Over the past seven months, I’ve been engaged in therapy that looks much like the kind we were receiving from S in 2016. This time, however, I’ve been writing about each and every session, and focusing on plural experiences that happen in the course of the rest of the week in as much detail, if not more, than the descriptions of said sessions. I’ve mentioned this before, but I bring it up, in this instance, because I believe that the act of keeping a journal for that long has allowed me to see patterns over time and start acknowledging some of the things about being plural that, previously, I wanted to ignore. Many of these things relate to the degree of influence, one might even say control, I’ve found myself to have over the rest of us, in many areas from fronting to inner communication. I’d even go so far as to say that these comprise the bulk of what I’ve learned about us in the past three or four months in particular, when winter was lifting its ice from the outdoors and I could step outside of my apartment and think without headphones on. While in the past I would have reached the conclusion that I’d been a crappy person who abused their headmates, and then proceeded to have done everything in my power to reverse course and make up for it, circumstances intervened before that part of the cycle could play out, and I’m extremely glad they did. A recent, and particularly jarring, experience in therapy seems to have woken me from something, some kind of unasked-for compliance with the rest of the system/community on my part, and I’ve begun questioning the accuracy of plurality as a framework for understanding my experiences, and trying to figure out what to do now that I’m beginning to doubt us.
There are two main things I’ve always struggled to make sense of from a plurality framework: 1, if we were all independent inside, why did so much of our communication, at least when I was involved, consist of emotions, which I more often than not struggled to identify as not belonging to me, and 2, why, if we were our own people, did fronting feel, to me, as though I was becoming the other who was apparently taking my place? Of course, when I asked inside, the answers I got were some form of, “We communicate this way because it’s what works best for you,” and “If we took over fully, you would panic,” but interestingly, those answers, like so many other things where plurality was concerned, changed with my genuinely held expectations of myself, what I was capable of tolerating and what I thought it possible to experience. The more I was determined to let others take more direct control of this body, for example, the more I had the experience of them doing so; similarly, when I was confident in my ability to hear mental words that I did not think of deliberately (this was rare, by the way) I could hear them at least semi-clearly. Doubts have, in the past, worked in much the same way. Starting in 2016, I began to worry that certain TV shows I’d watch, while not affecting me, would frighten the children inside, and very quickly this became the norm. At another point, I was exposed to the idea that if something in my mind called itself a person, I was not to treat it as anything else, and, after reading a book and having a vivid mental image of one of the story’s characters, which proceeded to act for all the world like it was independent from me, I felt I had no choice but to treat it as if it was a headmate. Loose associations between names and personality traits were met with the same result shortly after that, and it got to a point where I couldn’t write because any character I tried to create would instead become a headmate and not want to be written about (which I suspect was a product of me feeling like I had to get consent from them first). The times we were the most stable were when I said that enough was enough and started ignoring all that, going on with life as though I was the only one who could live it, and until now those times have been short-lived and I’ve come back to the others again and again, feeling guilty and getting the exact responses I expected to get – disappointed sighs, distrust, and, only later when I wasn’t beating myself up as much, glimmers of understanding.
I believe that both of the questions I’ve posed above have the same answer; the others are shaped, mostly if not entirely, by my expectations of how they are as people, and how they express their natures. That was the case in 2015 and I knew it, and has always been the case since then, though I lost track of that fact the more I believed the trauma narrative. I think the floods of names which filled my mind, which happened in the summer of 2016, were brought about because I’d been told unexplained emotion was a sign of as yet unknown headmates trying to make themselves known to me, and I was trying to be a good host and patient by listening for as many as I could, believing that in doing so I was helping hurting people to feel like there was at least some amount of safety in my presence. I believe that while I have the capability of experiencing presences that I can’t account for, such as Cooperland, who showed up in 2015 without me expecting him to exist at all, such things are better explained by the fact that I was still a teenager, still developing and still trying to figure myself out. As far as Cooperland’s appearance specifically, while I can’t say for certain, I think it was my way of experiencing a calm, grounded male presence in the absence of someone in this world who I felt like I could get that need met by, combined with the mental habit, already established, of attributing unfamiliar inner experiences to forces other than myself. The only other presence who came about without my deliberate and conscious involvement was Rozaya, whose name I heard in my mind in 2012 as part of recalling a previous life of mine. Yes, we did interact, but I viewed her as a spirit, and she herself was always clear that she was eventually going to become a part of me, which happened in 2014. Her being counted among this system’s population was not because she had returned to herself, but because I wished she had, and began to act as if that wish was already granted in response to a friend of mine saying that I should let her go.
