As many of you know, we left traditional talk therapy focused on plurality in 2021. What we didn’t discuss, and are going to here, is why we left it at all. General content notices apply, and there is a lot of talk of abuse of power and some descriptions of bad therapy and leading questioning throughout the rest of this post.
The story starts in 2015, shortly after we revealed ourselves to the therapist we were seeing at the time, who we will call “S.” (For literal readers, that’s S by itself, not with all the other punctuation.) At first her and I shared the same view about our formation and reasons for being a group, namely a need, on my part, to cope with being blind in a sighted world. I could agree with that, though in the back of my mind I knew it was more than problems that prompted me to take that rout, and remembered that I felt joy, not pain, as I created them and began to invite them to experience the world around me. I paid this disconnect little attention at the time, though, because S was right; I was, in fact, in need of acceptance from somewhere, and where therapy was concerned, I was willing to ignore little inconsistencies if it meant being understood. With that in mind, it makes more sense that when S’s ideas about our formation changed, I eventually went along with the new thoughts. After all, I had no desire to start over with someone new, and by the time we started being treated as though we had come from childhood trauma, the youngest among us were at a stage in their own development where they didn’t want to leave either. But take note of the word eventually. The new belief took its time to be accepted, and I had trouble with it at first.
But S had an idea about how to get around that struggle, and she even sought my permission to try it. If I would have known what she had in mind, I would have told her no. But I didn’t know, and I trusted her, so I went along with it. When I had given my permission, she moved her chair closer to mine, held my hands in my lap and had me imagine that I was a baby in the hospital. I had spent the first three months of my life in that setting, and had had the story told to me countless times growing up, so that was an easy enough thing to do. Then she had me try to move my hands even though, in the hypothetical situation she had described, they were tied down to avoid me accidentally removing IV lines or pulling other equipment’s wires. Of course, she continued holding my hands down while I tried to move them, and in my slightly more open state of imagining, the reactions I had were those I would expect to have at the thought of someone so young having to experience that. I cried – actually, sobbed and couldn’t stop would be a better description of it. When I was done, S outright told me that what I had felt was what Adealia, one of the characters I had created, had taken on for me, and that these feelings were why she didn’t talk, walk or take care of herself.
I know now that she was wrong; I had created Adelia consciously to compartmentalize something else entirely. But despite that apparent conflict of realities, I believed S completely, both about that particular thing and about the wider theory regarding how we came to be, after that session, because, as far as I was concerned, I wouldn’t have reacted that strongly if it wasn’t true. Adealia, of course, believed it, and if she believed it, I reasoned, then it must be accurate, even if I was having trouble accepting it. After all, she had independently told us her actual name, and I had not told her to do so; in fact, I had actively tried to stop such changes from taking place among the others because I didn’t want to lose control over them. Her belief in the validity of what S had brought up was confirmation of how apparently serious things had gotten within my own mind. When that seriousness set in, I didn’t question anything else brought up by a therapist until 2020 unless it clashed with the narrative Adealia, and the rest of us, including me, began to believe that day. Maybe instead of looking for a ton of support groups related to trauma-induced plurality, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, or anything else of that nature like I thought I should have done, I should have probed the things I was being told much further.
I eventually did, in 2020, after reconnecting with S, who had returned to the agency she used to work for, where all the problems began. I came to her, once again, in a vulnerable state, this time directly connected to plurality after my attempt to let go of the others backfired and I began to lose hours of time to them. To make a long story short, I was working with her for about a year, trying to reconcile the new way she was acting with me to the way she used to, and it not only didn’t work, but broke in an extremely messy way. We had just started doing telehealth sessions when I decided I was going to step out of the way of everyone and allow them to speak, as a way of facing my fears about letting them have any time in the world at all, and they were not happy with me shutting them out like I had been. I watched from the background, having recently felt like I could do that and still let them have their own words, and I did not interfere as they spoke animatedly about how I was on the computer all the time, how I ignored their attempts to get my attention, and how I either needed to do better as a host or face their anger directly. I refused to filter any part of their communication, and that became clear when, instead of listening to and validating their emotions, S attempted to impose calming strategies on those of us who were angry. Of course, they rebelled against this, and I stood by and watched as they advocated, first for catharsis as a valid healing modality, then against psychology’s overall denouncement of it as one.
