Many-Selved Etymology: role terms

[lb_lee]

Rogan/Mori: Lark of Hungry Ghosts asked me about the origination of plural role terms (which are apparently now this super-rigid straitjacket of How Plurals Must Be?). I dove into my records, and here's what I done found!

It's possible these terms were used earlier than I found here. These were the earliest I could find them in the multi files I have on hand.

Core: This terms looks to originate with Billy Milligan's case, in use by February 1980 in Wallace, Wallechinsky, Wallace, and Wallace's The Book of Lists #2: "In addition to his core self, Milligan has at least nine other personalities" (380) and 1981 in Keyes's The Minds of Billy Milligan. Seeing as Milligan was imprisoned for rape in 1977, it's possible "core" was used in earlier news stories about the case; I'd have to dig in. But Keyes quotes it (and "host") as being used by Cornelia Wilbur on page 50; she also treated Sybil. So: Wilbur, by 1980?

Helper: used by Ross, 1989: "Most persecutor personalities are in fact helpers who are using self-destructive strategies." (110).

Host: first attributed to Wilbur in Keyes, 1981: “the original Billy, sometimes known as the host or core personality” (50). So that explains why "host" and "core" get confused a lot in these things, it's because Wilbur conflated the two in Keyes!

Inner Self-Helper/ISH: Ralph Allison created it by 1977 in Hawkworth's The Five Of Me: "[Phil] was, in the beginning at least, hardly a personality at all, but rather what Dr. Allison refers to as an 'Ish'--an Inner Self-Helper[...] a separate personality whose sole function seems to be to prevent the other personalities from tearing the physical body apart." (20) Allison says he started treating multiples in 1972 (Hawksworth, 5), so 1972-1977.

Original: Wilbur again! She uses it in Keyes 1981 (50) and the term "original Sybil" is used a decent number of times (sorry, my ebook had no page numbers). Flora Rheta Schreiber wrote Sybil, but it seems sensible that Wilbur originated the term? So, by 1973 for adjective form, will have to dig for stand-alone noun. (EDIT 7/10/2025: INCORRECT! This term is older; "original patient" or "original personality" is used by Thigpen and Cleckley (38, 153), so I should dig into older work to see if it's used previously.

Persecutor: Used by Ross (and Norton?) in 1989: "An interesting finding (Ross & Norton, 1989b) was a clinical triad of Schneiderian made-impulses, voices in the head, and suicide attempts. This traid should alert the clinican to the possibility of MPD, especially if the made impulse is self-destructive, and the voice is commanding suicide or is hostile and critical. The triad is indicative of the actibility of a dangerous persecutor personality" (Ross, 99)

Protector: Used by Hawksworth once in 1977 (72), but Keyes uses it more formally, declaring Ragen "the protector of the family" (xv).

 

 

"Caretaker" is proving weirdly hard to pin down, so I'm calling it quits on that one for now, but of all these other terms, all of them come from medical contexts. If they aren't outright, obviously created by therapists themselves (Ralph Allison, Cornelia Wilbur), they're cited in books that they were involved in--like Sybil or the Minds of Billy Milligan. These are terms created by medical personnel to compartmentalize and organize headmates like a stamp collection... and often deny us the right to self-determine or grow. There's an icky historical context there; there's a reason these terms were considered unfashionable tools of the oppressor when we came on the scene in 2007!

These therapists are not little tin gods you should worship. There's a reason Allison, Ross, and Wilbur have controversies about them! (And I'm not as knowledgeable about them as I should be because... well, read on.) So here's some information about that, as a sorta "multi beware, worship not your doctor" thing.

There are almost 500 pages of data about Colin Ross's malpractice suits. He got run out of Canada for them; it's why he practices in Dallas (where I could've gotten committed once, funny story). Unfortunately, the top three "experts" involved with that huge 500 page slab (Richard Ofshe, Harold Merskey, and August Piper) are ALL on the advisory board of the lawsuit-happy False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and the source of data seems to be Douglas Mesner/Lucien Greaves, the Satanic Temple guy who's ALSO deep into the False Memory Syndrome thing. (Of the final two experts involved, Christopher Barden is the FMSF legal representative, and Jonathan Werier was apparently the doctor of the writer of the tome.) I'm sorry, but I don't have it in me to go through that combo. Medical malpractice, PLUS False Memory Syndrome Foundation, PLUS a therapist I find contemptible, PLUS having to critical think very hard about every single angle of that? For 500 pages? I'd rather eat lard. But Colin Ross is a creep who tried to sign up for the James Randi prize to prove he could shoot force beams from his eyes. (And it turns out James Randi was ALSO on the FMSF advisory board, aaaagh, so it's FMSF all the way down.) There's also this interview with an ex-patient, which I haven't girded myself enough to read, but I hear it's harrowing.

