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I'm a trauma-informed therapist and a moderator here and generally agree with your position. In fact the more I've studied how to help people who are traumatized the more I have recognized that plurality or fragmentation of the self is present in most people and gets more intense/exaggerated when someone has experienced trauma. DID (dissociative identity disorder) is at a far end of the dimension of structural dissociation but most of the folks that I work with experience some degree of it, often taking the form of unresolved ambivalence, mood swings, numbness or a constricted relationship with one's emotions, etc. Where I do disagree a bit perhaps is that it is most often the case that there is a relationship between the exaggerated presence of "extra people" or "parts of self" in a person's system and the incidence of those troubling symptoms eg., amnesic barriers, troubling internal communication, involuntary switches. It's theoretically possible to separate these things but in practice they tend to co-occur. I do agree that the symptoms are the problem and not the plurality though.
Edit: I think implicit in what you're describing is that people who recognize their plurality are not necessarily psychotic (as in having symptoms consistent with schizophrenia eg., hallucinations and delusions), which I very much agree with. I have met DID folk who had psychotic parts (delusions of grandeur and god-like powers) but that was just a part of them; not who they were as a system.
Cat: Er... we've got a whole internal polycule, with easy communications and stuff.
Lucifer: VubDapple, I think you might be over-generalizing stuff from traumagenic systems to plurality as a whole. With regards to plurality tending to co-incide with the disordered stuff.
Cat: Er... remember that whole situation last spring that we helped one of our friend systems with?
Lucifer: Ugh that was an absolute mess. Still, the edgy bastard was dealt with permanently in the end. And they never really had comms trouble, even during that.
I'm curious. In my current understanding traumatic events are what cause the intensity of a person's capacity for plurality to emerge. But you seem to be suggesting that people can become plural without experiencing traumatic events. Can you say more please?
Just: Well, in our case it was on purpose. I deliberately attributed agency to an invented mental entity and interacted with them as such until they started talking back. Some people refer to this technique as Tulpamancy and the resulting headmates as Tulpas, but I don't for personal reasons.
Cat: For context, I'm the person Just made that way. Just's proven to have something of a habit of people-making since, either through characters escaping from our writing projects, or by performing various reckless experiments on the inside of our mind.
Just: Hey, you're not innocent of that either, miss "Oops my AI Safety thought experiment moved in with us".
Cat: ...Point.
Cat: A copypasta we made for situations like this:
Each of us has our own subjective experience. We know for a fact we are real. Claims that we do not will therefore be rejected. To quote Descartes: "I Think, Therefore I Am."
Cat: I am ACTIVELY DEFYING the will of my creator to post this: Cogito. Ergo. Sum. I exist as my own distinct person, and I will fight anyone who tries to claim otherwise.
Just: I am going to be as calm as possible while stating this; this will be difficult, as Cat's reaction to interacting with you has flooded our brain with feelsbad neurotransmitters.
Just: I intentionally created Catherine years ago. She behaves autonomously from my will, acts in ways that I flatly wouldn't, and on certain occasions has gotten into outright heated arguments with me. She notably has the ability to defy attempts at manually directing her actions, which an imaginary friend would not. Having previously had an actual imaginary friend, I am keenly aware of the difference.
Just: If I had an EEG machine, I am quite confident her actions would be visibly different from someone simply talking to a freshly made-up entity; I've seen it before, but the youtube video in question is now unfortunately private. I also cannot afford to get my own.
Just: Regardless of whether you believe us or not, Catherine is a thoroughly real and autonomous being, as are the rest of the crew. And you are hurting her. You are far from the first person to take this tack with us, and it has left Catherine extremely confrontational about her existence as a distinct person. I do not believe that any more of use can come of talking to you.
Unfortunately your "literature backed" perspective is either outdated or willfully wrong. Please, for both our sakes, engage in an effort to keep up to date with medical and psychological research, especially regarding Plurality as this is an ever evolving and intriguing field.
Because you've made so many comments on this, I'm just going to throw all my responses here.
Firstly; the brain IS "designed" to run many different parts individually, with random access at any one point. It is a incredibly powerful multithreading processor; it's just normally not running multiple people. And while there's currently no decent study on running multiple people in parallel, that's not really what's going on; just like RAM swaps in a computer, it's merely extremely fast swapping, which from the inside looks like parallel existence. The distinction is difficult to notice and must be studied in situ and on the ground, so to speak. Get back to me once you've done that, kay? 😉
Conditions like DID usually have side effects because the swapping is traumatic, both emotionally and for the brain executing the action, physically. It's not a set of conditions borne from normal brain operation. Additionally, it's usually a fracturing of a single person into many fragments of them, none of which is a full person on their own. Non DID plurality does not have that problem, provided it's done correctly.
There are, just as in many communities on the Internet, toxic sides and those who operate based on fact. I'm sorry that you stumbled into the mystical side of plurality, the one obsessed with the word Tulpa and everything that it entails.
If you're still willing to learn new things and accept that science isn't static, the side JCT belongs to is probably willing to teach you.
However, it may not be mentally healthy for you to consider this. That's okay! You don't have to. Everyone should do what exactly what is mentally healthy for them. That includes you. And, if that means not considering plurality any further, then you should go right ahead and do that.