Many Minds: Credentials (001) | Edit | Kinhost dot Org
<voices overlapping, music in background>
Hey!
Oh! Good morning — oh! Do we have to get up?
Keep it down; I’m trying to sleep.
Yeah, we want to make that recording.
What are we going to record today?
What? What recording?
You know, the one about multiplicity.
You know, the usual — we’re trying to make a difference in the world or something.
Oh, yeah.
Well — I just really wanna help people!
I have no idea what to say.
I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who have really good questions, and need really good answers.
Why talk to them? It’s not like anybody gives a shit.
Well what makes us an authority?
I don’t really think it matters how long we’ve been multiple, or how long we’ve known we’re multiple — we’re multiple!
<Aliessa laughs richly>
Welcome to Many Minds On the Issue, the podcast about dissociative identity disorder, by and for multiples, hosted by the Crisses. Good morning. And this is our first podcast. We'd like to address exactly what it is that makes us an authority on multiplicity. We have known we are multiple since about 15-16 years old. We were able to hear the multiple tracks in our head - many more than we put into this recording- since we were probably about 9-10 years old. And we have distinct instances that we remember where people took over our body and spoke for us and where people in our head were defending us and switching in and out, since at least 7 years old. We have a blackout period, when we were 4-7 years old. We don't remember anything before the age of 4 and everything between the ages of 4 and 7 is extremely shaky. How we became multiple, that's a totally different story. We'll discuss that at some point. For now, we would like to go into more of our adult experiences of multiplicity, so that you can see why we've become something of an expert on the experience of being multiple.
After the age of 16, we were distinctly naming and writing down the thoughts and the histories of people—actually, the thoughts of people in our head started at 15. The experiences of people in our head, what we consider to be past life experiences - experiences before they became part of the Crisses - that we started doing around 16. Around then we were hospitalized for a suicide attempt. Our stay in the hospital became the beginning of a path of self-discovery and recovering from the delusion that we were one person. Between the ages of 19 and 24, we discovered some other problems that we had that were causing us extreme issues. We have several people in our head who suffer from borderline personality disorder. That causes all sorts of mental confusion as to what reality really is at any given point - probably even more so than the multiplicity itself. Borderline personality disorder caused us to have internal delusions as to our expectations. And our expectations have become a focal point to help ourselves have a more realistic point of view in life. After discovering that we had borderline personality disorder, we started a campaign of self help. It started with 'I Hate You, Don't Leave Me', which was about borderline personality disorder, and wended its way through Stephen Covey books and M. Scott Peck, and many other pretty well known books and authors' works in the field of self-help. Then we tackled recovery books, which is an entirely different subject than self-help. Things that actually delved into how we were abused and why we were abused and our memories of abuse. We still haven't uncovered things that happened around when we were 4-7 old any more than what we remembered when we were 13, when we first had a flashback. Our memories of abuse have absolutely nothing to do with being in therapy. Therapy never helped us recover anything. We weren't in therapy until we were 16. And what we remembered, we remembered when we were 13 - and we still haven't remembered a darn thing more. But we've been kind of doing an anthropological dig through our head and you know, kind of like an anthropologist will look at the artifacts of a culture and decide what happened there. You know, and look at the evidence of their works of art and their clothing and so on, and decide what type of people they were. We've been looking at each other inside of our head and figuring out what experiences we had as a whole that caused us to need the people that are in our head. The specific traits of each person in our head, you know, are either the result of what happened to us, or we called on them to help us with certain situations, because they would be fitting people to deal with certain situations. You know, regardless of, of their origins, they're here because of what happened to us. And where we don't know what happened to us, we're able to guess, because we have these people that are the results of those activities, those experiences.
