About Us: Number (+History)

One might assume that naming the number of people in our system is a straightforward task, but it’s actually quite complicated. Given the constantly-shifting nature of our system and the difficulty of naming who “counts” in our system count, we have mostly given up at this point. However, we do have an official system member count that is based on specific, agreed-upon factors. By that count, our current membership includes 65 people. I’ll explain how we arrived there.

When we were in middle school, we attempted to count what we then referred to as “characters” in a journal entry by listing them. We divided them into several categories and fussed over the list for quite awhile before writing the ominous conclusion “Number of Me = 80” in gel pen at the top of the page. It’s interesting, because our friends also created story characters and roleplayed them, but never identified with the characters in any way similar to the “number of me” list.

Fast forward a little over ten years through various life events, including high school, a failed attempt to “stop having imaginary friends and grow up”, a misdiagnosis with dangerous and inappropriate medication, our chronic conditions catching up with us after college and requiring a shift to full time rest for several years, a Buddhist phase, a number of moves back and forth across the US, a marriage to our partner system, and the beginning of their gender transition. All that happened, and we came across the concept of plurality, finally, on a forum online. We were 26 years old.

Being number-oriented people, the first thing we did was make a list. On that list there were 8 individuals. Within a month or so, a 9^th popped out of stasis (I’ll get into that in a minute), so now we refer to this as the 9 Phase. The 9 Phase lasted about a year and a half, and though that doesn’t seem long, it was a very significant phase because as soon as we found the plural label, we found a wealth of plural community information that was actually helpful- unlike any other mental health advice we had received before. That year-and-a-half saw a huge change in our thinking about ourselves, our functionality, and how we were documenting our system. Previously, we had documented our internal lives through stories and artwork, but we discovered vlogging almost immediately after coming across the community. We were shocked watching ourselves on video because our mannerisms are so different from each other, while also being reminiscent of how we experience each other inside. We learned internal communication skills, healed ancient arguments, began to purposefully share the front, combined our partially-separated memory banks using visualization, created an internal democracy for decision-making, and began the long years of work towards undoing our internalized ableism. Due to all of this, our memory for events in our life improved, we immediately had more energy, we felt better about ourselves as people, and we were suddenly able to make major decisions (such as the decision to go back to school and get a PhD in psychology).

But I digress. The point is, among all the change and upheaval, we clung fiercely to the idea that there were exactly 9 of us, that there had always been 9, and that we would always be 9. This was partially a reaction to the pathologizing literature we were reading about DID, as though we had to go to great lengths to somehow prove we didn’t have it by knowing everyone in our system. It was also a desperate cry for stability in a rapidly-shifting internal landscape. We wanted this discovery to be the panacea to what had been an absolutely miserable mental health time up until then. Of course, we all know now that life is complicated, people are complicated, and even more so, systems are complicated. And that’s fine! It’s okay to change over time. But we hadn’t exactly realized that fact yet.

Then, one of the 9 turned out to actually be a subsystem. In our case, subsystems have formed when people were in some way smooshed together temporarily earlier on in our life for various reasons (ex., us trying really hard not to be plural). Therefore, finding a subsystem is the beginning of a process we refer to as unfurling. We use this word because the process feels like a fern opening up inside, or someone digging through a box and continuously finding different things hidden in it. By our nature, we are like oil and water towards each other- given the chance, our individual identities separate almost like they are magnets with the same kind of charge. Subsystems inevitably start to separate out into the individuals within them, because (in our system) we were never meant to be combined. At some point, it’s impossible not to notice this happening, so began the House Lulin Phase.

The member in question unfurled (this time) into 5, putting us at 13. It took quite a bit of mental gymnastics to be okay with the increase, but that was helped by the fact that two of them were adorable children. We began to open our minds a little bit to the idea of new members. The House Lulin Phase lasted about a year-and-a-half as well.

The next phase we call the Returnee Phase. This was around the time we found the journal entry that said “Number of Me = 80” on it. Of course, we were taken aback. None of us remembered this list. It got us wondering, “who are all these people?” Unsurprisingly, discussing people’s specific names and loudly wondering if they were real or not started attracting a series of people who had been in stasis, and they began to wake up. At the end of the Returnee Phase, we had 21 members, a much better memory for past events, a much busier fronting schedule, and a higher tolerance for system member count increases.

I should explain what “in stasis” means for us. So, our system seems to have naturally operated by what we call “shift changes” (in the sense of a workplace) for most of our life up until our discovery of plurality. A group of between 6 and 10 headmates would run our life for several years as a group. Then, a shift change would occur, and that shift of headmates would go out of awareness. They experienced it like being asleep for years at a time. The new shift would run the front until we got too stressed out, at which point the shift would change again. Because of this, different eras in our life had different major fronters. Sometimes, someone would hold on across several shift changes for the sake of consistency. We were able to document these shift changes by examining our past writing and our art, combined with who remembered what parts of our life more vividly. As our current democracy, we have artificially interrupted this natural process in order to keep everyone awake at one time. But that’s a whole other story.

