Many Minds: Two Heads are Better than One (002) Transcript

Audio Episode

<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.

Hello, we're the Crisses and we're welcoming you to Many Minds On the Issue. This is a podcast about, about multiple personality, or rather about people with multiple personality. Hell, no, it's not about people with multiple personalities. It's about me. Alright. Well. We don't have to argue about it in the middle of a public place. Anyway, right now we're recording on our iPod f rom New York City in Bryant Park. It's Wednesday, March 30. It's a beautiful day out. The fountain is going and there's people all over the place and they've seated the lawn and well, you know, it's New York, there's no leaves on the trees yet, but there's a lot of green shrubbery here anyway. I'm gonna take a look in my bag while I'm sitting here, since I'm sitting down, and I'm gonna see if I have my notes with me. And occasionally check the the recorder to make sure it's recording. Cause it would really stink for me to be talking to myself for no good reason. Well, you know, something I do all the time, but try not to do it in public places unless I have the excuse of having a cell phone. I figure you know, if I'm sitting here and I'm talking to myself, it's not really any different than me talking on my cell phone. I've got this microphone obviously attached to my head. I didn't bring those notes. You know, when I really thought about it. Of course, I didn't think that I was going to be buying a microphone today.

In any case, what exciting things can I say about why people become multiple? Well, life is not easy. You know, we all like have our little bumps and grinds as we're growing up. And we all have our bumps and grinds as we're getting older. And there, there seems to be some commonalities amongst many multiples - not all, not everybody has the same traits. Not every multiple can account for their multiplicity the same way. But there is a, a high incidence of people who've been knocked around by life a little more than usual. And usually very early on, they were very young when it happened. There are a good number of multiples, who have had experiences that caused them trauma. Not all multiples became multiple because of abuse or trauma. It's certainly not something that one instance of trauma would cause. I mean, we're not going to have a bunch of, you know, little kids who became multiple because of 9-11. That's not going to happen. That's not the type of situation that causes multiplicity. Something that causes such a drastic change in your personality on a permanent basis requires something really drastic happening to you on a constant basis. In general, you're going to find that a lot of multiples, not all, have been abused in situations where it was recurring. That would be family abuse, family violence, or violence or abuse caused by close relatives, babysitters, stepfathers and stepmothers and so on. One can argue, though, that it is probably possible to emulate the behavior of another multiple to emulate their mindset. So another possible reason that people could be multiple is that their parents - one or both - are multiple. My mother dissociates - she may not be multiple, I haven't quite identified whether and on she is, so she probably isn't. I've been around so many multiples, it's pretty easy for me to pick out when they switch and what their traits are and so on. But my mother does dissociate pretty strongly, so she's somewhere in the dissociative spectrum. My father, on the other hand, does have very drastic personality shifts and their cubby holes, you know, that the personality shifts are consistent with each other. You know, when when something bad happens, when when he causes something bad to happen, when one of them is being naughty, later on another one will come out and apologize profusely and begged for forgiveness and get on his—literally get on his hands and knees crying and shamed and very shaken by what it was he did, and what he caused in me, you know. So we do have a possibility, at least, that having parents that are multiple can set the scenario for you becoming multiple, although I'm pretty sure that's not exactly why I became multiple. It certainly may have set me up for it. And it may actually be one of the reasons that I have far more personalities or alters or residents than what would be accounted for by what I remember as being my abuse scenarios. Maybe because my father was modeling multiple behavior at me, it was one of my first choices of refuge when things went wrong. So that's got to be you know, at least some of the the possibilities for why a person would become multiple.