The person I called Rozaya in 2015, just as with everyone else inside save for Cooperland, came about because of desires of mine, whether I experienced them as myself or as one of them. That is the point I’ve been trying to make with this post. I can regard each of us as people in our own right all day, and have for years, but I still have control over them, and at this point I don’t think I’m capable of letting it go, nor do I want to. If anything, I want to reverse plurality because of the anguish it’s caused; emotions at intensities I myself never have to experience and anxieties I’d otherwise be able to cope with have both made themselves known the longer I’ve allowed others inside to come forward in settings like therapy, and I know that these things are again due to my influence in some way. Perhaps my tendency to try to imagine other responses to various aspects of my life as a child, a teenager and even an adult, combined with the all too familiar habit of wondering, “Does this belong to me?” or “Is this really mine?” until I got a sign that it wasn’t, is at the root of it, but I’m at a point beyond caring. At this stage, I just want my life, and my childhood with its good and bad parts, back. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I didn’t dissociate to such a degree before I started believing that I did; I wrote songs and stories and poems and used mental movies all in the name of processing inner experiences and actively sought to incorporate them into my existence, for lack of a better word. Things weren’t always wonderful, but they didn’t cause me to dissociate to the point of creating others as a coping mechanism – I did that for entirely different reasons, which the therapy world first didn’t care about and then convinced me was not the case.
I’m not quite sure where I want to go from here. I’ve already gone two days without the almost daily check-ins with the others inside that I’ve usually done, and in that time I’ve managed to use all of the things I’ve written above to begin shifting my view of myself and them. I’m not pushing anything away, but I’m accepting as my own all the things I’d previously put onto someone else, even as I’m not completely sure it’s what I want to do. The results so far have been interesting; I’ve begun to remember times as a teenager where I felt OK and even passionate about something, times when I was enjoying something for the sake of enjoying it, unconcerned with anything else. I’ve also begun to have aspects of my creativity come back which I thought had vanished with high school, something I’m delighted about because it means, at some point in the future, I might be able to finish the 9 or 10 projects that have sat untouched for months or years in some instances. For the first time since 2015, I’ve felt like I might be able to write something with lyrics, and maybe even create a character without worrying about potential consequences from my own head. I’m going to find a way to continue having the joyful experiences I once did in the context of being plural, but these gains are ones I value more than holding onto that label as an identity or a lifestyle, and if it comes down to choosing art or altered states (which is the most accurate descriptor of everything being plural has involved for me) I’ll be choosing art.
I fully intend to explore the capabilities of my own mind, as I already have been doing, but never again to let that exploration take over my life in the way being plural has/did. I’m looking into technological aids to help in this exploration, because it’s clear that I need a structured approach of some kind, and I’m not willing to make repeated and costly ventures into things I could just as easily try at home for lower prices. I’m not going to detail, at this point, the things I’m looking into buying, but when I’ve made a decision I’ll post about it then.
As for the blog, I’m not sure what I want to do with it yet. It was intended to discuss plurality, but until I have some time to decide when, or if, I want to start incorporating that into my life again, I don’t see much of a point in continuing to maintain it. There’s no question that I’m going to accept into myself all of the aspects I’d previously thought of as individuals, and that this shouldn’t be hard to do, given how fronting always felt like I was simply going into another state of consciousness and treating that shift as if it was another person, eventually being rewarded with random names in my mind for my efforts. The more important question, as I see it, is whether or not I want to start over, maybe somewhere else, or stop blogging entirely. I’m not sure yet, but I’ll let folks know when I’ve come to a decision.
Thank you for reading, and thank you to those who’ve stayed with me through these confusing years.