Update: Jokes here aged like milk. and it's funny to think that in an alternate universe where alters would actually have been added to the goverment's logs, there would be so many asking to change their name.
This is about external dating, in-sys relationships/dating are not as complex as this and also very common among systems, this does not make a system less valid nor makes it "cringe", an in-sys relationship is something that has been often associated with healing and self-love. I must add I am in a in-sys relationship with people that I love and trust very much. However, that is not today's topic.
Dating is already hard enough, you have to find the right person, you have to share interests in some things, you have to meet and know each other deeply, trust each other completely, getting into a romantic relationship is hard, even for a singlet. Now, there's even more thing to consider when you're a system.
If you're part of a system and want to date someone outside of that system, you have to contemplate various things such as: How much time are you able to spend with that person considering your front times and patterns? Are the rest of the system even going to like my partner? How much are they actually going to like them? Might other alters fall in live with them too? What gender is okay with the rest of the system to date? Who in the system are aromantic or asexual that might not like to get in the relationship? etc. It's such a tangled mess of boundaries and communication and trust, but I'm not saying that it is not possible.
Once you have found the person (or even another system) you are sure you want to date and you have talked it out enough with your own system, it can be such a good experience, but you have to get boundaries through, not only yours as a individual, you have to get the boundaries of your system, and of course the other person (singlet) must know about the system, is part of the trust that you have built on each other.
About those boundaries, it is important to acknowledge if your system have littles in it and how to manage with them, how some alters have different love languages, how to deal with those hard to reason alters, how to deal with the otherwise fragile alters, it's so much that you have to let know the other person and you have to trust that they will actually respect every single member, because that's one thing that's beautiful about dating, that you can have this person along side all of you that understands and helps you through your journey of being a system.
Oh golly oh gosh, is it time to talk about this one folks. As far as I know, every system I've met had this kind of thinking at least once, myself included. It sometimes feel like this shit isn't real and that maybe we're just faking it to then rationalize that it is actually real (for better or worse, depends of the person on how they see this), that this is, unfortunately, the reality we have lived and that this is what it ended up providing us with; people (or sometimes a single person) living rent free inside our frontal lobe alongside us.
Giving our own example, I wanna talk about the reasoning of my own insecurity on this field.
We call it "Quick switching", it refers to a switch that happens either instantly or gradually in the span not greater than a couple minutes.
This is caused due to us constantly still being in stressful situations (or trauma) and, hypothetically speaking, the brain decides that the person fronting at that moment (often being me, the core host) needs protection, therefore switching at such speed for another alter who's capable of handling the situation.
Due to this happening so fast and so commonly, it can often feel like I'm faking all of this, having headmates, having different personalities and backgrounds. Yet, I have to remember, I am, unfortunately, a traumagenic system; the past inflicted on me is what has made me into a system. Of course it's supposed to protect me from this kind of situations, after all this all is a way that the brain handles all of this, a "huge coping mechanism" as someone has said before.
I would be lying if I said that this way of thinking has only happened once-in-a-lifetime. It has happened several times and I'm sure it will keep happening, there's no way out of this but I can still hope to get better in the future. Meanwhile, I will keep discovering more and more about ourselves, keep researching and trying to figure out a way to get help on this as well.
A lot of the help about systemhood and plurality has actually been from system friends, they giving their own points of view and experiences. Thanks to one of them I started questioning the "median" label, thinking that maybe I'm actually not median since the definition keeps wearing off as day passes, researching again about it and realizing that it doesn't fit anymore; don't get me wrong, I am a system, just not a median system.
And that's when I realized that this is something that can and will happened as day pass, old labels will no longer fit as much as we progress and discover more about ourselves, symptoms showing differently from how they were months ago, some being more prominent or happening less recurrently, fronts and switches happening out of the blue, etc.
All of these experiences doesn't make us less of a system, and we all need to understand that. We're us, even if a lot of us are introjected we're still us, and nothing is going to change that ever.
except maybe therapy, but we ignore that part since we're broke
Hello, Berry here. So remeber what Boo explained last post? Scratch that, it canceled itself out, somehow. The brain is weird.
Let me tell you what happened; Wil is back, he appeared once again with full force on the parking lot of a supermarket. This isn't a joke.
The guy didn't know how to take it as well, he was surprised while the time he was fronting and then I was surprised the time I fronted.
I talked about this with a friend system we have and they said that it was maybe "blurred consciousness", hence the name of this log, that ur happened maybe because I was the one handling a situation we had the better, maybe healthier than Wil, so that's why the brain decided to pull a joke on me and blur us. For the sake of coping apparently.
What I can say about him after coming back is that, the emotions he had before all of this were all already processed. He came back kind of "healthier", more confident in himself, more down to earth. Like the fact that I handled it while blurred with him helped him a whole lot.
He even helped the alter that kind of came from the situation we had, which, in theory, affirms the fact that he can confront the people around that, that he can handle this in a good way. Which honestly I think it seems like a lot of growth to me. I'm glad for him.
I just hope that the brain doesn't do that thing again because jfc did I fucking get very mad when it happened like, oh boy.
So anyways, that's that.
Also, as a foot note; when Wil blurred with me, all of our dreams dissappeared. I had no dreams whatsoever, or at lest, the dreams weren't strong enough I had absolutely no recollection of them when I woke up. When he came back though, all of our dreams came back, very vivid ones as well. I believe there's a strong connection between the two or something.
