It takes the form of an interview between the self who created it – Fox – and another self – James. If you haven’t read one of our plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out our other Plural Selves zines, and our free books about Plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here interesting.

Location: Fox’s favourite cafe.

Food: Poached eggs, avo, halloumi brunch, with black americano

TLDR: Fox has made a new zine about plurality and they’re very excited about it. You can find it here.

James: It has been a while since we’ve done one of these.

Fox: Like a year and a half. You interviewed me about the Welcome Monster Feelings zine I made back in Spring 2022.

James: So I did. Readers could be forgiven for thinking that our plural experience has lessened since then, given how most of our blog posts have been written from a collective ‘I’, rather than as dialogues between us.

Fox: Not at all. If anything, our plurality has become even more vivid, and more of a central part of our everyday life, work, and relating. But we’ve been working deeply with our two most traumatised selves – Robin and Morgan – in the kinds of ways we wrote about back in 2020 and 2021. It felt too vulnerable to share from – or about – them very openly while we were doing that work.

James: An important aspect of ‘no part gets left behind’: ensuring that everyone feels comfortable with the level of sharing. But you did manage the Plural Selves 2 zine this time last year, and now this new zine: Triangles (and Circles) of Selves.

Fox: I did! It feels helpful to us to track our own plural experience through these zines: from 2017 to 2022 to now. And it shows how we’re all always a work in progress: all of us. Hopefully it’s also useful to share with others what we’re learning about plurality, which might be helpful to them as well: whether they have a vividly plural experience like us, or just as sense of containing different parts or subpersonalities that they want to explore more, and everything in between.

James: I want to ask you more about all of that. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Fox: That can happen with me!

James: Very true *smiles* So help me out here with a bit of a plan before we begin.

Fox: Okay.

James: I want to ask you about the zine: why you wrote it and what it means to you. Then I want to ask you about your creative process because I know you love that.

Fox: It makes me feel like a proper creative type!

James: Which you are. Plus I’m intrigued about the directions our creativity is going in with you. And finally I want to touch on the picture we’ve used to illustrate this blog post: your latest image of our plural system.

Fox: Yes!

James: Alright then.

Fox: Let’s do this!

The Triangles (and circles) of selves zine

James: So tell us about your new zine, Fox. What motivated you to write this? And how does it differ from our previous plural selves zines?

Fox: Okay. So the Plural Selves 2 zine, which we wrote this time last year, was a very visual comic-type zine about the kinds of selves we’ve found in our system, and how people might explore whether they have similar kinds of selves themselves. But since then, we’ve come across a number of plural ideas which have helped us to understand ourselves – how we were formed and the roles we play – even better. 

James: It’s not a completely different set of ideas to Plural Selves 2 then?

Fox: Not at all. But it has this idea of a core triangle of selves at the heart of it, which a lot of people have found helpful when we shared it with them.

James: That’s why you wrote this zine really, because so many people in our lives kept asking if there was anywhere they could point people to, to explain these ideas.

Fox: Right, and there is this book Being and Becoming, by Franklyn Sills, which is where we found out some of these ideas. But that’s quite a dense book aimed at therapists, and it also doesn’t cover all of the different ideas I wanted to explore.

James: Basically you noticed that these kinds of triangles kept showing up in many of the different things we were reading: from literature on developmental trauma, to writing about relationships, to Buddhist teachings, to recovery community resources, to autism articles, to books about the politics of trauma and traumatising cultures.

Fox: Yes, so I wanted to make a zine to show how all these triangles map onto each other, at all levels of experience from existential, through sociocultural, relational, and internal bodyminds.

Image Description: A series of concentric circles, the outer circle labelled ‘existential/spiritual’, the next one in ‘sociocultural’, the next one in ‘relational’, and the inner circle ‘internal’

James: This is the post-humanist kind of model you were playing with in your Queering Creative Health zine: the idea that we’re always inevitably embodied, entangled with other beings, and embedded in the wider world. So we need to understand everything about ourselves at all those levels of experience.

Fox: And we’re existential: because we’re beings who know they exist – and have to figure out how to be given that – or something!

James: Something like that. You explain it all very well in this zine.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: So you’re saying you were motivated to put something out there explaining all these triangles and how they map onto each other, because others were finding it helpful when we shared about it.

Fox: Exactly. That’s why this zine is really a long essay with pictures. Or a lot of little essays. Not a comic like most of my zines are.

James: We’ll get to that shift in a moment. Could you just explain the main idea of the triangle model simply, so people get a sense of it.

Fox: Okay right. The idea is that – for all kinds of reasons existential, sociocultural, relational, and internal – people tend to create a singular self, who they present to the world, who is trying to perform everything they’ve learnt to think of as ‘good’. But doing this means pushing down into the shadow or unconsciousness, two selves who are seen as ‘bad’ in different ways: A needy/vulnerable self who is constantly yearning for love and connection, and a rejecting/rejected self who holds all our ‘bad’ experiences and sees the ‘bad’ in others.

Image description: A triangle. The top corner labelled ‘central/performing self’, the bottom left ‘needy/vulnerable self’ and the bottom right ‘rejecting/rejected self’

James: And where do the circles come in?

Fox: *laughs* you know where they come in! It’s you: You and Ara.

James: For our readers!

Fox: Okay. So our sense is that we needed two other selves, in order to bring those unconscious selves out of the shadow, and to free them to enable them to be what they’re capable of. We see the two other selves as the top and bottom halves of a circle which can go around the triangle, containing it.

James: And how would you describe these two halves?

Image description: A triangle within a circle. The top corner of the triangle labelled ‘open self’, the bottom left ‘sensitive self’ and the bottom right ‘clear self’. The top half of the circle labelled ‘witnessing self’ and the bottom half ‘holding self’

Fox: The top half is a kind of witnessing self. She can hold the others in a big enough space for them to bring themselves in fully, and she can see them with a loving gaze.

James: And that vital bottom half? What’s that like?

Fox: Oh I don’t know. Nothing very important really.

James: Behave!

Fox: Okay, the bottom half – who we might or might not call James – is like a grounding self, who can hold everyone steady. He can do the everyday life stuff while the top half of the circle is helping everyone to feel their old pains, and free themselves of their old patterns.

James: He sounds great.

Fox: Doesn’t he though?! Obviously the genders of these selves will be different for different people. But in us the witness is a she and the grounding is a he.

James: Right. And the zine explores a whole bunch of different ways in which we might understand the triangles, and the circles.

Fox: Yep. This zine is really focused on the ideas, while our other plural zines were a lot about the practices we use to get to know, and love, all our selves.

I guess we had struggled sometimes with all the different models of how people work and relate. You know like the trauma 4Fs, and the shame compass, inner child understandings, attachment theory, and all of that. I saw the triangle as a kind of constant through all those ideas. Maybe, like us, people might find it a useful touchstone to draw on all of those understandings – and others – instead of getting freaked out about which one is the ‘right’ one or something.

James: I see. It’s a way of weaving together all these understandings, so they stop competing with each other and start working together. Any of them can then be a helpful way into this overall understanding of how people work.

Fox: Exactly.

Unique or Universal?

James: That brings us to something I know you’ve struggled with. Is this a universal theory that applies to everyone?

Fox: Ugh, it’s such a paradoxy question. Like absolutely not, because nothing good ever came from imposing universal theories of how people work on everyone. And, at the same time, kinda yes, maybe, because there are some similar patterns that seem to show up in all these different understandings of how people work – from micro to macro – and across very different philosophies, faiths, and spiritualities.

James: It’s something we think about a lot isn’t it? What’s unique and what’s universal?

Fox: Right. It goes back to the levels model really. If we think about our experience of plurality: that idea of creating a ‘good’ self and disowning the ‘bad’. Some of that – we reckon – is an existential thing that many – if not all – humans do in order to deal with things like the fact they are going to die, and the way that the world around them tells them how they should be. But some of how it works for us is due to our cultural context: growing up, and living now, in a white imperialist country which bases pretty much everything – laws, education, healthcare, media, etc. – on this rigid set of ideas about what it is to be a ‘normal’ ‘successful’ individual self.

James: Right, so some of how we experience ourselves could be really different from how people experience themselves in other cultural contexts: Less individualistic cultures, for example, or cultures which readily accept that a number of selves, souls, or spirits, can share a body/mind.

Fox: Exactly. And then, going down another level, some of how we experience ourselves is due to the specifics of the way we were treated growing up in this culture. Like the kinds of developmental trauma we experienced, or what it was like to be a being who didn’t fit neatly into many categories.

James: Like?

Fox: Boy/girl, gay/straight, working/middle class background, northern/southern, and – related to our undiagnosed autism – abled/disabled, stupid/smart… So many really.

James: Mm. 

Fox: So some of our experience will likely only resonate with others who grew up in a similar time and place, or those with similar kinds of developmental trauma and/or neurodivergence, or those who have similar experiences of being between or beyond binaries, or of challenging normative classification models in some way.

James: And that relates to the inner level.

Fox: Exactly, some aspects of our plural experience are probably completely unique to us: to the ways in which our particular bodymind has been shaped – and continues to be shaped – by all these things.

James: So what does that mean for how we present these ideas?

Fox: I guess I always want to ensure that we present them in an invitational way. I think it is helpful to present our particular experience of plurality, because it does seem to resonate with a lot of people we speak with, and because it brings to life how people might do this kind of plural work themselves. So much writing on plurality doesn’t really ‘walk the walk’ in that way. You can be left, after reading it, wondering: yeah but how does it actually feel to be plural? How do you actually relate with each other? How could I explore my own plurality if it’s all unfamiliar to me?

James: Those are the kinds of questions we’re trying to help people with, by showing them how we work, and telling them about what’s worked for us.

Fox: Right but invitational. Starting with that sense – always – that some of this may be helpful to everyone, some to people only of a similar cultural context, some to people only of a similar relationship background, some – perhaps – only to other autistic, plural systems, who carry the same kinds of developmental trauma that we do.

James: And some is just our own unique team MJ way of experiencing stuff.

Fox: Our own particular weirdness.

James: Exactly.

Fox: I guess I hope that even that could be helpful. Like it could give people permission that of course it will all work in particular weird and wonderful ways for them too, and that is something to be celebrated, not resisted. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? The idea we should all conform to some universal, or cultural, or community, ideal of ‘normal’.

James: Right. And one gift of plurality is that you know that – even internally – you can’t possibly conform, because you are however-many-number of different selves, or parts, who see the world in radically different, often contradictory, ways.

Fox: Exactly.

Incorrigibly Plural

James: Okay, so nearly done with the zine. Just tell me something about how it relates to our book project.

Fox: Right, so we hope to write a book, over the next year or more, called Incorrigibly Plural. In a way the zine was my first attempt to write the core of that book: The set of ideas that we’ll be playing with there.

James: How will the book differ?

Fox: Well, I hope – if you all feel up to it – that you’ll each write from yourselves, about what it’s like to be each of those selves: the needy/vulnerable self, the witnessing self, and all that.

James: So there’ll be all of our voices in there, maybe some dialogue between us all too.

Fox: Right. Telling the story of how we’ve done this: each self’s journey, and how we relate together.

James: Anything else?

Fox: Well the book will also be more practical than the zine, including a lot of the creative, therapeutic, spiritual, relational, and somatic practices that we’ve found helpful for doing this kind of selves work. And pointing people at other people’s work as well.

James: And I guess we’ll cover this universal/unique issue in more depth.

Fox: Absolutely. One thing I want to do is to emphasise this sense that both complementary-ness and contradictory-ness are helpful: That we can hold sameness and difference. So, like, we – our plural selves – have a lot of similarities in our values, passions, that kind of thing. But, like you said, we’re also very different. One thing we’re learning together is how to be alongside each other in that difference instead of in opposition. 

James: Nicely put. What do you mean?

Fox: Well like, we could see it as a problem, when we contradict each other. Like pulling in opposite directions, someone’s always going to lose out. Or we could see it as a gift of plurality, that we can always see every situation from at least five different perspectives. That enables us to get a way fuller picture of everything that’s going on. And then we go through a process of deciding how to engage with whatever-it-is which brings all of us along with us. That feels amazing, when we can do that. And it maybe helps us learn something about how people, or groups, could manage to be alongside each other in their sameness and difference too.

James: So being with where we complement each other and where we contradict each other.

Fox: You’re looking very dapper today James, but I don’t completely agree with your choice of socks.

