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Trauma in Multi Identity
Trauma in Multi Identity
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000
Summary: "Agony! Far more PAINFUL than yours!" --"Agony," Into the Woods
Notes: This essay won the Patreon poll this month and was requested by a good few folks. The footnotes in this essay are explanation of terminology and history; you readers who know it already can skip them.
Despite being generally looked down on by singlet culture, plurals have nonetheless created an internal pecking order so as to feel superior to each other. Different places have different hierarchies, with different groups at different points on the ladder, but the pecking order itself seems to be universal, and mostly incomprehensible and ridiculous to outside observers. It’s like the geek hierarchy, only even more pointless.
For as long as I’ve been on the plural Internet, there have been divisions between plurals who associate their plurality with trauma and/or medicalization, and those who don’t. (Footnote 1). But in 2014, the divisions started becoming more intense, more heated, with a tone of moral outrage I hadn’t seen before. I started seeing the sentiment that trauma-based multiples were the only multiples allowed to call themselves multiple or plural—indeed, they were the only plurals allowed to exist. These folks called themselves “traumagenic,” while everyone else was lumped into the category “endogenic,” which is a false binary, one the term “endogenic” was created specifically to avoid (Footnote 2).
In this false binary, which as far as I can tell did not exist until 2014, traumagenics are an oppressed disabled group, and endogenics are their oppressors, stealing their words, their culture, their way of being. Under this philosophy, there can be no overarching plural community, because the two camps are morally opposed.
And that’s bullshit.
I have written before about the twenty-plus years of non-trauma multis existing in plural communities online (2017), so I won’t revisit that. Since writing that post, I have since found even earlier record of multiples who claimed to have no trauma in their backgrounds, being considered multiple and being mentioned in multi newsletters (Many Voices Press, 1992 June). So for about as long as I have records of traumatized multi community, non-trauma multis have been a part of it! (And that’s still ignoring centuries of record of religious or cultural plurality, before the modern medical association of trauma.)
Plural pissing contests are nothing new. But I feel that “the genic wars” is unusually nasty, because it is the first of the plural pissing contests that I’ve seen which reframes identity as moral imperative. Instead of non-trauma multis being stupid, silly, or lying, they become culturally appropriating, ableist oppressors. Which is perverse, because many of the claims traumagenics make about endogenics are, in fact, deeply ableist themselves! And unlike the other pissing contests I’ve seen come and go, this one is starting to show in my offline life, not just online.
So let’s talk about why people are so gosh darn mad that a plural might say, “I wasn’t made by trauma,” to the point that they compare it to slave-holding (Entropy System, 2018) and yet aren’t considered the lunatic fringe.
You’re a Filthy Endo, Aren’t You?
At this time, folks usually start expecting to me to state my plural demographic. Am I traumagenic, or am I endogenic? Where do I fall in the battle?
And that’s part of the problem. We plurals are expected to cough up what might be considered intimate information on command, to anyone who asks. Even though asking, “are you traumagenic?” is actually a host of questions:
• What kind of trauma have you undergone?
• Can you remember it clearly enough to be sure about it?
• Do you have access to regular, competent healthcare that agrees with you?
• Have you been diagnosed? With what? When? By who?
• Are you willing to tell me exactly what it is, so I can judge whether it “counts?”
• Is it part of your identity?
• Are you willing to answer these possibly invasive questions from random strangers?
I have known plurals who have refused to answer the question. They get tarred as endogenic (and thus ableist), regardless of their actual experiences.
It’s probably obvious that I don’t approve of being picked at like this. Disabled people are often expected to have no boundaries or privacy when it comes to our health, as though our condition is public property. We should have a right to say, “that is none of your business,” and that someone might claim that doing so is ableist (Footnote 3), and oppressing the person badgering us, is a mind-twisting pretzel of nonsense. It’s not ableist; it’s basic privacy, which all people should have!
Besides, I joined the community before these categories existed. Asking me if I’m traumagenic is like asking Caveman Og if he’s Catholic or Protestant. It betrays a certain ignorance of history, not to mention a stark political motivation. I have announced some of my trauma history publicly, but I think the “traumagenic” label is fundamentally flawed, and I don’t use it for myself for many reasons. Let’s go into them!
Ableism and Medical Authority
In the previous section, I mentioned how some traumagenic multiples paint basic privacy as ableism. This is a problem I’ve seen a lot—taking ableist arguments (“disabled people have no right to privacy”) and dressing them in the clothes of the opposite (“by not publicly stating trauma, you must have no trauma, and thus be trying to sneak into my clubhouse and steal my culture, and you are oppressing me”). It is a convoluted little piece of anti-logic, hard to explain and refute. But let’s try.
First, let’s take a step back and talk about what ableism and disability activism are. The basic principles of disability activism are: disabled people should have the same rights as anyone else to engage in public life, have our needs taken care of, and pursue our happiness. We should be able to trust that those taking care of us won’t abuse or murder us, and if we are murdered, we should be able to trust that this would be treated as a crime, and not a mercy. We should have our skills, languages, and abilities recognized, and be treated as the authorities of our own experience.
