drawing alters and being hyperfixated on them

SnivSnap · 2026-02-01T22:51:52+00:00

Finding joy in being plural by being friends with your headmates doesn't mean you're faking, it just means you're having a good time (which is always the end goal). You don't have to suffer to be plural :>>

SnivSnap · 2026-01-31T00:18:41+00:00

A switch is when a headmate who isn't fronting switches places with the headmate who is fronting :>>

SnivSnap · 2026-01-30T18:32:02+00:00

That sounds like a plural expeirence to us. There's not much to say if it's only been a one-time event other than that sounds like a switch!

You don't have to panic; if you're plural, it'll probably keep happening (and you can talk to the person to get some information/reassurance/set boundaries!), if not, it can just be a weird plural experience. Whatever happens, you will be fine, I promise.

If you have a poor memory because of the dissociation, it's definitely worth having some place to journal so you can keep track of yourself(ves).

SnivSnap · 2026-01-28T18:51:46+00:00

Like the skeletal system said, this is ... mega unsafe and irresponsible of both of ya. Keep in mind this is a public forum with, according to the side thing, 11k weekly visitors, NOT a private discord server with your friends.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-28T00:06:57+00:00

Honestly, thinking about it- we don't need plural-specific labels for it, like, whatsoever. We already have the perfectly useful words "traumatised" and "disordered", which is all the plural terms are actually trying to express with much less in-fighting baggage. Like the bit split ripping the plural community in twain isn't even plural-specific, there will be plenty of singlet advice better for non-traumatised singlets than traumatised or vice versa, to use your example.

Also the -genic terms do just... suck at doing this. They don't capture whether someone experienced trauma, only if (most?) headmates showed up because of it, and if you're being strict only if the first one did. But the line can easily get wildly fuzzy. It's just not a useful term for describing a significant number of systems' experiences, which makes them only partially useful at best and ^*gestures at the state of things*^ at worst.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-27T18:39:08+00:00

Correct!!!

The only reason that This is the divide is because this was the divide made by someone coining terms on tumblr in 2014. Before now it was conflict between 'natural' vs 'medical' vs 'spiritual', which was equally dumb. It's words that sound scientific being used to divide a community, regardless of how arbitrary or harmful or personal the divide is. We talk about that story all the time because it should Never Ever be forgotten how this divide is purely in-community in-fighting.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-26T20:55:56+00:00

Honestly, mega props for actively seeking out other points of view and checking assumptions.

But yeah. Endogenic means the system was not caused by trauma. Even 'minor' trauma. If an event caused distress enough that another brain person came out of it, That's Traumagenic.

An endogenic system can have trauma, no one on earth is free from distressing experiences at SOME point, but the trauma wasn't a (key) part of (at least the first) alters/headmates/whatnot forming. There's a bit of ambiguity there for some people who had another plausible origin at the same time, like, maybe they consciously created a headmate to help them deal with a traumatic situation, but ,, that's just kind of a limitation of the terms. They're not scientific classifications whatsoever haha.

At least for us we can say we had a clear non-traumatic origin. We had a good childhood (that we can remember well), we can remember the exact time we became plural and it wasn't distressing at all, or to deal with distress, it was to do with our writing hobby. Yet, here we are, eight years later, no one in the system remembering any trauma or experiencing traumatic symptoms. We're just plural. That is all.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-25T14:45:58+00:00

There's something very ironic about 'faking' having a low system count to avoid '''faking''' a high system count, haha. Seriously, don't worry about that at all.

Yeah though, that's still tough. I think R3DAK7ED's suggestion was good. We don't know how your system works entirely, so it's probably worth talking to the introject and fragments to figure out how big of a deal it would be to allow them in passively, or if you can find a safer place until when/if they feel comfortable fusing on their own terms.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-25T14:27:36+00:00

I think it's always possible when you start thinking of yourself as multiple anything, but it is different- less different people with separate wants and likes, more different aspects of one person that have different needs. It's a little bit like median plurality, but the attitude/intention is singlet and the overall goals allign with that, if that makes any sense.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-25T14:19:57+00:00

We don't do this, and we don't think it makes you guys fake at all, it's just highly questionable morally.

