Alter/Part/Personality

[JigsawAnalogy]

Yeah, I did lump all of those terms into a single topic. If anyone objects, I can make new topics for each of them again.

How do you define alter, or part, or personality? When you use any of those words, what are you referring to?

[JigsawAnalogy]

In my system, we tend to use the word "part" to refer to the different people who share my/our body. There is some resistance within my system to using words like "alter" or "personality," I think because that begins to seem (to some inside) as though they don't "count" as much as the other parts.

But we will use alter or personality to mean basically the same thing: one of the people who lives in our body.

As we understand it, a part is a person who lives within our body; they have their own opinions, ways of interacting with other people, ways of thinking about things. They have their own way of responding to situations, their own thoughts and preferences.

It's not the same as with people who only have one person living in their body, in part because no one part of our system is "out" all the time. And because of that, our life experience is a little different, because we have to do a lot of coordinating and cooperating with other parts, rather than just getting to live our lives on our own. On the other hand, we also know that we've got the option of shifting so that a part who is better able to handle something is the one who is out to handle it. We can skip over stuff that is boring or upsetting to one part, and have someone else come out to cope.