Interview with the Constellation System
The Constellation System resides in a 33-year-old White nonbinary person who has a successful tech career and several loving polyamorous partners. Despite a heavily traumatic childhood, they are flourishing in life to the point that they are opening up their own business shortly and have even saved lives by financially providing for the medical care of those in the Philippines. As if that weren’t enough, they have also prevented homelessness for several in the US. As a true success story of abuse overcome and a person with one of the biggest hearts I have ever met, I wanted to share some of their insights with you to inspire you that neurodiversity is real and is positive.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, is considered by many to be severely disabling- and in many cases it is. But as with all other diagnoses, hope and success exist. I have found many times that people with DID- sometimes known as Plurals, Multiples or Systems- have numerous “gifts” from their diagnosis once they do the therapeutic work to find and embrace them. The Constellation System exemplifies this in a truly heartwarming way!
Plurals can have alters of any age, gender, and sexual orientation, and can have their own memories, values, belief systems, and priorities that differ vastly from the other alters in the person. Alters can be based on fictional characters, objects, historical figures, animals, people in the Plural’s life, including their abusers, and “just plain average Joe’s.” Each alter thus can truly be unique from the other alters and be a whole person unto itself. While some Plurals are monogamous, it is not uncommon to find polyamorous Plurals, as each alter connects differently to other people they know in terms of sexual and romantic desire and personality match. For example, the body of the Plural may be female and age 33, with one alter who sees himself as a 40 year old man who is gay and is only interested in demisexual love, and where another alter in the same System may see herself as a 21 year old woman interested in playing the field with people of any gender that she finds intellectually inspiring. As you might guess, conflicts in these lifestyles can arise within Systems and can be crippling. But there are many, many happy and well-balanced Plurals out there who have found their way towards enjoying these complexities, finding them to give life and love almost endless texture and variety of experiences and opportunities.
So, let us begin!
River-Aaerin: Constellation System, please describe your System and introduce who is in it. Feel free to let each alter speak for themselves on each question as desired.
Constellation System – Star: Hi, River-Aaerin. I would be glad to. There is the Host, Star (hence our System Name), they/them, panromantic + pansexual; there is our Caregiver, Leah, she/her, panromantic + pansexual; there is our Gatekeeper, Nimbus, he/him, panaroflux + panaceflux.
River-Aaerin: How did you discover that you have DID?
Star: To some degree or another, it’s one of those things that seems painfully obvious in hindsight. But we didn’t know for a solid fact until the last couple of years, when we started into therapy for cPTSD. We had reached a point where everyday functioning was hard or even impossible, and we needed help just to get through that. The first thing that came to us was Fusing with Fragments; from there, we met our Gatekeeper (Nimbus), and, most recently, our Caregiver Leah solidified into her own person.
We’re not sure why this didn’t surface with prior therapists and in prior runs through therapy, but we also figure that, sometimes, the time just has to be right.
It finally was for us.
River-Aaerin: What’s been the most difficult part of your journey with DID?
Star: Honestly, just accepting that Leah was around in the way that she was.
To be specific, as far as we can tell, Leah – in addition to being a Caretaker – is a Trauma Holder. There’s rather a lot of trauma that she’s holding on to that I, Star, have had a really hard time accessing by myself. When we work together, though, we can do a lot more of the remembering.
It’s still not easy, and we’re steadily learning how to work together in this way.
River-Aaerin: I remember you saying at one time that Leah held the emotions that came with the abuse, and you, Star, had the logical memory storylines only. Can you describe for us some times that Leah helped you through some emotional distress, telling us what she could do for you that you alone couldn’t that was very healing?
Star: I would be glad to. One of the things that Leah has proven to be really good for (among many things, to be clear) is fending off panic attacks. While, overall, my emotional state is better than it’s ever been, I still have panic attacks from time to time. When they rear their ugly head, I have Leah Front, and I retreat into the Inner World. Once there, I have some time to simply not worry about things that are going on; Leah takes care of them all.
By the time I come back to the Front, I feel restored and balanced in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise.
River-Aaerin: I also recall you saying that you have other diagnoses, such as depression, anxiety and OCD, but that not every alter is impacted in the same way by them. Can you give some examples of how a diagnosis impacts one of you less, and how that empowers you to help the others?
Star: Leah, do you mind taking this one?
Leah: Hiya! I’ve been letting Star talk through most of this till now. They’re the ones who do most of the everyday stuff and all that.
Anyway.
Yeah, Star’s OCD is, on balance, mild or moderate. But it’s also never “off,” really. For them. For me, it’s either off or mild, and it’s not really a thing that even affects me directly.
