Frequently Asked Questions About Multiplicity
the myriad's primer to all things multiple. woohoo.

what is multiplicity?
the easiest noun for me to use for the-state-of-being-multiple is multiplicity. it's the experience of sharing a body with other people. some people call their 'other selves' personalities, alters, parts, fragments, or any number of things. i prefer to just think of us all just as people, because that's is more respectful of everyone's selfhood. i don't experience them as parts of me; who knows, maybe i'm just a part of them.

the dsm-iv calls multiplicity "dissociative identity disorder", reflecting a viewpoint that multiples are formed when a young child dissociates away from their self. most multiples i know don't think of their "condition" as a "disorder", and many multiples don't like the "dissociative identity" part of it, either. they prefer the older, more straightforward name: multiple personality [disorder]. this isn't just bits of identity that we control floating around like soap bubbles, these are other people, every bit as real as your friends or family. we just happen to live in the same head together.

a multiple system is a group of people who share one body.

sharing a body? how do you divvy it up?
heh. well, i personally like to use the right leg, and whenever nymph is out she likes to use the left earlobe; dustin has a fondness for the left knee, and cynthia tends towards the stomach... just kidding!

one term you'll hear a lot in discussion of multiples is lost time, which is what happens when a person comes to be "in the body" or "out front" (have i exhausted my supply of quotations yet?) and can't remember what the body has been doing. this can be fuzzy or sharp, abrupt or smooth, disorienting or familiar. every system is different and a lot of systems experience different kinds of lost time. some systems are completely co-conscious, which means either that they can easily communicate with all their fellow system-members, or that they all can see each others' thoughts, or that they all remember what the body does, or similar things. some systems are the opposite, which means that they won't remember a thing from when someone else was out. sybil, the famous multiple from the sixties, had no co-consciousness, and her transitions tended to be very sharp and abrupt. she would "wake up" somewhere and not remember how she got there; it would be like no time had elapsed at all. i also know a lot of multiples who don't have much co-consciousness, but whose switches or transitions are much more blurry and smooth. sometimes a person will come out and not have the memories from when they weren't out, but who also doesn't have the memory of leaving the body. they might act completely normal, and not realize that there's a whole chunk of the conversation or flow of events that they are missing.

we, the myriad, experience a variety of was of sharing the body. sometimes more than one person will be out together and sort of share their thoughts and actions so much that it's hard to tell who is who. sometimes (actually, for a few people, all the time) people will hang back a bit but still be watching what's going on "outside". occasionally some of us will have those dramatic, disorienting switches, where we don't know what's going on or how we got there or what year it is or what state we're in. a lot of us who are used to being out front will have blurry, smooth switches, where we don't remember much that happened when we were inside, but we won't realize that we don't remember unless we're quizzed on it. it's like losing time, but then losing the fact that you lost time, as well. sometimes the person in the body will be blocked from knowing much about their identity or their name. sometimes a person will act as a "tunnel", and be a sort of shell that can be absorbed, but not evaporated, by other people coming out through it. so sharing a body can be very complicated, but is sometimes (rarely, says someone in the peanut gallery) fairly simple.

yeah, but i mean how decide who is out when? can you control it?
some multiples can control who is out all of the time. often they're the ones who are co-conscious, and they simply discuss internally who would like to be in the body and make it happen. i guess it's kind of like being underwater and swimming to the surface. (that analogy was not meant to talk about everyone's experiences, just a possible experience. many systems have another reality that they exist in when they're not in the earth-body that is nothing like being underwater.)

we can't control who is out. sometimes a person will really need to come out, like for a test at school or for doing a certain job, but they won't be able to. sometimes if we hear our name or someone talking about us (specifically, that is, not us collectively) we'll be pulled more towards the front. sometimes a trigger will pull someone out front, like seeing a spider, or a sexy commercial on tv, or being yelled at, or endless things. sometimes it seems to be just random drift, uncontrollable and inane. being involved with a particular person's obsessions often brings them more towards the surface; for instance, playing video games will often make cynthia come out in our system, or playing guitar will bring out julian or liza.

how many people are there?
obviously this will vary from system to system. there is no norm, no standard you can use to measure us by. there are systems with as few as two people, and as many as thousands (or millions.) (usually when i hear about systems with more than a thousand, it's not so internal: more like they just live in another world, and many, often most of them, have lives completely apart from the body. so you don't have to think of it as a single mind containing and keeping track of ten thousand people, or whatever. although maybe some systems see themselves that way.)

