#functional multiplicity

[kaboom--bitch]

Treating your headmates like separate people isn't worsening your condition by default by the way. Treating them with respect isn't making you dissociate more. Final fusion is a fine thing to try and achieve, but people need to understand that functional multiplicity is a thing you can work to achieve in therapy too. Please stop pushing the idea that you need to treat your headmates like a disorder or curse in order to heal. You can be happily multiple if you want that.

[hiiragi7]

Fully Fused Multiplicity - Simultaneously One and Many

I refer to myself nowadays as a fully fused multiple - an identity that may seem somewhat contradictory, given how often functional multiplicity and final fusion are talked about as one-or-the-other.

Upon reaching final fusion, I came to the realization that the difference between functional multiplicity and final fusion is not and never was this unfathomable gap, that final fusion was not a bridge you crossed once and could never go back to multiple except through force (further traumatization, recovery falling apart, an inability to cope), but rather they are two sides of the same coin, fluid and overlapping and even inseperable from one another. The terms themselves quite honestly don't feel adequate to describe quite how this feels, and I fear they give people a rather binary view on the endless possibilities for recovery, seeing as I had this view before myself.

In my years in plural and system spaces, it was always "are you aiming for functional multiplicity or final fusion?", and so despite my own thoughts on plurality as a framework (if you view yourself as plural/multiple, you're plural/multiple), I somehow found myself surprised to learn the options for recovery as a multiple were never actually this narrow to begin with, and that the two are nowhere near mutually exclusive.

I am functionally multiple and fully fused; I am both, simultaneously, always. I have come to know each as a shift in view, both of which are needed. My parts are perspectives with which to explore life from many different angles. ( @reimeichan 's "Different Readers of the Same Book" frames this elegantly, and this idea has embedded itself in me ever since.)

Both as one and as many, it is a way of knowing myself on the deepest and most intimate level. Final fusion is a radical form of self-love, an absolute acceptance and celebration of everything that I am, and this has dramatically altered the way in which my parts express and how we come together into an overall self. Simultaneously, my parts are a relationship, one that can only be recognized as uniquely multiple in nature and yet has evolved in such a way that becomes difficult to describe using the language I had used before as an unfused multiple. I am undeniably a multiple and I am fully and completely fused.

The fluidity in which I find myself in is incredibly freeing, my self-expression made up of love letters to my parts. My parts are gradients of watercolor on a canvas flowing in and out of each other, only subjective distinction remains between any one of us, myself is the larger painting encompassing everything. All parts of me create a self so unapologetically full of color, the love found there as necessary as breathing. I have come to view even the painful parts as an expression of love.

I find my headcount these days to be infinitely shifting, all at once I am one and I am many. How I visualize myself, how many I am, it all moves with me. Alongside subtle changes in my emotions, my thoughts, my perspective, myself shifts from moment to moment in a way that just feels right. This is me, all of me. This is the love we have created.

[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.

[sysmedsaresexist]

Hot Take

Functional multiplicity and final fusion aren't really all that different in practice and experience, and you should all stop overthinking it

Worrying, fussing, and arguing is only going to stress you out, and we all know what stress does to systems

Relax and stop policing and scaring others, especially if you're not currently experiencing either

Slow down, take things one day a time, recognize and accept that your goals can change, that you collectively have more of a say in what happens than you think, and consider, maybe they're surprisingly similar experiences that are rewarding in ultimately similar ways

[system-of-a-feather]

Visualizing Different Forms of Late Stage Recovery DID / Full Integration

[Note: This is a repost from this post without the long essay attached to it for rebloggability]

We were thinking about it and kind of came to think of a potential visual for Functional Multiplicity VS Final Fusion and the kind of inbetween within the two

We are middle right.

Top Left:

DID prior to any significant amount of processing and recovery; parts are pretty separate from one another with little permeability between parts; some parts are made up of multiple colors

Top Right:

DID during recovery; some parts fuse and meld together to make new parts, others develop some permeability between parts while still maintaining their separation, communication and co-fronting is easy for these parts and they may have a temporary fused state where the areas overlap

Middle Left:

One form of Full Integration; Functional Multiplicity; All parts are connected through permeable barriers and parts are mostly functioning independently of one another. Some parts may be semi-fused or have temporary fused states for parts they are well integrated with, but they also can retain in their individual states as well.

