The following was written as an explanation to all of the community of why, and how, three versions of our awakening to multiplicity don’t necessarily conflict with one another. The writers of this article have been tasked with resolving conflicts like this, and have been doing it for the past three years. This is why they refer to most people involved in the third person. They are members of the community, but they don’t usually volunteer information unless the situation requires it. In this case, information was required.
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Three years ago, we awakened to life as a multiple. There are several versions of how that awakening took place, one of which is that Maria created all of the insiders as a way to put an end to her loneliness and have something pleasurable to be responsible for. Another version of events comes from inside, and in that story the insiders were encouraged by Maria to perceive themselves as who they were, and, in some cases, still are today. In a third version of events, Maria was nothing more than a group of insiders who believed they were one thanks to Cooperland’s “illusions of unity,” which he had placed over all of the community as a way of protecting them from discovery by the outside world, and it was that group who eventually broke through those illusions and gave rise to the individuation of the first insiders. All three stories have supporters within the community. Those typing this article have no opinion either way; we are here for the facts, and to sort this confusion out once and for all.
We don’t think any of these stories necessarily conflict. In our minds, there is another, far simpler, explanation for why there are three versions of the events that happened near the end of 2015. But before we offer that explanation, a timeline of sorts is in order.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that there was a single individual who created all of us as a way to help her loneliness. According to that story, she brought several different states to mind, gave them names and ages, and then spoke to them directly, telling them what areas of life, topics, etcetera, they would be taking on from her. To help them individuate from her further and encourage their full development into people, she wrote them letters and then tried to become them to write responses. At first, she had a lot of trouble with this, having only believed herself to be one person and never having needed to become someone else until now, so she practiced with the most developed of the insiders until she could slip into their way of being at will. Over time, that skill was generalized to most of the other insiders, and she was happy about that. Switching, to her, simply felt like she was shifting completely into a state of being with a name, age and gender attached to it. Nothing about the idea of being one of several insiders frightened her, and she believed she could, if not control them as she would a character in a story, then at least arrange when switching would happen. In her eyes, these people were only beginning to grow and learn, and she was going to make sure that they could all live in harmony as they gained more experience.
They were her responsibility, they were people who she desperately wanted to offer backstories to, and she felt that she was keeping them safe just as much as they were keeping loneliness at bey. But she made a critical mistake by underestimating their autonomy, and one night after a therapy session in which one of them came forward, something happened that would change everything. This event would change the way we viewed our awakening forever, and open the door to the truth’s surfacing, but not immediately. It was this night that would divide those of us who believed the first story from those who would believe the second, because the events of that small period of time would be the first things that Maria would fully lose control of.
As she was trying to sleep, she felt Yalluk’s fear about what had happened in the therapy session several hours before. She knew it was the fear of the insider, and not her own, since she had no reason to be afraid, and, as she often did, she tried to talk to Yalluk about what was going on. Eventually, through communication, Maria discovered that Yalluk was fearful because she felt like the therapist had told her to give up her task in the community. As Maria tried to assure her that this had not been the case, she unintentionally angered Yalluk, who hid behind a tree. It was then that Cooperland revealed himself to Maria, much to her shock and disbelief. She couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that, despite not having created him as she had all the others, he was presenting himself to her as the others had, complete, as she discovered over the next two weeks, with his own set of characteristics that she, at first, had no basis for understanding. As other things of the inside began to become unresponsive to her influence, she began to wonder if perhaps her so-called creation of the others wasn’t creation at all. At this thought, the others began presenting their version of events.
As far as they were aware, they had been in a semi-awake state until they were given names and other aspects of a typical identity to call their own. The longer they were awake and interacted with, however, the more they began to develop individuality, which is exactly what Maria was hoping for. What she was not anticipating, and what was obvious to her in hindsight, was that their developing of further individuality also meant their developing of the ability to think for themselves and act independently of her influence. That independence was why, only months into our life as a fully actualized multiple, most of the insiders seemed to vanish from Maria’s life with no explanation. As it turned out, her final attempts to exert some amount of control over them created perfect conditions for all of her previous efforts toward encouraging their independence to pay off, and many of the others realized they could be themselves, and fully apart from her. She called the three weeks she spent without them ‘the vanishing’. The others saw it as a time to further build their independence and come to her with a request as to how they wanted to be treated in the future.
