Check out the Many Minds on the Issue podcast episode on this topic: Can't We All Get Along? (episode 006)
Imagine a house where everyone comes & goes as they please. No one does the chores. No one contributes to the rent. The denizens don’t follow any particular rules or guidelines, nor do they even communicate. They steal from each other, lie, break things, use each other’s supplies and items without consent or apology. If you were to stop someone and ask them who lives there, they probably have no idea, or perhaps they have a couple names but don’t really know each other really well. Some people sneak about and hide from the others, living in closets, boxes, the attic, the basement, the garage — anywhere but where others can spot them clearly. It’s like a den of animals, without law and order, without a sense of decorum or being polite, with the stereo or TV blasting at all hours.
It sounds crazy, but this chaos is a multiple’s head on the brink of crisis. After enough nights of lost sleep, lost items, lost memories, inadvertently lying to their friends or family, meeting people they have never met who claim to know them, and basically living a crazy life in their head, often the multiple will plunge into a full crisis and a big fight over rights, respect, trust, identity, property & idea ownership, friendships or relationships, power and control erupts, sometimes overnight. For those of us who are lucky, we head the crisis off before it fully erupts. For those who have no idea that they are multiple, the chaos can be devastating leading to loss of employment and emotional disability until they can get back to a place of peace and balance.
Being good citizens
Most functional adults have good role models who have taught them how to do chores, who cared whether they were coming or going, who contributed to the household, who set and followed certain rules and guidelines and passed them along. But since society is chock full of singletons, most of us don’t have good role models for being good citizens in our own head. Multiples may comprise as much as 6-10% of society, but there are no good role models in books, on TV, in our homes, or in the media for how citizens in our head should behave. Instead of teaching multiples a similar method for sharing and caring that exists in any good community, we label them "Disabled," excuse them from society and sanity, and allow them to be a complete chaos, run by whomever happens to have control at any given moment.
And I would know, because I -- we, more accurately, are multiple. And I'm here to say "Enough!" and give you a refreshing breeze of what sanity has in store for you.
It’s time to re-create your internal relationships. We’re not going to play the blame game, we’re just going to have a revolution and change the rules, and do everything in our power to make it fun, adventurous, exciting -- and challenging. Don't we all love a good challenge?