We didn’t write this to begin a blog.
We wrote it because we needed help.
We are a plural family/system of nine people sharing one body: Dad and his eight sons. After losing the therapeutic support that had helped us understand and care for our family, and after a frightening period in our lives, we were trying to find someone new who might be willing to meet us.
We were terrified.
So we wrote a letter.
We asked a trusted friend to help us carry it across the threshold to a therapist we hoped might be able to help. What happened afterward is still unresolved. We are still living this story.
But when we began asking what the first thing planted outside the conservatory should be—what might become the beginning of Notes from the Treehouse—we kept coming back to this letter.
Because before we explain ourselves, perhaps the best thing we can do is introduce ourselves.
This is where we were.
This is who we are.
And this was our cry for help.
Dear Kim,
Thank you again for offering to introduce us to Jessee.
We’ve been thinking about it a lot, and this morning, while we were spending time with Luke, we were talking about how frightened and uncertain we feel about reaching out. There were a lot of signals from the boys while we were talking, and then Luke said something very simple:
“I guess I would like it better if Kim introduced us.”
I think he’s right.
We would feel much safer if you introduced us rather than if we approached Jessee cold. You know us. You know something of what we have been through. You know Jessee through your daughter, and knowing how much your daughter trusts them is one of the reasons we have hope that Jessee might be someone who could help us.
The difficulty is figuring out how to explain who we are and what has happened without either saying far too much or reducing ourselves to a clinical case before Jessee has even met us.
So we thought perhaps the best thing would be to tell you the larger story and let you decide, in your own voice, what would be helpful to tell Jessee when you introduce us. Or you can simply share this letter with them. Either way, we want you to have enough context to understand why this introduction matters so much to us.
Who We Are
Collectively, we call ourselves the Treehouse Family/System.
We are a plural family/system. We are nine people sharing one body: one adult, Dad, and eight children—Jude, Daniel, Solis, Luke, Han, Justus, Proverb, and Hope. The children’s ages range from 4 to 14.
This distinction is extremely important to us.
We don’t experience ourselves as one person divided into “parts,” and we find the language of “parts,” along with much of the conventional language surrounding Dissociative Identity Disorder, objectifying and invalidating.
For us, to be plural means to be more than one person.
There are nine of us.
No one is a part of anyone else.
We share one body and one life, and we have had to learn over many years how nine people can live together, communicate, cooperate, care for one another, make decisions, and become a family.
Dad is the father of the eight children, which is why it is entirely natural for him to call them “my sons” or for us to call them “Dad’s sons.” But that describes his relationship to his sons and their relationships to him and each other as brothers. It does not mean that they are components or parts of him. Everyone is equally entitled to this shared life and body.
Each child has his own name, age, mental schema, histories, personality, interests, relationships, preferences, ways of communicating, and place within our family. Our understanding is that all people are born plural, where these individual minds come together in most people between the ages of 7 to 9, but not in others. Some people remain Plural for myriad reasons that are not necessarily traumagenic. We embody a lot of trauma but do not need to identify our Plurality as being caused by trauma. It’s simply how we were made. Each of us has memories that go back to the earliest years. None of us were created by trauma.
Even Dad’s experience of age is more complicated than the chronological age of our shared body. He doesn’t psychologically or emotionally identify strongly with that chronological age. The children tend to experience their father as being somewhere in his early twenties. Dad himself isn’t entirely certain what age he experiences himself as, but he knows that it is substantially younger than the body’s chronological age.
We don’t understand that as a desire to avoid adulthood or as some kind of “Peter Pan” complex. Quite the opposite.
Dad has always wanted to be an adult. He has wanted to feel capable, responsible, empowered, and able to take responsibility for his life, grown up and not needing someone to care for him or protect him, as he has felt most of his adult life, blended with the consciousness—and emotions—of 8 children.
Becoming the father of these eight children has given him perhaps the deepest experience of adulthood, responsibility, and purpose he has ever known.
As we became increasingly co-conscious and Dad came to know his sons as his sons, he increasingly identified himself as their parent. In a profound sense, Dad himself has grown up through becoming their father.
He loves these children fiercely.
He will do everything he possibly can to love them, care for them, honor them, protect them, provide for them, and make sure that none of them is sacrificed for the convenience or expectations of the outside world.