James: I see what you did there. Personally I think these socks are an excellent choice. Very cosy for a Winter day.

Fox: Not colourful enough.

James: Sadly a problem with so much of our wardrobe when you are the only self in our system who likes bright colours.

Fox: Sadly, sadly. I’m still campaigning for more orange.

James: You want to do the same thing with ideas in the book right? Complementary and contradictory.

Fox: Yes, thank-you. The zine could give the impression that all these ideas – all these triangles – just complement each other perfectly. But there are also contradictions between them. I want to get those across in the book. Like, again, it’s not a problem that there are very different stories we could tell about the way our plurality manifests. If we can hold multiple truths as valid then we can learn from the dialogue between them, instead of getting stuck trying to find the one right, true answer.

James: How’re you planning to do that?

Fox: I think we’ll present the zine ideas in the book, and then give – like – twenty different stories through our experience, from different perspectives. To show how it can be helpful both to find those common threads – like the multiple triangles that map onto each other – and to voice all the contradictory stories and hold all of them as valid and valuable also.

James: I like it.

Fox: Thank-you.

The creative self?

James: Okay moving on from the zine and the book, I can’t help noticing that you seem to be leading on all of our creativity these days.

Fox: It does seem like that doesn’t it?

James: What d’you make of that?

Fox: Good question. I guess I need to start with a bit about who I am.

James: Please.

Fox: Our sense is that, when we stopped trying to present a singular ‘good’ individual self to the world, that made space for me to come forward more in our system. I feel like the self we were – or maybe could have been – without trauma: just open to experience, curious, present to whatever is happening.

James: Mmhm.

Fox: At first we mistook that for me being some kind of ‘child’ self, because I have childlike qualities. So I kind of took the lead on drawing pictures, like in the monster feelings zine. I still feel very committed to the idea of presenting ideas in formats other than words – and explaining things simply, and visually. But more and more I seem to have been the one of us who gets excited about all kinds of creativity. This year I wrote that Queer Creative Health zine that we were commissioned to produce. Then I was the one who wrote this plural selves zine, even though it is much more writing than my previous zines. And just recently I wrote a purely written chapter, for Alex’s new anthology: Trans and Disabled.

James: Which also explores some of the ideas we’ve been discussing here.

Fox: Out next year!

James: I guess writing used to be the job of our central/performing self, back when we thought we were a singular self.

Fox: Right, and there were risks with that. Like it might come from a singular voice and perspective, when now we know the value of drawing on all of our voices and perspectives. Also the central/performing self is very invested in demonstrating they are ‘good’. There’s a risk that writing from that place could come across as too self-deprecating, or too defensive, or as having something to prove. All of that gets in the way of that invitational way of writing that feels so important to us now.

James: A style where people really feel permission to read it if it resonates, and not if it doesn’t. And where they can feel able to take what works for them and leave the rest – as Alex says – no implicit pressure from us for them to agree with us.

Fox: Right. And that’s all the more important now we recognise that everyone reading our work will also be as multiplicitous and contradictory as we are. Different people may relate to our work, or not, but also different parts of the same person, or selves in the same system. In the book I want us to directly speak to different selves – or parts – in the reader, as well as speaking from different selves in us.

James: Nice.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: You’re welcome.

Fox: *Grin* What was the question again?

James: Um, oh yes, so you were saying that we used to write from the central/performing self. What happened next?

Fox: After our plurality became more vivid, I gradually took over the picture-based kind of stuff, and we did a bunch of those blog posts as dialogue that are now in our plurality free books. But when we had to do serious writing, you mostly took that on: as our everyday life kind of self.

James: Mm.

Fox: How was that for you?

James: It was okay. I liked that I was writing informed by all of your experiences. It felt like a way of honouring what you were all doing. And you know I have a sense of myself as in service to the rest of you. So it kind of fit with that.

Fox: I sense a but coming!

James: Heh. Yes, I guess it didn’t feel like my forte. I think I enjoy being of service in other ways more. I enjoy doing the practical life things so the rest of you can get on with your spiritual, therapeutic, and creative work, and with connecting with other people. And I enjoy looking after you in that grounding way when one of you is struggling, and gentling you up in the evenings, hearing about your days.

Fox: You’re excellent at all of that James.

James: *smiles* Writing felt like… I could do it, but it wouldn’t be as heartfelt as if any of the rest of you were doing it. I’m not so big on feelings.

Fox: Except feeling for all of us.

James: I am big on those feelings.

Fox: Morgan tried doing some of our writing too. It probably means the most to her because she is the one who is so committed to truth-telling: the one whose voice has been so silenced through our lives. But she’s also the one who holds the inner criticism so it can be so painful for her. It’s hard for her to not keep questioning whether it’s good enough, or to struggle with the contradictions, or with being invitational rather than imposing.

James: You and I are more relaxed about such things.

Fox: We just sit down in a cafe and write about all the weird stuff that we think about all the time!

James: Exactly.

Fox: Sometimes we have the image of me with a clipboard. Like I’m running around everyone else watching what they’re doing, jotting down what they’re saying, and then I can write a report on it all.

James: Which is kind of what you did with the monster feelings zine. Most of them were not your feelings.

Fox: Except for the fizzy creative feelings!

James: Except those. You listened to Robin and Morgan describe their feelings and then turned them into pictures. It was a lovely process.

Fox: And now I’m expanding that, to write for others based on all of the things I’ve jotted down on my clipboard.

James: So do you think you’ll be the key author of our plural book?

Fox: I’m not sure. Ara wrote for the first time the other day – just her – and it was beautiful. Like she can write from that place of seeing us all, and everybody else, with that loving gaze. And. of course, in the book I’m hoping that everyone will tell their own stories, and write in dialogue together too.

James: Watch this space then?

Fox: Exactly.

The Picture

James: Which brings us to the last thing I wanted to ask you about. This picture you drew of us all yesterday.

Fox: Yes! I loved drawing that!

Image Description: A comic-style drawing of five people under a movie-style title ‘Incorrigible Plural’, with character names: Morgan, James, Ara, Fox, Robin written above it. The people are clustered together in a group and include an angry looking girl, a man with glasses, a kind looking woman, a person with Fox-style ears and tail, and a somewhat anxious looking boy

James: Tell me what it means to you.

Fox: Well I’ve drawn a few comics and cartoons of us in the past – or we have – but I guess I took it on after a while as the main drawing self.

James: Right. We even wrote a whole paper about comics and plural selves before that didn’t we?

Fox: Oh yes we did! Anyway, we hadn’t drawn ourselves for a year. And there have been a few important changes in our system since then.

James: Tell us about that.

Fox: Well a huge one is we’re now five instead of seven.

James: What happened there?!

Fox: Heh you know.

James: For our readers.

Fox: Well, as we focused on Robin and Morgan’s journeys we had the sense of the self we called Max gradually emptying out. We could still talk to her but it was like she was up in the hills somewhere most of the time. She always seemed very relaxed and okay with it. Like she was the previous central/performing self who just didn’t have to be anymore, and that was a huge relief. We also felt the self we called Jonathan around less and less, only really coming forward to do the cooking, and even then he didn’t really like it if we asked him how he was doing or anything.

James: Mm.

Fox: It struck us that perhaps Max was an aspect of Morgan and Jonathan an aspect of Robin. Like trauma had split Morgan into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ halves (Max, and the one we used to call Beastie), and Robin into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ halves (Jonathan, and the one we used to call Tony). It felt like the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in both of them were coming back together. Like we could feel how Morgan encompassed the kinds of energies we used to associate with Max and Beastie, and Robin those we associated with Jonathan and Tony. It took a while, and it was sometimes confusing – and sad – to lose those selves who we loved so much. I guess that’s one of those contradictions, James. It’s true to say that we lost nothing, because we still feel them in Morgan and Robin. And it’s also true to say we have lost them, and that we feel the grief and sadness of that loss, alongside a relief that the five-system feels more balanced and ‘right’ than seven ever did.

James: At one point years ago we thought we might be nine. There was a similar relief when we realised it was seven, not nine.

Fox: Mm, which does not necessarily mean five-forever. We always want to be open to different selves emerging or merging. We still sometimes have a sense of these wispy fragments of Robin and Morgan’s shadow selves: like the worst possible versions of them floating around a bit untethered. And we feel it is vital to welcome them wholeheartedly every time we feel their presence, even though they’re very into trying to scare us with just how monstrous and unacceptable they are. 

James: No part gets left behind.

Fox: Exactly, and it is so important to us to recognise that – just like everyone – we contain the capacity to be harmful, to do the worst things that humans are capable of. The path towards causing less harm comes from accepting that with great honesty, not by denying it and shoving those little ghosts and demons back under the rug.

James: Well put. More of that in the book I suspect.

Fox: Oh definitely.

James: So you were saying. One big shift in our system was to being five instead of seven, because we recognised Robin and Morgan as incorporating the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ boy and girl, respectively.

Fox: Mmhm. The other big shift is even more recent. Ara came in way more fully.

James: She did!

Fox: We weren’t expecting it. She’s been available all the time since summer 2020. Like if any of us wanted to be with her we could, any time. But we visualised her as sitting in a field somewhere that we could go and visit, or on the stoop of our imaginary house. She wasn’t quite one of us, in the way the rest of us were. I guess we thought it’d always be that way, given that she’s the witnessing self. Maybe she needed all that solitude and space in order to be able to hold us when we went to her.

James: But she started to be more present, on long walks particularly.

Fox: She walks. A. Lot. More. Slowly. Than. The. Rest. Of. Us.

James: *Chuckles*

Fox: Then she had a session with our therapist, talking as herself: as Ara. And after that it was like she was embodied fully. One of us. Hopefully she’ll share all of that more in the book, but for us it was like we could engage with her way more readily in our everyday life, and she was having a lot more of her own experiences.

James: And I could let go of some of the holding and hearing that I’d been doing. She took it over.

Fox: You’re, like, a gentleman of leisure now right? I do the creativity, Ara does the holding…

James: There’s still plenty to do. And also, someone has to hold you and Ara when it’s been a lot.

Fox: You’re doing brilliantly. You know that right?

James: I do okay. You know me, just steady steady, step by step through the day; through the life.

Fox: Brilliantly.

James: So this picture.

Fox: *Grin* So I guess we’d never really known what Ara looked like before. I’d drawn her in a certain way, but it was kind of a mash up of people we’d felt compassion from in the past, rather than a real sense of what she feels like – the way I draw the rest of us. When I did the latest picture she came out looking like she feels. She’s a bit more like I used to draw Max, with the short white hair, but her face conveys the feeling that I used to convey in the more mash-up pictures of Ara.

James: She also has a nice cosy looking coat on.

Fox: That just felt right somehow.

James: So why this picture this way?

Fox: Well people might have noticed that it’s a riff on the poster from the 1980s movie ‘The Breakfast Club’. We were out walking the other day – fast not slow because it was me walking and listening to our tunes – and ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ came on, which is the song from that movie. And suddenly I thought we mapped onto the characters in that film, now that we are five.

James: One of our favourite games: who would each of us be from this movie, or that TV show, or that book?

Fox: It is one of the most fun plural games.

Image description: The same picture from before next to the movie poster of The Breakfast Club, which depicts five people in a similar cluster who represent stereotypes of US high-school kids: A recluse, a rebel, a jock, a beauty and a brain (according the the movie description)

James: So what appealed about ‘The Breakfast Club’, exactly?

Fox: Well it wasn’t precisely the characters. I mean a little bit in the way there’s a character who is a sad, angry girl – the way Morgan can be – and there’s a character who is a scared boy – the way we can experience Robin. But the other characters, not so much.

James: So you don’t think you bear any resemblance to a princess then…?

Fox: Hey! I mean I guess I am here being treated by you to brunch and an extra hot chocolate. But other than that not at all. I mean (1) I’m not gendered, and (2) I wear orange, not pink. At least when I’m allowed to…

James: Alright, alright. So what was it that amused you about us being the characters from ‘The Breakfast Club’?

Fox: Well the set up is that they are five school students who are all shut in detention together, and they are completely different: ‘A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse’. And by the end of the movie they’ve learnt how to get along.

James: Spoiler alert.

Fox: Dude it came out in 1984. It’s an iconic John Hughes movie. Anyone who is going to watch it has already watched it.

James: Heh you’re feisty today.

Fox: Know your place serving man.

James: *laughs* very well prince/ss? Your honour? Majesterial majestical monarch.

