It’s been a while since we’ve shared somebody else’s story, so we were so happy when our recent YouTube video about our system discovery inspired a friends to write their own discovery story.
Vir VSys is an American system in their mid-twenties and we’re honoured to be sharing their experiences. They, like so many of us, share how hard it is to accept ourselves when we feel we don’t have ‘enough’, or ‘the right kind’ of trauma, to develop a complex dissociative disorder. Their empathy is so strong, when there is so much injustice and pain in the world it can feel impossible to heal individually, they remind us that healing is not only a personal journey, but is connected to the collective struggles of the world around us.
TW: discussion/mentions of emotional abuse, Christianity, indoctrination
Discovery - by Erin
We didn't experience amnesia, we thought, but the experience of plurality - of many selves in one body - felt familiar. A Twitter account we followed seemed to be angry at certain kinds of plural folks, and we didn't know anything about that. Because of that account, we decided to seek out plural folks on Twitter and see what they had to say. We still didn't think we were plural, just interested from a psychological perspective, until we found this experiment:
Write something down. Ask if anyone else is there. See if anyone answers.
It was late at night. We opened a Google doc, and posed the question: is anyone out there?
As we were writing this, we had the distinct impression that we were not the same person who usually controlled the body. That we were someone different. That person ended up choosing the name Violet. And he made contact with another entity, who chose the name Vyk. Leif was our host at the time, and they seemingly had no idea they had been sharing the body with multiple other entities (we don't all consider ourselves people, but we have distinct viewpoints, goals, and ways we present ourselves).
That was July 2022.
By 2023 we were aware of about sixteen of us.
By next July, our count had reached 40.
Leif was determined to figure out what was wrong with us, and they dug deep in hopes of unraveling the mystery - why could we not hold down a job? Were we even really multiple in the first place? Dissociative disorders could not arise without severe trauma, but maybe we were just… pretending? Maybe we just hadn't gotten enough attention as a kid.
It turns out, a very common cause of dissociative disorders is emotional abuse. We thought there had to have been some physical abuse that had happened when we were young, and maybe there was, but that didn't really matter. We had to dissociate in order to fulfill the impossible demand of never expressing emotion, constantly burdened with preserving the image of a good, straight, white, Christian family even as we witnessed our father's angered outbursts gradually become more extreme during the Obama administration, to the open hate encouraged by Trump's presidency.
But we weren't ready to deal with all the repressed emotions we'd collected over the years. We didn't even understand how to express our emotions, or what we were feeling. All we understood was that we needed to somehow sort everyone into boxes and categories, to logically understand what had happened to us and where we had come from.
The problem is, it wasn't logical, what had happened to us. That was the entire point. Years of exposure to illogic and statements we had begun to realize in our heart were not true. Years of being told we essentially didn't matter.
We were never going to solve this by putting each other into different boxes. What we needed was simply to let each other - and ourselves - live and express our selves; let us laugh, cry, act like the kids we weren't allowed to be.
Addendum - by Leif
We're still struggling with this. We know the solution isn't to dig for answers, that we have to wait and let our traumatized parts come out when they're ready, but I've always been a person who seeks out knowledge, so it's hard for me to be patient. We don't have a therapist due to trauma/phobia of medical and psych personnel… we only have ourselves, and whatever support system we can manage to scrounge up, so it's even more important for us to be careful and understanding of each other and our own boundaries and limitations.
After years of unemployment with fears we wouldn't be able to get on disability, we now have a job with limited hours, where our coworkers and employer seem to understand when we need to call off for mental health reasons (even though we haven't disclosed any diagnosis except for anxiety to them). We feel very lucky to have even found this job in the first place; we wouldn't have even known it existed if a friend hadn't recommended it to us, and we nearly didn't apply after we learned they were Christian faith-based.
But even then, we fear we might turn out to be “too much” for them, as we've been “too much” for so many people in the past. Too complicated, too broken, too anxious, and generally unwilling to accept the roles society puts us in. We fear our transness, or the fact that we have a girlfriend, might be a sticking point for them, even though no one has had anything negative to say about those things yet; we're open about them, because we can't afford to not be anymore.
We know, as much as we've struggled, there are folks who've struggled even more. People of color. Homeless folks. The Palestinian people. We still feel helpless to do much, but we hope that sharing our story here, and continuing to be openly queer, might be at least a little encouragement for folks who might think things are hopeless, or that they'll never get the chance to live authentically. It is hard to stand up for what you know to be true, but I promise it is worth it. We've fought to be recognized for most of our life, and only recently have we ended up in a place where we feel safe being ourselves… but the fight is not over.
We will never be able to truly, fully heal until we live in a world that accepts people for who they are; that does not allow misuse of power, demonization of marginalized people, or colonialist entitlement. We will not be free until all are free.
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