Visions of Gray - Tulpamancy and Plurality

http://livingplural.tumblr.com/post/32266840107/could-you-maybe-remove-did-from-the-side-banner

…we’ve seen a lot of variations on this. Decided to say something tonight for some reason, even though we’ve seen that basic idea stated in much more inflammatory ways elsewhere.

Okay, I’m going to try to be as tactful as possible about this. (And hoping I won’t regret tagging this entry.)

Since you submitted this as an anonymous ask, I don’t know who you are.

But I can say, honestly, that I don’t think you’ve been around the community for very long. There is more elaborate, detailed, and complex history here than many people who say “you’re appropriating a mental illness; real people with DID aren’t like this” nowadays seem to know.

I’ve been in the multiple and/or MPD/DID community for twelve years now. (Also, regarding terminology, before anyone jumps me for “MPD isn’t the official diagnosis any more, it’s DID now”– about twelve years ago, many of the trauma-based systems I met still referred to themselves as MPD systems or multiples. There was actually a pretty contentious debate in the 90s as to whether the community should even respect the name change from MPD to DID in the DSM. There were some systems– and they called themselves systems– who wanted MPD to be kept and thought that DID was the psychiatric community’s way of dismissing and denying their existence. Especially since some of the doctors involved in the name change were pushing the idea that “you cannot have more than one personality; these are just delusional, traumatized people who think they do.”)

I was on a couple of mailing lists that were open to the idea of people identifying as multiple/plural but not with the labels of MPD or DID. The ones I’m mostly thinking of here are Dark Personalities and Other Worlds. At that time, having a history of trauma was mostly assumed to be the norm, not the exception– although several systems in the community of the time, including the Anachronic Army, Astraea and the Shire, were heavily backing the idea that it was possible to be naturally multiple while having been abused; i.e. that for some systems, while the abuse happened, they would have been multiple anyway no matter what.*

Some of the things I saw included the following:

-People who spent a lot of time describing their subjective worlds, even when they also spent large amounts of time describing abuse/trauma flashbacks/etc.

-Dragons, vampires, elves, various other forms of not-quite-human humanoids, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Phantom of the Opera, in people’s systems. (Whether we believed we were what they claimed to be mattered less than the fact that they were saying their systems included these characters or species.)

-People whose posts to the lists were mostly about dramatic events happening in their subjective worlds, which included things like lengthy magical wars and the like.

A lot of them had webpages. (Personal webpages seem to have been a lot more common 10-12 years ago than they were today, probably because they were used as a form of social networking back then, whereas nowadays people just get Tumblrs and LJs and Facebook accounts. In some ways we miss the personal pages, even the terribly designed Geocities ones that kept crashing our browser, because the people running them would often go into extensive detail about their system, its members, and their world, if any.)

And actually, they did “come out.” See, for example, this article: Coming Out Multiple, written around 2000 by a member of a DID-identified system. His take was “Multiplicity is not insanity. It’s considered an adaptive response to trauma that otherwise would result in insanity.”

And there were systems who were very adamantly anti-medication, or against using medication to specifically “cure multiplicity” (as opposed to using it for depression, anxiety, and various other things that non-plurals also experience).

Their webpages got snarked by detractors back then too. For “faking.” For “obviously roleplaying” and “not really having MPD/DID.” (Often by people whose claimed expertise on the subject was having taken psychology classes and watching Sybil. Despite the existence of writings criticizing the idea that “real MPD/DID” MUST look like Sybil, from people who were steadfastly in the corner that all multiplicity was caused by trauma, even then.)

And people would point to the dragons, elves, vampires, Ninja Turtles, subjective worlds, etc, in particular, very often, and declare that those things were the “proof” that all of this was the creation of “one person faking,” because “real people with MPD/DID don’t have those things.”

Ironically, the majority of the pages they linked to, to snark them and accuse the creators of being roleplaying fakers, were from systems who had started out in survivor/recovery communities, and in many cases still had strong ties to them.

Apparently it didn’t matter if their “cast list” went into a lot of detail about who they thought split from whom and why, if they talked about things like losing time, and if they had a lot of recovery material and links on their page. The very existence of “fantasy” elements in their system was taken as the proof that they were roleplaying fakers “hurting people who have the REAL disorder.”