Even these basics seem like too much to a lot of people—some people might be honestly shocked or horrified that I, a crazy person, might say, “I am the authority on my condition, not my doctor.” But I am. My healthcare team each has their own specialties—they know things about medication that I don’t, for instance, or certain forms of therapy that may have helped people like me in the past. But when it comes to my personal experience, nobody can replace me. A doctor can not, must not, replace self-knowledge. When folks act as though I should defer to a doctor in all my dealings with the world, I consider that a deeply ableist argument. It is saying that I don’t even have the right to name my own experience; I must look to a doctor to hand it down to me.
This isn’t just unfair to me; it’s also unfair to the doctor. Doctors are human beings like the rest of us. They can be wrong. They can be ignorant. They can be malicious. Treating them like gods is at best setting them up for an inevitable fall; at worst, it allows heinous overreaches of power and cruelty.
Plenty of people put doctors on pedestals, but medicalized multiples in particular have a culture of overly deferring to their healthcare team: never making a move without asking the doc’s opinion, treating therapists as their parent replacements, relying on their shrinks for things they should really learn to do themselves, such as taking care of their internal children. When I went to IGDID (a trauma and dissociation conference) in 2015, I saw therapists taking their dissociative patients to the con and talking about them in panels, never making it clear whether said patients consented. I met multiples who had been in care for decades, never improving, never seeming to learn any skills, but still absolutely enamored of their brilliant therapist (who they apparently couldn’t function without). These weren’t children either; these were people old enough to be my parents or grandparents!
Traumagenic multiples have the same problem with this culture as any other medicalized multi subgroup. But they are the first I’ve seen who claim that not mindlessly deferring to medical authority is ableist. The argument seems to go, “doctors have said that multiplicity can only be caused by trauma, and the doctors must be right. So if a multiple claims not to have been formed by trauma, they must be lying and are ‘appropriating’ multiplicity, which is ableist.” Even though that very argument undercuts everything disability activism stands for—namely, that disabled people get to be the experts on their own experience! And even though plurals have noticed the way doctors sweep non-trauma-based multiples under the rug as irrelevant statistical outliers (Collective Solipsism, 2015). (And the whole “appropriating” argument will get its own section.)
Another part of the argument, though I don’t think it’s consciously thought out, is that traumagenic multiples are “more disabled” and thus “more oppressed,” and thus less ableist. But none of this is true. I know plurals who are disabled for many reasons—it has little to do with whether they see themselves as traumagenic or not. I have never seen a highly ableist singlet go, “oh wait, you’re endogenic? That’s fine, you’re one of the good ones.” And level of disability has nothing to do with how big an ableist jerk someone can be; I’ve known disabled traumagenic plurals who were total ableist dirtbags.
The fact is, oppression can’t be solved through avoidance. Surrounding yourself with women won’t free you from misogyny, avoiding all white people won’t provide an escape from racism, and being only around traumagenic plurals won’t solve ableism. The only way to actually overcome these problems is through active engagement, awareness, and change. And I have seen no indication that traumagenic multiples, actually want to do those things, despite all their blathering about ableism.
So what is all that talk about ableism for?
Suffering as Identity
Before traumagenic came into use, multiples sometimes referred to themselves as “trauma-based.” The term was a general adjective used in mixed multi company, just used to describe yourself like “blond” or “left-handed.” There weren’t groups for it; medicalized multi groups instead tended to identify themselves with specific diagnoses (MPD, DID), or maybe “trauma and dissociation.”
But traumagenic is not treated as descriptor, as far as I’ve seen. It’s an identity, and as far as I can tell, it’s mostly based around medicalization, trauma, and suffering. I’ve already talked about the medicalization part, but I think suffering is a very dangerous hook to hang an identity on! Because then I have to ask…
• How much do I have to suffer to belong?
• What if I ever stop suffering?
• What’s the hierarchy of suffering? (Because oh, there’ll be one.)
These are ugly questions that I’m somehow expected to ignore, as though I haven’t spent years watching traumatized plurals gouge at each other’s wounds to make sure they’re serious enough to count.
And since traumagenic is falsely equated with “disabled” and “oppressed,” it begs the question, what happens if we stop being disabled or oppressed? What happens if we achieve all our most utopian dreams? That should be cause for jubilation, not existential crisis!
At least the survivor communities, for all their problems, are ostensibly about hoping for healing and recovery someday: folks might be traumatized now, but one day maybe they won’t be. The traumagenic identity, though, reframes the focus from “this is where I am for the moment,” to “this created me.” That is a static, unchanging identity. A creation can not be undone.
It’s one thing to show a respect for our origins, to accept their role in our lives. But I don’t want to have my identity forever framed as a horrific conception story. And I certainly don’t want my community and sense of self to hinge on my suffering, because that means I am incentivized to suffer. If the whole point of disability activism is to make disabled lives better, I sure as hell ain’t picking an identity that encourages the reverse!
Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe I’m taking it all way too seriously. But I’ve been in many different kinds of plural communities, online and off, for over a decade. I’ve read a lot of plural books and old archives of plural websites, newsletters, and mailing lists. And every trauma-based community I’ve been in, or researched, has had the problem of equating suffering as identity, even if they didn’t codify it like traumagenics have. I also know enough about myself to know that I can very easily slide down the path of mistaking my suffering for something noble, as though it’s money saved in some karmic bank account. It is too tempting, and leads to terrible things in myself—passivity, a perverse masochistic pride in said passivity, and surrounding myself with people who feel and act the same way. It also leads to a constant anxiety over whether my trauma is “bad enough,” a fixation on the gruesome details, rather than putting them in context, learning from them, and dealing with them.