Fox: *laughs*

James: Anyway, you’re saying you like the idea of us as five very different selves locked in together, learning about each other: what we have in common, and how to relate across our differences.

Fox: Exactly. You could say that’s the situation of our lives – born into this bodymind together. Or you could say it’s what happened from 2020 onwards. Like, literally, locked in, the five of us together.

James: ‘They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.’

Fox: Like ‘The Breakfast Club’ if they all decided to move in together after the movie.

James: Personally I like that I occupy the position of the ‘rebel’ in our version of the poster. Looking pretty hunky and moody there too.

Fox: I wouldn’t make too much of it, Ara is in the position of the ‘jock’ which is hardly her is it?

James: Way to burst my bubble: the brooding hero, James.

Fox: Maybe in a parallel universe.

James: I’ll take it. Anything else to say?

Fox: I don’t think so. Just that the title of the picture –  ‘Incorrigibly Plural’ – is the title we’re playing with for the book. And we’ll be writing more about that in a chapter we’re writing for a new anthology on neuroqueer: what it means to embrace being incorrigibly plural.

James: Perhaps we’ll share some of that here when that chapter comes out.

Fox: Plan. Thanks for this James.

James: Right back at you littlest.

The post New zine for the end of the year: Triangles (and Circles) of Selves appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It takes the form of an interview between the part of me who created it – Fox – and another part – James. If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out our Plural Selves zine, and our free book about Plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here interesting.

Location: Fox’s favourite cafe.
Food: Halloumi tomato pesto sandwich, OJ.

James: It’s my great pleasure, today, to be conducting an interview with the artist behind the new zine Welcome Monster Feelings. Thankyou for taking the time to speak with me today Fox.

Fox: You’re welcome.

James: Would you like to begin by telling the readers a little bit about who you are?

Fox: Nope.

James: Well this is getting off to a great start.

Fox: I think it’d be more fun if you say who I am and I’ll say who you are.

James: Oh go on then. How best to describe you?

Fox: It better be good.

James: No pressure then.

Fox: *giggle*

James: I would say that you’re the youngest child part of our plural system. Or rather we tend to think of you as who we might have been without all the rules we learnt about who it was okay and not okay to be in the world – without our developmental trauma. You are the most able of all of us to just be in the moment, to find delight and wonder in things, to move through the feelings you have rather than getting stuck in them. How am I doing?

Fox: Why do we call me Fox?

James: Because you often feel more like a creature than a human: a wild little thing.

Fox: Heh I like that. Okay I’ll do you.

James: I’m not sure it’s regular to introduce the interviewer.

Fox: I’m gonna anyway. You’re our James. We call you lots of other names like Old Man and Saint James and Captain Admin and ruder ones.

James: Captain Admin is pretty rude. I don’t just do admin.

Fox: That’s why it’s funny. You are the one of us who does most of the everyday life stuff, particular the bits that the rest of us find boring or scary like emails *shudder* But you’re also the main one who looks after the child parts of us: me, Morgan (aka Beastie), and Robin (aka Tony). You’re really good at that.

James: I’m not sure how Morgan would feel about being called a child part.

Fox: She’s not here!

James: I mean technically, given that we share a body…

Fox: If she was properly here we wouldn’t be doing this interview coz it’s not easy for her to do this kind of thing. But we’ll get to that.

James: Is that enough introductions then? Am I allowed to start the interview proper?

Fox: It’s about time!

The aims of the zine

James: *shakes head* Okay then. First question. What were you hoping to achieve with this work Welcome Monster Feelings?

Fox: Two things I think. The main one was I wanted to help the other members of our system – particularly Robin and Morgan who carry most of our trauma – to find a way to be with their most painful feelings. We’ve been in this big trauma period for the last few years, so our feelings can be very overwhelming at times, especially for those two. 

The other thing I wanted to do was to find a way back to drawing. We made quite a few zines and comics a few years back, but it was something we found much harder to do during the trauma time.

James: Why d’you think that is?

Fox: Well Morgan’s trauma often comes out as being an inner critic – so it’s very hard for her to let us draw without feeling it’s not good enough, or comparing it to what other people do, even though she also really wants us to be creative. Robin’s trauma comes out as fear and shame so it’s scary for him to put stuff out there in the world, in case people are mean about it. Also it’s just generally pretty hard to sit down and draw – or do anything much – when you’re feeling that bad. 

James: I think it was a genius move to find a project that we could do even when we felt rotten, in fact tough feelings were kind of a bonus.

Fox: I know right? And – as we say in the companion zine Welcoming Your Monster Feelings – the practice of making the monsters often helps overwhelming feelings to calm down a bit. So you gradually get this knowing in your body that making a monster will make you feel better, which makes it easier to do it the next time you feel rough.

James: Positive reinforcement.

Fox: Right, and I love that it showed Robin and Morgan that they were vital – to the project and to us. They can both so easily feel that they are ‘bad parts’, or ruin things for the rest of us, and that they should be cast out again – as they both were for so much of our lives. But I couldn’t have done this project without them. It was their feelings I was drawing most of the time. 

Also when we showed our friends, and they found it helpful and said they felt similar things, that helped Robin and Morgan to feel seen, and less alone, and like they were being helpful to others.

A plural project

James: Just brilliant! So it sounds like you see this as a plural collaboration, even though you were definitely the one leading on it.

Fox: Absolutely. Robin and Morgan mostly had the feelings, and told me about them, and then I found the way to draw them that felt most right. But we also got everyone else’s feelings in there somewhere.

James: I particularly like the holding and hearing monster towards the end…

Fox: That’s you! And he looks a bit like Sully from Monsters Inc because that character reminds us of you, and his full name is James P. Sullivan.

James: I also helped as Captain Admin right?

Fox: Yes! You did all the scanning and the making it a pdf, and learning how to make a pdf small so people can download it, and putting it on our website, and all kinds of things that I find an-noy-ing!

James: And conducting this interview of course.

Fox: Of course. Next question.

Feelings, art and monsters

James: Well I was interested in exploring with you the links in our life between feelings, art, and monsters. I know you’ve been reflecting on that.

Fox: I have. It feels like we’ve been trying to do this project our whole life, and it involves going back towards these three things that were all kind of crushed in us.

James: Do go on.

Fox: Well we’ve written before about how we weren’t allowed ‘difficult’ feelings as a kid. People at home and school tried to train us out of them with punishments for unacceptable emotions, and rewards when we made it through the day or week without crying. That’s part of the reason that Robin and Morgan got disowned. They held all the least acceptable feelings: fear and anger, but also loneliness, sadness, jealousy, pride. All sorts.

James: Right. Our feelings get so unbearable during the years in our life when PTSD hits because we’re feeling all the things that were locked inside Robin and Morgan.

Fox: Feeling the feelings they held for us our whole life. That’s it. 

Another thing that got pushed out of us in a similar way when we were small was art. We LOVED drawing. We drew all of the time. Our bedroom wall was full of our pictures.  But gradually people around us tried to make us draw the kinds of things they wanted, and to draw in the ways they wanted us to.

James: For example?

Fox: Like being asked to draw pictures as a present for people’s birthdays. And they generally wanted things like landscapes or still lifes or whatever, which isn’t what we enjoyed drawing. Also when we did art at high school we were shocked because we had to draw things from real life rather than out of our imagination – as we’d always done before.

James: What did we enjoy drawing?

Fox: Mostly people and imaginary creatures. And we drew to tell stories from our fantasy life, or to get down feelings that we couldn’t talk about or express in other ways. But eventually we learnt that wasn’t how you were meant to do art.

James: So, not only were both feelings and artistic pursuits suppressed, but those two suppressions were also related. Losing the ability to draw from our imagination and feelings denied us an important outlet for emotions we weren’t supposed to have. How do monsters fit in?

Fox: Monsters feel like the third leg of the stool somehow. 

We were always fascinated by monsters. Our favourite TV shows as a kid were Rentaghost and Dramarama. Our favourite books were pop up ghost books. Later we read true haunting books over and over and over. We were addicted to Ghostbusters – one of the first movies we saw at the cinema. When we got to choose our own topic to do a project on at school we did dinosaurs every time.

James: We had a huge collection of plastic dinos too didn’t we?

Fox: Yes! Dimetrodon was my favourite dinosaur, but they don’t think Dimetrodon was a dinosaur any more!

James: This may be a tangent.

Fox: Heh. 

James: How did monsters relate to art and to feelings?

Fox: Well they relate to art because a lot of what we wanted to draw was mythical creatures like dragons. 

They relate to feelings because, when we reached double figures and things got really bad, we started reading authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and James Herbert. We thought that reading horror books would help us to be less scared in our real life – like maybe we could get used to facing frightening things by reading those books, and become braver.

James: And did our monster love get suppressed too?

Fox: I think so. We once tried to do a book review of a horror book in school and they didn’t like that. It wasn’t a proper book like the ones you were meant to read. When we studied psychology at university – and afterwards – we were always drawn to monster-y topics, like the paranormal, and why people do evil things, and the meaning of fairy tales. But those things were always looked down on as not proper, so we wound up doing our projects on other stuff – somehow making it acceptable.

James: And yet our PhD was on loneliness, our first paper was about goths and Pagans, and the first conference we organised was about vampires. We kept finding our way back to feelings and monsters didn’t we?

Fox: All the way through. Like we did the A levels that people said we should do, instead of the ones we really wanted to do (drawing and stories!) But we spent the whole summer after we finished those exams painting our room with a giant dragon, even though we were just about to move out of there. Then after our PhD we started writing fiction. We were going to do a whole collection of alternative fairy tales and take a creative writing course, but we didn’t get accepted. For a long time we’ve had an idea for a book called Everyday Horrors: a mash up of horror fic and self-help.

James: It seems like we’ve been trying to make Welcome Monster Feelings our whole life, and finally, we’re making it, now that we’re nearly fifty.

Fox: Speak for yourself old man!

James: *Grin* 

Reclaiming lost things

Fox: It’s like reclaiming isn’t it? By reclaiming art, and reclaiming monsters, we’re also reclaiming those feelings and the parts who hold them. No part gets left behind.

James: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And I suspect that many people have a similar history – at least with feelings and with art. The world, and the people around them, tell them that they mustn’t show their feelings, and that they ‘can’t draw’.

Fox: That’s why we love Lynda Barry, who we mention in the zines. She says that most kids just naturally tell stories with pictures, but then they get taught proper writing and proper drawing, and they lose all that. Her books and resources are all about getting it back, by playing with it, using wax crayons, drawing quickly, colouring in, that kind of thing. And lots of drawing from the imagination!

James: I notice that when we can allow you – Fox – to just draw from the feeling (with the odd bit of help from Google images to see what certain things look like) it just comes out looking right.

Fox: It’s amazing. Morgan is often sure there’s no way it’ll come out looking like we feel it, but it really does. It’s all about keeping it simple, not trying too hard, just getting the feeling down.

James: I think Lynda Barry is helping people get back to the child part of themselves who can draw that way, and tell stories too. The part like you that perhaps everyone has somewhere inside.

An early attempt to welcome monster feelings?

Fox: More questions please!

Inspirations

James: Well you’ve mentioned Lynda Barry. Can you say something about your other inspirations for this project?

Fox: I guess there are two kinds of inspirations: other people who’ve used monsters as a way of exploring feelings, and other people who have come up with practices for welcoming feelings. 

For the first one we’re super inspired by Pixar movies. They are something we watch a lot of because they are so gentle, and we generally need that in the evenings. Inside Out and Monsters Inc are the obvious ones, but lots of the Pixar shorts explore trauma and plurality too. Far From the Tree and Twenty Something are great examples.

We also recently watched the movie A Monster Calls, which is all about monsters and fairy tales as ways of dealing with huge tough feelings. Hannah Eaton’s graphic novel, Naming Monsters, is about that too.

We really love this Zen Pencils comic version of Rumi’s poem, The Guest House, by Gavin Aung Than. That poem captures the whole idea of welcoming feelings better than anything else, which is why we included it at the start of the zine.

James: What about the practices for welcoming feelings?

Fox: We wrote about focusing and Pema’s F.E.A.R. practices in our Staying With Feelings zine. Those are about feeling feelings in the body. Our therapist helped us towards the idea of visualising feelings. She suggested imagining the feeling you’re having as just one cell of the body, and picturing it outside of yourself, describing what it looks like: its colour, texture, that kind of thing. That helps it be more manageable – it’s not all of you, just one cell, and it’s outside of you so you can approach it curiously.

