociation and repressing parts rather than fusing them.

For context, we're a fully fused DID system; we have a complex situation with how our plurality presents now (heres something of a post explaining it more) and honestly we kind of aren't really "traumagenic anymore" (hiiragi and I + some others chatting on that topic) but we kind of leave those labels for outsiders to put on us as we don't really care

But honestly, we fused because we actually hit functional multiplicity for a bit and found that sometimes when we did temporary fusions, we were actually able to better understand one another, better able to regulate, and be able to share the world and life we have SO much more fluidly and fluently. It stopped being a lot of "well I'll make sacrifice from my day so that you can have your day" because it was basically starting to be "when I'm fused with X we can be together ALL day and BOTH enjoy the day"

Fusion has NEVER been anything CLOSE to making parts go away. Absolutely never, in fact, I still can and regularly do actually still present and express certain parts and still do regularly present and experience myself within almost exclusively one part should that be 1) a better perspective / viewpoint to take on 2) a part that can enjoy the task / activity more 3) trauma processing and 4) shits and fucking giggles; you can honestly ask @reimeichan and @indigochromatic who was literally hanging out with me today that I literally do still do have moments where its like "lmao yeah hi XIV" or "lmfao okay Aya" because they still absolutely DO exist, its just our base line does not require any specific part to be out. Those parts are still VERY much there, they just aren't the most prominent part unless they / I want to be. (Reimei in particular can vouch that we are also fused because they saw us like 2 years ago and our voice is WAY more consistent than before because we really operate as fused 95% of the time and thus no voice changes compared to before) If one of my close friends that were cool with were to throw a joke or jab at XIV or Riku or Ray or whatever, that part will just pop out, fuck around for however they like, and return to the collective

The only real difference? Complete fluidity, little to no dissociation, and honestly the freedom to not have to think and worry about every single part getting their "piece" of life because I am - at all times - able to genuinely feel for EVERY part in our system, gauge what everyone needs, and we can enjoy every action of every minute of our life at the same time. We aren't living fractions of a life or "sharing" 24 hours in a day, we are all living 24 hours of our life, 24/7 365 days a week.

As someone who was in functional multiplicity for a while and then ended up fusing, the NUMBER one reason I prefer to operate as a fused whole is because we all get SO much more life as a fused whole and the level of which we deeply understand one another is THROUGH the roof.

All of my parts feel more alive, feel more engaged, feel happier and more satisfied with life because they don't have to share 24 hours with others, they get to have all 24 hours WITHOUT taking any time away from the other parts.

It's honestly amazing.

I know final fusion is something some plurals do strive for, but how can I accurately write the horror of being forced to final fuse?

Like, I’m thinking it’ll be a lot of grief, absence of “the other”, feeling as if your autonomy has been violated

but how can I write it?

How would you feel if it happened to you?

I am a clinical zoanthrope. I have schizophrenia. If you have read my posts or blog before this should be no surprise as I am quite open about it. These labels that have been put on me affect nearly every aspect of my life, and greatly affect how I interact with the community. There is often a lot of discussion surrounding ideas of physical identity, delusion and if these things should be acceptable within the community or how to handle these topics.

Length: 3676 words

TW: delusions, reality checking, mentions of medical abuse

If you ever wonder why you don't meet many fully fused systems in the community, part of it is because we are actively pushed out of the community.

People have been really shitty towards me ever since I hit final fusion in January. My friends who are fully fused have also experienced similar.

I feel like I can't talk about my experiences at all in a lot of spaces. When I do, I feel like I have to put in extra effort to word myself carefully, and even then it doesn't really help. It doesn't matter how much I say "everyone's experiences are different" or "this is how it is for me personally", people act weird towards me just because I am fully fused. I can't just talk about my experiences with my system like everyone else and it's really draining and frustrating.

People assume that because I am fully fused I will be pushy about fusion or even force fusion onto other systems. People say they are intimidated by me and don't want to talk to me because I am fully fused. People tell me about how horrible they think fusion is and how it's murder. People say they feel bad for fused systems because they think all fused systems are tricked into fusion and about how parts language is dehumanizing and abuse. People say I must hate myself or hate being a system because I chose final fusion. People say they don't believe in final fusion existing at all and that it's unhealthy to believe in it, that fused systems are just systems pretending to be singlets, and that we just need to deal with our internalized ableism and accept we're plural.