Middle Right:

One form of Full Integration; Functional Multiplicity and Final Fusion Simultaenously; there is a central and overarching “fused whole” that exists in the center of the system where all parts are blended together to the point it is impractical to label which is which; some parts are not fully blended in with the fused whole and thus it is possible to go into areas of the whole where each part is operating independently; its important to note though that a lot of the time, these parts are still holding parts of their adjacent parts and each section tends to have colors from more than their “original” self

Bottom Left:

One form of Full Integration; Full and Final Fusion; what some consider ideal and a more traditional idea of “final fusion” where all parts are fully and perfectly balanced and integrated with one another to create a solid singular identity

[multiplicity-positivity]

hello, I have a weird question maybe? were a traumagenic system and we’ve spent the last couple years growing and healing and all that good stuff, but we keep getting this feeling. We all really value our individuality, but at times we feel like we need to give all that up and live as a singular person, and it’s pretty upsetting. So I’m wondering like… what do we do with that feeling?

hey, we can view this issue from two different angles, so we’ll talk a bit about both of them.

if you feel like you need to fuse or live as one person because that is what’s expected of traumagenic systems in clinical, societal, or plural spaces:

honestly, you do you. functional multiplicity is a valid recovery goal and it’s one that most systems online are actively pursuing. you don’t have to fuse if you don’t want to or feel like it’s not right for your system. it is entirely possible to live happily and safely as a system. your trauma may be what caused your system to form, but that doesn’t mean that once you’ve healed from your trauma, you can’t be plural anymore. lots of systems out there have worked to heal from their trauma while maintaining their multiplicity.

if you feel like you need to fuse or live as one person because that’s a genuine recovery goal that feels necessary for your health and well-being:

we get it. there are some parts in our own system who feel like fusion is necessary for us to fully recover. it can be really hard coming to terms with a massive change like that. plurality is all we know, really. we can’t even begin to conceptualize what singlet life might look like. but just because it’s scary or we have grown comfortable living our lives as multiple doesn’t mean we will never be able to achieve final fusion in the future. if you feel like fusion is what y’all need in order to live your best lives… it’s okay to be upset by it. that doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to achieve it in your futures, though.

in the end, regardless of why y’all feel like you need to live as a single person, remember that you are not obligated to do anything that you don’t want or aren’t ready to do. it’s okay to take your time and relish your plurality, even if you feel that final fusion is necessary for your recovery. and if you feel like you need to fuse because it’s what others expect of you… fuck that. you don’t have to organize your system and orient your recovery around the expectations of others.

live your lives in ways that are empowering and affirming for your system. and if that means eventual fusion, great! if it means pursuing functional multiplicity, that’s great, too! if it means pursuing some recovery goal that’s unique to y’all and doesn’t involve either of those options, that is also great. what’s great is the fact that y’all have done the work, that you’re healing and growing and learning what’s best for your own system.

we’re wishing y’all the very best of luck with whatever your future holds :)

[plurapony]

So the path of healing that involves final fusion, often misrepresented as "alter death", was something that terrified our previous host. He was always very adamant that we would always achieve functional multiplicity, with as little fusion as possible.

You see our parts mean a lot to us, we all have roles to play to ensure the overall wellbeing of our collective self. There's a lot of us that hold symptoms of our comorbid disorders, our traumatic memories are distributed to those of us that can handle it, our small parts preserve our childhood innocence, we have parts that are tasked with small things to help us overall, we have parts that act as housekeepers for the system, we have caretakers that look after us in the different ways, protectors to protect us and the list goes on - every single part us plays a role and we are all equally important.

See our previous host was scared of final fusion because he believed he would be losing that, and he would be all on his own. but our previous host was wrong. You see we've been using our collective name more and basing our identity around our collective self instead of the individual part that's fronting. and whilst that's been a small change it made us realize something.

If we are all our collective self and are best when we function together, then maybe final fusion really wouldn't be such a negative thing. We may still achieve functional multiplicity, we may achieve final fusion but whatever the outcome is it'll be great as long as the bond we share continues and no matter what - we will always be together.

[IMAGE ID: ponyville is a (pro) endo free zone break dni and get blocked loser! END ID]

[starringmycoffee]

i wish i could explain how much i hate the lack of community for recovered DID folks. there's not any community terms for us to describe our experiences really. there's "wishiwashi fusion" from (i think) @system-of-a-feather , and there's... that's it. there's functional multiplicity and resolution and final fusion.

those are our terms. just four little terms to describe a whole vast spectrum of experiences. (at least to my knowledge.)

my alters don't "switch" anymore really, but rather become "more dominant". but that's a mouthful and i'd love something more convenient.

there is no term that i feel connected to, because final fusion implies a sense of being "a singlet" and functional multiplicity doesn't work when my body is disabled and not functional. i don't want to call myself "functional" when that implies "nothing is wrong".

why is it that recovery means i get demonized and excluded?