the question we get asked most often by people who find out we're multiple is, how many of you are there? we hate this question, partly because we don't have a good answer; we don't know! and partly because we're afraid of getting stigmatized or disbelieved if you're expecting, you know, five of us, and then you find out there's a hundred or two. you can look at our list of people, and know there's at least seventy-five or so. but that list is woefully incomplete. we used to be dismayed every time the number inched up, but we are who we are, and if there's a lot of us we just have to accept that as our reality. anyway a hundred isn't that many. two of our dearest friends have around fifteen hundred and five thousand people. that they know of.

what causes multiplicity?
a controversial subject, that. the mainstream psychological community maintains that multiplicity is caused only by severe childhood trauma, usually severe sexual, physical, emotional abuse, neglect, etc. their theory is that splitting or creating a new self is like dissociating on a bigger scale. dissociating is basically the same thing as spacing out, and there's lots of different ways to do it. the classic example of normal dissociation is when you're driving down the highway, on a road that you've traveled many times, and you're halfway home when you realize you can't remember driving for the past fifteen minutes; you were on auto-pilot and your mind was wandering. depersonalization is another kind of dissociation, where people actually feel like they're drifting out of their body, often up to the ceiling where they watch what's going on from a safe distance.

for us, though, the thing is that dissociation doesn't seem to have anything to do with switching. we certainly dissociate; sometimes it's like there's just nobody inhabiting the body, that everyone is inside, and sometimes it's the thing where we float up to the ceiling because it's too scary and panicky to stay in our body, and we sort of tend to wedge ourselves in the crack between the ceiling and the wall, like we're just a tiny floating invisible greasy blob. (can you tell we visualize it very specifically?) but switching for us is completely different; switching is just when one person goes away and another one comes out. or any of the other permutations we were talking about a couple of questions ago. so we don't buy it, that we just dissociated and dissociated until there were suddenly a whole bunch of us.

but for us, multiplicity was caused by abuse. i think. mostly. i can think of a million reasons why it might have happened, and probably it was a combination of lots of them. for instance, we couldn't tell anyone what was going on, so we made people who didn't know about it. or someone couldn't deal with what the adults they loved were doing to them, so someone else was created who didn't love the adults so much. or just the sheer terrifying experience is too hard to go through alone, so the mind finds solutions. with ritual abuse and programming and whatever else you want to call it, sometimes the abuser will be aware of multiplicity and will try to get the splits to happen, by calling the child a different name while doing certain things to it, or getting it really disoriented, or whatever. i don't think for me it was mostly accidental: it was more like my brain knew it needed company, so it did some sort of mental gymnastics and then there were two. maybe dissociation was involved; i don't know. i've never really been clear on this whole issue of causes in regards to me specifically. i've always known that i'm not a natural multiple, that i am so many because of abuse. but i don't really know the specifics of what the process of becoming many might actually have been. anyway, enough about trauma-causing-multiplicity theories. more about natural multiplicity.

there are a lot of multiples who were not abused. psychology doesn't believe in them, but i know a bunch, and i know it's possible. some of them say they were just born that way, some of them think that the bendy ego of a little kid is just multiple all by itself, and that "growing up" and being functional in society is just a forced integration. maybe we're all multiple to some degree, and some of us just stick together better than others. i know one system who believes that they're together because they all died in a bus crash together in a past life.

abuse is not the only thing that causes multiplicity. but it often does, and almost all the multiples we know do not remember a time when they were singular. it is how we experience our life, and wasn't usually something we chose. many multiples feel they would not be alive today if they hadn't been able to become multiple.

are all multiples on disability / as crazy as you?
no. multiples are just like other people... they can be extremely functional, extremely successful. i could go on about success stories, but they're not my stories.   i want to be clear that my experience doesn't mean that all multiples have this kind of a life.

but i think it's important, as a non-functional person, to speak up. because sometimes i feel lost in the wave of "empowered multiplicity"; i feel uncool for having been abused, for not being functional, for fitting some parts of the dsm model. this isn't always easy. if i were given the choice, i would choose to be multiple; but sometimes i wish with all my heart that i were not. when i feel out of control. when people do things that are unsafe, scary, or just inconvenient. anything that i would never do.

but if everyone were not here, then i would never be able to be as talented about all of my interests as i can seem. i would have no e who is never distracted from any interesting knowledge, especially if logic is involved. i would have no julian who is completely devoted to music. i would have no elizabeth who lives and breathes ballet. i would have no fiery and passionate jo/e to be politically active and insightful. i would have no esperanza to hang onto hope when all the rest of us have given it up. i would have no lily or morgan to play. i would have no kerry to help us count calories when we need to (find the blessing in everything, right? heh.)

i still feel crazy a lot of the time, though. i'll either get through it or i won't.

what is integration?
many things to many people. something we should not be forced into or expected to do. see the integration faq.

