I stayed away to give someone else a chance, but since no-one else has...

They told us or T. Our first hosty one learned about the first two alters that presented in therapy from T, and then they introduced themselves to hosty one (co-consciously). Later, with ex long term t we discovered more through the process of therapy and trauma memory recovery. One group of alts was / is happy to be known by name (insist on it). The trauma based alters have many issues around being known and do not like to reveal their names.

CassyO, the way I think of numbers of alters is that 'it is what it is' - it needed to be what it needed to be. We personally had many, many fragmented self-bits. We had years of severe ongoing abuse for all but a snippet of childhood and our system seemed to deal with it by sealing the traumas off in tiny fragmented self-bits. Sometimes self-bits dealt with similar traumas over time, and sometimes new ones were created for particular aspects of a single incident. I don't know how or why, it just is.
I describe our fragmented self-bits as 'containers for snippets of overwhelming experience / emotions' rather than 'personality states' or 'alters'. We have vastly fewer actual developed alters that have functioned independently over time.

Question:
Out of all the Ts you may have seen, how many do you think were competent (or at least willing to learn) about working with clients with dissociative disorders?