People even assume I'm "sysmed" because I am fully fused and use parts language. I have been vocally pro-endo the entire time I've been in system spaces. Hell, I myself am endogenic.

My very belonging in the plural community is constantly in question. I have witnessed numerous debates over the years about whether fully fused systems should be allowed in the community at all, or be allowed to talk about system experiences... because we "chose to be singlets". I've even seen people suggest that we are "appropriating" systemhood by talking about it because we are "no longer systems and have no right to talk about what being a system is like".

"No singlets should be allowed to talk about system experiences or be allowed in system communities, and that includes fully fused individuals" was and still is a major stance here on tumblr, as well as several discord servers I've been in.

I'm constantly expected to censor or completely not talk about my experiences at all because I am fully fused. Final fusion is on the blacklist for a lot of plural servers, and on tumblr a lot of folks get asked to trigger warn anything mentioning final fusion. This isn't something that really happens for any other form of DID recovery. This is specifically targeted at final fusion.

Yes, I understand that there are systems who are pressured to fuse and that it may be a triggering topic for these systems; at the same time, the plural community fosters a lot of fear and shame around final fusion by barring any talk of it and framing it as a negative thing, and it is rarely taken into consideration how triggering it is for many fully fused systems like myself to not be allowed to speak about our experiences and be treated like our existence needs to be hidden and censored, especially when we constantly see others talking very poorly of us and our experiences on top of that.

I get told I'm wrong about my own experiences as a fully fused system or about my thoughts on functional multiplicity and final fusion by systems who are neither fully fused nor functionally multiple, many of whom have never even spoken to a system who is or read about our experiences at all. People in the community are extremely black-and-white about it, and when I talk about how from my experience functional multiplicity and final fusion aren't actually a strict binary, people are very quick to tell me about how they're completely different experiences when they haven't even experienced it or even really know anything about it.

There's so much misinformation in the community about final fusion and it really fucking sucks.

It's so painful hearing my fully fused friends talk about how many of them have been chased out of the community or know folks who have been.

I love a place where fusion is only censored if the individual feels it should be, and not one where it's on a black list. If someone's talking about forced fusion they experienced and want to censor, they do. When we talk about a very painful fusion, we cover it, because maybe it was like death. But I never want to be somewhere where we feel pressured to censor when we talk about someone like Zera who had a positive and willing fusion.

Fusion isn't a negative thing, it is a neutral experience just like splitting. Splitting can be fucking horrid, people can be forced to split, but it's not commonly on a blacklist. Fusion including final fusion should receive the same treatment.

Also the assumption that final fusion = singlet feels weird but we're not in a place to comment on that entirely because we're not in that group. Someone who is a final fusion/in a state of final fusion will have many many experiences that a singlet will likely NEVER have.

In a very watered down and "not accurate but simplifying it for understanding", for me you can kind of understand it as having fused into something similar to a singlet then actively deciding independent of trauma to still exist, express and engage as plural. Like someone who did not have DID / traumagenic origins, the recovered / fused brain is still connected and wired with little to none of the dissociation that is signature to DID / traumagenic systems. It's an active choice, often something of an intentional practice and way of life of engaging with yourself, that creates the plural experience DESPITE the connection and wiring being more similar to someone without DID than someone who does. This lack of DID/dissocaition based wiring makes the plurality feel EXTREMELY different than it did when we still had high dissociation and what not.

It's also very different from functional multiplicity, so it's not really "still traumagenic / DID but with a different label". It's hard to kind of explain in words the difference, but as someone who was in functional multiplicity for almost a year before fusing and then fusing w/ our current plurality, the two are definitely two different things for us.

