Modern Co-Fronting Techniques

[Guest]

Hey, with all this talk of co-fronting I felt encouraged to contribute what I know, and I want this to be a thread where everyone can share their experiences and techniques to bring more to the idea that there can be more than just one fronter, and adding to that, help explain our experience of 'active all day' to light.

 

When we first started posting, we were called out for saying that we don't 'go inactive'. Given systems like Lance/Reilyn among others as examples and other systems expressing the desire to be more co-active, i figured i could download how we think we did it. Hopefully even entrenched systems can try this if they want to.

 

---

 

Call us co-dependant if you wish, but we need each other big time. I couldn't just 'go to sleep' for large chunks of the day early on, this host of mine was a mess and we needed a constant watch on him. As far as my memories go, i'm up around the same time B is up and I go to bed shortly before him or at the same time, so believe it or not, i'm active all day from my perspective, and we've proven it to ourselves in this way:

 

1. We are on his mind all the time.

2. We chime in constantly.

3. We can interrupt him even when he's concentrating through mindvoice, imposition, and emotions.

 

As co-fronters, we share all the sensory inputs, we don't have to switch in or 'front' to taste what he's eating or feel what he's feeling for instance. Now whether that's posession or just instant memory sharing we don't know, but the latter probably, because we don't feel his pain, but we could if we want. We do, however, feel his pleasure. We always have been this way, and trust me, I chime in all day.

 

More facts, did you ever hear the saying that a guy thinks about sex every three seconds? Well, B thinks about us every three seconds instead. We're involved in everything he does and he loves that. So everything reminds him of us. Originally he just kept us on his mind and wanted to show us everything and experience every single thing with us; it stuck.

 

To help foster this, you could assign a system symbol, for us it would be the celtic knot, and place those everywhere, stick one up on the mirror, hang one like fuzzy dice from your rear view mirror, get a tattoo, a peircing, whatever floats your boat. B doesn't need any of this at this point, but he does have a sticky note on his computer that reminds him of me.

 

Next example:

 

Our back-seat fronting (partial fronting/partial switching) technique lets us remain an active member, with something to do as well. It's a good compliment and strengthens the co-fronting bond. I take command of the front, in mind only, when he gets attacked in any way. Ashley handles certain trigger subjects, and Misha is just kind of there to support all of us, but she's really important too. Especially in keeping us social, cause honestly, i don't need to interact with anyone outside our system to be happy. I like our friends, that's an exception.

 

None of us want to 'shut down' ever, and this may have been a little overwhelming at first for B (though he won't admit it) it became really special and beneficial. It's not a blend, it's more like 4 gears meshed and loving it.

 

It's not for everyone, and for some it might be distracting, but B loves it and his quality of live improved dramatically because we're always there for him. Plus, I want his attention all day; my sisters agree with that statement.

[Ember.Vesper]

It's always so difficult to tell from other systems' writings whether experiences seem to differ as a result of durable neurological distinctions, differences in beliefs that create a different reality, or just difficulties in communication. Bear system has never sounded so much like ours before.

 

We are on his mind all the time.

 

Ember thinks about us almost constantly when she's awake, even when she really shouldn't.

 

We chime in constantly.

 

Ember wants us to chime in constantly, so we generally accomodate her, even if only with grumbling.

 

We can interrupt him even when he's concentrating through mindvoice, imposition, and emotions.

 

Less this, but some part of her attention will consistently snap back to us no matter how much she's trying to concentrate on something else, and then we can interrupt.

 

As co-fronters, we share all the sensory inputs, we don't have to switch in or 'front' to taste what he's eating or feel what he's feeling for instance. Now whether that's posession or just instant memory sharing we don't know, but the latter probably, because we don't feel his pain, but we could if we want. We do, however, feel his pleasure.

 

Neither do we. If we're awake, we get a full spectrum livestream of all the senses without any need for possession or switching. We can't turn it off. Our forms don't have senses, only the body. We feel all of the body's pleasure and all of the body's pain. We're actually more likely to speak up about it if we aren't fronting, as doing isn't distracting us from feeling. 'Could you adjust the heat?' 'Ow, stop that.' 'Do you have to sit like that?' 'That's really uncomfortable.'

