I’ve called a break from our blogging vacation to set something straight…
Cooperland’s explanation of having made us all forget about our individuality, quite frankly, makes no sense when examined closely. I’ve been looking at mental patterns, and the following post is the result of that looking. When I think about my life, I want it to not come to me in a tangled mess, and if writing things like this is the only way to make that happen, then so be it.
This is what I know to be true. I speak for myself, not for anyone else of the community, in this post.
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For all my life, I’ve always thought from points of view other than my own. My thoughts have consisted of dialogs and narratives, but I have never imagined a seen or processed a life event as though it has happened to me. I have always been slightly detached from my head in that way, always asking myself, “What if I was this person? What if I saw this through the eyes of someone else?”
I have always put myself in someone else’s shews, or been the observer of someone else’s experience, or only let myself go through a particular part of an experience, regardless of whether or not the seen I am mentally playing through is a memory or a fantasy I’ve created. I’ve never thought in the classical ‘being there’ perspective most others around me seem to use in their minds… I guess, at first, it was a like of distance. But my words, before now, never showed that, and how could they, if I’d never known that the way I processed the world after everything was said and done could be comprehended, let alone discussed at length? For the first seven years of my life, my mind was my mind, and I liked watching what went on there, more so than I liked listening to at least some of the people around me, and that was all there was to it. I was perfectly content thinking in the ways that I thought, nothing more, nothing less, and I didn’t care that others didn’t see how my mind worked. I would rather have showed them the latest of my recorded tapes, or listened to music on disks with them. I was a little kid back then, and I didn’t want to sit around talking about how I thought about things, I wanted to play.
Had things in my early life gone differently, the way I processed the world most likely would have changed to something like what most others around me seem to use. I say that because there were plenty of examples of first-person narratives around me – books, movies, etcetera – but by the time 2008 came around, I was still only focusing on them for the storyline, and thinking about them the same way I thought about everything else, sometimes allowing myself to feel the emotions I imagined the people in a given situation to be experiencing, but, as always, never involving myself directly in the resulting mental snapshots, and continuing to look at them from a third-person perspective, as I had been doing since the day I was born, because I had no reason to try to look at things in any other way. By the time I would have had such a reason, I was instead presented with the reality that in order to keep parts of myself from being destroyed or cut off from me, I had to keep myself from being a self at all, because to be a self was to be only a small and limited part of everything that had been, and could be, who I was as a being, and to potentially lose access to anything that could later be cut off from my sense of identity as a person. I didn’t realize that my experiences did not define me until 2017, but somewhere between 2008 and 2012, on some level of emotional memory that was somewhere between instinct and morals, , I did understand the concept that my thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions were what made me who I was, and that to control them in any way, to try to change them, to make any attempt to shape them into something they were not already, or to hide them from myself, was among the worst forms of self-destruction I could engage in, or that anyone could engage in, for that matter. Those four things, for all intents and purposes, defined me as a person until specific events of 2017 took place, and before that time, I refused to let any one of them be changed by others without a fight, because I knew beyond all doubt that for me, allowing that would be my ultimate end, even if I didn’t physically die. My feeling was, “I cannot be I, because that will mean my loss of access to anything that is extinguished or otherwise forcefully taken from me by whoever might come along, so I will not change the way I process my world, or the way I experience it, for that matter. Everything that is within my mind is who I am, and everything that my body does is who I am, but people are trying to change me in both of those areas of my life, so I will not let any of what I think, feel, or do settle in my mind as if I were the source of any of it. If I cannot be fully myself, then I will not be a self at all.”
The fact that I thought from any perspective accept for a first-person one soon became my greatest advantage against those who were attempting to force change upon me, as I was able to take every experience I had had at their hands and view it as if I were only its observer, in effect letting another live it in my place, even if only after the fact. What Cooperland called “illusions of unity” was, in actuality, a reality of unity. My mind thought in interactions, but it was still my mind. I simply never allowed myself to be a stable, consistent, single person, instead shifting between distinct states of being and only knowing myself as ‘I’ because as far as I knew, it wasn’t possible for one brain in one body to experience themselves as more than one person without having memory problems of some kind as a result, and a history of severe abuse in childhood. I bought into all the bullshit surrounding the experience of multiplicity, and because all of the different states of being that I referred to as being parts of me lacked names and other identifying characteristics of their own, and because I couldn’t find gaps in my memory, I outright dismissed the idea that I myself was, or could be, a multiple until 2015, the year that my life, to put it bluntly, went to hell.