I want my identity and community to be founded on more than pain or oppression. I want to build on the good things my plurality brings me—my friends, my partners, my inner family, my art. Those, I hope, will prove to be a more solid, long-lived foundation than suffering.
Plural Cultural Appropriation… and Culture?
As you may have noticed, a core part of the genic pissing contest is the accusation that endogenic plurals are “appropriating” multiplicity. But what does that even mean? “Cultural appropriation” is a term coming from critical race theory; it’s based on oppressed cultures having their most sacred symbols ripped away and used by their oppressors as kitsch, sports mascots, and justification of their extermination. But a diagnosis, obviously, is not a culture. A culture is organically created by the people in it; a diagnosis is enforced upon patients by those with medical authority over them. At best case, a diagnosis describes a disease, and when’s the last time you saw anyone “appropriating” syphilis? It’s nonsense.
So if traumagenic folks are claiming that to be plural is to be traumagenic, and that we have a culture that is being appropriated… well, what is it, then? What are our powwows, our languages, our foods, our cherished rites and rituals?
Culture is more than oppression. To say otherwise is downright offensive to any culture that exists. Jews have holidays, holy texts, bar mitzvahs, millennia of history. Deaf folks have schools and languages. Queer folks have Pride, coming out, a history of queer-owned businesses, and publishers. Hell, even furries have a history of community-owned cons, websites, and a thriving art economy! So what do plurals have?
When I think of my own plural touchstone experiences, and ones others have related to me, I think of things like becoming selves-aware, coming out, talking to other plurals online and off, creating a household with other plurals specifically for the purpose, even when it turned out poorly. And this isn’t including internal, in-system events—commemorating deaths, births/creations, marriages, or memory work touchstones. The vast majority of those experiences have nothing to do with being traumagenic or endogenic.
There are some medical experiences I and a lot of my plural friends have shared. But they aren’t (and shouldn’t be) the sum total of plural experience! And frankly, I’d rather focus my experience of plural culture (if it exists) on community with other plurals, not medical interactions with my healthcare team.
In my old 2017 history of non-trauma multis in the community, I wrote that plurals aren’t a culture, but I find myself rethinking that lately. Reading through the Many Voices newsletter, I was struck by the sense of plural community I saw there. Merchandise by and for multis, households created by and for multis, support groups by and for multis, a sense of community and unified purpose. Is that culture? I’m not sure, but if it isn’t, I think it could be, especially if we keep building our communities and culture together, instead of waiting around and acting like doctors can just hand them to us. They can’t. We have to do the work ourselves.
Because we are in this together. At the end of the day, 4chan doesn’t care what plural camp we’re in. Neither do doctors, or the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, or random folks on the street. To them, we’re all just crazy, and all our back-biting and in-fighting won’t do jack when things get bad.
Footnotes
Footnote 1: “Plural” is an umbrella term covering a large spectrum of people who experience multiplicity and multiplish phenomenae. It is equally applicable to a people like ourself, a person with imaginary friends, someone whose religion includes trance possession by their spirit guide, and someone who is only sometimes multiple and reverts to singlethood at other times. Many people may not USE that term, but it’s out there!
Footnote 2: Explaining the full twisted history of the social pressures that spawned “endogenic” is beyond the scope of this essay; for more details, see the Lunastus Collective, 2014; and Lee, 2019.
Footnote 3: “Ableism” is institutionalized oppression of disabled people.
Citations
Collective Solipsism [solipsistful]. (2015). We started reading The Osiris Complex [tumblr post]. Retrieved from https://solipsistful.tumblr.com/post/127108361130
Entropy System [theentropywe]. (2018). do you support endogenic systems? [tumblr post]. Retrieved 2019/03/14 from https://theentropywe.tumblr.com/post/173859245866/do-you-support-endogenic-systems
Lee, LB. (2017). A Brief History of the Use of “System” in Non-DID Space [blog post]. Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/881645.html
Lee, LB. (2019). The Creation of the Term “Endogenic” [blog post]. Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1006431.html
Lore Sj berg. (2002). The Geek Hierarchy [chart]. Retrieved from http://toogeekyforyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/geek-hierarchy.bmp
the Lunastus Collective [not-your-fucking-pet]. (2014). Long ramble on terminology creation [tumblr post]. Retrieved from https://not-your-fucking-pet.tumblr.com/post/94222698873/long-ramble-on-terminology-creation
Many Voices Press. (1992 June). Many Voices: Words Of Hope For People With MPD or a Dissociative Disorder, Vol. IV, No. 3 [newsletter]. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1992_06.pdf
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000
Summary: "Agony! Far more PAINFUL than yours!" --"Agony," Into the Woods
Notes: This essay won the Patreon poll this month and was requested by a good few folks. The footnotes in this essay are explanation of terminology and history; you readers who know it already can skip them.
Despite being generally looked down on by singlet culture, plurals have nonetheless created an internal pecking order so as to feel superior to each other. Different places have different hierarchies, with different groups at different points on the ladder, but the pecking order itself seems to be universal, and mostly incomprehensible and ridiculous to outside observers. It’s like the geek hierarchy, only even more pointless.