(That and, in some cases, the fact that some people apparently believed they were “not dysfunctional enough,” despite the fact that the book When Rabbit Howls, which was really as much about abuse as it was aboout multiplicity, described a system who ran their own business and so forth, and IIRC, by their own descriptions, only sought therapy because they couldn’t deal with abuse flashbacks. And it was published in 1987. Then again, I think some of the DDU and therapy scandals of the 90s did a lot to contribute to some people’s image of “multiple = cannot get through a day without constant debilitating triggers and flashbacks.”)

What was interesting was that a lot of the “classic” trauma-split systems, especially on Dark Personalities, had apparently felt unable to come out of the closet about the “weird/fantasy” elements of their systems– even to their therapists– until they found that list and other people talking about it.

And they were formally diagnosed with DID and were going through some form of the “standard” therapy for it.**

In fairness, it wasn’t just snarkers they got flames from. There were several systems who got letters attacking them for “having no idea what real MPD is all about,” and other things in that vein.  Interestingly, some of the other people who attacked them did apparently believe they were plural, but believed it was impossible to be plural without some kind of trauma, and so accused them of being in denial and having “alters who were hiding the truth from them.”

As we recall, the Anachronic Army in particular also got some real doozies of letters from Christian fundamentalists who insisted they were possessed and needed exorcism because they talked about having vampires and demons in their system. (Or people who identified as same, anyway. See above disclaimer.) And a friend& of ours at one point got a very angry, misspelled letter from someone accusing them of being “not real MPDs” (even though they had never stated they had MPD, just that they were multiple) and were “making money off the suffering of others.” (They were not making any money from their webpage.) This was all, again, in the early 2000s.

The thing is.

We still know, even if in many cases only distantly, most of the systems who were getting those letters back then.

And we haven’t seen any of them come forward in the last ten years to say “Guys, I admit, I made it up because I wanted attention and it was all fake.”

There was one group we knew of who said that they integrated naturally. But the majority of the systems we met on Other Worlds whom we still know anything about are still multiple, to judge by their online presence.

I don’t know where the “DID = never has other worlds/nonhumans/fictives” idea got started. Given that we know groups who identify explicitly with the label of DID, and have some or all of those elements in system, and have always known groups like that ever since we started out as a newly self-identified system in 2000-2001.

And given the number of “classic” systems we saw “come out of the closet” about those elements on Dark Personalities and Other Worlds– about things they hadn’t even felt safe telling their therapists– I don’t think it’s inappropriate to keep tagging the posts with DID.

I’m not saying I always agree with the advice being given in this community (livingplural). In some cases we flat out disagree with it, like someone’s suggestion that it was okay for an asexual main fronter to “ride” on the sexual attractions of other members of their system in order to avoid telling her boyfriend that she was asexual. I don’t think this is ever a good idea for anyone.  It’s never a good idea to drag out a lie about being sexually or romantically attracted to someone when you’re not, period. And we can say from some personal experience that trying to “piggyback” on other system members’ attractions in order to deal with a relationship not all of you want to be in, just eventually led to misery for everyone involved, in the end.

I’m not even sure if people would welcome us passing out advice there, given that we’ve been mods on LJ-multiplicity for a long time and (I admit) blatantly fucked up the handling of several disputes. In some cases it was because we had a disagreement with Astraea, back when they were the only other mods, about how certain things should be handled, and ended up deferring to their opinion. But in the end, we have to claim our share of responsibility as well for not pushing back and saying “No, this person needs to be warned/banned, and I’m going to do it” or similar. I don’t want to be perceived as grabbing status/seniority in the community here to suggest our advice is always more valid than anyone else’s, either.

(Admittedly, I don’t know why one of the authors writes in ALLCAPS, and it does make them look… not quite serious. Given that one of the first pieces of “netiquette” we learned was “ALLCAPS equals shouting,” and tend to associate it with… people who don’t spell or punctuate very well. But then again, there are people who make the decision to write in all lowercase for personal/self-expression purposes, so I guess I can deal with someone writing in ALLCAPS for similar reasons. Just… be aware, I guess, of the “people tend to perceive it as the equivalent of shouting” thing.)

And some of the questions that come up there involve stuff we have no personal experience at all with, and we kind of get the suspicion that at least some of the questions are actually from trolls (not fantasy-type trolls, the Internet let’s-mock-the-freaks type). The one thing we can weigh in about is history, for which a lot of systems on Tumblr– both natural-identified and DID-identified– weren’t around when it happened.

