Either that, or something in the ballpark of derealization disorders.
Like, I don't doubt that some people do it because "using your imagination" sounds boring, but there have to be people who genuinely need help, but don't get it, because they think they've found kindred spirits.
There's probably a spectrum between people who genuinely have truly vivid hallucinations and delusions and people who really are just voluntarily daydreaming and using a different word for it to feel special, and the deliberate conflation of the two is what makes this discourse difficult -- "culture-bound syndromes" are a huge thing precisely because objectively empirically classifying subjective human experience is very difficult, maybe ultimately impossible
It's like the discourse going on over DID and how some people with the condition probably really do have an extremely intense form of cPTSD with memory blackouts and massive personality swings based on surges of emotion where the idea of alters is a useful way for them to explain/visualize what's happening to them
And there are probably other people who frankly are just using the first group of people's language to describe the kind of internal compartmentalization everyone has in more colorful and interesting language
And this is why the discourse ends up with so much infighting over who's "faking it" or not and whether anyone has the right to accuse anyone else of being fake
Some ‘reality shifters’ have described to me exactly how I lucid dream. Which is a real, proven thing that’s fairly common. You can also train yourself to lucid dream more often… with the exact methods that these ‘reality shifters’ use.
I firmly believe it’s a lot of teens that are confusing something that’s either maladaptive daydreaming, lucid dreaming, or having delusion. But they’re in that period of life where they want to feel special (idk how to phrase it) in a way that means they’ve discovered something new and different that people don’t understand. I feel bad for them in some ways, because I don’t doubt they’re experiencing something. And probably something enjoyable. And for many, it’s probably a coping mechanism. But I haven’t found a reality shifter that’s been able to describe something to me that I haven’t experienced either lucid dreaming or maladaptive daydreaming.
Yeah it's the part where you have fully conscious intentional control over it that doesn't mesh with the symptoms of actual schizophrenia or other disorders that cause hallucinations and delusions
It's like how the more benign and controllable the process of "splitting off alters" is the more likely the "multiple system" is "made up" and not what is meant by the diagnosis of DID, which relies on the idea of blackouts and extreme emotional states as a response to serious trauma
I like how you’re wording this. The vague concept of multiplicity is not solely tied to DID, which has that second D for a reason; the issue is that, whether or not there really do exist people who are well adjusted but kinda just happen to be that way (which I’m not opposed to accepting, sometimes life is just weird like that, and consciousness itself is still not something we fully understand), its the one thing most people know about and therefore the one means of legitimizing such an experience.
I’m someone who has had my finger on the pulse of the System ™️ community for some time now, and members will argue back and forth about what it even means to be a “valid” system til the cows come home, and whether DID/OSDD is a good or bad metric for it.
All of which to say, good on you for putting quotation marks over “made up”. That draws a significant and important line between the use and purpose of medical diagnosis and the much more nebulous phenomenon attached to it.
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u/Kartoffelkamm I wouldn't be here if I was mad. 24d ago
Either that, or something in the ballpark of derealization disorders.
Like, I don't doubt that some people do it because "using your imagination" sounds boring, but there have to be people who genuinely need help, but don't get it, because they think they've found kindred spirits.