thenightmarebluntrotation

[thenightmarebluntrotation]

No fuck it I wanna write more about my individual experience. My aromantic allosexual system member experience.

Hi, I'm Itchy. I split in 2013. My brain has a mechanism where if it seems like we're going to fall in love with someone, I will involuntarily become dormant for the duration of the relationship and we split a new part to handle the relationship. The new part is usually partially introjected from the person they're built to love. This has happened at least four times.

I keep losing HUGE chunks of my life because my brain decides that the alloromantic alter's needs are more important than mine. I do not get a say.

People don't understand how we can go from being heartbroken over someone we were utterly devoted to, to being gleefully ecstatic to be out of there. I try not to fantasise about our current host being broken up with. There's nothing wrong with his relationship, they're both very happy, but the selfish part of me wishes something would happen that would enable me to be the host again and get my life back.

It's not that I don't like Dandy. I think he's doing an amazing job. Hosting for five years without cutting himself?? Awesome. I never thought that would be something we could achieve.

It's not that I don't like Peach either. Before she was Dandy's girlfriend she was my cool internet friend who I'd send money to sometimes when she was struggling. We got along really well.

I physically cannot speak to her now because if I was gonna speak to her the brain would switch Dandy in, but I'm still happy for them!!

But what I wouldn't give to have a separate body and a separate apartment and live alone with a cat or a reptile or something. Never have to answer to anyone, never have to tell anyone where I'm going or what I'm doing, never have to explain my reasoning for stuff. To not have a dissociative disorder and to get to just be aromantic on my own. To make friends and not have to worry about some other part of my brain falling in love with them and effectively burying me.

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Alloaros are not inherently more sexual than anyone else, and they don’t have to have sex to prove their alloaroness. An alloaro who has never had sex or who no longer has sex — whether due to not being able to find a partner, being celibate, experiencing trauma, not being ready, or any other reason — is no less alloaro than someone who has had lots of sex or who has one or more foveo(s)/FWB(s). There is no shame in an alloaro person having sexual relationships that don’t involve romantic feelings (or even platonic feelings!), but being alloaro without having sex isn’t a contradiction either.

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I love the abrosexual label so much, I love having a shorthand for 'my sexuality is fluid' that stops there and doesn't force me to explain WHY our sexuality is fluid.

Being a system with alters of various different orientations is so difficult to explain in non system spaces, especially with today's standards of "I have to know exactly what gender/sexuality you are so I can work out how oppressed you are and whether or not I'll be socially ostracized for mocking your identity'

Abrosexual cuts out ALL OF THAT and I'm so grateful.

In an ideal world I could be speaking to a queer singlet and I could say "Sometimes I'm an asexual lesbian. Sometimes I'm a bisexual butch. Sometimes I'm an aroallo trans guy. Sometimes I'm a pansexual enby" BUT we are not there yet and doing this would lead to either direct bullying or mockery behind my back, so abrosexual is my way of telling the truth while also obscuring some of the specifics.

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(Note: this isn't meant to be a judgement thing, I had a weird conversation with a friend, we were opposite extremes, both had never even considered anyone would feel the other way, just curious)

-submit your poll!-

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no because tell me why these stupid ass head motherfuckers are always the most active at the least important times. like they wont show up during actually important shit but when somebody thinks about what the weakest bone in the body is, FIFTEEN PEOPLE SUDDENLY APPEAR????

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tfw you're hyperfixated on something your friend was hyperfixated on a few years ago but like you don't wanna be WEIRD about it but also you know there's a mountain of carefully curated content to peruse jdhhehshdhd

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Possibly the worst feeling is watching your abuser go on to have a good life. How can you possibly deserve it? Do you not lie awake at night thinking of what you did to me, drowning in guilt? Because I do. Where's my fucking karma?

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Just a few reminders:

1. Plurality exists and has always existed far beyond the narrow scope of a colonial medicalized lense. Denying/Ignoring/Invalidating cultural/spiritual/Indigenous knowledge and presentations of plurality is inherently racist.

2. Not everyone who experiences plurality has or meets the criteria for CDD/DID/OSDD.

3. Having separate/multiple altered states of consciousness alone does not meet the criteria for a DID/OSDD diagnosis.

4. The ICD itself mentions forms of non disordered plurality within the section of the boundaries with normality threshold.

5. Claiming to know more about someone's lived experience than they do does not make someone an advocate. It makes them an ass. Especially if said experience is mainly/largely an internal experience.

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i should post more here about how being plural complicates gender extremely badly because i think we got a bunch of followers who would burn us at the stake for this sinful experience and the rent needs to be lowered

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How many are there?

At least but no more than like maybe.

