Personality Types

There are various reasons to take a personality test, but if you happen to be a member of a multiple system it might actually be pretty important.  Singular people have a lot more time to figure themselves out, whereas multiple systems have to split time between two or more individuals. Larger systems like ourselves may have members that only front once or twice every few months or so, and it can be difficult to figure out how to properly utilize these members. This is where personality tests come in handy.

We were directed to a particularly nice one by a friend: Www.16personalities.com

This test is quick, accurate, and comes with several pages of analysis that can help you discover the strengths and weaknesses of the alters you share a body with.  Aside from being practical personality tests can also be quite validating, especially for systems with less amnesia and/or distinctions between alters.

We were under he impression that we only presented a few different personality types, but so far we have discovered 7. With a system of our size (40+) I am wondering now if we actually cover all (or nearly all) personality types.

The hard part is getting everyone to cooperate and remember to take the test when they're out.

--Smith/Paul

We are on YouTube!

We started keeping a video log on YouTube.  This is mind from yesterday.  In the future we're going to try doing them once a week instead of every day (just because every day is a lot of work).  So if you want to watch us ramble about our lives (like we used to do on tumblr) go subscribe to our channel! --Reggie

Chronic Pain

We've noticed a pattern.  So many of the systems we know have chronic pain of one kind or another, and I can't help but wonder if the two are related.  I know that trauma permanently changes how one's brain works, but can it alter it so much that it causes one's body to ache constantly?  It just seems that nearly all the systems we know are sick.  A friend of ours just went to the ER for pain and the dr there told them they might have rheumatoid arthritis.

Our own body hurts all the time.  Sleeping is hard.  Just sitting here my shoulder aches.  It feels like there's a rock or something shoved under my shoulder blade.  The muscles that run along either side of our spine are so tight they're like steel cables.  We have a hard time breathing sometimes, I think because of the tightness in our shoulders.  It's hard to take a full breath.  Some days are worse than others.  Some alters are generally in more pain.  Some of us have a harder time breathing.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just anxiety?  Do we hold so much tension in our body that it's physically painful?  Is it because of the trauma?  The first time we realized that we didn't know how to relax was in highschool.. And we never really addressed that problem...

--Reggie

Out or..?

We are having some.. Disagreements about how open we want to be.  I think a lot of us would like to be out completely, just not hide at all from anyone.  We have several different social media accounts in which we blatantly say we have DID.  Yesterday Ruari made a YouTube account for some of us to use like a video journal thing.  If anyone we know (or knew) in person came across it they'd know immediately who we are.  And then people might ask questions.  And then we'd have to explain things to people-- which is easier to do with people we haven't known before.  I mean, part of the reason we aren't on Facebook is because it's filled with people we went to highschool with and we don't feel comfortable being out.  Not to mention our father, who we're sure is the source of our multiplicity (not that he ever did anything deliberately, I think, but he was just generally cranky and frightening and didn't like children that much.  We were terrified of him, and so was our brother. I mean really truly terrified.  I remember being afraid to move when he was in the room sometimes because we were never sure if he was going to yell at us.) I just don't know how we all feel about him coming to understand that he did this to us.  Like.. We don't like him but he's our father and he's depressed and I'm not sure what that would do to him.  Also he's still married to our mom and I don't want to make anything harder for her than it has to be.

But we're all so fucking tired of hiding.  We're so tired of editing our language to say I instead of We. It's tiring.  Anyway, there are already people who've noticed and just not been able to put their finger on exactly what our deal is.  We're artists so we can sort of get away with being extra weird, but I'd like to not have to anymore.  I dunno, this is just a point of stress for us.  I know I'm rambling... But that's kind of what this blog is for.

We're gonna keep the social media accounts.  Probably.  It's good for us to have an outlet.  With people.

Twitter: @we_are_sam
BBuzzArt: http://www.bbuzzart.com/profile/50502/works
YouTube: http://youtu.be/xRZw6eS2hRc
Li.st: @SamOwen

--Dante

Memory

Memory is weird.  I'm not sure how other people experience memory, but for us it's like snapshots with conceptual information attached to them. Some of the snapshots are in third person view, as in we can see ourself from the outside in our own memory. 

Sometimes we can feel a memory imprinting in the third person while it's happening. I'm not sure if this is a symptom of depersonalization or derealization. I know it's a general dissociative symptom. But sometimes we just think about ourself in the third person. We think we look different than we do and we can see ourself doing whatever we're doing in our mind... as ourself. 

And then there are the times when everything looks washed out and blurry and everything is streaking in our vision. We don't usually remember thighs when it gets like that unless something particularly memorable happened. Like that time one of us smashed our finger in a drawer because they were too dissociated to be coordinated. I have a memory that looks like a blown out photograph of a drawer in our kitchen that's not quite closed. There's a red sort of halo around the image. That's the pain. I know which memory this is even though our hand is nowhere in it. I just see that photograph and know what happened around it. 

It makes us sad sometimes. Because it seems like other people actually remember their lives. Meanwhile, I know that in a week we will hardly remember writing this post. We won't remember what was happening today.  Our days blur together. 

I know this blog doesn't have a lot of traffic right now, but if you read this I'd like to know: how do you remember things?  Whether or not you have DID. What do your memories look like?  I'm curious. 

--Raining Stars

Hello, our name is Sam

This blog is simply an expression, but we hope we can help some people along the way. Mental health issues are confusing and a lot of us are bumbling around in the dark looking for answers. We've gotten this far by bumbling into other people who happen to have a scrap of knowledge we need. Slowly things are starting to come together.

The first DID community we found was on Tumblr. This was years after we figured out that we were multiple, and finding this community was one of the best things that ever happened to us. The vocabulary that we learned was, by itself, worth the years of our life that got eaten by tumblr.  Being able to better express our experience has been liberating. Seeing how other people experience and manage the disorder has been enlightening-- but most of all I think the most beneficial thing was coming to understand that we actually have Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Because the actual disorder is nothing like the media portrayals most people are familiar with.  I only know one person who blacks out completely every time they switch.  Our experience of the disorder is much more cohesive than movies would have you believe, and so we operated for a long time under the assumption that our multiplicity wasn't related to "Multiple Personality Disorder" (which is what Dissosiative Identity Disorder used to be called, and the only name we knew for it before finding the Tumblr community).

I suppose part of the reason we decided to create another blog after leaving Tumblr is because we want to continue contributing to the community.  There are a lot of multiple systems still who don't understand what is happening to them.  We have helped two people so far discover that they have DID, and we were helped to figure out what was happening to us by another person who had multiples.  

There is a need for information and guidance, and we intend to continue paying it forward the best way we know how: by talking about ourselves on the Internet.

So welcome to our blog!  Our name is Sam and there are a lot of us.