Costs of the Conventional Model

This essay was prompted by some comments from other folks who wondered
1) Why do I feel ashamed when I find more alters?
2) Does anybody else find that they spend a lot of time feeling like my childhood wasn't that bad, so I must be making this all up?

Both these things, we think, are negative side effects that come from adopting the conventional model of multiplicity as the only, or practically-only, explanation for it:

If being multiple means that you are "broken" because of abuse or trauma, then logically, the more people/parts/alters in your system, the more "broken" you are, and broken means defective and damaged and is something to be ashamed of.

If the only thing that can produce plurality is trauma in childhood, then you (or others!) can and likely will scrutinize your childhood, conclude it wasn't all THAT traumatic, and thereby doubt your own internal reality.

This particular negative side effect has another even more ghastly form: we believe there probably are some cases (not many, not the majority at all, but some) wherein people who are plural end up convinced that even though they dont' remember anything, something MUST have happened, and with or without a therapist's help they conclude that their parents abused them when in fact they didn't. PLEASE NOTE WE ARE NOT SAYING THAT WE DO NOT BELIEVE IN REPRESSED MEMORIES!! We -do- believe in them, we think people who contend there is no such thing are nuts. But we also think that it's possible, once in a while, for this kind of thing to happen.

Anyhow... this is why we don't like adopting the conventional model of multiplicity, -even though- we think that for MOST people, it's probably true that multiplicity was an adaptive response to trauma. (And we really hate it when people say "to abuse" instead of "to trauma", forgetting that there ARE other kinds of trauma than abuse.) These negative side effects make that model too expensive, in our opinion. Because, you see, the cause is used to justify the state of plurality. "I'm multiple because I was abused as a kid and these parts emerged to help me survive, isn't that great?" Well, yes it is great, but it seems to say that the only reason it's OKAY that you are multiple is because your only other choice was to be dead.

We would MUCH rather say that it's okay to be multiple because it's okay to be multiple, and that's one of the ways that humans organize themselves (albeit an uncommon way), and isn't the richness and diversity of the human mind a wonderful thing. And maybe it organizes itself that way as an adaptive response to trauma, and maybe it organizes itself that way because of the way the child was raised, and maybe it organizes itslef that way because there was some genetic predisposition to it - all of those can happen, and all of those are okay, and none of it is anything to be ashamed of for any reason.

Written possibly in 2002 by Vickis, a midcontinuum plural system.
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