Discovery of something unseen is nothing unless its story is told. This is the story of our awakening from I to we, and it details the events that took place from the beginning of our discovery to the present day. Nothing is left out accept for the names of external people, and this is done both for the sake of their privacy and for our comfort in posting such a story.
The discovery began in 2015, when Maria slowly started her awakening into life as a system, and, in the process, awakened us to the existence of one another. On this subject, she writes, “In December of 2015, my ability to tolerate loneliness shattered. I began creating what I thought were only characters in my mind, not aware of the fact that I was a multiple at the time and that I was actually talking to insiders.”
As we gained further communication with Maria, the fogs that had surrounded us began to lift, revealing not only our existence as a system to her, but also revealing the existence of one another to everyone else. Those of us who had frozen in trauma or who were unaware of the outside world, through her persistence, began to take control of the body during non-traumatic situations and gain access to memories, or in some cases create new ones, which gave us the skills and abilities we needed to understand what she was living. Maria learned too, to step back with full awareness and let the rest of us speak and be ourselves. She began to do simple google searches as she realized how freely we’d acted and reacted to things both in our internal world and on the outside, coming across different names and kinds of multiplicity. At first, she refused to put a solid label to the experiences she was having, preferring to let things run their course. It was all a game to her back then, just a creative way of dealing with overwhelming isolation that wouldn’t affect her daily life. She drove us, even though she believed she was pretending, to seek more individuality than we’d been able to have before, calling for someone to handle one task and someone else to handle another, completely unaware that in some cases, we already had tasks in the system that we were tending to. It was through her creativity, openness and need to break the loneliness that she opened the door to revealing a life she hadn’t realized she’d lived up to that point. She may have treated it as a game at first, however there was something, or rather, someone, who was going to turn that idea around completely.
In the past, when it was vital that we remain hidden from anyone but ourselves, the ideas that Maria created were accepted by most of us only because we had played the part for so long that we had become, in a way, forgetful of ourselves, dragged along in the current of oneness that a half-life separated from the rest of oneself still called for. After all, we didn’t want to be known as multiple at that time, and we found a way of hiding that fact from the world. Those of us who were holding fragments of memory that could not be processed were hidden by stronger insiders, while those of us who were not held down by our past became so connected, so linked in thought and awareness of current happenings that, outside of necessity, it was almost impossible to identify as anyone other than Maria until she herself began to call for such different identification. Even as she did so, the idea that she herself wasn’t simply pretending was a difficult one for her to grasp, until an insider who is no longer with us at the writing of this article, Cooperland, came along. Maria writes, in ‘Events That Led Me to Adulthood,’ “I remember when the first insider I hadn’t named came to my awareness. He spoke to me as I tried to comfort another, and he sounded like the voices one would hear when thinking. Rather than forcing a name on him, I asked for any that he might have. As it turns out, he did have a name, taken and adapted from a city in this state.”
The medical mottle of multiplicity, as described in Shattered Minds: A Basic explanation of Dissociative Identity Disorder and Related Disorders , worked well for us until January of 2017. From December of 2015 until this time, we focused mainly on healing the presumed cause of our development as a system, learning skills the behavioral program had failed to teach us and meeting needs that, until then, had not been met in our children. We used more than one method to get to where we were in January, searching for a diagnoses before this when Cooperland and others who Maria had not known began to present themselves. Using the ideas presented to us about blindness and the need for education on the subject, we began to speak out about being multiple in the same way, thinking it would help us in our healing process and provide useful information to those who needed it. But for all the good that had come of blindness awareness, the backlash we came under from openly living another part of our lives was just as intense. For example, at times when we would switch from situational stress, we were treated as though we were a game, and were even told as much, by people who, we can only guess, were afraid of what they didn’t understand, or in some other way wanted it to leave them alone. Openly being ourselves around these people was a mistake we made sure not to let happen again, the impact on those who were treated as invisible showing exactly what could happen if we spoke too freely about who we were.
In response to our efforts toward educating the public being reacted to in this way, we became increasingly shut down to the world, turning even further within ourselves and to one another for support despite The demands from those around us that we not do so. When that failed to ease our pain or calm our anger at our treatment, we began to go public on even greater platforms such as YouTube and WordPress, lashing out through highly intellectual and wordy articles and videos. In the content of the videos, as some may already know, we talked about our experience of multiplicity, posted introductions and our music, and threw in topics like breathwork, while on the blog we’ve talked about our history and a little about present day happenings. Has all this helped us come to terms with our current situation or change it? Yes, because on April 10, 2016, we were involved in a meeting in which we brought up the treatment we’d been subjected to and asked for a change. We got that change, at least until our school year ended, in the form of a requested break by either ourselves or those who work with us, should anyone involved notice that a switch is needed or has happened, and we must not ignore the fact that we are grateful for this taking place. However, the existing damage has already been done, as far as dealing with those who still use invalidation to change behavior that they find ‘abnormal’.
The damage lies in the form of the message we've taken, not by choice but by logic based on statements to us from those who refuse to see things as they are, who insist on calling us a game, or who demand, through such actions, that we lie about who we are as a whole. This message goes something like, “we don’t want you getting better. We don’t want you healing or healthy, or living a full life, because who you are doesn’t match what we understand as being normal. Your comfort doesn’t matter to us, as long as you act happy and can perform to our standards.” Since the meeting on April 10, no insulting comments have been made toward us, but earlier that month, because of inability of the system to handle what had already been said combined with the possibility of further invalidation and denial at the meeting, a new insider, Mary, was formed. In an interview about the recent happenings, she said, “I didn’t want to be born. I didn’t choose this for myself, but I’m here, and I can’t let messages like the one we were given from early childhood to now keep us from living a good life. If Judging us, calling us a game and acting like we’re wrong when we haven’t done anything that breaks a law or hurts anyone is their way of trying to help us, they should get their psychology licenses revoked, if they even had them to begin with.”
Daniel said, “It’s hard to hide from someone like Maria, who’s searching for the reasons behind everything she experiences. So to finally reveal yourself in a nonverbal state and then have those who interact with Maria tell you that you basically don’t exist, that’s discouraging and prevents healing from happening. It tells me that the people who just won’t see things for what they are have their own issues to work through and they’ll probably not change their ways, and that’s sad. But there’s nothing I can do other than contributing to articles like this and leaving my own for the world to see if they want to. It’s like blindness, and any other difference in doing things, the more information on it that’s out there and the more awareness people have of it, the less likely it is that people will call it a game or whatever they’ve insulted it as last. At least, I can hope so.”
Since 2015, we’ve moved closer to healing than we’ve ever been in our remembered life. Maria’s discovery of the rest of us, and her subsequent efforts toward our development as individuals, have opened the space for the as yet unprocessed events of our life to be worked through, not only by the one person who first believed she had lived them, but by all who had been there taking on what she could not. While the existence of multiplicity is still debated, with many saying that it is, at most, a delusion, we have begun to learn that comments such as this don’t have to hurt us in the way they once did. Because of practice advocating for ourselves, while keeping in mind that no one is obligated to read anything we post, we can share our experiences with the public without fear of what others will think of us. This, to me, is the gift that was concealed among the shadows of self-doubt, sadness and anger that we first saw when working with multiplicity around outsiders. We don’t think that what was said or done was right, or that we should have had to justify our way of doing things, particularly to people who didn’t believe a word we said about any part of the situation, but everything that is outside of what a given culture sees as acceptable has had its time of such treatment, and, as history itself reveals, some of these things have gained their well-earned acceptance. It is our hope, as we have said many times on this blog and elsewhere, that multiplicity can be included among them.