Quora - July 1, 2023: Changing ANP
This is a sensitive subject for us, and very triggering.
I’m sure those who read our answers have endured repeated references to 5. He is a Legend in our system.
He was active between 2008 and 2021. He was a kind of “upgrade” from 4 because we acquired lots of new skills and expertise at the time, so he was not created traumagenically.
He is the one who understood the complexity of our system. Because of this, he knew that, at least neurologically, he would not be able to manage the whole system and that we needed to “upgrade” to a new host/ANP.
He made some very detailed plans of how this should happen organically so that the system would not be destabilised. These were so outstanding, that we are still following them. We often refer to him as The Architect of our system.
Everything would have been perfect, as it was customary for 5. However, he made one single mistake. He accepted a referral to a psychologist.
The abusive relationship that ensued, with the extensive invalidation of trauma, was catastrophic for him, and we had a split.
I came out of that. Before being Neuro, I used to be called 6.
I still remember the tug of war between me and him for control. But neither of us was aware of it. I remember that I used to just go about my business. I was probably out more and more. It took around 6 months before I took over completely.
It wasn’t until later that I found his diary and found the pieces missing from my memories. Like one day I went shopping and took a different route from the one he used to take. He wrote of his panic in finding himself in places without knowing how he got there. And there were lots of other similar incidents.
Unfortunately this was followed by even more invalidation from the psychologist. I believe that if that had not happened he would have been able to manage a smooth transition.
As things stand, a few months later I was the main host.
Unfortunately that did not go well. I did not have the same parts as his system did, all those skilled and competent people that used to make us great at what we used to do. I was just me.
But I did seem to click with the kids. The teens too, but especially the younger ones. Eventually I became their host and caretaker.
That’s when 7 was born. His situation was similar to mine. He was ill equipped to manage the full system, but he clicked with the teens and became their host for a while …
Then there was 8 and then 9. I don’t know much about them, but probably they ended up managing some of the other subsystems like I did.
Now we are finally at 10. He seems to have begun connecting to 5’s old parts and is getting to grips with the realities of being an ANP, and we are regaining some of our skills (yesterday we heard from our Grammar Police Guy! we missed him a lot.).
However, now we are wondering if we need an ANP as such. Since we are striving for functional multiplicity, the concept of an ANP seems moot. So at the moment we are looking at 10 and their parts as our professional system with a combination of life, professional, and social skills to handle public life.
But not as an ANP. In the sense that he is not apparently normal. He is crazy like the rest of us, but they are a professional. The others are more artistic, or more empathetic, or more whatever they want to be.
We have decided not to hide our situation any more, but rather to wear it proudly. We started telling colleagues and other people we interact with, and we are using their response to help us decide whether that is a bridge to burn. Even career wise we are moving towards using our own multiplicity to our advantage.
To conclude, our plans were foiled, yet we are still following them and we are achieving what we intended to, albeit with more difficulties than we anticipated.
Overall, we believe we are on track, we are a stronger system, internally we are so very close to each other even the ones we are out of touch with. We are a real fam and we are kicking butts IRL.
I am glad for this question on Quora as answering it helped me gain perspective on our situation. Being in the kid’s system I can be a little isolated from the others (and super busy) so I am not always able to process system information (kinda like a bulletin board in our brain) in a timely fashion.
