Question 1: Introduce Yourselves

[beepbird]

Let's get this community talking! 

Tell us about yourselves. What are your lived experiences with plurality? How do you understand yourselves?

If you're still figuring this all out (as we all are), then what do you know so far about your own experiences? What do you want to know?

Comments and posts responding to this prompt are both welcomed, though comments keep this question's answers easier to find (consider linking back to this post if you answer in your own post- it makes it easier to track!).

Comments

[chameleons3]

We have known we are a system for a little over two years. We call this being a "realized" or "unfolded" system. We call the process of each of us knowing who we are in relation to the others "unfolding."

Chameleons is a self. A person. We are all Chameleons. Therefore, we are all the same person, and therefore we are all each other. Transitive property, you know. If someone called us "parts" we'd edit it to "parts of a team." In the internal family systems (IFS) sense, we each have parts, and we also have shared Chameleons parts. All of us claim our life history, our heritage, our experiences with queerness, gender, disability, religion, and so on, as our own, and all of ours.

"Three headed dog" or "three dogs in a trenchcoat" are great metaphors for us.

We'll edit this post to link to an infodump about how we're all in the same clade, when we get that posted.

Chameleons are a packaged deal. If you are in relationship of any kind with one of us, then you are in relationship with all of us. Even if you never directly interact with the other two, the Chameleon you are in relationship with is constantly impacting and impacted by the other two. We have no memory barriers that we know of, no secrets, and very little privacy.

Headmates, as a term, is one that implies a bodyless experience, for us, so we dislike it used for us. If you hear any of us using "headmate" in relation to our system, then we're talking about the neighbors, which is our side system that is not Chameleons.

Our body is us, and we are our body. We do not want our body to be referred to as "the body." Our relating to one another, understanding each other, understanding the world around us, all of that happens in our body. Switching is a somatic and neurological process, not a headspace one. While we do interact in our headspace/inner world, we don't have parallel lives there. We don't necessarily hang out there when we're not fronting. We don't have a fronting area or anything like that. Finally, we call each other "selves" and "others."

Switching doesn't happen as a mental process for us. Sure there's some visualizing sometimes, or some mental intent. But it is mostly a body process. Sometimes it's intentional, with planning and relying on the associations we've made. Usually it's unintentional, incidental, or response to some kind of stimulus. Sometimes it's almost instant, like mid-sentence. Sometimes it takes hours.

Here are our posts about embodied plurality we made a while back.
Plurality as Embodied, Part 1

Plurality as Embodied, Part 2: We Are Our Body

Plurality as Embodied, Part 3: Switching as Action