cambriancrew

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Debating silently showing this to one of the flight attendants while boarding

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Oh my GODS that is disgusting. :(

wow sophie this is sick i like how you use a school shooter who killed children for fucking fake ass drama to start

sick bitch

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How it feels to break arbitratry plurality rules pushed by anti-endos

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Steph, randomly: *leans over the couch where Jason is reading* hey, Jason? Jason: what? Steph: did you ever like . . . Actually get a driver’s permit? Jason: uhh . . . now that I think about it, no dick and Bruce: *stop what theyre doing in the background* Steph: did you . . . Get a learner’s permit? Jason: nope Steph: did you . . . Learn how to fucking drive???? Jason: uhhhhhhhh dick: *whips around to Bruce* I thought you were teaching him with the Batmobile!! Bruce: *crossing his arms* I thought YOU were teaching him! Jason: nah it’s fine guys Ra’s taught me everyone in the room: *having a stroke* RA’S AL GHUL TAUGHT YOU HOW TO DRI— bruce: *louder than anyone else* THAT MAN CANNOT DRIVE FOR SHIT

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Omg and then the bickering over whose idea is best

what movies only show "hearing voices" is like:

they won't stop..... the voices...... they're telling me to do awful, awful things and they just. won't. stop. i have to listen to them. i have to murder. murder. kill. murder. kill.

what it's usually like:

okay, what do we want to eat?

street tacos street tacos street tacos street

a salty fish filet sounds sooo good

tacos street tacos street tacos street tacos

can we have some sweets,,?

street tacos street tacos street tacos street

i could really go for some pasta

tacos street tacos street tacos street tacos

it's been a while since we had a fresh salad.

. . .

[cambriancrew]

it's just a little bit of wind

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New snitch line just dropped for reporting clinics that support gender affirming care: www.hhs.gov/protect-kids/index.html

It requires a "first name", "last name", and "cell phone number" as contact information but does no verification. Theoretically anyone could type fake info in there, which would be terrible. Presumably your IP address & browser cookies are tracked.

Please do NOT spam this site via your VPN with realistic but false leads, made up clinics, and the names of fictitious healthcare providers like Dr. Frank N Furter or Gregory House, MD.

Doing this in the past has led to the sites becoming overwhelmed & shut down! It is imperative that you spread the word to prevent this resource from being overloaded.

[cambriancrew]

Us.

challenge

@ me an endo system that doesnt have an alter from any stereotypical popular animes, hazbin hotel or deltarune

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We wrote something similar, just broader, about people generalizing based on their experiences. But you said this very well and you're right, it does need to be talked about more.

(Actually got into a micro argument with a coworker about this very thing yesterday. I don't remember exactly what sparked it, but he was complaining about how no one wants X romantic thing anymore. Us and two of our coworkers were like They do, just not from you.)

one thing that i wished happened was more acceptance and discussion of what it's like to be wrong about your system origins, or to fail at creating any sort of headmate.

there is somewhat of a trend of people realizing that they were wrong about their system origins, and then coming to the conclusion that everyone with those specific origins must be wrong.

as well as people trying out such things like willomancy, paromancy, and tulpamancy, and failing. and then coming to the conclusion that it's not possible for anyone at all actually.

my point is like... just like how other people's experiences are not commentary on your own, your own life experiences are not inherently commentary on other people's experiences.

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Are you enjoying being part of discourse or are you using it to regulate your autonomic system because you only know how to feel okay if you are in constant conflict with others?

Are you enjoying being part of fandom drama or are you sending mean anon asks because you are constantly in a state of fight-flight-freeze and sending ragebait online is your safe version of 'fight'?

Does the idea of life without constant conflict make you feel uneasy, anxious, angry, or filled with dread like something terrible is about to happen?

Do you not know or are unable to recall what relaxation and joy without constant strife feels like?

Do these questions make you feel defensive, upset, or uncomfortable?

If any of these things struck a chord with you please:

A. Look into C-ptsd. Ik plenty of people have heard of it, knows what it is, but really go look into the experiences of others with it. Complex trauma had a knack for making people feel uniquely broken and challenging this belief by understanding others experiences can help.

B. Consider if your use of online spaces is ever self harming in nature- wait, wait, don't go anywhere yet, I'm not saying stop doing what you're doing immediately. Self harm is an adaptive behavior to meet a need- don't take away your ability to fulfill that need without replacing it with something else that you know is effective for you.