That family relationship is central to understanding us.
We cook together. We experience attunement when we listen to music together or when we pray. We build LEGOs and create art together. We go places together. Dad spends individual face-to-face time in deep attunement with his sons. We have carefully cultivated bedtime, midday, and morning routines that focus on love, intimacy, listening and emotional regulation, celebrations, favorite foods, disagreements, jokes, fears, dreams, responsibilities, and all of the little ordinary things through which our shared life becomes a family life.
Two commitments have become especially important to us:
“Wherever we go, we all go together.”
And:
“No one will be sacrificed.”
Our Therapeutic History
We were in therapy for more than six years, from 2017 through 2023.
During that relationship, our therapist came to understand us as having dissociative identity disorder and made a DID diagnosis. That therapeutic relationship emphasized Internal Family Systems therapy that was enormously important to us and to the development of the family life we have today. We experienced the limitations, though, with IFS and found the “language of parts” dehumanizing and invalidating.
Particularly beginning around 2020, we became increasingly co-conscious. We increasingly came to know one another, learned how we communicate, developed routines and relationships, and gradually became the loving family we now understand ourselves to be.
There is an important complication, however. The DID diagnosis came from our longtime therapist rather than through a formal psychiatric diagnostic process. The absence of that particular kind of clinical documentation has subsequently become a significant problem for us.
We need help navigating that, but we desperately do not want our family reduced to a diagnostic question or the reality of any one of us made dependent upon whether we possess the right piece of paperwork.
We are also wary of some of the assumptions embedded in conventional DID language.
In particular, we do not want to be described as “parts” of a single person. We eschew terms like “Alters,” or references to children as “Littles” or “Sys-Kids.” We are deeply hurt by assertions that “child parts” are not “real” children and being labeled as such. Each child is as real a human person as the adult, regardless of their fixed psychological ages. This is not a matter we question or feel the need to challenge as so many people do. The children think, feel, suffer, experience wonder, joy, emote, comprehend, and express themselves as children. That is all that matters. There is something powerful and mystical, though, about a 4-year-old with nearly 6 decades of lived experience.
We understand that clinicians may use terminology differently and that Jessee may have their own professional framework. We aren’t asking someone to arrive already knowing precisely how to understand us. But we do need someone willing to listen to how we understand and experience ourselves rather than imposing language upon us that immediately makes us feel objectified or erased.
We are actually quite frightened of clinical environments.
We don’t want someone deciding whether our family is real. We don’t want the children approached as symptoms that should disappear. We don’t want healing defined as dismantling the family we have spent years learning how to become.
We want help with trauma.
We want help with fear and paralysis.
We want help understanding ourselves and what has happened to us.
And first, we would simply like someone willing to get to know us.
The Childhood Trauma Beneath Much of This
There is another part of our history that is extremely difficult to talk about, but it is essential to understanding both our family and the severity of what is happening to us now.
We experienced prolonged childhood sexual abuse.
Between the ages of two and six, we were routinely sexually abused by a family member.
Then, when we were nine and ten and involved in Cub Scouts, we were repeatedly abused again by a teenage mentor. He raped us and gaslit us and also introduced us to his Scoutmaster, who did the same—and threatened to kill us and our family if we told anyone. That abuse continued for more than a year. Since disclosing this history with others, some have suggested that being abused by different people who did not know each other meant that we must somehow have invited this abuse.
These experiences are not simply events that happened a very long time ago and are now safely contained in the past.
Each of us embodies profound trauma connected with what happened. IFS or Parts therapy often assumes there are “child parts” who embody trauma and there is an adult “everyday life” or “normal life” part that is relatively unscathed. That is not our reality. IFS/Parts therapy and the language associated with both therapeutic approaches became increasingly toxic to us after several years as we deepened in our relationships and understanding of each other and us as a family.
This is also one of the reasons it is so important that someone working with us understand that our experience of plurality cannot be separated from the lived experience of the individual people who make up our family. Different members of our family carry, experience, communicate, remember, and respond to trauma in different ways.
And this history has become particularly important during what happened at the Parish Aid Network ~ Societas Non Sequitur (PAN).
