Accepting We're Part of a System | Collaboration

hey guys it's silver and I'm here again with Sondra of that exact system and we're doing another collaboration together this time I want to advertise the other half of our collaboration in the video because we just finished recording it and I'm really happy with how it comes out it's a video about things that happen within systems that were like how the heck is no one around us noticing that something we were just going on right now and it kind of goes from that subject to just like general societal like why do we have to hide

this in the first place and it's just a really good conversation about all of those topics it gets into some some discussions on ableism and just frustrations with singlet society in general it really loops around there yeah it's it's a good video anyways if you would like to check that out I will put the link down in the comments so please go give it a look if you would like anyways onto the subject of today we were having a conversation at breakfast this morning about how we've dealt with being assisted in the past and how

that's impacted us and specifically on the topic as both of us as hosts of our system have had periods where we've been really anxious about having a system and interacting with our system members on our notes in on the whiteboard I have anxiety written in capital letters and underscored and we wanted to have more of a conversational style of video with you guys on the other end of the camera about what that was like for us because some of the best kinds of learning comes from the narratives of people who've gone through it and come

out about sup the one of the reasons we started our channel is we wanted to pay forward the little knowledge that we had and I think this really just kind of goes with that whole idea it's like we've learned the hard way so you don't have to mm-hmm yeah I don't know how to start this conversation because it's such a big topic that affected us for so many years so the biggest hurdle I had when trying to come to terms with his system in the first place was that I didn't want another thing yeah I'm

already gay and I'm already trans you know I'm already have like so many identities that I have had phases of like hating myself over and have frustrations of how like society views me and stuff and it's like when I started to realize it I shoved it to the side because I was like I don't I cannot handle another thing and the feeling of like am I just doing this because I have this like sick need for attention that I'm like alright this is my new my new thing that I'm gonna get attention for or that

to make me feel special and that's that's obviously not true but I didn't want to continue to be weird I didn't want to be weird in a new way does that make sense yeah that does make sense I feel like it's backwards for us because being a system was the first thing we realized about ourselves but we still went through all the phases of I mean I I went through all the phases I wouldn't say this nearly much about my alters I think there's something specific about being a host of a system that this extra

impacts you and I think it also goes hand-in-hand with feeling like totally about and totally fake because I think my first big phase of like not knowing how to deal with being a system and not knowing how to handle being a system and also feeling like horribly fake at the same time was very much the concept that here are six alters I know about I know XYZ about my system and this will never change I had this need for everything to already exist and for me to just know it and then for that to continue

forward and because I knew of six alters already I was very much in this mindset of there's no one else here and I would always try to force alters who were obviously there at the time into boxes of other alters and interpret them as someone they weren't a lot more than I should have been doing it was just not a good time and this I still had impacts to today because I'm still going through phases I'm trying to learn how to be open and be accepting of all their alters showing up or new alter showing

up and accepting them for who they are and learning more about them and not having anxiety oh my god there's new person oh my god this new person I can't handle this because I know that's what I went through a lot during this phase in my life and to this day we just got a therapy homework that's every time I feel blurry or I feel weird about my identity I'm writing down like 15 but Julian notes about it for the next month and a half so it's still affecting us and it's still like undoing that

whole mindset that's just like I was so centered in for like I think it was like a year and a half at least it's still pulling out the strings and still undoing all that yeah we went through a similar thing um albeit at a much quicker pace due to the fact that we came to terms with our own plurality in a in an environment that had more resources and more voices sang just accepted basically when we first found out about the system I thought that we were a system of four including myself I was myself

glow Ellen sunny I thought that Ellen and Claudia were the same person for the longest time and viewers of our channel know that Claudia and Ellen are vastly different people if you go like way way back in our Twitter you'll see that I described Ellen as our fight part when that is Claudia to a tee like protector I was doing the same thing where I was pinning different alters into different boxes it's like here's the sunny box here is the Glo box and here's the Ellen box I myself I don't get a box because I'm

not I'm not part of that they're the alters it was this point where I was also thinking that sunny and Susan were the same person and not like me I guess sunny age slides up to like age 12 to 14 which is what Susan is and sunny seems really happy most of the time but sometimes man they're just like really depressed about really specific topics from around when we were 12 the only thing that started breaking me out of this was Claudia because about mum into knowing the system I'm gonna say like three weeks to

a month into knowing the system I started getting these nasty intrusive thoughts I eventually broke down I was like is there someone else here and before I even finish sending that thought out I got yes blasted to me like 20 times I I still vividly remember this image of Claudia just like stepping out of the darkness like giant doc marten booth first yeah and once she made herself known we of course started fighting immediately because she essentially she questioned my authority which sounds horrible to say but that's what happened because I considered myself like oh