[fragmentedfae-userboxes]

[thrivingwhilemultiple]

"Why did you get off the bus?" "I don't know. I knew it wasn't my stop."

Life isn't about control. We can't control what it throws at us; we can't control emotions or outcomes; we can't control our recovery timeline. I can't control other Motley members any more than we can just "get over" decades of trauma.

We don't control, we communicate. Cooperate. Become curious and compassionate. We observe, ask questions, listen to understand; we call out for what we need and offer what we can give; we reflect upon past behaviors to unlock the mystery of why.

Why did I say that? Why did I react that way? Why did I avoid that for so long? Why can't I focus? Why do I keep forgetting?

...Why did I get off the bus?

"Why did you get off the bus?"

[greens-spilled-tea]

Good lord I saw a post along the lines of "if you've hit final fusion you're still disordered because you can still potentially split" and while I understand what they're trying to say it's just such a bad argument, especially since it was said within the context of how "non-disordered systems don't exist".

When the disorder is no longer causing distress or impairment, is it a disorder anymore? Yes, I still have a DID brain. My brain is likely never going to be the same as that of someone who has never developed DID. There is no "cure" for this. At the same time, saying that I'm still "disordered" feels wrong in the grand scheme of things. I've heard of people who have achieved final fusion or functional multiplicity who had their diagnosis removed from their chart because they no longer fit the diagnostic criteria for said disorder.

Also, saying I can still split even after reaching final fusion and using THAT as some sort of a gotcha to prove that I'm still disordered is so harmful. Yes I still split sometimes, in fact I still split quite a bit! But those of us who have reached final fusion have learned how to cope and manage our symptoms enough to be able to handle that without them necessarily fucking up our lives. Also, *gestures towards functional multiplicity* when you reach a level of symptom management even with dissociated parts where you can thrive and the symptoms are causing little to no issues in your life anymore, you literally don't fit the criteria for the disorder anymore and that doesn't mean you're cured, it just means you're no longer disordered. There is a difference between the two! This is why I love using the phrase "in remission" because that's very much what's going on here.

Anyways I'm just rambling and tired and angry.

[disabled-sysboxes]

[TEXT ID: this system wants functional multiplicity]

[IMG ID: a light blue rectangular box with the OSDDID flag - a flag with four stripes, black, blue, green, and yellow - to the left, and the text 'this system wants functional multiplicity' to the right]

[TEXT ID: this system wants functional multiplicity]

[IMG ID: a light orange rectangular box with the original OSDDID flag - a flag with three stripes, white, orange, and black - to the left, and the text 'this system wants functional multiplicity' to the right]

–

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[granulesofsand]

Dissociative Amnesia with BASK

I would love to hear more about systems without amnesia. I’ve been thinking, lately that emotional amnesia is really similar to any other form except maybe full.

I mean that as in memories being stored by type of information; if it’s BASK style, alters can have barriers between any letter or combination of letters.

BASK

Behavior: what the fronter did/had the urge to do

Affect: what the fronter felt/expressed emotionally

Sensation: what the fronter felt/noticed physically

Knowledge: what the fronter was aware/informed of

I would define ‘full blackouts’ as sharing none of the letters, which is unusual for the systems we know/have read about. Even systems we currently describe as having blackouts tend to start with some leakage.

I’d say the most common leaks are Affective and Sensory; bursts of unexplainable emotion or feelings you can tell aren’t yours and unexplainable pain or flashes of perceptions respectively.

I’ve heard of people, particularly front-facing people, experiencing these without co-consciousness. They aren’t accompanied by ‘the facts’ of what happened, and can leave the receiving alters confused or frightened.

A full sharing of either information might be considered another flashback unless intentional, but only a Sensory barrier is labeled amnesia as it stands.

The other leaks we currently refer to as blackouts is Behavior; either as ‘passive influence’ or as co-fronting and co-consciousness.

Some systems have to work on barriers to get Behavioral transmission, which might be as simple as acknowledging the alters as behind them. Others have it as part of the standard function, or see fluctuations without any particular reason.

‘Grayouts’ are barriers that allow Knowledge through; instead of any experience, alters get descriptions of events. It can be compared to being told about memories, like a book or news report.

Systems tend to encourage the permanent sharing of Sensation and Knowledge when decreasing amnesia, Behavior when attempting co-consciousness, and Affect only when fusing.

A fully assembled memory is taken into long term storage, where they usually go when there is no trauma. I don’t know if endogenic or healed traumagenic systems have that complete lack of barriers or if they learn to dissociate non-traumatic memories for individuality.

