Thanks. I mean, we had been thinking about it for a while, but-- well, we've spent a lot of time around people who WANTED to be the only voice in town, the people whose standards and norms shaped everyone else's interpretations of their experiences, and being in places where there's an actual real legitimate attitude of "Seriously, we WANT other voices!" that everyone upholds feels almost like a mythical thing to us. So we had been worrying that it would come across as looking like we were trying to steal attention from you, and to hear that actually, no, you want to see other people writing about it is helpful, a lot.
Our experience was massively trial and error too, like... a lot of error. It felt like the old Otherworlds list was a lot of people trying to sound like they had it all figured out because they thought everyone else had it all figured out. And the Anachronic Army, like... I know their page was a blessing to a lot of systems who thought they were too weird, too fantasyish, etc, and didn't realize integration wasn't required, and in the late 90s they did a lot for the online multiple community. But they and Astraea and a few other groups also treated people who didn't think of their world as an alternate reality with disdain. The "real or imaginary" thing reached really stupid levels of wank on some pages and on lj-multiplicity, and we ultimately came to feel that it was the wrong question to ask; the questions to be asking instead were about the roles played by people's worlds, whatever the nature of them or their ideas about how they came to exist. (Kind of like how Istevia tends to say she doesn't care what people believe or disbelieve in nearly as much as what they do with the values they profess. When we started looking at the disparity between what people professed and how they acted in the plural community, like people who swore they saw each other as people in their own right but were fine with abusing their headmates, boy howdy that was a mindfuck.)
One of the major issues we want to address is how potentially destructive it can be to let other people, even (sometimes especially) other multiples, guide your discovery and understanding of your world, and if you have an otherworld-type space, the dangers of hanging around people who claim to regularly travel to other systems' worlds, especially if you're a newbie to the whole thing. I mean, we do allow for some situations where travel can be attempted with everyone's boundaries remaining in place, but our experience is that those are very much the exception rather than the rule, and people who yell at you that they always do fine with it often have the dreaded Conjoined Headspace, which can wreak absolute havoc on your selves-identity and where we've never seen a long-term healthy instance of it. (Ways to make us freak out about the future of a friend's mental health: "Well, we travel to each other's systems all the time now and some of us spend most of our time in Partner's system.")
...I guess we might as well admit, too, that we've been throwing around the idea of writing something about how to deal with it when you start with partial recall of childhood trauma, but total amnesia for other periods where there's strong proof of something bad having happened. Although yeah, a lot of it still leads back to "sometimes you just have to accept not having an answer," but we've at least been able to nail down more and less likely time periods and locations for certain things happening.
no subject
Our experience was massively trial and error too, like... a lot of error. It felt like the old Otherworlds list was a lot of people trying to sound like they had it all figured out because they thought everyone else had it all figured out. And the Anachronic Army, like... I know their page was a blessing to a lot of systems who thought they were too weird, too fantasyish, etc, and didn't realize integration wasn't required, and in the late 90s they did a lot for the online multiple community. But they and Astraea and a few other groups also treated people who didn't think of their world as an alternate reality with disdain. The "real or imaginary" thing reached really stupid levels of wank on some pages and on lj-multiplicity, and we ultimately came to feel that it was the wrong question to ask; the questions to be asking instead were about the roles played by people's worlds, whatever the nature of them or their ideas about how they came to exist. (Kind of like how Istevia tends to say she doesn't care what people believe or disbelieve in nearly as much as what they do with the values they profess. When we started looking at the disparity between what people professed and how they acted in the plural community, like people who swore they saw each other as people in their own right but were fine with abusing their headmates, boy howdy that was a mindfuck.)
One of the major issues we want to address is how potentially destructive it can be to let other people, even (sometimes especially) other multiples, guide your discovery and understanding of your world, and if you have an otherworld-type space, the dangers of hanging around people who claim to regularly travel to other systems' worlds, especially if you're a newbie to the whole thing. I mean, we do allow for some situations where travel can be attempted with everyone's boundaries remaining in place, but our experience is that those are very much the exception rather than the rule, and people who yell at you that they always do fine with it often have the dreaded Conjoined Headspace, which can wreak absolute havoc on your selves-identity and where we've never seen a long-term healthy instance of it. (Ways to make us freak out about the future of a friend's mental health: "Well, we travel to each other's systems all the time now and some of us spend most of our time in Partner's system.")
...I guess we might as well admit, too, that we've been throwing around the idea of writing something about how to deal with it when you start with partial recall of childhood trauma, but total amnesia for other periods where there's strong proof of something bad having happened. Although yeah, a lot of it still leads back to "sometimes you just have to accept not having an answer," but we've at least been able to nail down more and less likely time periods and locations for certain things happening.