Headmates/Plurality -

[The Maxx]

I don't know if anyone has heard of it but the FF7 house stories show just how crazy and destructive to others lives some of these people can be.

http://www.demon-sushi.com/warning/index2.html

 

[Protoman]

Jesus, I'm going through that site right now. This is some seriously manipulative shit. It's kind of scary how easy it is to get caught up in it, most of the people who posted here seem like they were mostly normal kids when these two swept them up into this weird soulbond shit.

 

[Trombonista]

I hope you're right. I hope they're just being immature or this is a misguided attempt to get attention. If they're immature I hope they grow out of it and see how dumb it all was. If they're faking a mental illness for attention then they ought to be ashamed of themselves, or they just have a weird idea of what fun is.

Or most of them are trolls wanting to mess with people.

If thy're really deluded then they need help stat.

I'm pretty confident I'm right about it. Like there's that infamous post online about the otherkin who "couldn't help it" and "became" a wolf at work and got fired for it. When people like this are doing stuff like that that means that they obviously actually believe that this is going on inside of them to their core. I recently read online about a "system" or whatever who had an abusive parent, their parent begins shouting at them, they got scared, one of their "other" characters or headmates came to the front to take over the situation and ended up cutting his/herself against her own will. Then they got taken to mental hospital for telling doctors that it was the headmate, then lied out of mental hospital by claiming they were joking. Someone who is clearly out of control of the situation and is doing shit like this clearly actually believes this shit is going on inside them. But think about it, all these multiple people are going around online like 'omg XXX in my head is so violent n edgy omggg' yet they have never actually DONE anything violent (not saying they should) when that edgyyy character is to the front? Because they know its bullshit and they arent really sharing a brain with X amount of other people. Just special snowflake syndrome. If you absolutely TRULY had another person take control of your body you wouldn't be able to stop them from doing any violence or life ruining shit they wanted to do.

If this is the post you're talking about, that person (Jenn) now claims to be a tortoisekin, but is most likely a troll.

 

[Protoman]

No, but the advice/lifestyle you're promoting can be/is seriously harmful to those who DO have schizophrenia.

 

[Enigma]

http://i709.photobucket.com/albums/ww95/Jikanu/bullshit.png

No, but the advice/lifestyle you're promoting can be/is seriously harmful to those who DO have schizophrenia.

Yeah, and the lifestyle you're promoting trivializes the severity of the disorder, which is absolutely fucking stupid considering schizophrenia leaves about 3/4 of its sufferers homeless, about 25% permanently institutionalized with no chance of recovery, and affects a pretty constant 1% of people worldwide.

Oh, but you are mimicking or doing whatever the fuck it is with DID because that's okay? A disorder that is caused by childhood trauma so severe that the only way the sufferer can cope with it is by compartmentalizing different memories into alters? I remember reading a case study of a young woman who had a very specific alter with a strongly developed gag reflex for whenever she was being sexually abused by her grandfather, and then another one for whenever her mother prostituted her off to drug dealers. This all happened when she was a very small child, and it took her many, upon many years of hospitalizations and near-death experiences in order for her to realize she needed to seek help. And you ~edgy little snowflakes~ are glorifying this?

Utterly, utterly reprehensible.

 

[Night Terror]

This is how I see it: these people don't have DID. Well, they don't think they do either, they came up with some stupid shit called 'natural multiplicity' which doesn't exist.
Anyway, they genuinely believe they have headmates. Of course, they don't, but isolation, fear of the real world, online hugboxes telling them their struggle is real, and obsessive attachment to fandom and fictional characters has completely deluded them into thinking they do. Hell, some cases might be severe enough where they actually do have something more serious going on.

 

[littlebiscuits]

what is the science? :?

 

[Mauvman Shuffleboard]

http://snag.gy/PrF39.jpg


what is the science? :?

After three clinical trials and the death of a couple hundred rats I bring you answers!

Spoiler

The eyes changed colour because the headmate shifted position in the mate header's brain, by moving forward to the front of their consciousness they brought their chromotriggers to eye level, presumably changing the eyes from green-blue to blue-green. One of the alters are allergic to cats because they're a loveshy and wither and die in the presence of pussy, since the other headmates are not shy about love they have no issue making contact with individuals of the feline persuasion. Also they're a fucking dumbass.

 

[Andrew Noel Schaefer]

My headmate tells me to post in this thread. My other headmate says that I should mix hot chocolate with cofee.

I say that this whole headmate thing is rationalizing decisions or personality qwirks and while there are people with DID or scitzophrenia, most of theese girls are just putting it on.

