...We freaked and briefly deleted most of this because we still have some lingering idea that we shouldn't say anything negative in public about this one other system, because they were really good at making us feel obligated to them and that we had maliciously misinterpreted their attempts to Only Ever Be Good To Us, but... honestly I'm really sick of being publically mute about how badly they treated us. If they're sorry, they can damn well apologize to us themselves and stop communicating with us only through our ex-partner system.
So there was one system who we met in our first few years on the Internet that we ended up debating and arguing with a lot about how multiplicity works, back when we were still identifying as "a soulbonder with more than usually autonomous soulbonds." We were (at one point) trying to argue that soulbonding could be like MPD/DID in significant ways, having full people with full ranges of emotions who could come out and take the body at any time, only "without the disordered part." I think in retrospect they may have been angry or jealous at the idea that you even could have "the good without the bad," and I almost want to say I can see their side of things and wish we'd handled it differently, except... they were all about multiples as superbeings who could behavioristically adapt to any and every kind of situation with people who were perfectly suited to it, and apparently disbelieved that our brains could have overall inclinations in terms of things like sexual orientation and gender identities and seemed to think that theirs were just fluctuating system demographics. Because something something children being blank slates at birth and if they learn they can become other people (but only before the cutoff age in response to severe trauma, of course), then the brain becomes neurologically flexible and retains this alleged childhood blank-slate ability to turn into anything that is necessary to survive in a given environment. (seriously those behaviorism theories about "you can take a child and make them into anything with the right conditioning" were shot down in the 60s and 70s but they didn't seem to have gotten the memo)
Also they were ultra-obsessed with their constant fighting and super edgelord hardcore struggles for dominance and attempts to kill each other in system, which they seemed to think was just a byproduct of the abuse-related stresses that created the system in the first place and that "if it doesn't spill out, it's no problem." That was kind of our first and last lesson in "if someone treats people in their system like shit or says it's okay for people to kill and torture each other, don't expect them to be super-ethical to people outside the body either." (But they also acted like they had earned the right to be pompous shits because they went through So Much Hell in-system, which apparently... was not totally preventable by laying down some ground rules and communication.)
Except when I really think about it, we had our own form of angry jealousy on our side, because we had been unable to make ourselves non-autistic or get rid of sensory overload or things we didn't even realize were PTSD by cycling through frontrunners. And here we were basically being told that if we'd had severe trauma before the magical cutoff age, that would never have been a problem for us (well, they said there were downsides but the ones they mentioned, apart from FIGHTING FOR DOMINANCE, hardly seemed like a sacrifice in light of fifteen years of struggles). I mean, looking back, we realize that the idea that we hadn't experienced severe trauma in early childhood was actually part of our family's bullshit narrative that we were going along with, but we kind of lashed back at them with "Yeah, well, some soulbonders can create 'full people' without the disorder parts too!", because they kept going on about why soulbonds didn't qualify as full people by their definitions (even though several of our fictive members actually did fit those definitions).
...and looking back, it also seems a bit unfair that they assumed there wasn't anything we could possibly be hiding from them, or in denial about to ourselves. They only knew part of the surface of our life, and used it to assume a hell of a lot. Like, yeah, we were wrong about the whole "no severe early childhood trauma" thing, because our memories were all jumbled and fragmented in a When Rabbit Howls kind of way where no one could focus on them for too long without freaking out so we didn't understand their significance, we just felt panic and terror all the time "for no reason," but even if we had been able to speak the truth at the time, I don't know if they would even have believed us. They had this very rigid set of ideas about "what REAL survivors do" that... literally discounted anyone who was too forthcoming in talking about their trauma and dismissed them as "exaggerating things for attention," and I have no idea where the fuck they got those goddamn ideas from.
We tried to describe the panic to them a few times, when we were panicking "for no reason," but they seemed to laugh it off and dismiss it and clearly didn't think it could possibly be that bad. Or consider that the fact we were living with our birth family at the time might have played a role in what we were able to understand about our childhood. (Been reading some of Jennifer Freyd-- Pamela Freyd's Evil Lying Daughter that the FMSF has spent the past 25 years trying to discredit-- and her theories about how parents and other powerful adult figures around a child can actively shape and distort their memories of abuse, telling them "No, that definitely didn't happen, THIS is the way it happened." I mean, we don't agree with every last thing she says, but the whole "creating a BS family narrative in which the family was totally healthy, just 'misunderstood by outsiders,' and absolutely not abusive at all" being used to shut down any chance to remember abuse in a non-dissociated, contextualized way or carefully examine memories which didn't fit the narrative was... pretty much our whole childhood and adolescence.)
...Actually the more we think about it, the more we realize that we felt animosity towards people we thought were "truly multiple, unlike us" for years before we found the "you can be multiple without being Sybil" stuff, since so many of them seemed to swear by the psychic superbeings stuff and "it's PROVEN we are more intelligent and creative than singlets!" That was a lot of why Tamsin wrote Sour Grapes in 2003 (gdi our webpage is so fucking out of date), sort of as a way of saying "Hey guys. This can make some people feel really fucking inadequate, you know? Have you ever considered if THAT'S the reason why some people have an investment in doubting your existence, if they don't know any other paradigm?" (Well, she tried to extend our skepticism more absolutely system-wide than it was because we were afraid of being laughed at, it's hardly a perfect essay, but we'll still admit to this day that bitterness that we didn't have all the "incredible abilities" and were just inferior earth peons was a factor in our not wanting to believe multiplicity existed when we thought we weren't really multiple.)
