I’m just going to write thus fucking article and then edit it for clarity a bit later. New alters coming forward doesn’t mean that you’ve failed, either as a host or a protector. I’ve been told by a few people that new alters coming forward are not new. They’ve been there all along, and they are just coming forward now because they feel safe. Granted, there are other situations where new alters come forward in order to protect the rest of the system in stressful situations. This is an opinion piece, and i’m going to say that upfront. Please don’t take this as a professional piece. In November alone, we had twenty-five new alters come forward. In the past month (March) we’ve had six. With everything that’s gone on, this has been pretty stressful. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve failed. It means that we needed different alters from further back in the headspace to handle things.

We are a polyfragmented system. That means that we have a hundred or more alters. (In the system, we actually have a thousand!) Being polyfragmented also means that you have alters who have alters of their own, or sub-systems. We have both. Originally though, when we started documenting our system, we only had twenty alters. In the year and a half that has followed, we have uncovered and gained new alters in huge sweeps –uncovering groups of twenty to thirty alters in a single month. For a long time, I thought that this was just because I was really stressed and freaked out and that it meant that Io-host had failed to protect the others in the system. It wasn’t until I posted about it on a couple of social media sites that I realized this wasn’t a failure.