Once we started doing that, we created a mailing list on Yahoo Groups, and opened it up for people who are multiple. Especially people who are multiple who have non-standard origins from people in their head, or non-standard types of people in their head, who need a place to discuss our common frame of reference as well as our differences. I also by then had a website where I was trying to share my own experiences with people. That website eventually opened up into a wiki, where other people could add content to it as well. Still, the vast majority of the content on Kinhost.org is mine. But there's a significant 10-20% chunk perhaps that is contributed from other people. So I've been looked at as the quintessential kin host, and I'll explain that term. Kin in this case stands for otherkin. Otherkin are people who feel they have an otherworldly origin, or who feel they have they have non-human origin. These people can be thought of as people who think they are from another world, for some reason, or they are of an alien species of some sort. Or these, you know, people who have some sort of perhaps supernatural origin. That's the kin part of it and host is a different way of looking at multiplicity. My personal multiplicity is that where we feel people from outside of our head took up residence in our body. The original person of whom this body belonged no longer lives here to our knowledge. We have no specific individual we can point to and say "That person is the person who owns the body." We used to think we did, but we do have a subset of individuals we call the Christinas, who we think are derived from the person who owned the body. And we think that Christina became a multiple in and of herself. She split into a whole bunch of people to defend herself from unmentionable things that we can't even remember that happened to us. She split into at least two people to begin with, who then further split into other people. And that's the group we call the Christinas. We also think that our family had some psychic gifts, especially on our father's side of the family, and that we may have channeled or called out for other spiritual help when things were overwhelming for the Cristinas. That they reached out to other entities outside of our body and invited them in to help us cope with our life. I mean, now we consider it that we all share this life equally. We've certainly all put in enormous efforts to get through the problems that this life has. And we all feel that we belong together - we're an excellent working group, and to try and kick people out because they came from outside would probably ruin our life. We got through all of that together, and we're going to get through the rest of our lives together. As long as everybody wants to stay here - anybody who wants to leave is free to attempt to do so. There's a question as to whether anybody can leave. There are certain people who have certainly tried and come back or failed. But, you know, in as far as we can tell, we have no particular desire to boot people out based on any criteria whatsoever, even if they're misbehaving.
The Crisses would like to interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special announcement. You know, we were about to add to the audio clips, say, a long rambly clip about having facilitated multiple discussion groups and coming out and our psychology degree in the working. But instead, I think I want to ramble about the royal we. We live a dual life. We live in a culture which does not accept multiples. Me and the other people in my head, we have to go out in the world and deal with people, as an individual. No matter who it is that's fronting, we have to pretend to be one person. And so we've gotten very used to, from birth on, using I as our first person pronoun. And rarely speaking as the royal we. We started talking as the royal we probably around 14, and it was kind of like, we were starting to slip. Then we started coming out. So coming out to more and more people, we built a community around us. We surrounded ourselves with people that we felt comfortable with. And we didn't work for 7 years, so we didn't have a business life in the business world. So we decided 'I' was not necessary anymore. 'We' could be used freely. You know, still we can switch back and forth, you know, between I, when we mean we and we when we mean I, and so on. It's kind of a slippery slope, trying to figure out how many people that are in our head at any given moment are talking or have the same opinion or want the same things. We don't sit around and vote every time and decide "Is this a we or night situation? I don't know." Just talk. Talk. It's much more important just to fucking talk. So we do. So you're going to hear us go back and forth between we and I. And sometimes when we say we, it's not everybody in our head. And sometimes when we say I, it's more than one. That's going to happen. We do horribly at work now. After seven years, we're finally working again, we're holding down a great job working with wonderful people. And sometimes we say, "Well, we can fix that." You know, "We have to work on such and such." And we catch ourselves and somebody in the back of your head kicks us, like "Dammit, stop that. You're not allowed to do that." And, you know, we just have to ignore it and keep going and pretend nothing happened and stuff. But someday we're going to end up coming out at work, because one day we're going to slip up good. And we're gonna say we when we mean I and, you know, ought to put on our social mask or, you know, one of the kids is going to come front and start singing Muppet Show songs or who knows. And we're gonna mess up more so than we're doing in this broadcast. So if anybody wants to point out to us, that we're doing this royal we thing very badly, and that it should always be we or it should always be I, screw you, okay? Just deal. Because that's the way we are - we're gonna switch back and forth between I and we randomly. And hopefully it doesn't confuse you - we'll try and make it as clear as possible when we're talking about our head and when we're talking about us and other multiples inclusive. So when it's all of us inside of our head, you might hear us say we. And we're not talking about everybody in the community. We're talking about us. And the vast majority of what we're talking about, unless we say otherwise, is going to be our personal experience. Whether that is inclusive of our experiences of other people or not, it's our experiences. So just wanted to make this little interruptive disclaimer, just to let y'all know what's going on in our head. Okay. And that's my our, the royal we. Not an all inclusive group of all multiples in the whole world. I'm not talking about you people. I'm talking about us. The people in this body, the Crisses. We're talking about us. We're not trying to globally make statements that stand for everyone. Love you. Without further interruption, we now bring you back to our regularly scheduled podcast.
