Host & Protector Amber On Host's Journey To Accepting Their System (a Rather Bitsy Post)

Host & Protector Amber on host's journey to accepting their system (a rather bitsy post)

(colours used to differentiate who said what)

Host: it's been a long road, and I'm nowhere near done but… One of the hardest things to accept when I realised I have a system was accepting that DID isn't bad. DID systems aren't inherently dangerous. They're not any more likely to be abusers than the general population.

I knew so in theory from watching documentaries, researching, listening to podcast and reading people's experiences with DID. However.. personal experience often outweighs rationed research.

TW, talk of sexual assault, harassment, grooming, abuse, abusers using DID as a scapegoat

I was groomed extensively by a person who claimed to have DID.

Host: I knew they'd tried to SA me however I was told, by them, that they never got to the point of actually doing it, and that their “primary protector” had stopped "their bad alter" from raping me. [Amber: our trauma holders have things to be said about that]

but in doing so, their likely faking of DID, and hiding under a guise of "that wasn't me" "my bad alter did that" "we have bad alters!" lead to me developing a deep-rooted fear of anyone who said they had DID/OSDD, including to the point of denying any possiblity we could have it.

[Amber: when I did call them out on touching us inappropriately, they blamed it on one of their other alters.]

I didn't need Split to scare me into believing DID systems were bad, I had someone I knew, and at the time, respected, do it for me.

From my perspective, everything in my life fell apart.

It was only after I had vanished into our internal world for several months did I start to feel safe to ask questions. I started writing to Amber and everyone else.

Amber: I wrote back pretty much as soon as I saw host had written to me - they'd addressed me by name, so I wrote back and explained my role. And they flipped out even further. We didn't see our host for months.

Not only did they disappear in headspace, but they wouldn't float in and out of the fronting space like they did previously. They wouldn't front, or track in Simply Plural, write, or comment on anything. I thought they'd gone dormant for a while.

Eventually they fronted, and asked myself and a couple of our friends, “Is there anyone in our system who would hurt anyone?”

I and one of our best friends explained that there wasn't. Luckily for us, our host trusts that friend implicitly and combined with my note of "everyone in our system would rather kill themselves than hurt anyone else" they started to believe us. Slowly but surely they started relaxing, and believing me, and being willing to speak in therapy.

And in return, our brain has finally let them appear solidly enough in the internal world that some of us can see and interact with them.

I finally got to hug them.

All I can say right now, I am so fucking proud of how far our host has come in the last couple of years. They've grown, matured and fought through so much shit lately, I couldn't be prouder. I feel like an older sister saying so, but it's so true.

Moral of the story; fakers suck ass. Hosts take time to come around to being in systems. Do your research.

And most importantly, be kind to your hosts and your system members. Take care of them. They may not front the most, they may not be the bravest people on the planet, they may not even know anything about the system, but our role as system members is to love and support our hosts and other sys members, come hell or high water.

Don't be afraid to reach out to people. You don't have to do this with just your system. <3

I really hate the term 'headmates' because of its origins, 'alters' feels too clinical for casual conversation… normally we just say 'the sys' or 'the others' but I wish I had another term fjhfj

I have a small list of ideas for alternatives

mindsharers

echoes / echoforms

facetselves

mindfragments

inner entities

mindshifts

inner fam

brainmates

mindmates

headfellows

sysmate

but i dont really dig any of them :( any ideas?

tell me on anon what you'd never tell me off anon

Being kind to "TikTok DIDers" and disliking what TikTok fakers have done to real systems (especially around diagnosis*) are two things that should and can coexist.

*We (myself, Amber and our gatekeeper) spent several years attempting to gain support for the system to be told that we could not be a system as it was trending on TikTok, therefore we must be faking it for internet clout. We've never had TikTok. And shocker, once we got a psych who'd listen, low and behold ✨we have DID✨.

I know we're not the only ones with experiences like that.

Guess what

IT'S ALED'S BIRTHDAY TODAY!!!!!!!🎂🎈🎈🎉🎁🎈🎁🎉🎈🎁🎈🎂🎈🎉🎁