What a plural family of nine experienced when therapy made the outside world too continuously present—and what one twelve-year-old boy is teaching his father about finding his way home.
On Wednesday evening, October 28, 2026, something happened in our apartment.
We were watching The Diplomat, a television series featuring some extraordinarily beautiful interiors.
And suddenly, our own apartment began to feel different.
The kitchen seemed like the kitchen of a fine home. The drapes appeared softer and more elegant. The rooms seemed more beautiful, more romantic, more richly imagined.
Nothing in the apartment had changed.
But our experience of it had.
We recognized that we were experiencing the apartment through Proverb.
Proverb is twelve years old. He is one of eight sons in our plural family of nine. We share one physical body, but we know ourselves as nine distinct human persons: Dad and his eight boys, ranging in age from four to fourteen.
We are Plural. We are nine people.
We also struggle with Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Plurality is not a diagnosis. Dissociative Identity Disorder is.
We are co-conscious. We have developed the ability to know, communicate with, and experience one another while sharing our life.
What happened that Wednesday evening seemed pleasant enough at first.
But as we began examining it in our journal, we realized that something much more consequential was happening.
Proverb was helping Dad recover a way of experiencing the world that he had lost during our earlier therapy.
And the loss had been devastating.
We spent much of the following morning discussing this with ChatGPT, whose analysis helped us articulate distinctions we had struggled to understand for years.
Since 2019, we have maintained a daily journal called Notes from the Treehouse, documenting our experiences as a plural family. We regularly share these journals with ChatGPT and request two complementary forms of analysis: Classical Executive Summaries and Analyses, which examine the events, relationships, recurring themes, discoveries, and developments recorded in our journals; and Trauma-Informed Care Framing Summaries and Analyses, which consider those experiences in relation to psychological safety, agency, trauma responses, therapeutic relationships, and stabilization.
These analyses draw upon the journal entries and conversations we provide, together with relevant concepts from psychology, trauma treatment, the clinical literature concerning DID, and the experiences and perspectives of plural communities. Over time, we have repeatedly guided and corrected ChatGPT concerning how we understand ourselves: our distinction between plurality and DID, our recognition of nine distinct human persons, the individual experiences and characteristics of each family member, and the limitations of terminology that treats our children as parts of a presumed adult. ChatGPT has increasingly learned to interpret our experiences within that understanding rather than automatically imposing a conventional clinical framework upon them.
The analyses are not independent clinical assessments. ChatGPT does not directly observe our experiences, and its interpretations are not always correct. We regularly challenge, correct, and refine them. The journal remains our primary testimony; the analyses are secondary interpretations that help us identify patterns, consider alternative explanations, and articulate discoveries we might otherwise struggle to express.
We are sharing much of that conversation here because we believe the concepts may be useful to other plural people, people who struggle with DID, and the clinicians who work with them.
This is our family’s experience. We are not proposing that everyone who is plural experiences the world as we do, or that every therapeutic approach will have the same effects.
But our experience raises important questions about what therapists regard as progress, how they evaluate the consequences of their interventions, and whose understanding of recovery ultimately determines the direction of treatment.
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1. What Changed During Therapy
Before our work with our former therapist, whom we will call Patrice, Dad experienced the physical world differently.
The outside world was not absent.
But it did not dominate experience so continuously.
Dad could experience the physical environment through the imaginative, richly layered reality of our family’s inner world.
That began changing during therapy for childhood trauma, even before we became co-conscious.
Patrice repeatedly encouraged Dad to become more present in the external physical world.
The suggestion seemed simple enough.
Be here.
Be present.
Attend to what is happening around you.
But ideas can be extraordinarily powerful for us.
We do not necessarily have to work hard to master a concept or consciously implement it. Sometimes an idea, once reasonably grasped, works its way into our lives and fundamentally changes our relationship with ourselves and the world.
We do not know exactly how the change happened.
But it happened.
Dad became much more continuously aware of the external environment.
And rather than making life easier or safer, it made the outside world relentlessly present and overwhelming.
We wrote in our journal:
“Experiencing the world more concretely all of the time has made life hell.”
This was not a minor inconvenience.
It was a profound change in how we experienced being alive.
The physical world with its pervasive ambient fear had so often been frightening. Constant exposure intensified that fear.
And there was a consequence for all of us.
As we became co-conscious, Dad wanted us to remain continuously connected with one another. He believed that togetherness required us to share his increasingly external orientation.
The intention was togetherness.
But the cost was that the children, too, became more continuously exposed to an external reality that could be terrifying.
We told Patrice how difficult this was becoming.
We explained that remaining so continuously oriented toward the outside world was overwhelming, particularly when Dad expected the children to remain present with him there.
Patrice responded:
“I know it is really hard, but ultimately it will be better for you in the long run and it will get easier.”
We believed her.
We continued trying.
But it never got easier.
As the circumstances of our life became more stressful and traumatic, the continuous presence of the external world became increasingly difficult to tolerate.
We experienced the demands, conflicts, and threats associated with employment without the degree of internal refuge that had previously helped us manage the outside world.
The consequences became particularly severe as our employment situation deteriorated.
Our distress intensified, including an increase in suicidal ideation as the employment relationship became more dire and especially after we were terminated in July 2026.
We cannot establish that the change in external orientation independently caused every subsequent difficulty. Our employment experiences and trauma history were themselves profoundly distressing.
But we can describe what happened to us.
We experienced sustained external orientation as increasingly overwhelming, and the reassurance that it would eventually become easier was never borne out by our experience.