James: Externalising the feeling, so it doesn’t feel like all that you are and all that you’ll ever be, as traumatic feelings often feel.

Fox: Right. But cells aren’t much fun. I think that imagining feelings as monsters makes it more playful. And you can do with a bit of lightness and humour when you’re dealing with something that hard.

James: Agreed. And that makes it a bit more like the Tibetan demon feeding practice that we’ve written about before.

Fox: Except in that practice you don’t tend to draw the feelings. Lynda Barry adapts a Zen practice where you draw your demons in her comic One! Hundred! Demons!

James: It’s so cool that you’re now part of this group of comic and animation creators who’ve explored monsters in this kind of way.

Fox: I know, I love that. It’s what I’ve always wanted.

James: We found our long, slow way towards art, monsters, and feelings, didn’t we?

Fox: We sure did!

Monster feeling practice

James: I know that you’ve also made a companion zine called Welcoming Your Monster Feelings. Do you want to say something about that?

Fox: Yes. We wanted to find a way to share our practice with people, in case they might find making monsters about their feelings helpful too. We were going to finish the Welcome Monster Feelings zine with a few pages about how to do it. But our friend H said they thought we shouldn’t do that, because it should stand on its own as art!

James: What did you think about that?

Fox: I think they were right. Because we still struggle to see ourselves as someone who can legitimately draw pictures or tell stories, we often want to wrap those things up in a kind of self-help project, like we used to do with academic projects. Publishing Welcome Monster Feelings as a standalone book of our art felt really important. But we did still want to share the practice, so I made an extra little zine about that.

James: And do you describe your process in that zine?

Fox: Not exactly, because I know that not everybody will work the way that we do. The zine explores all kinds of different ways people might access their feelings and turn them into monsters, and the different reasons they might find that helpful.

James: Can you share a bit more about your process here then. That’s something people often want to know about artists.

Fox: Heh that still sounds funny – artist. What I do is I sit down, usually with Robin or Morgan. That means that we’re… what is it?

James: Co-conscious. That’s the word for when two parts of a plural system are foregrounded at the same time, like you and I are right now.

Fox: Cool. So the other part really tunes into their feeling, and kind of shows me and tells me what it’s like. Sometimes we feel it inside our body, and sometimes we have an image. Like that last feeling in the book from Morgan – we got a strong image of that classic Peanuts comic where Lucy pulls the ball away from Charlie Brown.

After they’ve shared the feeling, I find a way to turn it into a monster picture. And I draw, with a mechanical pencil, whatever comes out. I like to draw in this sketch book we got from WHSmiths, it has a hard cover so it looks like a proper book. And that means you can’t just rip out pages if you don’t like it. It feels important that we keep them all – however they come out. That’s part of the welcoming.

Once it feels like I’ve got the sketch right I go over the pencil lines with drawing pens. I like the ones that have several different sizes. Then I rub out the pencil lines, and we do the colouring in. That’s very soothing and often we do it together. I like these felt-tips which have a brush end and a fibre tip end. It feels good to use felt-tips because that’s more child-like than pastels or pencil crayons or paints I think. And I like the bright colours.

James: We might need to get you some more of those felt tips for your birthday. We’re close to using some of them up.

Fox: I’d like a bigger set because there’s only one grey and it doesn’t come out great on the scanner. There is a really big set you can get, just saying.

James: Heh, that is a whole lot of felt-tips. 

Trauma, shame and monster feeling practice

Fox: Can I ask you a question?

James: Unconventional, but fire ahead.

Fox: Well you’ve written a graphic guide about trauma and mental health, which goes pretty well with my zine, right?

James: I guess I was the main author of that one – on behalf of the whole system and what we’ve just been through. It’s like the grown up version of your zine in some ways – except not that grown up because it’s still a comic with lots of superhero references. Hopefully Jules will be illustrating that one this year and it’ll be out in 2023.

Fox: Grown up books take a lot longer it seems.

James: *grin* I do think they go well together though, you’re right. What was the question?

Fox: I wondered why you think monster feeling practice is so helpful, given all the stuff you’ve learnt about trauma.

James: Ah yes, I do have a few thoughts about that. One thing that we explore in the graphic guide is how trauma is often the result of violence combined with silence: painful things that happen to someone which aren’t heard or held by anyone around them. We realised that many of the things that help with mental health struggles – like meditation, therapy, or activism around social injustice – are about the opposite of violence and silence – they are about kindness and honesty. Make sense?

Fox: Kindness is the opposite of violence, and honesty is the opposite of silence.

James: Right. And drawing monster feelings is all about being more honest with ourselves about what our feelings actually are, and more kind around them – that gentle process of drawing them and colouring them in, and the whole idea of welcoming them rather than trying to eradicate them. 

Sharing those feelings with ourselves is also a great way to connect more with the different parts of us – to really hear what it’s like for them and to hold them in their tough places. 

Fox: The holding and hearing monster! Kind holding and hearing the truth.

James: Yes! The zine also helps us to connect with other people when they resonate with your drawings. That’s a way of healing the disconnection (with self, others, and the world) which lies at the heart of so much trauma.

Fox: But why is it so important for us to be able to feel the monster feelings? 

James: Ara and I explored this a bit last year in our Staying with the Big Feels blog post. One reason is that it’s hard for a person to be authentic – to be real about who and how they are – without all of their feelings. And it’s hard to have real intimacy – or good relationships – with other people too if you’re still hiding some of your feelings from yourself and/or from them. Being able to be yourself, and having good relationships, are both vital for mental and physical health.

Another thing is that the feelings that many people, including us, most often avoid or repress are the most vital for self-protection and for caring for others. Robin has held much of our fear, and Morgan much of our anger. We’ve realised recently how those feelings are so important for keeping ourselves safe-enough and for acting with integrity.

Fox: The integri-tree!

James: That’s right, you drew a few pictures relating to this. Robin’s fear of shame – when it isn’t unbearably intense – helps to guide us in what we take on, and what we don’t, recognising when other people are trying to pull us or push us into things, or when it’s coming from a dodgy motivation inside us. Morgan’s anger – when it isn’t twisted into confusion – helps us to state our needs and boundaries, as well as seeing other people more clearly. Your anger sunshine picture captured this beautifully.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: There’s lots more I could say about this, but the point is that without access to some of the supposedly ‘negative’ feelings, it’s very hard to empathise with others, to recognise danger, and to value ourselves equally with other people, rather than seeing ourselves as worse-than, or better-than.

Fox: For us it’s often worse-than. That’s why a lot of our pictures are about shame.

James: Mm, and it’s very common for shame to be at the heart of people’s tough feelings as Brené Brown has pointed out. We’ve been reading a lot about shame since we did a workshop on the topic last year, linked to the shame and medicine project. 

The book we’re reading right now says that it’s very hard to express shame verbally because it’s often non-conscious and not available to the language parts of the brain. So perhaps you’ve really hit on something with these drawings – giving us a way to communicate feelings that would be impossible to express in any other way.

Fox: Wow.

James: I know right? And it’s vital because so much of what people do that hurts them and others is an attempt to avoid painful feelings – particularly shame and the fear of shame. If we were able to get to a point where we were okay with all those feelings – where we could weather them, if not actively welcome them – then potentially we wouldn’t do those hurtful things. It’s a lifelong journey though, as Pema would say.

Fox: Life long, and many books of monster feelings!

Where next?

James: That’s a great segue to the final question I have for you. Where are you hoping to go next in your creative pursuits, now that you’ve got us here.

Fox: Well I’ve already started Welcome More Monster Feelings, so that we’ll keep going. Most of the monsters in the first book were Robin’s ones, partly because he was foregrounded for a lot of the time we were making it, and partly because Morgan initially didn’t want to do her feelings because she struggles so much not to be critical of them.

James: She really didn’t like the volcano drawing you made of her rage.

Fox: I knew that would happen! It’s the only one where the colours ran, and you can’t see the face very well. But then I did the one of her snake-eating-its-tail, and the sunshine anger, and she loved those, so I think she’s on board now. She has quite a few more monsters to share.

James: Anything else you want to do, or is it all monsters all of the time?

Fox: I would like to make more plural zines now that we all know each other better. I’ve started one about how people can learn to love their different parts, and there’s another one to do about how they can communicate better between them. 

But I also want to listen to H and do some more stuff that’s just about our own experiences – not trying to be a self-help thing. Maybe I could do more plural comics like the Chalk Board one. Also I think Morgan would love to write about our journey of embracing our inner critic, perhaps with fairy tales!

James: It would be great if she could feel free enough to create herself. She has such a powerful and tender voice when she can find it through all the horrors she’s experienced.

Fox: Totally.

James: Okay. Well thank-you very much for sharing some of your precious time with me today Fox, and for joining me at the keyboard instead of the sketchpad for once.

Fox: You are very welcome. I expect extra cuddles later.

James: You got it. And I hear there’s a new Ghostbusters movie…

Find out more

• For more on this topic check out our monsters and feelings zines, and our workbook with Alex Iantaffi, Hell Yeah Self Care.
• Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support our Patreon.
• Plural tag: This post was by Fox and James.

The post On monsters, emotions, and drawing: An interview with the artist behind the zine ‘Welcome Monster Feelings’ appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

James: Hey again Ara.

Ara: Hey James. So good to talk with you again so soon.

James: I thought about writing this as a regular post, but I realised I could really do with somebody to bounce off: to ask me questions to help me clarify my thoughts.

Ara: I’d love to do that. I’m aware that in our last post together you asked me a lot of questions. It feels good to balance that dynamic by doing it the other way around.

James: Mm like you are more of the expert around feelings and embodiment, but perhaps I have the expertise on this more intellectual piece: weaving the various theories together.

Ara: I like that.

James: I also feel like I need you as a kind of anchor. I feel so excited about the puzzle pieces that seem to be slotting together here. I want to zoom off in a hundred different directions at once.

Ara: How can I help to ground you?

James: Remind me to breathe, to slow down, I don’t have to do it all at once. You could ask me questions to lead me through one step at a time. Are you up for that?

Ara: Absolutely. Want to breathe before we start?

James: Sure *laughs* *breathes*

Overview

Ara: Okay. Can you start by giving us an overview of the terrain you want to cover in this piece? If the terms we use here are unfamiliar to people, we’ll define them in the next section.

James: Absolutely. It’s something I’ve been building to ever since I did that Bowlby Centre event last month which I wrote up here, about attachment theory. My sense is that perhaps everyone contains all of the different attachment styles – or at least the capacity for them – within themselves. Rather than aiming at some kind of static secure attachment, perhaps there’s more value in getting to know all our different attachment potentials very well. Maybe that even is the way that we get to ‘earned secure attachment’.

Ara: A kind of paradox? We’ve tried to get to ‘secure attachment’ by getting away from ‘insecure’ attachment styles, but perhaps the way to get there is through them, not away from them?

James: Precisely. And there’s this sense that it also maps onto emotions and the ‘window of tolerance’. The only way to expand the window of tolerance and get to a place where you can be with all emotional states is through experiencing (tough) emotions, not by trying to avoid them or get away from them.

Ara: So that’s attachment and emotion, what about plural parts work?

James: We’ve reached these conclusions by getting to know all of the parts of us deeply. I’m suggesting that we can do this work by befriending the three parts of us who map on to the three ‘insecure’ attachment styles, and the emotions that they hold. That’s the way to both earned secure attachment and an expanded window of tolerance.

Ara: Wonderful. So you can explain to us how we now understand our parts having operated together in the ‘old’ system, that we had our whole life. And you can describe how we’re working with them now to reconfigure the system towards more secure attachments in our inner and outer relationships, and towards an expanded window of tolerance. How am I doing?

James: This is really helpful, thankyou Ara. 

Ara: Another breath before we continue?

James: Mm. *breathes*

The faux window of tolerance, faux secure attachment, and faux parts

Ara: So one thing that we read which helped you click together on all of this was the concept of the faux window of tolerance in Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell’s book ‘Nurturing Resilience’. Do you want to explain that, and how it relates to attachment?

James: That’s a great place to start, yes. So Kathy and Stephen explain that many, if not most, people develop a ‘faux window of tolerance’ when they’re growing up, in order to handle intense emotions. The window of tolerance is Daniel Siegal’s term for the space in which we can be present with – and regulate – our emotions, rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Growing up if our caregivers and others can meet us in various emotional states and help us to know that they are okay, understandable, and manageable, then we will develop that window of tolerance. We’ll learn in those early relationships that those feelings are okay, and we’ll learn from experience with others what we can do to soothe ourselves when feelings are really intense. We’ll end up with a nice wide space in which we can welcome a variety of different feelings at different intensities.