This is intended to be a self-help for other multiples. It's also intended to introduce people regardless of whether or not they're multiple, with the concept of what it is to be a multiple and how to broach etiquette situations when somebody introduces themself to you as a multiple, and also perhaps to debunk some myths about multiplicity that are being propagated in the scientific and the lay community There's a good deal of misinformation about multiples. There are movies that sensationalize multiplicity, one way or another. For example, Fight Club or Me, Myself and Irene, which either make light of it and make it funny, or which take it deadly serious. What is it really like to be a multiple? How much of the narrator's experience in Fight Club, for instance, is similar to those experiences that multiples have in real life? What really speaks to our experiences in popular culture, and what in scientific thought is real, as opposed to what is absolutely ludicrous? That's gonna be very difficult to do, because multiples are all different, inside and out. There are commonalities that many multiples share. There's absolutely no commonalities that all multiples share, other than perhaps the fact that we're multiple. That's going to be very hard thing to help people understand. You can't climb into my head and look around. I've done everything that I can in my power to make it, you know, through creative arts and so on, to make it as clear as possible what it's like to be in my head. There are pictures on the website of my internal landscape. And there are pictures of the people in my head, you know, drawings, and, and so on. Not of everybody. And then there's Frank's comics, which are amusing little snapshots of events going on in our head, whether they're real events in our head or imagined events in our head. But they're kind of a cartoon of the people in our head interacting with each other inside our head. It's kind of like the Herman's Head of the Crisses in a comic book. You can help yourself to, to the website - there's certainly a tremendous amount of material there that—I've heard of people getting lost in my website for several days, and I apologize profusely. I really don't think anybody should lose days to it. But you might want to poke around and take a look at, you know, what interests you. If you look in the sidebar on the wiki, there are links to my section of the of the website, which in and of itself is probably about 100 pages of wiki text that's, you know, only edited by the people in my head. I would like to touch on various subjects in the future, such as multiplicity in the paranormal, how abuse relates to multiplicity, or how to deal with a multiple when you're not. I would like to deal with issues of memory, and how multiples track or the lack of time tracking for multiples. And I would also like to delve into the structures that are inside of a multiple's head. Our next topic will be Two Heads are Better Than One: Why People Become Multiple. I would like to thank you for listening to this podcast. And please check out the website and let me know what you think. You can email me at manyminds@kinhost.org. Thank you very much.
Okay, there's only one more thing. Sorry to drag this on. But we did say we were going to explain what a host was, and then we went off and rambled and rambled and rambled and forgot to come back to defining what a host is. So in our mind, what a host is, is somebody who has invited other people to live in their body with them. That is separate from whether or not they themselves are multiple. But you're hosting other people, other people live in your body with you. So that's what a host is. I am a kin host because I am hosting, or we are hosting, other people from outside of our body. Whether or not they're human. Not all the people that we're hosting are human.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Many Minds on the Issue. Your Patreon support will keep this podcast coming. You can find more information, resources, and our Patreon link at K-I-N-H-O-S-T-dot-org Kinhost.org.