During this entire session, they never yelled, though that was not what S thought, as she told me in the one afterward. After she insisted that I must stay present when others were talking, attempting to misrepresent a book to validate her demands as she made them, and then dragged me through some kind of emotion word activity that I was never sure of the purpose of, I attended a final session with her and then left. We had been having problems for several months before that, and I had been willing to excuse them, or outright ignore them because I wanted to stay with her, in hopes that she would be the same way she had been before, but I realized, as she kept her focus rigidly within what she saw as acceptable practice, that my hope would remain only that. Even as she pushed integration, attempted to blur the boundaries between us, and refused to listen to our experiences when they clashed with what she thought was best for us to believe, I stayed, because I wanted her to treat us like we mattered, and like we were actually worth meeting on our own merits.
When we finally left, it was hardest on those of us who had attached to her as a parental figure, something she refused to address even though we’d brought it up to her as a concern multiple times. Some of us still miss the way she used to be from 2015 to 2016, but we haven’t reached out. I don’t want to hear her voice again. I’d much rather we all have the chance to connect with people online who understand plurality as more than a disorder in need of a cure. Those people are around, even more so now than they were when we began this journey, and I’m greatful for that. For us, support systems are everything, and frankly therapy should have encouraged us to find them sooner. Without them, we would not have eventually come to peace with our mixed origins.
Between my times with S, there was another therapist, L, who I saw from 2017 to 2019. That’s the time I started overthinking everything, because if I didn’t, he would try to either preach to me about religion, or brush off what I was telling him as if it was a miner problem. This would have been helpful for a limited time as I was coming out of the trauma-driven framework of our origins and into a broader one that described the full spectrum of our lives better, but not in those three years when we really thought S had been right, and where thing after thing would happen that we had no other explanation for accept those supplied by the narrower of the two views. We found our visits with him highly invalidating in some ways, but, interestingly, not so in others. The more he tried to reduce us to single functions and fit us into a working, psychology-accepted theory of subpersonalities, the more we rebelled. It helped that in 2017, we discovered the concept of star seeds, and were open to the idea that souls could come from other worlds to be born into this one. Toward the end, the content of our sessions consisted of us rambling to him about memories we were regaining of those previous lifetimes, mostly on the part of those of us who experienced disabilities. I let it happen. I realized, after he and I spent 20 minutes arguing about integration and he attempted again and again to change my mind on it, that talking about anything else with him was likely to lead nowhere.
We left L because we began to experience the time loss we mentioned above and knew that we needed to quit procrastinating and take things seriously. During that whole time, we never once doubted the origional thought S had basically hand-picked about our formation being due to trauma, but I fell into a rut that I needed to be shocked out of. I was, and then everything else with S happened. I’m glad it’s over, and I’m glad I figured out the cause for that time loss, and have taken care of it. Again, social support helps with those kinds of things, and so does exposure to the ideas that most closely fit your experiences. The mistake I made was trying to fit in, and force my experiences to match the ideas presented to me. No, I don’t blame myself for that. I was a teenager, I needed to belong, and that’s where my path was leading me during that time period.
The other thing that froze me in my tracks in terms of questioning some of the things I had been told about the others of this community/system was my degree of trust in the medical field. There are bad practitioners in every field, and the method that started it all should never have been used, especially not on someone who was lonely, needing connection with other human beings, and inexperienced in the ways of the world. Leading questions, in any form when it comes to memory, are bad practice, end of story. I don’t even need to be a therapist to know that. There was also no excuse to ignore my doubts of the trauma framework as it applied to our situation, something which was routinely done toward the end of my second time with S. Even if she did not have resources at hand, she could have encouraged my own research. There are many psychology-based, and even evidence-based, frameworks that do not involve the need for abuses of power or push for integration. She had options, and either through lack of knowledge or through unwillingness to learn, she did not use them, and ended up putting me into a position I will never let myself be in again.
I am in therapy, but not traditional therapy. This time, I am being allowed and even encouraged to feel in the way I’ve always wanted to, and I’m seeing more progress, even over the past fiew months, than I ever saw in the six years I spent supposedly suffering from plurality. The others talk sometimes, if they’re feeling something, because some of them still have memories of things that happened to me as a child, and I’ve learned not to dispute that anymore. With a lot of help from plural friends, I’ve come to accept our traumatic origins, as well as our spiritual ones and ones there isn’t an explanation for, even as I remember that I never meant for something so seemingly basic to become so complicated. I think the biggest thing I’m going to take away from all this is that when it comes to matters of the mind, nobody knows 100 percent of what goes on, and nobody can. I tried to do that and it broke, and I’m not going to try anymore. I’m a lot happier now that I’ve learned to accept what everyone tells me for their reality, nothing more and nothing less, and I wish that had been the focus of those hours I spent in offices listening to people I thought I could trust unquestioningly. It needs to be more of a talking point.
Thank you for reading.