Transcript: Episode 10
10. All About Alters
Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about Dissociative Identity Disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma and dissociation, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, where there is a button for donations and you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. You can also support us on Patreon for early access to updates and what’s unfolding for us. Simply search for Emma Sunshaw on Patreon. We appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are also super excited to announce the release of our new online community - a safe place for listeners to connect about the podcast. It feels like any other social media platform where you can share, respond, join groups, and even attend events with us, including the new monthly meetups that start this month. Go to our web page at www.systemspeak.org to join the community. We're excited to see you there.
[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
Hi, guys. I have good news and bad news. The good news is I get every day all by myself to do whatever I want, all day long. The bad news is The Husband is out of town for an entire week, which means somebody has to take care of the children in the mornings and the afternoons. Not gonna be me. This is the bonus of having DID, right? I mean, the kids are fun to hang out with and play, but I’m not doing homework. I’ve already been through that stage of my life, and I’m not doing chores. I’m not feeling that cooperative. So, someone’s in charge of that and we will just let her deal with it.
I will, however, pick up my own dishes from my own whatever, or clean up whatever mess I make myself. That is the agreement. That’s as far as I’m willing to go right now, but it is an agreement we’ve made with the T. And so that will be my therapy homework this week - is to clean up after myself. [Laughs] Because, you know, that’s the decent thing to do apparently. Not the fun thing to do, but the decent thing to do. But I’m not picking up after inside kids or outside kids. That is not my problem.
So, while we’re talking about what is my job and what is not my job, I want to talk to you about Alters. So let’s talk about the different kinds of Alters and I can share some of the things I’ve been learning. Some listeners asked us to do an introduction to our system and talk about the Alters we have. That’s probably just not going to happen, because actually, there’s not very many of us participating in this. There’s like a certain group of us that kind of need to do better cooperating and communicating, because we have to interact more with the external world, like The Husband and the kids, and functioning in different ways. And so I guess you could say hosting a bit is a word I learned. I don’t know if it entirely applies to us, but I’m playing with it and seeing what we understand about it.
So like, whoever has to be out front the most because of external things, kind of dealing with everyday life -- that’s kind of a hosting, you know, like you’re hosting -- I don’t know. What am I hosting? Hosting a party up in here. No, I’m hosting the body or hosting -- [Laughs] I don’t even know. I don’t know, because I don’t know. I just know that’s the word. Okay? So I’m learning about the word and that there are words for this.
So here’s what’s cool, I’m not going to tell you the science of it. The good doctor can do all of that, but what I can tell you is kind of how it works a little bit, and that I’m learning there are words for it. So, here’s what’s cool is that from people’s videos, or people sharing, or the books we’ve found, or whatever -- when we’re learning about DID, what’s cool is that these things we’re already dealing with, actually have words for them. So when I get to be the one doing whatever I want, and out front -- like the fronting is a thing -- like hosting is a thing -- there’s words for all of this. So, when it’s my turn out, like right now, then I’m fronting, because I get to be the one out front to do what I want with the body or talk how I want or whatever, and I get to pick what I want to do with my time. Right? Or like my time, the ever elusive slipping away time. I get to decide what I want to do, and so I’m out front because we are very good at changing nouns into verbs. It is called fronting.
And so fronting is a thing, but so is hosting, and I’m not entirely sure that always applies to whoever’s fronting, or it means like the primary person who deals with the most stuff. So, I’m not sure, because I definitely don’t want to have to actually deal with stuff. So if that’s part of hosting, then I don’t want to do it. But if it just means who’s fronting a lot, sometimes that’s me. So, I don’t know. We’re still learning and I will keep you up to date with what we learn.
When someone else comes out, then that’s called switching. So, when someone else is coming out -- so when someone else comes out, that’s called switching. Sometimes we know about it. Like lots of times, I know what is going on. Sometimes I can choose, like when the kids come home, I am out of here. If the kids go somewhere cool, I’m totally taking that over. If it’s movie night, I’m taking that over. [Laughs] If it’s just playing with the dollhouse, then the Little’s can do that, and I know the Little’s are going to do that, but I don’t want to do that. If someone’s like, “What are we having for dinner and where are the dishes so that we can eat?” -- I don’t care about that. That’s not my problem. So I’m not even aware that that is happening, partly because I choose not to be aware, I guess, so I have to figure that out. But also because it’s just not my thing.
