"Birth Spirit" or "Body Spirit" or “Core” or "Original"
Stub and needs updating
Overview
These ideas come from an outdated concept that humans are born as one discrete individual or consciousness and are chipped into bits or “split” by trauma.
This idea may come from plurals who for whatever reason regress to an earlier phase of development after identity fusion begins. This may leave traces of a sense of a singular “original” identity that was forming but then fell (back) apart.
Some words come from psychology or psychology has documented this perception using words selected by their client cases. As a result, an “original alter” or a “core identity” has a more clinical connotation.
The terms “body-spirit” and “birth-spirit” come from more spiritually-oriented lenses of viewing plurality.
Problems
The idea of a core/original alter or spirit in one’s mind can create significant issues with recovery. Here are the most common problems.
Therapist Insistence
Some misinformed therapists will push the idea of having once been one person and later falling apart on their clients, which becomes an act of denying their identities, reality, subjectivity, selves-knowledge and may result in attempts to seek our such a person in the plural system to please the therapist. This becomes a suggestion and more suceptibke or suggestible systems may assemble identities who can fill this role by hook or crook, essentially creating an iatrogenic alter or masked subsystem that presents as if it is the core or original requested. This damages the system and will lengthen recovery.
If the therapist introduces this topic and/or makes requests to find or speak to such a being without the client having brought this up, that’s ignorant and potentially abusive.
Inequality
Even when the idea of having a core or original resident comes from within the system, it can create imbalances as the person is given more power, more regard, more personhood, more weight in decision-making, and basically can entirely undermine the healing process through the illusion that they're more important than everyone else in the plural system.
Reinforces the idea of Merging
When there's an "original" or "core" there's more likely to be a push or encouragement to merge "into" that party to return the system to normalcy. First, the system may never have been one in the first place, and if the trauma isn't healed first, boundaries repaired, and the entire system take their power back from the world, there will be no achievement of being a healthy singular person.
This also completely undermines a traumatized system becoming a healthy plural.
We discuss the problems with merging elsewhere, but in short, the strength of merging must overcome the strength of any future traumas that the body-entity will go through. If merging is not undertaken with all internal entities entirely empowered to choose to merge and embracing the merging, then the process is already undermined.
Earlier Discussion
A body spirit is the spirit(s) or soul(s) born into a body. Sounds simple, right? Figuring out who(s), if anyone is the body spirit, can often be a lot more difficult than it would initially seem.
Also, some multiple systems believe that more than one spirit was born into the body, resulting in more than one body spirit. It can also be argued that, similar to how some one celled creatures replicate themselves in ways that leave no discernable parent organism, ALL splits derived from the body spirit, are each in their own right, body spirits.
For some systems, the body spirit gets more say in body decisions, for other systems, this idea is preposterous, since as far as anyone can tell, the body spirit had left a long time ago or never existed in the first place.
The significance, if any, of being the body spirit within the system is something each system should figure out on their own.