>>1204228I'm pretty sure we were never truly alone to begin with. I'm coming to recognize them as being older versions of myself given they think in ways I used to think and have attitudes and opinions I used to hold. I'm also growing to recognize their origins as very old childhood trauma responses and copes for gender dysphoria and queer sexuality, basically rooted in childhood through early adulthood denial and a sort of self-talk rooted in . I'm almost certain this is fundamentally a manifestation of old childhood complex ptsd symptoms, like the way CPTSD can leave one with an unstable sense of self conception, exacerbated by the survival need to be an egg for a while when trans.
I think the hormones have certainly contributed to making all this clearer to myself as I've experienced. But there, is in a way a certain pain in experiencing the memories of having to
be them whenever they're closer to the front in those dissociated moments and I feel their old familiar emotional responses ... and one of those is gender dysphoria ... and that makes it difficult to accept them when they're up front and making me feel like a man. I dunno, I guess this is a first step towards accepting them and growing so ...
>>1204234You can call us all Andrea if you want, that is our core identity after all. Though given their nature as old masks and trauma copes tied to memories of past self-conceptions, I tend to think of them as essentially all having my deadname, Andrew, while I am the oldest, the core Andrea.
I'm also kind of a blurry sort of median system, and I'm not sure how many past selves there are or if that number is even fixed, like their bits and pieces of the old Andrew persona. So it's kinda hard to really attach specific titles/epithets. So I'm still deciding what those should be. Especially given their nature to really only come out when triggered or dissociating by other causes.
Getting high as balls is now a party in my brain. Like, I like the image of a fraying rope as a metaphor for this. Or like the various multi-headed mythical beasts of various mythologies.