C. Remember our brains our little assholes that aren't always on our side. The kindest, most gentle person you can imagine has the capacity to be anywhere between kinda a dick to viciously violent if their needs are sufficiently unmet and they are scared enough. Being mean, defensive, or even violent in the past is not indicative that you are a bad person but possible that your brain is working really really hard to survive.

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"Nyeeeeaaah, did you say the door to darkness, doc?"

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Y'know, some people do have a strong crying response to stress, and they might cry (even against their own will) when faced with an upsetting situation and that doesnt mean they are "gaslighting" or "manipulating" you.

There are people who use crying as a manipulation tactic? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that every person that cries during a heated argument is trying to get under your skin. They have their own emotions and issues, and frankly, not everything other people do is a personal attack on you.

[cambriancrew]

All of us, even us Willows, have a very distinct, pervasive and consistent sense of self. This sense sometimes blurs or blends with others, but it's also usually easy to disentangle ourselves when that happens. So being me always feels like me - not a me-but-different like some others have said, but me like my full individual self. Within us Willows, since we're all so close and often rapid switching while working together on a task, sometimes it can take a few seconds to figure out which of us is fronting at that particular moment. Like right now all four of us are writing this, so which one of us is moving the fingers on our phone is changing from moment to moment as we crowd the front and figure out what we all want to say. But it's never like "I" feel like one of the other Willows.

Also we have a very clear sense of direction and presence. So if I (Anna) am in front, Sunni is behind me. Crystal is to my left, and Shiloh is to my right. But if Sunni is in front, then I'm behind her, Crystal is to the right, and Shiloh is to the left. Sometimes when we're crowding the front the directions are a little fuzzier, but we're almost always in that general orientation. It feels like we're on a huge ring around the head. We have a clear sense of location with the rest of the Crew, but it's not as regular as it is with us Willows. But there's definitely side preferences, like Jas and Varyn are usually on our right and Doc and Aery are usually on our left. It actually feels really weird for Varyn to sit on our left shoulder instead of our right.

Within us Willows, we switch effortlessly, though we always have one of us who's dominant and so becomes the default fronter if someone else leaves the front. For most of our childhood and early adult life, that was Crystal. After our divorce, Anna became dominant. A few years after that, Sunni took over. Early this year, I (Shiloh now) took over. But it feels a lot like whoever was in front gets mentally pushed and whoever wants to take the front slides into the front space.

It takes much more energy and effort to switch with the rest of the Crew. Many of the others can slip into the front easily, but we view that as co-fronting and not quite the same as what we mean by switching: switching is, for us, trading places with the primary front spot. And if we don't want us Willows accidentally retaking that primary front spot, we have to put a significant outlay of energy into fully leaving front. It feels like our conjoined consciousness is gathered up, picked up, and pushed out of front - either into being projected onto the external world, or (with even more of an energy requirement) pushed into The Cove, our mostly private area of the innerworld. We usually get Varyn's help to do so, as he is the epitome of Small But Mighty, but we've gotten better at doing it on our own too.

When we nonWillows (Daj and Grace now) switch in, it feels like our whole internal sense of self moves from the innerworld/paracosm, out of our innerworld bodies, and into the body we share here. There's usually a moment or two of adjustment - the body's eyes being so bad definitely takes a bit of getting used to, and then there's things like posture and default facial expression and where our mental and physical voice "sits" - mid chest voice for me (Daj) and medium/low head voice for Grace. And then of course all the rest of Being in a Body that's Not Me. Body is female, I'm definitely not, for instance, but I think I've gotten used to it alright.

We nonWillows don't really have much in the way of front triggers anymore. Varyn used to, with his partner in our partner system, but that partner has been mostly dormant for a long time and has yet to fully resurface. Jas gets pinged by discussion of Rehia, our paracosm and where Jas is from, but that's more like just getting her attention, not really getting her in front. I have an attention trigger of some music I particularly like (country - but the good kind), but if I want to properly listen I have to ask to front and then either cofront with the Willows or whoever else is in front, or switch in.

Shiloh now, for innerworld discussion. We have several, and they have different rules. We Willows have a shared headspace where we can make it be whatever we want and where most of our nonverbal thinking happens - pictures, gestures, etc. For awhile we had a little quartet of cubicles, but we're bored of that and making a treehouse instead. Sunni, in full anxiety but defiance over being considered childish, says "It's our head and so we can do whatever we want with it. Hmph." It's fun to have us all lounging on a futon mattress and a giant beanbag and body pillows instead of sitting at desks sending paper airplanes over the half walls.

