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Honestly I need the word “system” and all that terminology that’s been taken to mean DID-only, because if I’m just an “imaginary friend” or anything less than “real and not just secondary to the more important body-realperson,” (and anything that isn’t agnostic to whether I’m literally an external spirit or fully created here, because that causes Problems), then best thing for me to do is just to go back to spending most of my time isolated from the front and everyone out here, as terrible for my mental health as that has been, because frankly I’m bad for this body and its frontrunners. Either I’m real and get to actually put work into feeling a tiny bit better sometimes, or I’m some unruly imaginary friend or maladaptive fantasy and should go away.
– Serpent
Yeah no. No you fucking dont. You took the term system from us and it was MADE to be a DID/OSDD term. Please keep yourself OUT of our spaces and DONT use our terms. I dont care if you use “plural” or whatever, but using “system” puts YOU in the same category as those with DID/OSDD and that is extremely harmful for us.
Nah, the first time you start see people calling themselves “systems” is in general multiplicity communities. it pops up here and there in the literature, but it’s hardly The Terminology, and seems to be more of an extension from terms like “family system” or “system of entities” than anything “MADE.”
even if it were DID-only, it’s been “given” to non-traumagenic folks for at least 20 years now. (source: alt.support.dissociation used it, and find the question “What causes multiplicity?” for nontraumagenic inclusion) a bit late to keep it “pure”, sorry pal.
just responding in case you specifically haven’t heard this. we’ve been throwing it at anti-endogenic folks for a while now, and it never seems to stick.
also, we’ve seen people angry about endogenic folks using the word “multiple” – “plural” is only a matter of time. forgive us for being suspicious of any “well you’re allowed to do this, maybe, but we have already demonstrated how quickly that party line can change” :V
(’sides the post Serpent was vaguing about sorta explicitly set up a binary between “system” and “singlet” which… yeah doesn’t work out too well once you take away “system” from us.)
– Ace
^ This.
Seeing ourselves as a system of real people working together here, using one body and brain that we must share, is absolutely essential for our health and wellbeing too. So much so that we left the safest, most stable environment we had ever been in, to try and make it on our own, rather than be stuck with people who believed only our host was real and important.
I argued with our host that I am as real as she is for over a decade. Her lack of belief was painful, her lack of respect for my autonomy often abusive. Because she saw me as imaginary, she had no problem using my trauma as literal fetish fuel. Do you have any idea how horrible that was for our relationship? For my own health and healing from that trauma that still haunts me to this day?
But as bad as that was, I did even worse to Varyn. I knew what it felt like to be treated like I wasn’t real and then I turned around and did it to my dear friend V. I’m horribly ashamed of how I treated him like a lifeless thing, a tool. It broke our relationship. It damaged him in ways that may never be able to be fully repaired. But we’re working on it.
We’re all working on it together. And we’re living together. We’re being a multiple system together, dammit, one unit with many persons who depend on one another. Even if our coming together wasn’t by choice, our staying together and doing our best to try and do so, in this world outside the body here and the one inside of it. And going back to anything lesser would be incredibly damaging, and we will not do so no matter how many people get upset about it. Because my own health – our system’s health – is far more important to me than anyone else’s anger.
~Jasmine Tareht
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