Case in point, Star can be bad about doing things a particular, certain way and only doing them that way. That can be everything from how they take showers to how they make food to how they make their coffee . . .
You get the idea.
When they’re at the Front, they feel pretty dang obligate to do things those ways. When I’m at the front, though? I don’t. I feel the nag of the OCD or whatever, but I can ignore it; Star can, too, but it’s much harder.
Also, Nimbus has a contribution on this front, too. Nim?
Nimbus: Hello and good day. Where was I?
Ah, yes.
Star has especial difficulty with making spontaneous appointments, even when they need to do so. I, however, do not. Whatever the mechanism for this – depression, anxiety, or OCD – the simple fact is that I am not bound the way that Star is. So I will Front from time to time to take care of such things.
River-Aaerin: One of the other things that struck me about your journey is from your romantic life. You told me that one of the people you are dating is also a Plural with three alters that are dating your alters, and that it was a process of falling in love all over again as each alter paired with each alter of the other Plural. Can you tell us more about that experience, as it sounds amazing to fall in love again and again in different ways?
Star: Oh, yes! That’s a great thing to get into.
With the recent scenario that you’ve alluded-to, I’ll simply call the alters A, B, and C out of the interest of protecting their privacy. A is a man, B is a woman, and C is a woman. C actually found me, Star, over an online dating app, and we hit it famously, as it were, and we fell in love quickly, a current of feeling and attraction like a river washing over me.
While that was going on, I was getting to know A and B, too, though we didn’t have romantic intentions on either side.
Before long, though, Leah started developing romantic feelings for B, and her emotions – compared to Star’s – are like a house afire, so, after her feelings started, they went off.
While all that was going on, Nimbus and A were slowly courting one another, as both of them were the most reserved of all six Alters. They eventually found their footing, however, and their love blossomed with a grouping of tiny little buds, so to speak.
From there, I fell in love with both A and B, and all of us have relationships with one another (except for Leah and A, who have agreed that friendship is the best fit for them).
All of these loves and feelings are different from one another and spill over into each other in surprising and delightful ways. In a very real way, because we’re communicating so much, I’ve never felt so much love in all my life!
River-Aaerin: Any other ways that DID plays a positive role in your life, giving you skills or strengths that most people don’t have?
Star: One of the things that having three of us allows us to do is to see things from three perspectives simultaneously. I tend to be logical, Leah tends to be emotional, and Nimbus tends to be detached (in a healthy way, to be clear). Each of us has a definite way that we prefer to do things, and while I, Star, get the deciding vote more often than I don’t, Leah and Nimbus have offered outlooks and solutions that I definitely wouldn’t have reached strictly on my own.
River-Aaerin: You sound like you’re overall quite happy and healthy! Would you mind sharing what therapy has done for you to get you there? Would you recommend therapy to others?
Star: I would say we are!
And, yes, I would be glad to.
What therapy has done for me / us, broadly speaking, is unwinding the issues that we’ve had. The actual needs and matters of DID were somewhat far “in” to that tightly-wound ball. There’s a very clear sense of priority and sediment, in a way, like I’m an archaeologist of my own psyche.
Therapy has allowed me to peel these things back layer by layer.
When we finally got to the DID portion, therapy then set up a safe place to dig, to extend the metaphor, and gave us all the tools and space we needed to unearth everything. We’re pretty sure that we wouldn’t have gotten here as quickly or as thoroughly if we hadn’t had therapy generally but the dig site in particular.
River-Aaerin: Is there anything else you’d like to share, perhaps something you wish people understood about DID or mental health diagnoses in general?
Star: In our case – and in many cases, when systems are healthy and communicating – you can have so much friendship and love within yourself that singletons would not and could not. I would be hard-pressed to have better friends and family than Leah and Nimbus, and I know that they feel the same way.
Leah: From my side of things, I would say that I’m able to teach Star about self-love in a way that they couldn’t manage on their own. I mean, you know, I’m a Caregiver – it’s literally my job to love Star. They have a lot of self-loathing like a lot of abused people do, and, well, it would be a lot harder to undo without me. I think that’s pretty dang cool.
Nimbus: It’s been a pleasure and joy to watch Star grow and heal with time. While there’s almost always pleasure to be had within oneself on such topics, I am, nevertheless, separate from Star and am able to offer a slightly outside perspective on their progress. This combined internality / externality is a source of endless intrigue for me personally, and it’s something that those without DID would be, I believe, hard-pressed to simulate.
*Names changed to protect identity and interview shared with permission of all alters in System.
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