(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

This morning I'm revisiting an idea I contemplated a little over a year ago -- that 'fragmented personalities' are far more common than any of us suspect. We are used to thinking of "selves" as something that are handed out one to a customer. That is: in popular belief, one body = one self.

I'm no longer convinced that this is how it works at all.

I'm not talking about what the medical community calls Multiple Personality Disorder, though I think that this is possibly only an exaggerated case of what goes on in all of us.

Please bear with any generalities or imprecision in the following questions. This poll is meant to be intuitive and illustrative, not scientific or precise.

To protect anonymity, I am setting this poll so that only I can see the results. I'll post the figures as people reply.

Which of the following, if any, match your experience?

[Poll #199820]

Comments

[hai-kah-uhk.livejournal.com]

I'm having a hard time filling out your poll. My experiences are relevant, but not in a yes/no sort of way.

I guess you know a little bit about my situation from my journal, although I haven't described it fully and concisely in a long time, so I might be wrong about that... if you want details, I don't mind sharing; otherwise, just count me in as "fragmented."

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

I have never been formally diagnosed with MPD or its newly named incarnation, "DID". However, I know this is just because I am never honest with therapists - and why would I be?
The very "disorder" itself is considered by some to be a hoax, which really pisses me off. The people who come up with this are the same people who write books that says recovered memories are all lies, when amnesia of traumatic events is something that has been recorded for hundreds of years. They also want to pretend childhood abuse doesn't exist, which leads me to believe that they are either trying to hide something (either their own abusiveness or their past experiences they cannot admit to) or they cannot for whatever reason believe the very common tragedy of abuse that impacts so many families and children.
But even beyond the authorized psychiatric view of what the mind "should" be - I don't think people are as singular as they believe. RAW refers to himself in much of his writing by various names, depending on which aspect of himself he was exhibiting at the time: The Skeptic; The Scientist; The Mystic. The Qabalah teaches that there is one god, yet s/he is referred to by a multitude of names depending on the aspect s/he is showing or the capacity in which s/he is moving/acting: there is EHEIEH, the Creator or the I AM; Elohim Gibor, the warlike god form of Geburah; Adonai ha'Aretz, the God-form who rules earthly matters and concerns; yet these are understood to be different aspects of the same deity. If man was created in God's image, we can expect the same diversity within ourselves.

Bouncing Back to Wholeness

[freeandclear.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you're on to something here. All of us dissociate to some degree. I believe it's a protective mechanism. I also believe that some of us are better than others at bouncing back to integral wholeness.

Thanks for bringing this up.

[alobar.livejournal.com]

I took the quiz, but a lot of the choices squicked me out. Not your fault. I just hate the shrink worldview. I/we am/are legion, but *NOT* fractured. Over the years I have come to feel that people who have no conscious awareness of plurality within are at one end of a spectrum & those with myriad distinct persons within are at the other end. There also appears to be a second axis, perpendicular to the first with internal peace at one end and internal strife at the other.

Although I sure have no proof of this, I feel the population distribution along both axes to be a Bell-shaped curve. Because of shrink-induced social stigma, many pretend they are one person internally, when they are not. Depression (imo) can easily come from repression of one or more of those living within. I strongly feel there is no correlation between one's perceptions of internal persons and so-called "mental illness". However, I do feel that being at war with oneself is perhaps prone to make it very hard to be functional, or love oneself.

While I have not yet had the opportunity to get to know the man personally, I am inclined to speculate that perhaps Bush, our prez, suffers from having no internal dialogs, and therefore no hesitancy about doing amazingly stupid shit -- whereas I, in my plurality, am far more likely to examine options from many different angles, change my position several times, and then proceed from a perspective of unanimity or at least a clear consensus, subject to later revision.