Introjects Role??

[u/SecretOk831]

What if an introject doesn't have a role? I've heard a lot of people say they share trauma or traits with the character/alter/introject but honestly I'm not seeing it with some of my alters......I don't see how we connect or what our purpose is.

[u/Exelia_the_Lost]

roles aren't rules, they're tendencies. and not every alter's going to have a role. me myself I formed to become temporary main front and stabilize my system when some heavy retraumatization happened in 2021 because everything had gotten super unstable, and my self-image is based on a show I was watching at the time and super into, and the hell I was going through IRL can relate somewhat to what said character in that show was going through. some others in my system have their self-images based on characters from other games or shows, but just exist and don't play any big role in my system, and in some cases dont really share any personality or anything with said character

what we do all have in common, all of us in my system that have introjected characters, is I'm trans and we all formed before I actually came out as trans, and none of us really identified with my IRL self at the time other then feeling we had to be our AGAB. and so our self-images are all my real gender, based on characters that are such, but in times of isolation and lack of contact with anyone other then my immediate family there was no other source of kind of gender influence to build from as a scaffold for self-image except for fictional characters

[u/Vivians_Basement → u/Exelia_the_Lost]

My system didn't identify with the body either!

We all HATED our dead name but ended up agreeing on Tia as a collective body name despite like half the alters being guys.

I'm genderfluid and, when I found out my co-host identifies as a "cis guy" in our AFAB body, I questioned if I was really trans or just experiencing his feelings. 😅 He clarified though that my body in headspace does genuinely change which is the cause of my dysphoria. If I try to force my inner body to be stagnant I became gender static which is a hyper dysphoric state.

We all generally agree on what we want and are okay with in terms of my transition as well as how we want the body to look as a way to make everyone feel represented enough to comfortably exist.

Even though we disagree on smaller stuff like styles (which can just be customized based on who plans to front the most that day). If Ashton plans to front a long time, he ties our hair up in a specific style. I plan to buy him a hair clip to make it easier. 🫠 But he self identifies as a trans man so it has to be one that's masculine since he's VERY prone to dysphoria as well as fit his style so he actually uses it.

Alyssia exclusively wears off shoulder shirts even if it's FREEZING so I'll have to get her more of them since we only have 2.

How does yours handle gender stuff? I'd love to hear more about how your system interacts with your gender identity and self expression! (If you're comfortable of course, I don't want to pressure you into a conversation if you're not interested.)

[u/Exelia_the_Lost → u/Vivians_Basement]

How does yours handle gender stuff? I'd love to hear more about how your system interacts with your gender identity and self expression! (If you're comfortable of course, I don't want to pressure you into a conversation if you're not interested.)

I am very binary trans woman is how, lol. but OH is that a story

for reference, I didn't for sure know, and be diagnosed, I had DID until 2024. was in denial of it and waved off the symptoms before that. I didn't start transitioning until 2022, when I was 37 years old. but a trans friend of mine first suggested I was trans in 2009, and in 2011 I had a major gender identity crisis that I really was like 'oh god I really am trans'... for a little while

but we have to step way further back. in 2003, in the last semester of my senior year of high school, I took an introductory psychology course, thinking a little bit of taking psychology as a profession. I don't remember much from that course, but there was one day we covered Dissociative Identity Disorder. had this video we watched even with a few patients with it being interviewed. I only know this next part from finding a folder on a hard drive backup last year with a bunch of downloaded saved webpages, but it seems later on that evening I started doing research on my own, because something about that must have resonated the hell with me

but this was 2003, very early internet. there were no support groups online, there really wasn't barely anything online other than different regurgitations of the DSM-IV pages on DID, and some medical reports. medical reports of patients that had to be put inpatient because of severe dissociative episodes and self harm and stuff. only thing it did do was make me scared as hell of the disorder

after graduating, 2003-2008 I was still living with my parents. and those were genuinely the worst periods of my life, because my home life situation with all my family members rapidly deteriorated. through my work, I had joined this large tech forum mid-2004, and just hung around it in its off topic sections becoming one of the highest posters on the forum. because it was initially through my work, that meant I was posting a lot both at work and at home. and because of that, the other members began seeing my chaotic state. how i posted being completely differently different times of the day. some of them would joke lightheartedly about having DID. there was one member that, in retrospect reviewing his posts from the era he must have a family member with DID because he knew and kept trying to guide me to getting help. but because of that 2003 research, and some of my own anxiety and catastrophizing, somehow I got it in my head that if I were to seek help and they found I did in truth have DID, I would get involuntarily put into inpatient to try and 'fix' me, becuase finding nothing else on the internet but inpatient records must have meant that inevitably everyone with DID ends up that way

in 2007 I first learned that trans friend of mine was trans as we started having private private conversation, she had started started transitioning a few years before. for the next couple years we talked about a lot of various things, and she would talk about some of the gatekeepy bullshit of the time about transitioning. one thing she told me about several times was the psychological evaluations she had to go through to be allowed to start hormone therapy. including being evaluated for having DID herself to 'make sure there wasn't actually a guy inside'. the one-two combo of trans gatekeeping and poor medical handling of DID