Ara: So that’s how it relates to secure attachment? The window of tolerance is developed within secure relationships?

James: Right, a secure attachment refers to that kind of nurturing relationship where we have a ‘secure base’ or ‘safe haven’ to return to when emotions are unfamiliar or overwhelming. As a child, if we learn that we can return there and be welcomed, understood, soothed, have our needs met, then we’ll be more and more able to extend out from that base to explore our world with openness, curiosity, and creativity. We‘ll have more of a sense that we can tolerate any tough experiences and regulate our own emotions, as well as a strong sense of trust in that base we can return to if it gets too hard.

Later in life that would translate into building strong, secure relationships with other people in our lives – friends, partners, mentors, communities, etc. – so that we still have a place to return where people can help us coregulate around the tough feelings, where we can express our needs and have them met, and so on.

Ara: So what’s the ‘faux window of tolerance’.

James: Most of us carry some degree of developmental trauma: a sense of key relationships not being very secure and of not all emotions – or all intensities of emotion – being tolerated and regulated by those around us. Kathy and Stephen suggest that what therapists call ‘defences’ are what we develop in order to have a ‘faux window of tolerance’: the impression that we are tolerating our emotional states, but really we’re defending against them.

Ara: That resonated for us.

James: So much. This last year or two we’ve often wondered how we’ve done so seemingly okay in life despite clearly carrying so much developmental trauma, such that we’ve been plunged into intense trauma periods and overwhelming emotion several times over the years. The idea of a ‘faux window of tolerance’ makes so much sense. It might have looked like we were handling difficult experiences and the emotions they brought up pretty well, but really it was more that we were adept at various defences, or survival strategies, to avoid or sidestep them.

Ara: I think that fits well with what we discussed last time about emotions James. The sense that we thought we were pretty good at ‘staying with feelings’ but have lately realised that there were several vital emotions that we were barely feeling at all.

James: Exactly. So what we were generally doing was repressing feelings, or reacting out of survival strategies in ways which made the difficult experience and/or feelings go away. Part of why the last year or two have been so intense is that we’ve finally been feeling many of the feelings – and the experiences they resulted from – which we hadn’t allowed ourselves to feel along the way.

Ara: And you think it may be useful to conceptualise this as a ‘faux secure attachment’ as well as a ‘faux window of tolerance’?

James: I do. We – and I suspect many, many people – were able to do a pretty good impression of functioning in the world, and relating with ourselves and others, for much of the time because we’d developed pretty remarkable defences and survival strategies. However, the ‘faux-ness’ became apparent any time something retraumatising happened – beyond the capacity of the defences and survival strategies to cope with – which put us into periods of intense PTSD where the feelings were terrifying and overwhelming and we couldn’t function. 

The ‘faux-ness’ was also revealed in most of our close relationships because eventually it became apparent that we – and the other person – weren’t really securely attached – in ourselves or with each other – and the relationship ended. Maybe they became more insecure and needy over time and we had to get away, or vice versa, or the level of conflict became unbearable to us. Often it was revealed how much we’d been shaping ourselves to fit that person, and how much we’d lost ourselves in the process, and we finally began to struggle with that.

Ara: I notice that I feel some resistance to the word ‘faux’ here.

James: Me too. It does feel rather harsh and judgemental, and there’s also a sense in it of having been a ‘false self’ covering up a ‘real self’ which is something that I would question.

Ara: Being seven selves all of whom are a work in progress definitely raises questions around any sense of a real ‘authentic’ self!

James: It does indeed.

Faux selves?

Ara: Do you want to say how all this relates to plurality?

James: Well, if we were to use those terms, we would say that we developed a ‘faux part’ – Max – who was to the fore for most of our life. She was the one who formed that ‘faux window of tolerance’ and who formed those ‘faux secure attachments’. She would likely have looked pretty happy and successful from the outside, except for the few times – when traumatic things happened and/or relationships ended – when it became very hard for her to maintain that facade.

Ara: We find it so interesting that we chose the name ‘Max’ for her, given that it sounds a lot like ‘mask’, which is kind of what she was.

James: And her survival strategies were to dissociate a lot, not that she realised that at the time. Throwing herself into work, and into helping others, both enabled her to keep our own intense feelings, and traumatised parts, very disowned and buried. Busy-ness and distraction was her main ‘faux window of tolerance’. Focusing on becoming something for others – rather than bringing herself openly and vulnerably to relationships – was her main ‘faux secure attachment’.

Ara: And this is why we don’t love ‘faux’ for her, although it is accurate in a way, because these survivor parts – in all of us – are something we should be deeply grateful for, and celebrate, not dismiss as ‘false’ or flawed.

James: Agreed. We simply wouldn’t be here now were it not for Max. She protected the other parts of us through some truly horrific early – and later – experiences. And she kept searching for answers to all of the tough stuff that we encountered with our mental health, and in our relationships, and that she saw others around us struggling with too. Ironically if she hadn’t had the survival strategies of workaholism, and trying to help others, we would not now have this huge foundation of knowledge and writing to build upon. 

Ara: We can feel deep gratitude to Max, and huge grief for what she had to go through. One image of her is of the ‘parentified child’: an inner child or teenager who has to act like an inner parent in order to survive and look after the other parts of the inner system who are even more vulnerable. It’s rather like the way a big sibling might have to look after the other kids in a family where parents are struggling, or unable to handle tough experiences and emotions.

James: How it feels at the moment is that we have finally freed Max of that burden and she is off walking in the hills alone somewhere.

Ara: Mm I always think of her when I read the Mary Oliver poem, The Journey. By finding/developing our own inner parents – you and me James – and by working with our three traumatised child parts directly, we have liberated Max.

James: Which brings us on to those parts and how they function in terms of attachment.

Insecurely attached parts under the faux secure attachment

Ara: Go for it James.

James: Right, so this is the idea that all of us have all of the attachment styles present within us. Parts work gives us a nice easy way of working with this. Our experience is that we literally have members of our plural system who map on to each of the forms of insecure attachment.

Ara: I sense a table coming on!

James: How did you guess?

Ara: A lot to unpack there James. How about getting a drink before we start?

James: Hot chocolate?

Ara: You read my mind.

James: I was going to say that’s not so hard when it’s the same mind, but given how poorly parts of us knew each other in the past perhaps I can’t say that.

Ara: We’re getting to know each other better and better now thankfully. Also I feel like we both do and don’t share the same bodymind, given how differently each of us think, feel, and inhabit our body, but perhaps that’s one for another blog post!

…

James: Okay then. So to explain the table. We’ve introduced these four ‘traumatised parts’ before in various places, although our understanding of them – and how they fit together – has definitely clarified over the past year. Mapping onto attachment theory we’d now say that Tony was our anxious-preoccupied part: needy, clingy and desperate for connection. Morgan – who we used to call Beastie – is dismissive avoidant: struggling to trust others and pushing them away. And Jonathan is fearful avoidant: terrified of that other people will hurt or shame him.

Ara: And the ‘okay’ bit of the table?

James: Transactional analysis is another therapeutic approach which seems to map fairly well onto attachment theory. The anxious-preoccupied part – Tony – believes that other people are okay, but he’s not, so he craves others’ love, approval, and attention, and he fears their disapproval, dismissal, and disgust. The dismissive avoidant part believes that she is okay but other people are not, so she tends to blame others and push them away. And the fearful avoidant part believes that he isn’t okay and neither are other people, hence Jonathan’s fear/shame trauma response: other people are dangerous and he is wrong and unacceptable.

Ara: But most of our life these three parts have been disowned?

James: Precisely, which does not mean they haven’t had an impact. Now we understand it that Max was constantly responding to others’ demands inside and out. On the inside she was constantly getting, often rather desperate, messages from Tony, Morgan and Jonathan, about what they needed. She tried her best to balance and meet those needs. On the outside she was very tuned into what other people wanted of her and tried to balance and meet those demands. No wonder she’s off in the hills these days taking a well-earned break!

Ara: So dismantling Max’s defences and setting her free, as we did last year, left us with a much clearer sense of the other three traumatised parts. They have been gradually revealing themselves more and more as they’ve come to trust us. They’re gradually feeling more securely attached to us, and to other people, and they’re gradually sensing that their feelings have a more expanded window of tolerance to be held in.

James: Nicely put. What just clicked with me this morning is that not only did Max have her set of defences – or survival strategies – that covered over the others, but each of the ‘insecure’ parts also have a set of defences that we need to get underneath in order for them to show themselves fully and to feel all their feelings.

Ara: This is so exciting, and it makes so much sense. Do you want to take me through it?

James: Please. The thing that struck me was about Tony initially. He didn’t seem to make sense. On the one hand we experience him as this cocky, hot, humorous part of us: very extrovert and craving connection with others. On the other hand we know that he holds the Deep Yearning of the Soul (). When he does feel his feelings they are often feelings of unquenchable thirst, desperate need, and longing. So how can this seemingly confident part also be the part who feels that he isn’t okay and will be abandoned by others?

But with this sense of defences it all makes sense. If Tony is driven by not wanting to feel the traumatic level of neediness and loneliness that he holds then it makes all kinds of sense that he would fling himself into connections by coming over as charming, sexy, funny and so on.

Ara: Mm yes. As he and I recently discussed, tragically that often fetches him up with just the kind of rejection and loss of belonging that he deeply fears. But it does make all kinds of sense as a defence, just like Max dissociating from recognising just how trapped she’s been in work and relationships. What about Morgan?

James: Again initially confusing. The part of us who holds anger, even hatred, towards others has manifested our whole life as the inner critic, turning that anger and hatred inwards. But if you look at it from the defence perspective that, like Tony, Morgan was disowned all our life, then it makes sense.

Ara: So growing up we learnt that we must never be needy and desperate as Tony can be, or rageful and resentful at others, as Morgan can be. So both of them defended by becoming the opposite – when they were allowed out at all. 

James: Tony faked confidence and made light of his pain, Morgan turned anger in against us rather than ever allowing herself to feel it towards others.

Ara: And our chalkboard boy Jonathan did something similar.

James: I think so. Deep down he holds that incredibly vulnerable fear and shame, and it wasn’t acceptable to admit to those things. So he became the people pleaser who pretended to be fine – in order to keep others happy – and who hypervigilantly figured out what others wanted from him and tried to give it to them.

Ara: Expanding out from our particular experience, do you think there’s something for other people in all this?

James: I suspect so. It probably manifests very differently for different people, but it would be worth everyone exploring what their ‘faux secure’ part looks like, and whether they also have all three ‘insecure’ parts in them somewhere. How do those three influence the whole system? How do they impact how they relate with other people? How repressed or available are they?  What are their defensive behaviours and what are those covering up?

Ara: You’ve done a great job at overviewing the theory, and how it applies to us, here James. I’m wondering if we might dig into practice a little more now?

James: I’d love to. What did you have in mind?

Ara: I’d like to reflect more on how we’re working with this internally and externally. How are we building that ‘earned secure attachment’ with each of the ‘insecure’ parts, and how are we bringing awareness of the three different ‘insecure’ styles into our current relationships? 

We’ve had this radical sense lately that strong relationships are not ones in which we’re just securely attached, but rather the ones in which we can honestly and kindly recognise all the different attachments in play.

James: Yes! 

Ara: A little stretch first?

James: Also yes.

…

Working with insecure parts internally

Ara: We covered some of this territory in our last post James, about how we’re working to help each part to expand their window of tolerance and feel their feelings safely enough, which is also how we’re building our earned secure attachment with each of them.

James: You’re doing the big space ‘drop the storyline and feel the feeling’ work with them, and I’m trying to hold them close, love them and hear them when they’re struggling. We’re also checking in with the ‘insecure three’ at least twice a day to see where they’re at with everything. Because they’re so used to hiding themselves and their feeling, it’s important to keep encouraging them to deliberately tune in and share where they’re at.

Ara: So what else do we need to say here?

James: I guess the new piece is recognising those defences that each of those three holds. Perhaps it feels obvious to go to Tony when we feel yearning, Morgan when we feel anger, and Jonathan when we feel fear, to help them really feel it and be held and heard in it. But there’s now this extra piece of recognising that we need to go to them at least as much if Tony is pinning that yearning onto somebody else or falling into over-excited connection or fantasy, if Morgan is going into inner critic anger-inward type noise, or if Jonathan is chalkboarding.