After our membership reached 21, we had one year of no change in membership. During this year, we began to face up to our history of trauma. That may be its own entry someday, so for now I’ll just say that we experienced trauma related to medical treatment that started in adolescence (after the “80 of Me” situation). As we went back to school, we started to experience anxiety and somatic flashbacks and sought therapy. We received a diagnosis of PTSD and went through several good, neutral, or terrible providers. Again, a story for another day. The point is, we ended up opening the first of what we refer to as “trauma pockets.” This is because they feel like sealed-up ziplock bags, and if you open one, a ton of things come out, including past emotions, flashbacks of different kinds, nightmares, and in some cases, people who were previously missing. If this sounds dramatic, that’s because it is. The good thing about trauma pockets, though, is that once it all comes out of the bag, we feel infinitely better. Also, they tend to empty quickly. Within a few weeks or months, they resolve themselves just by being open.

This particular trauma pocket was very alarming because we didn’t understand trauma pockets yet. It was the first time this had happened. It was wild. We gained back most of the ability to connect to our body sensations, which had been covered by a blanket of dissociation. The price was extreme moods, intense dreams, and 7 previously missing system members who we refer to now as the Dream Called. If you’re counting, that put us at 28. There was a lot of healing that needed to happen among the Dream Called and between them and other members of the system, due to the nature of the trauma in that specific pocket, which I won’t get into here.

Around this time, we also started to debate an unresolved issue of who exactly “counts” as a system member. There are a number of partially-sentient or conscious entities in various parts of our headspace. There is a group of them that are made up entirely of nature spirits, for example. These sometimes come and go, seeming to enter our system from outside of it. Different members of our system have different opinions on what they are. Our spiritual members believe they really do come and go, while our more atheistic members believe they are created by our brain just like the rest of us. Also, this group rarely tend to front, though there are exceptions. As of right now, they are mostly not counted in our tally, but the debate goes on.

Following that, we had two more subsystem unfurlings happen, bringing us to 31. And then we discovered the Can of Wolves.

To understand the Can of Wolves, it’s necessary to know that the trauma-based dissociation in our system happened in exactly one place: between our body sensations and our mind-states. Once that dissociative blanket was lifted, we were left with our mind-states, plus body sensations that felt very unregulated and that we struggled to influence from a top-down direction. This led to the creation of a new system member, on purpose, to give voice to our body and allow us to communicate with it more directly. We gifted sentience to it and then allowed it to develop on its own. Basically, we created an extremely useful tulpa to help us regulate emotions and communicate our body’s needs to us. (Look up the term “tulpamancy” if you are unfamiliar and curious.)

This new system member came to connect our brain-minds with our bodymind, and it turned out to not be the only headmate that resided in there, on the other side of the previous dissociative wall. The reconnection began the unpacking of the Can of Wolves, named after the fact that all of our bodymind-type headmates identify as wolves (for unknown reasons).

The slow unfurling of the Can of Wolves lasted for several years. During that time, we also gained a few headmates via other methods (ex. trauma pockets). At the end of that, we were around 40 in our official count. We were also nearing the end of graduate school, finally.

At this point, we had gotten our PTSD completely under control using therapy and medication. We had accepted the idea that we just don’t know how high our member count really is. This, combined with slightly less external stress, probably led to what came next. To make a long story as short as possible, it turned out we were being watched internally by a group of headmates who had stayed out of sight for several years, trying to determine if they should talk to us. This group had hidden during an earlier traumatic time, then surfaced when the Can of Wolves Phase started. They had stayed out of our awareness for a couple of years before deciding to reconnect.

We had gotten pretty good at acclimating to a few returned headmates at a time, but suddenly discovering 21 other people who had been observing us for years was kind of destabilizing. They had moved into an area of our headspace we refer to as the Dream Worlds, so moving them from there into the regular headspace was kind of difficult. They had their own system government from the time they had been isolated, so we had to figure out how to interface our methods of operating. They also had conflicts with each other and with us that needed to be mediated. On top of that, one of their members was a subsystem who needed to unfurl several times. Our headspace was too small, so we needed to remodel it, which isn’t difficult but does take a certain amount of energy.

It's been almost exactly one year since those members rejoined us, and we are at a time of stability once again. There are currently 65 of us by the official system count. We have learned, at this point, never to declare that we’ve found everybody. There’s still that “80 of Me” list, that mostly does correspond to the 65, though not entirely. There is also that continuing discussion around who “counts.” But fortunately, the issue no longer really bothers us. We’re good with being Nsashaell, number unknown.