Glossary

Alter - The 'official' psychiatric term for members of a system that are not the original person born into the body. Use of the term "alter" implies that one person in the system is real and the rest are not, or are less real. Even in systems where there really is an original person the others came from, "alter" is taken by many systems (including ourselves) as an insult. We prefer 'people' and other such terms. We've had to work so hard to get people in our lives to refer to us as actual people, and individuals, instead of just some pretend thing, that we tend to take this pretty seriously. We do, however, use the term 'alter' in academic spaces so that everyone is on the same page.

Bestia daemon - The species that Tavor, Nico, and Keaira are. More information can be found here.

Co-consciousness - The state where two or more people in system share an awareness of what's going on in meatspace. It is unlikely that system members are aware of each other's thoughts and feelings in this state. Usually, this feels like (usually one) person is inside and controlling the body, and the other(s) are outside and walking alongside it and interacting with meatspace, although invisible and intangible.

Co-presence - The state of more than one person experiencing meatspace at the same time, without necessarily being able to know what the fronter(s) are thinking or feeling. This feels a bit like someone watching from behind the eyes, but that's less common for us than co-consciousness.

Co-fronting - More than one person actively using the body at once. There are three ways this can be arranged, to our knowledge. Unequal distribution - where each person co-fronting has access to different parts of the body. In this arrangement, we can talk to each other and have to coordinate our movements so we don't look like QWOP. Even distribution - where each person co-fronting has equal access to all parts of the body. There are two forms of this. One is where we remain separate and can talk to each other (still slightly risking QWOP-like movements). The other is where we sort of dissociate and the lines between who's who get a little blurry. We function more effectively as a single unit this way, but we can't communicate very well.

Core - An old term used to decribe the person originally born into the body. It has fallen out of common use due its implication of a central being that the others are pieces of.

Dissociation - A state of disconnect from oneself and everything else. It can take may forms, including, but not limited to:
Feeling like you're experiencing the world from a void where you don't exist, even though you can see and touch the world around you. Like everything that makes you 'you' ceased to exist.
Feeling like wandering through a world underwater and invisible, where everything is muffled and canned and far away.
Feeling like having your only emotion be 'white noise'
Feeling like sitting on the edge of the bed in the middle of the night, staring off into space for god knows how long, because time doesn't exist anymore.
Feeling like watching a movie and someone calls your name, and you realize you're not in the story, you're just staring at pictures on a screen, and suddenly everything seems so fake.
When someone hurts you deeply, and you're so tense and full of fear, but it just drains out of you and soaks into the ground, and you don't feel anything anymore.
When you're talking to someone, and you suddenly realize they could be a hallucination, or a simulation, or a dream, and you would have no way of knowing.
Sometimes things just lose meaning. Things are reduced to moving shapes and sounds, but you don't understand any of it, and it doesn't bother you, even though it seems like it should.

Front - The mental position in which one occupies or runs the body, interacting with meatspace. We liken it to piloting a ship.

Fronting - The act of being out front. Controlling the body.

Host - Similar to core, although most of the DID community uses it to mean the person who fronts the majority of the time. We don't use it that way. We dispise the word core and use 'host' to refer to the entity that was both for the longest time, but we now no longer have a host.

Inner World - Headspace, the grey space, inside, the paracosm, ect. The realm and non-physical world in which everyone in this system resides when not interacting with physical space. Information page is here.

Integration - A controversial act where the people in a system merge into one being. It has been the 'go-to' cure for DID since it was first understood, and many therapists insist on it to this day. Many systems have attempted integration, and many of those split back off again. They say the whole that integration creates is less than the sum of its parts, and some see it as a from of murder. We fall into that latter category, and have voted very firmly against the act.

Little - A child or young person in a system.

Meatship - The body, as so lovingly dubbed by Helyx. The term stuck. This one is the meatship BOB.

Meatspace - The space where meat walks around in khakis and whines about its job. The physical world. 'Reality'.

Median - The state of oneself being neither a member of a distinct system nor a single entity. In a way, it's also both. There are two median subsystems in this system. In our case, each subsystem is a person comprised of two pieces, interacting with the world as one person. Like two sides of a coin. Jekkyl and Hyde, so to speak. Only, it's no case of good and evil, thankfully, but rather man and beast, combined into one heterogenous mind and body. It works a bit like a sliding scale, with human on one side, and non-human on the other, and the scale shifts randomly back and forth throughout the day.

Otherkin - People who believe themselves to be non-human in some capacity. I include this definition to draw lines between what otherkin do and do not have in common with us. None of us use the term for ourselves, and non-human works fine. Otherkin are usually singlets who have spent much of their life growing up enmeshed in human culture. Eventually, they 'figure it out' or something, and assume the label otherkin. Those of us that are not human have never been raised in human culture and marinated in its social norms, so we tend to resent those that call themselves non-human that get all the benefits of being raised as one.

Presenting Self - The person that everyone thinks 'you' are, as a system. We are not out to the world about who and what we are, so we try to maintain a consistant façade. We jokingly refer to this 'person' as BOB, which is what we've named our meatship.

Singlet - A person who is the sole occupant of their body; a person who is not part of a system.

Switching - A change in who is up front. This can be controlled or uncontrolled. Uncontrolled switching is not necessarily a bad thing if the system has protocols in place for continuous tracking of what is going on and shared skills. These things can be acquired with practice.

System - A group of persons in one body.

Tchtetnaa - The species that Shackles is. More information can be found here.

Trigger - An event or stimulus which causes an instant and unavoidable reaction because of something with which it has been deeply associated in the past. Since DID is closely associated with (and possibly a more severe form of) PTSD, it shares many of the same symptoms. Basically, if it's something that happens with PTSD, it's probably also something that happens with DID. Since knowledge of PTSD is more common, using it as general guidelines is a good place to start when interacting with a system. The issue of "trigger warnings" on the internet is a hornet's nest of insanity that we wish not to comment on at this time.