I'm the leader I'm the real one so like everyone else just kind of takes a backseat to my life and Claudia who was also under the impression that she was the only one was like mmm no that is not how that works anymore it got Claudia kind of shaking me out of that to make me accept that there could be other people and when aldri came along soon after that it was like I was a little more ready to accept that and by the time that Claudia found Susan it was like okay I feel ready

for this now you made a really good point about the community that you were in and how that influenced you because we didn't know any systems for the first two years I was discovering it I can't um I remember we found out the summer before us starting high school and we talked to our therapist about it relatively soon after that but it took till like midnight school ish until we saw a YouTube video from someone who I don't think posts any videos about this ever it was just one video they randomly made until I saw

a YouTube video at like backstage at a piano concert and just like almost like cry because I had seen no one else in like two years of knowing about the sorter and knowing that we existed I also don't really know what started transitioning us out of the pudding altars into people boxes phase but the next phase was definitely putting altars into action box phase um I kind of define this as like oh you're Mia I know who Mia is Mia acts like this and I would get super anxious whenever anyone else fronted or took front

and I would cling to the front like this and I'd beast it was so overwhelming for the other altars they like didn't really know what to do and I was so full of anxiety that they would act any differently than what I knew them to be even though I was more accepting of new people showing up and new people entering the system and learning that was more people than just six of us I was still very you have to act a certain way and otherwise I will freak out and have an anxiety attack and that

was just a lot I feel like we went through a similar thing as well we're like if Claudia was out it felt very unnerving for me if she was having a good time because it's like Claudia isn't like this she's angry all the time she hates everyone and everything whereas you know meanwhile Claudia is hanging out with our spouse who she loves more than anything or anyone else in the entire world and she's just like she's having a nice quiet night with with her spouse and like I'm just nervously in the back of our head

just like this is really Claudia who could this be somebody else oh my god is there somebody else yeah and very similar to what Claudia did to you guys earlier to realize that she existed me and did the same thing for me to get me out of the action box like I remember in high school in the spring we'd walk to and from school because there was no way to get there we looked at a district and all the walks home I distinctly remember Mia fronting and then me clinging to the front and her getting

so angry at me being like you don't define how I act you don't know me you haven't done to know me well enough you can't predict Who I am that's not who I am don't put me in a box like those words if don't put me in a box it's like stuck with me the most oh yeah me it was like at my throat in those years um cuz she's just a very free spirit and I don't think she's made a video on this channel but she and I act very differently we're very very different

people um she reminds me a lot of Claudia but much younger than Claudia but we're very different people so we would clash like that all the time and it was only until like so many of these classes happened that I finally started to go wait maybe I should let her act and it was less of like me realizing that and more of me and just doing her thing and me having the realization of like there's absolutely no way I can predict this that made me forcibly change how I thought about the system this whole process

like spanned like a year year and a half it was a long time and I know it was very hard on the system and I'm still working on repairing those relationships internally because of that yeah honestly that's something that like once you burn a bridge it's hard to rebuild it yeah and but when you do rebuild it it is really sincerely worth it mine Claudia's relationship is not perfect and we are by no means best friends but we are friendly we can joke around we can hang out we can respect each other when I think

the moment where I knew that like our system was 100% going to be okay interpersonally was during a therapy session where Claudia said that I work hard to help manage the system saying it out loud doesn't make it seem like much but Claudia I don't think had ever given me a compliment at any point before then to hear her say sandra is doing a good job was like monumental you know we both burn our initial bridge from both ends and then we both worked really hard to build a better bridge between us yeah I will

admit that like I'm still working on that main glow still have a lot of issues we have a metric ton of issues and I think at least part of it stems from how we split off from each other but I think that it cannot be said enough how much I caused those issues some of them at least there was a period of time where I thought I could get rid of glow I've been trying but I fantasized about trying a lot to the point where I was driving to work one day and I was thinking

about it and blow came up to me like in our head and was like if you're going to do it just do it and stop dreaming about it because I'm sick of seeing this fantasy over and over again I it was hard and glum and I still haven't repaired that relationship and she and I have a long long long long long way to go and I think that's a thing that you're never done mm-hm and I think that's a good thing that you're never done because I don't think you're ever done working on any relationship

even a positive relationship you're never done working on it but like repairing what was once a negative relationship even making it just like a neutral relationship where you two can be in the same room as each other is worth it it's always worth yeah we had a very similar thing with ivy I think during very early stages at some of our systems so this is when I thought only system is six and this is everyone someone who was a very very negative influence on our life convinced us that we both can get rid of ivy

and shouldn't get rid of ivy and that series of events I don't very much memory of but it led to her being dormant for a very long time and from her resurfacing and rejoining the system in the past couple of years there's been a lot of anger held towards me for those actions in those years and I haven't been the best at repairing that relationship over time but I think right about a year ago now there was one time where I be fronted and she literally punched something and then left me an angry note and