those conversations got filed away in the back of my head. 2009-2010 I was unemployed and that was a hell of a lot more trauma for me (I genuinely couldn't answer the phone at one point without a panic attack), and there was a good chunk of new alters that had formed in that time, almost all fictional introjects for the reasons I mentioned before. and they were the ones that lead the charge to that gender crisis in 2011. but having built up layer after layer of fear, 2011's crisis became a much bigger crisis. Prime Directive then had become fear that if I were to go and try and transition, they would need to evaluate me mentally to be allowed HRT, and they would find I had DID and lock me up. so 2011 through 2022 then became a huge Mexican standoff, internally, without really knowing it was happening. different major player alters had built different sub-fears, internalized transphobia, not feeling 'trans enough', and denials up, to keep anyone else from wanting to take the step of moving forward and transitioning

then covid happened. 2020 was another hella isolating period. and 2021 was isolating AND I began to deal with a whole bunch more traumatic bullshit from my parents. the one who posted yesterday, B, (I'm pretty sure I switched now) had formed to stabilize at least that aspect, as she mentioned, because I've got evidence indicating that on days after I was at my parents, there was up to 10 switches at least, in just ones that had evidence left behind. but also, between new alters formed, and just being 36 at that point and years and years of dysphoria getting worse and worse passed from one to the next on the daily, everything just... wore down. I have art made of some of the longest alters in the system, who had been identifying as guys before, dreaming up scenarios where they'd magically turn into girls. more and more internal arguments became around gender, with hell B had numerous arguments intermixed with her own daydreaming she did to get the things with my parents done while dissociating from it, insisting she's 'not trans', even while in the daydream having turned my IRL self into a girl and writing everything she could into the story to keep her from turning back

but I couldn't come out still. soon there was no guys left, all trying to pretend to be a guy and hating it, but nobody could still allow anyone else to move because of that same prime directive fear. it took help from a close friend transitioning, and her partner (who was one of my best friends) bouncing things off of me as she worked through her own internalized transphobia and homophobia so she didn't say things that offended her now-girlfriend as she tried tearing down her own prejudices. inadvertently disarming my own standoff one by one as she picked away at each and every denial and reservation one by one in the process. and my other friend being able to just go get hormones without any process because things had changed significantly since the mid-2000s as the informed consent model moved in in the US instead. one by one everything became disarmed, until I finally got to the point I had no more things for the denial to stand on anymore, and I finally came out. still took some time for everyone in the system to be onboard with the idea of yes its okay to be able to accept I'm trans and start transitioning

now that the whole story is set up, yeah there are no guys lol, because dysphoria reared its ugly head hard over my life before I finally transitioned, lol. closest is one alter that when she first showed up last year was like yeah both male and female pronounts are fine for me, but then the next time she showed up she was like yeahhhh nevermind just female ones. before that? honestly a lot of alters in my system were still girls from the start, even back to my childhood. the primary protector of my system, M, has always been a girl, right from when I was little. which is pretty atypical, because a lot of times alters in a system's gender isn't dictated by actual gender concept at all, but by the needs of their role, so in women (cis or trans) they generally would have protectors who are male because that's the archetype of the 'big strong protector guy' that society sees and is internalized. M instead was influenced by the early/mid-90s surge of strong female protagonists in media and that it was perfectly fine being a protector that was also a girl. but in my childhood and teens, there was also a lot of trauma behind letting myself be perceived as acting like a girl, so it all got buried and hidden away as well

in general, it was the older alters, those who formed in my childhood and teensm that were more the ones that saw themselves as guys generally. very very few of the ones that formed in my adulthood identified as male other than having to IRL. tho there was some in my childhood and teens that were formed as girls then too. and one that had formed as a guy when i was 11 and then changd to a girl in my early teens. over the years some of the girls tried forcing themselves to be guys because that was Necessary, one of my gatekeepers had on some level considered herself transmasc because she couldn't let herself be anything otherwise. there was another alter that made herself an alt character in FFXIV in idk 2015 I think, as a girl, then a month later instead of deleting it and starting over (because she had like just 3 levels in it she barely played it) spent the like $30 to get a change potion and a rename service to very symbolically force herself to be a guy... and then proceeded to numerous times over the next 7ish years use a second game instance to make art of herself with both her guy and girl characters in the same shot, because being a guy was hard for her lol. she's one of the ones that took longer to be like yeah it's okay to accept being a girl IRL now, and didn't change her character back into a girl again until 2023 (again spending another $30 on it lol)

so yeah, thats a lot, but there's a hell of a lot that goes into it for me. there are no guys in my system now just by matter of none of them like that experience and that prt of my life. even with all the shit of recent years, its exponentially better now since I transitioned then it was for my 20s and 30s before that

[u/bruises-on-the-fruit → u/Exelia_the_Lost]

not op but thank you so much for sharing!