It's likely different for hiiragi7 than it is for me because we've talked about this some; but for me, my system - without changing the members - almost feels recreated post-fusion and thus the "origin" of the system also has changed from that of an involuntary-result-of-DID origin to something that is an aspect of how I express myself, my relationship with myself, and give space and honor to the things I went through that made me... well me. I made the active decision to be plural and reclaimed my experiences apart from trauma, dissociation, DID and dysfunction. I've suffered, struggled, learned, adapated, thrived and lived with disordered dissociated traumgenic DID-originating plurality most of my life and I've put in the literal blood, sweat, and tears to not only survive with it, but to THRIVE with it. I've worked hard to be able to heal the way that makes me happy and to have the option to fuse, and I actively chose to keep my ability to be plural or a fused whole as it is something that is now a strength. My plurality is the result of post-traumatic growth.

I personally don't identify as endogenic, but thats largely because I don't really identify as anything. If people want to call me endogenic / willogenic hearing this, I won't say they are wrong or deny it. If people want to call me traumagenic, cool, I really don't mind either way and I can see the case either way.

But ya know, its kind of some food for thought and some explanation and ideas on the topic as someone who hangs around in an arguably hilariously curated space where people are extremely normal about fusion to the point that when I saw this I went "wait... isn't fusion the majoirty these days" for a second before remembering I keep a very nice curated space of people whose vibes I like and like.... not being weird about fusion is a very early vibe maker or breaker XD

My parts are expressions of me, they are differing perspectives and thoughts and feelings and so much more. They (I) are not who we were in the past, though they are (I am) made up of past experiences. They make up who I am, and together we are a community of one person. It's an active choice we make, to both navigate the world as one and to engage with ourselves as several when we like to. It's fluid, it's fun, it's incredibly loving and passionate. I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.

I identify as endogenic primarily because of my created headmate, Fennel, who I chose to create a good while after final fusion (fully fused in January, created her in October). I used various paromancy techniques and guides to do so.

The fully fused experience certainly in my experience is often different from being a singlet, and I often feel misunderstood when people talk about final fusion as "becoming a singlet". Maybe for some folks it is, for me it isn't - because my brain is wired differently and I grew up multiple. I could be one person, sure, but for me, I feel weird when people say that's the same as me "choosing to become a singlet" because it feels like erasing my life up until this point and the work to get here. I have lived a multiple life, not a singlet life, and my experiences are different.

Anyway, DID recovery is often pretty unpredictable. You can kind of try to guess where you'll end up, but sometimes it turns out totally differently than expected. If you'd asked me some years ago, I would've told you I was very much interested in functional multiplicity if I went down any recovery path at all (I honestly wasn't convinced I would recover) and would never consider final fusion... much less fully fusing and then practicing paromancy. Life is weird, systemhood and DID is weird.

At the very least, I'm pretty comfortable with where I'm at with my system, and I always love talking about it.

There's something about an entire system changing little by little until it can be argued to be a completely different system with entirely different origins... It makes me think...

But HONESTLY the System of Theseus is unironically something I think about at least every other day, cause honestly I apprecaite and acknowledge the gift that has been our place in recovery since I hit it like 1-2 years ago (since its just SO wildly and amazingly different from both anything I could have imagined living before let alone anything I ACTUALLY ever lived before) but very much like.... if all my parts fused together and choose to express themselves independently after it in a way almost identical to the way they used to present, is the system the same system?

It doesn't matter or mean much practically speaking, much like the ship of theseus is still a ship that can sail and needs to be cared for regardless of if it is 'the original ship' or a new one, but just as a fun philosophical thought experiment of sorts

If all the parts still can and do (when they want to) identify as themselves and experience themselves and express themselves after having been fused and what not, are the original parts that presented the way they do due to trauma the same parts as those that presented as an active choice post fusion; and do they have the same origin as the variation that came post fusion?