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new boundary for if me and peach ever wanna try exploring kink with other people again;

i do not do any kind of sexual or kink related activity with anyone who can't take two minutes to listen to me explain a bit about our fronting triggers so as to not further traumatise our littles or sex repulsed alters.

anyone who can't do that is a risk to us. i will not put my system at risk like that.

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Thanks, Anon!

-submit your poll!-

[thenightmarebluntrotation]

Some Basic Advice About EMDR for Systems

(drawing on our own experiences, reading about it, and comparing notes with our therapist)

This is mainly aimed at systems who are considering doing EMDR or planning on it, but want to know what the process is like and what to look out for, with some personal experiences sprinkled in.

Under the cut, because I talk a lot:

General Concept

I think the big picture in our experience is that EMDR is/was like…an intensifier for the kind of headspace/internal system interaction processing work that a lot of systems do naturally, at least a little, especially if they have decent internal communication. This has both upsides and downsides/areas to be cautious about.

A lot of EMDR pre-work (often called “resourcing” iirc) is about making sure you have a good toolbox of “mental tricks/techniques” to be able to handle unexpected intense emotions, feelings, and/or imagery etc that often comes up when you get into trying to work with traumatic stuff. This is in my opinion very important, and something your therapist should take at least a few sessions to talk with you about even if you already have good tools for it already, just to make sure they knos your strategies and you’re all on the same page. Also super common and normal to spend some time developing extra ones if needed—stuff like “the box” for temporarily containing crisis emotions when needed, having a mental “safe space” that you can come back to, etc. Also, EMDR specifically tends to often be a little rigid/scripted in the types of visualizations and metaphors you’re “supposed” to use, but in my opinion a good therapist should be flexible enough to adapt to equivalent images/techniques you may already have (like, “imagine you’re viewing the traumatic memory on a movie screen, or out the window of a train going through a tunnel” is a common instruction; if, say, your headspace has a lot of fantasy elements and it makes more internal sense to be viewing the memory via…scrying in a dish or something, your therapist should be down with you doing that instead, if you want to).

As for the sessions themselves, a big thing we don’t hear articulated a lot is that, in our experience  and that of some other folks we know, EMDR has a tendency of being…like, sneakily intense: It doesn’t necessarily hit you all at once in the session, which may just feel “ok that was Some Therapy Work but I’m chill”, but over the rest of the day and maybe even the next few days, it’s not uncommon to keep feeling a lot of emotional intensity/vulnerability, having more intense “internal conversations and/or realizations”, etc. For this reason, EMDR is generally supposed to start with a very mild memory-to-process, like 4-5 out of 10 max.

Notes of Caution and Stuff to Keep In Mind

Especially for folks who already heavily dissociate from emotional trauma, it’s super easy to think you’re “going too easy” only to find that the memory has a lot more emotional baggage than you realized—really go easy on yourself when you start, EMDR is like psychology power tools and you absolutely can hurt yourself. (We’ve heard from plenty of systems who had bad therapists who did not adequately support them in doing EMDR, and absolutely fucked them over by starting too big and retraumatizing the hell out of them— this isn’t meant as fear-mongering, especially if you really like and trust your therapist, but just genuine “hey, EMDR can be very volatile stuff, which is part of why it can be so helpful, but also means that it’s important to not skip out on the safety precautions and self-care”.) What this means in practice is often stuff like: (our recommendations at least) - trying to schedule breaks/easy days immediately after - possibly getting someone to drive you home, especially if you know you’re going after a Big Thing, because the dissociation hangover immediately after can be pretty real - start with a memory that feels "too easy", and scale up if a week later it still felt trivial/like you’re fully over it, because it’s way easier to ramp up than try to do damage control.

Our personal experience, in tl:dr form, was that it felt like the core of the technique was really useful for us, and mirrored some of the most useful instances of self-processing we’d had before while also kind of serving as a “shortcut” to it—but, it was pretty intense and we didn’t really like/fit well with the therapists who we were working with at the time, which is why we stopped (didn’t want to keep doing an emotionally intense thing with folks we didn’t trust).

Finally, a bit about EMDR and "maybe I'm plural but I'm not sure, and/or may not have great in-system communication": yeah, this is a case to be especially slow and careful, for all the aforementioned reasons; what my instinct/recommendation would be in those cases is to: 1) make sure you learn a lot of resourcing techniques 2) try to check in with yourself(s) frequently and with compassion/intent-to-collaborate, "ask the inside of your head how it's feeling" and even if you're not sure whether the "reply" was just your own thoughts or a headmate, listen and try to engage with/respect those responses and emotions 3) if you start getting warning signs/back-off signals/sudden intense feelings, listen to them and lighten up, pause the session if you need to, do some self care etc, even (especially) if you don't know why you felt that way and it seems 'odd/random', and really you're super curious about what's going on and just want to figure it out. Like...you and the inside of your head and/or other system members are trying to navigate a complicated D&D maze together, in the dark, and you each only have part of the map--so you have to work together and trust each other, especially listening to warning signals even when your "part of the map" doesn't show anything to worry about there. And the more you work together and trust each other, the better everything gets, including therapy work.