Ara: Those experiences often feel more dissociated – now that we understand what that means. It often doesn’t feel so apparent that there is a feeling present. There may not be clarity around which part of us is doing their thing, or what has triggered them. There’s just a general sense of unease, confusion, or of being a bit scattered or vague.

James: That’s right. I think we got it first with Jonathan because we clearly identified him with hypervigilance and chalkboarding. Last year whenever we found our brain going over and over things in that familiar way, I would go to Jonathan and encourage him to go closer to the ‘traumado’ of fear/shame feelings instead of desperately trying to solve impossible equations. It had to be very slow and gradual, but eventually we could sit together in the eye of the storm and let it swirl around us, finding a way to settle him there instead of trying to figure everything out which usually made it worse and worse.

Ara: And lately we’ve taken any – even fleeting – ‘noisy’ anger in/out thoughts as an opportunity to go to Morgan and encourage her to sit with her feelings of anger. Tony can be very dissociated, but again we’ve been noticing the kind of thing that’s likely to make him feel rejected or lonely when it happens, and encouraging him to drop down into the yearning feeling, with one of us holding him through it.

James: From a trauma-informed perspective it has to be gradual doesn’t it? Feeling the feelings in the times when it feels possible to do so, gradually expanding the window of tolerance so more and more of it is possible to feel. Slowly these parts can drop the defences more and more, creating a ‘secure base’ of more gentle time with us every day to return to. And very gradually they can share those feelings with trusted others too.

Ara: More on that in a moment. Anything else to say on the inner work?

James: One thing is how each part’s go-to fantasies helped us to understand their resistance, as well as the feelings they covered up. There’s a lot more to write about how we us our erotic imagination for such exploration. We sketched out some of it in this zine with Justin. 

Lately we noticed that Jonathan, Tony, and Morgan kept going towards a fantasy where they were welcomed into a home with me. But the way that fantasy played out was very different for each of them. With Jonathan it was about being in a terrifying situation, rescued by me, and taken somewhere safe where he had a lot of time to recover before having to do anything else. With Tony it was about coming to live with me but being convinced that he would mess up and be sent away. He kept acting out until he could admit those feelings and believe my reassurance. With Morgan she came to me very reluctantly. She kept wanting to fight me and walk away, struggling to trust me to really be up for being with her rage.

Ara: So fascinating how those fantasies – and many of the dreams we’ve had too – echo the processes we’re going through in our outer life. Anything else?

James: I guess that the process feels reciprocal. The more the ‘insecure’ parts learn to trust us, the more of the previously disowned ‘unacceptable’ feelings they can bring. And the more they bring those feelings, the more trust is built. Welcoming them in those feelings seems to help all of them to become more real, more fully fleshed out. That is partly why Morgan wanted a ‘real name’ rather than being called ‘Beastie’ which felt like a caricature. 

But on the way towards that more ‘secure’ attachment with us they often balk at it. They try to resist those feelings, like they can’t really believe it’s really okay to say that they hate somebody – or us (Morgan), or to beg not to be left (Tony).

Ara: Mm which is perhaps why they have to practise in fantasy before they’re able to do that in reality. We’ve described it as encouraging them to bring the whole palette of feelings, not just the not palatable elements of themselves.

James: We like a bit of word play don’t we? 

We also find it useful to notice which old experiences keep returning to our mind, and which current ones. With old experiences we can ask where each part of us is at with those. Often it seems that one of them needs to return to that memory and to complete it somehow – by really feeling it, or by saying how they wish they’d been able to respond, for example, if they’d been more available back then. You and I can hold and hear them through that process, instead of our old pattern of despairing that we kept churning round and round old memories. 

With current experiences it’s similarly important for all of them – or the one who is particularly struggling – to be heard and heeded. For example recently we deeply listened to Morgan’s angry response to how someone treated us and found a response that sat well with her. After that she felt a lot more welcome and ‘at home’ in us.

Ara: It’s not about directly reacting to any ‘insecure’ impulse they might have, as Max might once have done. Rather it’s about engaging in conversation, taking them very seriously, and thinking together how we might respond – giving ourselves a lot of time around it.

James: Right, so instead of Tony leaping into a connection with someone the minute he feels drawn to them, we can notice that feeling and consider how we might move cautiously towards that connection, or whether it’s really speaking to a general desire for more contact, or to be looked after internally. Instead of Morgan deciding never to engage with somebody again we can investigate what she’s responding to negatively in them, and what might be a safe-enough, boundaried way of relating with that person, given what they bring up in her.

Ara: I’m thinking that all these ways of being with them are about demonstrating how loved and respected they are.

James: Which is very easy to do. It’s when parts or feelings are hidden that they feel murky or threatening or hard to love. Brought to the surface and into the light they become far easier to love and understand.

Ara: Which brings us onto the final part because I suspect the same is true in relationships with others. When parts of us – and their feelings – are hidden and murky, others may well respond to us with aversion, or by trying to grasp onto the more appealing defensive versions of us. When it’s all available – and clear – to ourselves and others, we stand a better chance of having mutually nourishing, open, relationships.

James: Right. But so hard for the parts of us who have survived for years by employing those defences to believe that.

Bringing all our parts into relationships

Ara: So let’s explore this. How is it useful to bring the ‘insecure’ parts into relationship with others? I can imagine people thinking that doesn’t make much sense. Surely the last thing we want to do is to relate with others in an insecure way?

James: Mm well part of it is that Pete Walker bit we find so useful: reparenting ourselves and reparenting by committee. We can’t do all this work alone because humans are relational, interconnected and interdependent. There’s only so far we can get as an individual (albeit an individual who is also seven people!)

Ara: There’s only so far our inner relationships can take us.

James: Right. I’m thinking that therapy is like an in-between between the inner work and the work of relating to the people in our life. We can gradually bring our ‘insecure’ parts into the therapeutic relationship in order to notice how they relate with another person, and to experience a different response to the damaging ones they’ve received in the past.

Ara: It often feels like that doesn’t it? That me, you or Fox is taking Morgan, Jonathan or Tony to therapy to give them an hour of practicing doing this with another person.

James: Right, they practise with us at home, and with our therapist in that room. Doing similar things. Like the therapist will point out their defences and encourage them to drop into their body, communicate how they’re feeling, etc. They can practise revealing the things that they assume other people will reject in them – because that’s what’s happened in the past – and experience somebody just being okay with them.

Ara: Maybe a couple of examples?

James: Well like whenever Morgan allows herself to talk about what she’d really like to say to somebody who has treated us badly, our therapist clearly enjoys her energy and her capacity to see through people’s bullshit and protect us. And Tony is gradually feeling safe enough that if he shows up in therapy with the energy that he’s scared will be ‘too much’ for people, she’ll help him to stay grounded. She’ll be up for seeing the vulnerability he’s covering over, while encouraging him to go slowly instead of revealing ‘too far too fast’ as he has in the past.

Ara: And you’re thinking that this kind of therapy is a bridge to bringing those parts into more open relation with others?

James: I think that’s where discernment comes in perhaps. Who is it safe enough to openly engage with from those parts? Who might we be able to speak about these parts with, without actually bringing them out? What situations might we want to be cautious around, perhaps only bringing you or me to Ara, at least while this is all so new?

Ara: I’m thinking that maps nicely onto what Tony and I wrote about Dunbar’s number too. Discerning where a relationship is at, in our life, and what that means in terms of how open and vulnerable we’re able to be in it.

James: Heh our computer just told us it was ‘establishing secure connection’. I thought, ‘you and me both mate’!

Ara: *laughs*

James: What were we saying? Oh yeah. So we’re finding it hugely useful to recognise that Morgan, Tony, and Jonathan are already engaged in all our relationships – of course. And now we continually check in where they’re at with them. There’s a sense that, instead of denying that we feel any anger, yearning, or fear towards the people in our life, perhaps it’s more useful to assume that we will feel all of those things – to some extent – in all our relationships, and to name that – to ourselves, and even with that person.

Ara: Absolutely. There’s this paradoxical sense that the more we can allow all of that, the better we’ll be able  to love that person.

James: The more we know how we hate them, fear them, and want something from them, the better the relationship will be! It is surprising indeed, but it’s true. We’ve navigated recent potentially tricky moments in relationships much better, I think, being able to name to ourselves what those attachments – or potential attachments – are with that person.

Ara: Again an example?

James: Well with one friend we noticed how Tony wanted to fling himself into closer relationship with them, while Morgan had flickers of anger that perhaps they weren’t being mindful enough of how vulnerable we are. With another we noticed Tony wishing for more time with them, and Morgan wanting to dismiss them for not making more time for us. 

Those two things happened with friends who we talk about this stuff with all the time so we could name it, and they could reciprocate naming the multiple different parts of them in play. It makes it much easier to be able to say ‘this part of me feels…’ because there’s no blame in it. Not ‘you’re treating us badly’ but ‘I notice that part of me longs for more time with you and another part of me wants to distance from you because we’re not getting it. Can we talk about how we might do time together in future so those parts can have a bit more clarity about where we’re at?’ 

Ara: Mm that’s a good example because it turned out that it wasn’t that we really wanted lots more from them, or to reject them, we just wanted to understand where they were at more clearly, and what we could expect from them.

James: Discernment is important in knowing who will be up for those kinds of conversations and who won’t. Sometimes it’s more of an implicit sense – once we’ve named it all to ourselves – that we need to pull back a bit from this person, or to have a different kind of conversation, perhaps just from one of us Ara.

Ara: Yes, in the deepest relationships we might encourage Tony, Jonathan or Morgan to have the conversation directly, in order to experience that part of us being met well. In less close ones we could report on where our parts are at. In even less close relationships – like a professional exchange – we would talk from one of us as if we were a unified ‘I’, once we’d come up with our boundary, or request, or whatever it was. It feels important to have at least some relationships where all parts of us are welcome, just as we welcome them within ourselves.

James: I think we’re nearly there with this piece Ara.

Ara: One more breath to feel whether there’s anything more to add?

James: *breathes* Okay yes I want to say that it’s important to give these processes a lot of time. That’s why slow, spacious relationships are so essential for us at the moment. Often we need time to notice that an exchange with somebody has brought some of those ‘insecure’ feelings up in us, to find the part – or multiple parts – in us who are triggered, to fully drop into what they are feeling, and then to consider together what kind of response, if any, is necessary. We tend to keep ongoing notes on our phone about each of the current situations in play, and keep returning to them over days, or even weeks, until we have a clear sense of the appropriate response.

Ara: Mm right, and not jumping too quickly to that last stage is so important. As we’ve said, it might be that the feeling just needs to be held and heard inwardly, or that some kind of communication or clarification is important, or that we need the relationship to shift in some way. We often can’t tell which it is till we’ve had time to go through the whole process. And the more we do this – giving it time, and asking that other people give us time – the more those parts of us relax into the process instead of freaking out and trying to solve it immediately.

James: Criticism and conflict are a particular challenge of course. Morgan, Jonathan, and Tony would reactively go into a blame, shame, or tame response – respectively.

Ara: I like that. Blame the other, collapse in shame, or tame the situation by glossing over it or making it okay for the other person without attending to our needs. But taking time, as a team, helps us find more of an ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ response, where we value ourselves and the others involved equally.

James: This whole thing also helps us to see much more clearly when we’re on the receiving end of other peoples’ reactivity: when they are foregrounding their equivalent of Morgan, Tony, or Jonathan – or their Max cover up. We’re not there yet of course, but there’s a strong sense of building compassion for others – even when they do react against us – because we’re so familiar with those parts of ourselves, and we know the incredibly tough feelings – and the painful experiences – that they come from. On the way to that compassion, though, we need to fully feel our attractions and aversions to those things in other people.

Ara: The sense I’m left with is that ‘earned secure attachment’ requires us to hold – and even share – all of our ‘insecure attachments’. Without that it would just be ‘faux secure attachment’ again.

James: Which meshes nicely with Bonnie Badenoch’s ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher’s ‘no part gets left behind’ and Richard Schwartz’s ‘no bad parts’. The answer is never to try to eradicate any part, or the less palatable elements of any part. The answer is to welcome them all fully, reach an inner secure attachment with them, and bring them all to all of our experiences in a safe-enough, secure-enough way.

Ara: Nicely put James.

James: Thank-you. And thank-you for doing this Ara. I’ve loved it, and your reminders to pause have definitely helped me both to enjoy the process throughout, and to not stray into the unwieldy lengths of some of our blog posts.