The answer is subjective really and to each their own and to their own preference, but at the end of the day, the answer and label itself isn't really as important as it is just acknowledging that the experience is, in itself, an experience worthy of respecting, honoring, and giving space to regardless

The answer means much less than the practical reality that persists regardless which is "this is a person with an experience much like any other person" and sweating too much (or attacking, questioning, grilling etc) over the exact label and the philosophical question of "is it the same and is the origin still the same" is really missing the forest for a tree;

i’m trying to find information/hear personal experiences of systemhood from others, if any of you would be so kind as to help me!

particularly, i would like to hear from those who identify as endogenic or otherwise non-trauma formed systems. of course, i would love to hear from trauma-formed systems as well! it’s just that i am one, and so that’s the community i have been most involved with & heard from already.

feel free to DM me anonymously if you don’t want to share publicly. i won’t post anything. my aim is to hear from others so that i can form my own opinions, figure out the right direction to go for independent research, and to simply understand others more.

thank you very much in advance, and i hope you all are having a wonderful day 💙

I think personally what makes it complicated is that it is impossible to separate my experience with systemhood from trauma, even if it didn’t fully originate from it. This is mostly in reference to medical mistreatment and trying to naively be out as a system as a teen when I was actively punished for it.

I realise trying to explain at least somewhat why that was results in me having to explain slang and it just becomes a lot. Let’s just say being docked points within a behavioural therapy points system for talking about unapproved topics was a thing in my life for a moment (it did not feel like a moment).

The first headmate ‘I’ internally could communicate with emerged while ‘I’ was lying in a hospital bed, after unsuccessfully trying to die, then somehow more emerged over time.

Some headmates ‘I’ found by engaging with tulpamancy, hypnosis, and spiritual means. An internal strong pushback against certain suggestions in hypnosis is how ‘I’ found one headmate. It felt like something other-than-me within me was responding. Another was found from moving spiritual energy around my ‘body’ like astral projection style - idk how this happened but previous-self at this time thought that was a walk-in from another realm/dimension somehow. I don’t think a tulpa was ever purposely created but I don’t fully remember the details. Some headmates also existed to help previous-self cope.

Years later, I just didn’t have headmates anymore. I no longer had the ability to mentally visualise a headspace and I suddenly didn’t have internal communication with headmates that had name/personalities/feelings that definitely felt like separate people.

I still somewhat think about myself and not-myself in plural ways, but I’m not a system. Like ‘previous-self’ is a previous version of myself that is nothing like who I am now, to the point that it often feels better to think about them as semi-separate from ‘myself’ - but it’s also difficult to identify what myself is, which is why I’m using quotation marks around certain pronouns and nouns to try to communicate that. I feel simultaneously me and not-me, but I don’t really know what I mean by ‘I feel like myself’ (all reference points for who I was and should have been were destroyed, both on purpose and accidentally).

Yesterday I was talking with some friends about systemhood, and about origin labels. At this point in recovery with DID, it simply no longer feels accurate to say I "am" traumagenic - It's more like I "was" traumagenic.

Traumagenic doesn't describe anything about my current experience, it's become more of a past event than anything. All of the parts which make up my system (and me, as a whole) are explicitly the result of self-love and my own forms of recovery rather than trauma; all of my parts are made up of many, many, many fusions of parts (ie., their origin is not trauma, it is fusion - which, for me, is an expression of love between parts). My system, as a whole, has been recreated through full fusion; this event can be seen, itself, as a new origin.

Calling myself traumagenic at this point feels not only inaccurate but unfair to myself. This new system, this new self, this experience of living as fully fused, is not traumagenic; in some ways, it feels like the opposite of it. Continuing to call myself traumagenic feels like a denial of myself and the changes that have happened (as well as the effort put in to get here), and brings to mind a familiar sense of time strangeness that I've felt before living as a traumatized person.

But dude ABSOLUTELY agreed and same here and its actually something I've thought about at least every other day for a few minutes since we reached this fully fused / fully integrated state.

I don't really identify as traumagenic anymore, because honestly my current and present plurality is a means of interacting, expressing and engaging with myself AFTER fully fusing. My system before final fusion WAS traumagenic, but having fully fused, the way my system works is operating from a base line that is NOT driven or started by trauma.

Honestly, trauma is a very very small part of our day to day life most of these days. It still comes by but it hardly is a large thing in our life let alone something driving any of the dynamics and presentation and operation of our system. The way we exist in terms of plurality, I feel, is likely easier to understand for non-traumagenic systems than those that are traumagenic.