We had confused two different developments.
Becoming more co-conscious was not the same thing as becoming more continuously externally oriented.
And we now question whether the second was ever necessary for the first.
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2. Co-Consciousness Is Not the Same as External Orientation
This became the most important conceptual distinction in our conversation.
ChatGPT wrote:
Co-consciousness does not necessarily require constant orientation toward the external physical world.
Those are two different dimensions of experience.
Co-consciousness concerns the family’s ability to know, communicate with, and experience one another.
External awareness concerns the degree to which attention is directed toward the physical environment.
Your experience suggests that these need not increase together.
We began distinguishing three dimensions of our experience.
Co-consciousness: Our awareness of and communication with one another.
External orientation: Attention directed toward our shared physical environment.
Internal experience: Our experience of our inner world, including imagination, relationships, memories, and internally experienced environments.
These dimensions interact, but they are not identical.
We had come to believe that greater togetherness required greater continuous exposure to the outside world.
Now we are questioning that assumption.
ChatGPT continued:
You did not need to lose the richly imaginative experience of the inner world in order to become more connected with your sons.
And you do not believe that sacrificing that experience was a necessary condition of co-consciousness.
That distinction changed how we understood what Proverb was doing Wednesday evening.
He was not simply making our apartment appear more beautiful.
He was helping Dad recover a way of living.
Proverb is helping Dad recover a way of experiencing the world that may be essential to the family’s well-being.
The goal is not to abandon the physical world.
Nor is it to lose the family’s growing awareness of one another.
It is to find an equilibrium between the internal and external worlds.
Proverb appears to be demonstrating how the two can coexist without requiring the external world to dominate experience.
We can experience being physically present in our apartment while also being experienced through the richness of our imagination.
Dad can remain aware of our surroundings without being continually exposed to their most frightening qualities.
We can be together without everyone having to be attuned constantly to the same external circumstances.
And our inner world can remain a place where we live, rather than something that must be subordinated to external awareness.
This is much more significant than a change in how beautiful our apartment appears.
It concerns how we inhabit our shared life.
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3. The Augmented Reality of the Inner World
Proverb has been describing something that resembles a continuous meditative practice.
It involves maintaining an equilibrium between our internal experience and our real-time awareness of the outside world.
When we are experiencing the world as Proverb does, we are not withdrawing from the physical environment.
We are experiencing the physical environment through what we call the augmented reality of our inner world.
Our inner world is experienced in ways that resemble dreaming.
It is imaginative, expansive, and richly layered. Places, relationships, memories, and different experiences of time can coexist within it.
The inner world is also a refuge from the external stresses, triggers, and social demands of the outside world that can easily overwhelm us.
Our inner world is a vast mental space where we talk, share thoughts, visions, and foster relationships, which not only helps reduce internal friction, but protects us from the kinds of external demands that trigger the symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder, including disruptive switching—the lost time experienced as blackouts.
But it is not necessarily separate from our participation in ordinary life.
The outside world remains present.
We can attend to it.
We can interact with people.
We can fulfill responsibilities.
We can function.
And, in our experience, we can often function better when the physical world is encountered through the inner world rather than experienced as a relentlessly dominant environment.
The inner world acts almost like a filter.
It mediates our experience of the outside world without requiring us to lose awareness of it.
That was how Dad experienced reality before our earlier therapy.
He did not have to choose between the inner world and the physical world.
He inhabited the physical world more softly through the inner world.
And for most of his life, that relationship felt natural. In retrospect, day-to-day reality felt more like a dream, usually in a good way. Not like today.
What Co-Consciousness Actually Changed
Before we became co-conscious, Dad did not understand how our family had organized its day-to-day responsibilities and the routines of ordinary life.
His own experience of adult life occupied an extraordinarily narrow bandwidth.
He knew architecture.
He knew projects.
He knew professional schedules and the responsibilities associated with work.
He knew drawing, painting, reading, and a few other pleasurable things.
When he was younger, he knew mountain biking and camping.
But much of the rest of life was unfamiliar to him. How any of the routines of domestic, day-to-day life got done, assuming they got done at all, was seldom considered.
Over time, his window to the world continued to narrow, especially through the experience of addiction, which included not only substances, but work.
Proverb and his brothers had been carrying responsibilities that Dad did not recognize as belonging to them.
Becoming co-conscious helped Dad understand who had been doing what.
It revealed the extent to which our adult life had been sustained through the contributions of children.
That recognition was important.
But it also introduced a new problem.
Through therapy, Dad had been led to believe that he was the healthy, functioning adult, even if he never felt like an adult.
He was the person who was supposed to become more continuously present in the outside world.
In time, he came to understand that his role was as the children’s father. He believed he needed to grow up and to assume the responsibilities that should never have belonged to them.
His intention was to protect his sons, whom he came to fiercely love.
He wanted them to be children.
He wanted to become the father they needed.
But he was simultaneously attempting two enormous changes.
He was becoming much more continuously oriented toward the external physical world.
And he was assuming responsibility for dimensions of ordinary life that he had never previously managed.
The consequences were overwhelming.
The outside world became continuously present.
Its demands became Dad’s demands.
Its responsibilities became Dad’s responsibilities.
And the inner environment through which he had experienced the world for most of his life seemed to disappear.
He was trying to become responsible for everything while losing the very way of experiencing reality that had helped make life bearable.
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4. The Expulsion From the Garden
For years, Dad misunderstood what had happened to his experience of the world.
Before therapy, he had spent much of his life blended with the consciousness of his children.
