First Controversial Post In A While But People Need To Realize A Therapist Is Not Going To Challenge

Here’s my metaphor for systemhood that I tell my singlet friends.

Imagine you’re playing a first person video game. You have the controller, you control your character. It’s a normal first person game. You are an alter, the character is the body. This is fronting.

Other people live with you. Sometimes, they come into the room and sit and watch while you play. They sometimes try to guide you, give you advice on what to do next. They don’t always agree, and they can argue with each other. Other times they scream at you that you’re doing everything wrong and you suck at this game. This is co-consciousness.

Imagine how distracting it would be for people around you to tell you what to do, or to scream at each other or at you, even if they have good intentions. It wouldn’t be easy to focus on your game, would it?

Then sometimes, something happens in the game that prompts you to hand off the controller to someone else so they can play and you get a break. This is (some types of) switching. This can be good.

Other times, someone rips the controller out of your hand or fights you for it. This is (other types of) switching. And sometimes, six other players hook up their controllers, but there’s only one character to play as. So all of you have your controllers, but you’re all trying to play the same character. This is cofronting.

Imagine how difficult that would be. Imagine how hard it would be to try and play a game while someone is trying to take the controller from you, or while six other people are trying to play too.

There are also times that nobody is playing, or you can’t decide who should play. What’s happening to the character in the game? What are they doing if no one is playing? This is dissociation. The character is doing nothing. They’re stuck.

This is the best metaphor I have come up with for being a system. It’s something a lot of people get because they’ve played games before.

Everybody say a silent prayer for me as I smash the head of baby Jesus clean off this statue in the name of art.

first image inspired by you monster (affectionate) by @slow-clap-processors

original images below

So much more than "I feel like I'm someone else" , DID is so often "I feel like I'm in someone else's life". Like, this is not my house, these are not my clothes, that is not my cat, you are not my friends, but I've got to carry on anyway as though they're all mine and just hope that no-one notices that I'm walking in someone else's skin

the horrors persist but so do we (im making a barn what color horse do you want?

I love how there’s like 20 hitchhikers’ guide fans on here and we’re just tryin our best to keep the so called fandom alive (you could fit us into a minecraft village

Anat the Canaanite goddess of sexual love, war, and hunting. Progenitress of heroes, lady of Palestine.

Info on each sketch below:

Top right: Anat is shown here in a man's war kilt and her hair pulled up, a nod to the Anat statue head found in Gaza. This is after Baal Hadad's 'death', with her cheeks gouged by grief and face painted to resemble a man's beard. This beard imitation combined with her topless clothing and the horned headdress she wears is to evoke a sense of Baal having risen from the dead to claim revenge.

Bottom Right: An exploration of her musculature, with a focus on the markings on her hips and stomach. Drawn from female Canaanite fertility idols that show similar markings with a lot of emphasis on the navel/bellybutton.

Bottom Left: Anat at the feast of Baal's new palace. She wears expensive, imported Egyptian linens. Her hair is braided, eyelids darkened with kohl, and hands darkened with henna.

Center: Anat's fullbody with lots of influence from historical Palestinian dress. She is shown with a vulture because Aqhat, killed at her order, was eaten by vultures and because Anat is often shown with wing imagery.

When you're autistic, it's impossible to miss how much society normalizes child abuse.

I could dedicate my entire life to studying how to interact with people and I'd still never master the social skills that young children are expected to have on command.

Say the wrong thing? That's disrespectful and you're punished. And you don't even have to actually say anything wrong. Pretty much anything you say can be considered "giving lip" if your parent wants some excuse to punish you. But if you say nothing, then you get punished for ignoring. You also have to calculate your response to their mind game quickly because taking too long to respond is considered ignoring. Also, if you're being wrongly accused of something, saying nothing is considered a confession. And even if you somehow manage to say exactly what your parent wants in exactly the correct tone, they'll still punish you for "sarcasm" or "not really meaning it".

one of the most important things about dissociative identity disorder and generally being a system that i wish people would understand is that it truly isn’t as cut and dry as it may seem for member count.

you’ll see people who say they have “six alters” and then immediately assume it’s six fully fleshed out equal individuals with no confusion or fuzziness regarding identity. that’s simply not true in a majority of cases, as i have seen.

most systems still VERY much deal with confusion regarding potential splits, go through dissociative episodes where they’re unsure of who they are, sometimes feel no attachment towards any identities, feel like they might have split and then suddenly that person is gone, unsure if alters they haven’t heard from often have gone dormant, not sure how to react when alters do come out of dormancy, etc.

it’s not a fun feeling and it’s genuinely unfair in certain situations to force systems to list every single alter to you with full certainty, as if it will never change. because it will. for so many different reasons, systems will grow, they will shrink, they will fuse, they will develop. you can’t expect the person with the dissociative disorder and lack of core identity to be able to keep up a perfected list of forever, it’s simply impossible. you may have alters who stick with you, but that doesn’t mean changes won’t happen.

and systems who may be reading this — please don’t feel bad. you are not a hassle, you are not a headache, and you are not an inconvenience for simply coping with something like this. it’s out of your control and the only thing you can do is continue to cope to find ways to help yourself retrain from these reactions. please don’t allow yourself to be harmed by others who don’t understand what you are going through. there are people who will accept and love you for who you are, all of you.

past, present, and future.

I am very passionate about how Portal is a very feminist game. I see a lot of people say that Portal is progressive because it could’ve had a protagonist of interchangeable gender, and that Chell being a woman affects nothing. But it completely does! Chell being a woman is inherent to the plot and theming of the narrative! Portal is progressive because it depicts corporate exploitation of women and actively shows a woman perservering and overcoming that abuse!!!