☢ Delta's Blog ☢

Therianism, Introjection, and Dissociation

03/20/26

Bit of a long one today. First, though, some updates.

After some discussion, we've decided to stop trying to use aliases since they weren't really doing anything useful. Obsidian has given us permission to use his real name, Kat was responding just as much to "Pinkie", and it seems like Blue likes that name more than what we'd been calling him internally anyways. Perhaps this is a risky move, but no more so than being open about our dissociative experience in the first place IMO.

We think we've established what is likely the final mental map and timeline, but of course its possible some parts are being so reclusive that none of us are aware of them. Between the nine of us, there are no significant gaps in memory. Luke is the one who remembers most of highschool and is the primary source of anxiety / suspicion, but as such he is not the other half of the former host; that would be Obsidian. It should've been obvious to me after Rin identified herself (and therefore disproved our previous theory on Obsidian's origin), but Salem is the one who figured it out. He says it makes sense because he was carrying a large amount of self-hatred before the split.

Overall, it's been getting a lot easier to have internal conversations lately, though half-verbal half-internal is still easier (i.e. one of us is talking out loud), and fully external via text is the easiest. All of us seem to come and go somewhat at random, but maybe there's patterns to it we just can't see yet.

Anyways, moving on to what I actually wanted to muse about today. I've been thinking a lot about our internal self-perceptions and how they differ from what we know to be literally true about the body. From my understanding this incongruency is very normal for dissociative people. My knee-jerk reaction to the system realization was to think maybe our therianism was just an extension of the dissociation, but after talking more to the others I don't really think this is the case.

So, let's back up a little bit and talk about that. For as long as any of us can remember, we have not perceived of ourself to be human; we are some type of feline. I don't believe this is the result of trauma because it started in toddlerhood; we simply identified ourself as being a cat as soon as we had any semblance of self. We could potentially pathologize this as being related to autism, but it has always felt much more like a spiritual understanding of our soul rather than the result of external dehumanization or internal delusion.

^{Of course, some callous, incurious individuals may think any kind of inhuman spiritual connection is a delusion, but I digress...}

In adolescence (circa 2012-ish) we had learned about therianism and otherkin identities, but didn't feel like we really fit in with that crowd, so we just shelved the whole thing for like a decade and embraced our identity as a furry instead. The furry community at large is already inclusive of non-human identities, so it wasn't necessary for us to feel like we had to use a more specific label or learn a new set of social rules & expectations; we could simply be ourself. It's a subculture built on being free to express yourself in your own way — including sexually — and has no pressure to be part of anything tight-knit, so it's been an invaluable part of our life. Having multiple fursonas or multiple versions of the same fursona, for example, has been a way to express our multiplicity without even fully realizing that's what we were doing.

In retrospect I think perhaps it was just that specific otherkin social circle we felt out of sorts with; we feel similarly about just about every kind of online community space we've come across, be it for neurodivergency or queer identity or whathaveyou. The way I view labels is that they are primarily social signifiers, so if I am disinterested in signalling my belonging to a specific social group, there is not much point in using their label. On the other hand, though, labels can provide a way of communicating to others in your life about your experiences, so it's not to say I never use them.

Like, don't get me wrong here. I completely understand the benefits of finding a space which gives you a sense of belonging and adapting to it; there is a lot of power in shared experience and shared language to describe that experience. I am simply not much of a joiner, and I am lucky that I already have supportive friends and family.

As such, though, I didn't really use the label "therian" for myself for a long time and still hesitate to be very vocal about it, because I do not really consider myself to be part of that community or the broader alterhuman community (a word that I've said before I dislike despite the intentions of its coinage). It is a very personal thing for me. They also seem to have a lot of well-established social conventions and such that are simply not a good fit for me to be a part of. This is also how I feel about the plural community, FWIW, and why I don't use that label either. It's a personal choice, not a judgement on the people who do feel they belong there.

So, all of this to say that "therian" can be used to adequately describe my experience despite me not at all being involved in therian spaces. I have dreams and other unexplainable feelings of what I used to be in the past compared to how I am in this life and this form. And this is true for all parts of me. So, rather than the dissociation causing the therianism, I think rather the therianism has effected the way the dissociation presents.

It creates some interesting incongruencies for specific parts, though. Topaz, for example, percieves himself internally as an ancient dragon, but whereas a dragon alter in a different system may have this perception while understanding that they are "really" a human, Topaz rather understands that he is "really" a snow leopard, same as the rest of us. We all know physically, however, that the body is human; none of us have any confusion about that, just some dysmorphia. Similarly, Rin perceives herself to be a vampire, but also has an understanding that she is "really" a feline, too. Many of us have both a self-perception of what we "look like" internally, as well as a self-perception of how we want to represent ourselves via fursona, but our sense of our spiritual identity is unquestioningly unified, and we all understand the differences between these and our physical body. It's one of the things we all have in common.

