Detached self-analysis

[kiya]

The weirdest thing about being under this level and this type of stress is how, instead of being fairly consistently integrated across my aspects, I'm shifting very abruptly from personality to personality, with each one fronting for a varying amount of time before some stimulus or other sends another one dominant.

It's like a dial, going click-click-click. There's no transition. One moment I'm bawling my eyes out, the next moment I'm analysing the correct language for referring to the personality that's currently in the driver's seat.

I'm Darkhawk now. I was Silver five minutes ago, and back where I was last night before Do Not Baboon knocked me solidly into the Altair's Child for the night. My shirt is still damp from that, but I can see again. Occasionally I dip into Stormwolf for abrupt split seconds of blind rage and then snap into someone else. I'm not . . . the integrated personality, I'm the splinters, each in turn.

Fascinating, captain.

Hm. Kevin's come home. With R&G Are Dead.

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Are any of them apart from Darkhawk sufficiently rational and/or interested in co-operating for you guys to be able to discuss this abrupt switching problem and see if you can agree a better way of sharing the fronting? We find we can do this best by holding what we call a "system meeting" and typing out the conversation in dialogue form (which then usually gets posted on DJ, or failing that saved to our hard drive, so we have a record). It does depend on how able people are to verbalise, though, and how good others are at translating for the ones who can't.

[kiya]

That's a tricky question. I suspect, though I'm not entirely certain, that the fronting-as-opposed-to-timeshare . . . fuckiti'velostitagain . . . external stimuli . . .

. . .

, , ,

If I didn't go distinct I'd be me not us.

Can't see to type. Pardon whatever.

[kiya]

I try this again, when Silver isn't going to take over in the middle and render me incoherent.

When I'm not under a stress of some sort, I'm a gestalt, a fluid, somewhat fluxing amalgamation of the personalities. There's usually one dominant: Silver dominates relationship-stuff, Darkhawk dominates dealing-with-outside-people (I didn't think of this consciously when choosing that as my prime face-to-the-world handle, but it works out -- it may be that I was using that as my outside-face handle, so that persona adopted it, rather than me naming the persona and the persona taking the world job); Lightweaver dominates religious situations and workings; so on, so forth. I wouldn't say that the dominant aspect has more than . . . between 40% and 60% of the personality at a time, though. (If I'm doing percentages and the like, Darkhawk's almost certainly either dominant or strong secondary.) I'd say I'm normally something like 60/30/10/trace elements. (At the moment it's Darkhawk/Jade almost entirely.)

The other thing about the model of the inside of my head is . . . it has a front-stage and back-stage. Back-stage is all the aspects, in various combinations; the backstage conversation was what I wrote down the other day in the locked entry with the dialogue. On-stage has whatever personalities are present in the, the current gestalt, or avatars of them (I'm none too sure about the difference between front-presence and back-presence, but it feels like there is one). Backstage offers advice and commentary on frontstage, sometimes heckling too.

Stress situations . . . narrow the stage? Or maybe it's that lack of time-pressures make it possible for aspects to work together and pool skills, but stress situations don't have time to negotiate number of hands or other grasping appendages involved? I don't know. I think it's the case that my aspects have skill-sets that are optimised to dealing with specific stress situations, and I don't know how much that is cause or how much effect.

Silver takes over in stress situations when nurturing is needed for someone else's pain. Stormwolf blows shit up. (That's how Stormwolf puts it when I asked; I think she also minds lust. Pronouns for Stormwolf are weird; she's sexed but not gendered.) Jade is self-protective through withdrawal (and used to be able to completely control the stage whenever she showed up, which would mean that her presence would often lead to, essentially, catatonia; she still does that, but she does other stuff too now).

I think my current problem is that Silver doesn't have much if any defense against pain. Which means she tries to interact with the relationship-problem, it hurts her badly, she shuts down, and the self-defense personae -- Stormwolf and Frostpaw, mostly -- take over until the problem is no longer a "threat" (often due to inflicted damage), at which point Silver flips back to try to fix the damage. . . I think I need to de-stress the situation enough that Silver can do her job without having to go it alone and not having her protectors around.