Other things I don’t want to know. So, this may be a little off topic, on a tangent, but it also has to do with where we are inside -- so, some people with DID have these extensive things -- what’s the word? An internal world, where all of the Alters live or where different Alters live on the inside. Okay? So I’m just learning that that is a name for that and that they can do that. I know that there’s three groups of us that I know about. We call them circles. There’s three circles of us, and that’s really the best way I could describe it without drawing pictures that are probably not appropriate to share. So, I don’t think I would get away with sharing that. We talk about it in therapy sometimes.
But, I know that the people on the first circle do not know about circle three at all. And I’m on circle two, so I know about circle one and I know about circle three. But all the People in circle two still live in the house where we lived when we were little, which is not a cool place to be. And I know that circle three is at a different place, but I didn’t know that People could build their own worlds inside where you want to be, as opposed to where you grew up or something, or where bad things happened, or where you remember stuff.
So, I don’t know how that works. So I’m not talking about that. I know it sounds like I’m talking about it today [laughs], because I’m learning. I’m trying to process what is cool about that, because it seems like that would be amazing if you could really do that. But I don’t know how to do it yet. So that is literally all the information I have.
Anyway, so what I was trying to say is that we have different groups of us, but only some of us are doing the podcast, and it’s kind of for specific reasons. We are not going to be -- like, I just know, at least right now, because of some of the issues that we have that I can’t talk about right now, and because of some of our background -- this is not going to just be a parade of different people. That’s not the kind of podcast it is. Also, we totally failed Instagram, so our podcast is not going to be an Instagram kind of podcast. Some of the videos out there -- people are really cool about doing and there’s just lots of people participating in their system, and that’s amazing. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’m just saying it’s not us. We are very chill, very do not -- I guess we are -- maybe we just don’t feel that safe yet. So that’s cool other people do, and what they’re doing is super helpful. I’m not saying that they’re bad or they’re not real. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying it’s not our style. And also, we just can’t yet. We’re not there, in that place.
But, we do want to document what we’re learning -- some of us -- and we want to share -- I want to share the way people have helped me and hope that it helps other people. So, while -- what did she say it’s called? Self disclosure. So there’s some things that we’re totally cool about sharing personally, but the whole map or whatever, when you say everyone who is in your system and what they do -- that’s called mapping. So there’s another word - mapping. I just -- it’s not just going to come out on the podcast. I’m not going to talk about our map on the podcast very much, unless there’s a specific reason that someone wants to share something, or refer to something, like trying to explain internal worlds.
So, we have three circles. Not like you live on a circle, but it’s like groups -- I don’t know how to explain it. I really don’t. I do know circle two has an actual house, but that house is a house from the past. And some of the videos I’ve watched of other systems, the internal worlds they’ve created are kind of amazing, cool places. So, I don’t know how they got from what was in the past to creating their own space where they are safe and happy, but that sounds like a legit goal we need to work on, but I don’t know how to do that. So, I will share more about that as we learn how to do that.
But for today, talking about Alters, the few people that are participating in the podcast like we already talked about - like the Good Doctor, right; and then me, Sasha; and John, who kind of takes care of the Little’s. So there’s different kinds of people who do different sorts of things. And then there’s also Emma herself, who thinks -- so, here’s again, words I’m learning. So, Emma thinks that she’s the original, first person, but that’s not actually a thing, nor is it true about Emma. She doesn’t know that yet. We’re trying to teach her, and we’re trying to learn.
So, here’s what we learned about that -- is that there are some people who think -- there are some people who think there’s an original person who was born, and then that person is the one who broke into other pieces. And so the one who was born is the original, and then like somehow the special Part that belongs with the body, and everybody else needs to get healed back into that person, like squashed back in there somehow. That’s not a thing. And the best example I heard for that was from Kathy on the Discussing Dissociation blog, who’s a therapist with some information out there, and we’re actually going to be interviewing her coming up.
But anyway, one of the examples she gave on a different podcast -- which I will try to link to -- was about a chocolate bar. If you take a chocolate bar and you drop it, and the chocolate breaks into different pieces, which one is the chocolate? They’re all chocolate. They’re all a part of the chocolate bar. They’re all still chocolate. And so it’s the same thing. This is all us, but we’re not the same person. And so the other way to explain it -- more of a structural dissociation thing -- if that’s the right word, and I could totally be wrong -- but my understanding is that it’s more like everyone is kind of born not fully integrated, because that’s just how personality develops with everybody. But when you have trauma and neglect and hard things happening, then that development gets disrupted, kind of, and so there’s just not opportunity to integrate into one personality as you grow up. And so it just doesn’t happen, which is why it’s so hard to heal from it.