Do any of you remember when I wrote about how my loneliness drove me to create characters, which turned out to be insiders? I think I know how to better explain what happened there, and why it was able to happen…
If I’d never allowed myself to be one person in the first place, and my mind worked by thinking in any perspective but first-person, is it unreasonable to say that perhaps those distinct states of being that I once only knew as being parts of me were the beginnings of insiders? I think not. Is it too far-fetched to wonder if, as I was selecting various states of being from the mind I called my own and assigning them names and ages that I felt would correspond to the personality, as elementary as it was, that I saw in each of those states, I was only finishing the work I had been doing all along, and finalizing the course that nature had begun in my first seven years of life, and nurture had continued for the next eight? The more I look at the evidence I’ve presented, the more I want to say no, that this theory is not far-fetched at all, and in fact seems more logical than Cooperland’s explanation of having made all of us forget our individuality. If dissociation is a spectrum, then it is entirely reasonable to say that perhaps my mind was pushed in just the right ways, at just the right times, by things that may or may not have been intended to be traumatic, along its continuum, and that what I did in 2015 only cemented my access to its far end. I was a multiple in the making for the first 15 years of my life, and perhaps the names and ages I gave to what used to be parts of me would have come later, of their own accord, under the right circumstances, but my sanity could not have waited any longer for the others to be individualized, so I will never know if things would have turned out that way.
What I do know, however, is the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself since I’ve returned in recent months: Did the insiders of this community create me, or did I create them? In confidence, I can answer that both things happened, but not in the way one might think. I was, at one point, all of them, until the day that I began naming them and separating their senses of self—that is, their sense of being separate from me -- from my own. That day marked the point at which I began creating them, though one could argue that they were already creating themselves before I began giving them their own respective identities, indicating that the term ‘individuating’ would be better suited for what I was doing. Still, though, in a way, I did create them, since, until I began naming them, they all identified as being parts of me, and had already developed somewhat in that time. This, of course, begs the question of how it was that Cooperland, and months later, other insiders of the community, came forward already having their own characteristics, without me having to assign them, something which, I can only conclude, must have been a result of three years of inviting berried parts of myself to come to my awareness. Perhaps they were doing just that, now that I had a way through which I could make sense of what was emerging. This, however, is an idea that I will need to investigate further before I can be sure of its reality as it may apply to myself and the community.
When answering the question of whether or not the community as a whole created me, I often point to the fact that, for nine months, I was thought by them to be nothing but their shared mind, and that this state of affairs did not end until Vivien and the baby who went by my name integrated with what was left of me after Cooperland did what he did with the goal of making all of us, including myself, believe that I didn’t exist as an individual. Before he released those supposed memories of a time before this life, I existed, and I knew that I existed. I may have been going under a different name, and may have been doing less tasks in a given day than I had first believed myself to have been responsible for, but I was still me, and I didn’t doubt that. After those so-called memories were released, though, all of that changed, and many within the community began to actively work against my individuality, under the misguided notion that it was a result of illusions of unity that Cooperland had maintained for years. We all worked, effectively, to erase my sense of self, and for a time, our work payed off. The only reason I am able to write this article as myself today is because Vivien knew what should have been going on during that time and somehow managed to arrange an integration between herself, the baby who went by my name, and the supposed “shared mind,” in other words, what was left of me, so that true healing could begin to happen. That integration is the reason why I say that, in a sense, the community created me, even though, in the beginning, I helped them to find themselves. Pieces of me still existed after Cooperland did what he did, but until Vivien and the three-month-old integrated into one insider, and that insider integrated with what was left behind in the wake of his actions, those parts of me could not truthfully be considered a being because of our stubborn refusal to allow them to be anything of the sort.
