I wish people understood that plurality is the brain's response to having a disassociated identity during formative periods of development, and as such, the way yr plurality works, what it looks like, is as individual as each brain, is entirely subject to yr metaphor of self.

like, my specific manifestation of plurality looks like other people, like the friends and family I needed and longed for and did not have as a child, during those critical periods where I was serially abused and preyed on. That's what *I* needed, then, as a child.

For other people, their plurality maybe looks like characters from fiction that they desperately connected with, or longed to be, or wished would protect them, animating those disassociated parts of self and speaking or acting for them. And I think that's normal?

I have concerns that disassociative identity attached to fictional characters risks increasing the difficulty of growing and changing and healing as a system, as there is a specific frozen external image of those characters, but each system has it's own challenges.

And also, in a very real sense, I do not think yelling at fictives or telling people that it's bad is going to do a single thing to shake or alter the identification of systems that have already formed in this manner, it is just going to alienate them & drive them off

It's like spraying a cat with a water bottle or hitting a dog, you don't do a single thing to disincentivize the behavior, you just teach them that you, specifically, are mean and unsafe