See, I don’t even know how to talk about this, because I don’t know the right words yet. I’m on such a learning-curve right now. But, the point is that there’s two pieces to DID. One is that the one personality never got to develop and so all those personalities are separate still as in the beginning, and it’s just going to be that way. And the other piece is dissociation itself -- learning how to do that and having it be such a habit, for lack of a better word -- there’s some of that you can get better at, like not just splitting into new people when something hard happens, but it also makes sense why that happens, because that’s what’s always happened and why we’ve always dealt with it that way. And so even though it’s not intentional, like we don’t necessarily want that to happen -- I mean, maybe somebody wants that to happen. Maybe I caused it because I don’t want to do dishes, so now there’s someone who only does dishes. I mean, that’s not true. I’m just using that as an example, right?
But at the same time -- at the same time, we don’t necessarily want more people, because it means I have to share more time, I have to fight to know what’s going on. So there’s a level of chaos that’s really hard to deal with. So it’s not like it’s a, “Oh, this makes me feel happy, so let me do more of this” so much as “For us as a system, this happening right now is too much, and so a new person gets assigned to do that thing.” Does that make sense?
So, when there’s different Alters, who do different things, then there’s different roles for it. So, there’s one kind of thing that’s called an ANP, which stands for the apparently normal part. Sometimes that’s the person who’s the host. Sometimes it’s someone who takes turns hosting. But what it means is that basically how we deal with the world and interact with others seems like normal. Most people in our lives don’t actually know that this is what’s going on or that DID is a problem for us. They know we’re kind of quirky. They know we’re pretty anxious. They know there’s some trauma background, but they don’t know that there’s a thousand of us inside. And again, not an actual number. I’m just using it as an expression.
So, that’s what an ANP is, or a host -- is like an apparently normal part. Or some people refer to Alters as Parts or Personalities. Those both seem kind of weird and awkward. There’s a lot of people -- culturally, for DID systems who know each other -- a lot of those people -- the whole culture in the community of plural people -- people with plurality -- how do you do that, because you don’t identify by them? Hmm? A lot of people in the community of plurality refer to Alters as Headmates. That’s still -- I’m not there yet, because I don’t want to share my head with anybody. So, I’m not there yet. We still just refer to them as the Others, which maybe is overly generic, but that’s just where we are.
But, we had one therapist who described DID like a waffle. So she’s like, “It’s not that there was a first one, and it’s not that you are the most important one, and everyone needs to help you. It’s that the body itself is like the outline of the waffle and all the others, including you, are one of the squares in the waffle. And so you’re not the waffle, you’re just one of the squares in it, but you are equal to all the other squares, and everyone is as important and everybody together makes up the waffle.”
Now this is helpful in some ways, but in other ways it’s pretty hilarious. The Husband never got it. He’s like, “The waffle doesn’t work. That is not an analogy that works.” But it at least explained to me that I was not more important than other people and to Emma that she was not the born -- like this didn’t happen to her. It happened to us, that she’s a part of all of us. That we are a we, together. So in that way it was helpful, but it was kind of funny.
So, the main person or the host, maybe would be there for consistency or safety or for presentation, for the outside world, I guess. But for us, it’s so divided up by jobs. The same person who takes care of the kids is the person who does the appointments with the kids and goes to the school for the kids and does IEP’s for the kids. I am not going to do an IEP. Yikes! Sometimes I cook my own stuff, but mostly for family meals that are supposed to be healthy or whatever, she does those things.
There are other things like I will be going on a date with The Husband. Nobody else gets my dates with The Husband. Although, John might steal my food if we go out to eat somewhere. So sometimes that happens.
But when we are talking about different types or different jobs, or different types of Alters, or different jobs for Alters, there can also be obviously the Little’s - so like little child Alters. These are often I think the kids -- like that’s just when bad stuff happened. Or they stopped growing because there was a split of somebody else who took over from there for whatever reason. I don’t think I can even go into that right now. But some of them are kids, like John, but there are even younger ones than him. They’re not all the same gender. So like, John’s a boy, obviously. It doesn’t even matter that the body is a girl. I don’t know how that works, but it doesn’t phase him, and he’s just a boy.