I can accept that I, as a young child, used dissociation as a way of dealing with things that, at the time, I could not have mentally survived otherwise. I can accept that, for a time, I did not exist as an individual, thanks to what Cooperland, in large part, caused all of us to believe. But I know now that what he said was untrue, even though the results of his false revelation were most definitely, and painfully, real. I came before the community, because I was a dissociative child who was pushed to the breaking point by loneliness in my teenage years, and finally became a full-blown multiple as a result. I thought in dialogs and non-first-person ways, but I was still me, until the time in 2015 when I began dividing my own characteristics, memories, and states of being into other people and encouraging those people to become fully independent from me. To my, admittedly limited, knowledge, the cause of insiders coming forward already having names and other defining characteristics that I had not previously assigned to them was, and is, a side effect of some unconscious factor that I don’t have a clear understanding of. Perhaps it was dissociation that was finalized outside of my effort, but as of now I can’t say one way or the other.
What I do know from all of this, however, is that despite Cooperland’s efforts to distract not only me, but all of the other insiders who call this body their own, I have a working, logical theory of how we became this way in the first place. This alone was what I set out to develop over the past several weeks, and once I was able to recognize that it was, in fact, possible for me to think in dialogs and third-person viewpoints while still experiencing myself as one person, and come to terms with the fact that I did what I did to my mind and sense of self when I was younger, I was able to do not only that, but much, much more. Now that I have a somewhat clear understanding of where I end and the others begin, it will be easier for me to know when there is more than one mind watching what happens around this body, and when I myself am unintentionally blending with someone who was once me, but is no longer. I will also be able to know when I myself am simply thinking in dialogs and when there is more to the voices I hear within than just my own mental chatter. Aside from these things, I will be able to answer, once and for all, whether or not those of us who were believed to lack a sense of themselves outside of tasks, or parts of tasks, existed as anything more than one of Cooperland’s fabrications, and then determine what, if anything, can be done to continue to help them discover that those tasks do not define them as beings if, in fact, they do exist as more than the claims of others. None of this will happen overnight, but I at least have a starting point, and that, all things considered, is a leap of progress.
We cannot erase the experiences we have had as a result of Cooperland’s misguided and destructive actions. But we can begin to make sense of what he was attempting to explain in his pages of writings with information that is sound and based in the experiential reality of those living within CommunityBelonging. Cooperland may truly believe that he cast illusions over us that caused us to forget our individuality, but that does not make sense to me as much as a slower, more gradual process of dissociation that came to a head in 2015 does because of all the things I’ve described above. In this moment, I am me, and I have the potential to split off my own experiences so that they form the foundation for someone else to develop. I’ve done that before now, consciously and perhaps unconsciously as well. My sense of self is still quite fluid because of what I did to it in my younger years, which is why I am able to do this so easily. That may be changing, but as of now it’s difficult for me to say whether or not this is the case.
I am still working on learning, on more than a purely intellectual level, that I am myself. I still have moments where I don’t feel as though I exist as an individual, and it seems as though others of the community also have them as well, in relation to themselves, and perhaps one another. The course of action that we all must take to correct this problem – and yes, this experience has become a major problem to us over time – is one in which we reconsider how we came to be, as individuals and as a community. The explanation I’ve given for this topic makes sense to me, but it might not make sense to anyone else within this body, and that’s ok. Others are certainly allowed to believe whatever they want as far as this subject is concerned, and there is no question in my own mind about that. In the beginning of all this, I wrote letters to some of the other insiders, telling them that I wanted them to have opinions and identities outside of my own, and a little over three years later, I see that my work has payed off. I couldn’t be happier about that than I am. Now I need to sit down and start retracing my steps into obvious and unmistakable multiplicity, so that all of us can have a chance to see the full picture of how each one of us came to be.
That, for now, is my mission. I will help the others find themselves through sorting out their stories, and also allowing each one of them to construct a personal narrative that they themselves can see as true, and, unlike Cooperland, I will do these things in an honest way.