Cornelia Wilbur has a whole book devoted to her called Sybil Exposed. I tried to read it, couldn't get through it because Debbie Nathan is a massive creep on the board for the National Center for Reason and Justice (which fights to release convicted child molesters from prison, including ones like Father Shanley whose crimes are exceedingly well documented over the course of decades), but Erin Ptah goes into it here.

Ralph Allison is the one I know the most about and feel the most confident over, because he himself admits to exorcising his patients in 1973 (1999, pg. 77-79), one of whom later committed suicide (93). He has his own very idiosyncratic idea of how DID and MPD are completely different disorders, to be differentiated on whether someone's first trauma experience came before or after the age of seven. He's a kook. There's a reason people don't talk much about him these days, except for the ISH; nobody discusses his Celestial Intelligent Energy or Malignant Imaginary Playmates.

Sources:

Allison, Ralph, and Schwarz, Ted. (1980, 1999). Minds In Many Pieces: Revealing the Spiritual Side of Multiple Personality Disorder, 2nd edition. Paso Robles, California: CIE Publishing.

Allison, Ralph. (1995). "MPD and DID are Two Different Post-Traumatic Disorders." San Luis Obispo, California: Calif. Men's Colony State Prison. Retrieved from https://dissociation.com/2007/docReader.php?url=/index/published/MPDIDPAP.TXT

Hawksworth, Henry Dana and Schwarz, Ted. (1977, 1978). The Five of Me: the Autobiography of a Multiple Personality. New York: Pocket Books.

Keyes, Daniel. (1981). The Minds of Billy Milligan. New York: Random House.

Ross, Colin. (1989). Multiple Personality Disorder: diagnosis, clinical features, and treatment. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Schreiber. (1973). Sybil. New York: Warner Books.

Thigpen and Cleckley. (1957). The 3 Faces of Eve. New York: Popular Library.

Wallace, Wallechinsky, Wallace, and Wallace. (1980). The Book of Lists #2. New York: William Morrow and Company. Transcribed by me here: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/873671.html)

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

I've noticed that there's a lot of "If you have a problem with these sketchy characters, the opposition is these other even worse people!" Like the book Sybil on its own described a disturbingly enmeshed relationship, poor boundaries, and damaging use of drugs. But looking at critical or questioning perspectives on that type of treatment immediately brings out the abuser's lobby labeling a wide range of abuse accounts as Just False Memories.

[lb_lee]

IT’S SO FRUSTRATING! I have had the devil’s time really digging into this stuff, because both sides are awful and I feel like I’m pouring battery acid into my brain. And then the fact-checking! Ross alone would be 500 harrowing pages of horror and fact-checking and crying into my damn beer. Plus I’m from the tail end of the Memory Wars generation, so I still take psych damage from the constant grinding “you can’t trust your memory, the truth is impossible to prove.”

I hate it. Eventually I will have to do it, but that day ain’t today!

[gullwingdoors]

Y'know? We continue to be glad that in terms of being *in* plural spaces we've pretty much intentionally kept to our small online friend/shared-interest groups, following and keeping up with a couple accounts here, and Cohost when that was still going. I just... why *would* you strap yourselves so tightly to prescribed roles?? Never really clicked with us why one would try to cram into little boxes like that, it seems so limiting.

... So, uh, learning that it directly comes from therapists (of particularly dubious repute even) of the eighties specifically FOR cramming yourselves into neat little boxes... yeah, that checks out! It's just... it really figures that's where this particular snag would be rooted, I guess.

We always kind of feel like we really dodged a bullet this whole first year of There's A Bunch Of Us Up Here Now by choosing to stay out of the big bitter conflict-pits that seem to be the plural spaces of bigger social media, and this is just further cementing that, I think?

[lb_lee]

Yeah, consider that bullet dodged. I hadn’t heard about any of this myself, since I entrenched myself in Dreamwidth and now only hear about this stuff from other people. Not sorry about it, either! I’m perpetually outdated now, and I’m glad to have missed a million tempests in teapots. But I can all these terms to my etymological dictionary at least! Mwahaha!

[beepbird]

It's wild how often I see people approaching roles as "there must be a specific name for this thing, or it's not actually happening" lately. Labels in general, but roles most often. (To say nothing of the nightmare of trying to parse half of them that I've never seen in my life)

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, I have an interest in learning more about therapy harm, therapy abuse, and the flaws in the mental health system that compound the harm. And when I find information about the more credible accounts of therapists engaging in memory manipulation (such as hypnotizing people into believing they were abducted by aliens) it's being used by people trying to invalidate all recovered memory accounts of abuse and also misrepresent a lot of other cases of adults coming forward with accounts of child abuse. Like a lot of things to do with therapy and harm, neither of the two loudest sides is about protecting the clients.