I also learned from the online community that when there are some who are mean or whatever, they’re often called persecutors. And so maybe they hurt the body or they do different things that make life harder or complicated in some ways. But what I’m learning is that they are also protectors and they still have a purpose and we still have to be nice to them. But that makes me mad, because -- not mad, mad, but it makes me crazy, because it’s what The Husband and the therapist always say and how I have to be nice to everybody - not fake nice, but everybody has a purpose, everybody is a part of the system, work together, la la la … .
Sometimes there may be non-human Alters, like an animal or some other kind of thing. But anytime there’s an Alter -- the reason that would happen if I think about that -- like in the movie, Forrest Gump -- she was like, “I wish I was a bird and I could fly far away” or whatever. That’s that example. It sounds crazy at first. “Oh, there’s a wild person” or there’s an oh, this or that, or what is that creature, or why is there an animal there, that’s not a thing. That doesn’t make sense. It actually does make sense when you get to the story of why that person is there, and what purpose that person serves for the system as a whole. Then it gets context and makes sense of why that could happen or how that could happen.
So, you have to be really careful about stereotyping, because persecutors can be protectors, and memory holders can be good. So like yeah, there are some memory holders who hold specific memories or specific things of specific memories that were all trauma-based, but there may also be memory holders who hold good memories or exist without the bad memories for some purpose.
So like we have a child Alter who plays all the time. That’s her thing. She plays, plays, plays, plays, plays. So that seems like a good thing and it seems like an innocent thing and it seems like a fun thing, but really what she’s doing or where that comes from -- this part I can say -- I don't want to get into it very much. But this I can say -- is like her job was to play at the door of the playroom so that she could see down the hall so that we would know when they were coming for us. So, even though it seems like, “Oh, she’s just playing. She’s just happy, and she’s only good” -- she still had a specific job. She still watches out for us now, even though she’s little, little, little, little, little. Okay, she’s four. I got permission to say that. Sorry. That took me a minute.
So, she’s four, and so even though she’s only four, she has a specific job. She really protected us in that way, and by focusing on the playing, she’d have to think about how bad everything else was. Right? So, does that make sense?
So she is a memory holder, but kind of just the good pieces. And I guess the therapeutic word is denial or whatever, but it’s not about -- it’s not just about denial about what happened, because that was really happening to someone else. It was more about protecting the system from knowing everything all at once. So, kind of a warning system and kind of a -- okay, I’m totally blowing my own mind right now, because I never, ever until this moment, while I was talking for this, thought of her as a protector. And so my brain has kind of exploded. [Laugh] I don’t even know how to like -- what is happening right now?
Okay, I think I just -- oh. I wish I were in therapy, except not, because that would be too hard. So see, I do the same thing. I like, “Ah, that’s not my job. I don’t want to. It’s too much. It’s too hard.” So one of the things we’re going to have to learn to do in therapy, as we learn to work with each other, is be able to tolerate some of that a little bit. Not that we have to take it over, and not that anybody disappears, but we’re going to have [laughs] to deal with some of those pieces, because right now, I literally cannot function with my brain holding that piece that I just figured out. I don’t know what to do with that. What does that mean? That’s crazy sauce.
But then the other thing is -- okay so, persecutors can be protectors. Memory holders can be good. But then also, fictives can be real. So, I just learned about the word for fictives. I knew that that was a thing, because actually a lot of our younger ones are from books, or based off of characters in books. We read a lot of books when we were little and so some of those characters are based off of books. And what I know now is that some of them -- not all of them -- really even though pieces were taken from that, because it was really the one of the only comforts we had -- also the mother was a librarian, and so we spent a lot of time in libraries. And so sometimes that was all we had. And so the stories from some of the books we read are pretty real and a pretty big deal to us.
So when I was first learning about fictives, I was like, “How can that be a thing? What does that even mean?” And, “How is that possible?” Except then everybody started raising their hand and I was like, “What?!” And so having to sort it out.
So for example -- this is totally neutral and not from our system, okay, totally neutral, not from our system -- if Superman is the only thing that is strong enough to save someone, then if they want a Superman, then if that becomes an inside part of their system, then that is a fictive. And it may or may not match everything from the story, but it makes sense, again, you just think that’s crazy. You do not have Superman inside you. Except that if that was the only hope that that child had or the only safe place that child had, then it totally makes sense, if that was the only comfort they had, then it totally makes sense of how it would become a part of them inside.
And so there are different degrees, with different systems of how much of a backstory, or how much of a -- how like same or different that person is from how you might know it in a book or story or whatever. But now I finally understand why that makes sense, and creepily enough, that it sometimes applies to us in some ways.