Obviously like, we have DID and we have a shit ton of trauma, but the way we express and exist as a system these days is NOT as someone with DID or as a system that is plural because of trauma. Our plurality at this point is an active decision, an active reclamation of our identity, experience, and self as a REWARD and prize that we have gleamed from our recovery / healing journey.

Our plurality is the result of post-traumatic growth and while a case could be made that it is still "traumagenic" I absolutely think that undermines the ACTUAL work, story, and reality of what we actually are with the conotation / implication that "trauma" is what made us.

Recovery and healing is what made us. We CHOOSE to operate as a system regardless of our mostly resolved trauma.

Saying that we are "traumagenic" takes away the agency and active decision (which we earned through recovery) that we made / make when we choose to present as plural.

We dont really use -genic terms and what not cause they were never our cup of tea but like

To say we are traumagenic is just very.... incorrect to how we function now these days

Anytime we are operating as multiple parts, its an active choice and decision with a lot of practice and self love and self expression to it; very very little of it is because of something external or something we developed BECAUSE of something or to protect / serve one reason or the next

Every "split" we have is not even really a split so much as an active like mixture and recombination of parts of ourselves to develop a different outlook, a different aesthetic, a different energy and expression of our complex whole

Its an art for us; there is no "splitting" for us

Like living as a system for me these days is an active PRACTICE involving intention and a decision to present as a system which is EXTREMELY different from how it was back in the day

For the sake of syscourse and what not, we just say we are a "fully fused / integrated DID system" because it best reflects the perspective we come from and we really don't sweat labels, if yall think we are one thing, I don't really mind that being what you think from an outsider view

Yesterday I was talking with some friends about systemhood, and about origin labels. At this point in recovery with DID, it simply no longer feels accurate to say I "am" traumagenic - It's more like I "was" traumagenic.

Traumagenic doesn't describe anything about my current experience, it's become more of a past event than anything. All of the parts which make up my system (and me, as a whole) are explicitly the result of self-love and my own forms of recovery rather than trauma; all of my parts are made up of many, many, many fusions of parts (ie., their origin is not trauma, it is fusion - which, for me, is an expression of love between parts). My system, as a whole, has been recreated through full fusion; this event can be seen, itself, as a new origin.

Calling myself traumagenic at this point feels not only inaccurate but unfair to myself. This new system, this new self, this experience of living as fully fused, is not traumagenic; in some ways, it feels like the opposite of it. Continuing to call myself traumagenic feels like a denial of myself and the changes that have happened (as well as the effort put in to get here), and brings to mind a familiar sense of time strangeness that I've felt before living as a traumatized person.

The Jackal in the City: An Empirical Phenomenological Study of Embodied Experience Among Therians and Otherkin

The result of FurScience's interviews and focus groups with therians at Anthrocon since 2016 is finally out. Tens, possibly hundreds of therians were interviewed one-on-one in close to hour-long sessions, their responses recorded, transcribed, and later analyzed anonymously. The study was published in The Humanistic Psychologist and is 20 pages long, detailing the experiences of therians and otherkin, along with associated analyses and a suggested re-terming of what we call "mental shifts," at least in the context of psychology.

While most therians will already be familiar with the what this study will reveal, I'd consider this the closest thing to a "therapist's guide" to therianthropy/otherkin that currently exists. It's accessible for $20 through the APA website linked above. For those who would not like to pay for it, I will summarize below:

The study analyzes the experiences of many therians and otherkin and seeks to "destigmatize and depathologize" our experiences. They provide well-structured examples of what we experience, as well as its psychosocial connotations starting from early childhood and into adult life.

They define a therian as "an individual who believes that they are not human—or at least not completely human. Instead, they identify as a species of non-human animal that either currently exists or has existed and is now extinct," and an otherkin as a person identifying "as a nonhuman being that is typically considered mythical or fantasy-based (e.g., fairy, elf, unicorn)."

They apply Sara Ahmed's work on the ideas of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation to alterhumanity. They dive into our preference for natural environments over manmade ones, our disconnect from other humans and our own bodies, species dysphoria (which they describe but do not explicitly name), and reorientation by means of our own personal image, shifting, seeking out community, and "ontological doubling" - "living [a] human life with its human demands, alongside a pervasive feeling of being out of place."