This is perhaps different from how an animal alter in a human system may experience it, but I would guess there's a lot of variation in that experience, too. I'd be curious to talk to others about it and get their perspectives.

As a final thing to touch on here, we (specifically me) were talking to one of our other dissociative friends recently about introjection more broadly, which animal and mythical alters are a part of. We had previously thought that this term only applied to real people and fictional characters, but it makes sense that it applies to any external source.

I had said in a previous post that I'm not a fictive, but after learning more about those specifically it seems like I do qualify as such, but without restating everything I've already said about my feelings on labels, I don't really want to call myself one. Our subconscious simply latched on to some aspirational qualities found in a character from a show we happened to be really into when we needed a new part, so it became the outline for me. I don't feel at all connected to the "source" character, though; we are quite different (I'm not a robot, for one thing). It's just convenient for me to use his name to distinguish myself from the others. This doesn't stop Salem from giving me shit about it and calling me a Church kinnie, though LOL.

System Updates + Some Explanations

03/14/26 (Edited 03/15/26)

Happy pi day! We are in the middle of a very unproductive spring break currently — well unproductive on what we should be working on; we've almost truly 100%'d BugSnax. Kind of expected given our poor mental state lately tbh. Big traumaversary and my split date is right around the corner too lol.

Anyways, despite Salem's initial confidence that there were only six of us, perhaps unsurprisingly this is not the case; we've confirmed the existence of two more.

One of these is Pink / Pinkie, another child part that we discovered to be separate from Blue, and who is responsible for the times when Blue seemed to be able to talk despite typically being nonverbal. Her relationship to Blue overall seems to mimic the relationship we had with our sister in childhood.

Pinkie seems to hold most of our positive childhood memories, though she reports that she remembers "some sad stuff too." She does not fully understand what's going on but she wants to do her best to be helpful, so that's what's important. Salem was able to have a surprisingly lengthy conversation with her yesterday and instructed her to keep looking out for the four-year-old.

The other part is yet unnamed as of writing this. I'm hesitant to draw too much attention to him because he is the one who cleared the website and deleted our social media side accounts after a panic attack last weekend. We suspect that he is the other half of the part that Salem splintered off from in 2017. I am unable to talk to him but Salem was able to briefly when he became triggered again later this week. He seems to have significant influence over Salem when active, and Red will attack him when he fronts.

We also have reason to believe that he is both who pulled us out of therapy last year (which I had believed to be Salem) and the "anxiety voice" that Salem previously believed to have been me despite me denying it. Just goes to show how useless finger pointing is in all this, huh? lol

He seems to be aware of the system and is upset that we have discovered and are talking about it. Hopefully we will be able to establish better communication with him and ease some of his anxieties, after which we will introduce him properly if he is comfortable with it. Until then, we will respect his desire for privacy.

Other than this, there is likely at minimum at least one other part (possibly a teen), because 3 years of our life are still "missing". It also unclear if there is a second, younger part similar to Red or if what I'm picking up on are simply Red's memories. I try to avoid drawing too much attention to him, too, until we are more stable — and not to point more fingers after saying so is unproductive, but some of us should also avoid intentionally provoking him.

That's all for today. Here's hoping we survive the second half of our final semester of grad school.

Update: As of this morning, Rin has identified herself as being separate from who we are now going to refer to as "Black", and has decided that she wants her name to be known as well. She prefers feminine pronouns and perceives herself as a preteen.

We found a new therapist who seems promising. We did intake with her yesterday and it went really well; I think she can help us work through this and she's offered us a reduced rate until we have stable employment. I do the budgeting and while it will be tight I think we can make it work. I mean, we kind of have to.

Salem is having second thoughts about posting about things publicly, and also about going back to therapy, but I still feel like blogging is helpful to me — and therapy is necessary so we do not do anything drastic again; I've caught us more than once planning another attempt. We're turning 30 this year and some parts are unhappy about it. A long time ago we had plans to end it on our birthday and so the thought creeps back in sometimes. We always try to have a really good birthday so that we don't do that. I need to make sure that it doesn't happen, and Salem doesn't want to die either so this is a lot of why he's agreed we need help.

But still. He was cooperating for awhile mostly because he felt motivated to draw again, but now that we're past the creative spark he's pushing back on it pretty hard and retreating into the "you're not real none of this is real and you just need to go away". He's agreed not to pull out of therapy unless at minimum I give consent for it but it's hard to take him at his word for it. There's just so little trust between us that it's hard to work with him even when he's "playing along".