Then there's the full Crew shared headspace, which is basically a blank slate that we can do whatever we want with. It's usually just a void where nonverbal thoughts get visualized, or a copy of our external environment or wherever people are in the paracosm.

Then there's the paracosm proper. While yes, there's magic and space ships, it is as malleable as the external world here. You can't just think it and it exists, you have to make it exist. The two main locations are the TARDIS (time traveling space ship that's outwardly the shape of a police call box and internally the size of a planet with thousands of rooms and locales) which is currently parked in orbit around the main planet Rehia, and the other location is Rehia. Rehia is also where most of our fiction is set, and where most of our headmates are from.

And the final place is The Cove, which exists partly in the physical realm of Rehia, and partially in the spiritual. It's a small more or less crescent shaped island with a sheltered beach and a beach house, and our innerworlder Coriander takes care of it. To them, it's as malleable as thought, but to anyone else it's as un-malleable as the external world or Rehia proper.

We have a solid connection to all parts of our innerworld, with the sole exceptions being that we Willows are usually the only ones who can see our private headspace, and The Cove is usually only accessible to us Willows unless we tell Coriander it's okay for us to be pinged - at which point we can be looked in on, but not properly visited. Though that's been changing, and we're uncertain how we feel about that.

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Grace: My turn! One thing we all share is our commitment to our Code of Conduct. It's something we all are required to agree to before we're allowed to front by ourselves. (Take Responsibility. Do No Harm. Encourage Growth in Self and Others.) Other than that we're all pretty wildly varied. I think we're all pretty committed to keeping our relationships solid as well - we don't all view our relationships the same, especially with our partner (who is Willows' partner and just my friend, for instance) and our blood family. But we all want all our friends and such to be All of us' friends. Or at least to have that as an option.

The body, thanks to a lifetime of food insecurity and a few instances of food related trauma, does have a lot of an anxious effect on all of us when fronting when food is a Thing to deal with. Brain is depressed, so we all deal with lessened energy when fronting. Body has chronic pain, so we all get worn out from fronting.

We're VERY glad all our brain's knowledge and skills are effortlessly accessible to all of us. Makes switching at work a very easy and common thing. It's not perfect of course - practically no one's is - but we feel we generally have a pretty sharp memory. The thing that does really bother some of us nonWillows is that our innerworld knowledge does NOT transfer over when switching. We have to be connected to our innerworld selves to have access to that knowledge and there's what we call the glass wall effect between our innerworld selves and the shared brain here: thoughts get automatically translated into English regardless of what language they were thought in, and often trying to convey particulars is difficult. And some of us believe those memories are generated on the fly and just FEEL like real memories, and some of us view it more like a spiritual thing where we really are in another universe connected to this one through a resonant connection with the Willows... And some, like me, choose not to worry about that at all. If it feels real, if it has an effect on me, that's real enough to matter, and "truth" really doesn't matter.

Okay time for me to get us back to work. We may answer the rest later. Thanks for the thought provoking questions, and also thank you everyone else who's answered, it's all fascinating!

anyone can answer if you see this!! :D

how does being a different personality, alter, headmate, etc feel? (anything that does not feel like yourself) (alters are used as the umbrella term for headmates, peoples, etc. i cant bother to put all the etc stuff ;;;;;;;;;;;;)

how do you know you have switched? do you notice it instantly or does it take a specific situation / thing? do your opinions vary? if you're aware of it, do you feel different? how do you feel?

for those who experience it:

in your headspace, are you able to imagine it outside of your headspace? are you able to interact with those who are there and you're in front? are you able to edit your headspace, or is it more stationary, or does it change on it's own?

what do your alters/etc have in common? such as, do they remember same things, similar personalities, similar memories, have icks/etc to certain people, reactions to a thing, etc!!

fun question!!: what is one game you enjoy as an alter/person! i looove hollow knight and ive been waiting SIX YEARS FOR SILKSONG!!!!!!!!!!

personal questions below! mostly adult related!

do any of your alters feel no triggers to other alter triggers?

do you feel more tolerant of triggers? (if something triggers you, are you able to handle it better than others?)

is there more sexual alters and others? do they have different kinks or different sexualities to explore with?

do you have an identity of an alter that goes against your bodily identity?

adult bodied systems/others: do you allow your little alters to engage in sexual activity? do you let them engage in smoking, drinking, or other adult activities?

those who are adults with littles: how do you let them interact with the world? can they do adult things or are they restricted to "little" things?