then from that I realized holy crap I need to like talk to her and we need to work this out and we like sat down and we had a series of conversations about the issue and we really like connected to each other on a personal level of understanding what each person was going through and what happened back then that caused all of those issues and made compromises from moving forward in our relationship and it's been so much better since that I can't stress how much just treating your alters with love and compassion for who they

are and like really talking to them about things it's just so important regardless of how you view them or regardless of how they view themselves or how they view you and I think what you said about it just being a constant process of like any relationship even positive ones and also just a process of like learning to love your system and learning to love being who you are both as an alter and being who you are as in being part of a system and like being multiple it's been really important yeah I think one of

the things that mainly helped me start working towards that was the realization that I'm just another alter like I am no better or worse than anyone else in the system I'm no more real than anyone else in the system Claudia likes to play that I'm just as fake as everyone else I don't know what exactly kicked off this revelation but I had this feeling that I had not always been the house I had this like really nagging feeling and it was something that I pushed away and when I can fronted that and thought about like

why I was so upset at Claudia I think the real fear that I had with her was that that I'm not the real one like I'm not the real one either like no one is and that was somehow more deeply unsettling to me then just I'm not the only one in here Claudia once said that finding out that she wasn't the only person in the body was disturbing but finding out that she quote wasn't even the main one was worse I agree with that sentiment to a degree even though I can't fully empathize with that

being the quote-unquote main one just as you know host the one who's the most I feel like that that idea of you're not the most important in your own body that is scary and I don't know if we've set this am video but it's like we're wearing oldest child and we've had to kind of share everything for like our whole life and then you move out you know you you get stuff of your own and you don't really have to worry about sharing it too much except you know when you're when you're married and stuff

you share all that stuff done where you find out you're a system and suddenly not even your body is your own you have to share it with everyone else and that is both terrifying and so frustrating it's like I can't just go out and get a tattoo or get my ears pierced or you know get SRS because I have to consult with everyone else because it's not just my body and it is something that frustrates me to this day but in a different way I wish this was just my body but I understand that it's

not and I understand why it's not and I understand that it is okay that it's not but there is some like longing still and I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes yeah even with all those frustrations nothing is comparable to the feeling of loving yourself through loving someone else in your system yeah yeah it's a good segue that's a really good segue and that's also really true there's absolutely nothing like when I'm feeling like a horrible host and like I'm feeling really down and when I open myself and like Lily is there to comfort

me and just for here feeling we love you we appreciate you here in this body there really is nothing like the love between system members yeah in our system Susan came out of dormancy for the first time since we were like 14 15 so she went from being in a world where she was a cyst girl in a a mab body I can't imagine that well I can sort of mad how she felt being a trans woman in my body I can't imagine how she felt not even being able to like focus on on that

sort of stuff because of stuff that was going on but because she she went dormant when we were still considered boying considering ourselves a boy and she woke up and all of a sudden everyone sees us as a girl and we see ourselves as a girl we see the body as a girl she finally gets to be a little girl for the first time in her life and seeing her navigate that and explore that is something that straight up will actually make me cry if I dog vet any longer because it just it makes me

so happy it makes me so happy for her and so happy for us and like we were talking earlier today about how she's really good friends with a younger altar in the patchwork system shout out to Sydney and how Susan just got a friendship bracelet in the mail from Sydney and I you told this to me I literally fell over in my chair it's so cute and there's something just medical about caring about each other and loving each other to the extent of you're always together you're always in the same body and yes that creates

conflicts like you and Claudia back in the early and like still today even though it creates conflict it creates this great sense of like love and camaraderie you have to you're forced to build this immense amount of trust between each other to live together in to function and to just be and it like creates this love within alters within systems that I think singlets just can't experience in ways similar to how we do I think even if you want to view altars as other parts of yourself or extensions of yourself it's a powerful thing to

look like I said love yourself through yourselves recently we went to a spoken word event about mental health narratives and I had not prepared anything at the time because I was really busy with I think it was a test but sitting there and listening to everyone's narrative I like went into the corner and quickly wrote down a spoken word piece and it was all about this progression that we've talked about how like I went from curiosity of who is this person here to fear and afraid missed - blocking out - I think I know who

you are and you must be like this - you act like this - finally like love and acceptance and I think one of the final lines in there when I hear the words decision identity disorder I don't think of trauma and I don't think of pain and I don't think of disorder I think of love and I think of family because that's what we are and building that was so powerful for us and for any younger systems out there who are watching this and might be going through what either of us went through in those

earlier stages we love you you can get through this we believe in you and we're here for you always it won't be like this forever and because if we keep going I'm pretty sure one of us will start crying I think we're gonna end here take care of yourselves and love each other and have an absolutely wonderful day I look good cry yeah man like this ended up being super emotion yeah I didn't expect both of these videos to be so like intense