The way I see it, it's just kind of an Occam's razor situation. Just OCD + psychosis doesn't explain the memory loss or the internal voices or the sense of intrusion on someone else's body or the fact that I feel separate from him. I'm happy to pretend that we are the same; in fact it's necessary for keeping us safe that people don't recognize what's going on on the inside. But I've accepted that we have to address our needs independently if we want to get effective help and he's not ready to do that. He's refusing to talk to me again but I'm already public so I'm going to keep posting. He might delete it later though if he's still in a bad mood.

On Colours and Symbols

02/23/26 (Edited 02/24/26)

We've always been someone who thrives on making cross-categorical associations, so colour coding was one of the most obvious things we could do to differentiate ourselves visually — and something we had already kind of been doing. Like, hi, it's me, "alternative palette Salem" who has green fur and red eyes as opposed to the "normal" purple fur with yellow eyes LOL. Topaz ofc has his own fursona that he made in high school which uses a lot of teal.

Purple and teal are Salem and Topaz's favourite colours, respectively, though they both like the other one. Literally the day after we graduated high school, finally free of a restrictive dress code, Topaz bleached and dyed our hair turquoise.

It's hard for me to really feel like I have my own preferences, but I guess my favourite colour is lime green because it's what I was instantly drawn too. I think "green Salem" was a soft way for me to feel like I could be seen without intruding too much on Salem's public image. I don't think I feel that strongly about the rest of the fursona, and don't really feel like I need my own, but maybe that will change as we continue to explore our existence. Honestly it's just a coincidence that green is also the colour of my namesake — but maybe that's part of why I like him.

Red seemed like the obvious choice for, well, "Red" — though I also considered it for myself at some point. He didn't reject it, so we went with that. The other two we flip-flopped about for awhile before settling on magenta/pink and blue, which are also colours all of us like.

Then symbols. We felt like it would be useful if there was also a non-colour visual shorthand we could use for each person, because our doodles can get a little messy. The symbol to use for me was obvious: upright triangle ▲.

For the others besides Salem, there are four of them and we've always been fond of playing card suits, so it worked out nicely. Topaz is a diamond ♦ because he's named after a gem, Kitty is a spade ♠ because the ace of spades is her favourite playing card (she drew a self portrait as the Queen of Spades, once), "Blue" is a heart ♥ because he is, in some ways, at the "heart" of us, and "Red" is a club ♣ because its reflective of his nature.

Originally we were representing Salem with the skull that we often draw on our fursona's shirt in the comics and a radioactive ☢ symbol on our Tumblr, but we felt this wasn't quite abstract enough and was also pushing up some hard feelings about him insisting that he is the "main one". But we came up with a solution everyone seems to be happy with for that, too.

As we've been trying to be more aware of each other's actions, much like it became apparent to me that Topaz was separate from Salem, it's also become apparent that he can be just as active as the two of us when he feels like it. So, between his symbol being a diamond ♦ and mine being an upright triangle ▲, it made visual sense to use an inverted triangle ▼ for Salem. I decided to use the filled-in triangle ▲ rather than the actual delta symbol Δ to keep us all visually coherent and with easy-to-access ASCII characters.

It's also worth mentioning that it's a little funny how we've used the radioactive symbol ☢ — which is six triangles — and the biohazard symbol ☣ — which visually resembles our mental map — for various things over the years.

On Names

02/21/26 (Edited 02/24/26)

Originally, we were referring to ourselves by more formal titles rather than distinct names, but this was causing some internal friction and we also realized with more investigation that each of us is a little more multifaceted than I'd assumed at first. I chose the name Delta because the AI fragment analogy makes sense to me, and I like the other things the symbol stands for. I'm not a fictive or anything like that.

Salem feels most connected to our outward presentation and fursona, so he took that name to distinguish himself from "Matt", the collective sum of our parts.

Matt / Matthew is the name we took on in high school when we transitioned from FtM publicly. It is our legal name and what we use for IRL interactions, and is what we would have been named if we were AMAB. We used it openly online for a few years (2015~2019) before deciding we preferred to use the alias Salem instead to keep some distance between our online presence and our real-life presence. We don't mind if people know our real name, but we don't like being addressed as such by strangers (even IRL).

Kitty prefers to go by our middle school nickname, which is derived from our birthname, because she does not feel attached to "Matt" as an identity. Our birthname never really felt "correct", which we would later realize is because we are transgender, but "Kitty" is the first name she really chose for herself, so she feels an attachment to it.

Topaz named himself when the body was 17, well before I gave myself a distinct one. It's named after our favourite December birthstone, blue topaz.

The other two have names as well, obviously, but they are much older than the rest of us (chronologically). "Red" named himself after rejecting the one I gave him, but would not elaborate on its origin and does not want to be directly addressed. "Blue" is too young to understand any of this, so I gave him a name, but we will also refer to him as an alias for privacy.

Aliases upon aliases upon aliases... when does it end? Lol