I realized the other day another thing that bugs me about 'traditional' psych terms for multiplicity. It's because of the way they use possessive terms, talking about stuff like 'my alters.' (We never really felt the word 'alter' fits us because it implies that these are all supposed to be alternate to one person, and in our case, I don't know who we'd be alternate to except each other. It's more the 'my' part that bugs me. Okay, so even maybe accepting that the person saying it -does- have one original or central person, even if the others -did- split off from them, how are they 'yours'? They're not your property. They are their own people, even if they happen to share a body with you. I sometimes say "my system" in the sense that it's a group I belong to, but that's sort of a different thing entirely. Just because I came here later than some of the others, just because I haven't spent as much time up front as some of them, does not make me 'theirs.' They don't own me, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be just lumped into a group as part of 'my insiders' or whatever. (On a similar note, that term never made very much sense for us because it seems to imply we can't come up front and spend time in the body.) It seems that the real underlying idea for a lot of systems where the 'host' talks about their alters doing this and that is that the others shouldn't exist at -all-, that the fact that they're here at all really squicks them out. There also seems to be an expectation on the part of the host (or the person who thinks he or she is) that the others can't be expected to control themselves, behave rationally, be stable, etc. Because if any of them actually -are-, I guess, if they show themselves to be more capable of handling things, they take it as a threat. But I guess this kind of goes along with the assumption that the others aren't people, just broken pieces, and as such, can't be expected to act reasonably. I also get annoyed at the assumption in a lot of multiple communities that only the 'host' is expected to be the one posting, that others can't join in-- I've seen several places with restrictions on 'whether alters can post.' You know what I seriously think this is for? It's because so many of the people in those places are squicked out by being multiple that they get really uncomfortable at people demonstrating their plurality without remorse. We have some friends who were once told to 'not switch' in a chatroom. But frankly, we've been a lot better off since Azu was able to relax and let other people take over things for her and not try to do everything alone. Bwah. People are silly. Back |