One Big Family Inside

We are a family of 13, there are 3 asleep and so there are 10 of us right now. So the host is me, Alice, the core is Jessica (asleep), two co-hosts, Poppy and Jacqui are both asleep, then the persecutor Louise, and five protectors, Dorothy, Skylar, Amber, Anne and Estella. Then the child alters, including Vissenta, Lucia and Jasmine.

What do you think?

your question......What do you think?

I think its fantastic that you know so much about your inside family even though you have psychogenic amnesia. me and my alters....

I am an adult woman with 4 children and married to a wonderful woman. I am integrated now but still have dissociative disorders and problem. I had dissociative amnesia (your term psychogenic amnesia) too with my DID. and I knew hardly anything about my system of alters (your word family) until after all my alters integrated. I had about 20 alters but only had limited co consciousness with 2 or three. the rest I had no co consciousness (awareness of their existence and other things too) now that I and my alters are integrated into one whole person again I am everything that they were, including their memories, which means I now know everything that they knew about their selves. but before this very little.

Have you been meeting them and getting to know them over recent months? Do you have an inner world that you all live in?

Is the persecutor modeled after an outside person? How has it been going, dealing with her?

Thank you for sharing this with me. I had complete amnesia and since last year, I had been integrating like you and I came out of amnesia just last year and so now I understand more about my system that it was in response to trauma, as a survival strategy and dissociation from the pain. Much of the traumatic memories were retrieved and now I am aware of these alters, that really help me. I am so glad that you are integrated and has a wonderful family and life.

I have been getting to know them a lot more these days, I think especially my amnesic blockage has been broken and now I have more understanding of the traumatic memories that I have been through. I rarely have amnesic effect now due to trauma, but have that co-consciousness of different identities that we have. Yes! We have a safe hiding place, where we would escape to, as what we call it pseudo-hallucination, so the traumatised ones can hide in, when we cannot find it anywhere else in this world as safe nor people.

My therapist told me that the persecutor is mean, but in a way it has a job to do. I have no idea what it means in my case. I have heard about a persecutor is protecting us as well, but I could not understand this so far? Yes, I do feel that the persecutor is modelled after multiple perpetrators or abusers from the outside in the past. We don't like Louise, the persecutor, because she is verbally and physically abusive and does not let us feel anything good, or else she would punish us. She says that we are unlovable and all that.

Nice to meet the system

Hi and welcome, nice to knows ya’ll. You are doing the integration, how nice.

May I ask how old is the body? We’re 50....tires are kinda worn.

Our “amnesia” is the separation between parts....but we chit chat, fight, help, edify, tear down.....all the crap a disfunctional family does. I’m glad that you are a happy family....now we know that it’s possible.

Thank you for sharing this. We are in a 22 year old body. Our family is not harmonious sometimes though, we do fight also, with the persecutor part especially. Dissociative identities really help us to separate the pain from trauma.

we think some of them have really beautiful names

"estella" is lovely. we used to know an outside person called estella.

as for calling yourselves a family, well, if that works for you, that's great.

people have refered to us as family and friends, but, even though we see what they mean, we get very serious about our did and our insiders.

we're here for a reason, and we're not really family if that makes sense

Why you think your insiders together are not a family together?

because when I think of the term family, I think of a lot of close people getting along and looking out for each other.

our system arn't really like that. constantly arguing and fighting

I don’t see our insiders as family because family suucks...at least ours did. We are more like shipmates...a captain and a crew with everyone a job to do. Of course more of a futuristic ship’s tale and accompaniment due to our intellectual prowess dispersed amongst the crew with higher degrees of learning and experience, I might add.

The captain’s hat is passed from situation to situation at a moments notice. We vote and confer on life leanings, like how we as an embodied “singleton” would outwardly live life to the other human habitants eyes of this world to somewhat appear “normal”, out of notice, sane to the unsuspecting eye, a system hidden within a system,....but of course every crew member has their own personal preference, but we must adhere to the dress code and code of conduct the best that we can unless voted on in council for some personal embellishment.

Of course we have our emotional rogue parts that carry us off on a living life tangent for awhile a ways before we can enact emergency ship recovery protocol and regain control of this ship/body/life cleaning up the wreckage caused by said part.

To appear normal, we must stay in control and not let the emotional parts gain control of this ship: must stay vigilant and aware lest we find ourself somewhere at someplace at sometime unexpectedly: this proves to be most dangerous, embarrassing, bewildered, unexplainable, out of character and sorts, and very expensive.

Since this a ship, the littles stay in the nursery and seldom ever front- they do get to voice their wants under heavy adult scrutiny and supervision.

Is this a 100% working system to stay unnoticed and undetected? I wish. We have drawn a plenty of sideways looks, glances, giggles, stares, questions, laughs, finger pointing.....but we always seem to manage to keep on going by burying the moment and moving on.

always changing 2,

I think that's a good way to see a system

like shipmates