Some multiple/plural systems have concerns or actual actve situations that are not safe in their life, are triggering headmates who may be acting out, or find themselves with difficult internal dynamics, self-harm, self-sabotage, or other potentially harmful intrusions or behaviors. This is a group of selves-help resources to help with creating and ensuring safety, inside and out.
Y'all can consider working on a system safety plan here (offsite course, self-contained, self-paced, free of charge) — this is entirely separate from the work below and is more about system mood management, managing escalations of symptoms (whether mental or physical) towards crisis (crisis being anything requiring hospitalization or being unable to care for yourselves anymore).
Here's a variety of resources that can help your system with internal & external safety issues:
- It's very important to work on building trust within your system to ensure your system's safety. Y'all are survivors and have a lot of wisdom to tap into regarding how to stay safe in your own specific circumstances that no article, podcast, or online course can offer y'all. In our experience, you will survive better together as a team.
- It's our experience that many internal conflicts arise from a lack of external safety — so please make sure that y'all pay attention to each other and any red-flag issues that system mates are being triggered by (living with abusers or tolerating abuse in your life, triggers in your environment, housing or financial insecurity issues, etc. can trigger headmates, and when triggered or PTSD-activated, some headmates may act out in a variety of ways we describe here.) Sometimes headmates are acting up because they want y'all to protect yourselves better.
- Stuff going on outside affects inside — and vice versa. This is an important principle, so if you aren't safe inside, it may be because you're not safe outside, or the other way around. Check this article out.
- If y'all skipped the system trust issues mentioned above, y'all may still want to check out Boundaries and Empathy (011) as it contains a lot of important information about boundaries, which are important for system safety. There's also more about boundaries here and also here.
- See the Getting Along Inside and Getting Along Outside sections of Multiplicity: The Missing Manual in case any of those circumstances apply to y'all.