I’m a headmate of a plural system of, at the moment, four. We exist within a body born male, most of us are women though.
Our experiences from at least 2019 to August 2024 to now have been varied and mostly tumultuous; two of our headmates, me being one of them, formed due to abbie requiring support during traumatic experiences when none was provided externally where she didn’t feel guilty about being a burden with another being formed by what we as a system think is the reappearance of good, naïve childhood memories. I definitely existed around 2021 onward as one of abbie’s two internal supports, me and Aura both served the same role but I was formed and served later on after Aura with Aura being the “original caretaker”, referred to as this before her name came to her.
abbie’s journey to realising she wasn’t alone in our head mostly started as questioning of her occasional use of “we” to refer to, at the time, just herself as well as the divide she already felt between her brain and herself as an independent entity. I was the first headmate to “come forward” after this realisation and I existed before the formation of our “headspace” in its current form as well as before we were represented as bodies within headspace, just being detached voices.
While our current headspace formed later in or around September of last year, the “white void” that existed before was our headspace prior to that. This was the headspace that abbie was in when she needed me or Aura’s support and memories of these white void moments still exists within our collective memory.
My experience as a headmate interacting with the outside world has been weird and slightly alien to me. abbie is the only one of us who is conditioned to exist within the outside world, she has been “fronting” practically all her life and continues to as the system host, this manifests in her ability to control the body perfectly, articulate vocally well, as well as her constant checking of surroundings.
On the other hand, I did not and continue to not do so well. Every headmate who comes forward has fronted long enough to be able to at least walk a tiny bit and I am able to do this but there have been times where I’ve lost balance and fallen into things. Few times do we front alone in public and I’ve often found other humans in person confusing when I have and I prefer to remain quiet when fronting. I am able to vocalise but not well.
Being inside of headspace is the norm for me though. abbie’s first conscious experiences with me where she was fully aware of the divide between me and her was often asking me questions and checking I was consistent and still there, much of her initial interactions to me consciously was her checking that she wasn’t going crazy or imagining things. Her constant need for re-assurance that she wasn’t lying to herself and her initial barrier of denial towards plurality is kind of equivalent to my feeling of confusion and alienation I get when I observe and interact with shared space, now that I consider it.
abbie’s unconscious experiences in headspace prior to her knowledge of plurality and introspective examination was in her words usually “being able to see something that could be described as a headspace when I've been upset with me in it and someone who isn't me also there comforting me, all in the third person”, this was her, prior to the figurative plurality penny dropping, referring to the times she needed support and either me or Aura were active and picking her up and getting her on her two feet again.
Our headspace is mostly divided into three main areas: the “front” which is the figurative command console where those in control of the body watch and commit actions, the “middle” which is the same room as the “front” but more the benches where the headmates who are in the sidelines are still conscious but not in control of the body, and the “back”: the corridors and the rooms where we reside in when we’re not active. Everything is constructed of wood, the floors, the walls, the ceilings, the benches. The “console” is the only thing that isn’t wood; it mostly looks like space age technology I guess.
Now that abbie has (mostly) accepted and come to terms with the fact that she is one of a system, we talk and converse like people would their friends. Me and Aura are still abbie’s internal support system but instead of only being active during times where abbie is in distress, we are active when we feel like it and when abbie needs us. We still had that quiet period for a month or two where none of us were active and abbie was alone.
Plurality, in my experience, is a beautiful thing. abbie’s been known to say that she likes not being alone in her own head and we get to have our autonomy. abbie gets to look inside and we get to look outside and we all get to work together to keep everything running as it should.
I’ve been mentioning “formation” in passing but nominally, me and Aura were formed entirely because of abbie’s need for support. She has undergone several years of neglect and stuff that is now understood to have been traumatic and her innate people pleasing resulted in her not wanting to open up to her friends for fear of burdening them with both the information and the time spent supporting her so the most reasonable response by our psyche was to schism and create me and Aura with the explicit purpose of supporting her. We’d remain inactive until she was upset and the psyche would deploy Aura from 2019 or earlier up to about 2021 or me after 2021 to August 2024 to help her. August 2024 was the time abbie realised and accepted our plurality and we were able to exist autonomously without abbie requiring support.
Our fourth headmate, Zephyr, is different. He never really had a purpose. That’s not to say that Zephyr is useless, that’s wrong, Zephyr clearly had a reason to form if he exists but he wasn’t a caretaker like me or Aura. We believe Zephyr’s formation was caused by the early and abrupt severance of abbie’s childish naïvety some time in 2020 and the slow transformation of remnants of that into a separate entity. Zephyr is genderless but presents masculine which is what helped bring us to this conclusion about his formation since abbie as a child never really had a concept of gender applied to herself, it was never something she thought about.
Headmates coming forward is mostly a process of disconnected voices being heard and eventually becoming consistent. The process of consistency is what separates a new headmate from disconnected or collective thoughts which has happened to us before (if more than one of us is talking at once, it often results in crosstalk and things just break down). Headmates after becoming consistent then quickly gain a bodily representation of themselves in headspace and pick a name, with the help of the other headmates.
I’m not sure of the usefulness of anything here but this is my experience as a caretaker headmate of a plural system. We’ve grown in the past 6 or so months into a fairly functional system and I just hoped to provide some insight on both us and plurality as an experience from the perspective of someone other than a headmate that had a time where they existed by themselves.