• See intro post for pronouns

Collectively They/Them (See pinned post for specific members' pronouns)

Plural system of 40+ (though only a few of us will post), mostly introjects/fictives, looking to have fun and relax!


🎡 Another general plural-related question, though this time with a little bit to do with autism as well. But has anyone else found that it's harder for some of their system members to express emotion when talking out loud than others? For example, Fidget and I can emote rather well when talking, but then there are a few others who have difficulty expressing tone in their voice when talking out loud. We're autistic and I'm going to assume it may have something to do with that, but also we're all rather expressive when talking internally, so this sudden difficulty in expressing mood is jarring to them. Also worth mentioning that one of us has only started talking out loud yesterday, so it's possible she just needs to practice at it.

If anyone has any advice for us, that would be greatly appreciated!


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in reply to @HappyCamperSystem's post:

Autism... carries you away. Or rather, lets you get carried away. If you're focusing on practice, you'll be able to get it right relatively easily - and practice is also useful for testing out the different voices you can use, and finding one that you like. But you can't practice the habit of not getting carried away... you can only develop that habit in real situations, unfortunately.

Not autistic, but ADHD, which comes with rejection sensitive dysphoria, which does affect how much we "allow" ourselves to be emotinal/vocal in meatspace.

Yes, there are definitely system members who don't emote well, or even talk, when they front. Part of it, I think, is some people have "issues" they need to sort out. Sunny is incredibly anxious and scared, even though there is no danger anymore, so she can't do much more than be frozen in place. So we need to work with her and get her to understand she's safe and trust us.

Another theory I have is that some people aren't as used to driving the body, so emoting/tones/speaking is difficult because they just don't know how to operate this thing. For "the body" in this context, I am including part of the brain, because there is some sort of interface/filter between what you think and what you do. Because of the ADHD, the body deals with auditory processing issues, which means our hearing is pretty much perfect, but speech being converted into words our brain recognizes just...doesn't always happen. And I, as the host, am really aware of this issue and what I can do to work with/around it. But the others really don't, since they don't front as much. And that can be remedied by them fronting more (or co-fronting? and taking notes) and learning how to work the body better.

So maybe your tone/speech/emoting issue is rooted in the fact that there's some (metaphorical) button or knob the fronter has to hit to make it work, which you don't need to do in headspace, but since you (the host, presumably) do it so much, you don't even think about needing to do it anymore. But the others don't even know they're supposed to be doing it.