I Love You Darling. My Heart - It's Yours.

Hey, shout out to systems with "frustrating" or "socially bad" traits.

systems who seem indecisive, "hot and cold", disloyal, dishonest, etc. to others due to subtle switches, passive influence, amnesia barriers, etc. between headmates with very different opinions, wants, and moods

systems who have headmates with "scary" attributes/symptoms, like hallucinations, delusions, anger issues, hypersexuality, low/no empathy, selfishness, need for attention, etc. especially those afraid they're perpetuating the "evil alter" stereotype

systems who never know who's fronting. especially those with memory barriers, those who struggle with feeling any sense(s) of personhood, and/or those who struggle to keep close bonds with people due to this

systems who struggle with meltdowns, tantrums, outbursts, pathological demand avoidance, poor sense of social norms, and other tendencies/issues that make being social or just existing in public difficult

systems with fluctuating sexualities and/or triggers that make it difficult to remain with a partner/partners (or to date in the first place)

systems who infight in-system and have trouble making decisions without intense internal backlash

systems who have trouble keeping self care (and may go out of the house dirty/disheveled) due to other mental illness or due to frequent fronters being unmotivated, forgetful, or having sensory issues or triggers that interfere with self care tasks

systems whose "self defense" relies on people pleasing, avoiding stressors, getting overly defensive, or getting angrier than "reasonable"

You are loved, you are appreciated, you deserve to be a part of society, you deserve to be happy, you deserve to be understood and given patience... you deserve to be able to create, love, heal, be respected, be treated like your own age, to lead, to have a voice, to feel safe.

Akaroa, South Island, New Zealand

Castle Howard

embracing the calmness of the lake🍃

So funny story! When we were first learning about systems and DID and everything, we learned that denial is a massive symptom that's baked into the foundation of how systems function, so right off the bat we put in a lot of work to accept that we are a system, and build an internal structure of reassurance specifically for our existence as a system.

However! Our brain still found all kinds of ways to trip us up with denial! And it's been a constant frustrating battle. For several years we thought that we were an "average" sized system of about seven to ten headmates, and only recently have we been able to drop enough denial barriers to find that there's actually close to a hundred of us in here. Even after that, it took months to actually see the fictives from our biggest comfort medias (percy jackson and the heroes of olympus, avatar the last air bender, and others) because for some reason our brain thought that large system was bad so "nu-uh" and fictives from "childish" comfort sources were also somehow bad so "what fictives?" and it's been so much chaos T-T

Just the other day someone was going through and updating our system server and poked into channels they didn't recognize and then got smacked in the face with vibes that are obviously in our system somewhere, the person has full on had conversations at some point, and we just completely forgot they existed several times

So basically, yes, a lot, denial comes in all kinds of nasty packages and it's such a pain in the butt and you're not alone <3

Question for systems:

How often do you go into denial or convince yourself that you faked everything/your headmates have disappeared?

solo

instagram @matialonsor

Okay so when I got sucked into the phantom zone last week while watching youtube shorts a lot of the content it fed me was ADHD tips and a lot of it was either useless for me or redundant but there was one REALLY good tip about taking breaks that wasn't about taking breaks it was about RETURNING from breaks and the tip is: when you are about to go on a break, before you step away from your task (work, craft project, school stuff) decide what you'll do as the first thing when you sit back down at your task and set up your workspace to do that thing.

That means you've got an easy re-entry point to go back to doing the thing instead of sitting back down and having to make a decision or having to reorient from break mode to task mode. You have pre-reoriented and can just go back into working mode.

I've been doing this by circling what my next task on my tasklist is and bringing up the windows that I'll need for the task before I step away from my desk.

Brilliant hack, works great for me, hope it works great for you as well.

I'm still learning about addiction and all the different ways it can cripple someone, but from what I've gathered so far, addiction is basically coping tools gone wrong. Someone is dealing with something that feels like too much, so they reach for whatever they can in order to feel less trapped, less afraid, less angry, less overwhelmed, or feel anything at all (among many other things) and they end up trapped in a cycle that they thought they had control over. A lot of the time it can come with intense guilt and shame, especially if the people around them disapprove, because they know it's not good for them and they just can't stop. It's their body, it costs money, they're a person with their own autonomy, they should be able to just walk away from it right? Unfortunately, there's usually way more going on that most people can't see from the outside

the problem with addiction is not that it's pleasurable. it's not "having too much fun" disease. it's not even a requirement for addiction that you have fun at any point in the process at all and to be honest it is incredibly common that no pleasure is gained from substance use. imagining that addiction is about pleasure does two things: 1) demonises feeling good (there is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy/comfortable/etc), and 2) frames addicts as people who Like Having Fun Too Much. it's simply not useful to frame things this way as well as just fundamentally not being true

Normalize loving children instead of controlling them

Normalize apologizing to children.