Another one, another subgroup, I guess, of the multiple community seems to have been involuntarily made multiple in one way or another. I mean, I certainly wouldn't call my response to an abuse situation a voluntary response, or a choice. But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that nobody put the people in my head. There are people though, who do feel as though something put people in their head, or that their, their situation is not voluntary. A good example, although limited on the number of people that are residing in the body, is when somebody is a walk-in. There's a subset of the community who are completely new to their bodies. And generally this happens in adulthood. I'm gonna have to go into that a little more deeply. In psychology, there is a dissociative spectrum event that happens to some people called dissociative fugue. That's f-u-g-u-, in case that word didn't come out very well. It's a fugue. It's based on what a fugue is in etymology, in in the etymology of the word fugue, it means to run away. So somebody dissociates and runs away. Usually, this is something that happens very suddenly in adulthood, or at least according to psychology, psychology literature. It happens very suddenly, when there's an adult trauma, that somebody will suddenly switch personalities drastically, their old personality is completely submerged. And the new personality takes over and flees, it runs away. So we got, we've got dissociative fugue. The person switches personalities, runs away, and usually tries to take up a life as an entirely new person somewhere else. Sometimes they recover from dissociative fugue and come back to their old personality, and sometimes they don't, and they take up an alternate identity in a new place. And their families missed them and don't know what happened to them, usually, I would imagine. Well, some people who we call walk-ins have a, the reflected side of that experience. They have this experience from the side of being the person that has this swap go on. And the way they describe it is they were going on their merry business, in their own bodies in their own world, and suddenly, bam, they're here in a human body, whether or not they were human before. Suddenly they're here in a human body, and they don't know who they are. They don't know who this person's body is that they're wearing. And they don't know what to do. The name is uncomfortable, the clothes are uncomfortable, and quite often even their gender is uncomfortable. And maybe their species is uncomfortable. Maybe they weren't human before. They remember perfectly well having existed before this, and now suddenly, they're not in Kansas anymore. So that's that's the flip side of the dissociative fugue from the the quote unquote, 'new identities' point of view. They consider themselves to have walked into this body into this life, that they don't own. Many of the walk-ins I know did not run. They switched and then they tried to cover for themselves. Uh-oh, now I'm everybody's calling me such and such and I have to pretend to be them because I don't know what the hell is going on. And this is possibly far more common than where the person runs away and makes a big deal out of it. It is quite possible that people just suddenly become someone else for the rest of their life, and that the original person just goes away. That's a pretty scary thought. That situation sometimes happens on a scale where the original personality does not leave. So now you've got a hosting situation, you have new people living in the head with the old person. And the new people are absolutely adamantly convinced that they had their own bodies and their own lives just a few moments ago - you know, or however long ago - and they are new to this body and experience.

So little more about me being here in New York, before I get back on the topic. You know, I've got to switch topics just for a moment. I'm sitting on a stone bench making my ass cold in Bryant Park with a helicopter somewhere nearby. And I'm wearing all black except for my custom-made leather boots, which are brown, and the kind of coat that I'm wearing which is kind of a corduroy—what are you, a corduroy trench coat, I guess. And it's not warm enough to warm up the seat. My ass is really getting cold. And my black T shirt says "I do whatever the voices in my head tell me to do." So on the topic of doing whatever the voices in my head tell me do, you know, I actually had a interesting experience a few minutes ago. Wow. Okay, more than a few minutes ago now. But in the library, I went to the library to go pee. You know, and the library's diagonally across the street from here and I go in, and they check your bags now. And it's a small price to pay for a free toilet in New York City. So, you know, my bag, let him poke around, whatever. And this guy looks at my shirt, and he dropped his jaw looked at my shirt. And they said, "I do that all the time." And I just smiled and laughed. You know, I mean, what am I gonna say? You know, what do I say, "Hi, would you like to be on my podcast?" You know, I wasn't ready, I wasn't set up with my equipment yet, I had to open the boxes and test it out and stuff. So it's like, well, what am I gonna say? Well, you know, I laugh and ask if he wants to look in my bag, you know, it's like, come on, guy, I gotta go to the bathroom. Anyway. So I've had like, probably at least four people read my t-shirt today. One of them was in the, in the trains. I took train down from Middletown, New York and at Secaucus Junction, you've got to get a little ticket, you got to stick it in a reader, a ticket reader, so that you can pass from one train to another train to get to Penn Station in New York City. And there was somebody helping people put their tickets in, you know, one of the station attendants. And the attendant read my shirt and started laughing too. And several other people have just read my shirt andnot said anything. Actually, the station attendant said something about having seen the shirt before. So anyway, it's kind of neat walking around, you know, with my multiplicity screaming on my shirt, but nobody's gonna believe it. And doing this podcast about multiplicity, it's really neat. Alright, so back to the subject.

