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Ohhhh I feel this. A lot.
I’m still pretty bad at being supportive since I have a tendency to shut down communication and forget the progress we’ve made when being plural feels too overwhelming, which I’m working on, but it makes things complicated. I think we might be getting an introject and I am probably being really unhelpful since I don’t want to “encourage” him to coalesce, but like. It’s not fair to smother him either?? And I don’t want to set off my panic response, but I want to do better at being happy for the new guy if he is forming. I don’t know, it’s rough.
Y'know... We've realized smth and I dunno how to feel about it.
Everyone makes the "*sigh* p;m new" jokes, and "uh oh new introject" and etc. etc. and that's fun!! It's genuinely an okay joke to make, we have no issues with these jokes. We join in on them often, they're silly and most plurals probably experience them as 100% harmless.
But lately we've noticed we... don't experience them as harmless. Actually we've realized that, personally, there's an underlying truth there. Admitting a new headmate is real is seen as admitting defeat. We feel the need to question and interrogate ourselves at the possibility, and we feel like we're not allowed to express any want for a specific introject or headmate for reasons I can't articulate. To the point that one of our new headmates, love him, has literally told us "I won't force this. A lot is happening at once, I can be the one to step back and wait until you're ready to believe that I'm here."
LIKE THANKS I GUESS BUT??? GODDAMN. We're realizing that we don't let things develop in our collective, as much as we wish we were a collective that welcomes new headmates with open arms; we tend to fight it until we can't deny it and then we welcome them. But they have to truly fight to get us to believe them, because "what if that's just me." It's a lot worse if it's a sourcemate, or someone that we'd want to be there.
There's no real point to this post other than maybe to offer up our experiences in case someone feels the same way. Not a vent so much as something I hope someone out there might relate to.
-Travis