What is Plurality?

Plurality is the experience of more than one person existing in a body. Sometimes this is medical, as in Dissociative Identity Disorder, and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the people are completely serparate from each other, and sometimes the boundaries between them are more blurred, or they're distinct parts of a greater whole. Sometimes there are spiritual aspects to a system and sometimes not. Sometimes the people can take control of the body, intentionally or not, and sometimes they can't at all. Plurality is a large umbrella that emcompasses many experiences. Below are some links to websites that describe it all better than we ever could.

Beginners' Guides to Plurality:

• More Than One: wonderful interactive website going over the basics of plurality.
• The Dissociative Initiative: "For, by, and about people with multiplicity, dissociation, and amnesia"
• The Plural Association: "For Dissociative Identity Disorder & all other forms of Multiplicity under the Plural umbrella"
• Understanding Multiplicity: PDF from the Manchester Metropolitan University explaining multiplicity as a whole using data collected from self-identified multiples/plurals

Personally, More Than One and Understanding Multiplicity are our favorites.

Our Plurality

We've had plural experiences since we were very young, but our current collective identity as The Network didn't solidify until we were 9. For most of our life (until our early 20s) we didn't know that there were others who also were more than one person in their body. Because of this, sometimes we use shared community terms and sometimes we use our own.

Also for most of our life (~age 25) our plural experience was more of a peanut gallery situation; we had one person who was always fronting (in control of the body), and while others in here could influence what we did, the most everyone could do was make comments on what was happening. Since then we've learned how to fully switch between people, and no longer have a host, frontstuck or otherwise.

In short, we've always had good internal communication, a good shared memory, and have recently learned how to have good control over who fronts and when. This doesn't mean that there aren't struggles associated with this; sometimes communication goes down, or people get thrown into the front unintentionally. Sometimes our memory is worse and more cut up than normal. But in general, we've been very lucky in those regards.

We have both psychological and spiritual beliefs in regards to our plurality. Different people here think different things about their own origins, and we don't police other member's beliefs. These beliefs range from being an unintentionally created psycological thoughtform to being a soulbond (more on soulbonding here and here).