*Actually, if you read the much less well-known follow-ups to The Three Faces of Eve, I’m Eve and A Mind of My Own, Chris Costner-Sizemore&– aka “Eve”– basically seemed to think that this was the case with her/them. That she had experienced trauma as a young child, but it didn’t cause her MPD (how she refers to it in the book). In fact, in one of those books she suggested that the “others” were present even before she was born, and may possibly have been who she was in past incarnations. She still apparently regards it as a disorder always requiring treatment and that incarnation should always be the goal, but she did, in fact, challenge the “only trauma causes it” psychiatric norms of the time. “Despite authorities’ claims to the contrary, my former alters were not fragments of my birth personality. They were entities, whole in their own rights, who coexisted with my birth personality before I was born. They were not me, but they remain intrinsically related to what it means to be me.”- from A Mind Of My Own

**More writings on this stuff– other worlds, nonhumans, natural vs. trauma systems– if you want it, from the time period when Dark Personalities inspired a lot of systems to “come out” about it.

Integration– Not For Natural Multiples: “Even in cases where multiplicity is trauma-based, this re-“splitting” almost invariably happens. Perhaps this is because even when multiplicity starts out as a so-termed “coping mechanism,” it becomes natural – becomes the state where everyone is happiest and best functioning.“ Written in the late 90s.

States of Mind: Talks about inner worlds and nonhuman system members, written in 2008, by a group who (afaik) started out in the recovery/survivor community. “So if our Inner World is a place where magic is real and people can fly if they have the right powers and you just might meet a vampire, that’s what things are like for us. It isn’t a role-playing game or a fantasy, not a made up place at all. That world is as real as the one you see and touch and interact with every day.”

Shire’s Natural Multiplicity: This was written around 2002-2003, if we recall correctly. By their own description, their system’s original person died due to trauma, which allowed the other members of their system to enter their body from another world. Again, it doesn’t matter whether or not you personally agree that things like that are possible– just that, ten years ago, there were systems who described both trauma histories and talked about subjective worlds and “fantasy stuff.”

A good thing that you can use for one is have everyone say one thing that is on their mind. The things don’t even have to make sense, but it’s a good way to get the ball rolling for writing in a notebook.

There are other ice breakers so to speak that people in our system have come up with too like “imagine if you were an anthropomorphic fruit” or “if you could change one thing what would it be?”

After a while things will start to flow more smoothly once you get mire used to writing. Then you can start doing more serious things like describing your headspace, writing down questions for eachother, and various other things.

You are 100% valid as a system unless you have a disorder that can cause false symptoms.

Can you elaborate on “a disorder that can cause false symptoms”? I’ve met systems, including one formally diagnosed with DID, who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I’ve also met systems (again, including one with DID) who don’t have schizophrenia diagnosis or another along those lines, who experience spells of psychosis. Along with systems with narcolepsy, personality disorders, etc.

None of that makes them any less plural or real than systems without those disorders. If these disorders can be recognized as comorbid with DID/OSDD, then I see no reason why non-DID/OSDD systems can’t have them and also be plural as well.

To throw another wrench into the works, one can even argue that as long as someone utterly and sincerely believes they are plural, they will eventually become plural via this belief giving rise to non-deliberate tulpa creation as a coping mechanism. (Which may be part of why some DID/OSDD systems are anxious about tulpamancy, since it treads a little too close to the accusation that DID/OSDD is iatrogenic--it’s definitely a topic that should be approached with nuance and care, but it’s something for another time, though.) It might be that they’re not the type of system they think they are, but they’re still plural, regardless.

To throw yet another wrench into the works... earlier today, a system we will not name was sent to a psych ward, where they were told that their system wasn’t real, was psychosis. This utterly destroyed them. They were panicking. They were breaking down. they felt like they had no right to speak in the community anymore. Especially considering how so many professionals still don’t understand DID, how many doubt it exists, and how many systems go misdiagnosed or undiagnosed for years--and that’s DID, not even non-DID plurality--I’m against the idea that any external person’s word, even a psychiatrist’s, should speak over someone’s internal reality. That does real harm to people.

I get what you’re trying to say, but this thing can very easily give way to identity policing, when it’s so much more complicated than "having this disorder means you can’t be plural”. And it’s honestly kind of problematic to say that people with those disorders are less capable of recognizing their own inner reality, or that their own internal experiences cannot be trusted, or are less real.

I feel that instead of focusing upon under what criteria a system can be valid or real, we should instead focus on recognizing abusive and problematic behavior, as described in [this post].

