This kind of thing is what happens when people have things to get off their chest.
As the observer of the community, as one who hasn’t chosen a name yet…
I feel that I have a duty to report on this issue in particular.
When we were living our third life as a multiple, we were pushed to the point where the idea of one host was not reasonable.
We’re a long way past that now. Talking to a friend who knows of our situation, we are switching rapidly, all of us eager to get a word in edgewise.
“Be normal, act as one,” a remembered voice commands. We begin to blend again.
When Cooperland was born, his first task was to create an illusion of unity that would cause us to be unaware of our separation. That lasted from our third life until 2015, when loneliness drove us past it.
In spiritual circles, honesty is usually expected, unity is encouraged, and love is said to abound.
In spiritual circles, a multiple’s honesty means they have souls of the dead living within them, and if it is even remotely possible they could have Multiple Personality Disorder, they need to work on integration or they will never be healthy. Insiders are either lost and need redirection, unwelcome and need punishment, or fragmented parts of the original person and need to go back where they belong.
There is not one hint of unity as we know it in any of those ideas. In fact, fear and hate are more evident.
In the area of medicalized multiplicity, as well as the area of spiritual intervention for those who have actually died and not found peace, it is common knowledge that, when compared to whoever presents first, the other being is different in a way that forces one to take notice of their unique presence. But when you share a body, you’re not a person. You’re a spirit, or a fragment, and you have no right to exist as anything else.
In our community, there is a child in the Internal Behavior Program who is a multiple. When the school of our inner world was closed, we got access to his behavior plan, which mandated that all of his insiders be ignored accept for the boy himself, the insider who responded to the name by which the adults of the school called him.
We shredded that document. Its implementation only caused harm.
Earlier, before we discovered the school, we sat on a skype call with another multiple and listened as one of their insiders told us of a friend’s request that they, and we as well, avoid switching as frequently as we were because it drained energy from them.
“Act as one,” someone inside hisses, and we all blend, while Cooperland’s illusion of unity acts at full strength to finish the effect.
Cassandra seems to tolerate us as we are. Our switching doesn’t bother her, she tells us, and she begins to work with us in an attempt to help us heal. She brings to mind memories of another, another who tried to restore unity to us, and who was also the original person to request that our friend and us avoid such frequent switching. Sadly, the fear driven through us of being discovered as we are is never truly that far from us, and as she ventures deeper into our inner world through spiritual means, someone shouts from a distance, “Act as one!”
Unity is not always meant to be taken literally. It can mean many things becoming one, or it can mean cooperation between those many things to bring about oneness of the whole group, a shared direction of sorts. Sadly, many spiritual people don’t specify that. The person who first tried to help us didn’t, and even as Cassandra tries now, even though we know about some of us, even though she says we are allowed to switch as much as we need to around her…
Fear drove that child’s behavior plan. Fear drove illusions such as the one Cooperland gave rise to in our moment of need. Fear drives a lot of things, including the “Act as one!” order that has been barked out by adults here for life after life. But fear is not love. It cannot have the same effects.
Being multiple meant our survival was possible. Being multiple meant that we could avoid going into shock. It meant that we could, if not hide problems, at least make it inwardly safer for us to show them on the outside by changing ownership of the issue from one insider to another. It meant we could, eventually, focus on what needed to be done. It meant finding some sort of happiness where there was none.
But we are to act as one.
I know, I know. Multiplicity is a disorder. You can’t talk to us at all unless we respond to the body’s name, our birth name. We need to integrate to be healthy. You can’t understand it, so it’s not worth your time. We’re all just parts of one person anyway, or we’re spirits needing to cross over because we’ve died somehow, or we’re unwelcome intruders who need to be chased out, or we’re life-draining insects that are only pretending to be what we say we are. Or, to those who aren’t spiritual, we’re a game, a lie, a fake trendy attention-getting act.
If only you knew how much we’re actually pretending. If only you knew how difficult it is to play one, even with the illusions of unity only having been partly broken through in the sense that many of us still lack names. But having names isn’t ok, unless it’s just the body’s name. We are to act as one, or we won’t be able to learn, or live, at all. We are to act as one, or we’ll be ignored, and our cries for help will fall upon ears that have purposefully become deaf until we begin the endless lying that is our life all over again.
Let me say things exactly as I see them. If you teach multiples that the way they live life is wrong, if you tell them that switching is going to get them in trouble, if you take away what just might be their only way of dealing with their world, if you shame them for that…
Then I will rebel. I will give up my position as observer, if only to overturn your “no switching,” “act as one!” “Be normal!” demands, I will allow everyone within the community to experience school, work, and all other areas of life, I will talk to them out loud in places where you can hear us conversing, where you can hear the voice change, where you won’t be able to punish us by disengagement, where you won’t be able to…to…