Thank you for this thread. I'm not sure I understand the core issue of pretending, but I do understand what you say about alters taking control as needed. I'm still not sure where pretending plays any kind of role since it's my understanding that d i d is hidden from others by design.

My understanding is that everyone's job is to keep things running smoothly on the outside, even though that does not always happen in my case with lot of current stress and triggers due to increased family interactions. So when there's this kind of stress, I keep outside contact to a minimum. I wouldn't call any of this pretending, though, and I still struggle to understand what that means, unless it has to do with a greater ability to control who is out? Or the degree of co-consciousness, as someone pointed out? If that's the case, I still don't get it, because I think I have a good degree of co-consciousness, although things are spotty sometimes.

My therapist is the only real life person I have to talk to about this and she says no one is likely at all to notice my switching. She can see it because of the years I've been seeing her and she's gotten to recognize different ones. So the only pretending going on with people in the outside world is just an omission of a diagnostic label. To others, I might appear moody or quirky, but that's it.

If everyone in my life were to be in the same room, there would be definite groups of outside people who have absolutely nothing in common with each other--like, literally, nothing. That tells me that whichever of us needs to be out at a given time is able to do that (again, unless there is a lot of stress, in which case...chaos and public meltdown). But no one is pretending to be another that I am aware of. Everyone uses the same name on the outside, which is not the birth name, but a functional one taken when the break from family was finally made at 21. Again, though, I don't see that as pretending when that name is used, but more a function of d i d to keep hidden.