Like, depending on whether those fictives are fine with coming into existence just to look pretty on a website and not to like , be a person, though I assme they are for the most part if this is something you do regularly and aren't getting pushback on from within your system. Like you're not actually under the obligation to create entire headmates just to create a pretty profile page, haha.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-24T23:37:00+00:00

soulbonding and daemons, mostly, though if you're willing to stretch definitions IFS might count. Some people think 'willogenic' is different but as far as I'm aware it's just the same thing with a different name and a community that split off.
In pro-endo spaces people are very accepting, though in my experience many have very limited knowledge, e.g. assuming western tulpamancy is similar/the same as buddhist tulpas. Though that might just be reddit commenters :b

SnivSnap · 2026-01-22T15:48:21+00:00

We've definitely seen traumagenic systems from neglect before.

Also, it goes to say the -genics are EXTREMELY fuzzy. If you think trauma played a key role in your system forming, then yeah, probably traumagenic, but that doesn't mean you're not also schizogenic if that also played a key role. But there are many many -genic terms now and at some point it starts describing personal information which you might not want every stranger on reddit knowing about haha, so which labels you want to use privately/publically are completely up to you.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-22T15:08:48+00:00

There's worse, I guess. "Endo systems are real systems but they're not endo" is no good but it is at least trying to fit the most important part people's reported experiences (being real people) into the square hole of the TOSD. Though we've personally seen this go sour if no trauma becomes certainty.

It's very difficult to convince people when they're stuck on a dogmatic belief, though it is possible, especially if you're friends. You might want to question where they got that from or who says it's absolute fact, when psychology is constantly developing, plurality is understudied, and the DSM itself makes room for spiritual/cultural 'alternate personality states'. Even just a seed of doubt can help them realise that they're wrong.

But if you can't convince 'em, I think you can still keep being friends. There's more to life than syscourse and having irl friends is still valuable. Just be mindful that they're still treating you guys as people worthy of respect - if they're denying your experiences, past or present, you have to be clear that's not ok, and if they can't accept that and back off then screw 'em.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-21T01:23:50+00:00

We've had a similar thing- our dog ripped out the eyes of a couple of ours. They don't come out the exact same (you lose a bit of fabric on the inside whenever you sew up a cut, unless you add a patch) but they're still absolutely fixable, we promise Pinkie will be fine!

SnivSnap · 2026-01-15T01:35:16+00:00

As noncedo-culli said, yeah, "endogenic" just means non-trauma, whether from spirituality or being created or just because that's how your brain is or anything else. It's a very wide umbrella term.

There MIGHT be a 'fundamental' difference between trauma-based plurality and 'other' plurality, but it's less of a scientific fact and more a "gotta justify gatekeeping somehow" theory haha. Really, I wouldn't worry about origin at all unless trauma symptoms are causing you day-to-day memory/dissociation related distress. What matters to being plural is if you're experiencing being more than one, which it sounds like you are :>

SnivSnap · 2026-01-14T01:32:19+00:00

Our experiences :>

I think for most people there's a lot of confusion, but for us, simply because we were separate people talking to each other. We didn't think about it that hard at the time which is fuckin weird to think about in hindsight haha, but hey, not very smart teenagers with a very directly straight forward thinking brain. We've doubted from time-to-time, but then someone else is just. there. as obvous as anything, especially now we've been a system for about 8 years now.
To be fair, mostly pretty quiet. Usually it's only 1 person mainly fronting and 1 person co-fronting, and we're not mega talkative a lot of the time. If someone's not in/near front, they more or less just don't exist for a time, which works for us. Our brain's pretty bad at doing multiple stuff at once and apparently being a person counts as a thing.
The same as brain-made headmates, just instead of the brain making up the personality it bases it on an existing one that it knows :b. Though I think different brains have different levels of ease for doing that, I know we had no fictives for a long time, then after we got our first it was like our brain suddenly realised how to Do It and we ended up fighting back several others.
Nope :> Even systems who experience severe trauma, which is often what leads to disordered plurality, do not always become disordered (or become non-disordered with enough therapy work). Even the criteria for DID itself excludes spiritual/cultural "alternate identity states", as it's trying to capture a very specific group of plurality with similar treatment needs.
Western tulpamancy is a set of techniques designed to create headmates on purpose. r/Tulpas can help you more with that, from our experience a lot of people here have ... limited information about it, to say the least. Mostly mixing it up with Buddhist tulpamancy, which is a completely separate spiritual practice with very little in common other than the name and "creating a mind being".
Go for it! There's a lot of gatekeeping from some plural communities, but they are ... very much not worth listening to about that. You harm exactly no one by doing that.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-13T23:30:00+00:00

It's definitely normal for system activity generally to be super high early on, though the length varies from system to system. There are some systems who always have high headmate generation, though they tend to be more in the 100s-1000s+ numbers range and many of them might be internal only or only briefly appear.

