====== Headmates ======

These are the people who live in [[headspace:Abyss]]. They were broken off from me through my [[theories:dissociative mechanisms]] and pushed down there through [[theories:redshift]].

Selves:

  * [[headmates:Jaime]]
  * [[headmates:Sophie]]
  * [[headmates:Kate]]
  * [[headmates:Singer]]
  * [[headmates:Alice]]
  * [[headmates:Oliver]]
  * [[headmates:Daisy/May]]
  * [[headmates:Penelope/Anabelle]]
  * [[headmates:Lucy]]
  * [[headmates:Abby]]

Factive introjects:

  * [[headmates:Mom]]
  * [[headmates:Dad]]

===== How to refer to us =====

On the //outside,// all of us just see ourselves as ego-states of [[headmates:Jaime]]. Please just call us all Jaime and use they/she for us. //Unless// you're talking about us in a way where it's necessary to distinguish. It's fine to use the names you see here if that's ever easier, but in the usual case where it would be harder, it's perfectly fine to just pretend we're a singlet.

==== Then why have names at all? ====

The names listed here are just internal codenames. We use them on the inside to make [[functioning:internal communication]] less disorienting. For the most part, we don't think endogenic elaboration on our preexisting traumagenic differences is useful in our healing process (this is only a claim about //us, not// a universal claim about all systems) but our //names,// at least, are a necessary evil: they're the only way we know who's telling us what. If we don't know which of several disjoint continuities of consciousness a thought or emotion is coming from, then neither can we know what it's eventually going to take to stitch them together.

Put another way, if we disjoint continuities of consciousness didn't have //some// way of identifying ourselves to one another, that would just make us even //more// disjoint. There shouldn't be discrete self-contained collectives of internally-connected thoughts and emotions that can't freely access each other, but given there //must// be, given it //already is// this way and can't easily be repaired, it's better to be able to identify thoughts and emotions by their containing collective, rather than the abject unmitigated chaos I can only imagine it would be to experience each and every passing thought or emotion as an individual unto itself.