the-secret-third-mon

[the-secret-third-mon]

I know I've talked about being jealous of the other alters on this blog before. Not just me; jealousy seems to be a pretty pervasive thing that all of us experience towards each other in some form or another. One alter may be jealous of another's ability to stay calm in stressful situations, another may be jealous that other alters don't hold as many painful traumatic memories, and still another may be jealous that they can't sing as well as another, as just a few examples.

But recently, I've noticed a shift in my thought patterns. A version of me was being happy and sociable with one of our coworkers and even asked, boldly, if they could be friends outside of work. And I thought... wow, I'm so glad I have a part of me who's able to make friends so easily. And I paused and examined that thought, because it's true, and also, in that moment, that version of me didn't feel like a different person or a different alter or part or headmate or whathaveyou. That just felt like... an aspect of myself that I was able to express in that moment.

It's so wonderful to be able to actually feel connected to myself to the point all of the things that make up "me" and "us" feels like a part of me. Sure, I'm able to pinpoint which exact alter was likely most prominently interacting with that coworker at that moment. But also, I'm able to feel that the words and actions and intentions were my own.

All the things that made up the various different alters also make up who I am, and they all exist inside of me. And I'm able to tap into all of my own skills and thoughts and emotions and memories and everything else so easily. Just... ahhh I love how it feels to be so connected to myself and selves 💕

[the-secret-third-mon]

BTW for the folks at final fusion, functional multiplicity, full integration or whatever you want to call it. If you end up splitting, fusing, dividing, eating a tomato or take a nap at 8 pm, none of that is a reflection to you failing at recovery nor does it invalidate your stage of recovery.

Additionally, you are of no obligation to announce it to your audience like it was a sin, failure, or form of deception to your place in healing.

There is no genuine strict threshold or rules to your recovery path and where you find yourself.

[the-secret-third-mon]

A recent conversation with a close friend reminded me of a quote that's incredibly near and dear to us. Ever since watching Lilo & Stitch, when it first released in cinemas, I’ve carried those words with me - along with the symbolism that they illustrated.

I’d also say, without a shred of doubt, that the quote shaped how we approached our DID healing journey, too. I’ve always been a huge fan of “chosen family” or “found family” stories, but I never quite understood why until discovering our system.

Sometimes, for better or worse, something impacts you so deeply that it resonates throughout your entire being. I guess that's just another form of introjection, too.

[the-secret-third-mon]

Stop worrying about what's "normal" for DID TBH. Hate to break to to you, but DID is already outside the realm of "normal."

Besides, whether it's "normal" for DID or not, if it's happening to you it's happening to you, and even if you're the only person in the whole world who does X or has Y or whatever else, it's not going to change the fact that that's what you're experiencing.

[the-secret-third-mon]

“i’m not the same as who i was before [x] thing happened to me” does it help to know that you would not have stayed that person regardless

[the-secret-third-mon]

It can sometimes be hard for me to know exactly how far I've come since I started working on DID recovery. My initial amnesia was pretty bad after all, and my day to day progress is slow enough that oftentimes it feels like nothing has changed at all. And I can't exactly just ask my therapist either, as I've had 3 therapist since I started DID-centered therapy work, along with 2 others before then to help me work on trauma stuff.

However, I was able to ask my partner, who's been with me since the beginning of this journey, to tell me what's changed in their perspective. They tell me that my day to day amnesia is significantly better: I'm much better at keeping track of things that I have done and things that I need to do, relying less on my notetaking apps and my alarms and calendars. And my moment to moment amnesia is a lot better, too. In the past, I would often "lose my train of thought" mid-conversation or mid-sentence and have to ask people to repeat for me what they just said or what the conversation was even about. I rarely have to ask people to repeat things for me now, unless my audio processing or my hearing loss gets in the way, but even then that's more about asking them to repeat a sentence instead of recapping a conversation we were in the middle of having.