For as long as I’ve been on the plural Internet, there have been divisions between plurals who associate their plurality with trauma and/or medicalization, and those who don’t. (Footnote 1). But in 2014, the divisions started becoming more intense, more heated, with a tone of moral outrage I hadn’t seen before. I started seeing the sentiment that trauma-based multiples were the only multiples allowed to call themselves multiple or plural—indeed, they were the only plurals allowed to exist. These folks called themselves “traumagenic,” while everyone else was lumped into the category “endogenic,” which is a false binary, one the term “endogenic” was created specifically to avoid (Footnote 2).
In this false binary, which as far as I can tell did not exist until 2014, traumagenics are an oppressed disabled group, and endogenics are their oppressors, stealing their words, their culture, their way of being. Under this philosophy, there can be no overarching plural community, because the two camps are morally opposed.
And that’s bullshit.
I have written before about the twenty-plus years of non-trauma multis existing in plural communities online (2017), so I won’t revisit that. Since writing that post, I have since found even earlier record of multiples who claimed to have no trauma in their backgrounds, being considered multiple and being mentioned in multi newsletters (Many Voices Press, 1992 June). So for about as long as I have records of traumatized multi community, non-trauma multis have been a part of it! (And that’s still ignoring centuries of record of religious or cultural plurality, before the modern medical association of trauma.)
Plural pissing contests are nothing new. But I feel that “the genic wars” is unusually nasty, because it is the first of the plural pissing contests that I’ve seen which reframes identity as moral imperative. Instead of non-trauma multis being stupid, silly, or lying, they become culturally appropriating, ableist oppressors. Which is perverse, because many of the claims traumagenics make about endogenics are, in fact, deeply ableist themselves! And unlike the other pissing contests I’ve seen come and go, this one is starting to show in my offline life, not just online.
So let’s talk about why people are so gosh darn mad that a plural might say, “I wasn’t made by trauma,” to the point that they compare it to slave-holding (Entropy System, 2018) and yet aren’t considered the lunatic fringe.
You’re a Filthy Endo, Aren’t You?
At this time, folks usually start expecting to me to state my plural demographic. Am I traumagenic, or am I endogenic? Where do I fall in the battle?
And that’s part of the problem. We plurals are expected to cough up what might be considered intimate information on command, to anyone who asks. Even though asking, “are you traumagenic?” is actually a host of questions:
• What kind of trauma have you undergone?
• Can you remember it clearly enough to be sure about it?
• Do you have access to regular, competent healthcare that agrees with you?
• Have you been diagnosed? With what? When? By who?
• Are you willing to tell me exactly what it is, so I can judge whether it “counts?”
• Is it part of your identity?
• Are you willing to answer these possibly invasive questions from random strangers?
I have known plurals who have refused to answer the question. They get tarred as endogenic (and thus ableist), regardless of their actual experiences.
It’s probably obvious that I don’t approve of being picked at like this. Disabled people are often expected to have no boundaries or privacy when it comes to our health, as though our condition is public property. We should have a right to say, “that is none of your business,” and that someone might claim that doing so is ableist (Footnote 3), and oppressing the person badgering us, is a mind-twisting pretzel of nonsense. It’s not ableist; it’s basic privacy, which all people should have!
Besides, I joined the community before these categories existed. Asking me if I’m traumagenic is like asking Caveman Og if he’s Catholic or Protestant. It betrays a certain ignorance of history, not to mention a stark political motivation. I have announced some of my trauma history publicly, but I think the “traumagenic” label is fundamentally flawed, and I don’t use it for myself for many reasons. Let’s go into them!
Ableism and Medical Authority
In the previous section, I mentioned how some traumagenic multiples paint basic privacy as ableism. This is a problem I’ve seen a lot—taking ableist arguments (“disabled people have no right to privacy”) and dressing them in the clothes of the opposite (“by not publicly stating trauma, you must have no trauma, and thus be trying to sneak into my clubhouse and steal my culture, and you are oppressing me”). It is a convoluted little piece of anti-logic, hard to explain and refute. But let’s try.
First, let’s take a step back and talk about what ableism and disability activism are. The basic principles of disability activism are: disabled people should have the same rights as anyone else to engage in public life, have our needs taken care of, and pursue our happiness. We should be able to trust that those taking care of us won’t abuse or murder us, and if we are murdered, we should be able to trust that this would be treated as a crime, and not a mercy. We should have our skills, languages, and abilities recognized, and be treated as the authorities of our own experience.
Even these basics seem like too much to a lot of people—some people might be honestly shocked or horrified that I, a crazy person, might say, “I am the authority on my condition, not my doctor.” But I am. My healthcare team each has their own specialties—they know things about medication that I don’t, for instance, or certain forms of therapy that may have helped people like me in the past. But when it comes to my personal experience, nobody can replace me. A doctor can not, must not, replace self-knowledge. When folks act as though I should defer to a doctor in all my dealings with the world, I consider that a deeply ableist argument. It is saying that I don’t even have the right to name my own experience; I must look to a doctor to hand it down to me.