 

[Protoman]

This is how I see it: these people don't have DID. Well, they don't think they do either, they came up with some stupid shit called 'natural multiplicity' which doesn't exist.
Anyway, they genuinely believe they have headmates. Of course, they don't, but isolation, fear of the real world, online hugboxes telling them their struggle is real, and obsessive attachment to fandom and fictional characters has completely deluded them into thinking they do. Hell, some cases might be severe enough where they actually do have something more serious going on.

That's actually a pretty excellent way to put it. Pretty fucking accurate, too, from what I've seen. It's another way the whole concept of fandom is fucked up - predicating a portion of your identity upon being a fan of something is kind of awful.

 

[The Maxx]

This is how I see it: these people don't have DID. Well, they don't think they do either, they came up with some stupid shit called 'natural multiplicity' which doesn't exist.
Anyway, they genuinely believe they have headmates. Of course, they don't, but isolation, fear of the real world, online hugboxes telling them their struggle is real, and obsessive attachment to fandom and fictional characters has completely deluded them into thinking they do. Hell, some cases might be severe enough where they actually do have something more serious going on.

That's actually a pretty excellent way to put it. Pretty fucking accurate, too, from what I've seen. It's another way the whole concept of fandom is fucked up - predicating a portion of your identity upon being a fan of something is kind of awful.

I think one of the problems is that they make the fandom their identity and not a part of the greater whole of them as a person. They have no other interests out side of it and don't want any because they are immature.

This is something that happens to a lot of teenagers, they latch on to something using it to try to find an identity for themselves. Normally as a person matures they can still like these things but also find other hobbies or likes outside of it. Two examples I will use are myself and my Father in Law. I am a big fan of horror movies. In high school it was all that I watched and nothing else, edgy slasher movies because it made me "bad ass" and cool. I was the horror chick. As I grew older I started to find all kinds of movies, books and hobbies that I enjoyed. I am now big in to cooking, sculpting, and I built my own computer. I still like horror movies but even that became broader to include silent films and thrillers ect. My sculpting takes the form of making masks (Something I am still learning) but I do like to try new things because it's fun and challenges me. My father in law is a big football fan. He has autographs and posters. He use to have all his football stuff in one room for foot ball parties. Not too long ago he had a bad divorce and lost most of it. It made him sad but he knew that he had more important things to take care of. As he put it "It's just things, I can always get it back and if not then at least I had it for a little while.

TL;DR (because this was WAY longer then I meant it to be) It's fine to be part of a fandom. It's just good to be mature about it and know that it is only a small part of what makes you as a whole. There have been crazies in fandoms for ever. My father in law may love football but he would never paint himself and run around shirtless.

 

[Protoman]

So I was going through and found a few more interesting posts on the Living Plural blog.

Spoiler

That last one's kind of awful on several fronts. It seems to imply that the asker should actively try to hide things from their therapist, thus making the therapist job's way harder than it needs to be. It also seems to imply that a person's headmates can ALSO have mental illness, which would be really interesting if this whole headmate thing wasn't absolute horseshit.

Also, I like how sex is apparently a trigger word and there are a complex set of rules on how you can or cannot love a headmate.

 

[Strewth]

Oh man, these people. I knew eventually a thread about these guys would pop up. Let me tell you about headmaters.

Just as a background, one of my sisters (my biological sister) is mentally ill. Her current diagnosis is psychosis NOS (not otherwise specified) and borderline personality disorder with schizo tendencies. Basically the doctors don't know what's the matter with her. We've known since she was a tiny infant that something was wrong with her but it was always hard to say what.

When she was about twelve she became involved with one of those RP websites, you know, play-by-posts, that kind of thing. At first it was fine, no big deal, but pretty soon she was posting hourly, staying up till the wee hours of the morning pretending to be a horse-wolf-fairy thing.Apparently, a 25 year old woman, the moderator of one of those Plural Activist/Headmate sites had personally convinced my already incredibly unstable sister that her RP characters were real people living inside her head and she should begin to "section' off parts of her personality to them. The woman claimed to be a "plural" herself and decided that her other headmates were in romantic relationships with my sister's so called headmates. She decided the best thing was to have my little twelve year old sister come down and meet her so that their headmates could finally be together. Now, my sister was already slipping into some other schizophrenic behaviors at the time, violent outbursts, strange disordered thinking patterns ("I can talk to cats therefore I am God.") and the absolute last thing she needed was some crazy pedophile telling her to listen to the voices in her head. Now, that 25 year old woman was not actually schizo or D.I.D. She was crazy alright, and creepy as hell, but it became apparent to us that she did not suffer from any of the ailments that she claimed to have.

It was horrible. I hate those people.

What the actual fuck? That's awful, I hope your sister and your family are ok.