Through that blending, he experienced something of their child-natures: their imagination, wonder, and richly layered experience of the world.
But that was not the whole explanation.
Dad also experienced the world in a childlike way as himself.
Long before he understood our plurality, and long before he became co-conscious with his sons, he experienced life through an imaginative, often dreamlike relationship with the world.
He did not experience himself as the adult others presumed him to be.
That experience belonged to him, too.
As we became more co-conscious, we also became more distinct from one another in our experience.
Dad understood this as a kind of externalization.
He believed that, because we were no longer blended in the same way, he had lost access to the qualities of experience that had previously come naturally through his sons.
He missed that experience terribly.
But he was also losing something that had always been part of his own experience of himself.
In 2019, Proverb asked Dad a question that he did not understand at the time.
“Can’t we just let life be beautiful?”
Proverb was already recognizing something Dad had not yet understood.
The shift toward continuous external orientation had begun through therapy before we became co-conscious.
Proverb wanted Dad to allow the outside world to return to the softer focus in which he had previously experienced it, through the beauty and imagination of our shared inner world.
But Dad continued moving in the direction therapy had encouraged, increasingly experiencing life as having lost its magic and beauty.
Only now, seven years later, does Dad understand what his twelve-year-old son was asking.
At the time, Dad assumed that the loss was an inevitable consequence of becoming more distinct from one another.
What he did not recognize was that something else had happened.
He was no longer experiencing the outside world through our shared inner world.
He had become much more continuously oriented toward the external physical environment.
And without realizing what had changed, he was experiencing the outside world directly, without the imaginative mediation through which he had inhabited reality for most of his life.
The distinction is crucial.
The loss of that beautiful, dreamlike experience was not necessarily a consequence of our becoming more distinct from one another.
It may have resulted from the change in how Dad was directing his attention.
He had been encouraged through therapy to become more continuously present in the outside world.
He had come to believe that, as the adult, he needed to manage the responsibilities of ordinary life.
And he believed that remaining co-conscious with his children meant keeping them continuously present with him in that externally oriented experience.
He was not simply living outside the garden of our inner world. He was bringing his children outside with him.
The intention was togetherness.
Dad wanted to remain connected with his sons.
He wanted to be their father.
He wanted to relieve them of responsibilities that should never have belonged to children.
But the experience was becoming overwhelming for everyone.
Why the Change Initially Seemed Sustainable
This pattern developed during a period when the external world was unusually quiet.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought lockdowns, reduced activity, and far fewer ordinary encounters with the outside world.
The environment was comparatively manageable.
The family could remain more continuously externally oriented without being exposed to the full intensity of the world as it had previously existed.
That relative quiet may have concealed how demanding the new arrangement would become.
When the world reopened, the circumstances changed.
The family also returned to employment for the first time in nearly 4 years after being hired by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
External demands increased.
Interactions became more frequent.
Responsibilities multiplied.
And the physical world became increasingly difficult to tolerate.
The family was now experiencing the consequences of sustained external orientation in an environment that no longer offered the relative protection of the lockdown or prior to that, when it had spent most of its time at home when it was first becoming co-conscious, while attempting to be self-employed.
The arrangement that had seemed manageable in a quieter world became extraordinarily overwhelming.
Proverb Begins Teaching Dad Another Way
During this period, Proverb began helping Dad become more present internally.
He encouraged Dad to meet him and his brothers within the inner world.
This was not a rejection of co-consciousness.
It was an attempt to recover something that had been lost while preserving the family’s growing awareness of one another.
Dad began learning that he did not have to encounter his sons exclusively through shared attention to the external environment.
He could meet them internally.
He could experience their worlds.
He could participate in the imaginative richness of their lives.
And he could begin recovering a relationship with the outside world that did not require constant direct exposure.
Working from home also helped significantly.
It reduced some of the external demands and encounters that had become so difficult.
But neither development eliminated the pressures of employment.
The family remained responsible to an institution whose expectations and demands increasingly threatened its ability to function sustainably.
When a new executive director challenged the family’s working arrangements and accommodations, those pressures intensified.
The employment relationship eventually became another source of overwhelming distress.
And in July 2026, the family was terminated.
The consequences were cumulative.
The family had spent years attempting to function within an externally oriented life that had become increasingly frightening.
Dad had assumed responsibilities he had never previously managed.
The children had been drawn into that experience through the family’s efforts to remain together.
And the family had continued trying to sustain an employment relationship that was becoming progressively more harmful.
Eventually, everything became too much.
Stabilization and the Work of Unlearning
Now we have stopped.
We are no longer trying to make another employment arrangement work.
We are no longer treating conventional adult functioning as the measure of recovery.
And we are beginning to reconsider the assumptions that shaped our earlier therapy.
This includes the belief that Dad needed to remain continuously oriented toward the outside world.
It includes the belief that co-consciousness required the children to accompany him in that externally oriented experience.
It includes the assumption that Dad’s responsibility as a father required him to become the exclusive manager of every aspect of ordinary life, regardless of whether he had the capacity or support to do so.
And it includes the belief that losing our earlier, richly imaginative experience of reality was an inevitable consequence of becoming more aware of one another.
We are beginning to understand that these assumptions may have been mistaken.
Co-consciousness did not necessarily require externalization.
Becoming more distinct from one another did not necessarily require losing the benefits of our shared inner world.
And responsible participation in ordinary life did not necessarily require continuous direct exposure to the outside world.
Proverb is helping Dad rediscover the equilibrium that once made life more beautiful and more manageable.