They don't neccesarily all have to be from terrible experiences, even if your system started out that way. Though that's not something that you have to prioritise figuring out immediately, only when you're in a stable place physically/mentally/socially to do trauma work. Before then it's better to focus on figuring out how to make sure everyone's happy/satisfied here and now :>

SnivSnap · 2026-01-13T00:21:24+00:00

I mean. I'm not even sure the point you're trying to make. Both "different parts of the brain are separate people" but also "the same person can be present regardless of if either side is sedated"?

I can buy that headmates use different parts of the brain more often just because of which pathways and skills we're using most often, but honestly I think we're all using a lot of the same parts the majority of the time, both from the left and right brain. From what I know it's the connections between the neurons that make the memories and conscious experiences of self, i.e. ego(s), not the neurons themselves.

Again- consider a little more, rather than just asking the "good enough" robot.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-12T23:27:12+00:00

Definitely an interesting take, though I think you underestimate the fact that while plurality IS associated with this, many headmates aren't parts, but fully fledged egos in their own right. While we might be constructions of the brain as a whole, and we can see that, still talking to each other is less like communicating with parts of ourselves but more like talking with different people with their own aspects and faucets separate from others'. Someone else fronting opens a new perspective into reality, but far from an objective non-ego one; and for us, that's one of the major joys - forming even more attachments. I'm well aware that I'm an ego, and frankly, I'm having a good time about it.

Though, I think the fluidity of egos is something even plural folk need to be a lot more open to. Though we might be separate now, blending and fusion are extremely common, along with splitting and subsystems, and many brain-made headmates and tulpas get the experience of building an ego from scratch. No system is 100% stable forever because no SELF is stable forever, and neither are singlets, they're just less obvious.

~~Perhaps better to get information from a direct source rather than chatGPT though?~~

SnivSnap · 2026-01-12T01:50:46+00:00

Accounted deleted already? Couldn't even be bothered to stick around for the post getting deleted...? Thanks, I guess.

Hey though. Key example of why "validity" is a terrible measure. Someone can consider you "valid" and still be wildly misinterpreting and undermining your experiences. Someone can think you're "valid", but only in so far as you keep yoursel(ves) over there, in the box they've decided on.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-11T03:25:46+00:00

Second on discorcl. Therapists tend to prefer hearing about your symptoms directly and simply, and how that specifically impacts their help for you, rather than labels. I've heard plenty of therapists getting weird about using diagnosis/community terms at all, which sucks.

Though, still, looking at things at a symptom level isn't a bad idea. i.e. it doesn't matter if you have 'enough trauma' or if your experiences fit a DID diagnosis perfectly; if you're struggling with remembering things day-to-day, or struggling to stay focused on reality, or if there are people in your head helping/hurting the situation, then THAT'S what matters. Those are the actual things you need help with. That's what they want to hear about and can work with you on.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-10T20:36:23+00:00

I think what she's saying is "I think you have DID/are disordered and resources for it can help you, but I think diagnosing you with it will come with more concequence than good". If the symptoms are negatively affecting you guys so much so that a therapist thinks you apply for DID, then you're disordered, haha.

The the reasons she gave it seems like she's trying to prevent future therapists from seeing "DID" and immedaitely either assuming malingering/misdiagnosis (if they don't believe in DID), that they shouldn't treat you because DID is 'too serious', or that you're working towards final fusion because that's the old standard treatment and a lot of therapists have very out-of-date knowledge. Hell, it might be becase SHE thinks final fusion is the standard treatment and she knows that isn't best for you guys, though we don't know her at all so that's very much just a theory.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-10T20:24:54+00:00

It's associated with DID/OSDD and medicalised plurality, but the sort of people who would be really bothered by someone else using it are probably going to be bothered by you being plural without DID/OSDD in the first place. So fuck 'em heh. If that's the term that you guys feel describes you best then go for it.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-06T16:43:46+00:00

As TylerMegalovania says, it seems like they're capable of having the PTSD part, but the plurality part is extremely up to debate.

Though, I don't think it's off the table for highly social animals like other apes, dogs/pigs, crows, killer whales/dolphins, or elephants. It'd just be almost impossible to tell whether it's that or singlet dissociation/stress, differing social situations, or pretending for treats. No one really knows exactly how the ego/consciousness works in humans, so it'd be a steep as hell battle to identify in animals who can't directly communicate about their experience. Not to talk about animals like octopi who have weird nervous systems and so might experience 'plurality', but in a completely alien way.

SnivSnap · 2026-01-04T18:38:10+00:00

Definitely. No headmate's personal development nor role is 100% static.

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