I hate people who pretend to have mental illnesses to seem edgy. I've suffered with severe anxiety disorder and bi-polar for most of my adult life. I work, and I lead a relatively normal life, but it can be fucking hard. Like when I can't even bring myself to leave my house because the idea of doing so makes my head spin, or the time I had to cut a two week holiday to Paris short on the second day because the idea of not knowing what people around me were saying was so terrifying that I was physically sick in a restaurant.

The worst thing is that these people trivialise it. They can stop being 'mentally ill' any time they want, and because they are seen to, it makes less informed people think that anyone with such a condition can do so.

Seriously, fuck these people.

 

[Obnoxion]

I saw this thread and didn't want to read it because I knew it would really be messed up, and it's about what I thought.

This, so much this.

I don't even remember where I first encountered the term "multiplicity". It might have been on Wizardchan or on some similar image board, but I'm not sure. It was a few months ago. I googled it, and it seemed really fishy and... well, special-snowflakey to me. Just another attempt to be seen as unique, and a very cheap one at that.

Well what I remember is, SOMEONE pointed me or someone else towards healthymultiplicity.com. From there I went to this FAQ page: http://www.karitas.net/blackbirds/layman/whatis.html. It uses phrases such as "stop living a lie", which makes the whole thing really suspicious, to say the least.

MYTH: why are you telling me about this?

Because we want to stop living a lie. Because we want to stop letting our friends believe in a lie when we have the choice to do otherwise. Because we want to be your friends and talk to you as our individual selves, not cram everyone into some single identity through which to interact with you. Because we don't like lying to our friends. Because we trusted you. Because we loved you. Because we thought you might do the same for us.

It is natural for people to have multifaceted personalities. I guess it's okay if they pretend those parts of them are separate entities and give them names. Just don't flaunt them or coin new terms like "headmates", as if those were actually split personalities. That just spreads the confusion and blurs the line between people who need help and special snowflakes from Tumbler.

I have to say this, though: at one time, before I knew about multiplicity, I actually named some parts of my ego. I think I was 15 or 16 back then. I did that again when I was 20. All that was simply begging for attention which I crave. I'm pretty dumb, so it took me a while to realize that I was fooling myself into thinking I was special. I guess those... "multiple systems" are what happens to people like me when they find each other and there is no one to break it to them that they are being obnoxious attention whores who artificially make themselves look special to fill a gaping void in their empty lives. I have this headmate alright: it's a cow, and it gives lulz instead of milk.

Since I'm a pro at being insufferable, here's an idea for "multiple systems": instead of making up people in your head, you can make yourself seem special by saying that your mind is actually a garden/city/mountainous landscape/computer/library/whatever. Call yourselves "mindscapers" or something like that. That way you should at least be able not to cause problems to people who are genuinely mentally ill. Hopefully...

"I'm leaving," says Anon, "I can't take this anymore. (...) I hate this site. My safe space has been destroyed."

Good.
Also, this "trigger warning" idea is ridiculous.

 

[Smutley]

I've got an ex-friend who, if this movement was around in a big number a decade ago, would have been a part of it.

She's one of those people with Trendy Mental Illnesses, so she suffered from schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, anxiety, and claustrophobia. Her head was full of her alternate personalities, which were all super hot and sexy vampire characters she role-played as. They would talk to her and give her advice and support and encourage her to be a "stone-cold bitch" and she would laugh - LAUGH! - in the faces of those who tried to take advantage of her (read: not give her ass-pats).

But don't worry guys. Even though she never went to therapy and doesn't take any medication she's miraculously cured of all that now.

 

[The Nameless One]

TRIGGER WARNING: This post mentions the word "penis."

I can see the suggestion in that third screenshot going over so well at the therapist's office. "I'm not crazy, but the people living inside my head are." And then, "But they don't feel like fronting right now, so for the next 50 minutes, you want to talk about race cars?"

Penis.

 

[Butta Face Lopez]

I don't even remember where I first encountered the term "multiplicity"

Oh, I do.

 

[2spooky]

I really wish all of this was just an elaborate trolling scheme, but given the idiots I dealt with in my weeb phase... it's not. And tumblr is just a cesspool of these nuts, too.

I mean, tumblr's a cesspool in general, but you know.

 

[hm yeah]

(haven't read the whole thread)

I didn't delve too deep into this, but I've been kinda aware of it due to my sniffing around in the pits of deviantArt over the years. What I got from all this is, teen girls just don't seem to get how complex and amazing one person's personality is. They have a zillion alters who come out to be "the violent side" or "the angry one". And one individual person can't have different moods? A "happy person" can't fall into a deep depression for an extended period of time? They seem to think it's fine for one alter to have one mood and a few interests only. They have no idea how BIG and complex just an average joe's personality is.

 

[EI 903]

I don't even remember where I first encountered the term "multiplicity"

Oh, I do.

Neil Rosen is one dishonest sumbitch.