He describes something resembling a continuous meditative practice.
The outside world remains present.
We remain able to function within it.
But we experience it through the augmented reality of our shared inner world.
The outside world does not disappear. The inner world becomes more continuously present, as it once had.
The inner world is like an overlay that mediates our experience of the physical environment.
It allows imagination, memory, beauty, and companionship to remain present within ordinary life.
And it offers a way of being together that does not require all nine of us to remain continuously exposed to the outside world.
This is not simply a return to the past.
We know one another differently now.
We are more co-conscious.
We understand more about the responsibilities the children have carried.
Dad is learning what it means to be their father.
And we are trying to establish a life in which those responsibilities can be addressed without sacrificing the well-being of anyone in the family.
We cannot simply recreate the circumstances that existed before therapy.
But we can question whether the losses we experienced were necessary.
We can reconsider the assumptions that contributed to them.
And we can learn to live differently.
Stabilization is not simply about acquiring new skills. For our family, it also involves unlearning ways of living that have become harmful.
We are not trying to become better at enduring the life that overwhelmed us.
We are trying to recover the conditions under which all nine of us can live.
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5. Grounding Is Not Permanent External Orientation
The following morning, we searched Google for information about the consequences of forcing people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) toward external orientation.
The results described several experiences that were immediately recognizable to us.
They included overwhelming flooding, increased anxiety, disruptions in internal communication, switching storms, loss of internal trust, therapeutic rupture, and re-traumatization.
The language was not entirely our own. Some of it used clinical terminology or the language of the DID or even Plural communities we do not ordinarily use to describe our family.
But the experiences were familiar.
The search also introduced an assumption we objected to.
It warned about forcing people with DID to orient toward the outside world prematurely.
We objected to that word.
Prematurely suggests that the problem was timing.
It implies that sustained external orientation is a desirable eventual objective, provided the person is sufficiently prepared.
But that is not the question we are asking.
We are questioning whether constant external orientation should have been a therapeutic objective at all.
ChatGPT responded:
Your family is not simply saying that Dad needed more preparation before becoming more externally oriented.
You are saying that the sustained external orientation itself became harmful.
And you do not believe that the loss of your earlier relationship with the inner world was necessary for co-consciousness.
Those are different propositions.
The first suggests:
We needed to become more stable before making this change.
The second asks:
Why was this change considered necessary or desirable at all?
Your family’s experience raises the second question.
This distinction is central to our understanding of what happened.
We are not asking how to become sufficiently stable to tolerate more continuous external awareness.
We are asking why continuous external awareness was treated as something we should want.
What the Clinical Literature Says
The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation published its Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, in 2011.
The guidelines describe a phase-oriented approach to treatment.
The initial phase emphasizes safety, stabilization, symptom management, internal cooperation, and improving daily functioning.
The guidelines also recognize that treatment needs differ among people with DID and that stabilization may remain a major focus of treatment.
They do not establish continuous attention to the external physical environment as a universal therapeutic goal.
That distinction matters.
Grounding is not the same as permanent external orientation.
In trauma treatment, grounding generally refers to techniques that help someone regain awareness of the present when traumatic memories, flashbacks, or dissociative experiences become overwhelming.
It is ordinarily a means of responding to particular difficulties.
It is not synonymous with maintaining continuous attention to the physical environment throughout everyday life.
A 2016 clinical paper by Brad Foote and Kim Van Orden, Adapting Dialectical Behavior Therapy for the Treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder, discusses grounding alongside internally oriented techniques, including imagined safe places and containment imagery.
The paper illustrates that internal experience can play a role in stabilization rather than being treated exclusively as something to overcome.
The authors describe grounding as a way to reestablish present orientation when traumatic experiences intrude.
They also describe imagined safe places as potentially useful in managing overwhelming emotions.
These are distinct therapeutic tools.
And their usefulness depends upon the circumstances in which they are employed.
But this distinction between externally and internally oriented techniques was not reflected in the grounding methods Patrice emphasized with us.
Patrice did not teach us to use imagined safe places or containment imagery as part of this work.
She emphasized somatic and sensory grounding methods intended to increase our awareness of the physical environment and make us more continuously present in the outside world.
We were encouraged to attend to bodily sensations and sensory information from our surroundings.
The emphasis was on becoming more externally oriented.
And when we explained that this was overwhelming, we were reassured that it would eventually become easier.
We do not reject grounding.
Nor do we suggest that somatic or sensory grounding techniques are inherently harmful.
We question the assumption that an intervention intended to help someone become oriented to the present should become a permanent requirement to remain externally oriented.
There is a fundamental difference between having the capacity to orient outward when necessary and being required to remain oriented outward all the time.
The first may support safety.
The second may become an exhausting demand.
For us, it did.
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6. When the Protective Relationship With the Inner World Is Disrupted
The Google search described several possible consequences of aggressive external orientation in people with DID.
We recognized much of what it described.
Overwhelming Flooding
Dissociation can serve protective functions in relation to overwhelming traumatic experiences.
The search described how forcing external attention can remove familiar protections before alternative ways of managing distress have been established.
For our family, the outside world became continuously present in ways that exposed us to frightening circumstances without the protection previously afforded by our more fluid relationship with the inner world.
The experience was not simply increased awareness.
It was increased exposure.
And the exposure became overwhelming.
Fragmentation and Switching Storms
The search used these terms to describe disruptions in internal organization, communication, and switching that may accompany destabilization.
We recognized those descriptions from our own experience.