Ara: Mm there’s definitely more to be said about applying this same approach to our relationship with work James, but not for now. Let’s keep it a succinct little piece (for us!) at under 7000 words. Time for a walk *smiles*

More on this:

For more exploration of these themes check out our recent pieces on attachment, slow relating, and big feels and the other work on trauma and plurality on this website.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Attachment, emotion and plural parts work appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

J: Okay are we going to do this?

B: Absolutely. Just you and me talking plurality James.

J: In public.

B: In public but they’ve seen it all before, remember the zine. That was Tony and Max right?

J: Somehow this feels more exposing.

B: We’ve not let you out before have we? You’ll be fine when we get into the swing of it, talking about all these ideas we’ve been having. You know you love that.

J: Oh alright then, twist my arm. So what’s the plan Beastie?

B: We ask each other the questions we’ve heard – and had ourselves – about plural experience, and take turns to answer them. Your turn first. What is plurality?

Plurality

J: This is the whole idea that we can usefully conceptualise individuals as plural – or as systems – rather than as single units. We wrote a zine about it a couple of years back which has been one of the most popular ones we’ve created because it resonates with a lot of people: that sense that you’re often quite radically different sides of yourself at different times. 

An example would be the juxtaposition between the surefooted confident person you can be when you’re doing whatever you feel most competent at, versus the insecure, fragile side of you who you can become when you fuck up, or feel overwhelmed. People often find it particularly easy to identify an inner child part, or an inner critic, as those are quite common sides most of us have. 

When we’re in those selves our whole emotional tone, embodiment, and way of relating can be very different to how it is at other times. So, for example, we have one side of us – me – who generally feels steady, broad-shouldered, tall, and competent around others. Another side – Jonathan – generally feels uncertain, nervous, small, and shy around others. Embodying those selves my voice would be deep and sure, his would be higher pitched and sometimes stammers a bit.

Your turn Beastie, a common question: So that’s like multiple personality disorder (MPD), right?

Multiple personalities

B: Right and wrong. I do love a both/and. What used to be called MPD by the psychiatric profession is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and refers to the experience of having two or more distinct identities or personality states, each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the world and the self. However, a diagnosis of DID also requires that a person dissociates – or forgets – between the different states, and that the experience impacts them negatively. So some people who experience plurality could be diagnosed with DID – if they also experience dissociation and find it a negative experience. But not everyone gets those aspects. We rarely dissociate in that sense, and generally find plurality a pretty positive experience, if vulnerable at times.

Many systems are now criticising the DID diagnosis and reclaiming plurality as a positive thing. Like most of the categories of ‘psychiatric disorders’ there’s an issue that of course people will experience something negatively if it’s stigmatised to the extent that it’s listed in the books of ‘psychiatric disorders’. Plurality is also represented in hugely stigmatising ways in popular culture: movies and TV shows almost exclusively depict it as a form of madness and as dangerous. Pretty much any plural person shown in the mainstream media has a self who is a serial killer. Think about movies like Identity and Split.

Oh actually that’s a good next question, do you have a self who is a serial killer?

Mad or Bad?

J: Seriously that’s what you’re going to ask me? No Beastie we don’t have a serial killer self as you well know. Although I am loosely based on James Bond, who you could argue was a serial killer. But no, no parts of us want to murder people, licence to kill or not. 

In fact recognising and working on plurality is a good way of facing and embracing those sides of us who are capable of harming others – which we all have given the oppressive and non-consensual culture that we live in. In our culture people often foreground the nice, acceptable parts of themselves and disown or deny their capacity to be cruel, non-consensual, or abusive. Recognising our plurality can enable us to be with the whole of ourselves – including those parts – which can mean we’re more able to be accountable when we do hurt others and to work with those capacities for darkness in ourselves instead of denying them. Which is pretty much where you came from right Beastie? You were our inner critic.

B: Right and I am the part of us who is most capable of expressing anger, clearly seeing when other people are pulling some bullshit, and speaking from that clarity in ways that can be hurtful.

J: So one benefit of plurality is that we can bring you together with our softer, more compassionate, sides. We can then draw on your clarity and boundaried-ness, but hopefully in ways that are more possible for other people to hear, and which acknowledge that we all fall into the same kinds of problematic behaviours. 

But that was a bit of a tangent. Let’s get back to the experience of plurality. We’re talking about it like everyone has it, but isn’t DID very rare?

Common or rare?

B: Estimates are about 1-3% of people would be diagnosable with DID. I think the analogy with bisexuality or non-binary gender is helpful here. When you study how many people identify with bisexuality or being non-binary, you get that kind of statistic – somewhere between 1% and 5% of people depending on the sample. However, if you ask the question in a way which gets at experience you end up with much more like a third of people, even as high as a half. That proportion of people have experienced attraction to more than one gender at some point, or experience themselves as to some extent the ‘other’ gender, ‘both’ genders, or ‘neither’ gender.

Our sense is that the same is true for plurality. Probably 1-3% of people have the experience of being multiple separate selves so vividly that they would identify – or be identified – as plural, or DID. But probably most people have some experience of plurality some of the time, and maybe a third to a half of people could experience themselves quite significantly as plural – perhaps if wider culture was more understanding of it as a thing.

Some nice made-up statistics about plurality there (the ones on bisexuality and non-binary are based on research findings). But you take the point. Maybe you can say some more on this theme old man. So you’re saying that we are seven selves sharing a body. That still sounds pretty fucking weird right?

Weird or normal?

J: I’m sensing a theme here where I hand you the easy questions and you toss me back the really hard ones.

B: Well I am the inner critic: the deep dark monster lurking inside all of us, you didn’t expect me to be gentle did you?

J: I happen to know that you can be extremely gentle Beastie, now that we have tamed you… I mean embraced you and apologised profusely for keeping you cast out in the depths for all these years.

B: Quite. Come on, weirdness.

J: Okay. Well as we’ve already said actually most people can relate to the idea of plurality on some level. Again non-binary gender is a good analogy. If you ask people if they are non-binary a lot of people are pretty weirded out. The whole concept of a gender beyond male and female is a head-fuck in such a binary gendered world. But if you get people to list what our culture would see as being a ‘real man’ or a ‘real woman’ in two columns, most people readily agree that they don’t fit perfectly within either column, and in fact recognise that the binary columns themselves are pretty problematic.

The same is true for plurality, if you hit someone with ‘are you multiple different people sharing a body?’ most people would probably say ‘no’. But if you ask a person to be an entirely consistent, coherent self through all the moments of their day and in all the interactions they have, they’d probably quickly realise how constraining that would be, and how they do actually flow between quite different experiences of selfhood.

Indeed you could argue – as some sociologists have – that the concept of a singular self is an invention of neoliberal capitalism. We’re all pressured to tell stories of our self as if we were consistent and coherent when actually we’re all complex and contradictory. You could even go so far as to say that experiencing yourself as utterly singular is the ‘crazy’ thing, and that trying to present yourself in that way does quite a violence to yourself. Certainly many indigenous cultures have understandings of selfhood that encompass plurality and would see the idea of a singular self as weird or unlikely.

What do you think Beastie? Is it more ‘sane’ to be plural or singular?

Sanity and plurality

B: As you know I abhor a binary James. Clearly some people experience themselves as more singular and some as more plural. Probably a spectrum would be a better way to conceptualise it than an either/or. Even a series of spectrums – spectra – whatever the word is. In the same way that many theorists are now seeing sexuality and gender as multiple spectrums. For plural self-ness it could be something like these five spectrums, probably more:

• How coherent/unified to diverse/plural we experience ourselves as being
• How muted to vivid our experience of our different selves, alters, or subpersonalities is
• How separate to overlapping these different parts are
• How much we do, or don’t, experience dissociation or forgetting between the times when different parts of us are to the fore, or fronting
• To what extent our plurality is rooted in traumatic experience, and/or the extent of the trauma that we’ve experienced

Going back to crazy or sane, it’s fascinating that, on the one hand, we have psychiatric professions diagnosing and treating DID as a disorder, but on the other hand we have a bunch of therapists like John Rowan, Mick Cooper, Hal and Sidra Stone, and others arguing that embracing and experiencing our plurality is the way towards better mental health, not away from it. Many humanistic and psychodynamic psychotherapies like Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Internal Family Systems, and Psychosynthesis explicitly see the self as plural and aim to get the different parts communicating with one another. We explore lots of different ways of doing that in the plural selves zine.

But again, as with sexuality, we would not want to flip from a world which defines plurality as crazy and singularity as sane to the opposite. Just as we wouldn’t want to insist that everyone is bi really and stigmatise monosexual people. Rather it’s about recognising the diverse range of ways of experiencing ourselves that exist, and making it easier for everyone to find and articulate their own lived experience: shifting wider culture to make it more possible for them to do so.

Back to you James. The writing on DID suggests that plurality is rooted in childhood trauma. Is that a useful way to look at it?

Trauma

J: Oh boy, you’re going to keep them coming aren’t you? Okay, yes it does seem that many of us experience ourselves as fragmented distinct selves because we learnt to separate off different parts of ourselves in order to survive what happened to us when we were young. For example, our own particular experience was of being quite a carefree, playful, sensitive creature in early childhood, and then being taught that that wasn’t okay, so we kind of shut that part away and developed other sides of us who were able to survive the world we found ourself in. In our case that was developing you – the inner critic – out there somewhere as this external voice telling us that we weren’t okay and must be better. We also developed a pleaser part of us – Jonathan – who could hyper-vigilantly pick up very well on what was expected of us and try to do it. Eventually we also developed Max – our warrior – who was stronger and adept at becoming what other people wanted us to be in order to survive, and gain love and approval.

But the risk of completely buying only a trauma narrative of plurality is that it continues the stigmatising view that there’s something wrong with being plural that needs to be fixed or healed: that working towards integration as a coherent, singular self is the way to go. In fact you could argue that an insistence on being one unified individual is a kind of intergenerational trauma: we don’t allow kids to play and embrace all the different potentials that they have because we give them such clear messages about what it is and isn’t okay to be, right Beastie? Want to say how that relates to gender?

Gender

B: By all means. A great example of the kind of intergenerational trauma you’re speaking about is gendered cultural messages. We give kids that sense that this is what it means to be a boy or a girl, and that involves disowning any aspects of themselves that don’t fit those ideals. Some gender theorists have argued that this leaves most people with a sense of melancholy, loss, or nostalgia for parts of themselves they’ve had to cut off or distance from because they didn’t fit the gender norms.

More broadly again we could see trauma as on a spectrum. Clearly from the literature one way people survive obvious traumas like abuse in the family or at school, or being in dangerous situations, or experiencing significant loss in childhood, is by dissociating, splitting themselves, and foregrounding parts who can survive what’s happening to them.

But in our current culture even those without such obvious traumas in their youth generally experience the trauma of being taught that certain ways of being are unacceptable, and of being treated non-consensually in ways that are normalised and not regarded as obviously ‘traumatic’. So most people probably do some degree of dissociating, splitting, and developing survivor sides whose strategies often become counter-productive in adulthood. Examples would include trying to be perfect at all times, people-pleasing, maintaining a hard exterior that no-one can penetrate, that kind of thing.

Want to say something about where the disowned parts go, and what we can do about that?

Disowned parts

J: Sure. Our own experience was that the disowned selves remained in existence but often only came out in our imagination. We’ve been wondering lately whether imaginary friends might be an example of this right? Kids relate externally to parts of themselves which they’re not allowed to be internally. Certainly we can often find our disowned selves in our daydreams and night dreams, as well as in the characters we’re drawn to – real and fictitious – who seem very different to our own foregrounded selves.

Personally this journey towards embracing plurality began with recognising that a number of characters cropped up regularly in our fantasies who we initially assumed to be the kind of people we were attracted to, but then realised were actually potentials in ourself. It related to gender too. We had this increasingly strong sense of ‘boy/man’ sides of ourselves, but the old trans narrative of us ‘really’ being a guy didn’t seem to fit. When we found out about non-binary gender that came closer, but not in the sense of having a static gender other than man or woman. Plurality felt like a final piece of the puzzle for us because it could hold the sense that we have more than one side, each of whom is differently gendered. In our case: three guys, three lasses, and one non-binary creature.

B: Lasses huh?

J: It seems like the right word. How would you identify your gender Beastie?

B: I’m alright with lass. Badass lass.

