30 Days of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Day 04 (Part 2)
Welcome back! Sorry if you barely survived yesterday. It was bad. You'll be happy to know that our friendships are much easier as a system, and also a lot easier to avoid people when they show signs of not being a cool person.
As usual, this question comes from CatalyticConvergence. It's the same one as last time, covering in-system relationships this time!
This episode should really have a different title though
The Fuck Kind of Graph is This?
Are you or any of the others in a relationship in or out of the system? How does dating work for you if you do it?
Now's as good a time as any to mention that inter-system relationships are not just romantic, and it's very annoying when people act like relationships in general are just romantic. It's a very self-centered, non-communal form of interpersonal relations that cuts people off from the things that make us people (historically speaking, in the context of government-sanctioned separation of families and US grind culture preventing people from having any meaningful friendships).
That being said, inter-system relationships are much of the same. They can be romantic or sexual, sure, but they can also be platonic, familial, professional, or even animose, if alters tend to piss each other off.
Our system does not have an inner world where they interact to fulfill these relationships. Interacting with other alters always requires some form of co-consciousness at the least, to include while we are asleep and dreaming, which we don't consider to be the innerworld. Anything we do together is something literally done together: we are just present at the same time and can sometimes even talk to each other through internal dialogue.
Inter-system relationships can also be just as complex as real relationships! When we track in-sys relations in PluralSpace, we use the default terms with some custom terms or extra details to fill in the gaps. Here's an example of how complex it can get and how they end up being distantly connected to each other.
- Finn and Mater are life partners.
- Mater is Mario & Luigi's cousin.
- Peppino is Mario & Luigi's uncle on another side of the family.
- Mario, Luigi and Gooigi are all siblings. I also noted that Mario is Luigi's caregiver.
- Bowser and Luigi are married, Bowser is Luigi's protector.
- Due to a coping mechanism, Bowser and Mick and Globox are all adoptive siblings.
- Ray and Globox are starting to become friends, but for a while they weren't even aware of each other in-sys and didn't communicate.
- Mick and Aries are partners.
It's very complex and goes a long ways away! Finn and Aries don't even know each other, but they're connected thanks to Finn's partners being the cousin-in-law of Aries's partner. And this doesn't even cover our entire system, but we're not done with that yet and we're also keeping it secret for privacy's sake.
People might be concerned with the complexity of our in-sys relationships, and to be honest, they're so real for that. But the reality is that in-sys relationships are not a suitable substitution for real relationships. Peppino can't replace any of our uncles, and Mater can't replace our cousins. They are their own people, but they're important people, and having a dissociative disorder doesn't negate that.
If anything, having in-sys relationships can be beneficial towards integration, which I covered in the last post of this series. Reminder that integration is simply lowering dissociative barriers through reducing amnesia and increasing communication between parts. If in-sys relationships help with integration, then why should we dismiss that? Most effective as we're fully aware that all of our parts are different bits and pieces of us: they're not the same as people outside our system, but through our in-sys relationships, we're able to function as a cohesive unit under good circumstances (current stressful times are not helping, but I digress).
The best tip I can give for fostering communication is to leave notes for each other and check your notes after you come back from dissociating. You can use whatever you want, but I strongly recommend a pocket notebook and a pen that you'll take with you. The internet is not a permanent or private as you think it is.