Apologies for butting in again--I really do think you guys do good and much-needed work, and again, I see where you’re coming from with this. I don’t think you meant anything malicious, and we all see and word things differently.

Thanks for reading.

-- Cassius

Positivity:

This blog was made to try to spread positivity for systems without DID or OSDD1, because it’s fairly commonplace for their tags to be filled with hate. The only way to fight negativity is with positivity, so here we are.

Education and Help:

Everyone here is dedicated to educating others about systems / multiplicity, and to supporting our fellow systems!

Natural / Endogenic systems - Mod Rose, Mod Specklebum.

Tulpamancy - All mods have experience with tulpamancy.

Soulbond - Mod Squiddle, Mod Riding Hood, Mod Blade, and Mod Felt.

Traumagenic - Mod Baby Blue, Mod Snow Queen, Mod Dead Wolf, and Mod Carrot Idol.

Median System - No current mods are median systems. (seeking info)

I feel like most systems have got something, somewhere, that can be labelled ridiculous or “sparkly”. Either it’s a fictive or a factive, or a non-human headmate, or it’s something about their headspace, or it’s a member’s beliefs about how their multiplicity came about or how it functions — there’s something there that you can then stand back and say “Oh, they say X, no wonder.”

And then another part of it is a matter of framing. I mean, look at this particular self-description we did a while back, to make that point (a post which, amusingly, made it to watchful-entity).

Basically, I think if you dig enough / twist enough with any system, you’re gonna find something sparkly. They just might seem more salient when you’re looking for reasons to dislike the system anyway.

At the same time, I’m married to another system member, and he’s a dead guy who used to shoot aliens.  My predecessor was a magical alien Mary Sue from a story we wrote when we were twelve.  There’s a good slab of labels I could use, if I wanted to: demisexual transgendered DID EDNOS blah blah blah.  Who cares?  So what?

As the title says, the original author of this post is Hail Fall, a member of a multiple system that includes tulpas. I received her permission to repost this extremely well-written post on multiplicity. It is very informative and well-worth a read for tulpamancers and non-tulpamancers alike.

(original post from reddit)

I can’t believe I am even jumping into this fray. Oh well, got to do it as someone who is multiple and has tulpas. Note, I use the term system-mates for everyone in this brain since it is more generic, and well, to not cause people’s minds to immediately jump to tumblr. As a friend once said, tumblr is not a place to learn about certain things from (was specifically referring to multiplicity and otherkin).

First, time to drop some actual places to read more up on multiplicity (really, if you have never read these places, you should)

The Layman’s Guide is a good place to learn about it that is suitable both for people who are multiple and those who are not.

Astraea’s Web is another place with a lot of info, and especially definitions in its glossary. Place is a little dated, but is still good.

Plurality is the term that includes all phenomena where there is more than one consciousness in a single brain/body. It includes multiplicity, tulpamancy, etc. It is the generic term. The opposite of being plural is being a singlet - one consciousness in the body.

There are three main origins of plurality

Natural - for some reason or another, the body just started out with more than one member in the first place.

Trauma - there was originally one person in the body and then trauma caused that person to split or others be made (note, the trauma need not be when someone is a child, but that is usually how it works).

Constructed - there was originally one person who then made, whether intentionally or on accident, other consciousnesses in the body. This includes tulpamancers, daemians, soulbonders (there has to be a better definition somewhere), etc.

And of course, systems (group of all consciousnesses living in a single body/brain) can have mixed origins, sometimes have unknown origins, and sometimes an origin that just doesn’t neatly fit into the above classifications (say a system-mate who just appeared). My system is a mixed origin system. There was originally one person (would be called the original) and then I came into the picture sort of as a split and sort of made (its a mess and kind of defies classification) during the school years. More recently, I made 5 tulpas, 4 unintentionally (natural tulpas they would called) and one intentionally.

the ones who use “we” instead of “I”

Lots of hosts and tulpas do the same. Also, it kind of begins to happen when decisions are made together as a system to some degree or another. Also, there is such thing as co-fronting. Fronting is the act of being in control of the body. Changing of fronters is called switching. Co-fronting is when more than one person are in control, paying attention to the physical world, etc. Possession and eclipsing are specific types of co-fronting. When more than one system member is co-fronting, it is kind of natural to start using “we”, especially if there is any sort of blending/blurring going on.

the ones whose headmates have inexplicably appeared and sometimes inexplicably take control of them

System-mates can sometimes be hidden, and sometimes new ones appear. The latter are called walk-ins, to no surprise. Accidental tulpas (as opposed to natural tulpas) would technically classify. My guess is that once there is more than one consciousness in the body, the bar to making new ones is low enough that it can happen spontaneously, with the bar lowering with each new consciousness (this would explain why walk-ins are most common in very large systems).