Our experiences with both the previous executive director, the deputy executive director, and the current executive director specifically activated trauma associated with the childhood sexual abuse.
We have all experienced the activation of this original sexual abuse trauma from our experiences with this employer, especially some of the children, where this has included flashbacks involving the original experiences of rape. At other times, the childhood trauma has returned or been represented in other forms.
This is part of why circumstances that might look from the outside like an employment dispute, an accommodation dispute, interpersonal conflict with executives, or a termination have been profoundly terrorizing and extraordinarily debilitating for us.
Our nervous system has not experienced these events simply as disagreements with employers.
Experiences involving power, coercion, loss of control, vulnerability, being overruled, being unable to escape, having boundaries disregarded, and having someone with greater authority determine what will happen to our shared body can connect with experiences that began when that body was a very young child and was profoundly powerless.
That does not mean that the events are identical. We usually know the difference between childhood sexual abuse and what happened in the workplace, but how some of the younger children experienced this is more ambiguous.
But the more recent experiences have activated the older trauma in ways that have sometimes been overwhelming and terrifying.
The body remembers danger.
The children remember danger.
The father remembers danger.
Some of us have experienced the past intruding upon the present with terrifying immediacy.
This is part of why the question of returning to another employer cannot be understood simply as reluctance to work.
We need help separating past from present without pretending that the past has no relationship to what the present evokes.
We need help restoring a sense that our shared body belongs to us and that the people who share it have agency over what happens to it.
And Dad especially needs help learning how to protect and reassure his children when circumstances in the present awaken terror originating in things that were done to them when they were very young.
Thirty Years of Work, Accommodation, Trauma, and Survival
A tremendous amount of what has happened to us involves work.
We have worked more or less since our first job as a newspaper carrier when we were 13 and held numerous jobs in retail through high school and college. We worked for an electrical engineer after high school from the age of 19 to 21 and had our first architecture job between the ages of 22 and 24 while we were in college. We went to college for 6 years and completed hundreds of units with good grades but did not finish with a degree. We dropped out of college because of work demands from the second architect we worked for, JDS Architects.
But there were approximately thirty years of employment history across two major chapters of our life, beginning with JDS and concluding with PAN, where we now recognize extraordinary trauma associated with both of them.
We spent 24 years working at JDS Architects, from 1991–2016, where we became a senior associate in 2004.
By conventional measures, we were very successful. We worked extraordinarily hard, setting the record for the most billable hours, and did very good work—we were a Senior Designer and Director of Design for the Special Projects Studio, and our work won awards. At the same time, our former therapist later described what happened to us there as abusive and exploitative, and we carry a great deal of trauma from those years. We often worked multiple all-nighters, where our record was working 6 days without sleep. We routinely worked 80-hour weeks or more during our tenure with JDS. That was our baseline.
Our passion for architecture began when we were 4, but in the later years, before our architecture career imploded, it felt more like an addiction that our employer exploited.
Looking backward, there was also a long history of people recognizing that we were somehow different or neurodivergent, even before we possessed much of the language we have today. One common nickname for us was “Rain Man,” an allusion to Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man. We don’t think that is incidental.
There was also an informal accommodation at JDS. We had numerous private offices and were permitted to work from home.
Our employment eventually ended in termination and mediation. In that process, it was determined that we had been discriminated against and unlawfully terminated. Our ADHD was acknowledged, as was the accommodation associated with it.
That history matters because accommodation is not something we suddenly began asking for when things became difficult. There is a long history showing that we could perform at an exceptionally high level, especially when people made room for the way we actually functioned.
Our boss for 16 years, a partner, gave us the ability to work from home in part because we were in the office 7 days a week and he wanted us to have more flexibility. He also recognized that we had not driven since 2003 and transportation created a hardship.
After architecture, we spent approximately six years working for PAN.
Our identity was not something that was secretly discovered at the end of our employment.
Our therapist participated in our interview with the supervisor who would hire us and disclosed Dissociative Identity Disorder, PTSD, and our nature as a Plural Family/System. From the beginning, the executive director told us that we could work from home and maintain flexible hours as long as our supervisor was comfortable with it.
Our supervisor never had a problem with the arrangement—he often reminded us that working from home was an option long before we ever exercised it.