It's been especially interesting comparing where I'm at in my healing journey to my partner who has only just recently hit system discovery. I see a lot of my own familiar past behaviors in them, how they space out mid-conversation and ask me what we were talkikg about, how they actively avoid thinking about difficult topics by distracting themselves, how they struggle recalling even basic things about their childhood or college days. College days that we shared together, that I can remember with clarity and nuance. And of course not everything about our experiences are the same, but... it's definitely a nice reminder to myself to see an example of where I was even just a few years ago, and where I am now.

I guess it's good to remind myself just how far I've come, and let myself be proud of that for a bit. I put in a lot of work to get to where I am today, after all. I'm glad to have gotten so far, to be able to help the people around me with their struggles and to also be a better support to them. And, of course, I'm just really happy I'm doing a lot better and struggling less myself. I never could have thought that I would be at the place I am right now, working a job I enjoy, living a life with the people I love and actually looking forward to waking up and seeing what the day will bring me. The hard moments are still there, but I can handle them so much better now, and the neutral and happy ones far outweigh them.

[the-secret-third-mon]

Sometimes I feel like I'm too old to still be unpacking my trauma and then I remember that

1. 30s isn't that old

2. If I don't do it now, I'll still be doing it at 50

3. My parents didn't even start processing their own trauma until 65+ so I'm winning here

[the-secret-third-mon]

I was prodding around my private Discord server, adding each of our chosen emoji into the names of our personal “journal” channels, and a thought occurred to me:

Our (my) mind really is like a small community these days. XD

Even if we view ourselves as a single person, I can’t really deny anymore that I also view myself as being “multiple”, too. The best way to describe this vibe, outside of my usual “the secret third option”, is as a person with both a single collective identity and multiple identities.

We’re fluid parts of a single whole, and enjoy existing as that “fused” whole whenever a situation lends itself to such; but we love interacting with each other, our friends and loved ones, and the world in general as each individual part of us, too. Both is good.

It just really amuses me when my personal Discord server has more channels on it, and regular activity, than a vast majority of the smaller, private Discord communities that we’re part of. We have a handful of close, mutual friends on our private server, but often times it’s largely just us (aka. myself) rambling away in a “thinking aloud” way or writing at each other. How one person can talk away so much to and/or at themselves I have no clue, yet here we are. 😂

It also often blows my mind how much different my life is now, two years after first realizing (and consciously acknowledging) that we had DID, compared to my life prior to that. In many ways, it honestly does feel like another lifetime…

I guess in a sense, recalling our past life is like another secret third option, too: not quite an entirely different person’s life, but definitely not the exact same person we were prior to DID awareness either.

Having so many previously internal parts of us fully integrated, fused, and actively fronting now has significantly changed my daily identity, even if the average person couldn’t even tell. My own internal vibes are just strikingly different to how I used to feel, not least because I finally comprehend why my gender orientation shifts so frequently (gender fluidity is a trip). It’s also really lovely having ready access to so many different emotions, memories, and everyday skills nowadays, too, and I’m most definitely a better teacher and employee as a result.

But returning to my original observations: I just find it very amusing how natural it is to exist as multiple these days, despite also feeling more singular and “whole” than ever before. Everything just makes so much sense now, in ways my mind previously never did for as long as I could remember…

I really do love every part of me (us), and this strange little community we’ve created. There’s a particular Japanese song and music video that used to resonate with me long before I ever fathomed being multiple, and in many ways it’s even more meaningful and dear to me now. All I can do is keep praying for safety and good health, so that I can properly enjoy the rest of my life with every part of myself/us/we and this wacky mind community we’ve forged together.

(The song in question that I referred to above)

[the-secret-third-mon]

I was working through my Bing app Microsoft Rewards daily quests, innocently clicking through my daily set links, and came across this:

Absolute feels punch the moment I read that third bullet point. 😭

Just, ahhhh. I resonate so deeply with that philosophy - most especially since working through DID healing, integrating with all of our parts, and coming out the other side. It’s just such a beautiful way to view both mental and physical wellness, and life in general.

