#and probably OSDD

[tonypostt]

i dont want to lose this image i drew again so im posting it on tumblr

[moonlitmeadowsys]

me a few years ago: why do i feel like i just came into existence when i was 12 or 13? why do i not really remember my childhood very well? why do i have such a horrible memory in general? why do my identity and behaviors vary so drastically?

me now: oh

[kazeh1k1]

Plural people with an anxiety disorder call that nervous system

[thehealingsystem]

me hearing a new voice in my head and choosing to ignore it

[reimeichan]

Stages of DID recovery

Stage 1: my brain is so quiet. I feel nothing. hear nothing. remember nothing. it's just... nothing.

Stage 2: HOLY FUCK THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE HERE SHUT SHUT UP SHUT UP STOP THINKING THERE'S TOO MUCH THINKING

Stage 3: we're now in sync, everything is in peace, we understand each other, sometimes we need to talk but it's fine it's not as chaotic-

Stage 4: HOLY FUCK I'M FEELING AND THINKING EVERYTHING FROM EVERYONE THERE IS NOTHING STOPPING THESE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS FROM EXISTING THIS IS TOO MUCH SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UPPPPP

Stage 5: actually this is normal and fine. we're good.

[0the-anomaly-system0]

we've got did call that mob mentality

[aurorae-system]

yeah ive got double Ds

⠀

dissociative disorder.

[antiendovents]

ABT THIS GUY

they commented on my post abt endos being in the actually dissociative tag saying something like " undiagnosed systems also dont belong in the tag " ( they said more but i blocked them immediately so i dont remember it )

that bugs me a lot as someone whos undiagnosed ( but trying to be ) bc a lot of systems, especially minors, are in unsafe/abusive households where they legitimately CANT get a diagnosis or even therapy. I've also heard that, in some cases, it can take 10+ years to get diagnosed.

a diagnosis is not required to say you have a disorder, a diagnosis is a privilege!!

nod, nod. People who are anti self diagnosis are often the most privileged or the most ignorant fucks. Like what do you mean you think someone who could literally be kicked out of they got a diagnosis should just get one anyways or else stay out of the community that is helping them? What?

[sysmedsaresexist]

Kind reminder

It's not your job to tell people how to identify.

Many, many mental health disorders are lifelong, they never go away, but symptom management is possible!

If someone reaches a point that they are choosing to no longer identify with their disorder, or feel that it no longer fits them, or simply choose not to transfer their medical records to a new doctor (hi) because they feel they no longer need access to resources at that time, or if they never had a diagnosis to begin with...

That's none of your business.

You can't force the label on them, or force them to keep it. Yelling about how they still have a disorder isn't helping anyone-- not yourself, not them, not the people still working on themselves watching this happen.

You can't force diagnosis, treatment, or ideals on people. There are many reasons that someone might choose to drop a label or diagnosis, and it's none of your business why or how.

Learn to respect personal autonomy and self-determination in mental health care.

You're not just telling them they have a disorder, you're also telling them that they're struggling, even if they're not.

And that's just not for you to decide.

[lokilysolbitch]

me, an alter in a system, when my goals, likes and dislikes, name, pronouns, voice, and self image, start to feel different: maybe its just me being me lol

[mental-illness-bingo]

Listen my DID has caused both a lot of pain and stress (and saved me a million times over) so insert disclaimer about not romanticizing/glorifying here

BUT you can pry my “well at least I get to date the fictional characters I fall for” out of my COLD. DEAD. HANDS.

Thank you that will be all we now return you to your regularly scheduled trauma posting.

Endos fuck off this post in particular please. I’m not comfortable seeing you make light of a trauma disorder by using my post for it. Generally I get that chances are you actually do have trauma you don’t remember because that’s literally what DID is supposed to do but in this case I do not have it in me to see endo stuff on this. I can be playful and pretend this disorder is fun for a moment because I know that I still struggle and that I fought to survive so much for so long that my goddamn brain stopped developing into a single person and never fused the personality from ego states like it was meant to - forced to stay in pieces because it couldn’t manage to live that way, and at least what you say is that you got this without any of that. I know you’re probably not trying to cherry-pick and take the good and leave the actual disorder part of systemhood behind but that’s how it would feel to see you reblogging this particular post. Thanks./gen /nm

Edit: added color bc I feel like it helps put attention on the point of the post above the annoying disclaimer

[thestarpletsystem]

Imagine being so insecure that an app/discord bot made for anyone who’s plural makes you so uncomfortable that you have to make a new one. Then, on the inverse, you feel the need to go into inclusive tags and throw a shit fit about said inclusive tags. What a bunch of man child babies. Grow up.