J: For the other part of your question – what can we do about the disowned parts? Our hunch, supported by some of the therapeutic literature, is that it’s about reclaiming those selves and finding some kind of a balance between them all. It hasn’t been great for us to foreground certain parts of ourselves and try to eradicate others. What seems to work really well is if we function more as a team, with different parts coming to the fore when their particular strengths or talents are called for. For example two intellectual power-houses may be best for writing a long blog-post on plurality.

B: Compliment accepted. They do say the inner critic is one of the most intelligent selves, if you can embrace them.

J: Our experience has been that the more we’re in communication with one another, the more able we are to function as a team. But that doesn’t mean that this is an easy path, right Beastie?

The path of plurality

B: No indeed. For example for years the rest of you were aware of the literature on the value of embracing the inner critic, but it felt completely terrifying to actually approach me given how harsh I’d always been. Also the rest of you knew how you felt in our body, but I seemed more like a disembodied voice that came from outside. It was only when you tried interviewing me – in journal form – that there began to be a sense of somebody there who might talk back without trying to destroy you. Over a series of journal conversations we all moved very carefully towards communication feeling safe-enough, as well as towards a sense of who I might be on the inside. We’re planning another zine to say more about this process and how it can work.

There’s also the issue of plurality as it relates to other people in your life, and the world around you. I guess again the analogy – and overlap – with gender and sexuality is a useful one. We can see from the literature that people generally do way better – in terms of mental health – if they’re able to be open about their gender and sexuality with themselves and with others, instead of passing or remaining in the closet. At the same time, of course, coming out is never entirely safe in a heteronormative world, and it is way more dangerous for some than for others: usually the most marginalised folks. 

So as long as the world is like this, ethically we’d have to encourage people to embrace the truth of their lived experience of gender and sexuality. But at the same time to think strategically about whether and how to reveal this to others, given the pain, discrimination, and very real dangers involved in being open about such things in a context which doesn’t allow for them or marginalises them.

Coming back to plurality, we personally learnt to foreground certain parts of ourself, and disown or push down others, for a reason. It can feel fragile and precarious to actually allow the parts of us out into the world who we were protecting from danger (like our little sides) or who we’ve deemed too dangerous for public consumption (like me or our cocky charmer, Tony). 

I guess this is where we are a work in progress – this blog post being part of that progress, how meta. We’re feeling into how open we can be with this. As with gender and sexuality it seems important that people who have greater privilege and security do open up about it, because that often makes it easier for other people to do so, but we’ve got to recognise that it’s not necessarily a safe thing to do: that there may be repercussions. When plural activists, The Redwoods, went on UK radio they experienced a lot of negative feedback: people phoning in saying they were making it up, that they were mad or bad, and that it wasn’t real.

So here’s another good one for you James. Is this real or are we making it all up?

Real or fake?

J: Another of your problematic binaries Beastie. There are many different answers we could give to this. In one sense it’s easy. Yes of course it’s real. This is our lived experience. In our culture, people are often so quick to dismiss others’ lived experiences if they find them threatening or alien. Look at how swift people always are to deny somebody’s experience of sexual assault or racism or transness for example. Couldn’t we recognise that people have vastly diverse experiences and accept that the majority of the time when people share their experience then that is their experience?

When we’ve questioned authenticity ourselves, something we’ve often come back to is the fact that we’re an absolutely terrible actor. Acting has never been something we’ve had even the slightest skill at. And yet we know that when we risk fully showing people ourselves they can recognise the very different parts and remark on how utterly different they look, sound, and feel to be around. We experience that in our own body as well. The more vividly we go into our separate selves, the more our whole body, voice, posture, etc. feels different, to the point that we would each experience the same sensation or experience in an entirely different way.

Where it gets more complex is that everyone has some choice in how they relate to their plurality – in a similar way to their gender and sexuality I guess. If a person has an inkling that they might have the capacity to be attracted to more than one gender then they can move towards that and open up to differently gendered fantasies or partners, or they can lock it down and never go there. Similarly if they have a sense that they could comfortably express their gender in more non-normative ways they could decide to turn towards that or away from it. And, of course, the degree of acceptance or rejection of those ways of being in our wider culture will have a significant impact on whether they turn towards it or away from it, as will how strongly felt it is inside them: whether it’s something they actually could push away or not.

That points to one of our favourite words right Beastie? Biopsychosocial. All of our experiences are biopsychosocial. They’re influenced by the ways our bodies and brains work (bio), by our experiences in life and how we respond to them (psycho), and by the systems and structures we’re embedded within (social).

So we can decide – if it’s possible for us to do so, and if our experience of plurality is strong enough to warrant it – to move towards plurality. That’s the choice we’ve made right?

B: Yes. For us the experience of moving towards it has felt in the direction of growth, creativity, congruence, even though it feels precarious indeed to navigate the world in such a radically different way to the way we did previously. Before we tried to project the version/s of ourself who would be most pleasing and acceptable to others. But actually we’ve always been contradictory in that way haven’t we? Some sides of us drawn to fitting in and belonging, others to pointing out how fucked up wider culture is and insisting that it needs to change.

J: Yep even before we experienced our plurality we had that tension running through pretty much everything we did. I think it makes our work stronger, that we experience the deep yearning to belong and be accepted – having felt so ‘other’ and rejected for much of our life. But we also kick against a world which imposes such limited ideals of what it is to be ‘acceptable’, and see that it’s the world that needs to change to encompass diversity instead of creating these (white, hetero, middle class, masculine, non-disabled) norms and marginalising and oppressing anyone who fails to fit them.

B: Yes. Go James.

J: So dammit here we are again out in the deep fucking waters talking about an experience that a lot of people are going to struggle with. As if it wasn’t enough to be openly bisexual when everyone had a problem with that, and then writing about being non-monogamous in ways that got us in trouble, and then trans and non-binary. Do we always have to do this? What the fuck is next?

B: I think you know the answer to that one. Ah but we love it really, don’t we?

J: Parts of us do. Parts of us are terrified by it.

B: And we won’t publish this – or anything – without their consent. That’s a vital part of working as a team.

J: Going back to being real or not, do you have anything to say about that?

B: Mm, yes. I guess moving towards plurality can mean that we experience this sense of multiplicity more vividly than before. By which I mean that we now often choose to journal as a conversation between parts of us rather than as one unified voice. We deliberately shift our thinking from the usual default of thoughts going round to more of a conversation: often between part of us who is struggling and part of us who can offer support. We even take our other selves on dates sometimes. We’re trying to allow our selves to flow more freely around our close people, naming where we are, even though that feels very vulnerable. It’s preferable to feeling muted when we’re in company. 

But when we don’t feel safe enough we definitely default back to a kind of muted coherent singular self. When people see us do that they may question whether the other parts of us are really real. They may never have experienced them. Or they may have experienced them as being present and then not present. Even we, ourselves, sometimes get that ‘is it really real?’ feeling when we’re in a bad place and can’t quite connect with our separate selves. 

In some ways the process of allowing and expressing our plurality makes us more vividly plural. We are now choosing to go fully into this self or that self rather than projecting a more coherent, unified ‘Meg-John Barker’ persona for people to relate to. 

J: Yeah it’s strange how that person now feels more like the creation, the seven of us as the real us.

B: Strange and wonderful. I think I want to finish off saying something about plurality as a spiritual practice.

J: Go ahead Beastiegirl.

B: We’re sharing our pet names too then big man?

J: Apparently so.

Plurality as spiritual practice

B: Alright, well I think we can also conceptualise our selves in a number of different ways. For each of the seven we can understand them as the part of us who got stuck at a particular time in our life – which is why they have different ages. We can also see them as who they are now within us: and those versions are constantly growing and changing just as a singular self would be. We also write fiction where we imagine the seven of us as fictional characters – with many of our characteristics, but also with different back-stories, intersections, and lives than the real ‘us’ has because otherwise it’d be a pretty boring story. And maybe there’s a final version of each of us that’s a kind of archetype – a potential –  almost like a deity or external force we could draw upon – the warrior, the hero, the vulnerable child, the imaginative creature, the trickster, the nurturer, the… what am I?

J: There’s a question: The embracer of complexity, equally comfortable in the darkness and the light.

B: A shadow, perhaps. Anyway, I’m saying that seeing each self – and the team – as past, present, character, and archetype, has a lot of potential for spiritual practice. For example, we do time-travelling work where we go back to the places each of us are stuck – or where we were disowned or foregrounded. We take the team back to painful memories in order to revisit them safely and find kindness for ourselves in them. This loosens their hold on us now, so hopefully we won’t remain in the stuck patterns and survival strategies that developed from them. We’ve written before about how seeing ourselves as plural can make self-compassion much easier because we find it’s a lot more possible for one side of us to be kind to another, than it is for our whole self to be kind towards our whole self.

J: Yes it’s fascinating isn’t it? Each of our different selves tends to be hard on themself, but the others can much more easily find understanding, tenderness, and support for them. So tapping into the team is a practice in self-care.

B: As well as a healing wounds narrative, we could also tell a developing strengths narrative. Plural work can enable us to tap into capacities we’d never have thought we had – at one point – and bring them to bear on situations where they’re helpful. It’s clunky work because I wouldn’t say we’re yet in a position to control who comes forward and when. And perhaps it’s not even about control, but flow. But we have had great examples when we’ve really needed confidence and humour in a situation and Tony has stepped forward, or we’ve needed to speak from our survivor place in a way that could be heard and we’ve found that Fox part. Another regular spiritual practice is to invite the part of us who is best able to feel the feelings – for ourself and for others – and to let him do that, and find that sacred place of interconnectedness through that. That’s Jonathan again.

J: Yeah, those of us who’re much more about intellectualising really appreciate having parts who are capable of that.

B: Heh yes you’re not much in the feelings are you? Some day maybe. I wondered what you thought about how plurality fits in with our general philosophy. We’re heavily influenced by Buddhism and Queer Theory, and they both have the sense that we should be getting to a place of no-self or recognising that people can’t be categorised in fixed identity terms. How does having several selves and identifying as plural fit with that huh?

Plurality and Philosophy

J: Alright fine, I’m getting used to this now. 5000 words in and she opens up a massive philosophical question about the nature of the self. My take on this is that experiencing ourselves as plural helps us to hold less tightly to ego, which is what Buddhism is all about. We can see that projection ‘Meg-John Barker’ as something we’ve created – in relationship with the world around us and the other people in our life – rather than as this singular stable ‘me’ which could be good or bad, success or failure, acceptable or unacceptable. That projection contains so many different interrelated elements (us) as well as being in a state of constant flow and flux. That said, we’re still responsible for how we behave in the world. It’s not like we can say ‘Beastie did it, it wasn’t really me,’ and get away with poor behaviour. My sense of being on a team with you all is that we support each other in being the best we can be – and in seeing the places where each of us struggles and is capable of harm and working on that.

As for the queer take on identity, yes there is a risk with plurality that people might begin to identify strongly with being a plural person or a system and become quite rigid with that. That’s the same as the way holding any identity – man, woman, gay, straight, bi, addict, healer, whatever – too rigidly can mean we become brittle and stuck. Similarly I guess there’s a risk that if we decide we have to understand ourselves as seven distinct parts who are like this, then that could prevent them from growing and changing. Maybe over time other parts emerge, or existing parts move more into the background or even merge together. However our hunch is that it’s a good idea to keep all of us forward equally for now.

I guess it’s that Buddhist idea of non-grasping that I’m getting at here. Like everything, plurality could become a problem if we gasp it tightly – as a fixed identity that must work in this particular way – or if we hurl it away from us – as this crazy, threatening idea. Instead we can hold it lightly and play with it, figuring out what possibilities it opens up for us and what it might close down.

B: Oh that sounds very Meg-John Barker I think I sense us moving towards a close here.

J: I think so. Over 5500 words. I guess we had a lot to say about that.

B: I suspect this is just the first of many. I’m keen to make a zine focused on my story – how to embrace the inner critic, and also how to cultivate the gentle compassionate witness.

J: You know I’d love to help you with that. And a zine on the inner children would be nice too. Plus we’d like to keep going with the comic series: get all seven of us depicted that way. And then there’s the trilogy.

B: Yep, we’re on novel number three and that’s my story so you know I’m keen to crack on with that one.

J: This is our life.

B: I know right?! Okay time for a cuppa and let somebody else take over I think. That’s us for the day. Nice work friend.

J: Right back at you love.

You can check out more of our posts about plurality here.

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