On the second part, that can happen either through uncontrolled switching (neither the person going into the front and the person going out chose it to happen) or through forcible switching (also called brute force switching). The former can sometimes be something that happens in rapid succession, or something that happens due to a certain stimulus which is called a trigger (sort of a different definition of the word than most people are used to). Both can make life difficult and systems generally try to get it under control or at least make sure measures are in place to make sure thing work out right despite the switching.

Brute force switching is where one member of the system forcibly removes another from the front (or at least attempts it) and puts themselves in front. This is not something exclusive to multiples. Unless a tulpa is really strong, when they are switched in, the host can generally brute force switch them. For an old and strong tulpa, sometimes the other way around is possible. With some exceptions, whoever controls the body the most is the strongest and can thus brute force switch the easiest. Brute force switching can definitely pose problems (it doesn’t do good for trust between system members, for one), but sometimes it has a useful purpose. Say someone in the system is about to do something that breaks the house rules (e.g. might be about to hurt someone) and isn’t listening to the others, then the other system-mates might need to do a brute force switch (it can be easier if all of them gang up on whoever is in front).

It goes without saying that brute force possession is also doable, as well as things that are sort of in between. I’ve experienced some of the in between stuff. I am damn near impossible to dislodge from the front other than when I spontaneously fall out due to weariness, but I am not that hard to possess. Both the original member of my system and the T (a subsystem of 3 tulpas together in one form) have possessed me in such a state where they could forcibly move the body parts they were in control of with the exception that I could only override them if I put in nearly everything I got. In case you are wondering, this has always been cooperative with the T (I agree to it before hand) and within agreement with the original (I told her she can do it whenever she has the strength except when I am doing certain things like driving, riding a bike, at work, etc.). I trust them. And if they were to do something not so great, I will take responsibility with them like all plurals are supposed to do (note, the multiple community strongly believes in this idea of shared responsibility http://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/2jxbyi/what_do_you_think_of_the_tumblr_headmate_trend/clg7li8 ).

and the ones who actually believe that their headmates are real and that their rights should be recognised.

This has been discussed a bit by others here, so I only have a little bit to add. When you get down to it, is a host any more real than a tulpa. I mean, the body is in some ways a meatpuppet controlled by whatever consciousness has the front, whether they be host, tulpa, headmate, or whatever. I would say that all consciousnesses in a body are equally real and/or equally unreal. To take my own system as an example, the original is definitely pretty real. I have been pretty much exclusively controlling the body (most of the time, she was sort of attached to me in a complicated fashion, but lets ignore that since I was always the dominant one and she virtually never tried to exert bodily control) for 15+ years. If someone knows the body, they definitely know me and don’t know anyone else in here short of what I proxy for them or when I let them possess me, unless they knew the body really young in which case they know the original. I would say that makes me real, just as real as the original. Given this, I would have to say that the tulpas are just as real as she and I are.

EDIT - needed to add something

Now, where does DID/MPD and DDNOS come into this. Well, systems that are unhealthy and disordered due to their plurality (as opposed to some other mental health issue) have those conditions. If a system is really unhealthy and disordered, then they fit DID/MPD. If they aren’t quite as unhealthy and disordered, they fit DDNOS. There is a lot of grey area in between these. An unhealthy and disordered system can eventually become more healthy, possibly becoming actually healthy. Healthy systems can sometimes become unhealthy. And things that might cause one system to be disorderd (say, losing time, which system members not fronting experience a memory blackout) can be handled by another system making them healthy (notebooks and calendars are really helpful here) though of course it is more difficult to be healthy in this case.

I’m planning on going back through the blog itself and updating things, though I’ve been unsure on the exact details of how I’ll do it. I don’t want to simply delete things, since I feel like I’d covering up my past mistakes without actually solving anything, and I don’t want to simply stick an [OUTDATED] tag on everything without clarifying what is and isn’t outdated. Chances are I’ll end up putting an [Outdated, see bottom of post for notes] tag up top and details at bottom for each post that gets updated.

In any case, you are certainly heard on this. I’m sorry for the distress we’ve caused.