thoughts on: alter ages
so like, people are weird about alter ages.
which is natural, because it's a weird thing, and there's not much room for nuance in the social media landscape. i don't really fault anyone for not knowing how to handle it (whether they have DID or not) because, like everything with plurality, it's so different between every system and even individual alters. i think most peoples' kneejerk reaction is to automatically connect "child alters" as being inherently "literal children." which makes sense, because it's not like there's a universally understood model for peoples' ideas of child alters to be based on besides physical children. for a lot of individual child alters, that approach works well. what people tend to get more hostile towards is the idea that there are child alters, existing within adult bodies, who can handle an adult level of responsibility.
after all, with the understanding that all alters' ages are very literal, then it would be deeply irresponsible to let your 8 year old drive a car. a 12 year old should not be doing your taxes. a 14 year old should not be going to work. particularly within online DID spaces, this hostility gets amplified by two things:
1. many people within these communities are in them because they are deeply traumatized as children. i'd wager that a vast majority of us were expected to step up beyond what was developmentally appropriate, be it through parentification, grooming, or just plain old going through some shit that left them jaded. seeing other people allow their child alters to do things that wouldn't be developmentally appropriate for a physical child probably brings up a lot of emotional baggage. nobody's in the wrong for this. it is what it is.
2. people want to feel validated. the world is not validating towards systems. many of us aren't open about it to our own loved ones. it's isolating. coming into somewhere that's supposed to be a safe space for likeminded people and seeing people say things that contradict with your experiences can exacerbate those feelings. i know this because it happens to me literally all the time! it sucks! but it's good to remember that nobody - neither the person feeling invalidated nor the person sharing their experiences - is wrong. again, it is what it is. sucks. what are we gonna do about it?
all of that is a very longwinded way of saying: the points i'm softly about to push against all have reasons for existing. everyone is valid and nobody has to die.
with that being said, let me share a little about two of my child alters:
one of them is young, about four years old. she's vulnerable and scared and she hates the world. she can read and write more than a physical four year old could, but other developmentally inappropriate tasks make her shut down, panic, and cry. she can't cook (because she's too little), she can't do chores (because she's too little), she can't go to work (because she's too little), and any situations where she's expected to do these things are overwhelmingly frightening to her. at no point would it be therapeutic to throw her into the deep end and expect her to figure these things out.
on the other hand.
another is around eight. unlike the four year old, she's much more secure. she's had a lot of time to watch how our adult selves function, and she's in a stable enough place to be interested in those parts of our collective life. she's 8, but she's also been alive and continuing to grow as a person for at least 18 years. perhaps it would be more accurate to think of her as an 18 year old. here's a little secret: she likes to drink a little alcohol. she's more responsible about it than some of our adult alters. she can also drive a car, take care of our pets, and file our taxes.
what gives?
i think it would be foolish to treat the 4 year old the same way i treat the 8 year old. if the 4 year old has a panic attack and shuts down when trying to put away the dishes, there is no way in hell i'd ask it to go over our w2. what about the 8 year old? would there be much benefit in talking down to her? in my case, it would be counterintuitive to my goals in therapy for me to strip her of her responsibilities. we're gunning towards final fusion. in order to fully step into the adult world, at some point, she has to grow up. that means, when she's expressed interest in doing so, letting her try new things in a safe environment. after all, it's not like(ly) that one day, she'll wake up, say "mr. gorbachev, tear down these dissociative barriers!", and suddenly become an adult. she needs to go through the embarrassing, cringey experiences of teenhood and young adulthood.
the more she catches up with our adult selves, the thinner the veil between us gets. i'm excited to see the kind of person she grows into. i know she'll love it in the world.
post-credits scene:
this is not based on any clinical literature, rather an observation i saw someone make online many ages ago, so take it with a grain of salt. however, i thought it was very interesting:
this person noticed that a lot of the time, the roles that peoples' child alters take in the system seems to correlate with how they perceived adulthood when they first split. a lot of the time, you get adults who take care of things and children who are stuck in trauma time. however, in systems who perceived adults as a threat while being protected by other children (such as older siblings or friends), the opposite tends to happen: adult parts are more likely to act as emotional parts, while the children serve as protectors, caretakers, and so on.
i have no idea if there's any data or writing on this, but logically, it makes sense to me. i'd be really interested to follow this train of thought further.
i think this is one of the bigger problems with our understanding of DID: the fact that there's no one-size-fits-all answers to any of this. every person on earth is an individual with their own thing going on, and that applies as much to alters as it does singlets. beyond that, every system is so uniquely tailored to their upbringing and what was necessary to survive that i really don't think any two systems will look alike. we can notice similar patterns, and we can try to come up with language for that, but really, that's all it is: similarities. not a guidebook, or rules, or perfect definitions. that's why i think most DID advice, particularly geared towards singlets who know someone with DID, falls flat. the only thing we all have in common is dissociative parts. how those parts function, who they are, how they relate to one another, how many parts there are, how much differentiation there is between them, how easily they split, and so on are going to be different between everyone.
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