So I talked about voluntary or at least explainable causes, and then there's the involuntary, not necessarily associated with abuse causes. There's other things. I know at least one multiple whose situation is that their physical body on this world, on Earth, is like a portal on another plane, on another world somewhere. And people I guess, sightsee or whatever on that world, and they just pop into this portal, and suddenly they're moving around the body in this world. So they've got a lot of people in their head. You know, from our perspective. And from the other side, their perspective is that they're kind of, you know, just like tourists, I guess. You know, I'm not quite sure I'd have to talk to them more about it. But, you know, they're just visiting. They're not, they're not permanent residents, although there are some that visit more often than others. They don't really think that they live here. They live there, they live on that other world, and they just visit here. You know, like watching TV or for them or something, playing a video game, I don't know. But they're not always here, they're usually somewhere else. That goes really deeply into internal landscape stuff, which I'll have to cover another time. But, but in that case, it might be a supernatural origin, as well as the walk-in situation where suddenly you were picked up from another world and brought here into this body that was for one reason or another possibly vacant. It's possible that the person on earth just like, they 'lost their mind', quote, unquote. Oh, there's another one for my, my everyday evidence. I lost my mind. So they lost their mind, their mind went away, and then there's a void, and something has to fill it. In fact, that might actually relate somewhat to what happened to me when I was a kid, because we had many instances where we tried to check out. We tried desperately to leave. Whoever it was, it had the body at the time - and we have the thought traces, you know, and we know what they were thinking about at the time. But they would just sit, you know, they get so upset about the world and the state of things and, and not be able to cope anymore. So they would just sit there and say, "That's it. That's it, I'm leaving, I'm out of here. I'm just going to leave the body sitting here as a vegetable, it's just gonna sit here and not do anything anymore. Because I'm out of here." Very adamant, very—you know, and we're stubborn. We've got stubbornness from both our mom and our dad. And we would have done it too. But for some reason, the person would do it, they, they thought, "I'm checking out, I'm out of here." Be gone. And then somebody else pick up the body and go to the bathroom, or go and eat, or take care of our homework, or whatever it was that had to be done would just get done. Like, someone else was always there to take over and do something. And we did that so many times, I wonder how many people we lost, if they actually left. Or if they were just simply unable to leave? We're not sure, but, but I remember the frustration, you know. It's like, "Well, why didn't my body just stay there? Why did it get up and start moving around and doing things? I made up my mind to do this. Why is this not working? Why are we getting up and moving around and leaving and, and go into the bathroom?" And we're supposed to just sit there and do nothing for the rest of our lives. Die sitting there starving as a vegetable. And it didn't work. So it's possible that we did something like that at some point and wandering spirits got sucked into our body, because it's a void. You know? I don't know. Another person looking at me funny. I should start looking at them funny. Anyway, haven't you seen anybody talking on their cell phone before? Doesn't that look an awful lot when they have an earphone mic in? Doesn't that look an awful lot like they're talking in themselves? I've got a headset on. I know I'm talking to myself.

