I still remember when we first started working with our therapist…over two and a half years ago at this point.

I remember being Very Skeptical of any therapist saying that they specialized in dealing with clients having D.I.D, even if they came at the recommendation of the counselor we were seeing at the time. After all, our counselor was just working with us for our gender dysphoria…what would he know of what we were going through?

However, due to a variety of life situations, we were becoming VERY self-aware, and we needed some form of help…so we needed to give this therapist a shot.

I remember especially Alexei being very hesitant of this person, so he took on vetting them personally. However, we stated that we trusted them to their face. Since, we have learned that they are a very smart therapist and didn’t truly believe that we were that trusting of them from an early stage. To be honest, some of us STILL don’t trust them, but we’re working on that.

But anyway…the last few days, we’ve been thinking a lot about some things we talked about with this therapist near the beginning of our therapy with them.

This was actually one of the things that made Alexei a bit hesitant about them in the beginning, but in the time since, we’ve come to understand more of what was actually meant.

When we were beginning to tell them about our system, the topic of the number of alters in our system came up. One of our main internal “knowledge-keepers” was talking, but due to our distrust, we know we said we didn’t really know, but had established some manner of communication to about two dozen at that time.

And I remember our therapist saying something along the lines that somewhere in the thirties is generally the most alters a brain can have while healthily functioning. They did mention that having a lot more than that would likely mean that your brain would be soup.

…at the time, we already were rapidly coming to the knowledge that we were likely polyfragmented. And while being so newly self-aware, we had dozens of viewpoints being thrown at us about what constituted the difference between a ‘fragment’ and an ‘alter’. To be perfectly honest, we’re STILL learning the differences, as we’ve come to realize that our brain has…very much been a soup for far longer than any of us could begin to grasp.

This would be a good place to put a TW for CSA, trafficking, incestual abuse, and probably a lot of connected traumas that I will try to add as we type. Please do not keep reading if you are not in the headspace to handle such topics.

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When one is raped and trafficked by close family members from infancy, one unfortunately tends to believe that these things are normal and/or “just part of things”.

However, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t cause trauma. Especially when our system had the unfortunate experience of being used by some highly sadistic individuals…and not a small number of them over the years.

It’s been awhile since I researched this, so forgive me if this is incorrect, but I remember reading that most neurotypical people can really only access their memories back to around the age of 6-7 (around kindergarten/1st grade), unless there is some trauma…such as breaking a bone, a significant move, etc. (this was in the context of neurotypicals, so the traumas listed may not seem to connect to the traumas a lot of our brains may first go to, but they are traumas just the same).

No matter…we remember being “more than one” from LONG before this age. In fact, we have very fragmented memories, pieced together with stories we’ve heard of our childhood, of at least “Alexei” and “Gabriel” (now Orpheus) being around before the age of two…and likely even before the age of one, due to several traumas we have confirmed timelines of.

Now, obviously they didn’t exist AS Alexei and Gabriel at that time. They likely more existed along the lines of “pain-bearer” and “play/happiness”. And then, over the years, they were able to find names and appearances that grew with them, into the identities they have today.

But with how much we were trafficked, and with the extremes of sadism we experienced AS A CHILD…we were highly fragmented before we really got a chance to conceptualize and become “a single entity”. This was apparent for all of our life, as our tastes in music, clothing, food, beverages, books, and so on would change by the minute. We would bounce between everything available to us, seemingly on a whim…but we can look back now and recognize that those were shifts in front.

Some of it was obvious a natural part of being a kid, and learning what things we liked. But there’s a lot that we can look at and realize…no, the back and forth between watching Sleeping Beauty, Goosebumps, and Mulan was also very much a difference on whether “Eve”, “Alexei”, or “Gabriel” was closest to front. Same with our frequent changes in styles of clothing.

We would be hella girly one day, and hella boyish the next…and if we had the energy and permission from our parents to change, we’d often change several times a day.

Some of this was also battles with sensory stimuli, but a lot of it really did vary on the fronting situations…when we felt more safe, and there wasn’t obvious abuse going on, “Gabriel”‘s style was more apparent. When we were scared, and trying our best to simply survive, typically it was “Alexei” fronting. When we were dressing for the “friends” who were coming by, or who we were visiting, a lot of times it was “Eve” who was getting dressed.

This is a long, loopy way of saying that we have NO memories of being “one”. We have always been “multiple”.

So…when we, as a newly self-aware system, came across a lot of systems who have less of a distinction in self, it was really hard to not feel like we were faking.

Especially when we were still easily mistaking fragments, alter-fragments, sub-system alters, sub-system fragments, and ‘solid’ alters all for one another…we were so overwhelmed, and with the inconsistency of vocabulary within the dissociative community (at least at that time…I think it’s been improving a bit in the last few years, too), it only made it all the more confusing and disheartening in our quest of ensuring that we were truly on the right track of what we deal with.

Hell…we still get hit with imposter syndrome, even with plenty of evidence to support our diagnosis. And we’re still having trouble distinguishing the spectrum of alters and fragments…especially as a lot of alters have different perspectives on the system, due to their “clearance level” or the memories they hold.

We still have LOTS of alters…more than enough to qualify for the “brain soup” label. And we have a lot of subsystems…which both does and doesn’t help with the tally, since we have a high level of distinction in identity, due to the amnesia barriers still in place…

But what I’ve come to realize our therapist meant by “alters” in the beginning did NOT include the sub-levels, where alters have alters (yay, subsystems~ /half-sarcastic), or any of the types of fragments. While it still put us off at first, especially as a surface-level statement, I’m really glad to gain more of an understanding. I can tell that it puts some of the still untrusting alters and fragments a bit more at ease with our therapist. Especially as they are very much against forcing any sort of integration or EMDR work [we’re bad at saying no to the stuff sometimes, but that’s another issue…and our therapist does their best to remind us that we can and should if we don’t want to, for any reason, and that they will respect that]

What sucks is the level of brain soup we’re becoming aware that we have…

Remember when we mentioned that we’ve always been multiple?

Well, with the level of trafficking and other traumas we experienced, we were getting pretty heavily fragmented before we hit the preteens…and it only grew throughout puberty, our teen years, and so on.

I don’t know how recently or explicitly we’ve stated this, but some of our recurring, really bad traumas, only stopped at the end of 2023. We’ve only since then been able to start building “safety” and learning that we don’t need to keep fragmenting to oblivion.

We’ve recently had some extreme stress that has undone some more minor integrations we accomplished earlier this year, but we’ve also been starting to make bigger strides in integration work as well. We’re in the process of finding a less stressful job, as all of our health providers have been screaming at us that our current job is taking a heavy toll on our physical and mental health. We’re in the process of getting safer, and further away from the people and situations which were pulling us away from what had actually been helping us.

Currently, our main focus is simply…survival, and spending as much time with our wife/partner-system as possible. When we get to a better, more stable place again, we’re hoping we can reconnect with friends we’ve been unable to spend time with, or even really talk to…

Our major hope right now is that we get the job we had an interview for this past week. That would be a HUGE step forward. But even if this job doesn’t pan out, we’re going to keep working towards getting to a more stable place.

I can’t wait until we no longer are completely soup-brain.

For now…that’s just where we’re at, but at least we’re in a better place than we were a year ago.

-written by several alters from within the soup-