How Many Hosts Do You Have, If Any?

[pheonix_system]

Our host count is kinda complicated.

Our total count is 9. However, only 4 can be considered main or primary hosts, while three of the others are hosts of subsystems or Solar’s sidesystem, and the other two are are the hosts of our sidesystems. The last four are all hosts in the main system, so we tend to front more than any of the others.

Also, bonus question because I’m curious: Do other systems have hosts who are also caretakers? Asking because three of us have both roles (me being one of them) and I’m just curious how common it is for these two roles to be found together.

Comments

[seraphikiss]

alva
we have one dominant host, and the rest are co-hosts.

luca (he/him) is a co-host and one of our caregivers. we also have a few other co-hosts, but many of them rarely front.

technically, all of my alters are, in some way or another, co-hosts. and to us, a co-host is more of an "emergency backup plan"/"plan B", in case the dominant host is incapable of handling certain scenarios.

[lightning_beast]

Either one or three depending on if you count the Deltas as one person or not. (we're median, it's complicated!) Personally I'd count it as three. We've all been here long before syscovery, with Sharpwhistle being the youngest of our little trio (we're fairly certain he appeared around our teenage years).

[lb_lee]

I mean, my immediate question is, what do you mean by "host"? I've seen it used to mean "main fronter" OR "original person," which are two very different things.

[pheonix_system]

We're using it to refer to "main fronter"/"handles the most day-to-day things". We consider it completely separate from "original person".

[lb_lee]

Ah gotcha. I guess we have 4-5 people through whom the responsibility circulates? It’s fluid.

[abyssal_sylph]

It changes semi-constantly for us. Sometimes somebody gets frontstuck, but otherwise we don't have consistant hosts.

[foggerss]

Honestly none? Common fronter changes too consistently for us to label any one as a host. We used to consider a group of 7-8 or so fronters as hosts, but we have dropped the label as it has personal negative associations for us (our last hosts fault)

[beepbird]

We choose not to have hosts nowadays. We arguably did have hosts for a long while- at least in the sense of having a "default" person in control- but it consistently led to power imbalances, burnout, and conflict that hurt all of us. It's a little too easy for anyone labeled a "host" in our group to decide to take over our life regardless of what the others think, then suffer the consequences of trying to do too much.

Nowadays, we actively work to balance fronting time between us fairly- or, at minimum, to ensure there is no default. It seems to be working out well. There's less burnout, less conflict, and better distribution of power inside. The only challenge is working with our brain when it doesn't want to allow a switch to someone who needs more time. Sometimes we have to wait it out.

We also stopped using role labels entirely (with one exception: Ann uses "persecutor" in a reclaimatory way, which seems to help her process past mistreatment).

[lb_lee]

It feels like what you describe is a more overarching shitty power dynamic in multi folk... back in the LJ days, we sometimes saw it called “hostzilla,” the idea that one headmate (or specific group of headmates, usually small) were inherently better and had the right to wield power and force over those “beneath” them. (Often those dynamics also included aspects of gender, race, age, or ability— “they’re too unacceptable/weird/fake/young/weak/crazy to be trusted with any power or right to choice.”)

I dunno what even to call it. Host supremacy? Internal authoritarianism??? Because while it can definitely be ASSOCIATED with hosts (in both senses of the term), they’re sure not the only ones.

[beepbird]

I have noticed that this is a wider pattern that appears here and there in plural groups; we are certainly not alone in having struggled with it. Aspects of age and ability were certainly factors here, as was lack of internal trust and an unsafe-feeling social environment.

I would say that it took until last year to really start to shift that pattern, but it is still something that crops up. It's just less pervasive/constant than it used to be, and we have slightly better tools for dealing with it. May it continue to become less common of a problem for us. It sucks. We are all still more afraid to give our time to others inside than any of us would like to be because of this.