They suggest the "re-terming" of what we call "mental shifts" and "phantom shifts" and the like as embodied shifts instead, seeing as they involve more than just a shift in consciousness and can include physical sensations (such as phantom limbs) and can occur in response to the environment, by one's own volition, or spontaneously. While some may be against outside individuals coining terms for us, these are professional psychologists and this likely has more to do with their own understanding of us. Per the study:

"Therianthropy and otherkinship are often experienced as an attunement and orientation toward, and a belonging with, nonhuman animals and to the natural world. In connection with their environment, therians and otherkin experience profound changes in which they are less likely to be mindful of their humanness; instead they experience heightened sensations (especially those sensations that are sharp for their theriotype/kintype), increased spatial awareness, phantom limbs (feeling limbs and body parts belonging to their theriotype/kintype), and personality changes (e.g., from passivity to aggressiveness or assertiveness, from anxiety to calmness, introversion to extraversion, etc.). These changes were conceptualized as mental shifts by Grivell et al. (2014), but due to how this experience involves not just a shift in thoughts and emotion, but in the body and their relationship to their environment and to others, we here use the term embodied shifts. By conceptualizing shifting as an embodied experience, we reaffirm that affective [for the uninitiated, "affect" in psychology regards one's physical expression of emotions - gestures, postures, vocalizations, etc.] and behavioral changes, alongside altered states of consciousness, are not experiences located within the individual, but take place in the intersubjective field (e.g., as a reaction to changes in the environment, feeling threatened at work, or experiencing comfort in isolated spaces or with groups of accepting people). Although these experiences can be orienting in terms of the therian’s or otherkin’s experiences of self, allowing them to become reoriented to their environment or situation, it can also be disorienting for them and their social interlocutors."

The conclusion to the paper encourages professionals (therapists and such) to understand us through a lens of cultural humility and provides some hope in that "(perhaps ironically) humanistic psychotherapy..." can provide therians and otherkin some sense of wellbeing.

I refer to myself nowadays as a fully fused multiple - an identity that may seem somewhat contradictory, given how often functional multiplicity and final fusion are talked about as one-or-the-other.

Upon reaching final fusion, I came to the realization that the difference between functional multiplicity and final fusion is not and never was this unfathomable gap, that final fusion was not a bridge you crossed once and could never go back to multiple except through force (further traumatization, recovery falling apart, an inability to cope), but rather they are two sides of the same coin, fluid and overlapping and even inseperable from one another. The terms themselves quite honestly don't feel adequate to describe quite how this feels, and I fear they give people a rather binary view on the endless possibilities for recovery, seeing as I had this view before myself.

In my years in plural and system spaces, it was always "are you aiming for functional multiplicity or final fusion?", and so despite my own thoughts on plurality as a framework (if you view yourself as plural/multiple, you're plural/multiple), I somehow found myself surprised to learn the options for recovery as a multiple were never actually this narrow to begin with, and that the two are nowhere near mutually exclusive.

I am functionally multiple and fully fused; I am both, simultaneously, always. I have come to know each as a shift in view, both of which are needed. My parts are perspectives with which to explore life from many different angles. ( @reimeichan 's "Different Readers of the Same Book" frames this elegantly, and this idea has embedded itself in me ever since.)

Both as one and as many, it is a way of knowing myself on the deepest and most intimate level. Final fusion is a radical form of self-love, an absolute acceptance and celebration of everything that I am, and this has dramatically altered the way in which my parts express and how we come together into an overall self. Simultaneously, my parts are a relationship, one that can only be recognized as uniquely multiple in nature and yet has evolved in such a way that becomes difficult to describe using the language I had used before as an unfused multiple. I am undeniably a multiple and I am fully and completely fused.

The fluidity in which I find myself in is incredibly freeing, my self-expression made up of love letters to my parts. My parts are gradients of watercolor on a canvas flowing in and out of each other, only subjective distinction remains between any one of us, myself is the larger painting encompassing everything. All parts of me create a self so unapologetically full of color, the love found there as necessary as breathing. I have come to view even the painful parts as an expression of love.