[moonlitmeadowsys]

do you ever feel like other alter(s) are stopping you from processing something?

you start thinking about something bad that happened, and if you think too much about it, someone else comes to front and/or you switch?

so you are never able to process it, and you’re stuck in a weird limbo of “i know that happened but it doesn’t feel like it happened. i can tell that i just haven’t fully processed it, but i’m unable to do that.”

it’s really weird, but maybe it’s for the better.

[livseses]

Spiritual Systems and DID

We always find it annoying at best, and downright dismissive or invalidating at worse, when we see folks talking about spiritual systems as being "completely different from" CDD systems.

They can be sure. Absolutely a CDD system can view themselves entirely as psychological, and spiritual systems can be wholly unrelated to disorder.

But they don't have to.

We're a spiritual system. We're supposedly "completely different from" people with DID. Apparently when one of our headmates takes over our body, that's something totally separate and distinct from a switch. When we hear our headmates talking to us, that's nothing like internal communication. When one of us has a lot of emotions about something that bleeds over to front, that's a phenomenon wholly unrelated to passive influence. And when one of us feels like something happened to another person piloting our body, well that's completely different from dissociation/emotional amnesia.

I bet you're going to tell us that when we forget things beyond the norm, that's nothing like amnesia too.

But here's the catch: we're diagnosed with DID.

So what? Are we wrong about our spiritual explanation? Well then that means all of those other spiritual systems could be just as wrong about their experiences. Which seems to kinda fly in the face of the hard line exclusion between the two. Is someone out here going to prove the existence of spirits to add to the diagnostic toolkit? Are there no such things and there's a psychological explanation that may or may not have some similarities to CDDs?

So are we wrong about the diagnosis? Idk what else really fits the cluster of symptoms involving distress and dysfunction around having multiple personality states and amnesia. Its definitely not a normal part of accepted cultural practice. Trauma fucked that right up. The DID therapy we're in seems to be tackling our trauma much better than any therapy we were in before the diagnosis. And at the end of the day, I trust our diagnostician much more than anyone on the internet about this. Again, that hard line doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. If we can't have a CDD because we believe many of our headmates are souls from another world, well shit did we find a cure for DID? Present them with the belief that got ghosts in their butt?

(Low key, that has been a helpful for our recovery, but that's more to do with acceptance and letting go.)

We're a system that's made up of spirits and traumatized girlies. And the lines between those two categories are blurry (heh) at best. Telling us that our experiences are completely separate from our experiences is silly.

Instead of saying that this category is completely separate from and has no overlap with this other category, can we all just allow for those blurry places to exist? I'm not saying to call every instance of spiritual plurality some form of CDD. I'm not saying that CDD spaces need to be flooded with spiritual plurals that have no disorder. Im not even saying that they're always or even often the same thing. CDD spaces should be talking about CDD stuff. But sometimes CDD stuff includes the experiences of spiritual systems.

I'm asking that we leave room for overlap. Sometimes the broad category of "is a bunch of people" will have crossovers with the different subcategories.

[sawyer-is-eepy]

MaDD and plurality

okay so we're MaDD, right?? and we're also plural??

NOBODY talks about how freaking hard that makes communicating omg.

constantly i'll be trying to talk to someone and then i drift off and suddenly they are completely drowned out OR they're ALSO daydreaming!! it's so frustrating, because it means that to even semi-effectively communicate, i have to talk out loud. if i have to communicate something important and we're in a public place i just have to focus REALLY hard on internal communication and it sometimes STILL doesnt work.

on top of that, we have ADHD so it's even harder, and talking out loud still doesn't work that well because without another person physically here to snap me back to reality whenever i'm daydreaming, if i start daydreaming, i'm just stuck until i realize, which can be anywhere from within a minute to literally 20+ minutes. usually they're able to get my attention by that time, but it's hard because our communication is not easy for anyone but the host(me, who is ALWAYS fronting) to initiate, so unless i actively open myself to communicate with them, it's hard for them to get my attention. sometimes my daydreams even last hours, but that usually doesn't happen when i'm not actively deciding to daydream. so yeah, it's really difficult because i've already got issues focusing, and adding basically irresistable urges to daydream at random that get triggered way too easily on top of that, inner communication is SO HARD.

