a talking point i often see when defending the consumption of dark content is that it’s a coping mechanism for those with trauma which is very valid and true but i also want to make this abundantly clear: you can like dark content for no reason. you can enjoy fucked up shit in fiction because it’s enjoyable and entertaining. trauma is not required as a ticket for entry. enjoy your dark content bc it’s fun and sexy and don’t let anyone take that away from you

People with autism or ADHD: I have this symptom

Me, a schizophrenic: oh me too!

People with autism or ADHD: I have this symptom

Me, a schizophrenic: haha yeah I got that too

People with autism or ADHD: I have this symptom

Me, a schizophrenic: yeah I deal with that daily

People with autism or ADHD: have you been checked for autism/ADHD? It really seems like you have it

Me, a schizophrenic: you know those are all possible symptoms of schizophrenia too right? You know that we have more than just psychosis right? And we can experience almost every symptom of autism and ADHD combined right? You know that we are more alike than we are different, right? Right?

Here's a great graphic to depict this created by @gray-gray-gray-gray (not all symptoms listed are part of diagnostic criteria but are often seen in people with these diagnoses)

an appalling number of marginalized people in this upcoming generation appear to be under the impression that saying they're "reclaiming" a slur gives them a free pass to use that slur in a derogatory way towards other marginalized people in their communities that they dislike or think are annoying. maybe it's just the people i've had the misfortune of encountering in the wild, but it's getting bleak out there, folks.

like the other day i encountered some cunt using the fucking R slur to refer to an autistic person stimming in a way they found annoying, and when confronted about their ableism, they replied, "oh, i have ADHD, i can reclaim it." and it's like, no, you jackass, you absolutely the fuck cannot! that is not what that means! if the way you use a word is indistinguishable from the way a fucking nazi would use that word, then you're not "reclaiming it" anymore, you dumb bastard!!! you're just using it the same way the damn nazi does!!! shut the fuck up and be kinder you ass!!!

Reclaiming a slur means applying it to yourselves as a badge of honor. It needs to be used with a positive connotation. That is what reclaiming means!

If you are not talking about yourself, it is not reclamation.

If you are not talking about the group kindly, it is not reclamation.

You reclaim a word by making it from a weapon into a way to connect with your own community positively. That is what reclamation means.

you dont have to be useful to be loved btw

I think it needs to become common knowledge that "inability to read social cues" can show up as overcompensating.

You don't know how much misbehaviour is allowed, so you become the perfect child who never tests rules.

You don't know if someone is irritated with you, so you'll be extra generous and self-effacing.

You don't know how much is expected of you at work so you'll kill yourself in a minimum-wage job and not notice that nobody else is working like this.

"Hardworking and quiet" should be as much of an autism red flag as "ignores rules and doesn't know when to stop talking". Or why don't we just start using words to communicate so i can stop tracking everybody's eyebrow twitches, that would be great.

DR BRAND UPDATE

After answering this anon, I emailed Dr Brand asking for her opinion on the idea of multiple identity outside CDDs. She sent me this article, saying "This article will explain my opinion on this." The published revision was written so recently as October, after this blog was created, so this is fresh out of the oven!

Most of it is about self-diagnosed DID, some about the spread of self-diagnosis for other disorders. The general tone is skepticism but not dismissal.

While not the main focus, for the first time ever on this blog, multiple identity outside dissociative disorders is actually mentioned in the article! So what do they have to say about it?

Seems like a fairly neutral description. Right about now is when I would expect them to say something like, "there is no evidence that plural identity can exist without trauma or dissociative disorders, and it is concerning that this has become such a big part of..."

What actually comes next?

Instead of dunking on the idea of non-traumagenic multiplicity, which it seems like they should do right after introducing it given the target audience (other scholars who aren't familiar with this topic), they make a point of defining “system” not as a medical term, but as internet slang. Weird.

Possible fakeclaiming of introjects aside, why is “systems” still in quotation marks? Why are these professionals treating it like foreign terminology?

Because despite what's often alleged here, “system” is seldom used to mean this (a collection of self-states within an individual) in scholarly publications. I double-checked all the previous daily readings and “system” has not been used this way even a single time among those hundreds of pages about DID.

Oh, this is about non-disordered multiple identity. Pardon the term war detour.