So I guess I’d like to hear from systems with no barriers, systems with Affective/emotional barriers, and systems that dissociate memories for non-trauma reasons. The whole system or between some members would also work.

What is it like to experience? How do you perceive the sharing, either in internal worlds or as a construct? What does it mean for system dynamics when the alters to share what they do?

You can answer without those guidelines, if you’d prefer. I’m more just curious about the existence of others unlike us than looking for specific datasets.

[reimeichan]

I know that when people say that DID has no cure, that those of us with DID will always have a DID brain and may even split again in the future, they're trying to be realistic about recovery goals and maybe even acknowledge that those of us who have reached Final Fusion or Functional Multiplicity are still part of the DID community. However, I've recently been finding those kinds of statements to sound.... defeatist, actually. There's oftentimes an underlying feeling of "what's the point of trying so hard if I'm just going to have DID forever?" or "no matter what I do there will always be the possibility for me to relapse", and as such I've started to see these phrases as being almost anti-recovery.

I agree, there is no cure for DID that we know of. We cannot change the fundamental way our brain works. However, that's not the same as saying there's no way to get better with DID, or saying there's no treatment for DID, or there's no way to live a happy, fulfilling life with DID. It takes a lot of work, yes, but it's absolutely possible to learn how to live with both dissociation and trauma to the point they have very little if any negative impact on your life. That's what expanding your coping toolbox is for. And learning emotional regulation. And trauma processing. I may never live the same life as someone who never developed DID or has the same traumas as me, but that doesn't mean I'll be unhappy and miserable and fighting against my own brain every day of my life. Instead, I've learned to work with my brain and with my disorders, and in the process I've learned how to not just survive day to day but thrive. I'm excited to see what tomorrow brings me. I'm hopeful.

And I think that's really what my feelings on those phrases boils down to. They feel like they lack hope and end up making me feel like working on recovery isn't worth it. But I know that's wrong, for myself at least. It's definitely worth it to keep walking forward one step at a time. Where I am now and where I was before are two very different places, even if some days it's hard for me to see those differences and acknowledge that. And there's so much more for me to look forward to as well.

So, here's to healing and recovery and thriving with DID.

[sysmedsaresexist]

Further Reading 📚 &

Clinician Showcase 📣

Multilayered

Adrian A. Fletcher, Psy.D., M.A.

I've mentioned this name before-- Dr Fletcher is a DID system and clinical psychologist

This article is a beautiful little piece about struggling with mental health, with a CDD diagnosis, and how you can still be so successful.

Classifying my experience as a mental illness has been hard for me because my way of living is all that I have ever known, and the symptoms that I have experienced have been a response to experiencing extreme trauma. Although I have been formally diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, labeling it has served only to validate that I am a resilient human who has survived because my brain fragmented my experiences into parts. I don’t feel like I have a disorder; yet I clearly meet the diagnostic criteria and have been formally diagnosed.

What I want people to understand is that, as with other illnesses, with this “illness” there is a wide range of functioning, and the treatment can take a general medical, alternative, or traditional psychiatric approach.

[system-of-a-feather]

Alternative System Mind Mapping Method for Communication

[DISCLAIMER: This is not a professional or scientifically or anything really backed method, this is something coming solely from peer / personal experience.]

In regards to an anon ask earlier, I was thinking about it and one of the ways we've approached improving communication - particularly internal - in a way that is a lot less prone to flooding or dealing with trauma or anything too overwhelming - is by approaching it following the concept of Memory Webs

I haven't read up on them recently, but "Memory Webs" were a thing that our AP Psychology teacher in highschool made us do because the AP Psych test was term / jargon heavy. Memory in the human brain has been shown to be HEAVILY associative and the ability to remember and connect things tends to rely on following a "web" of connected topics, ideas, concepts etc from one idea to the next.

So in our AP Psych class, she gave us these GIANT books for Vocabulary Webs that we had to slowly work on, each of which required 6 other vocab words / related concepts, a summarized definition, and an image to represent it. By doing this, you added 6 cues to recall the word (increasing the chance you'd remember it), a visual cue, an episodic memory of working on it, and a definition - all in all improving how connected the word is to other concepts in your brain and making it easier to recall it.