Hi guys, Boo here, I'm the newest member of the system, and I came to tell you about our experience about fusion, because it happened, like 3 weeks ago, and our host didn't talked about it, because he didn't know how to take it, so I'm explaining it.
Why am I even talking about it if our host didn't take it very well? Well, it's because if this blog is about our documentation then at least someone has to talk about it, also, he is already getting used to it, so he's fine, don't worry.
Okay so, let's start by saying, Wilbur(the guy from previous log) and Berry (our host) fused on the night of December 5th, and it was confirmed on December 6th, at first Berry felt normal, felt like usual, then they tried to call Wilbur and front trigger him, no success, the guy was nowhere to be found internally, and so Berry had some feelings and would pay attention to some behavioral details that matched Wilbur's, such as the way of thinking, habit of poetry, etc.
The way that this is different from the overlapping identities or personalities is that, when this is done, there's no easy way to go back, also this feels like only one person, while on the other there's still a hint of there being 2 people, as well as the fact that now the perspective on some memories made by one of them, goes to the other person involved in the fusion, and now sees those memories as their own.
To some systems, this is the death of an alter, our host is not the exception. He took the fusion of Wilbur as his death, mourned him and notified close people. To me personally, fusion is just a sign of healing, it's not the death of nobody, is the unification of two people that is going through a healing process. Wilbur is not dead to me, he is just going by another names, looks and pronouns that matches the host's.
Anyways, yeah, that's it, thanks for coming to my TED talk, it's 3 am and I am posting this now because I have insomnia when I front. I'm not talking about that now. Goodnight. Happy new year.
Hello! This is Wilbur speaking, I'll be the one presenting this post for today since I am basically the reason why it happened 😅.
So, picture you're having a dream, a normal one (...if dreams were actually normal), you're just going around and then you're not yourself anymore, someone came to front and took over without even noticing. Well, this happened to us.
The events that happen in our dreams tend to reference on whatever happened in our life, so me starting to dream about texting my boyfriend and the enviroment changing to known places was something that I did, before Berry took over because of a front triggers of theirs happened.
We asked after waking up to another system "Hey, have this happened to you?" and they said "yes, it has, a couple of times", so we ran that conclution that we have not gone insane, it would've been worse if they said "No" considering the fact that I fell asleep fronting and then Berry woke up fronting next morning.
So that was something.
It is weird.
The real question here though, is that if this is one of the reasons why our sleeping pattern changed so drastically ever since. But, only a person can assume, the real answer is something that only the universe might have.
This is one of the most common phenomenons I've heard ever since I started my research on the median system due to me experiencing it (yes, we do research before evaluation). A lot of pages and sources have been telling their experiences about this and I am no stranger to this either.
Before explaining i just want to emphasize that this is my personal experience, this can be different for every other system out there and it's fine, everyone experiences stuff differently.
In our case, the identity overlap is not a daily occurrence but is still very common, so common in fact we had to make a new proxy on Pk bot because of this. Taking an example for this, Wil has been lately one of the most common one to overlap with me. A list of characteristic to this phenomenon goes like this:
These are a few of the changes I can think of off the top of my head that we’ve noticed when this happens.
Ok so, first of, yes the name is literally stolen from a D&D spell. In our defense, this is one of the only ways we could kind of explain this experience.
So, this happened to us once like 2 or 3 weeks ago. My mood was not very good at the moment and one of my facets (Wil) seemed to be in the same page. So we started talking and talking, analyzing our situation until we just, hugged. This is the center of this log.
This hug, that apparently lasted like 24 to 48 hrs, is something that I would describe as a phantom sensation. I am not unfamiliar with phantom limbs, I get the sensation of them every once in a while, I would describe this experience as something similar to this phenomenon, except we are not talking about libms, we are talking about a full on precense, the precense of one of my facets.
As for the visual parts, of course I couldn't physically see him, but I did envisioned him beside me. What this envisioning seem to do though is that it would pull me out of my surroundings a little bit and make me focus more on how he looked, how was he beside, details to then "see" him as part of my surroundings too.
I wanna add, I did ask around some close friends about this, if this is something that should be considered kind of weird because, in some way, I am technically hugging myself mentally since this is one of my facets. They said that it isn't at all and that this could be considered as "headmate support". Which, honestly, sure.
Also, Wil was seemed to be pretty tired after this so he just went back inside the 2nd night. I didn't heard from him for approximately 3 to 4 days after that.
This is a state/phenomenon that has happened to me so many times in daily life, the strength is variable and inmensurable. Figured I could explain a bit about it and figure out if this isn't that rare and or could be linked to the whole median situation.
«Where in situations where identity isnt involved or is ignored and, therefore, forgotten about. Tends to happen when we are hyperfixiated on something (ex. a proyect that requires our full focus and attention), on something that doesn't necessarily require that much attention (ex. Washing dishes, folding clothes, repetitive stuff that is now a habit) or when we are too focued on uninteractive binging (ex. watching series / youtube videos, mindlessly scrolling, etc.)
In this phenomenon there is absolutely no thinking, the body's defence mechanisms/instincts seem to still function completely as to protect from posible threats as well as it bring a state of semi, if not, non verbal. In the case of semi-nonverbal, the voice seem to be too weak and or too low.
Then, again, this could easily be a common occurrence for other mental neurodivergence such as autism.
The way that we are "brought back to reality" (grounded) is by sensorial external input (ex. Getting called, something else catching our attention, loud noise, touch, etc.).
As much as these descriptors are very alike with dissociation our experience and feel about it indicates that this is way softer or weaker than it.»