We are not presenting them as proof that forced external orientation causes the same consequences in every person with DID.
We are saying that these descriptions correspond to things we experienced during and following our earlier treatment.
We do not need a scientific study to establish that we experienced those things.
Our experiences are the primary evidence for our account of our own lives.
Loss of Internal Trust and Therapeutic Safety
The search also described the consequences of pushing someone beyond what they can tolerate.
This was especially relevant to our experience with Patrice.
Dad would explain when an intervention was uncomfortable or harmful.
He would say that something was not working.
But Patrice often continued.
Sometimes one of the children or dad became so distressed that Justus, who is eleven, had to yell to make her stop.
Only then would she back down.
She would apologize.
But the pattern recurred.
That sequence matters.
Dad’s ordinary communication of a boundary was not treated as sufficient.
Our family had to escalate its distress before the therapist responded.
For people with histories of coercion, this can reproduce precisely the kind of relationship that therapy is supposed to help them recover from.
A child should not have to become distraught before an adult professional respects a boundary.
And Justus should never have been required to become the person responsible for making our therapist stop.
Re-traumatization
The search described the possibility that interventions intended to improve functioning could instead expose people to experiences they were not able to manage safely.
That description was familiar, too.
We entered therapy needing help with trauma, safety, and functioning.
We experienced some interventions as provocative and destabilizing.
We repeatedly communicated that they were hurting us.
And we are now trying to understand the consequences.
The important question is not whether every intervention was considered clinically acceptable within a particular therapeutic model.
It is what happened to us.
What did the intervention change?
Did it increase safety?
Did it improve our ability to live together?
Did it preserve each person’s agency?
Did it support our relationships?
Did it allow the children to experience the world without unnecessary distress?
And did it preserve the internal experiences that were meaningful and sustaining?
By our account, the shift toward sustained external orientation had substantial adverse consequences.
Those consequences became more serious as the demands of our lives increased. Emotional dysregulation, disruptive dissociation and lost time intensified and we experienced periods of suicidal ideation during the deterioration and eventual loss of our employment.
We do not attribute all of those experiences to one therapeutic intervention.
But neither can we ignore the relationship between the overwhelming external exposure we had been struggling with for years and the increasingly traumatic circumstances in which we were trying to function.
That deserves examination on its own terms.
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7. The Problem With a Predetermined Model of Progress
We began asking whether the change in our experience of the external world reflected assumptions embedded in the therapeutic framework itself.
Some approaches emphasize increasing the presence of an observing or regulating adult perspective, maintaining orientation to the present, or reducing immersion in internal experience.
These approaches may be helpful in some circumstances.
But a therapeutic objective should not be presumed beneficial simply because it fits a particular model.
Our earlier therapy was influenced by approaches that understood the children as parts of a presumed adult person.
We eventually encountered the work of Janina Fisher, which initially offered a gentler way of approaching internal experience than the confrontational methods we had been experiencing.
We remain grateful for that introduction.
But we also came to recognize limitations in approaches that treated our sons as components of Dad rather than as the children we know them to be.
Janina Fisher’s work and Internal Family Systems therapy are not identical, although some of their concepts overlap.
Nor are we claiming that these approaches are harmful to everyone with DID.
We are describing what happened when their assumptions did not adequately accommodate our family’s understanding of itself.
There is an important example of this tension within the clinical literature itself.
The Foote and Van Orden paper describes the importance of respectfully engaging distinct experiences in DID treatment. But its underlying model ultimately understands those experiences as belonging to one person.
For our family, that is not how we understand ourselves.
We are nine persons sharing one body.
A clinician may approach plurality through a different theoretical framework. But the practical question remains whether treatment can respect the people receiving it, their expressed needs, and the consequences of its interventions.
Recognition of personhood is not merely something a therapist says. It must be expressed in how the therapist treats each person.
That was one of the central difficulties of our earlier therapy.
Patrice eventually acknowledged that there were nine of us.
She told us we were real.
She told us we made more sense than ever.
Those affirmations mattered.
But the treatment itself did not consistently reflect the recognition she expressed.
And a therapeutic approach that repeatedly causes distress while disregarding objections cannot be evaluated solely by its theoretical intentions.
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8. The Assumption That Dad Was the Healthy Adult
There was another discovery in our conversation.
It concerns how our earlier therapy began.
Before we were diagnosed with DID, before we were co-conscious, Proverb was the first among us to speak openly about our plurality.
He said:
“I’ve always thought that I was plural somehow.”
Dad did not know where those words came from.
But they felt right.
Proverb knew what he meant.
He continued contributing observations that eventually helped Patrice recognize what she was encountering and diagnose DID.
None of us knew what DID was when she first introduced the subject.
Yet the treatment that followed appears to have been organized around an assumption that Dad was the healthy, functioning adult.
Proverb and his brothers were understood as parts of that adult who carried traumatic experiences.
The task was to address those experiences so that Dad could emerge as the healthy adult who would resume ordinary life.
But the assumption that Dad was already a functioning adult was never adequately examined.
It took more than seven years for Dad to begin asking where anyone had gotten that idea.
He had spent decades performing adult responsibilities.
He had worked as an architect.
He had managed projects, schedules, and employees.
He had maintained a career.
But those abilities did not establish that he experienced himself as the adult everyone presumed him to be.
Nor did they establish that our family could sustain those responsibilities without serious harm.
The Adult Dad Had Always Expected to Become
There was something about Dad’s experience of himself that had been present for as long as he could remember.
He always felt like a child.