I personally like to look at DID and our parts in a similar manner sometimes where the large issue is that a lot of the nodes in the web of associations are either disconnected or connected through a hard-to-find and/or small chain. In that sense, parts struggle to be held together because they are not associated concepts. It's hard to reach other parts because the dissociative walls (which in our unsubstantiated opinion is less a 'wall' and more so a lack of reinforced neural connections, so I would call them dissociative caverns) keep associations from forming

As a result, alternative to more traditional ways of mapping your system and parts, a method I've liked to internally visualize systems and navigating system dynamics is through a memory web manner. (I actually have never done it physically cause the Ray part of my brain - also the most prominent part writing this rn - rarely liked to front if he didn't have to and did a lot of stuff internally)

Here's a bit of a breakdown using six of our parts if any of you want to try it out.

We personally like it because it strips a lot of trauma and stress off of it and makes it a lot more of a positive and present engaging activity. For the purposes of this, I'll be using the free online app of Milanote cause we've used it before for OC associative webs and I think it'll do fine enough. (Honestly it actually might just be a good way to log alter information now that I'm looking at it if you are at a place in recovery where keeping track of that physically helpful)

So we can start by dropping down the parts we want to include in the form of boards

So from here, we have a bunch of disconnected parts. However, we find that a lot of these parts have things that mean a lot to them, that illicit a strong emotion or reaction from them.

Some parts may lack it more than others (often in our case trauma holders and/or trauma locked parts) and that's okay and to be expected. This is a visualization method and if there isn't much connecting a part that is 100% okay.

For demonstration sake, I will now add bubbles around each part of things that were pretty early apparent that each individual liked.

Also for the purposes of how I know our system works and how I plan to do this, I am actually moving Riku to the center and you will all see why Riku is such an S tier center point with this model

So you can see some connections forming.

Some key things you can take from this visual that also applied to earlier stags of how we connected

Lucille and Riku are and have always been pretty darn connected, they go back as one of the longest duos and were split almost as a pair to deal with academics

Chunn and Ray have a very shared interest of "I don't want to do anything leave me alone"

XIV literally was just a piece of shit early on and didn't have any immediate HARD connections with anyone largely because he never was interested in actually engaging in things he liked in a positive way as his "favorite emotion" at the time was "being pissed off"

Lin - an originally trauma stuck / loop - is very very poorly associated with anything that isn't overtly trauma related (and that is saying something cause Vocaloid is trauma related) and thus has very few connections to other parts

So looking at this though, there are a few things that have some similarities between parts. What you can do is make plans to try to foster the interests that you do have and try to generalize it a bit more to also encompass what interests other parts have. So lets engage in hobbies a little more - explore a few concepts that mean a lot to parts independently - and find some more generalized version of those hobbies

(forgot to add easy listening to Ray's and "only wearing monochrome*" to XIV's earlier) (*there are a lot of nuances and caveats)

Damn, look at that. It's messy and ugly to have in a 2D form. I absolutely hate it, this would be so impossible with our whole system. But HEY, it's very connected - and that's the goal.

Compared to the previous one, you can see how easily it can be for one part's interests to start to drift into another. Because they are largely and strongly associated features to each part, they are a lot more accessible when engaging in their shared / associated connections and interests which makes it easier for the them to stay together near the front, stay associated with one another, and work with and communicate with one another.

Of course anyone following this blog goes "Where tf is Birds" and that I left out because it would ruin the point of the web as it actually is one of our traditional "you are around the system a lot? okay pick a bird" which serves to 1) be a fun system culture thing 2) be a means of welcoming a part in and 3) helps establish a foundational connection; we do the same with music but with music its a lot more elaborate and I probably wont explain it for other reasons.

But overtime, by fostering interests that were already present and encouraging parts to broaden and generalize their specific interest a bit, you end up with a lot of overlapping associations that can greatly improve internal communication, co-fronting ability, and just general fluidity and easy of moving around the brain web.

It becomes a good way of trying to figure out what you can do to encourage and help build connections and associations between parts by seeing where things are similar / could have more overlap (combat and martial arts, different types of fashion, different types of music, different appreciation for arts, taking over the world, yada yada yada)

And you wanna know the coolest thing? When you step back from the whole web you can see certain things appear that stand out the most and have some of the most connections.

If you ever intend to go to Final Fusion, those are the things that will likely be the most prominent traits of your whole self

For us? [REDACTED BIRDS for the point of the demonstration], Music, Fashion, Taking over the World, Recovery and Healing, Buddhism, Martial Arts, Arts in general - they're all some of our largest traits that persist in almost all forms as individual parts, partially fused parts, and fully fused parts.

And the BEST part? Doing this didn't require us to touch trauma at all.

Of course in recovery that will come up cause PTSD doesn't ask permission, but its a very low stress way to help improve internal communication and engagement with one another.