This isn’t just unfair to me; it’s also unfair to the doctor. Doctors are human beings like the rest of us. They can be wrong. They can be ignorant. They can be malicious. Treating them like gods is at best setting them up for an inevitable fall; at worst, it allows heinous overreaches of power and cruelty.
Plenty of people put doctors on pedestals, but medicalized multiples in particular have a culture of overly deferring to their healthcare team: never making a move without asking the doc’s opinion, treating therapists as their parent replacements, relying on their shrinks for things they should really learn to do themselves, such as taking care of their internal children. When I went to IGDID (a trauma and dissociation conference) in 2015, I saw therapists taking their dissociative patients to the con and talking about them in panels, never making it clear whether said patients consented. I met multiples who had been in care for decades, never improving, never seeming to learn any skills, but still absolutely enamored of their brilliant therapist (who they apparently couldn’t function without). These weren’t children either; these were people old enough to be my parents or grandparents!
Traumagenic multiples have the same problem with this culture as any other medicalized multi subgroup. But they are the first I’ve seen who claim that not mindlessly deferring to medical authority is ableist. The argument seems to go, “doctors have said that multiplicity can only be caused by trauma, and the doctors must be right. So if a multiple claims not to have been formed by trauma, they must be lying and are ‘appropriating’ multiplicity, which is ableist.” Even though that very argument undercuts everything disability activism stands for—namely, that disabled people get to be the experts on their own experience! And even though plurals have noticed the way doctors sweep non-trauma-based multiples under the rug as irrelevant statistical outliers (Collective Solipsism, 2015). (And the whole “appropriating” argument will get its own section.)
Another part of the argument, though I don’t think it’s consciously thought out, is that traumagenic multiples are “more disabled” and thus “more oppressed,” and thus less ableist. But none of this is true. I know plurals who are disabled for many reasons—it has little to do with whether they see themselves as traumagenic or not. I have never seen a highly ableist singlet go, “oh wait, you’re endogenic? That’s fine, you’re one of the good ones.” And level of disability has nothing to do with how big an ableist jerk someone can be; I’ve known disabled traumagenic plurals who were total ableist dirtbags.
The fact is, oppression can’t be solved through avoidance. Surrounding yourself with women won’t free you from misogyny, avoiding all white people won’t provide an escape from racism, and being only around traumagenic plurals won’t solve ableism. The only way to actually overcome these problems is through active engagement, awareness, and change. And I have seen no indication that traumagenic multiples, actually want to do those things, despite all their blathering about ableism.
So what is all that talk about ableism for?
Suffering as Identity
Before traumagenic came into use, multiples sometimes referred to themselves as “trauma-based.” The term was a general adjective used in mixed multi company, just used to describe yourself like “blond” or “left-handed.” There weren’t groups for it; medicalized multi groups instead tended to identify themselves with specific diagnoses (MPD, DID), or maybe “trauma and dissociation.”
But traumagenic is not treated as descriptor, as far as I’ve seen. It’s an identity, and as far as I can tell, it’s mostly based around medicalization, trauma, and suffering. I’ve already talked about the medicalization part, but I think suffering is a very dangerous hook to hang an identity on! Because then I have to ask…
• How much do I have to suffer to belong?
• What if I ever stop suffering?
• What’s the hierarchy of suffering? (Because oh, there’ll be one.)
These are ugly questions that I’m somehow expected to ignore, as though I haven’t spent years watching traumatized plurals gouge at each other’s wounds to make sure they’re serious enough to count.
And since traumagenic is falsely equated with “disabled” and “oppressed,” it begs the question, what happens if we stop being disabled or oppressed? What happens if we achieve all our most utopian dreams? That should be cause for jubilation, not existential crisis!
At least the survivor communities, for all their problems, are ostensibly about hoping for healing and recovery someday: folks might be traumatized now, but one day maybe they won’t be. The traumagenic identity, though, reframes the focus from “this is where I am for the moment,” to “this created me.” That is a static, unchanging identity. A creation can not be undone.
It’s one thing to show a respect for our origins, to accept their role in our lives. But I don’t want to have my identity forever framed as a horrific conception story. And I certainly don’t want my community and sense of self to hinge on my suffering, because that means I am incentivized to suffer. If the whole point of disability activism is to make disabled lives better, I sure as hell ain’t picking an identity that encourages the reverse!
Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe I’m taking it all way too seriously. But I’ve been in many different kinds of plural communities, online and off, for over a decade. I’ve read a lot of plural books and old archives of plural websites, newsletters, and mailing lists. And every trauma-based community I’ve been in, or researched, has had the problem of equating suffering as identity, even if they didn’t codify it like traumagenics have. I also know enough about myself to know that I can very easily slide down the path of mistaking my suffering for something noble, as though it’s money saved in some karmic bank account. It is too tempting, and leads to terrible things in myself—passivity, a perverse masochistic pride in said passivity, and surrounding myself with people who feel and act the same way. It also leads to a constant anxiety over whether my trauma is “bad enough,” a fixation on the gruesome details, rather than putting them in context, learning from them, and dealing with them.
I want my identity and community to be founded on more than pain or oppression. I want to build on the good things my plurality brings me—my friends, my partners, my inner family, my art. Those, I hope, will prove to be a more solid, long-lived foundation than suffering.