I've been thinking of it as an internalized reaction to sanism and cultural imperialism/colonialism: "I'm not crazy if I'm in full control of the inside of my head, and I have the right to do what I want with my brain even if it protests because it's supposed to be My Brain; therefore I'm supposed to take control of everything inside, screw any complaints".

Or, sometimes, "I'm more real than you, so I should be the one who has the final say on everything." The "real person" bullshit strikes again.

"Hostzilla" is a good word for it in practice. Silly enough to work as a "hey, you're being a bit overbearing here" without it being taken as an attack.

[galewings]

one i think? we've got a host/main fronter for our overall system and it's me (one of me is usually in front so my subsystem as a whole is therefore the main fronter)

as for my subsystem: idk if we have a host. we have a default face/persona (that doesn't match any of the individual mes) that we're all fine using, but i wouldn't call that a host really

[cosmicwebofnoodles]

Eh? We don't really have hosts in the way you mean it. Co-fronting is such a near-constant for us that the idea of fronting itself kinda loses all meaning when trying to assign it on an individual basis. What we consider our host is Shreddie, but that is because we have adapted that role to be more of a classification, to mean "this is someone our brain formed to be able to maintain our external life".

[rainbowrivercollective]

While we personally don't use the term host anymore because of connotations of being like the "leader" in plural spaces we have 2 that fit the general idea of being the ones that front the most one of them is also an OCD holder and the other is like a protector.

[chameleons3]

Zero.

In the beginning, we had someone who "had final say." Very quickly realized this wasn't gonna work for us. Resentment cropped up immediately. too much baggage about who is and isn't welcome, whose desires and opinions matter and whose don't. We shifted the way we do things to be more aligned with our values and politics. That was rough when we weren't finding a lot of examples of how the way we wanted to do things worked in practice. System governments, system admins, hierarchies, they just don't work for us. We embraced anarchy pretty early on.

In this case, anarchy means none of us has the inherent "right" to anything in our life. No inherent right to lead, make decisions, be in partnership with our committed partnerships, veto, override, or any of that. Any agreements we make with each other are based on mutual accountability and shared goals of our life being a certain way, not based on appeal to authority.

For us, having any one of us be a host -- that is, leader or final decision maker, default fronter, any one of us assumed to be "the original" or "the real one" for whatever reason -- is too close to appeal to authority. It does not work for us at all.

Curious what you mean by caretaker in this case. Seen the word used many different ways. You could argue any of us three is a caretaker in some capacity. Zahi takes care of Arini and me in a lot of emotion regulation ways. Arini takes care of us in a lot of emotion processing ways. I take care of us by being a hardass and putting big ass walls between the others and people who are being shits.

[pheonix_system]

I’m using caretaker in a broad sense to refer to anything that might fit under “watches over or cares for the system or specific member(s).”

Basically just if it involves taking care of another member or the body in any way

[sagittaoftime]

In the sense of default person, we used to, but we don't anymore, simply because we can't be bothered to keep track of who's who when. For a while we had a small group we called frontrunners, the folks who were frequently found in or near front and would rotate on a few-days-at-a-time basis, which is similar. I wouldn't say either hosts or frontrunners ever had strict overlap with caretakers, but our multiplicity intersects with meeting our own emotional needs when external sources are absent, so... probably connected in that way.

[329production]

We do have people who fit the "fronts often and handles daily responsibilities" definition, but we generally don't use the term for ourselves. Though if you ask us, the fronting frequency is the less consistent aspect of the ones in here who do handle day-to-day stuff. The one label we have in place focuses more on how well we handle daily life than our fronting frequency because this works better for us. Assuming these members all count as hosts, we'd have around 50 or more of them. If we only count someone who fits the basic definition, we do have one currently. But again, we don't use the term. We treat our system as a hostless system regardless.

Bonus: using the above assumptions on what counts as host, pretty sure everyone would help take care of each other and the body if needed when they're around, host or not. So we don't really think of any of them as host-caretakers. However, we have what people might call host-protectors.