Body Hopping Headmates
Jul. 21st, 2019 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeThis is kinda an addendum to Your Princess is in Another Headspace. I kinda tried to discuss both topics together, and it was just too scattered and too much. So body hopping goes here, in much shorter form!
Body hopping headmates (also sometimes called intersystem travel, or system hopping) is pretty self-explanatory: it's when a headmate jumps from one system to another, be it temporarily ("I'm here to celebrate your birthday!"), permanently ("You people suck, I'm leaving!"), or as a regular trading back and forth. At its furthest extreme, we've encountered folks who claim that they're one system with multiple bodies. (We'll explain why that tends to be an especially bad idea further down.)
How Traveling Headmates Are Similar to Bookend Headmates
In most cases, they're the same "we're specially connected" claim, just in different wrappers: instead of "we're your loved ones in a different body," it's, "we're y'all in a different body!"
They seem to happen for the same reasons: people long for connection. Just instead of, "I miss my spouse from my other life," it's, "I wish there was someone who understood and saw me as I am." System travel can seem a quick and easy way to insure it--after all, you can't be mistaken for your vessel if you aren't in it!
But they have many of the same pitfalls:
Both claims also get more social leeway than they should sometimes within the community, because of the social more of respecting someone's individual identity, however odd it might be. However, like with the bookend headmate, a relationship is not an identity. When someone is claiming to be your loved one, your headmate, or YOU, that is something they don't get to say all on their own. You're a part of it. You get to say no!
However, also as in the case with the bookend headmate, often times the folks involved are coming from a place of good intentions. They might already be friends or partners, trust that they'd never lie about this sort of thing, or have actively attempted to perform system travel, like we did... only presumably with better results. They just want to get Mario from Point A to Point B! What's the big deal? (This especially applies to plurals who see their headspaces as not existing within their minds, but in the astral plane or other dimensions. Thus, body hopping is the equivalent of traveling from Dallas to Paris, just maybe a little more weirder.)
Like with bookend headmates, I don't think a blanket avoidance really solves the problem; we have to be able to talk about it to deal with it properly. We used to be on a now-defunct plural skeptics forum where folks discussed what body hopping may truly be, including folks who WERE body hoppers. Two of the ideas I remember going around were soul-puppeting, to use an old snarky soulbond term, or the idea that each system had their own headmate version (of Mario, say), which would go dormant or active according to relevant time. We weren't really able to contribute to the conversation, but it was nice to see it BE a conversation, rather than an accusation of "you're not real; you don't exist."
As with bookends, it IS possible to do it healthfully, but it's Relationship Hard Mode. And the requirements for that health are roughly the same:
How Bookends and Body Hoppers Are Different
Even in okay situations, there's a higher risk of reality torque. Say your Mario is going to go body hop to another system on 5-6 PM Wednesday, and both systems are aware that this will happen and have agreed to it. So Mario says his goodbye, heads out, and comes back an hour later. When asked, he says yeah, he went, it was fine. However, say you contact the other system and they say, "Oh no, we're sorry, we totally forgot about the appointment! We never saw Mario!" How do you deal with that? How does Mario? Even the most stable, grounded person on earth might feel uneasy and try to just pretend that never happened. (And this seems to be a thing that will happen at least once if you do system travel regularly. It was likely things like this that spurred the plural skeptics discussion I mentioned earlier.)
Then there's the "one system, two (or more) bodies" thing. Even the most matched-up bookend systems are at least claiming to be different people, however joined at the hip. A couple of times though, we've seen folks claiming to be the same system (and thus the same PEOPLE), just in different meatsuits. That's relationship hard mode on a level so staggering that I doubt anyone could manage it; instead of coming off true, it says to us, "we have no boundaries or identity without our other body; we mold ourselves into the same entity because we have nothing else holding us up inside."
Some really nasty systems will hold a traveling headmate hostage. "You wouldn't want something TERRIBLE to happen to Mario, now would you?" There are less overtly blackmail-y variations, but they're all gross: "Oh, Mario likes it here much better, he says your system has too many problems," or "you can't have Mario back until you deal with your issues."
