Exploring multiplicity.

[bladespark]

There are 111 people on my friends list.

Of those, there are eight that I am aware of who have some form of multiplicity. That is, there's somebody else keeping them company in their heads. Whethere completely separate personalities, or characters with a life of their own, or aspects, or whatever.

That's 7.something percent. If you count me, it makes it nine out of 112, so it's actually 8.something.

That's a pretty high percentage, really. Even if you take just those who seriously identify as multiple, there's at least four.

And I may not even know of them all, since I don't know everyone on that list well, and it's quite possible to be very quietly multiple. Textbooks tell you that Dissasociative Identity Disorder (the current "proper" term for multiple personalities,) is perishingly rare.

What I think is that though Dissasociative Identity Disorder may be very rare, Dissasociative Identities are not. It's merely that most of us are completely functional, and there's nothing wrong with us, so we never see the need to get treated for it. Though I probably still can't quite qualify as Disassociative, I'm too well integrated. I'm too much of a single person, really. The only voices that are even anywhere near being their own personalities entirely are the Aidans, (though if they were, I think they'd be just one, with two aspects of his own,) Yin, and Guardian.

If you all can't tell, this subject totally fascinates me.

Comments

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this too, partly in the context of if there is a correlation between various metrics of cognitive ability and degree or tendency towards dissasociative identities. (My intuition is that there should be, as a consequence of the complexity of the human brain reaching something like a critical point beyond which single-identity structures are unstable.)

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes! I've wondered about that too. I don't think it's necessarily an intellectual thing in the sense of IQ, but more of a creativity thing. That there's only so far you can push your brain in imagining and exploring before it just becomes... dunno, overextended, maybe? And you need help to prop it up.

Or not so much that that you're just adding things to yourself, memories and ideas and experiences and thoughts and things you've read or seen or dreamed and there's so much stuff in there that it starts sticking together and taking on a life of it's own.

Hrm. Or actually more like when you're then put under stress (because almost all my personas have turned up when I was under stress) all that stuff starts oozing out the edges to form something else.

Which would be why there's that high percentage of multiples in my lj, because I know a lot of creative people.

[graydown.livejournal.com]

It was my understanding that psychologists believe that multiple personality disorder is caused by child abuse (http://skepdic.com/mpd.html). Not that I necessarily trust them, of course; they have a vested interest in making sure their patients keep coming back, and there seem to be endless stories of psychologists destroying lives by calling up "repressed memories" of abuse that never happened.

... my god but I'm cynical this morning. Excuse me. I'm going to go track down a picture of a baby fox or something, and try to cheer up.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Psychologists are, frankly, totally uneducated on the issue. Because, you see, they only see the abnormal ones. They only see the ones who can't cope, who can't function in society. Most of them have probably never spoken to a functioning multiple, and given that they do regard it as aberrent, most multiples I know refuse to speak to a psychologist, because they don't want to have somebody try and "cure" something that they don't regard as a problem.

Before coming onto lj I had no idea there were ANY other multiples that weren't severe and dysfunctional out there. We blend in, we look and often act just like everybody else.

[raimei.livejournal.com]

Just reading the comments above here; very true that psychologists have no idea of 'healthy' multiples. Of course, with some of the problems it and similar has brought into my life thus far I've fallen into the niche of having a nice, clear line of where healthy and unhealthy is; usually if I can see variation without being told it, something's wrong. ^^;

There's a few people on my list who identify in such a way, and I think it's much to do with the mentality of those people I make friends with, and who might do the same with me. Though I don't know for certain, it's certainly a plausible idea that some people might be so able to do this thing and just not take the mental leap of acknowledging it, whether by choice or by not interpreting it in such a way.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

For me multiplicity is actually a coping mechanism. Without my others I would be a lot more stressed, depressed, and all-around crazy than I am now! So in my case, at least, it's a very healthy thing. Of course it's a very complex situation, and does range all over the place.

[silveradept]

If they are disassociative (and that word already invokes spectres of insanity), they're probably remarkable good at hiding it, for the fear of being declared to have the disorder and go through whatever treatment is prescribed for it. Most people are a bit too attached to their personas to willingly want to be separated from them.

I'd be interested to hear whether there are correlations between disassociativeness and intellect or creativity or stress or any other factor that happens to show up.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough one of the recent discussions on a multiplicity community I just joined involved somebody "coming out" to their counselor about their multiples, and they weren't told they should try and cure this, the counselor seemed to regard it as the results of a vivid imagination, and didn't really take it too seriously. Probably because the person involved didn't show any symptoms of the disorder part of DID.

