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Recently we held a poll in which 200 people with dissociative identity disorder participated. The question was a simple one,
does your system include any non human alters ?
Non human alters is a wide term, used on purpose in this poll.
It can mean anything from a robot, to an animal, an angel
or a talking tree. Or ANYTHING else.
This writing is meant to give information, stats and to give a better understanding
of non human alters, their possible purpose and to break the stigma surrounding the topic.
Its nothing to feel ashamed about, its not weird or rare. As you will soon enough find out in this article.
In our groups we often see people ashamed of having non human alters.
Or they don’t understand such a concept. What is the purpose?
And how am i going to live inside safely the rest of my life with a lion or a dragon?
The first thing to do in order to understand anything about it, is to realise and accept,
they are alters just like you, the host and everyone else in the system.
In the end, what it comes down to, like at the bottom line,
every alter came to help you survive a traumatic experience,
an ”out of the normal human experience event”
I think non human alters can be created during both fight or flight experience.
Just different non human alters.
Some non human alters came to just protect (on the) inside.
So how do you live safely with a dragon or a lion next door?
You very slowly make first contact. If one of the alters feels especially connected to a certain kind of non human alter, then let that alter do the initial contact.
The ”How to train your dragon” movie, literally a life saver 😉
Jokes aside, in our System, Drake is not responsible for the dragons,
but he is responsible for other animals like the wolves.
He takes them out for runs, build shelters for them, he helps them feed.
Train social skills and tames them.
and if a bond is build one can communicate inside, with a non human alter.
Most likely not with spoken human words, but through imagery, visions, flashback’s dreams or if all else fails, nightmares. If it does not work to speak in human language to a non human alter, you could see if you could hold their ‘hand’ or maybe even hug them,
if you have established that trust. Then you try to send imagery to the non human alter.
Maybe they pick up on how to do it and that way you can establish more then just contact but an actual form of communication.
So here are the results of the poll we did:
As you can see more than 80% of those with dissociative identity disorder or DDNOS
who participated in this poll have non human alters!
That alone should be a reason to not or feel less shame about this.
Because you are certainly not the only one, nor the exception to the rule!
Every DID System is unique and different. Every System has its own mechanisms
on how things work (best) and the best thing i can advise you is, go with your gut.
Follow your intuition, listen to your heart. Try to imagine the scared child in that
scary monster in front of you. ”kiss” the frog and release the prince.
(please don’t randomly kiss any alter, its a metaphor.)
Also try to accept the culture of non human alters if they have one.
In return you can expect the same.
We hope this article was helpful to both those with DID and those who treat people with DID. I think your patients might be very interested to hear that over 80 % has non human alters in this non scientific yet very interesting poll.
Thank you for reading! Please like this post if it was helpful for you 🙂
Disclaimer; i know i skipped whole groups of types of (non human) alters in this post, this is not to exclude any one type of non human alters in your or anyones system.
There are many, many more examples of different types of non human alters that i have not mentioned here. Feel free to share your own experience in the comment section!
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About the authors
The Stronghold System are the proud volunteer founders & CEO of The Plural Association Nonprofit. They are from the Netherlands and reside in a 30-something-year-old body, are nonbinary, parents of an amazing child & 3 cats. They got diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder over 10 years ago & also self ID as Plural.
This made us cry,the all cats meowed the panthers and all the birds flew into the sky dancing.. the flying lions roared,the leopards growled and all the winged wolves howled in joy. Never before have we felt this validated. We are not a human,never was,the human she’ll is a menagerie inside..we thank you.
Hi Panter, you are all so very welcome! I’m so happy to read you feel truly validated. You and your system are as real and valid as any other. Howl, purr and roar dear Panter and Co.
Meows roars chirps and purrs to you..in kinship and pluralness panther.
Meows roars chirps and purrs to you..in kinship and pluralness panther.
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I’ve lived with what I’ve thought was a “monster” inside me since 5-6 years old, until I got to understand it enough to discover it was a dragon protecting the broken child. With time, the dragon has been pacified to the point to make the child feel really safe; yet, while reading it, I’ve come to understand how did I finally pacified the dragon, how the child took part on this, why hugs are so effective to keep the dragon down. Also, I could feel the child climbed to the edge, expecting and hopeful, as I was assimilating the information.
None of my therapists seemed to be aware of the existence of a dragon alter, or maybe they were just trying to ignore it in order to force me to overcome it; as a result, it has always prodeced me a sence of shame and terror, and I rarely share its existence with some particularly special people, as keeping it hide the whole time is really hard work. Thank you very much for this help; as usual, I feel exhausted after dealing with the splinters, but behind that, a sense of peace always appears. Thank you so much!
Great testimony! Thank you so much for sharing! Dragons are the best 🙂
Thanks. This clears lotta confusion about non-human alters. Along with it, it’s validating. <3
Glad you enjoyed the article! Thank you for your comment!
Thank you, glad it’s validating!
I probably have 4? Most busy is Timer. He tells me five seconds before the toast or microwave goes off and makes noise, or when the bread is done baking. He also had me wake up every night at 3:15 most of my life. That changed with a burnout & now it’s 1.5 hours after going to sleep, then every hour the rest of the night usually; sometimes he’ll let me sleep through after the 1.5 wakeup.
He has countdown timers for time, but also for people. He decides when we’ve given people enough rope & need to be dealt with & brings in Assassin, who eats my feelings for the person. Assassin then hands them off to Machiavelli to decide the most advantageous use for that person in my life, now they’re just a game piece to me. Not that they’re not human, but that they’re only going to get minimum emotional engagement.
I can sometimes anticipate or feel when a big timer is trying to go off. I don’t know what to do with it, because I don’t set them nor really know how to turn them off.
Out of the 70 alters we know only 2-4 are solidly human! We also have plushies, sirens, foxes, gods, angels etc. A lot of “uncommon” alters. For us it’s less “being treated less then human” and more that is just our brain’s last thing to consider is a human. At some point our subconscious brain went, “human=bad” and never stopped. Our alters are more symbolic then literal, as most nonhuman alters are. Our sirens are from trauma related to water. Our foxes are from a need to be slippery and sly or for comfort. Us plushies formed to be comforts, sort of “emotional punching bags”, who don’t really form attachments. Just move onto the next person who will take us.
I have multiple animal alters that regularly make themselves known. The strongest is an ape that i refer to as Julian, cheeky monkey is exactly that, a very cheeky monkey who is easily entertained but is petrified of spiders above his head and George the gorilla only shows up sporadically.
My family has learnt to live with these as they are very comfortable coming out around them.
To my current knowledge I only have 3 human alters, 2 being children 1 boy 1 girl, yet I have a multitude of animal alters including cats dogs and parrots.