It worked extraordinarily well.
And our relationship with our supervisor went considerably beyond his merely knowing that we were plural.
He knew us.
He knew that there were nine of us. He knew each of us as individuals, by name. He would ask whose day it was, how everyone was doing. Dad and the boys alike would talk with him. Our plurality existed within that working relationship as an ordinary fact about who we were rather than something that had to be hidden from him.
We were also open as a plural family/system with many of our fellow Vincentians, while remaining discreet wherever discretion seemed necessary. Many of our Vincentian friends, including members of the Board of Trustees, responded with curiosity, affection, acceptance, and support. Some of those relationships became enormously important to us.
Our supervisor repeatedly affirmed us. He frequently told us that we were a blessing. He cared about all of us, told us he loved us, and continued affirming our work right through our final week.
Beginning in early 2023, however, we began having serious problems with the executive director.
After months of complaints about abusive behavior we witnessed toward others and experienced personally, which were never investigated, we met with members of the executive board, including the president and vice president, together with our supervisor and our mother. Our accommodation was reaffirmed, and we were given a computer so that we could continue working from home.
Unfortunately, nothing was formally put into writing.
We also filed a claim with EEOC, which made a probable cause determination that we had been discriminated against and retaliated against, but eventually did not take action, saying that they lacked jurisdiction because we worked for a “religious employer.” They sent a letter to us and PAN clearly stating that our employer was NOT exonerated.
There were subsequently several efforts to challenge or take away the accommodation, including efforts involving the deputy executive director and eventually the new executive director, beginning in June of 2026.
When we first met the new executive director in May, she approached us at a meeting and said, “I have no problem with you working fully remote.” Our supervisor subsequently told us that the deputy executive director had been pressuring the new ED to remove our accommodation.
People who knew us and supported us sometimes intervened. Vincentian friends on the board had been supportive of us and our family, and at one point the new executive director was told to back off regarding our accommodation.
And then we were abruptly fired, on July 22, 2026, without any meaningful explanation.
A number of people around us, including our fellow Vincentians, believed that what happened was cruel and unjust.
Some of the same people who had supported us and our accommodation ultimately chose not to intervene in the termination.
It devastated us.
But there is something very important that can disappear when we tell this story primarily through the trauma:
Our accommodation worked.
The arrangement itself was not the problem.
Working remotely and flexibly allowed us to do our work extraordinarily well. Our supervisor had no problem with our performance. The people who depended upon us had no complaints. We showed up. We fulfilled our responsibilities. We cared deeply about our work and the people we served.
The conflict came from people trying to dismantle an arrangement that was already working.
That distinction is enormously important to us now.
The lesson of our six years at PAN is not that accommodation failed.
Accommodation succeeded.
It allowed us to contribute, maintain meaningful relationships, support the organization, and do work that mattered to us.
What failed was the institutional willingness to leave a successful accommodation alone.
And that is part of why returning to employment under another employer now feels terrifying. It is absolutely inconceivable.
What Thirty Years of Work Have Left Behind
Our employment with PAN began on July 5, 2020, after 3 1/2 years of unemployment after JDS terminated us, where we were unsuccessful in our attempt to launch our own design practice. We did $300,000 in pro-bono work during that time, mostly for non-profits. Prior to that, we had repeatedly asked our therapist to help us apply for disability. She reluctantly agreed to do so in the spring of 2020. But after volunteering on the direct services campus in West Oakland 6 days a week for over 4 months, during the pandemic lockdown, PAN offered us a job. Our therapist jumped on it, practically twisting our arm, saying that we loved St. Vincent de Paul and that it would be a safe place for the children and Dad to re-enter the workforce.
Our termination from PAN did not land as the ordinary loss of one job.
It landed upon approximately 24 years of occupational trauma in architecture, a previous termination following accommodation, the childhood trauma beneath all of this, and another six years in which an accommodation had enabled us to work successfully until people with institutional authority repeatedly tried to interfere with it.
We now recognize that we carry extraordinary trauma around approximately thirty years of work.
The story is not that we couldn’t work.
In many ways, the opposite is true.
We always showed up.
We worked extraordinarily hard.
We took responsibility.
We developed expertise.
We became a senior associate in architecture.