ETA: Also I suspect you already know this, but I've noticed a distinctly different pattern between the subset of recovered memory accounts where I think therapist-induced significant memory distortion is more likely (disproven SRA claims, alien abduction claims, and cases where the client later said that the therapist was manipulating their memory) and all other claims. The ones where there's the best evidence for significant memory distortion involve things like over-medication, extensive use of leading questions under hypnosis, and extremely enmeshed therapist-client relationships. They're often closer to brainwashing than ordinary therapy.

[wolfy_writing]

I've definitely noticed a weird increase in fixation on labels. Like there's always been a degree of it, but it's gotten a lot more intense.

[chameleons3]

Love me a works cited. Thank you.

I find it odd that there’s a prevailing community notion of doctors being infallible. Prevalent enough that this post requires a “why you shouldn’t listen to everything doctors say.” Odd in this community because of how divided folks are about pathology and anti-pathology. Just. Very odd.

[lb_lee]

Also, when I've experienced people telling me things involving traumatic memories that seem highly unlikely to be untrue... never once have I got the feeling that NOTHING happened. All the people involved, I had reason to believe that SOMETHING horrible had happened! Just not necessarily what they were saying. (Note that all three cases of this I saw, they either weren't in therapy at all, or I had no reason to believe their therapist was involved. They cracked from a mix of intense stress and/or unwise use of mind-altering techniques or substances.)

I remember when reading a debunking of Michelle Remembers going, "Wait... y'all are describing this person getting abused, being taken advantage of the therapist who married her AND helped write the book... AND you're trying to make it HER fault?" But in American literature anyway, it's damn near IMPOSSIBLE to find decent works on this stuff, just because the Memory Wars salted the earth so hard and devoured EVERYTHING. It's infuriating.

[lb_lee]

I feel like it's a combo of authoritarianism and ableism. Loonies can't trust themselves, only their saintly doctors! If a therapist says it, it is AUTOMATICALLY more accurate and true, no matter how defrocked or crackpot they are, no matter how little they know about dissociative disorders or plurality or possession or trance...

It probably doesn't help that a lot of people are so constantly told that they can't REALLY be experiencing this, they're just confused/crazy/attention-seeking/wrong, that it becomes really hard to trust yourself! It becomes so tempting to believe that getting the Formal Perfect Diagnosis will suddenly solve all your problems, and that your doctor will save you, and then you'll never need to deal with denial or self-reassessment ever again.

[lb_lee]

Mori: I wonder if it's like some side-effect of online marketing crap being obsessed with shoving everyone into increasingly fine-grained, personalized boxes to make it easier to advertise to us and data-mine us?

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, there's often things like unhealthy family dynamics, abuse or assault that's been downplayed, things like medical trauma that have often not been acknowledged as trauma, etc., and I've noticed that a lot of the "We will recover your memories of alien abduction" hypnotherapists really reinforce the Not Bad Enough message around normal trauma.

Yeah, I've noticed that one of the impacts of FSMF is treating "This person may have been abused and manipulated by a therapist leading to, among other problems, inaccurate trauma memories" like a character failure on the part of the victim.

[wolfy_writing]

My first thought was the whole smartphones/social media/COVID combination making people more disconnected from physical experiences and the outside world and more attached to abstract concepts as a way to try to anchor their experience and sense of self to something.

[gullwingdoors]

Words for the Words Guide. Words for the Words Guide. Words for the Words Guide.

... Every so often, out of morbid curiosity, we poke our nose into Tumblr's #plurality tag, and between all the systems just posting through their life experiences there is a frustrating amount of needless infighting, and so so much of it comes down to stuffing yourselves into categories and getting up in arms about it because that's the prevailing mode of self-interpretation hanging around Tumblr. It makes us want to crawl out of our ears, not least because it feels like the whole thing feels so flimsy - half of it's just reheated transmedicalism, and all of it feels like it could just be neatly sidestepped by everyone realizing you have zero way to know what's going on in another head.

... We should probably, uh. Stop doing that. Unfortunately, habits are tough to break.

[anomalymonster]

Rex: This is very interesting, thank you for sharing your research.

I don't like roles myself. Labeling myself as a protector when the body was a teen wound up leading me towards self-destructive behaviors because I felt like I had to take the blunt of the trauma for my system. In practice what made me label myself as a protector was because I've been around for a long time as an active frontrunner, my appearance in headspace is large and fits with how nonhuman protectors traditionally look, and I don't express stress in an outward way which makes it look like I'm handling things better than I am.