Plural Cultural Appropriation… and Culture?
As you may have noticed, a core part of the genic pissing contest is the accusation that endogenic plurals are “appropriating” multiplicity. But what does that even mean? “Cultural appropriation” is a term coming from critical race theory; it’s based on oppressed cultures having their most sacred symbols ripped away and used by their oppressors as kitsch, sports mascots, and justification of their extermination. But a diagnosis, obviously, is not a culture. A culture is organically created by the people in it; a diagnosis is enforced upon patients by those with medical authority over them. At best case, a diagnosis describes a disease, and when’s the last time you saw anyone “appropriating” syphilis? It’s nonsense.
So if traumagenic folks are claiming that to be plural is to be traumagenic, and that we have a culture that is being appropriated… well, what is it, then? What are our powwows, our languages, our foods, our cherished rites and rituals?
Culture is more than oppression. To say otherwise is downright offensive to any culture that exists. Jews have holidays, holy texts, bar mitzvahs, millennia of history. Deaf folks have schools and languages. Queer folks have Pride, coming out, a history of queer-owned businesses, and publishers. Hell, even furries have a history of community-owned cons, websites, and a thriving art economy! So what do plurals have?
When I think of my own plural touchstone experiences, and ones others have related to me, I think of things like becoming selves-aware, coming out, talking to other plurals online and off, creating a household with other plurals specifically for the purpose, even when it turned out poorly. And this isn’t including internal, in-system events—commemorating deaths, births/creations, marriages, or memory work touchstones. The vast majority of those experiences have nothing to do with being traumagenic or endogenic.
There are some medical experiences I and a lot of my plural friends have shared. But they aren’t (and shouldn’t be) the sum total of plural experience! And frankly, I’d rather focus my experience of plural culture (if it exists) on community with other plurals, not medical interactions with my healthcare team.
In my old 2017 history of non-trauma multis in the community, I wrote that plurals aren’t a culture, but I find myself rethinking that lately. Reading through the Many Voices newsletter, I was struck by the sense of plural community I saw there. Merchandise by and for multis, households created by and for multis, support groups by and for multis, a sense of community and unified purpose. Is that culture? I’m not sure, but if it isn’t, I think it could be, especially if we keep building our communities and culture together, instead of waiting around and acting like doctors can just hand them to us. They can’t. We have to do the work ourselves.
Because we are in this together. At the end of the day, 4chan doesn’t care what plural camp we’re in. Neither do doctors, or the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, or random folks on the street. To them, we’re all just crazy, and all our back-biting and in-fighting won’t do jack when things get bad.
Footnotes
Footnote 1: “Plural” is an umbrella term covering a large spectrum of people who experience multiplicity and multiplish phenomenae. It is equally applicable to a people like ourself, a person with imaginary friends, someone whose religion includes trance possession by their spirit guide, and someone who is only sometimes multiple and reverts to singlethood at other times. Many people may not USE that term, but it’s out there!
Footnote 2: Explaining the full twisted history of the social pressures that spawned “endogenic” is beyond the scope of this essay; for more details, see the Lunastus Collective, 2014; and Lee, 2019.
Footnote 3: “Ableism” is institutionalized oppression of disabled people.
Citations
Collective Solipsism [solipsistful]. (2015). We started reading The Osiris Complex [tumblr post]. Retrieved from https://solipsistful.tumblr.com/post/127108361130
Entropy System [theentropywe]. (2018). do you support endogenic systems? [tumblr post]. Retrieved 2019/03/14 from https://theentropywe.tumblr.com/post/173859245866/do-you-support-endogenic-systems
Lee, LB. (2017). A Brief History of the Use of “System” in Non-DID Space [blog post]. Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/881645.html
Lee, LB. (2019). The Creation of the Term “Endogenic” [blog post]. Retrieved from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1006431.html
Lore Sj berg. (2002). The Geek Hierarchy [chart]. Retrieved from http://toogeekyforyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/geek-hierarchy.bmp
the Lunastus Collective [not-your-fucking-pet]. (2014). Long ramble on terminology creation [tumblr post]. Retrieved from https://not-your-fucking-pet.tumblr.com/post/94222698873/long-ramble-on-terminology-creation
Many Voices Press. (1992 June). Many Voices: Words Of Hope For People With MPD or a Dissociative Disorder, Vol. IV, No. 3 [newsletter]. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1992_06.pdf
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I feel like calling it discourse dignifies it. Back in my day, we called it wank, and I think it's the better name: most people do it, but preferably in private or with consenting parties.
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(... Hm, deja vu. Did we make a comment like this recently?)
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Because there's no hate like self-hate turned outward.
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- Fuzzy
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You can guess how unimpressed I am by that.
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--Rogan
Thank you for the history lesson & resources
Re: Thank you for the history lesson & resources
Re: Thank you for the history lesson & resources
We're endogenic friendly and even the DSM acknowledges DID must be differentiated from widely accepted cultural and religious forms of plurality. Of which there's several non-white cultures, including ours, specifically.
Unfortunately, we've had white traumagenic systems be racist and/or engage in ongoing harassment campaigns towards non-white traumagenic systems who are endogenic friendly. While saying they're not racist, of course.