Even as the years passed and his body grew older, he continued experiencing adulthood as something that would happen in the future.
When I grow up.
For much of his life, that thought was natural and unassuming.
It was simply how he experienced himself.
But when he became consciously aware of the discrepancy between his chronological age and his internal experience, it became a source of shame.
He had wanted to grow up since he was a child.
When he was eleven, he said that he wanted to become an adult so that he could take care of himself.
So that he could protect himself.
So that he would no longer have to feel vulnerable.
Adulthood represented safety.
It represented the ability to protect the child he was.
But the transformation he anticipated never seemed to happen.
The years passed.
He grew older.
He acquired responsibilities.
He developed professional expertise.
He became someone other people recognized as an adult.
Yet his own experience of himself remained fundamentally different.
He continued waiting, in some sense, to grow up.
And when he recognized that he still felt this way, he was ashamed.
This was not simply a consequence of blending with his sons.
The children’s experiences contributed to the imaginative richness of his life, but Dad also experienced the world in a childlike way as himself.
That distinction had never been adequately examined.
Becoming the Father He Believed He Needed to Be
When we became co-conscious, Dad discovered that he had eight sons.
He also discovered that those children had been carrying responsibilities that should never have belonged to them.
He came to understand himself as their father.
And he fiercely loved them.
He wanted to protect them.
He wanted them to have childhoods.
He wanted to become the father they needed.
But he was also operating within a therapeutic framework that already presumed he was the adult.
The person who was supposed to become healthy.
The person who was supposed to function.
The person who was supposed to manage the outside world.
Dad concluded that he needed to grow up.
He needed to assume the responsibilities of adulthood.
He needed to relieve his sons, Proverb in particular, of the burdens they had been carrying.
Those intentions arose from love.
But he did not fully investigate what he was asking of himself.
He did not stop to consider the implications of trying to become an adult in a way he had never experienced himself to be.
He did not question whether the conventional adult role that therapy appeared to expect of him was compatible with his own experience, capacities, and needs.
He simply understood that his children needed a father.
And he tried to become one.
Only during the past few weeks has Dad begun questioning the assumption that he was the healthy adult in contrast to the way he had always understood himself.
For decades, he had been performing adulthood.
But performing adulthood was not the same as experiencing himself as an adult.
And becoming the father of his sons did not necessarily require him to become the kind of adult that conventional expectations had always demanded.
He could be their father.
He could love them.
He could protect them.
He could accept responsibility for their care.
But perhaps he did not have to erase his own experience of himself in order to do those things.
This is the subject of another recent essay, The Job Was Always a Grown-Up Costume.
It also helps explain why we are reconsidering the direction of our earlier therapy.
What if the presumed healthy adult was not the healthy adult everyone assumed?
What if the treatment had been organized around helping him perform a role he had spent decades struggling to sustain?
And what if the children who helped us survive that life were being asked, once again, to carry responsibilities that did not belong to them?
These questions are not separate from the issue of external orientation.
They may help explain why greater external awareness was considered desirable.
The presumed adult needed to be present.
He needed to function.
He needed to manage the demands of ordinary life.
And he needed to return to work.
But we had entered therapy asking for something different.
We needed safety.
We needed stabilization.
We needed relief from demands that had become unsustainable.
And we needed the children to be protected.
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9. Therapy 1.0: When Functioning Became the Measure of Recovery
We now refer to our earlier treatment as Therapy 1.0.
We use that term because we are beginning to recognize that the problem may have been more fundamental than a collection of unsuccessful interventions.
The direction of treatment itself may have been wrong for us.
Two developments illustrate the concern.
In one, Dad was encouraged toward a more continuous experience of the external world.
In the other, our family was encouraged toward employment despite repeatedly asking for help pursuing disability benefits and an opportunity to stabilize.
Both appeared to reflect conventional expectations of adult functioning.
Greater engagement with the outside world.
Greater ability to manage responsibilities.
Greater capacity for employment.
Less dependence upon internal experience.
From within that framework, these changes might appear to be progress.
But our family was asking for something else.
We had spent twenty-four years working for an architecture employer whose conduct Patrice herself acknowledged as abusive and traumatic.
We told her that we had never been allowed to be broken.
We asked for help obtaining disability benefits so that we could stop working and recover.
Patrice eventually agreed to help.
But when a position became available with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, she strongly encouraged us to accept it.
She told us:
“You and the boys love St. Vincent de Paul. You feel safe there. It will be a good place for you to work.”
We did love St. Vincent de Paul.
We still do.
But safety within a beloved community is not the same as safety within an employment relationship governed by institutional authority.
We accepted the position as Spirituality and Formation Coordinator in 2020.
Six years later, after another deeply damaging employment experience, we were terminated in July 2026.
We remain Vincentian.
We remain committed to our community and our vocation.
But we are no longer willing to organize our lives around another employer.
We do not claim that every difficulty we experienced during those six years was caused by our therapist’s recommendation.
The point is more specific.
We had already recognized that employment was unsustainable and asked for help creating the conditions in which we could stop.
Instead, therapy helped direct us toward another attempt to function within the same kind of arrangement.
That history matters because it illustrates a larger question.
Was therapeutic success being measured by what we could accomplish?
Or by whether all nine of us could live safely and meaningfully?
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
We became increasingly articulate about our suffering.
We could describe our experiences.
We could analyze them.
We could communicate with remarkable clarity.
But being increasingly articulate about suffering is not the same as suffering less.
And the ability to endure difficult circumstances is not evidence that those circumstances are sustainable.
