In Sys Qoute #1

I was holding the hand of a little in co-con as we were walking and it was genuinely so weird to go at my walking pace. Like yeah we’re in the same body but they’re small and can’t keep up :((

well i guess that's fine

shoutout to introjects who are so far from their source that they’re barely recognizable. you do not owe anyone “canon-like behavior”

decoration i found at a thrift store

[ID: a simple black decoration with white text that reads: If you see me talking to myself, just move along... We're having a team meeting. / end ID]

Update: I was continuing to think about it and someone from further back in headspace just hollered “I’m [character] because I call women WHORES” and while I’m quite sure he (? Idk who it was) was joking the delivery was hilarious

A server I’m on asked the question of which characters from a show everyone related to the most, and I was stumped before remembering that I’m not the only one in here and me an the lads relate to different ones 😭 suddenly all my crises over kinning wildly different characters makes sense

Reminder that if you have ios you can use focus to change the status of who’s fronting as well as link a wallpaper to that focus

(Will provide tutorial if needed)

-Anthony

Plural POV #66

I mean, who hasn't had a devil-adjacent headmate at some point?

I think a big part of the reason that I went from anti-endo to endo-safe was absolutely due to how starkly different the communities felt.

Anti-endo communities were hard to engage with. Sure, some of them would focus on their support for each other more than their hatred of endogenic systems. And that's great! However, when you are brought together by your dislike of a certain group, you can't help but feel the hate permiate into so much of it. It always happened eventually. Anti-endo communities had such a focus on systems who were "fake" that I couldn't help but worry I was one of them, no matter how much they told me it was "just endos" they were concerned about.

The endo community (at least the parts I've engaged with and were easy to find) were so kind and respected me as a system, no matter how I felt or my plurality presented. Simply knowing we could find joy in our plurality allowed us to strive for so much more than we had thought possible before.

As a traumagenic system, we've improved so much with our symptoms and communication as a result of the positivity and acceptance we recieved. When we joined communities where we could be authenticallly ourselves (no matter what), we came together and faced so much less conflict between each other. And the conficts we did have, we realized that we could solve them together rather than alone.

When you are constantly doubting if you are "actually a system", you start to push the others away, and that made our dissociation and amnesia so much worse. I understand being careful of self-misdiangnosis, it can put you on the wrong path for how you learn to manage your symptoms. At the same time, the sentiment I often heard from endogenic systems when I was struggling with doubt and denial was very simple: "So what if you're not a system?" In short, it was okay to be wrong.

And that was huge for me. I realized that, no matter if I was a system or not, the techniques I used to improve ourselves and communicate with one another beneficial to me. At the end of the day, even if I wasn't a system after all, the skills I had found we invaluble to my health and well-being. So when I fall into denial spirals, no matter what I think about myself, I now know that I don't need to deprive myself of what has helped me, even if it is a "system thing." I don't feel scared to use these skills anymore (even in denial spirals), beacuse the line between what systems and non-systems or singlets can/can't do suddenly wasn't a big deal or a battle of "who can do what."

Our plurality is no longer a burden or a scar to us. It is simply who we are. We've learned so much about each other and ourselves since we've been accepted in full, and since we've learned to accept others. Endogenic communities have helped us (a traumagenic system) probably more than they'll ever know, and we're forever grateful for that.

So thank you, endogenic systems.

I've been thinking about trauma and what may qualify, and I'm starting to realize that raising animals probably did contribute to the trauma we have.

(tw explicit animal death/killing, general gross/gore warning)

I remember watching a family friend crack open eggs that hadn't incubated fully to hatching when I was five or younger, and she explained that it's just the way things are on a farm sometimes as I watched those soggy underdeveloped chicks lay still on the straw.

When I was older one of my goats had a stillborn kid - but it had been dead long enough to rot in the womb, and its corpse was literally falling apart as we pulled it out.

I raised a couple batches of turkeys that I loved so, so much, even though I knew we'd butcher them. I named them and carried them around and spent so much time with them they were incredibly docile. One turkey from the second batch I raised got injured - I think he broke his wing or something? - and the bigger tom that was with him was doing what turkeys do and trying to bully him to death. He was in so much pain, and while I agreed to help my parents butcher him for meat, I asked that one of them kill him because I hate killing animals. Unfortunately, mom decided to wait until later in the day when it would be more convenient to butcher him. When I found him suffering in his pen hours after I thought my parents had put him down, I got my sharpest knife and sobbed as I pinned him down and slit his throat.

I have so, so many stories like those that I am starting to acknowledge qualify as traumatic for a tenderhearted kid, but I feel like I shouldn't be traumatized by them. It's the way things are on a farm, after all. It's what happens. It's how life goes. So many of my animals died because I owned a bunch of animals for a long time and it's the way things go. Was I really not strong enough to handle it? Surely I should have been able to. Surely it's just the way things are, am I really so weak as to let those facts of the circle of life hurt me?

This is what life is. Why did it break me?

"Source trauma" and "exo trauma" is real btw.

You can have trauma from something that didn't actually happen because trauma is a reaction to a distressing event, regardless of the actual event happened. Both are comparable to real trauma, so for the love of god stop acting like introjects can't be traumatized from source.

Fictional introjects can be IN their source, they can come from their source. They are no different from other alters.

They can have real experiences as being that character because they're can be that character and if they genuinely believe they do/are, that's not a bad thing and whether source separation is needed, the alter will come to their own conclusion some day.