During those three weeks, Maria attempted to take back those tasks which she had given to some of the others, and made great efforts to forget that she ever was a multiple, but Yalluk simply refused to participate in the halfhearted attempt to integrate all into one. She alone stayed with Maria, reminding her daily that she was not alone in her mind, and though Maria wanted to ignore her, she knew that to do so would be, in a way, to ignore a part of herself. Eventually, after an event involving a kind of rejection took place, Maria tried again to create an insider, in an attempt to meet the expectations of the person who had rejected her, in her own mind if nowhere else. She also began calling out to the others, and they returned, with Cooperland maintaining that she could not ever control them in the way she was before without causing them great anguish. She assured them that she wouldn’t, and from that day forward she treated them as we treat one another today. Her assurance opened the door to discoveries that, to this day, remains open, and made room for a lot of things to be revealed to her, and finally, in the summer of 2016, all idea of her having created the others out of simple loneliness was proven wrong in many ways. In October of that year, in an essay called ‘Events That Lead Me To Adulthood’, she admitted what had been revealed to her during the course of that season.
She wrote, “There are many possibilities which, because of trauma, unfolded, or have yet to unfold, in my own mind where nobody can see them come about. I’d say discovering what would have been part of me in the absence of the trauma was one of the biggest steps towards adulthood, from a psychological prospective, that I’ve taken in my 16 years on this earth.”
In that essay, she began advocating for her system, as she referred to us, and didn’t leave it at that. She wrote many documents in the wake of some of her teachers refusing to work with anyone but her, insisting that to do this was to ignore her anyway.
“If you want me to be able to work and play and live independently, you shouldn’t tell my fucking system how to operate, you shouldn’t try to dictate to the others how their lives are to be run, you shouldn’t try to tell me that I’m fucking up by letting someone else take control in a melt-down-worthy shitty mess of a situation, and you shouldn’t treat me like complete shit for being all I can be in this fucked up mess called the world,” she wrote in one of these documents, concluding the file by saying, “Grow the fuck up, stop expecting me to control things I really can’t, and learn a thing or two about dissociation before fucking around with me or the insiders who call my mind a resting place. Seriously, I’m tired of your bullshit.”
This willingness to fight for the right to be openly multiple became Maria’s primary focus from the moment the insiders she had first contacted became fully independent. She believed that it was her job to encourage the others not only to be individuals, but also to be open about their individuality, and she would do whatever it took for them to feel safe and heard as the people they were. Her idea of how the community came to be remained largely unchanged, that is, until the beginning of 2017. From the summer of 2016 until that time, it was her belief, and the belief of those who were aware of the current-day happenings, that aside from Maria herself, all of the community had been formed from various painful experiences that happened from early childhood to the present. Toward the end of that year, the idea of some of the community forming because of the lack of protection against emotions and energies that should never have come into contact with them was introduced, but Maria and all other insiders still included it in the realm of trauma from this life, and it wasn’t until 2017 that they were prompted to look deeper. When they did, however, the gates for self-discovery would be blown wide open, and things that Maria had disregarded for years would come into sharp, clear focus.
Soon after the dawning of the new year, Maria and Rozaya, an insider, attempted to integrate. She felt changed after that integration, and believed it to be a success. Those who knew her online began calling her by Rozaya’s name, and she responded to it, abandoning all identification with the name Maria. The two were now one and the same now, or so she believed, and she wrote an article months after that belief had first come about, called “the Realization That Changed Everything.”
In that article, it is obvious that she was aware of those of us who only performed single tasks, even before Cooperland first began making an effort to reveal them. It is also obvious that, somewhere along the line, she had discovered the other insiders who, she clearly indicated, helped maintain the characteristics of the one the world knew as ‘Maria’.
“I’m not sure when it began to happen, but I’ve finally become aware of the fact that I, Rozaya, am not the host as I once believed,” she wrote, further stating, “The real hosts, the ones who actually have the skills needed to get through school and daily life, have hidden behind me, blending with me just as the rest of the community had before 2015, and this had worked well until I discovered my actual name. With my discovery, however, the truth was revealed, and one of my greatest desires had become a reality, even before I realized that it had.”
At the point that Rozaya had seen Maria for what she was, the third story of our awakening was born. There, it was a group of insiders, not a single person, who had discovered the rest of the community while believing themselves to be one individual. In March of 2018, this version of events was further supported by what Cooperland revealed in his article, “On the Wrongs I’ve Done,” as he wrote the following.