This might be a lot of fail and rudeness because we haven't been sleeping well, let me know if it is
So there was one system who we met in our first few years on the Internet that we ended up debating and arguing with a lot about how multiplicity works, back when we were still identifying as "a soulbonder with more than usually autonomous soulbonds." We were (at one point) trying to argue that soulbonding could be like MPD/DID in significant ways, having full people with full ranges of emotions who could come out and take the body at any time, only "without the disordered part." I think in retrospect they may have been angry or jealous at the idea that you even could have "the good without the bad," and I almost want to say I can see their side of things and wish we'd handled it differently, except... they were all about multiples as superbeings who could behavioristically adapt to any and every kind of situation with people who were perfectly suited to it, and apparently disbelieved that our brains could have overall inclinations in terms of things like sexual orientation and gender identities and seemed to think that theirs were just fluctuating system demographics. Because something something children being blank slates at birth and if they learn they can become other people (but only before the cutoff age in response to severe trauma, of course), then the brain becomes neurologically flexible and retains this alleged childhood blank-slate ability to turn into anything that is necessary to survive in a given environment. (seriously those behaviorism theories about "you can take a child and make them into anything with the right conditioning" were shot down in the 60s and 70s but they didn't seem to have gotten the memo)
Also they were ultra-obsessed with their constant fighting and super edgelord hardcore struggles for dominance and attempts to kill each other in system, which they seemed to think was just a byproduct of the abuse-related stresses that created the system in the first place and that "if it doesn't spill out, it's no problem." That was kind of our first and last lesson in "if someone treats people in their system like shit or says it's okay for people to kill and torture each other, don't expect them to be super-ethical to people outside the body either." (But they also acted like they had earned the right to be pompous shits because they went through So Much Hell in-system, which apparently... was not totally preventable by laying down some ground rules and communication.)
Except when I really think about it, we had our own form of angry jealousy on our side, because we had been unable to make ourselves non-autistic or get rid of sensory overload or things we didn't even realize were PTSD by cycling through frontrunners. And here we were basically being told that if we'd had severe trauma before the magical cutoff age, that would never have been a problem for us (well, they said there were downsides but the ones they mentioned, apart from FIGHTING FOR DOMINANCE, hardly seemed like a sacrifice in light of fifteen years of struggles). I mean, looking back, we realize that the idea that we hadn't experienced severe trauma in early childhood was actually part of our family's bullshit narrative that we were going along with, but we kind of lashed back at them with "Yeah, well, some soulbonders can create 'full people' without the disorder parts too!", because they kept going on about why soulbonds didn't qualify as full people by their definitions (even though several of our fictive members actually did fit those definitions).
...and looking back, it also seems a bit unfair that they assumed there wasn't anything we could possibly be hiding from them, or in denial about to ourselves. They only knew part of the surface of our life, and used it to assume a hell of a lot. Like, yeah, we were wrong about the whole "no severe early childhood trauma" thing, because our memories were all jumbled and fragmented in a When Rabbit Howls kind of way where no one could focus on them for too long without freaking out so we didn't understand their significance, we just felt panic and terror all the time "for no reason," but even if we had been able to speak the truth at the time, I don't know if they would even have believed us. They had this very rigid set of ideas about "what REAL survivors do" that... literally discounted anyone who was too forthcoming in talking about their trauma and dismissed them as "exaggerating things for attention," and I have no idea where the fuck they got those goddamn ideas from.
We tried to describe the panic to them a few times, when we were panicking "for no reason," but they seemed to laugh it off and dismiss it and clearly didn't think it could possibly be that bad. Or consider that the fact we were living with our birth family at the time might have played a role in what we were able to understand about our childhood. (Been reading some of Jennifer Freyd-- Pamela Freyd's Evil Lying Daughter that the FMSF has spent the past 25 years trying to discredit-- and her theories about how parents and other powerful adult figures around a child can actively shape and distort their memories of abuse, telling them "No, that definitely didn't happen, THIS is the way it happened." I mean, we don't agree with every last thing she says, but the whole "creating a BS family narrative in which the family was totally healthy, just 'misunderstood by outsiders,' and absolutely not abusive at all" being used to shut down any chance to remember abuse in a non-dissociated, contextualized way or carefully examine memories which didn't fit the narrative was... pretty much our whole childhood and adolescence.)
...Actually the more we think about it, the more we realize that we felt animosity towards people we thought were "truly multiple, unlike us" for years before we found the "you can be multiple without being Sybil" stuff, since so many of them seemed to swear by the psychic superbeings stuff and "it's PROVEN we are more intelligent and creative than singlets!" That was a lot of why Tamsin wrote Sour Grapes in 2003 (gdi our webpage is so fucking out of date), sort of as a way of saying "Hey guys. This can make some people feel really fucking inadequate, you know? Have you ever considered if THAT'S the reason why some people have an investment in doubting your existence, if they don't know any other paradigm?" (Well, she tried to extend our skepticism more absolutely system-wide than it was because we were afraid of being laughed at, it's hardly a perfect essay, but we'll still admit to this day that bitterness that we didn't have all the "incredible abilities" and were just inferior earth peons was a factor in our not wanting to believe multiplicity existed when we thought we weren't really multiple.)