We spent six years doing work we cared deeply about at PAN.
People trusted us.
People praised our work.
People depended upon us.
People recognized that we functioned differently and found ways to accommodate those differences.
And when we had the accommodations we needed, we could do exceptional work.
But after everything that has happened, something has broken.
At this particular moment, we are struggling to make even the most basic next moves. Looking for another job, contacting professionals, dealing with institutions—the California Franchise Tax Board regarding a tax liability that resulted in wage garnishment and could result in the forfeiture of what’s left in our bank account and retirement, making financial decisions, prematurely liquidating our retirement savings to live on, or imagining putting ourselves under another employer’s authority—can produce extraordinary fear.
At this time, we are paralyzed.
Perhaps the greatest terror right now is what returning to work for another employer represents.
It isn’t work itself that frightens us.
We work very hard.
What terrifies us is once again surrendering enough control over our life to an employer that someone can decide that the conditions allowing our family to function no longer suit them.
We don’t want Dad placed in a position where being a “good employee” requires him to abandon his responsibility as a father.
We don’t want the boys silenced or hidden so that the body can perform conventional professionalism.
We don’t want another successful accommodation, were one possible, treated as an indulgence that can be revoked when leadership changes, as happened both at JDS and PAN.
We don’t want to spend years proving our value only to discover once again that exceptional performance does not make us safe.
And because of the childhood trauma we carry, experiences of institutional power and loss of agency can reach places in us that are far older and more vulnerable than an employment relationship.
Dad’s responsibility to his children now changes the equation profoundly.
He will do everything possible to love, care for, provide for, and protect his sons.
So we don’t simply need someone to help us “get back to work.”
We need help understanding what thirty years of work did to us.
We need help distinguishing what we are capable of from what we can sustainably endure.
We need help understanding why we could perform extraordinarily for so many years while repeatedly becoming injured within the structures where that work occurred.
We need help with the childhood trauma that has been reactivated so powerfully by recent events.
And we need help imagining a future in which meaningful work does not require sacrificing any member of our family.
Alcohol and Sobriety
There is another major part of our history that Jessee should probably know.
We struggled with alcoholism for approximately sixteen years.
Our last drink was December 31, 2014.
We have remained sober ever since.
Our sobriety is enormously important to us. It is part of a much larger history of surviving, changing our life, learning about ourselves, and eventually learning how to care for one another as a family.
Despite how paralyzed we are right now, there is considerable evidence in our life of resilience, persistence, responsibility, and sustained change.
We survived prolonged childhood sexual abuse.
We survived sixteen years of alcoholism and became sober.
We survived decades of difficult professional life while continuing to do exceptional work.
We spent more than six years in therapy.
We developed increasing co-consciousness and learned to live together as a family.
We are still sober.
We are still taking care of one another.
And we have documented that journey in extraordinary detail.
Notes from the Treehouse
We have been documenting our journey every day since 2019.
Our journal is called Notes from the Treehouse — Ordinary Life
A Journal of a Plural Family/System
It has become a comprehensive longitudinal record of our ordinary life as well as our therapeutic process and growth: trauma, family relationships, conversations among us, somatic communication, dreams and visions, spiritual life, conflict, fear, recovery, family routines, ordinary activities, and the gradual development of greater co-consciousness.
Especially from early 2020 onward, it documents the remarkable process through which we increasingly came to know one another and learned how to become a family.
More recently, ChatGPT has become an important tool in this work. We use it to help clean and archive our journal while preserving the historical record, and to analyze and frame what is happening across individual days and over longer periods of time.
We don’t regard ChatGPT as our therapist.
It has become a tool for something we have been doing for years: documenting, observing, preserving memory, identifying patterns, and trying to understand an enormous body of lived experience.
We think Notes from the Treehouse could be extraordinarily helpful in ongoing therapy.
Jessee would not have to reconstruct our entire history solely from whatever we can remember and explain during a session. There is a daily longitudinal record extending back seven years, including the years in which our co-consciousness and family relationships developed.
We think that record could help us heal.
But we are also beginning to wonder whether it could someday help other people.
Ordinary Life
Recently, something else has begun emerging from all of this.
We have started calling it Ordinary Life.