We also had to put a hard ban on the persecutor label for our system for a similar reason. People kept getting caught up in being labeled as "the bad one" and fell into worse and more self-destructive habits.

In our system as it is now, we do somewhat have roles, but they're not rigid and anything that's important we try to divide between multiple headmates. That way nothing collapses just because someone decides to take a day off.

[anomalymonster]

Rex: At least from my memory of being on Discord around when this trend started, there was a lot of microlabel coining that was going on pre-COVID, which then exploded during COVID. Especially because of Pluralpedia, which was linked as a beginner resource and was in combination with lockdown leading people to self-reflect and realize they might be systems, I think led a lot more systems to assume they need to have microlabels like that and their introduction to the community was through microlabels.

From what I've seen, that also combines with systems' need for selves validation. I've seen newer systems seem upset when they don't have a specific microlabel that fits them, and if you check social media with newer systems, there's a lot of "is there a role for someone who does xyz".

Term coining in and of itself is an entire rabbit hole as well. Some Tumblr blogs will coin dozens of terms in a short period of time. It makes it a mess to track what terms are even being in current use - for example, the -genic label for created systems has gone between parogenic (coined on I believe Discord or unarchived social media) and willogenic (coined by an anonymous message on a very prolific term coining blog) with tulpagenic (unsure of the coiner for this one) being thrown in there sometimes. While parogenic was the leading term for awhile, there seems to be a sudden switch to willogenic, and people on social media seem to barely use terms like created in favor of the -genic labels.

...As I type it out, I'm starting to feel like we should use popular social media less.

[lb_lee]

Last I heard, Rings were working on a thing about all this. I should ask them about it; they worked under an academic who focused on the Memory Wars and had access to stuff that I could only salivate over!

[lb_lee]

WORDS FOR THE WORDS GODS!

Yeah, these days we’re like a dotty granny who just gets to listen with enthralled befuddlement to the Things The Youth Fight Over These Days, and marvel at their originality. It feels like I imagine it would to be a parent to a teenager who’s deeply invested in “cool,” since every school has its own idiosyncratic definition.

[lb_lee]

Mori: ooh yeah, your explanation is better and sounds way more sensible, I could buy that!

[lb_lee]

Hahaha that sounds awful and I am sorry, friends.

Apparently in China, plural groups mostly use Emmengards’ naming scheme of creative, adaptive, etc., which is way more straightforward and sensible. Neat!

Pluralpedia is a milestone I have basically entirely missed out on and never been involved with.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, “persecutor” is such a bomb of a label to slap on someone! Even when Rawlin was god-eaten out of her mind and exiled, we refused to call her a persecutor because what a thing to reduce her too! (And even if you stuck with the “nicer” version of “persecutors are helpers in disguise,” it would’ve sent us barking up the entirely wrong tree as to how to deal with her.)

Besides, multis have a long troubled history of labeling a headmate bad, when really, it's “they want me to leave my abuser and get a life and are maybe blunt about it.”

[chameleons3]

Yeah leaning on the medicalized stuff to find trust is a thing. It’s really… shitty. Especially when folks decide that if someone else isn’t using a medical model or uncritically relying on a clinician then they’re automatically wrong and bad.

[vaguelyautonomous]

I've been calling myself the system core because my daemons come from me and embody different aspects of myself (which is what a daemon generally is: a personification of one's soul, the other half of one's inner dialogue). But I guess as a median daemian, my situation is different from that of the average multiple system. It's easy to see how constraining those role boxes are, and it's a good reminder not to limit my daes to the parts of me they grew from.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: Yeah, I’m embarrassingly ignorant of the daemian culture, but I have no trouble believing the ideas are different. Hell, I hadn’t encountered this idea myself except through a friend! (Then again, I want my blog to be a nice place to hang out, so people trying to rearrange linguistic deck chairs don’t usually last long.)

[vaguelyautonomous]

The majority of daemians don't actually consider themselves plural because their daemons are a supportive mental construct that's more or less "them in a different font" (though a not-insignificant number see it as a median experience like I& do, and there are multis who have their own daes, either one+ for the whole system or one+ for each headmate who wants them). How autonomous a daemon is varies on a case-by-case basis, and it's considered normal and healthy for daes to separate and unseparate freely based on the needs of the 'mian. Basically, it's a Venn diagram of plural adjacency, kinda like soulbonding (though of course soulbonding has its own unique reasons for being not inherently plural).

[lb_lee]

Rogan: Yeah, that makes sense, they have their own culture and community! Has anyone done any history write-ups of it that you know of? I think House of Chimeras did something a while back, I should recheck...