There's a deeply concerning trend of traumagenic systems mostly getting their "research" from Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr and a few mediocre websites with sparse and old citations. We have been asked to cite psych journals, which we do. However, in general, obviously non disordered Plurality isn't a research interest by medical authorities. Yet citing sociological research of our own culture which has established forms of spiritual plurality is deemed utterly invalid evidence.
Yet accusers don't need to cite anything themselves. Not one single recent psych journal.
The cherry on top is that they obviously haven't read their precious DSM either: It shows in the active harassment private messages, as well as public "calling out misinformation by [system name]" posts.
We chuckled at discourse / syscourse being called wank. It indeed seems like it.
We're actively seeking wider plural spaces, and generally plain fed up of discourse being shoved in our faces, when we do everything to avoid it.
YOU ARE RIGHT (edit: oh god this comment is so long I am so sorry)
Back when I made this essay, I wasn't confident enough to clock anything but the ableism of this argument, but now I feel absolutely solid in saying that it's also REALLY racist to force an American medical model upon (overwhelmingly colonized and oppressed) people who already have their own cultural framework for it, as though medical = superior! (Especially since by the time the MPD diagnosis was created, it was overwhelmingly applied to white women, if I'm remembering right. Other folks, especially black folks, would get tagged with schizophrenia instead. Kevin Young even calls this out in Bunk, though he comes to the opposite conclusion of me--he treats multiplicity as a racist hoax, IIRC, while I take the standpoint that no, there are plenty of nonwhite plurals, they just get erased or categorized differently.)
Like, I'm still regrettably ignorant about other cultural frameworks of plurality, and even I can recall without too much strain that Haiti, Uganda, India, Bali, Nigeria, and Cote d'Ivoire have traditions of that nature. (And those are just the ones I have the citations for onhand.)
Unfortunately, we've had white traumagenic systems be racist and/or engage in ongoing harassment campaigns towards non-white traumagenic systems who are endogenic friendly. While saying they're not racist, of course.
I am disgusted but not surprised. You're not the first I've heard that from. USA plurality has a massive racism problem, and I think an antiracist plurality would be a lot less shitty and suffocating for everyone.
There's a deeply concerning trend of traumagenic systems mostly getting their "research" from Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr and a few mediocre websites with sparse and old citations.
*screams into a pillow* Thank you for reminding me why we need to get
Yet citing sociological research of our own culture which has established forms of spiritual plurality is deemed utterly invalid evidence.
...I mean, if you have those citations onhand, I would love to further my education. That's exactly what I'm interested in reading right now, even though it might take me a while due to impairment. (I also welcome non-academic sources. Don't get me wrong, I do my best, but I often find academic language a real challenge. Any text sources you have with a solid timestamp is welcome.)
Insisting that American doctors/academics make the rules when American medicine and academia are still overwhelmingly racist is rigging the game so you are destined to lose! People like you are being forced to bear the burdens of others people's insecurities and viciousness, and the unfairness is infuriating.
Yet accusers don't need to cite anything themselves. Not one single recent psych journal.
Gee golly gosh and willikers! Whoever would've thought????
Admittedly, part of why I ended up making essays like this one was realizing that I am demographically "allowed" to do so (and oh, how I hate it). I've still had to barricade myself here on Dreamwidth, where clicking one ticky box can instantly kill any troll campaign in progress. Twitter or Discord or Tiktok would eat my sanity fast.
We're actively seeking wider plural spaces, and generally plain fed up of discourse being shoved in our faces, when we do everything to avoid it.
Well, you're welcome on my corner of Dreamwidth, for sure! This platform is aggressively pro-free-expression and anti-harassment, and I love it for that, even though it's old fashioned and not that mobile-friendly. I unfortunately can't recommend any online group in particular, since, uh. Haven't been a part of any much since like 2011. Though if you're in the Boston area, you're welcome to come to our offline multi meetup! We're hoping to have movie night next month.
Re: YOU ARE RIGHT (edit: oh god this comment is so long I am so sorry)
Hahaha, we're fine with long comments. We used to be on forums with BB code around year 2004, before social media became so pervasive and dominant. Dreamwidth reminds us of those days.
Re citations on spiritual plurality, we will have to dig through our bookmarks. Like you& said, sources tend to disappear + sociological research is difficult to find. For our culture, we don't think there mich rigorous academic research describing spirit possession because it's still an ongoing practice, although it's dying out due to Christianity. Why write formal papers on something that's still ongoing and very much relatively ordinary, you know?
There's definitely articles by outsiders observing the practices, and yeah sharing them = "not valid research" while racist sysmeds somehow don't need to provide citations of their claims eye roll They don't even know what the hell is "possession form DID" (which differs from non disordered plurality) in all those boring, "educational" posts regurgitating the same basic stuff from the same old sources.
There's definitely 2 psych studies, 1 showing spirit mediums meet criteria for psychiatric diagnoses, and 1 where it states they do not.
We're not college educated, so while we've read academic psych journals out of necessity, they are pretty hard to fully and deeply understand all the nuances of. We usually understand the basics.
We would love to check out that plurality archive! Collective forgetting is so common on the Internet. We've seen brief mentions of other cultures with non disordered plurality but don't know what cultures because understandably, BIPOC don't want to be specific.