Ok, now they're gonna say it's bs. Right?

No, that's all folks! That's the last mention of multiplicity as identity in this article. You can check for yourself, the authors just leave it there with no rebuttal. "Some credible people are saying that multiplicity as an identity is valid and we're not gonna argue with them."

So while I appreciate the attempt, anon, this confirms it: Dr Bethany Brand and all her co-authors are endo-neutral at best, and frankly they're probably leaning pro because their main issue is with people self-diagnosing with DID which a lot of endos don't do.

The search for an anti-endo doctor continues.

Pro tip for what may be a very niche audience of systems with mid level internal communication: if you can only internally communicate when trying to do so and you rarely or never hear surprising, random comments from other headmates that some other systems talk about, that is in fact normal. Internal communication is something that almost always takes time and practice to get better at, so it's not unusual for a system to have difficulty hearing each other and need to actively try to talk to each other to achieve internal communication. Hell, there's a reason that learning internal communication is a part of treatment for systems seeking medical support – because it can be difficult and it's unlikely that you've mastered it right off the bat!

Not hearing your headmates most of the time is okay. Needing to focus on talking to a headmate to internally communicate is okay. If you rarely or never get surprised by someone internally talking to you, that probably just means your internal communication has some barriers, difficulties, or quirks that other systems do not have. That does not mean you're faking; that does not mean you're less of a system. Don't fool yourself otherwise just because you see other systems getting caught off-guard by their headmates talking to them, or overhear each other talking while they're focused on something else, or anything else. They are not you, and your system is going to be different from their system. It's okay if your internal communication is different from other systems.

Tl;dr: Don't trap yourself in self-doubt if your system doesn't have perfect internal communication (including if you have internal communication that's "good enough" for your system but lacks in some areas). Internal communication (and communication skill) varies from system to system, and you don't have to have flawless communication to be a real system.

as a completely cis dude, I would press this button immediately, without question. There are a lot of things I would do for money, but shit I'd do this for like 20 bucks... maybe less?

She said with all too much confidence

A DAY!?!?!?

happy almost one year anniversary to arch-user having her realization in well under 24 hours

edit: i checked. it took 6 hours.

I hate 2 say it but being a part of a “weird” subculture does not meaningfully inoculate you against a conservative moralizing impulse. You gotta unlearn that. Saying “cringe is dead” is not enough, you have to actually be okay with things that discomfort, perplex and/or disgust you.

Think systems with a high number of fictional introjects are a new phenomena? Kluft's paper on polyfragmented/extremely complex DID from 1988 includes a patient with LOTR introjects, and another based off of Shakespear's Tempest. Fictional introjects have been a thing for a very long time!

Yep! You can find it here.

(also the URL in case tumblr eats that hyperlink like it sometimes does)

We actually love this paper. We got a lot out of it. There's actually a lot more said that fakeclaimers always say is fake. Some key takeaways:

1. very high numbers of alters is very possible. The highest number in this study was over 4,500! 40% had 26-50 alters, 4% had 51-75, 12% had 76-100, 19% had 101-200, 8% had 201-300, and 20% had 300+

2. there's "ad hoc" forming of alters, as in they form frequently and often arbitrarily. "One patient was so apprehensive about her consultation with me that no alter would agree to attend. A new alter was formed for the occasion." Some even "developed a pattern of forming new alters in the face of trivial stressors and inconveniences, or whenever they felt cornered." And there was evidence of forming multiple at once, "almost two-thirds developed complex splitting patterns so that more than one alter emerged on each occasion of the formation of new alters."

3. innerworlds! "Over two-thirds had developed elaborate inner worlds, in which the personalities interacted among themselves". And "in some cases alters appear to have been created to do no more than to fill roles in these inner worlds."

4. yes, fictives, and factives! Some "formed alters based on the therapist." And in fact, "most MPD patients have alters based on identification, internalization, and introjection". And introject-heavy proof: "a small percentage have formed a massive number of alters in this manner as a defence against object loss."

5. there's the phenomenon of essentially cycling through alters, or as the study describes, "with each major life change some or all of the alters were created anew, and their predecessors might either remain active or subside, and become covert or latent."

