Rules of Engagement

Introduction

So, you’ve finally met an actual plural group somewhere, and you want to learn how to relate to them? I can’t pretend to speak for other groups, but I will speak from my own experiences as someone in a plural group. Other groups will have their own ways of handling things, but I hope that this article will be helpful in some way, anyway. Most of this article was inspired by things that have happened to us in the past.

Don’t constantly ask for the first person you talked to in the group, or worse yet, ask for the ‘real one’.

    This often occurs when people who knew someone in a group before they revealed that they were a group, and often, they still have some lingering belief that the first person they spoke to in the group is the ‘real one’, or that that person is the only one you know. That’s quite untrue. I mean, if you were talking to any of us for an extended period of time, you’d be convinced that zie was the real one, not just the one that they were talking to. It’s also rude to assume that you should not speak to anyone else in the system besides the person you thought you talked to, because in many cases, plurals will present as a singlet under a particular name, and you may have been dealing with a composite. Even if you did only know one person in the group, isn’t it polite to at least be friendly and civil to your friend’s family members or housemates if they were in a separate body?

    Even more frustrating is when people ask to talk to the first one they talked to because they assume that that person will be more reasonable than the other people. I guess that’s because they see us as just imaginary characters, or products of the ‘original person’s’ delusions, or ‘alters’ as most psychs say. This has happened to me personally, and I was very insulted by this, especially since I was telling the person to avoid doing something that would be immoral and potentially harmful to her. We’ve since made up, and she understands things now, but it was a hard time at first.

Please don’t try to explain our plurality away in a patronising way. Let us tell you how it is.

    Plurality is a subjective experience, and only the people who actually live in that group are able to understand the situation completely. I don’t appreciate it when people try to explain away how some of us came into the group, or what our ‘purpose’ is in the group. That’s something we have to work out for ourselves. At the extreme end, people trying to explain away WHY there is more than one consciousness in this brain end up sound patronising.

    A related topic is people assuming that we are one type of plural group when we are not. For instance there are some groups that have been created by trauma and dissociation, and other groups that have always been plural (with or without trauma). We have always been plural to some extent, but I know others haven’t. Differentiation has happened at various stages for various people so I don’t like it when people generalise about ALL plural groups.

Please don’t talk to us as if we are the same person.

    We all have different interests, different ways of talking and different perceptions of the world because we are DIFFERENT PEOPLE! Some of us are wiser or more intelligent than other people. We aren’t the same, and we will not act the same either! We’re like any other group of people. We like different music, books, sites and other things, so we really take offence to this! For example, Richard likes neuroscience, biology, philosophy, the classics, fine art, typography, classical music, European history and genetics. I’m interested in physics, death metal, weapons, industrial music, dancing and internet memes. And that’s just two of us – I’m not going to go into everyone’s details right now!

Please do not say that we are ‘aspects’ of the first person you met in the group.

Unless we say we’re aspects of that person, we aren’t. And in our case, we are separate people with completely separate existences and thoughts,  not ‘aspects’ of someone else.