Especially since by the time the MPD diagnosis was created, it was overwhelmingly applied to white women, if I'm remembering right. Other folks, especially black folks, would get tagged with schizophrenia instead.
Hell, the disparity in accurate diagnosis still definitely exists, especially for Black folks. If they aren't tagged as schizophrenic, they're tagged as Bipolar or Psychotic. And of course there are traumagenic systems with comorbid schizophrenia. Instagram has taught us and BIPOC systems we know to put lots of disclaimers, amd many simply stopped posting.
demographically "allowed" to do so (and oh, how I hate it). Aw, its using your privilege for good, same like how we use our East Asian privilege in Asia where we live.
Is the structural dissociation still being treated like gold? I haven't ventured out much in a while, I'm totally out of date I think it isn't super gold anymore but it's still around, definitely. Frankly we avoid discourse as much as possible, and don't like The Theory of Structural Dissociation, so we do a ton of pre-emptive blocking. It's wild how whyte traumagenic systems can switch from supposedly being anti-racist, to full on racist. I think Power To The Plurals (website we were told we shouldn't read) has an article about the huge flaws in it.
Re: YOU ARE RIGHT (edit: oh god this comment is so long I am so sorry)
Ugh, I'm with you. A lot of them are hell to read, and sometimes it's because the subject is very complicated, but often it's because they badly need a prose editor. I have a few sources that are just... ordinary people discussing their experiences and lives in plainspoken language, and they are the BEST. I love those, and I wish fewer people tried to sound like a bargain-bin academic and focused instead on clarity.
Collective forgetting is so common on the Internet.
IT IS. T_T It's so tragic, how quickly things get forgotten! I hoard multi files like a dragon, because I don't want them to be lost!
We've seen brief mentions of other cultures with non disordered plurality but don't know what cultures because understandably, BIPOC don't want to be specific. [...] Instagram has taught us and BIPOC systems we know to put lots of disclaimers, amd many simply stopped posting.
Yeah, who'd want that target on their back? Especially when the game is so rigged against you?
Aw, its using your privilege for good, same like how we use our East Asian privilege in Asia where we live.
*high-fives*
I think Power To The Plurals (website we were told we shouldn't read) has an article about the huge flaws in it.
Oh yeah, we did a plural history vid for them once. Haven't spent much time on their website or anything, since we're bad at watching videos and are way more of an artist, writer, and linkdumper than an activist.
Re: YOU ARE RIGHT (edit: oh god this comment is so long I am so sorry)
I have a few sources that are just... ordinary people discussing their experiences and lives in plainspoken language, and they are the BEST. I love those, and I wish fewer people tried to sound like a bargain-bin academic and focused instead on clarity.
Omg yes! We recently had to read legalese (we have some exposure to it but obviously aren't anywhere close to fluent) and it was a nightmare to understand and then explain to our fiancé who didn't have any exposure to it. It feels like jargon in some fields (not all, thankfully) is some kind of elitist test.
Yeah, who'd want that target on their back? Especially when the game is so rigged against you?
Exactly. We never see white systems on that social media platform publicly call out the racism though. Plus reporting is plain useless. One of the reasons we left Reddit too because a Vietnamese person with CPTSD mentioned their distaste for The Body Keeps the Score, and you& can predict what happened.
However we heard recently from someone that Entropy System lost a large following after their racist comments in that 2018 YouTube video.
IT IS. TT It's so tragic, how quickly things get forgotten! I hoard multi files like a dragon, because I don't want them to be lost!_
We're quite new to this for e-books, and we're really glad that we keep a backup on an old external hard disk, and 1 copy each on 2 cloud storage sites. Haven't figured out a good way to organise them though. It would be nice if we could tag a file with multiple keywords.
Oh yeah, we did a plural history vid for them once. Haven't spent much time on their website or anything, since we're bad at watching videos and are way more of an artist, writer, and linkdumper than an activist. We're bad at watching videos and listening to voice messages, and vastly prefer text. We don't consider ourselves activists either.
A professional with lived experience wrote this 2022 paper titled: The Online Community: DID and Plurality.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468749921000570
It's missing a lot of online plural history, if we read it right.
Re: YOU ARE RIGHT (edit: oh god this comment is so long I am so sorry)
That's awful about those folks on Reddit! Haven't read The Body Keeps the Score; everyone recommends it, but for some reason I felt maybe a little weird about it? Don't know why, it's not like I haven't read all sorts of boring or upsetting stuff. (I have that Reviving Witiko article right in front of me, and witiko are TERRIFYING.)
Entropy System can eat my ass for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I only looked them up enough to verify they were spouting racist, historically inaccurate nonsense, and I am mad people apparently take them seriously.
The organizing problem is real, friend. We have folders (memory wars, Ye Olde White Multis of Yore, spiritual, fiction-based...) and name the files "Author - Title (year)" but it's still ugly. ...we print out most of what we read, honestly. Easier to take notes in the margins, and impairment makes reading ebooks harder.
Same! We definitely prefer text too! Making that one video was enough for us to learn we never wanted to do so again, hahaha. Sourcing things in video is hard!
Re: YOU ARE RIGHT (edit: oh god this comment is so long I am so sorry)
Re: YOU ARE RIGHT (edit: oh god this comment is so long I am so sorry)