are you schitzophrenic?
no. (i include this question here because it's a common one, not because i'm trying to underestimate your intelligence.) schitzophrenia is a chemical brain condition that can be treated with medication, where people will have hallucinations or other difficulties perceiving "reality" (who knows? maybe what they see is what's real). i'm certainly no expert about it, so forgive me if i say things wrong. popular culture seems to have the idea that schitzophrenia means a "split personality", someone like dr. jekyll and mr. hyde, a normal person with a scary, out-of-control side. it's understandable i suppose-- confusingly, the roots for the word schitzophrenia mean "split mind".

sometimes multiples are mistakenly diagnosed schitzophrenic, usually because they hear voices (many multiples hear the conversations of people in their head as voices.) the difference between multiples and schtizophrenic people is supposed to be that multiples still have a grasp on reality; but who's to say what reality is? and it's easy to see how a skeptical doctor could slap an incorrect label on a multiple for believing in themselves -- especially if they talk about their internal landscape or their conversations with each other.

multiples can have schitzophrenia as much as any person walking down the street could have it. sometimes a system will have a single person who has this condition, or several people, just as individual people in a system can have just about any characteristics (for instance, some of us need glasses and some of us don't. most of us do, though.) we are not schitzophrenic, as far as i know, but some of us have hallucinations sometimes. however, these are almost always related to flashbacks of abuse, and don't go away with medication. we hear voices, but we can tell they're coming from inside our head. (usually.)

you keep talking about internal landscape. what is it?
many multiples have a place to go when they're not in the body. it makes sense that if you're not constantly in one world, the earth world or whatever, that you would have another place to be. some multiples see their internal reality as a construct, something they made up in their head. some multiples see their alternate reality as not internal at all, merely another place they go, an entire world as real as the one their human body is in. probably this is the part of this page where you get the most skeptical, but i repeat my refrain: who's to say what is real and not real? to me reality is in perception. each individual has their own, and there are none that are fake or lesser. i use the term internal landscape because it's convenient for me; but i do need to mention that for many there is nothing "internal" about it.

internal landscapes can be big or small. i know people that have just a couple of rooms where they all hang out, or one house, and i know people that have complex systems of worlds and worlds, with cities and deserts and forests and oceans and chasms and a million different things. an alternate universe, even. our world inside is pretty big, and we're not really sure whether it's a construct of our brain or someplace we just ended up. (for us it doesn't really matter.) some people in our system seem to have psionic powers there - they can travel great distances in an instant, for example, or control someone else's will. to me this makes sense; it's a landscape of the mind, so individual minds might have great power there.

in some systems, they have certain locations that were built by abusers. more about that in the ritual abuse faq.

for more about this, or ours in particular, go to multiple realities, a collab project for cataloguing these other worlds.

how do you all agree on stuff that affects everyone? like deciding on a lover?
well, first of all, that might not have been a great example, because different people inside can have different lovers. but like we moved to santa cruz, moved in with aeryn, enrolled in school... these are big decisions, and even bigger when you think about how many people they affect.

i know a system that has a group of people called the council, who meet to discuss these sorts of issues, to make important decisions and set policy. i admire them for having things that much in control. (once dustin in our system tried to set up a similar system. it failed.) for us, we try to talk about it with each other whenever we're thinking about something that affects us all. it's impossible to talk to every member of the system about things; we don't even know how numerous we are. but the people who hang around, who are close to the body (sometimes we call the body the front, and people who often inhabit it, fronters), we'll try to talk to each other about stuff. we have no "host", no one person who is "real", no one who has executive control.

we have a group of people who call themselves the managing committee who used to make or pretend to make major decisions. we thought they had a lot of power and were really thinking things through and being fair. we have since found out that the managing committee was basically a farce, something to reassure the fronts with. miss shirley was the only one who had any power, and she was partly controlled by a group inside called the ones of power, who are loyal to our abusers. sometimes miss shirley or the ones of power will try to make decisions for us, but we don't listen very often anymore. they still have power -- so sometimes we can't just ignore them. but they're less powerful than they used to be.

most often decisions are made in our system by whoever happens to be out, one person at a time, who goes off and does stuff, even though they know other people wouldn't agree. they'll buy a video game and throw away the receipt when they know we can barely afford groceries. or they'll cut the body when they know other people don't want to have scars. we'd love to have more of a democratic process. we're still working on that.

no host? so which one of you is real?
we are all real. there is no one person any bigger or more three-dimensional than any of the rest of us. we're all people, fully fledged. some of us spend more time at the front, so you'll be more likely to know them if you interact with us. between five and ten of us are in the body 80% or so of the time, but the five or ten people tends to shift over long amounts of time. the group of fronters are not set in stone.

