Jack Dawkins, Yavari Caralize, Vladimir Romanov, Fiona Romanova, 2023
Multiplicity is not dissociation
The experience of multiplicity is not dissociation in and of itself. It overlaps, since a lot of multiples, including us, are trauma survivors. We tick so many of the classic Dissociative Identity Disorder boxes, including child abuse, PTSD, involvement with cultish religious organisations, self-harming headmates who take years to reveal themselves.
The prevailing idea is that severe childhood trauma either causes someone’s personality to fragment or prevents a singular sense of self from developing altogether. Headmates or system members (or as they usually call us, ‘personalities’, ‘alters’, ‘ego states’ or ‘parts’) are just trauma containers, no more and no less. This is how you get those two-dimensional alter taxonomies: the Scared Little, the Persecutor, the Evil Demon Alter, the Pancake-Loving Alter.
But this model doesn’t apply to us. In fact, it fails pretty epically. (We have our own model, Mutually Emergent Association.)
Why? When we’re dissociated, especially when we’re stuck in a flashback, we become less distinct. We don’t know where Yavari ends and Jack begins. Dissociation is a haze that affects everyone. Anyone who comes to front while we are dissociated is going to feel disconnected, split and hazy. We are fragmented, scattered, blurry, foggy. Our thoughts are denuded of their usual colour and vibrancy. When written words appear in our mind’s eye—we’re ticker-tape synaesthetes and think in complete written sentences when thinking verbally—they appear in a flat, bland typeface on a white background. When we’re smashed together in a dissociative haze, we feel like a trauma receptacle full of painful memories, nothing more.
We run on autopilot when we’re in situations where we can’t be open about ourselves, which is most of them outside in-person hangouts with good friends. This is a lightweight kind of dissociation; though we are more aware of who we are and what we’re doing, there’s still a disconnection between who we are in our fullness and the mashed-together version of us that we present for the general public. We’ve historically been able to get through work because we’re usually alone at our desk and can get into a flow state if it’s work we care about. (It’s harder when it’s work we don’t care about and find difficult, since there’s nothing to distract us from the flood of memories that comes in.)
When we’re happy and feel safe, we feel more individualised, and our distinct thinking styles become apparent. For example, Jack’s thoughts are shot through with colour, textures, diagrams, vivid typography (he and Jamie can recognise hundreds of fonts by memory), artwork, photography, graphic design, music videos. Vova, on the other hand, has sharply photorealistic thoughts, often with film-style titles appearing over a mental scene, like Санкт-Петербург, Россия, 2023 г. (St Petersburg, Russia, 2023) in a white font that looks like DIN Condensed.
We also want to distinguish between dissociation and the flow state. Although you lose your ego awareness in a flow state, this is different. Individuals enter flow states, not the system in its entirety. Co-fronters—whether blended or distinct—can feel flow states alongside each other, but this is still an individual phenomenon connected to each person’s self-expression, not an indistinct dissociative blob. When Jack sits down and gets engrossed in an art project, he is still creating as Jack, even if he’s not consciously thinking about himself. His art will still look different from Vova’s or Fiona’s.
We suspect that our dissociation looks more like this because we were born plural, trauma notwithstanding. The way our plurality manifests itself is strongly influenced by our trauma, but that’s the same thing for our autism too. Dissociation wipes our distinctiveness away and turns up into a singular blob. When we feel like one, our integrity has been compromised. It feels like a kind of ‘reverse DID’.
Integration is not fusion
Integration isn’t fusion either. Some therapists, though not all, think that turning a plural system singlet will make them more functional and allow them to integrate their traumatic memories. But this rests on the idea that multiples are composed of fragmented trauma buckets with no room for growth, self-awareness or metacognition. This makes sense for systems that were formed through traumatic splitting that resulted in undevelopmented fragmented selves.
But this model doesn’t work for everyone, including many trauma-split systems with self-aware headmates who can grow and change over time. (Zip, for example, is an alter who split from Yavari in 2022, but he is still able to reflect and develop over time; he’s not just a trauma container to be integrated back into Yavari or the front persona.)
We have and have had headmates who haven’t fully processed our trauma. They’re the ones who are the most likely to self-harm or unintentionally sabotage us when we’re trying to get things done. Less-integrated headmates act alone and don’t spend much time talking to the rest of us. They don’t introduce themselves to people outside the system, or if they do, it’s a one-off introduction. We don’t know their stories, even though nearly all are walk-ins (we have two types of system member here, walk-in and alter; walk-ins have detailed backgrounds and often have independent lives)1.
When you are integrated, you are able to be fully present and pay attention to what is around you. This is much easier for us to do as self-aware system members than it is in public Singlet Mode or in a fully fledged dissociative state. When we’re aware of our distinctions, we feel more deeply and strongly—that is, we are more integrated. That’s because the front persona isn’t a real person, just a program. It’s based on an average of our personalities and traits, but it isn’t independent of the Pluresians running the show.
Those of us who are further along in their recovery have better metacognitive skills and are better able to recognise a traumatic response when they see one. They know who they are, they recognise their distinct role in the system, and they accept that our traumas happened to us. They can feel present in the moment, feel flow states when they write or draw, can tell you what music they like, can expound on their political or philosophical beliefs. They join us in creative projects—audio plays, stories, essays, artwork. This is integration. When a headmate is ready to engage with the rest of us (they don’t have to come to the front and interact outside the system, but they need to engage with the system leadership at the very least), they’re on the path to integration.
—various Pluresians (mostly Yavari, Jack, Fiona and Vova)
- We borrowed the term ‘walk-in’ from spiritualism, even though we don’t believe that we’re literally from parallel universes. ↩︎