anyways, this makes making a tulpa really fucking difficult because forcing is really hard.

but here are my tips, for other MaDD, especially anyone making a headmate/alter/tulpa/parogen/whatever themself -

incorporate your daydreaming into the communicating/forcing. like daydream you and that alter hanging out and then communicate via that. this does not ensure that you won't start daydreaming about anything else, but it lessens the chances. if you try to force yourself to not daydream at ALL the urges are gonna be much harder to ignore, at least for me. if you're ALREADY daydreaming, and it gets interesting enough, minor distractions are gonna catch your attention less and less because you WANNA focus on this one daydream. it becomes much more enjoyable.

this kind of like the last one, but this is more specific to tulpa/parogen forcing. don't really view it as a chore, which i've accidentally been doing more and more. not a chore i dislike, but i've been viewing it like something i have to do every single day for x amount of time other wise it wont work and it'll fail horribly and everything will be ruined, when it shouldn't need to be that. it shouldn't be on a to-do list, unless that really works for you(which if that's the case that's freaking awesome and you should probably ignore this tip). idk about everyone else, but it's much easier for me to daydream if i'm treating something like something i need to do because it's so much more tempting to just go live somewhere else for a minute while i do things i need to do. i often daydream doing chores because it's not interesting enough to keep me grounded. so, to make sure it gets done, i drift off while i'm doing it, so i am doing it in the real world but to me i'm in another world or in one of my stories. but for forcing, to be able to do it, you HAVE to be constantly aware and present. if you view it like you're just having a fun little conversation with them, it becomes like whenever you're bored or lonely just like you would reach out to a friend, but instead you're getting some talking to your head friend in. even if it's not traditional forcing, it works and develops them more, even if it's just a bit here and there. idk about everyone else, but i think partially because of my ADHD and partially because of my MaDD, whenever i have a chore i need to do i kind of put it off if i'm already doing something. i don't really *want* to put it off, but i just can't get my body to move. especially when I'm daydreaming. because, why would i get up and do the boring thing when i can watch my story in my head ? it's so much easier to sit and do nothing. but as we all know, that ADHD paralysis is so so SO stress inducing, the best option is to always get up and try to force yourself to. idk if non-ADHD MaDD will relate at all though, because that paralysis is mostly exclusive to those with ADHD afaik, but for me, my MaDD makes it much worse. anyways, that probably didn't make much sense sorry

write down what everyone is saying. this makes it much easier to keep track of what they are saying and stay present, but it also documents the conversation as well. so even if you weren't that present during the conversation, or you're worried you'll forget something important, you'll have a record to read back on later if you need! and also with created alters/headmates, keeping track of their progress is always incredibly important!!

don't listen to music! this one might be a bit of a given but unless it's like instrumental music that you genuinely won't pay that much attention to but still helps you focus, DON'T listen to it. songs are an easy gateway into a daydream. ESPECIALLY songs with lyrics, even ones that you can't understand because they're in another language, which by the way for literally any other thing you need to focus on, that's a great tip, listening to music in other languages, because you can still focus with interesting music in the background but the lyrics arent grabbing you at all. anyways back to plural-related MaDD tips, yeah, don't listen to music. even if that song usually doesn't catch your attention. for me, if i'm talking, internally or externally, and there's music with lyrics playing, i reallyyy cannot focus on what i'm(or others, again, internally or externally) are saying. idk, might just be some sort of auditory processing issue related to my ADHD but i cannot focus on it, and because it's hard, i just need to pick one, and sometimes my brain picks the song and i just. stop talking. and start daydreaming.

idk what to do if you're not fronting and trying to communicate with whoever is fronting, because i've not switched(like i mentioned before, the host, who is me, has never not been the one fronting), but if anyone has any other tips either related to that or the ones i already have here, please feel free to let me know because i'd love to hear them and i'm sure others do too!! anyways, i hope i helped, idk this might be too specific to me.

[disrealities]

Religious horror system.

A flag for systems who feel a connection to, feel represented by, and / or just like religious horror!

This may be movies, general media, the aesthetic, or the concept as a whole! There is no wrong way to identify with this!