Plurality as Embodied, Part 2: We are our body
posted on May 5, 2025
Over and over we push back when people refer to our body as "the body" when speaking to us. It is our body. Yes, we share it, but it's more than that. All three of the us identify with and as our body. Even when each of us remembers something differently or interprets memories differently, our body has still encoded that memory for all of us. Even when each of us experiences physical activity, body cues, interoception, and pain differently, each of us is still our body.
One of the reasons it took a long time for us to understand how switching works for us is that there is never a sense of disconnect from our body. None of us looks down and goes, oh, that's not mine. It's always "mine" even when it doesn't "look right." None of experiences our body as a vessel that we pilot, in the way the "your body is a car" metaphor implies.
Until we started knowing what cues to look for, it was actually pretty difficult to understand when we were switching and how it worked.
Inner world isn't our world
Yes, we have one. It is ephemeral, and we only remember what happens there clearly if we're all focusing on it, or whoever is fronting does. Otherwise, the memories are more like recalling a dream.
None of us "go to our inner world" in a literal sense. It is an experience we all opt into with a shared focus. Yes, we can interact with each other there, and it has a landscape, areas, places, rooms, and things like that, things that we're not always in control of without conscious work.
But switching is not "trading places" for us, and so, the Chameleons who aren't fronting don't necessarily "go inside". Therefore, if we're trying to figure out who's fronting, then, “Let’s look in headspace to see who’s not in there” does not work for us.
- Front is not a place for us so much as a type of directed focus
- Our inner world is liminal, ephemeral, and not so visually oriented. We perceive each other primarily by scent and touch.
So our life is not inner world focused. It can be for other systems, but not us. That means a lot of figuring things out meant fronting, being embodied, being in our body, and taking ownership of our body as belonging to each of us, and all of us collectively. The way Brick learned about his trauma -- the trauma that's unique to him, from headspace, before our syscovery -- was by stumbling into triggers that caused mental and somatic flashbacks for him while he was fronting. This is why we say inner world memories for each of us individually is like piecing together a dream; the bulk of that lesson was from this journey he had with us. This is also how we figured out why he seemed to unintentionally switch with enyo more often than Arini did -- surprise, it's instincts and reflexes from his trauma and our trauma! There was also a lot of, "why did I say that?" and, "why did I do that?" when he was experiencing all of these things.
Our experiences, our relationships, our memories, they are all embodied. This is why we don't say "the body." We say "our body." Not only do all us Chameleons claim it; all us Chameleons are it. That's why for us, switching is not a process of trading places. It's a process of becoming each other.
Switching is not only a mental process
enyo was so used to being the default fronter that they didn't understand what not fronting felt like, what switching felt like. He'd encountered so much literature about it being an experience of dissociating and getting caught up later, with memories of being in another place in between. Only once we started talking to other plurals did we realize it could be different.
None of us experience a like “blink and I’m here a few hours later” kind of thing. Each of us becomes each other, or combinations of each other, or blends, temporarily fuses, or co-fronts. So, if enyo has been fronting for a while, and Brick is starting to switch in, they might notice his thought patterns, vocal affect, and posture changing. It can be slow or it can be fast. It can be sudden. It can be spotted by other bodies before we've processed that it's happening. But none of us actually goes anywhere. There are no barriers between us.
Those switching guides that talk about disconnecting from your body or dissociating do not work for us. Down the line, we learned that the your-body-is-a-car metaphor doesn't really work for us unless you can wrap your head around the reality that we are also the car, always, no matter who is driving it.
This isn't to say that there's nothing mental about our plurality. But the work we've done to get where we are has happened mostly outside of our head. We used to (and sometimes still do) communicate via discord chat so that we could understand each other. We've had to pay close attention to how our perceptions and sensory experiences of the outside world differ. We've taken lots of time -- literal months -- to develop front anchors and switch cues that are material and kinesthetic. We had to figure out how to link the intellectual associations we had with one another to all of these physical things.
We'll go into this in further detail in part 3.
Future Reading
Feathers Guide to Fronting and Switching
Part 3: How we switch (in the works)