Rogan/Mori: So, way back in the tumblr days, I would see this multi urban legend that you could only become multi if you'd been traumatized before the age of... well, the exact age would change depending on legend iteration, apparently nine was the magic number I saw in 2011, but I feel like seven was another. I could not for the life of me figure out where this stupid idea CAME from, and it drove me crazy!

Well, surprise, but while digging around doing etymological research (i.e., digging in Ralph Allison's published papers), I might've found a source of the urban legend: Allison's "Critical Issues: MPD & DID Should Be Used For Two Separate Groups of Dissociators" CANDID (California News of Dissociation and Identity Disorder), 3(3):4, 1995. (And apparently I even knew about this back in 2011 when I first blogged about this stupid urban legend, but I didn't dig deeper or put two and two together.) This paper is worth discussing, just because... well, it's crackpot as hell, and a nice example of why you shouldn't believe everything a therapist tells you, no matter how famous or (once) well-respected they are (or were).

( This started as us reading a stupid paper about this guy's cracked ideas, only for us to get sucked into pointing at it as a stellar example of why therapists should not be treated like gods. )

Mori: Okay guys. I'm gonna tell you about some old dead Freudian lawyer's mouth-breathing fanfic and I'm gonna make him all y'all's problem now. (Told ya we wouldn't quit doing stupid info-dumps about many-selved slapfights of yore.)

( The woman who married an angel, and the Freudian who married his theories. )

"System" in the plural slang sense is used as a stand-alone noun (or, less often in my circles, in the specific phrasing, "a multiple system" or "plural system"). People will ask us, "are you a system?" or "have you heard about systems?" In this context, a "system" roughly describes the gestalt entity that is formed by the mix of a plural's vessel, internal populace, headspace, and other internal forces at work.

So far, here is my timeline for the use of "system" in a plural context.

( EDIT AND UPDATE: Plurals have been using it since 1990, and even the most parsimonious estimate shows it was used by non-MPD plurals by 1992. )

This one was 98% done right before the move.  Now it's finally done!  Please see glossary of terms for explanation of various words. ^_^

( This started as just a minor note in a greater article about the LJ soulbonding community, but it got WEEEEEEEIRD. )

Your Princess is in Another Headspace
Series: Essay
Summary: the pitfalls of plurals seeking bookend headmates in other plurals--for example, the Princess Peach to their Mario. "Imagine book-ended twins.  Outwardly different, but joined in every way possible at all times..." Crane and Naifeh, How Loathsome, pg. 73
Word Count: 3700
Notes: This was the unequivocal winner of the Patreon story poll this month! A glossary of terms is here; cited sources are at bottom. This is part of a series on plural social anti-patterns, and it’s inspired by conversations we had with (among others) Amorpha, Veterans, Rhymers, and Plures.


If you hang in certain multi circles long enough, you may hear warnings against systems who claim to have matching headmates to yours, or who claim your headmates travel into their own system. In other words, if you have Mario as a headmate, this other plural would claim that he visits their own headspace, or that they have Princess Peach or Luigi, or both or more. (Due to the clunkiness of the terminology, for the sake of convenience, I’m going to hereafter label this phenomenon “your princess is in another headspace” and conversely, the matching or shared headmates as “bookend headmates”; see endnote)

But a blanket beware doesn’t explain much. Why is this bad? Are there times where it’s not bad, and if so, how can you tell the difference? Why and how does it happen?

Let’s talk about it.

( Originally I was going to call them headmate princesses, but that just seemed misleading. )

( Citations )
( Endnote )

Hey guys, Sylvans System wrote a big critique on the book the Haunted Self, by Van Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele!  I haven't had a chance to read the book yet (and everything I've heard says that I will find it a miserable slog), but if you're curious about it and how it frames medical multiplicity, might be worth a read!

Hi guys! While digging around for info for the plural history wiki, I discovered a surprising bit about how the term "median" was coined, and what it was used for! It's intertwined with the history of a plural group called Pavilion Hall--ostensibly it was a plural activist group, but it never really did anything. <_< Zyfron and us used to make jokes about it.

That was about ten years ago, but a little while ago, I found out that Pavilion Hall hadn't done much of ANYTHING after its first six months in existence... back in 2002! And even those first six months didn't really get a lot done! It was like a Potemkin activist group! It was so weird!

The only thing Pavilion Hall ever seemed to achieve wasn't activism at all; it was coining the term "median," and even that was kind of mean and gross! So I thought this was a weird bit of plural history trivia worth talking about!( Let's goooooo! Oh gosh this is long. )

Okay, the earliest citation I can personally find for the whole "'multiple' is a DID-only word and everyone else is appropriating" myth is August 7, 2014, from an ask I got on tumblr from someone going by not-your-fucking-pet.  The original messages appear to have long since been deleted, so I don't know if it came from a named user or an Anon.

So the myth is longer lived than I thought, but still brand spanking new.  And I think it was the first time I encountered it at all, since I seem kinda mystified in the answer, rather than, "GOD THIS AGAIN."

--Rogan

Okay, there’s this idea I’ve seen around tumblr, so let’s get this out of the way: ‘multiple’ is not a word you can appropriate from people with DID/MPD/DDNOS.

( Read more... )