there's a great pressure, especially in the psychiatric community, for multiples to act more like non-multiples. it's more comfortable for the doctors if we can be seen as a single person with this aberration living in our head. our whole society is built around the idea of selfhood as singular, and multiplicity can be really threatening to a lot of people. so in literature about multiplicity you'll often read about the host or the core. the host is supposed to be the person who is out front, the person who deals with the outside world, the person who goes to school or has the job or whatever. the core is supposed to be the "real" person or the "original" person, the only one that will be left when everyone integrates, the "real" self who created everybody else. sometimes the host and the core are assumed to be the same person; sometimes the core is a baby or child self who never comes out.

some systems really do have hosts or cores; but not all and i don't think even the majority do. it's damaging for people to try to put us into these boxes. we're all just people.

a really cool young person in one system (lettuce of the consortium) said this to their therapist: "i ate the core. seeds and all."

you said that different ones of you have different lovers? how does that work?
i'll probably write another faq about polyamory and multiplicity. but the subject deserves a mention here.

i've always been amazed at multiples who manage to be monogamous, choosing one significant other that everyone in the system is supposed to be loyal to and satisfied with. our system could never do that. i could never imagine find one single person that everyone could agree on. luckily, we came across polyamory and tried to implement it in our life before we even knew we were multiple. polyamory means loving many, and it's the practice of responsibly loving and being in romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. in some ways polyamory is tough; to do it with the smallest possible amount of hurt feelings, a huge amount of communication is necessary. some people aren't capable of it, don't seem to be built that way. one of our exes had a six-month relationship with us before she decided she couldn't be anybody's second girlfriend, she needed to break up with us. it seems to be another facet of sexual identity.

polyamory is not the same thing as different people in a system having different lovers, but the two practices work well together. polyamory is a way for one single person to have more than one relationship. but because that negotiation and communication process is set up, it's easier for different people in a system to talk about which relationships are theirs and the nature of those relationships. our system has two significant others that we feel attached to as a whole, dani and aeryn. (both of whom are multiple systems.) there's two more people that our system feels in love with as a general thing but doesn't get to spend time with, becuase of distance, the chimera and polly, also both multiple. and within those systems, there are specific people that have specific relationships with specific people in our system. kerry in our system is the girlfriend of the boy aron in the paradox collective (also known as aeryn for convenience's sake.) jo/e in our system and rose in dani's system have a thing going on. theoretically there could be an outside body that just one person in our system is dating. (we just don't know that many non-multiples.) kerry and aron started dating long before the myriad (our system, remember) started dating the paradox collective. i'm not quite sure how to define it when i say that our systems are dating. basically it's just that so many people in each system are involved with each other that there exists some sort of overarching relationship. aeryn (i should say aron, really) sometimes has sex with people that they don't have specific individual relationships with, and it's because our two systems are just so intertwined that we say the whole systems are dating. i'm not being as articulate as i'd like to be. but it's a big subject.

people within a system can also date each other. just like any two people can date. oh, and when different people in a system don't have to all share a significant other, there's less conflict between the people who have differing sexual orientations and identities. the lesbians can go find a girl, and the straight boys can find a different girl, and the straight girls can have their boyfriend, the submissives their master, etc.

what's empowered multiplicity?
there's a big community online of multiples who don't see multiplicity as a disorder, who don't think that multiplicity is necessarily caused by abuse, who emphasize that multiples can be perfectly functional, and who see people in a system more as regular individuals than as "parts", "personalities", or "alters". this community has somehow gotten the tagline of empowered multiplicity. one of the most-recognized sites about this is darkpersonalities.com, but there are many many other excellent sites with information about this community.

i don't like the fact that there tends to be a perceived dichotomy between the survivor community of multiples and the empowered community. survivors can be empowered, even ones that need to be on mailing lists that are protected from triggering material. i don't see myself as belonging to either side of the fence, and i don't really see that there is a fence. it's important for multiples to recognize that we are diverse, that we don't have to fit into the little boxes that psychology would place us in. it's important for multiples not to tell other multiples how they have to be.

i think that there's not two different camps anymore as much as there used to be, and that the empowered multiple community has done a lot of work at getting their stories out there and included with the more traditional stories. multiples are able to be who they are with less apology than in previous years. but we still have a long way to go.

do people within a system ever die?
yes, but with every system the process can be different. and not every system ever has deaths. in some systems, some of the dead walk as ghosts, but can't interact with the world in the same way they used to. in some systems, when a person dies they are gone, and no longer exist inside or come out. as far as i can tell, death is permanent in our system. in the past year, two people have been killed by the ones of power and one (our then-front, matt) killed himself. none of them have ever come back.

if you have a question about multiplicity that this page didn't address, please email me!