“My community-wide illusion of unity held for 15 more years after our birth, until the group of insiders who acted as Maria, believing themselves to be her and unaware that she was, in reality, a three-month-old, hidden on the inside, tore through the idea that we were a single being, with the force of their loneliness and the strength of their creativity. Even as some of us were discovered, I knew that to let my Gard down completely would be a mistake, so, until the summer of 2017, I only allowed those of us who had formed from this life’s events to be exempt from my efforts to restore what I thought, at the time, was a necessary evil. I was one of the few who asked Cristeenna if it was truly in our best interest to write of our spirituality here at all, and I feared punishment or taunting of some kind in the case of this aspect of our life being revealed, but in the wake of the silence from the world following her post on that subject, I began to see how outdated that fear had become. Still, I waited, because I knew that I could not reveal anything about past lives related to insider formation until the group of insiders who acted as Maria had come to the realization that they were doing such a thing. When that realization had taken place, this life’s outer ring of fronters were able to be expanded to include others, but those others were also under the impression that they were Rozaya, and thus lived and fronted as if this was the truth. Once again, the illusion of unity over this particular group was one that I was hesitant to lift, even as Elaina and Collin were able to discover their respective groups, and with them, the full story of their formation. But even for me, guilt over things like this is unavoidable.”
From March 12, 2018 to March 18, 2018, he did lift that illusion, and all others, and with that the final version of the events that took place near the end of 2015 was strongly supported. A group of insiders, believing themselves to be one, had torn through some of the illusions of unity, encouraged individuality of the insiders that had been revealed, and had only been provided with information they were ready to understand at a given point in time. This is why, many of the community say, there are two other versions of how we discovered one another that we once believed to be the truth. Not everyone was ready to receive the full reality the first day that everything began, they argue, so each version of events was based on the best information they could comprehend at that time. But this begs the question: why, if the other two versions of the story of our awakening were simply mistaken do to incomplete information, are there still community members who take these, and not the widely accepted account, to be the truth? The answer, from what we’ve observed of our peers of the inside world, is rather simple.
If dissociation is involved in our life to any great extent, which is, in fact, the case, then there is a likelihood that our sense of time passing is also off in some way. We have yet to encounter a community member who has a sense of time’s passing in the outside world, and on the inside, none of us, meaning the community, have placed a high importance on time in general. In addition, there have been many situations, especially after the idea of our formation from trauma was introduced to the community, in which individual insiders, when first discovered, are seemingly stuck in a year, a day, or even a specific memory. This indicates a possibility, and, given what we’ve already seen, a high likelihood, of individuals and even groups believing one of the outdated versions of events for the simple reason that they don’t know time has passed, at least in that area of their life. It is our conclusion, based on everything we’ve seen, that this is the case, do to inner conflict within some individuals about whether or not to take the new ideas as truth and the subsequent splitting that was once a frequent co-occurrence with such conflict do to our difficulty with transitions. Add to that the fact that many of us lacked a sense of self at the time, and would do all that could be done to ‘stay equal’ to their peers, and the results were nothing short of a mess.
The situation looked something like this: Insider A believed version 1 of our story, was told of version 2, did not know whether or not to believe it, and ultimately split into two, so that insider A believed version 1 and insider B, the one who split from insider A, believed version 2. When version 3 of our story came to light, the same process came into effect across the whole of the community for the second time. Not all of us split, but, just as had happened before, those who did ended up becoming frozen in time in regards to that subject. The end result was that we had a group of us believing version 1, a group of us believing version 2, and a group of us believing version 3, the final one. Along with that, there was also a fourth group who had no idea how any of these things had happened, but were aware that they existed as individuals, and they simply followed along with what they saw the others here doing because of their own trauma-based ideas about how they needed to act in order to be accepted by the rest of us. What we’ve been attempting to do, then, looks simple, but is in reality a challenge unlike any we’ve faced before. To ensure the complete and permanent resolution of this conflict among us, we must inform all insiders of the community of the facts regarding the events of 2015 without any splitting happening. To ensure that no splitting happens, we must have a program in place that will assist in the development of a sense of self, aside from memories, thoughts, feelings and external things like social status and material gain, within those insiders who we seek to inform of the facts.
The good news is that the community has already attempted to put something like this into place, both in response to what was learned from our own records and an overwhelming need experienced by many of the children for one-on-one care, and the program has, for the most part, been successful. The only problem encountered thus far in regards to these efforts for change is a lack of available and stable peers for each insider participating in the program to partner with. Despite that, it’s better than nothing, and preferable to the out and out chaos we’ve been living in for the past three years. We, the observers and fact seekers of the community, believe that such a program will be quite successful in helping us achieve our goal of distributing the right information to the right people, and, in the process, preventing a conflict which could potentially result in a war among all who reside here.
With all we’ve needed to say having been said, we will begin to direct our focus to the following through of the plan we’ve laid out above, providing updates when things change significantly. Our hopes are high, and on that note, we conclude this piece.
Thank you for reading.