The Purpose of Doubt
Sep. 19th, 2018 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeIf you've been in any plural community, probably the most common question you've seen is, "Am I plural?" Pretty sure it's true for other relevant communities as well. I figure this is a common part of reassessing yourself on any front--you aren't sure, you think about it a while, then you decide one way or another and move on. In this capacity, doubt helps you find certainty, far more than if you just plowed in without ever questioning yourself.
But what happens when doubt plagues you for far, far longer? When that is a doubt you can never, ever appease or move on from?
Well, in that case, I find myself wanting to ask, "What purpose does the doubt serve?"
Denial is crude and it is fragile, but it can also be super-effective. Don't want to deal with something? Well, now that something no longer exists! Hurray, problem solved! Most people realize that ignoring the dirty dishes in the sink doesn't not actually make them go away, but if whatever it is isn't physically there, attracting flies in their kitchen, it's way easier to dismiss. Would recognizing you're plural mean you have to do something about it? Well, that's scary and requires life changes, sooooo claim you're not plural! Claim nobody's plural! Anyone who says otherwise is lying, delusional, or brainwashed, and surely that will never, ever bite you in the ass.
With plural doubts in particular, I think the denial also protects from guilt. Back when I was a violent screamy ragebaby in the system, I didn't have to be guilty about it, because nobody was real! Realizing I was multiple, and existed, meant having to go, "Oh my god, I was such an asshole," making amends, and actually changing myself into a decent human being. Obviously, that was a lot to take in, so it took me longer to come around to being multiple, even though I insisted that my reasons were pure emotionless logic. Sneak had nothing to feel guilty over, so pretty much snapped to accepting zer existence right off the bat; ze had no face to save, in that circumstance.
Plurality doubts can also just be a distraction from even deeper, scarier problems. In this case, plurality just becomes a symbol for something else. Is there trauma in your life? Don't want to look at it? Well, if you're not plural, then OBVIOUSLY you're not traumatized, hurray, problem solved! Or say, maybe your system reflects gender dynamics that make you suuuuper uncomfortable, but if you were singlet, you could just ignore all that! Or maybe there's that one headmate who calls into question your own religious beliefs, and denying the headmate becomes a way to avoid those niggling worries. (After all, where do you think that old evil demon alter phenomenon came from? Headmates often become symbols for the things we don't want to deal with.)
The denial becomes protective, the equivalent of your brain whispering, "Shh, don't look at that. Everything's fine. Nothing to worry about. Shhhhhh."
As we've aged, we've grown to find the "shh, don't look at that" to be a huge red flag. The whole purpose of doubt, in its best form, is to make you question yourself, look hard, and find clarity. Doubt that DISSUADES you from questioning and looking, that's obviously not doubt in its best form. That's clearly something more dubious, something that thrives on avoidance.
So, what is it that you want to avoid? And is avoiding it really going to protect you when things go wrong?
--Rogan
But what happens when doubt plagues you for far, far longer? When that is a doubt you can never, ever appease or move on from?
Well, in that case, I find myself wanting to ask, "What purpose does the doubt serve?"
Denial is crude and it is fragile, but it can also be super-effective. Don't want to deal with something? Well, now that something no longer exists! Hurray, problem solved! Most people realize that ignoring the dirty dishes in the sink doesn't not actually make them go away, but if whatever it is isn't physically there, attracting flies in their kitchen, it's way easier to dismiss. Would recognizing you're plural mean you have to do something about it? Well, that's scary and requires life changes, sooooo claim you're not plural! Claim nobody's plural! Anyone who says otherwise is lying, delusional, or brainwashed, and surely that will never, ever bite you in the ass.
With plural doubts in particular, I think the denial also protects from guilt. Back when I was a violent screamy ragebaby in the system, I didn't have to be guilty about it, because nobody was real! Realizing I was multiple, and existed, meant having to go, "Oh my god, I was such an asshole," making amends, and actually changing myself into a decent human being. Obviously, that was a lot to take in, so it took me longer to come around to being multiple, even though I insisted that my reasons were pure emotionless logic. Sneak had nothing to feel guilty over, so pretty much snapped to accepting zer existence right off the bat; ze had no face to save, in that circumstance.
Plurality doubts can also just be a distraction from even deeper, scarier problems. In this case, plurality just becomes a symbol for something else. Is there trauma in your life? Don't want to look at it? Well, if you're not plural, then OBVIOUSLY you're not traumatized, hurray, problem solved! Or say, maybe your system reflects gender dynamics that make you suuuuper uncomfortable, but if you were singlet, you could just ignore all that! Or maybe there's that one headmate who calls into question your own religious beliefs, and denying the headmate becomes a way to avoid those niggling worries. (After all, where do you think that old evil demon alter phenomenon came from? Headmates often become symbols for the things we don't want to deal with.)
The denial becomes protective, the equivalent of your brain whispering, "Shh, don't look at that. Everything's fine. Nothing to worry about. Shhhhhh."