Well, what does, what does multiplicity do for somebody? If they're making a conscious choice? Okay, on any level, even a subconscious choice to become multiple, what is it going to do for them? What are the benefits of multiplicity that are going to help? Because you can't just say, "Oh, well, you know, I chose to become multiple." And, but then it's like, why? Why? What benefit is it? What is enticing you to make this choice? I'll tell you, once you make the choice, you probably can't go back. But that's my personal opinion. There are enough people who've supposedly integrated to argue with me. But why would people choose this? Well, that's where we come to the title of, the title of this episode. Two heads are better than one. In some cases, it is possible to use multiple chains of thought to think around a situation. It is possible that a situation warrants that you need a second opinion, but maybe you were told that you're not allowed to talk to anyone else. Well, then who are you can talk to? Yourself. There's the ability to compartmentalize your experiences that comes with being multiple. I can discuss that at great lengths at some point. But essentially, what you're you're doing is, even if everybody is separate and autonomous, you're still dividing up the experience of life. You're taking only a certain amount or certain percentage of sensory input, and you're channeling the different areas of the brain. Even if everyone has a distinct psyche and soul and personality and so on, which I think they do, only one or a few people are fronting at a time to take direct input from the world, or to interact directly with the world. So compartmentalizing your experiences allows you to keep them neat and orderly. Yeah, this is the person that comes out when we're relaxed. This is the person that comes out when we're angry. This is the person that comes out when we're being abused. This allows you to to specialize. People can be very specific about the types of things they handle. That's not to say that Joe is the 'angry one', but Joe handles our anger the best. That doesn't mean that Joe doesn't have a non-angry side and can't come out and be a 'nice Joe' and not an 'angry Joe'. It just means that—woah, that's a lot of noise—it means that Joe handles that situation for us. Joe handles when we need to be angry about something. There are other advantages and disadvantages. I'll just have to cover more of that in another show, because this is getting long.

And then there's disadvantages, you know. Eventually being multiple gets old. In the situations that were the reasons that pushed you towards being multiple, one way or another, sometimes are no longer happening. Like, I am no longer seven years old, helpless, being abused by the people taking care of me. So it's gotten old, in some ways. So there are definitely drawbacks to being multiple now that I'm an adult, and I have the freedom of will to do things on my own. Well, one of them that comes to mind is we have to divide our day. We have so many diverse interests, including things like making podcasts, like right now in my backpack, I've got an Apple script book, I'm learning Apple script. I've been working on changing the PHP code for my wiki to handle the MP3s in the RSS feeds. I've been working, I want to make curtains, but I haven't had time yet. I'll be sewing curtains at some point. My partner, Chris. Yeah, Criss and Chris. My partner Chris is working on a desk and I want to help him and... I can't begin to tell you the number of interests. I mean, we're reading a C++ book at the same time we're reading an Apple script bookm at the same time we're read a Linux LPI certification studying book, at the same time that—we were reading a book about 'From Chaos to Calm', which is a parenting book for dealing with difficult children. I have two of them. And what else am I reading right now? I'm reading 'Life Strategies for Teens', which is by Dr. Phil's son. I have to work on website for eclectictech.net, which is my business. I own an LLC now. And so on. So you know, I've got a lot on my plate. Splitting a day for all this stuff is really, really hard. And the dishes still need to be done, and the laundry is believed to be done. And I'll tell you, the house is a wreck. You know, we've got all this stuff going on and there just aren't enough hours in a day. And there's definitely not going to be enough hours in our life for everybody in my head to do everything that they want to do. And we do the best we can to juggle everything and, and try and give everybody a fair share. But that's often very difficult. Buying the attachments for the iPod is part of our commitment to doing the podcasts and a lot of other audio work that we wanted to do. So, diverse interests. You're never really alone. Some people want to be. Drawbacks to multiplicity, when you're this old, well, there's insomnia, anxiety. There's both a benefit and a drawback. That, if you're doing the self-discovery thing, you've got your work cut out for you. It's going to become a lifelong commitment to, to figure out exactly who you are at all times. And I wouldn't recommend it. You know, if you've decided, "Hey, I want to be multiple too," forget it. And if you're a singleton who thinks, wait, maybe I am multiple I have this problem and that problem and—just stop right there. Stop listening to my podcast. You don't want to know. It's gonna be more than enough for a day. I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.

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.