So that’s a thing too. The important thing is that all of the Alters are there for a reason, and all of the Alters are there for a purpose. So when you take something from the outside and bring it in, that’s called an introject. So it might be an abuser, who then becomes a persecutor, but maybe protects from the abuser. Because that’s a behavior. A child learns from the behavior given to them, right, so that’s why sometimes I’m busted for doing -- like sexually acting out or whatever. Because if this is what I’m only taught or only what is given me or all that I have to model, then that becomes a part of me or a part of a part of me or whatever.
And so an introject can be something scary like that, or it can be something super cool like a fictive or it could be some other form of comfort or some systems have fairies, for example, who can have a lot of magic or have a lot of good or have wings to escape or all kinds of whatever that perspective is for that system, right, so it makes sense.
We have a really specific example I want to share, but I feel like I don’t have permission to do that. It’s not my story and not the time. So maybe we can share that later. The point is that every Alter is there for a reason and every Alter has a purpose. And so you need to get to know them or get to know us, and not just about asking who am I talking to right now, but also figuring out what are we good for, what is it that we offer the system, and then internally the same thing. When there’s someone you don’t get along with as well, like the Good Doctor bores me to death and makes me crazy, but is actually doing a lot to help me understand this DID stuff we’re learning.
So, trying to work together, trying to be a little more co-conscious which -- trying to work together, trying to be a little more co-conscious, which means less amnesia between us. That means working together a little bit. It means talking more. It means knowing what’s happening when the other one’s there, sometimes even fronting at the same time. We can do that a -- some of us can do that more than others, obviously. And some can’t do that at all. So, it’s kind of a continuum. And also, at least for me, that fluctuates a little bit. I can’t always do this, but I can kind of do this part. Or sometimes I can only listen, but not see. Sometimes I just can feel it, but I can’t hear it or see it. Other times I’m like, “Woah, why are you participating right now? It’s my turn for a podcast.” Except that I just learned something and it was super helpful.
Therapeutically, the important piece, I guess, is number one, trying to work together so that your system as a whole is safe. That’s kind of the whole point of having Alters, and so it’s really important that we, as Alters, work together, to keep the system safe. And number two -- I already forgot what number two was. [Laughs] And then number two, being able to communicate enough to more effectively meet our needs. So, if someone needs time out front, or if someone needs to do a particular activity, or some job for the family, or for the body, or for their own interests, then I’m really good at saying, “Dude, stop working. We need to chill. We need to rest. We need to play. We need to go have some fun. We need to get out of the office.”
I can do that. And if she’s only just hearing me of like, “bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh” [laughs] -- which is probably what I sound like [laughs] -- then all she’s going to do is feel badly the whole time she’s working and not be able to function. But if she listens to me and we can go play, then I can get everybody settled down better, so that when she’s working, she can actually function better. So that’s really number three, is working together enough to sort of increase functioning so that we can do what we want to do, and meet our needs, and be more effective as a system.
And I’m sounding super intelligent right now, because she’s way too [laughs] close, and it’s kind of trippy. But that’s part of learning how to do it, right? And so that’s all I have to say about that, because it’s made me super fuzzy and foggy and the whole thing about the four year old being a protector has blown my mind, because I guess, in some way, it kind of makes us all protectors. Wait, what?! I can’t even. Oh, my brain is blowing up right now.
Okay so, this is an entirely different conversation, because that’s too much for me to go there right now. But that’s what we’re learning about - Alters and all different kinds of Alters and different jobs of Alters and how it all kind of works together. So again, there’s lots of videos out there and lots of articles to look up if you want to learn more about different kinds of Alters or different types of Alters. But the important thing is to be accepting and to be patient and to focus instead of on behaviors, to focus on what you can offer the interaction to make it more positive and to be respectful to learn what the purpose of that Alter is and what it is that they need, so we can more effectively meet the needs of a system, and feel better as a whole.
I’m sorry for intruding some on her podcast, but I feel like it was important to come full circle and I wanted to be sure that all of those points were included and also that we ended it well, focusing on safety and functioning and communication, as opposed to only how everyone is different. We can work together and improve ourselves as a system. Working together as a system will help us stay safe and improve our functioning and communicate with each other better, so that all of our needs get met and that we learn better how to do that more efficiently.
So, thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon. And join us for free in our new online community by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org. If there's anything we've learned in the last four years of this podcast, it's that connection brings healing. We look forward to connecting with you.