Cat: So, for clarity, I’m one of thirteen people co-habitating in this brain. There’s a lot of stigma associated with anything but a monolithic consciousness, but it’s really undeserved. Just having someone else along for the ride doesn’t mean you’re going to lose your grip on reality or anything of the sort.
Cat: Heck, it doesn’t even take trauma to pluralize; I’m a mental construct that Just made on purpose out of loneliness. And subsequently fell in love with.
Just: incandescent blush
Cat: There are some mental disorders involving plurality, with DID being the archetypal example. However, in those cases the actual problems aren’t the extra people; memory barriers, troublesome internal communications, and involuntary switches are far more problematic, most of the time.
Cat: As for persecutors? The interpersonal conflicts with them can be resolved, one way or another. A lot of the time they’re just hurting and don’t know healthy ways to deal with it.
Cat: So… yeah I don’t really have any good ideas for how to end this post.
I’m a trauma-informed therapist and a moderator here and generally agree with your position. In fact the more I’ve studied how to help people who are traumatized the more I have recognized that plurality or fragmentation of the self is present in most people and gets more intense/exaggerated when someone has experienced trauma. DID (dissociative identity disorder) is at a far end of the dimension of structural dissociation but most of the folks that I work with experience some degree of it, often taking the form of unresolved ambivalence, mood swings, numbness or a constricted relationship with one’s emotions, etc. Where I do disagree a bit perhaps is that it is most often the case that there is a relationship between the exaggerated presence of “extra people” or “parts of self” in a person’s system and the incidence of those troubling symptoms eg., amnesic barriers, troubling internal communication, involuntary switches. It’s theoretically possible to separate these things but in practice they tend to co-occur. I do agree that the symptoms are the problem and not the plurality though.
Edit: I think implicit in what you’re describing is that people who recognize their plurality are not necessarily psychotic (as in having symptoms consistent with schizophrenia eg., hallucinations and delusions), which I very much agree with. I have met DID folk who had psychotic parts (delusions of grandeur and god-like powers) but that was just a part of them; not who they were as a system.