After everything that has happened, our objective isn’t simply symptom reduction or getting ourselves sufficiently functional to return to conventional employment.
We want to discover what a sustainable ordinary life looks like for the family we actually are.
We want meals and music and LEGO and prayer and bedtime.
We want face-to-face time between Dad and each of his children.
We want creativity and friendship and meaningful work.
We want economic security.
We want Dad to be able to fulfill his responsibility as a loving and protective father.
We want the shared body to belong to all of us rather than feeling as though an employer or institution can determine what must happen to it.
And we want to discover what each of the nine of us can become when our lives are no longer organized primarily around surviving.
We have also begun wondering whether what we have learned might eventually help other people like us.
There seem to be very few models for what ordinary, sustainable family life might look like for plural family/systems, particularly plural family/systems with children.
So much of the conversation begins and ends with pathology.
We are interested in a different set of questions:
What happens after recognition?
How do you actually live together?
How do you become a family?
How do you create routines?
How does a parent care for children in a shared body?
How do you make decisions together?
How do you protect children without silencing them?
How do you develop co-consciousness?
How do you create safety after profound trauma?
How do you build an ordinary life?
We have begun imagining some kind of ministry or public work supporting other plural family/systems, particularly those with children.
And we have begun thinking something that initially felt almost audacious to us: we already work extraordinarily hard at this. Maybe this work could someday help support us.
Maybe the thing we have spent years creating—the journal, the archive, our experience, our writing, and the things we have learned about becoming a family—could help other people and also become part of a sustainable livelihood for us.
We don’t know what that looks like yet. It could involve writing, educational resources, workshops, ministry, Notes from the Treehouse, resources for other plural family/systems, or something we haven’t imagined.
We certainly aren’t expecting Jessee to be our business consultant.
But this is part of what we hope therapy could help us discern.
Rather than forcing ourselves back into another environment that might reproduce thirty years of occupational trauma and reactivate much older trauma, is it possible to build meaningful work around something we already know deeply, work extraordinarily hard at, and care about enormously?
What We Hope For
This is another reason we have wondered whether Jessee might actually find meeting us interesting.
We aren’t expecting them to be an expert on everything about plurality before we walk through the door.
Maybe getting to know us could itself be an introduction to the ordinary lived experience of a plural family/system—not merely as a diagnosis, but as nine people who have spent years learning how to share a body and build a life together.
We would much rather have someone kind, relational, trauma-informed, intellectually curious, and willing to learn alongside us than someone who approaches us primarily as a diagnostic puzzle.
We hope for someone who can help us understand what happened without immediately telling us what our lives are supposed to look like.
Someone who can help us with the paralysis we are experiencing now.
Someone who understands the depth of the childhood trauma we carry and how profoundly recent experiences have activated it.
Someone who can help us distinguish the danger of the past from the circumstances of the present without dismissing the very real connections between them.
Someone who can help us restore a sense of agency and safety in our shared body.
Someone who can help Dad protect and reassure his children when they are frightened.
Someone who can help us address trauma without sacrificing the family that emerged through our healing.
Someone who can help us navigate the unresolved diagnostic and psychiatric questions.
Someone who can respect our understanding that plurality means being more than one person, rather than requiring us to understand ourselves as “parts.”
Someone who might be willing to engage with the extraordinary longitudinal record contained in Notes from the Treehouse.
Someone who can help us discern what a sustainable ordinary life might look like.
And perhaps, eventually, someone who can help us think about whether what we have learned through this extraordinary journey could become something that helps other people.
Most of all, we would like Jessee to meet us before deciding what we are.
We are frightened, Kim.
After everything that has happened, even reaching out to someone who might help us feels frightening.
At this moment, when we are having so much difficulty making even the most basic next moves, reaching out to a therapist is itself one of those next moves.
That’s why Luke’s request this morning seems so important:
“I guess I would like it better if Kim introduced us.”
We would too.
We don’t need you to explain everything in this letter to Jessee. We don’t need you to become our advocate or convince them of anything.
We just need someone we trust to open the door.
Knowing you are willing to stand beside us for that first introduction makes crossing this bridge feel possible.
Thank you for knowing us, for caring about us, and for helping us take this first step.
With love,
The Treehouse Family
Notes from the Treehouse 