[silveradept]

Good counselor, then. At least, that they didn't reach immediately for the DSM. That they were regarding it just as imagination is probably the safest thing for the counselor to do, regardless of reality, so long as there's no signs of it actually interfering and causing harm. Although the fact that it was an event should tell us something about how much courage was probably needed to do so.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Yeah. She had to work up quite a bit of courage beforehand. And honestly there the community wasn't much help, nearly every single person said "don't tell!" But I think if you're getting counseling for something, it could possibly impair their ability to properly treat you if you keep important bits of your phyche completely hidden.

Of course that's assuming that you have a good counselor. Were I stuck with a bad one I certainly wouldn't tell!

[westly-roanoke.livejournal.com]

I consider myself spiritually multiple.

There's four of us here. There always has been...

Why is it? Hell if I know. Could I live without it? Sure...but that'd be like asking if I could live without some of my best friends.

I suppose the lot of us are lucky, we have access to eachother's memmorie (for the most part) and some of eachothers abilities. (Roanoke actually has different abilities than I do. Say for instance, he can tune a guitar, and I have no idea how to do it...) Though, sometimes we do show through as 'different' to people. (Like say, when Roanoke's in the driver's seat. Or when Wolf's co-driving..)

Im kind of curious as to how creativity effects this sort of thing as well...

[xpieces-of-usx.livejournal.com]

We'd speak up on this, but it's probably better done in an email...We've been this way for as long as We can remember. There are, at present count--14 of us.
We all have seperate lives, seperate dreams, seperate emotions.

Anyway...If you'd like to know more, our email is the.fragments.system at gmail.com

[catwoman69y2k.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I agree that it is hard to explain Kat (the component of Mary the person) as another identity of mine that Im totally aware of. Its too easy for non furs to mistake it for MPD (multiple personality disorder)

-Kat

[kainhighwind-dr.livejournal.com]

I suppose you could consider myself in your list (if you haven't already), though I think perhaps my 'condition' differs from what I read here. I do use multiple instances of the self in dealing with different events, people etc. And I can definitely vouch for part of it being due to creativity. It sure helps in writing stories, particularly dialogue, when I can convincingly 'become' several characters.

[kainhighwind-dr.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and there's the whole gender thing too, though whether that feels like multiplicity to me or not I'm not quite sure yet.

[sulcharae.livejournal.com]

heh, at worst, i'm a multiple-headed monster. The characters i create out of some sort of need to express -something- often stay in to continue to be an outlet or a housing space for that expression.
Syn, Kin, Jaci, Yu, they all have their function in the way i work, but i suppose they are not so independent from one another....
hard to really say.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I think, like most things, it tends to be a spectrum, running from people who don't even make up characters at all to people who have competely formed, totally independant personalities. You and I fall somewhere in between. I don't know yours all that well, but I get the impression that the more active of mine are a bit more fully formed. (Aidan in particular.)

Which is as it should be, really. We're all different, and that's good. If things were more black and white, you could just file everybody handily it two categories "single" and "multiple" and that kind of division of humans never ends well.

[tieran.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't really know if I.... "qaulify" as having multiple personaliteis or not. They *are* different aspects of me, but I don't feel like I need to refer to myself as we... does that make sense? @_@

four of my friends have these same aspects, and we call the groups of them by different names (colors, splits, mirrors, mindbabies, etc.) I have a GreatestJournal for all of them to express themselves on (mirrorforest http://www.greatestjournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=mirrorforest if ya wanna check it out)

Unfortunately, I *do* also exhibit a lot of the symptoms psychologists associate with DID, so I'm not too good an example of healthy people living out there with it, I guess :/ but then again, how much do people *really* know about the mind anyway?

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Not terribly much. And it's hard to understand it from the outside, so people who study things but have never experienced them sometimes, I think, don't really have a handle on them. It's hard enough to figure out WTF from the inside!

As far as if you qualify as multiple, to me the borederline is, can your personalities do things that you tell them not to? Mine can't. They occasionally do things I didn't really expect, but that's normal, one's own subconcious can surprise one quite easily. They backtalk a bit sometimes, particularly when I'm stressed and all the different bits of me want to fly off in different directions in response to it. But they can't do anything if I tell them not to.

Of course forbidding them things has weird effects. (Surpressing part of yourself is tricky, after all.) Any time you block of something that your mind wants, it tends to leak out somewhere else. But still, if they're actual personalities, and not just aspects, they'll be able to ignore your directions of they want, whereas aspects, as part of you, eventually have to listen up.