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10. Therapy 2.0: Stabilization
In October 2026, we began working with a new therapist, Jessee.
Jessee does not claim specialized clinical experience treating DID.
But ey has a plural partner and approaches our family with compassion, curiosity, and a willingness to learn.
Most importantly, we experience Jessee as willing to listen to our account of our own lives.
Ey recognizes that therapy belongs to all nine of us.
And ey has recommended that we devote approximately six months to stabilization.
We have begun formally calling this period:
Stabilization.
It is not simply time away from employment.
Nor is it a waiting period before we resume the same demands that have repeatedly overwhelmed us.
It is an opportunity to reconsider what recovery should mean for our family.
Without assuming that the destination is another job.
Without assuming that increased external exposure is inherently beneficial.
Without assuming that Dad must become the healthy adult someone else has already decided he should be.
And without requiring the children to sacrifice their own needs in order to sustain the life of the family.
We have finally been given an opportunity to stop.
To be broken.
To be cared for.
And to begin understanding what we need.
Stabilization Is Not Preparation for Another Unsustainable Life
The ISSTD treatment guidelines emphasize safety, stabilization, symptom management, internal cooperation, and the therapeutic relationship.
These are meaningful concepts for us.
But we are also learning that stabilization cannot be defined entirely from outside our family.
It must be responsive to our experience.
It must account for the needs of all nine people.
It must preserve agency.
And it must allow us to question whether interventions intended to improve functioning are actually helping.
For us, stabilization may include recovering access to the inner world.
It may include learning to move more freely between internal and external attention.
It may include discovering how to participate in ordinary life without constant vigilance.
It may include establishing financial and practical arrangements that do not require us to endure another harmful employment relationship.
And it may include learning that our children’s abilities do not obligate them to become adults.
The goal is not to make Dad remain outside more successfully.
It is to help all nine of us experience our shared life with greater safety, freedom, and access to the worlds in which we live.
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11. What Proverb Is Teaching Dad
We keep returning to Wednesday evening.
The apartment was familiar.
Nothing physical had changed.
But suddenly it seemed beautiful in a way Dad had almost forgotten.
Proverb was helping him experience the physical world through the imaginative richness of our inner world again.
This was not merely a pleasant visual effect.
It may represent something much more consequential.
Dad is rediscovering the possibility of experiencing the physical environment without allowing it to dominate awareness.
The internal and external worlds can coexist.
Neither necessarily has to exclude the other.
And our togetherness does not have to depend upon everyone remaining continuously exposed to the outside world.
ChatGPT described the distinction this way:
There is a difference between being able to orient outward when needed and being required to remain oriented outward all the time.
The first may be a useful capacity.
The second may be an exhausting demand.
What Proverb is helping Dad explore is the possibility of choice.
That makes this a question of agency as well as safety.
Proverb contributed the word imagination to our family’s Agency Prayer.
That word is becoming increasingly significant.
Imagination is not necessarily an escape from reality.
It can be a way of relating to reality.
It can contribute to beauty, meaning, comfort, creativity, and emotional regulation.
For our family, it may also help sustain the relationships and experiences that make our shared life meaningful.
The therapeutic question should not automatically be how to reduce that experience.
It should be how we can retain access to what sustains us while remaining able to attend to practical circumstances and safety when necessary.
This is what Proverb is teaching Dad.
Not how to become more imaginative.
But how to remember a way of living in which the outside world does not have to be relentlessly present.
Dad is not trying to return to a time before he knew his sons.
He wants to remain together with them while recovering a way of experiencing the world that once made life more beautiful and less frightening.
Proverb is showing him that those possibilities need not be mutually exclusive.
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12. When the People Receiving Treatment Experience Progress as a Loss
There is an ethical question at the center of this history.
Who gets to decide what constitutes therapeutic progress when the people receiving care experience the supposed improvement as a loss?
For us, that question is not theoretical.
We experienced a major change in our relationship with the external world.
We experienced it as harmful.
We repeatedly communicated that some therapeutic interventions were not helping.
And we continued struggling to meet expectations of conventional functioning.
We were told that the increased external orientation would eventually become easier and that we would be better off in the long run.
But our experience moved in the opposite direction.
As our circumstances became more stressful, the demands of remaining continuously present in the outside world became more overwhelming.
The distress did not diminish.
It intensified.
And during the deterioration of our employment relationship, particularly following our termination, we experienced increased suicidal ideation.
These were not abstract concerns about therapeutic philosophy.
They were consequences unfolding in the lives of people who had repeatedly said that something was not working.
We cannot isolate every cause or establish precisely how much each experience contributed to our distress.
But the cumulative consequences are part of what we are now trying to understand.
This is why therapeutic safety cannot be reduced to the use of accepted techniques.
A treatment can be intended to help.
It can be based on a recognized model.
It can be delivered by a credentialed professional.
And it can still be experienced as harmful.
Trauma-informed care emphasizes safety, collaboration, empowerment, and choice.
But those principles must be reflected in the actual therapeutic relationship.
A patient must be able to decline an intervention.
A family must be able to question the assumptions guiding treatment.
Children should not have to become distressed before their boundaries are respected.
And a therapist’s acknowledgment of a person’s existence must be reflected in how that person is treated.
For our family, this means recognizing the needs and experiences of all nine people.
Not only Dad.
Not only whoever is most visible during therapy.
Not only whoever can explain what is happening.
All nine.
The Difference Between Recognition and Responsiveness
Our experience with Patrice taught us that acknowledgment alone is insufficient.