(A couple times we have seen a headmate who becomes so disgusted with the behavior of their system that they just up and leave and move somewhere else. But there's no hostage-taking, no conversation. They just leave, usually when the systems are already gone away from each other. And I don't know what the other side of the equation thought or said about the experience.)
Our Own Experience
We ourself do not travel. However, we've had two sort of experiences about it: one involving a perfectly nice system, and one gross one.
When we attempted this with a plural friend, it was under controlled conditions. We both agreed to it in advance, we both knew when it was going to happen and for how long, and we trusted that the friend system in question wouldn't be a jerk or creepy about it. We'd known them for years previous, and had built trust independently from that. They did nothing wrong. It just didn't work. We consider it a useful, neutral experience: we know now that we can't do that.
The other experience was not like that at all. It was not a friend system. There was no discussion or consent. It was just a sudden claim that they had met one of our headmates in a part of our headspace. But their descriptions were flat wrong, and our headmate instantly said, "that never happened." It was a gross, unpleasant experience, and while it was unclear whether it was manipulation or sheer mental instability, it was still enough to cement our decision to never interact with this system again.
Why? Because our headspace is in our head. So when someone just up and claims that they accessed it, they are in fact saying a host of other gross things:
It was infuriating. It made us feel unclean. But at least we could take comfort in knowing that there was no way they could've done what they said they had. I imagine it would've been much worse had we felt we COULD be traveled to, if our headmate hadn't been right there to say no, if we DIDN'T have a headspace that was sentient, doesn't let people in, and would wig out if someone were.
Body hopping headmates (also sometimes called intersystem travel, or system hopping) is pretty self-explanatory: it's when a headmate jumps from one system to another, be it temporarily ("I'm here to celebrate your birthday!"), permanently ("You people suck, I'm leaving!"), or as a regular trading back and forth. At its furthest extreme, we've encountered folks who claim that they're one system with multiple bodies. (We'll explain why that tends to be an especially bad idea further down.)
How Traveling Headmates Are Similar to Bookend Headmates
In most cases, they're the same "we're specially connected" claim, just in different wrappers: instead of "we're your loved ones in a different body," it's, "we're y'all in a different body!"
They seem to happen for the same reasons: people long for connection. Just instead of, "I miss my spouse from my other life," it's, "I wish there was someone who understood and saw me as I am." System travel can seem a quick and easy way to insure it--after all, you can't be mistaken for your vessel if you aren't in it!
But they have many of the same pitfalls:
- being used as justification of a special relationship that few can hope to match. ("We must be special, that your headmates are coming here!")
- short-circuiting the requisite boundary-setting and trust-building a true close relationship requires. ("You can trust me! I'm your very own headmate! I vouch for them!")
- encouraging a lack of boundaries or separate identities ("we're literally the same people, just in different bodies!")
Both claims also get more social leeway than they should sometimes within the community, because of the social more of respecting someone's individual identity, however odd it might be. However, like with the bookend headmate, a relationship is not an identity. When someone is claiming to be your loved one, your headmate, or YOU, that is something they don't get to say all on their own. You're a part of it. You get to say no!
However, also as in the case with the bookend headmate, often times the folks involved are coming from a place of good intentions. They might already be friends or partners, trust that they'd never lie about this sort of thing, or have actively attempted to perform system travel, like we did... only presumably with better results. They just want to get Mario from Point A to Point B! What's the big deal? (This especially applies to plurals who see their headspaces as not existing within their minds, but in the astral plane or other dimensions. Thus, body hopping is the equivalent of traveling from Dallas to Paris, just maybe a little more weirder.)
Like with bookend headmates, I don't think a blanket avoidance really solves the problem; we have to be able to talk about it to deal with it properly. We used to be on a now-defunct plural skeptics forum where folks discussed what body hopping may truly be, including folks who WERE body hoppers. Two of the ideas I remember going around were soul-puppeting, to use an old snarky soulbond term, or the idea that each system had their own headmate version (of Mario, say), which would go dormant or active according to relevant time. We weren't really able to contribute to the conversation, but it was nice to see it BE a conversation, rather than an accusation of "you're not real; you don't exist."
As with bookends, it IS possible to do it healthfully, but it's Relationship Hard Mode. And the requirements for that health are roughly the same:
- Despite intense pushback, the folks involves must develop a solid sense of their own identities.