As we've aged, we've grown to find the "shh, don't look at that" to be a huge red flag. The whole purpose of doubt, in its best form, is to make you question yourself, look hard, and find clarity. Doubt that DISSUADES you from questioning and looking, that's obviously not doubt in its best form. That's clearly something more dubious, something that thrives on avoidance.
So, what is it that you want to avoid? And is avoiding it really going to protect you when things go wrong?
--Rogan
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Date: 2018-09-20 01:40 pm (UTC)One thing we've sometimes talked about over the years, but not as much as we'd like to, is how much we didn't resemble the stereotype of "the host is weak, fearful, and has no memory of what the others do." I guess I would've been seen as the "host" when we first really became selves-aware, because I was the one driving our public presentation, although I had been blending and blurring with others without realising that was what I was doing. And I was a control freak. An asshole control freak. I was an asshole to myself and everyone else in here, telling myself/ourselves that "I just want to think I'm multiple so I can feel special, and I should be punished for that." Even when I decided to start consciously trying to let others front, I would shove them out of the way and decide they "weren't real, just me play-acting" if we didn't switch perfectly and completely and if I remembered too much about what they had done. (Never mind that being able to remember what we had done, after a certain point in our life, was BETTER for avoiding abuse than being amnesiac of it. We'd feel more like "I know I did that thing, but it was like I was a completely different person when I did it.")
I know on some level I was trying to save myself from potential disappointment and humiliation. From putting my faith in the others as real persons who could support and help me, because I was so afraid it would turn out not to be true. I thought it was for my own good, and the good of whoever else might be in here with me, and I also somehow framed it to myself as the epitome of cold hard logic (even though I was also doing things like constantly moving the goalposts for what constituted being "real enough"; like "well, you're not real if you can't do this... okay, well, scratch that, you're not real if you can't do THIS, ignore previous.")
Would recognizing you're plural mean you have to do something about it? Well, that's scary and requires life changes, sooooo claim you're not plural! Claim nobody's plural! Anyone who says otherwise is lying, delusional, or brainwashed, and surely that will never, ever bite you in the ass.
Yeah, this was me when we were 19-20, as surprising as it might sound now. Admittedly, part of it was having read one too many toaster stories and claims of superhuman abilities ("we never get tired/hungry/etc, because we can just switch!"), which was why we wrote Sour Grapes. (Please excuse the terrible page design. Our ex wanted us to pay them for web design, and their sense of design is firmly stuck in the 90s.)
A lot of it describes our own thought processes around these things (well, we aren't as uniformly skeptical as we made it out to sound there, but we were still in "we must convince the debunkers" mindset), and it's something we've... pretty much never seen anyone else talk about. That to us, magical toaster powers weren't wish-fulfilment, but terrifying, and "sorry, you missed the cut-off age to be special" felt like just more "you missed your chance to be great." We don't regret writing it, but all the same, looking back, focusing on issues of toaster powers and cutoff ages was... honestly, in some ways, a way to keep ourselves focussed on abstract issues rather than concrete ones about what was actually going on in our head. As was letting other systems prompt and guide us about who and what they thought was in here, instead of trying to discover it organically on our own.
-Amaranth
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Date: 2018-09-20 02:05 pm (UTC)--Hikaru
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Date: 2018-09-20 03:47 pm (UTC)Yeah, I used to be the same way, but I discovered that some people will just never be convinced. God could come down his own self and declare it, and they'd just go "nah."
Also some folks changed their minds without me ever trying to persuade them. They just lurked and watched quietly and did all the heavy lifting themselves, which is really cool. It helped me realize that no, this business is not a high school debate class.
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Date: 2018-09-20 05:16 pm (UTC)--HIkaru
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Date: 2018-09-21 08:57 am (UTC)It's a waste of energy, but I think it's also your brain trying to defend itself in some way, scrolling through bad scenarios and trying to come up with answers to them. It may never come to pass, but some kind of survival instinct feels it's better than ignoring it. I guess the challenge is always how to strike a balance between the extremes.
-Istevia
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Date: 2018-09-20 03:49 pm (UTC)Yup, been there, done that, making the comic about it, haha! I think a lot of people go through that, sadly.
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Date: 2018-09-21 12:00 am (UTC)Also, Crisses (I know I know) have this United Front boot camp thing, which is actually.... surprisingly good in that the first thing it says is to stop expecting perfection, or to have everything all at once.
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Date: 2018-09-21 07:38 pm (UTC)Who are Crisses?
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Date: 2018-09-24 08:04 pm (UTC)Here's the link for the boot camp.
Clicky
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Date: 2018-09-24 08:57 pm (UTC)Looked through the Boot Camp stuff. Heh. Wish their tactics on memory work had worked for us...
--Rogan
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Date: 2018-09-27 02:13 pm (UTC)we also think their work is interesting but they're dead wrong about a few things
--renny
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Date: 2018-09-28 01:18 am (UTC)Maybe we're just lucky we DIDN'T succeed at it for that long or something.
--Rogan