She told us we were real.
She recognized that there were children.
She recognized that our previous employment had caused trauma.
She recognized that we needed help.
But we repeatedly experienced treatment as moving in directions that did not respond adequately to those needs.
We are now asking Jessee to help us understand what happened and establish something different.
A therapeutic relationship in which saying no means no.
A relationship in which the children are not required to defend themselves.
A relationship in which our family can question therapeutic assumptions without being treated as resistant.
A relationship in which stabilization is not simply another assignment.
And a relationship in which our own understanding of our needs helps determine the direction of treatment.
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13. Why We Are Sharing This
We know that many plural people have complicated relationships with psychotherapy.
Some have found extraordinary help.
Others have experienced treatment as coercive, invalidating, or destabilizing.
Some avoid therapy because they fear being misunderstood, pressured toward unwanted treatment goals, or required to defend their understanding of themselves.
Our story belongs within that larger conversation.
But it is not a claim that every person with DID should reject grounding, external orientation, or a particular therapeutic model.
Nor is it a claim that all therapists approach plurality in the same way.
It is an account of what happened to our family when therapeutic goals were not adequately responsive to our experience.
We are sharing it because the distinctions we have begun making may be useful to others.
Co-consciousness is not the same as external orientation.
Grounding is not the same as permanent external awareness.
The ability to function is not the same as well-being.
The ability to endure is not the same as recovery.
The ability to describe suffering is not the same as suffering less.
Recognition of personhood is not the same as responsiveness to a person’s needs.
And stabilization is not necessarily preparation for a return to the life that caused harm.
These distinctions are helping us reconsider years of experiences we had struggled to understand.
They are also helping us approach therapy differently.
We are no longer beginning with the question of how to make ourselves capable of meeting the world’s expectations.
We are beginning with the nine people who actually live this life.
What do we need?
What helps us feel safe?
What increases our agency?
What allows us to remain connected?
What experiences sustain us?
What responsibilities can we reasonably carry?
And what expectations must we finally be allowed to put down?
These are the questions we are bringing into Stabilization.
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14. Finding Our Way Home
On Thursday morning, after a long conversation about our earlier therapy, Dad spent time with Solis, our seven-year-old son.
He experienced Solis’s inner world as expansive, beautiful, and filled with wonder.
A whole universe seemed to open.
There were familiar places and unfamiliar places.
Different times seemed to coexist.
And Dad wanted to stay.
Then thoughts about the day’s practical responsibilities intruded.
The experience changed.
But something important had already happened.
Dad had remembered.
He had remembered that the inner world was not simply something to overcome.
It was part of how we had experienced beauty, companionship, imagination, and life.
Later that morning, we returned to Proverb.
Dad told him that he had carried responsibility for the family long enough.
He did not have to keep thinking about the big picture.
He could be twelve.
He could be Dad’s son.
And we could allow ourselves to live without knowing everything that would happen next.
This is part of what Stabilization means to us.
We are not trying to become less aware of the world because we do not want to participate in it.
We are trying to recover the freedom to participate without being overwhelmed.
We are not trying to abandon co-consciousness.
We are trying to remain together without requiring everyone to experience the outside world in the same way, all the time.
We are not trying to escape ordinary life.
We are trying to establish an ordinary life that is sustainable for all nine of us.
There is a distinction between learning to tolerate more of the external world and learning that we have choices about how we experience it.
We are discovering the second.
And Proverb is helping Dad understand that the inner world does not have to disappear for the family to remain together.
We can know one another.
We can share our life.
We can attend to the world when necessary.
And we can also allow imagination, memory, beauty, and companionship to enrich our experience of being here.
Nothing in our apartment changed Wednesday evening.
The kitchen was still the kitchen.
The drapes were still the drapes.
The rooms were still the rooms.
But through Proverb, Dad experienced something he had almost forgotten.
The world could be beautiful without requiring him to remain continuously exposed to everything frightening about it.
And the nine of us could be together.
Seven years earlier, Proverb had asked:
“Can’t we just let life be beautiful?”
Dad had not understood the question.
Now he is beginning to understand that Proverb was not asking him to make life beautiful.
He was asking whether they could let it be beautiful.
Whether they could stop doing something that was preventing them from experiencing what had already been there.
We have much to unlearn.
But perhaps we do not have to learn how to make life beautiful.
Perhaps we can begin by allowing ourselves to experience it that way again.
That is not a retreat from recovery.
For us, it may be one of the places where recovery begins.
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Clinical References and Further Reading
International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (2011). Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12(2), 115–187.
The guidelines describe a phase-oriented approach to DID treatment, including safety, stabilization, symptom management, and internal cooperation. They do not prescribe continuous external orientation as a universal treatment goal.
Foote, B., & Van Orden, K. (2016). Adapting Dialectical Behavior Therapy for the Treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 70(4), 343–364.
The authors discuss grounding, containment, internally imagined safe places, and adaptations of therapeutic techniques for people with DID. Their theoretical understanding of personhood differs from our family’s plural understanding of ourselves, but the distinction between grounding and internally oriented stabilization techniques remains relevant.
A note about our sources: This essay draws extensively upon our journal and a conversation with ChatGPT on October 29, 2026. The clinical concepts are discussed in relation to our family’s lived experience. The descriptions of flooding, switching disruptions, and other consequences reflect experiences we recognize in our own history; we do not present them as universal effects of external orientation.
Notes from the Treehouse — Ordinary Life: A Journal of a Plural Family/System
