A Conversation: How do I know I’m a Multiple?

·        Certainly, if I know all my other personalities? (Astraea, n.d).

·        If I don’t fall in love, but the host or others within fall in love? (SemperFilthy, 2014).

·        If I’m too broke for psychological help, and the next thoughts are, we should probably lock our selves in a room (Malaysia.answers.yahoo.com).

·        If it seems like He’s a different person while being Batman, Transformers, or Spiderman? (Concerned Mom, 2013).

·        If I am fully aware of feeling like a different person? Childlike, protective adult, goth, secretive, angry, crazy, etc? (KelMel, 2014).

·        If there is an animal inside us? (A Shattered Soul, 2013).

·        If I can relate to the “Experience Project” site for “People who have Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)” (Undetermined25, 2013).

·        If I feel like I have “Friends inside my head?” (Annabanana 1907).

·        If I’m sure one of “the Little’s” in my head is trying to tell me something through a nightmare or flashback? (Vanessa G., 2013).

What if my doctor says there are few Multiples, and that we’re roleplaying? (Temple, n.d.).

So who is to say being a Multiple would even be a good thing?  Or a real thing?  Desirable?  Some people believe if you are diagnosed as Multiple, you one day wake up in a mental hospital - sometimes suicidal, and especially scared and without a sense of self-control or pushing out as a danger not only to self, but danger to others. (AwakenSoul 82, 2013).

There are a bevy of ways to understand Multiplicity whether for, against, or without opinion. Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Multiples is that in all likelihood MOST Multiples want to be responsible Multiples.  If it happens to you, why would we want to be less? This will hold to whichever tolerance level they've been enabled through self, but most likely through a steady relationship with a significant person.  The goal of responsibility is important, because the role of being responsible to self/selves is shared  as critical not only by selves, but by the public and professional views of MOST people - particularly in the legal system and our relatively ordered society.  

Multiples are sometimes ostracized, fearful, angry or in debt, and then made to feel crazy inside the therapy session with people who don't understand them, outside the therapeutic bond, or without critical key therapies at all.  Some professionals in psychiatry believe and some disbelieve in the disorder or being - Multiple, and those views are pushed out into the world without giving a lot of insight as to where their (for or against) beliefs are coming from.  Have you ever tried to access psychiatric journals where they study Multiplicity?  They are in lock-down by publishers and the American Psychological Association (APA).  At best, some of the articles on dissociation can be purchased for $35 a paper, as long as you have a connection with someone who is a MD or PhD. or is a current university masters' student.

There is no doubt a tremendous need for Multiples either with or without therapists to gain support in understanding themselves.  This is particularly true through communication, understanding of selves, learning to trust, and self-community building, and which includes sharing within their system to rebuild using both abilities and deficits.  Some of the Multiples' switching occurs and needs to be grown-out through experience or re-developed within the Multiples' system and beliefs in selves and others.  Inside the stronger community of Multiple advocates, people try to help one build better and more "abled" communities of people.  In lesser communities people enable and disable in the victimization of self and others.  

Anthony Temple > (Astraea, n.d.) states that “Multiplicity is Natural” and non-pathological.  He believes that the trauma view of dissociation “is simplistic, dis-empowering, patronizing, and downright insulting to multiples who do not fit this limited profile.”  While conceding to trauma theories, Temple writes that the problem with the limiting understanding of Trauma theory, is that it places all people who are Multiples within a stereotypical realm of abnormal psychology; being a helpless victim, whereas in other cultures, Multiples might be considered more creative or spiritual.  In the medical model, you are a Multiple after you have been diagnosed as a patient.  If you need personal help, you need to be a patient; see sick and non-functioning.

Part of being a Multiple is a sense of knowing, that because you are a Multiple that certain things affecting you, happen - and though this might be different than the general public, it may be more understandable with knowledge. Knowledge will build strength and determination to reach personal goals. (Teikay, 2014).  Understanding ones selves will help people to grow and become better citizens.  

It is also true, being a Multiple in general could give you feelings of anxiety, depression, depersonalization, derealization, or feelings of being overwhelmed.  A person could experience decades of therapeutic support and many financial dollars without being able to completely get out on one's own.  We advance the theory and movement that better relating to people, will make one's world seem more plausible and more hopeful - EVEN if the relationship has to, or gets to be with a psychiatrist/therapist.  The secret in relating to a professional is in communicating to a potentially intelligently-trained, primarily balanced, honest, trustful, and present-orientated person.  

This theory could work with friends or family also, but theoretically, the psychiatrist/therapist has been specially trained as an intelligent person working through with other on healthy personal issues. The reality is that Multiples need - as like water - healthy people in their lives and that doesn't always happen with the general public, or more than often the people that raised them.  It seems though the more educated on ourselves we become, the higher our aspirations raise toward a potentially suited life even with and especially with internals.

Being a Multiple my/ourselves has meant that I eventually started to focus more on Multiplicity and the Community of Multiples, including those people interested with Multiplicity who were not Multiples.  To do this, we collect information on Multiplicity in all sorts of bits and pieces.  We are trying to make sense of everyday thoughts on Multiplicity found frequently through Google searches, and by publications, journals, and videos/movies and by trying to define the common words that those utilized within the field of Multiplicity, although many words defined are things like feelings, thoughts and emotions that are generic with all people.  

We also access different platforms that seem to congregate Multiples like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Yahoo Groups and Twitter.  The similarity in all of the above resources is that they can be found within our Multiple Mind Map (MMM) though the MMM is just at its infancy after approximately a year of making "thought" entries.

Finally, there is one source of information that we’re really going to try hard and understand and incorporate into daily thoughts and writing.  It is Paul Dell and John O’Neil’s (2009) book on Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders:  DSM-V and Beyond.  Their book is co-authored by approximately 70 people publishing formally on Multiplicity, although most would probably not be Multiples.  Most of this group, would seem to be in the field of service or education, though perhaps specializing in trauma or dissociative disorder. 

The information input will be ongoing – suggestively for the rest of our life, but it is just the first half, because the other half of this form is the work of curating the information found.  By that I mean not only collecting the information on Multiples, but as well sorting through it and then writing about what we have discovered from within ourselves and the material that had presented to us, as it did.  I would hope you might find yourself looking through the Multiple Project (MMM) and the writing that we are doing, but as well that these initiatives would be something that might be helpful to your writing too and to other people in understanding Multiplicity.  

Most important is that the effort eventually will generate an ongoing conversation that mixes the thought of EVERY one talking about it from the naysayers, to the psychiatrists, to the movie producers, to the general person on the street, and certainly to the Multiples and their loved ones.  The Multiple field is at present a quagmire of oddity that beckons for clear and guided resolutions of logic. 

McNight (2013) writes, “I did my own homework as well. Finding out that this disorder is a coping mechanism for those of us who have it. I thought "whoa how cool is that, that my mind could split apart like that to preserve me from trauma! How awesome is God, who created our minds in the first place.” Although the majority of Multiplicity seems to be trauma-based, there is an entire world's worth of clarifying information yet to read and write about, and especially make sense from.

With Multiplicity, people want to be “Their own person(s);” the substance of really, real reality, (McKnight, 2013) but are our realities the same?  How do I know if I’m a Multiple?  “Basically, we were blunt.  We just say it and explain why we know this is true.” (Jeff, 2013).

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