Nupoet, uhm, I haven't posted here much, but I can understand your confusion. I usually get no sort of signals from my "parts" whatsoever. I do, when in danger, dissociate; if function, but my perceptions are strange during the episodes and my memories of the episodes are distorted or sometimes missing. When I am having a hypomanic of mixed episode (I am bipolar) I am usually under a lot of physical and mental stress, and then I start fragmenting more, I suppose. There are are parts of my consciousness that argue with each other, referr to me in third person, talk to me have pasts I don't know, but I have no missing time, etc. I can go years without more than a casually awareness of some of these Parts' chraceristics being loaned to me at one time or another, as if it were a role I was stepping into.

As a child, I was bullied horribly for years. There was a lot of physical abuse from my classmates and verbal abuse from teachers, and I remember as a small chld being literally sure I would be killed at school. Was this realistic? No, probably not, but that terror and facing it every day was. You don't have to have a Sybil or David Pelzer background to have a brain that decides, "you know what, I think I can handle this much better if I just make a few adjustments here and call in the troops." It isn't all that wierd, and lots of so call ed normal people have one form or another of dissoicating in all it's lovely forms. Huggs!