6. even full alters (not fragments) can be relatively similar to each other: "this patient, with over 4,500 alters, had only 300 alters that were as poorly defined as the alters in Case 19 [(fragments)]. They were remarkably full when they appeared, although many were quite similar to one another. It was as if the same "basic issue" types of alters could be reduplicated readily, and regenerated again and again over the course of the patient's life."

7. the author rejects "splitting" terminology in most cases because "the mind, rather than dividing itself, rather multiplies itself, recopies itself selectively, or rearranges a finite number of elements in patterns of great potential variety." And also, "if one understands the process of alter formation as one of defence reduplication and/or reconfiguration rather than division, the problem of wondering how the mind becomes divided into such complexity ceases to be relevant."

We love this. This study really speaks to us. And it was published in 1988. Amazing.

Image description: The first image is an excerpt from the paper in question. It says, "One patient reconfigured her alters after reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and presented a complex cadre of alters based on hobbits, orcs, and wizards; another used Shakespeare's Tempest, a situation that became clear when I encountered an alter named Caliban."

The second image is a screenshot of a Tumblr reply from user blu-cheavy-main, saying: "hey do you have a link to the paper?" End image descriptions.

That's a very interesting paper! A book by the same author, Richard P. Kluft, also talks about fictional introjects. Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality, published in 1985 by American Psychiatric Press. You can borrow it from the Archive.org library or use WorldCat to see if you can borrow it from a library near you.

Kluft's book is the earliest academic source-- and earliest source, period-- listed in a booklet of history research by House of Chimeras, A Collection of Mentions of Nonhuman and Fictional-Based Members of Plural Systems. Chimeras's booklet gives this summary of the relevant part of Kluft's book:

"On page 180 while talking about the alters included within a specific case of multiplicity, the author [Kluft] noted one alter in the system was based on a character from The Hulk series and Captain Kirk from Star Trek, another alter had some similarities to Mr. Spock from Star Trek, and two other female alters had the same name as the two female characters from the series The Flintstones."

These are even different characters than the ones that the 1988 paper wrote about. Between the two sources, these tell about three different systems who had fictional introjects in the 1980s.

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

Share the knowledge

Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!

hey its me your immune system. looks like we caught somethin here. try sneezing real fast see if that gets rid of it. yeah no dice, huh... alright lemme try filling your lungs with fluid. no yeah i do it all the time dont worry works like a charm. hmmm... still no good... alright well just hold tight here for a minute maybe it just needs time to start working. in the mean time ill go fire up the ol' neuron cooker n see if that helps

HEY its me again. false alarm turns out it was just like pollen or somethin haha sorry i can be a little jumpy is all. ...hey man youre not lookin so good are you okay?

"Dissociation" as a term is kind of in a weird position compared to a lot of other medical terms that slowly enter public knowledge, because people expect it to be misused like OCD and delusions and so on; they assume people are using it for situations where it doesn't apply, that they are "watering down" an important concept. But the thing with dissociation is no, all these people who are using the term "dissociation" lightly are also using it correctly.

Zoning out is a form of dissociation. Daydreaming is a form of dissociation. Dissociation covers a lot of different things, from complex disorders to everyday behavior. People aren't "misusing a serious term" when they describe these experiences as dissociation, and they aren't hurting anyone who experiences more severe forms of dissociation by doing so. I'm not offended when people without DID describe their daydreams as dissociation, I'm happy that they can recognize there are healthy and everyday forms of dissociation, and so when they encounter dissociation in the context of trauma or a disorder, it hopefully won't be as scary to them.

This is a "yes and" situation, not a "no but" situation. Yes, zoning out is a form of dissociation! And this is how I experience "zoning out" as someone with a dissociative disorder! I'm glad you now have a better understanding of medical terminology and will hopefully be able to better understand any medical texts you come across in the future

If you're looking for people misusing "dissociation", I assure you there are still plenty of people who associate any mention with it with senseless violence. How about we tackle that first before deciding the word for a spectrum can only be used to describe the most extreme forms of it

I still stand by my opinion that a majority of the claims of endo systems invading cdd tags is people seeing a post with pro endo adjacent tags and immediately assuming that means that system is endogenic instead of you know a cdd system who doesn't hate endos

Now sure, once in a while there's bound to be an actual crosstag but with how quick some anti endos are to fakeclaim anyone who supports endos I do genuinely believe that is what the "invading spaces" posts tend to be in most situations