Why are multiples multiple?

There are two main ways of thinking when it comes to the reasons why people are multiple. Some multiples believe that they are just naturally so, that there is no 'cause' as such. The other consideration is that multiplicity is the result of an innate psychological defence mechanism being triggered by experiencing trauma at an early age.

Natural Multiplicity - For many multiples, their multiplicity is something which is entirely natural to them. They often don't have any specific history of trauma in their past that could be said to have been be a determining factor in their multiplicity. For them, there has always been more than one person.

There is a growing online movement of people who consider themselves to be naturally multiple. These groups have no desire to be defined by the narrow constraints of psychiatry. They have no will or need to change their existence by fusing everyone into a whole 'individual' by the process known as integration. Being multiple is just how life is, and they want to simply get on with living.

Psychiatry - The approach taken by psychiatry considers the state of being plural to be a mental disorder which needs to be addressed and put right. They believe that severe and enduring childhood trauma is usually the cause of the original personality fracturing, or at least a major factor. This mechanism is described well in lots of places, so we won't give a description of it here.

We, The Gang believe that the main reason that we are multiple is probably somewhere in between. Do the two above models really need to be mutually exclusive? We experienced early trauma and experienced further trauma throughout our childhood, but that may not exclusively be the reason that we are multiple- maybe we were destined to be multiple anyway. Even just the measure of how traumatic a given experience is can be very subjective to different people. The truth is that we may never know why we are multiple.

March 2023