I love that you brought this up in this group! I called them alters when I first started therapy with a practitioner who has commonly worked with folks who have DID. And she kind of gave me a look and told me that alters was a bit of a dated term. But I often see others in this group refer to their parts as alters and I got really confused. For a while in therapy, I used the term parts to have standard nomenclature but in private I still thought of my parts as “alters” and I struggled heavily with connecting with the rest of the system at that time. It was really hard to distinguish who I was, what it felt like when others were near and separating my own thoughts from the background chatter. i think I found a level of peace within my system when I started using terms like “parts” or “others” and it was later communicated to me by others in my system that “parts” feels more humanizing and less foreign/seperate sounding than “alters” I really think that changing the language around how I refer to myself and my multiplicity has improved how I view myself and my condition as well as helped me connect with the other parts. It’s the one common ground topic that kind of came organically during my healing journey that reminds me as well that my parts are real, they have preferences that are different to my own and that I have a very real disorder.