When it's "Death By A Thousand Papercuts"-type Trauma Instead

If you're not sure where to start because there aren't a lot of obvious "Big Bad Memories" that feel like they adequately explain the issues you're having, some recommendations:

-> First, note that "no Big Bad Memories are immediately coming to mind, idk" is super common in systems and also in CPTSD, way more than I think most folks realize, so know that you're not alone and also that it doesn't mean you don't necessarily have stuff deserving of help and support.

-> So yeah, there's kinda two things imo you can try. The first is, if your therapist is on the more flexible side, you can try doing EMDR with either "this specific memory wasn't too bad, but it's representative of an ongoing pattern or theme that wasn't great" (say, loneliness at school or something, and you pick a specific lunchtime memory, which wasn't really That Bad in the moment, but you were kinda sad and/or upset about it and it feels representative of the overall trend you're trying to process/heal). Or you can try just doing the EMDR process on the theme itself, at the abstract level, and see what comes up--again, I'd really recommend starting with a much lower-stakes issue/theme than you think you need, just because it's really easy to underestimate, especially for systems and other folks whose brains dissociate a lot. (And especially if you know your system has episodic amnesia--e.g. event-amnesia/blackout amnesia--as well as emotional amnesia.)

The second is, there are other "more flexible" types of similar somatic therapy techniques (brainspotting is the name of another one, and there's more I can't think of rn) that might fit better instead-- tldr, totally worth asking your therapist about the whole situation, and asking what they'd feel most qualified for/comfortable with, in my opinion. You don't need to be doing Specifically Exactly EMDR to do somatic trauma therapy, even though EMDR is one of the more well-known modalities for it, and finding a version that feels right and not like you're forcing anything is really valuable (and you're not 'being picky' if it takes a while to find one; you're allowed to want to find one that feels right).

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Your relationships with your headmates are just as real and important as your relationships with people outside of your system!!!

There's an idea that we had ingrained into us that was pretty prevalent in the community that was like, your relationships with your headmates can't substitute real interpersonal relationships. And I think that notion is SO dehumanizing. Yes having relationships outside your system is important but sometimes you have exactly what you want inside your system and trying to "substitute it with something real" is just gonna hurt everyone involved!!!

If your closest and most important relationships are inside your system THAT'S AWESOME. KEEP IT UP. You and your headmates are NOT flawed for this!!!!!!

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Saw some asinine syscourse, SO,

We have said this before and we'll say it again:

There's just as much proof of trauma-formed systems as there is proof of non-traumagenic systems. Which is to say... none. "But--" Nope. None. Not a goddamn shred. There's literally nothing out there that proves that being "more than one" in any sense is possible.

YES, there are brain scans that show something is happening. But that does not prove that the "something" is "multiple people/selves in one body". That is entirely subjective and internal. You can't prove to someone outside your brain or body that there's anyone else in there with you, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

BUT.

Good news! This also means that no one outside of your brain or body can disprove it, either. And that holds true for ANY system of ANY origin, including endogenic and other non-traumagenic systems.

We're all equally real or fake in the end.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is why even seemingly neutral "I believe you believe it" statements are so fucking ridiculous, because that's all that matters. A system's belief that they are a system is the ONLY definitive proof that systemhood even exists. Brain scans and studies can't prove "okay, yeah, you have multiple people in there who can swap in and out and have different personalities, likes and dislikes, histories, sexualities and genders".

It's literally "I think, therefor I am" in practice. A system, regardless of how they experience their plurality, is the way they are because that's how they conceptualize themselves. Sure, you could call into question whether or not any given non-traumagenic system "actually" is traumagenic instead, but the reverse is also true. How do you know for a fact that your system formed from trauma, and wasn't already plural-leaning or wouldn't have formed anyways?

It's just all very silly. If you're experiencing being more than one, then you are, period, regardless of how you think you got to be that way. Because the only brain that can sit there and figure out if you're plural, is the one inside your own damn skull. Nothing and no one else can 100% prove or disprove it.

So, yeah, if you believe it then we believe you because no one else's opinion fucking matters lmao.

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me: ooh something in my drafts i wonder what it was

drafts:

me: january 4th?? was this really two whole months ago and i haven't done anything?

me: *notices it actually says january 4th 2024* god damn

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try fuckin listening to a song in this house it doesn't work