Which is . . . well, it's a thought, but I have no idea how to implement it.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. Thanks for the metaphors - they make a lot of sense, and they really help me get a handle on how things are for you. I have equivalents for a lot of the things you describe.

I will ponder and see if I can articulate anything that might be helpful.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I think my current problem is that Silver doesn't have much if any defense against pain. Which means she tries to interact with the relationship-problem, it hurts her badly, she shuts down, and the self-defense personae -- Stormwolf and Frostpaw, mostly -- take over until the problem is no longer a "threat" (often due to inflicted damage), at which point Silver flips back to try to fix the damage. . . I think I need to de-stress the situation enough that Silver can do her job without having to go it alone and not having her protectors around.

Hm. Makes sense. In the meantime, I wonder if it would maybe be useful to Silver to have the borry (as you say) of one of several lioness-cloaks of ringmail, very very fine and supple. This lioness finds them useful for certain things, as they are designed to provide appropriate protection when certain Big Energy is being handled. Dunno as Silver'd want to take up wearing them long-term, as that sort of insulation has drawbacks as well as benefits (and takes certain kinds of practice to handle some of the more delicate, more long-post-crisis tasks), but they might could be useful short-term, and wouldn't take much learning, for that particular use anyhow, I think.

If it turns out you'd (for such values of you as may vary) find such a thing useful/interesting, they're on the brass coatpeg thingums inside the back door of the Imaginary Outpost over here; I shall leave a note with the gate guard explaining that you are to be treated with every courtesy (including being hospitably ignored, if that proves comforting -- I know some situations in which receiving that has been a great goodness for me, so I offer it just in case). The big blue-gray one is the thickest, and the shiny mithril-looking one is the most supple' the rest are somewhere in between. Please to leave a pawprint on the board to say hello, if you wish, and have my good wishes for you.

Good wishes in both short-term and long-term, I might add.

[kiya]

I shall try seeing if getting one of those on helps, yes. (Though at the moment, Altair's Child is a bit busy going, "Ooh, shiny! And it makes chink-chink noises if you shake it like this, look!" so it might be a bit.) :}

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Noodling:

Stress situations . . . narrow the stage? Or maybe it's that lack of time-pressures make it possible for aspects to work together and pool skills, but stress situations don't have time to negotiate number of hands or other grasping appendages involved?

Is the stress constant at the moment, or might there be time to try to negotiate some skill-pooling in advance for the next time it rears its head?

[kiya]

Hrm. I'm having . . . let's see if I can get that translated.

I have periods in which I can relax enough to integrate some, though mostly those integrations are dominated by Darkhawk or Jade. There are . . . hrrr.

The situation is such that I can relax and integrate, and even have Silver out and interacting sometimes, but in which it seems to me that if I do so, I run the significant risk that the situation will suddenly shift to not-safe in a way that, if Silver is out, she'll take the brunt of it. So it's not that the stress is constant, but the . . . derivative stress, the stress that comes of anticipating the possibility of future stress . . . is pretty close to omnipresent.

Resolving the situation that's producing the stress strikes me as being nearly impossible without Silver's active participation. Unfortunately, things that approach the situation in any way directly are also producing very large amounts of derivative stress, because they blow up so regularly. Given that, I've been working on trying to alloy Silver with Darkhawk or Jade to try to protect her in those situations, which helps; however, when the out-of-the-blue blowups happen, I'm not prepared for that particularly well. (And if I get to the point that I'm completely unable to manifest trust -- to front Silver in a gestalt -- I suspect that the relationship will be fatally wounded. Which means that I'm reluctant some to avoid letting her front until things are fixed; if I manifest broken-patterns for long enough, they tend to set.)

Fortunately, the last out-of-the-blue blowup has been acknowledged in a way that reduces stress some; I may be able to parlay that into a reduction in derivative stress in the post-processing, if everything goes well.