- They must not rely on the body-hopping to anchor their relationship. They can stop it at any time without the relationship being insta-killed.
- They have to be able to accept that the traveling headmate may not be. They can handle a “no, I never went anywhere,” or a, “I did, but I don't do those things,” without taking it personally, and deal with it without collapsing in a spiral of denial or existential despair.
How Bookends and Body Hoppers Are Different
Even in okay situations, there's a higher risk of reality torque. Say your Mario is going to go body hop to another system on 5-6 PM Wednesday, and both systems are aware that this will happen and have agreed to it. So Mario says his goodbye, heads out, and comes back an hour later. When asked, he says yeah, he went, it was fine. However, say you contact the other system and they say, "Oh no, we're sorry, we totally forgot about the appointment! We never saw Mario!" How do you deal with that? How does Mario? Even the most stable, grounded person on earth might feel uneasy and try to just pretend that never happened. (And this seems to be a thing that will happen at least once if you do system travel regularly. It was likely things like this that spurred the plural skeptics discussion I mentioned earlier.)
Then there's the "one system, two (or more) bodies" thing. Even the most matched-up bookend systems are at least claiming to be different people, however joined at the hip. A couple of times though, we've seen folks claiming to be the same system (and thus the same PEOPLE), just in different meatsuits. That's relationship hard mode on a level so staggering that I doubt anyone could manage it; instead of coming off true, it says to us, "we have no boundaries or identity without our other body; we mold ourselves into the same entity because we have nothing else holding us up inside."
Some really nasty systems will hold a traveling headmate hostage. "You wouldn't want something TERRIBLE to happen to Mario, now would you?" There are less overtly blackmail-y variations, but they're all gross: "Oh, Mario likes it here much better, he says your system has too many problems," or "you can't have Mario back until you deal with your issues."
(A couple times we have seen a headmate who becomes so disgusted with the behavior of their system that they just up and leave and move somewhere else. But there's no hostage-taking, no conversation. They just leave, usually when the systems are already gone away from each other. And I don't know what the other side of the equation thought or said about the experience.)
Our Own Experience
We ourself do not travel. However, we've had two sort of experiences about it: one involving a perfectly nice system, and one gross one.
When we attempted this with a plural friend, it was under controlled conditions. We both agreed to it in advance, we both knew when it was going to happen and for how long, and we trusted that the friend system in question wouldn't be a jerk or creepy about it. We'd known them for years previous, and had built trust independently from that. They did nothing wrong. It just didn't work. We consider it a useful, neutral experience: we know now that we can't do that.
The other experience was not like that at all. It was not a friend system. There was no discussion or consent. It was just a sudden claim that they had met one of our headmates in a part of our headspace. But their descriptions were flat wrong, and our headmate instantly said, "that never happened." It was a gross, unpleasant experience, and while it was unclear whether it was manipulation or sheer mental instability, it was still enough to cement our decision to never interact with this system again.
Why? Because our headspace is in our head. So when someone just up and claims that they accessed it, they are in fact saying a host of other gross things:
- I hacked into your brain.
- I did it without asking.
- I thought this was appropriate behavior, or at least that you wouldn't call me on it.
- I can't tell the difference between my mind and yours.
- You aren't people. You are objects to be used for my own psychodrama.
It was infuriating. It made us feel unclean. But at least we could take comfort in knowing that there was no way they could've done what they said they had. I imagine it would've been much worse had we felt we COULD be traveled to, if our headmate hadn't been right there to say no, if we DIDN'T have a headspace that was sentient, doesn't let people in, and would wig out if someone were.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 07:58 pm (UTC)--Mori
EDIT: I mean, it's been ages since I saw Matrix stuff, but isn't Smith's whole SCHTICK that he kinda mutates and duplicates and spawns everywhere he goes? And that there can be a bajillion copies of him and this doesn't bother him or cause him existential distress in the slightest? And that these various copies can change and grow independently of the others?
no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 08:13 pm (UTC)--Mori
no subject
Date: 2019-07-21 07:57 pm (UTC)It's like some folks see plurality and just throw basic boundaries out the window.
--Mori