See, Microsoft? Sometimes I actually do read your suggestions! (And they make me cry) </3

[the-secret-third-mon]

"For me, I prefer to call it "full integration" - because at the end of the day, the divide between FM and FF feels so arbitrary to me that trying to pin myself as one or the other would actually do my experiences a disservice…"

Couldn't agree more with this! I often use the terms "final fusion" and "full integration" interchangeably because, regardless of how we’re expressing ourselves at any given time, it's all the same to us. It's honestly just choice and perspective. We could exist as a single identity for the rest of our life, with a single name, but we don’t want to... because, it's my brain. I'm the one who has to live with me, and that’s translated to us honouring myself/ourselves holistically. Realizing that I'm gender fluid has also changed the meaning of "identity" for us in multiple ways, too, which apparently wasn't just because my brain was a fractured mess for multiple decades... But even with the gender stuff aside, let’s be real here: I didn't ask to have a disorder like DID. I’d honestly never fathomed two+ years ago that I genuinely did have MPD/DID, despite all of the many memory, sensory, and cognitive oddities we’ve experienced throughout our life. Denial, dissociation, and lack of self-awareness are wild things. But now that we've come so far with our DID healing journey, I can at least choose how I want to live the rest of my life identity-wise. And I chose the "secret third option". XD

hi!! I'm curious about how your system works - what does it mean to you to be fully fused, but also operating as multiple/as alters? (as I've seen from your posts, so correct me if I'm wrong!)

is it similar to how functional multiplicity is generally understood? is it more being able to work in harmony, while maintaining an individual identity? something else entirely?

thank you!

So historically, I've used the term "functional multiplicity" to encompass a pretty wide spectrum of my own experiences, from "I'm definitely still experiencing a lot of daily dissociation and my system is still very divided but I have strong coping skills and resources to manage it that I no longer am struggling and in fact am thriving despite all that" to "I am so incredibly fully integrated with every single part of me that I'm more or less a single identity, but I can still identify and even interface with the world as specific individual parts". And that latter one is more or less what I'd also call final fusion.

When I'm in a fully fused state, I feel connected to and in sync with all the other parts of me. It doesn't even really feel like "working together" because that implies we're putting in effort to communicate, it's more like we're all of the same mind and everything is automatic. I've used an analogy of comparing my experiences to individual atoms of water connected to each other all flowing together in the same direction without interruption, and that's still pretty akin to how I feel.

However, if I dig in deeper, I can definitely still see the individual parts of me, and I like being able to still notice these parts of me and honor their existence. Sometimes the me who interacts with the world is more Green-coded, so I'll tell everyone "hey guys I'm Green", while also knowing that just because I'm acting very Green-like doesn't mean I'm not also Cyan and Purple and Gray and everyone at the same time. Sometimes I will purposefully dig into my psyche to interact with the various versions of me internally to better understand myself.

I guess for me, once I hit a certain point of "functional multiplicity", the jump to "final fusion" was really more of a perspective shift than necessarily doing any more further integration. Do I see myself as various alters working together? Are these things that I'm experiencing something from another alter or do I accept that it's all me? And I regularly will go from one perspective to the other that FM and FF basically are two sides of the same coin for me and it's why I actually kind of hate using those terms for my own experiences. People often talk about FM and FF as if they're wholey separate end goals that you cannot possibly achieve at the same time, and that's likely due to the strict ISSTD guidelines for how FF is defined (which, in turn, is due to how narrowly Kluft defines Final Fusion). I honestly find this framework limiting as it doesn't allow for or encompass all the possible ways integration in DID can look. For me, I prefer to call it "full integration" - because at the end of the day, the divide between FM and FF feels so arbitrary to me that trying to pin myself as one or the other would actually do my experiences a disservice, and I feel like "full integration" encompasses both FF and FM experiences while also filling in that nebulous ill-defined middle area.

Trying to explain my internal experiences is kind of difficult so I hope that helped a little, anon!