Possibly less than “excellent”

First of all. Hello; My name’s Alexei.  I am normally a sarcastic and cynical alter who interjects their thoughts into other blog posts between [brackets]. But today I have a lot on my mind, and I want to talk about it.

Warning. As the title states, this may be a “less than excellent” post. It’s not intended to be. It’s intended to be an expression of thoughts and feelings that are stampeding in our mind without a resolution. As one of our system’s persecutor-protectors, sometimes things I say sound a lot harsher or more critical than I mean them to be. But this also isn’t directed at anyone in particular. It’s just…sharing how I feel through writing.

-=-=-=-=-

So.

What sort of crazy thing is up that makes our system so concerned that we will be less than excellent with this blog post?

Well…to be perfectly honest, we’re not entirely sure.

And that’s WHY it’s so jumbled and confusing for us

I’m hoping writing this will pull my thoughts together in a way where I can figure out our next step.

But I’m also aware that I don’t have all the facts. And at this point, with some of the things at-play, I might never be able to get the whole story from all sides and all of the facts.

That really freaks my ptsd brain out, if I’m being honest. But more on that when I get to it.

Time to get to the point.

[deep breath, well aware that I might be sending all the security our system has worked towards having in this “safe space” up in flames]

I’m not going to pretend that our system is completely unaware of “the drama” more or less ‘recently’ in this community’s Discord and website.

However, we also do not know the whole of the situation, due to multiple factors.

A lot of it is simply not our business, and so we ignore it. [or at least don’t bother to scroll back and read through everything, instead deciding to believe that things are able to move forward from the present]

Other times, we simply were too busy dealing with our own life to have extra energy available to read and attempt helping situations. There was one time where we thought we might be able to help, but were worried that it’d be somehow stepping into more of a mod role, which we do not have. So we just…ignored it.

Now…this may just be a strong PTSD reaction [I will 100% admit to that], but not knowing all sides of the story makes it really hard for us to be comfortable here [on this site and Discord].

We have inferred and read that a lot of the true drama came from the vein of fakeclaiming. Our system never saw any actual fakeclaiming happening ourselves [At least, not in the sense of the term we have come to know. And maybe our own definition of fakeclaiming needs some work. I genuinely don’t know right now].

Maybe it’s for the best that we didn’t see any of this, because people have said that it was bad enough to cause systems with multiple diagnoses of DID to even question themselves.

But the fact remains that, for our system, the whole situation became one individual’s word against another’s, against another’s. And to be perfectly honest, from what we saw, there were a lot of users who seemed to be purposely aggravating the situation against the one individual, who was already in a heightened state of hurt and feeling unwanted/uncomfortable.

I saw the person react in ways that I would have reacted too.

They seemed [from what our system saw], to be trying to move on from the situation. We saw several others seemingly on purposely needle this person and bring the situation back up after it had supposedly been moved on from. And then we saw this person react, possibly in hurt and some level of scaredness, at this being brought up. [Which, in my opinion, was understandable]

I saw people taking the opposite side. And then I saw this individual make a blog post. The feelings and emotions contained in that blog post were insanely relatable. There was some talk that may have bordered more on the fakeclaiming side of things, but it wasn’t directed at anyone in particular [at least…our system couldn’t tell it was]. It seemed much more brought up in a general aspect in connection with the feelings they were expressing in the post, and talking about how the situation as a whole made them feel]

Now, again, our system DOES NOT have the whole story. We are NOT ASKING for it, either.

I am just compiling my thoughts.

I am not the individual, so I don’t know what sort of system roles anyone there has. But a lot of how the person reacted reminded me of me.

I like to pretend I’m simply a protector, but time and time again I have proven to my system that I am still very much a persecutor as well.

I’ve gotten better in some aspects, but there’s areas I fail in.

I still unintentionally get our system into plenty of miscommunications and misunderstandings, just because my voice and text tend to carry more angry tones when I’m stressed/upset/scared/hurt/etc.

Hades knows, I’ve caused plenty of stress in this way just privately with wife/partner-system and ourselves. I can only imagine the shit I would get us in if I talked more in other situations.

But my point I guess is…where can alters like me [especially on my more persecutor-y days] exist and talk about our own stuff without being treated like we’re the problem? [And I’m not saying that there definitely wasn’t actual problems. Like I keep saying, we don’t know the whole situation]

Since the “drama”, our system has significantly pulled back on how much we access the Discord server.

We’ve even avoided the site more, and not interacted as much as we previously would have.

We…or at the very least I…don’t feel safe.

It is most likely a PTSD response.

But all emotions-genuine emotions, not necessarily the thoughts and context tied to them, but the emotions themselves-are valid.

For example, even if I don’t intend for my statement to hurt someone, the hurt I caused is still there and it is my responsibility to apologize, try to better explain what I meant, and try to improve my communication. Likewise, once amends have been made, and if the actual intent wasn’t harmful as well, shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the other individual to accept the miscommunication as that-miscommunication-and move on?

Now, I know it’s a bit harder in systems. More alters/fragements might bubble up who still hold feelings of hurt about the situation that were not able to be resolved for one reason or another.

I would really like to give a very personal example of this, but I currently don’t feel comfortable doing so. It’s still a sore spot for myself, and I would also want to talk to my wife in more depth about it before sharing it as well.

But let’s just say that, a couple years back, I more or less made an ultimatum. Looking back, I definitely should not have called it such, and I definitely could have been better worded and communicated.
I was attempting to protect my system from hurt, but I also severely hurt my partner-system.
As of a month or so ago, there are still alters in their system who are expressing hurt that I caused them. A lot of these alters took a long time to feel comfortable being vulnerable enough again to bring it up, and even though at first I really didn’t like that…it is valid. However, there has definitely been some trial and error as to how these things get brought up, because there’s a lot of my own emotions tied to the situation that I haven’t yet been able to resolve that cause negative reactions out of fear when it gets brought up.

They’ve had to be a little more careful in the when, where, and how they bring up these feelings so that I can both be fronting and also in the proper headspace to listen to them without causing more issues. But I’ve also had to be a lot more careful to make sure I’m responding to them with empathy, and not just with my own hurt. My stuff will have its turn, when I’m able to bring it up for myself. It’s not their responsibility to help me resolve those feelings until I am at a place to bring them up [a lot of them I’m still trying to figure out if I can resolve myself, too, as some of my words were truly wrong, and those are 100% not their responsibility to resolve for me]

Anyway…I guess what I’m trying to say here is that our system is having a hard time feeling safe and comfortable in a place that is supposed to be safe for systems. This is possibly simply a PTSD response when it comes to situations where it’s based on what people say and not anything we can see for ourselves.

But the whole thing makes me feel like alters like me aren’t even safe to be ourselves in a place that is supposed to be a safe place for all parts of the dissociative community.

I’m not saying to allow fakeclaiming. Just…nope.

But I also want to make sure that those alters with more “persecutor” vibes have a safe space to be themselves. Especially because persecutors really are just protectors with a fuckton of trauma responses. We are harsher and more aggressive at times because we often fronted in environments where that was the only way to be even slightly safe.

I just…want to have a safe space too.

And I had really hoped this community could be that.

But for right now, it’s really hard to feel safe as myself, even though our system has yet to be reprimanded even once.

-Alexei