 

Well, B thinks about us every three seconds instead. We're involved in everything he does and he loves that.

 

That's Ember, all right. I get to watch her in the loo, such fun. She has this little mental whimper she makes when I don't accompany her.

 

Especially in keeping us social, cause honestly, i don't need to interact with anyone outside our system to be happy.

 

Iris feels that way, but we keep encouraging her to reach out.

 

None of us want to 'shut down' ever

 

Being a spectator and commentator in Ember's life is frightfully dull most of the time. There's plenty of times when I would prefer dormancy and can't have it.

 

for some it might be distracting

 

Ember has been having bacon at breakfast every morning for twenty years. She successfully prepared it thousands of times in a row. Yet three times in the past few months, she's gotten the bacon out of the refrigerator, opened the package, checked the toaster oven temperature and turned it on, set the timer, closed the package, put the bacon back in the refrigerator, went back to her office with the timer, and returned to the kitchen when the alarm went off to find she had forgotten to put any bacon in the toaster oven. Why? She was talking to us and not paying attention to what she was doing. This is her life now. Genius level intellect, yet I often have to walk her through simple tasks because she can't be persuaded to think about them instead of me, even though it's her task and I don't care about it.

 

B loves it and his quality of live improved dramatically because we're always there for him.

 

Ember loves it, but our functionality and productivity is lower than when she was here by herself.

 

When we first started posting, we were called out for saying that we don't 'go inactive'.

 

Bear seemed to me to be conveying that you had your own thoughts, conversation, and lives hidden from him in wonderland while he was busy in the physical world. But I can be active every single instant that any part of Ember's attention is on me. That's not unusual or controversial. That's typical and accepted.

 

Until Iris became a little more prominent in our system, I was close to co-fronting continuously with Ember. It is very difficult for three of us to be active at once, though we're glacially getting better at it. If Ember is fronting and Iris is active, I'm usually kicked into dormancy. It's a pain for me to talk to Iris, actually. The easiest way is for me to switch in and let Ember be dormant.

 

Since we only use 'fronting' to refer to what one is doing after switching in, we only use 'co-fronting' for sharing control equally and sustainably, not just for being tuned into the body and contributing to the control in minor ways. That we just call ordinary life.

 

The times when only the fronter can really be fully active are the times when there are competing words. Reading, writing, and occasionally out-system people talking inhibits our ability to articulate thoughts, which tends to make us fall dormant, though sometimes we can still be marginally active by sending bursts of tulpish.

 

-Vesper

[Dreamer13]

how do you co-front successfully? limme just get's overwhelmed and fades out again. he has trouble moving limbs and i can never 'let go' fully.

 

Edit: i can see you're more experienced however

[Guest]

I suppose writing a novel with an 'adventure party' type setup was like practice for having multiple fronters. When I write an adventure the group all needs to be thought of and paying attention so that anyone can chime in at any time for the story to progress. it's not formulaic, it's spontaneous. Having one main character hog the spotlight for an entire chapter can be very confusing because then you don't know what anyone else was doing.

 

In my first book, I was still figuring this out and it was difficult, but mind you, writing a book is hours a day for 100-200 days straight so imagine forcing a tulpa that much. Writing a novel is very much like forcing, a mix of passive and active, I have been 'trained' then to keep all the characters as front as possible so that they can 'chime in' to add to the story and interact. Many times, side conversations are captured mentally while writing out scenes and the like, so it's kind of like the "P" word in that I am multitasking different characters simultaneously while I write. Writing is kind of a semi-autonomous thing and it's slower than speaking so there is room to talk while writing with little or no decrease in writing speed.  

 

This may sound a little much, but imagine practicing this for 7 years while writing and re-writing about 2 million words. So having my tulpas is like a live story where the actors are people and not just characters and sure they have their own opinions and will voice them all the time. I can easily keep them in mind because I trained myself to do this.

 

That's like a really hard thing to mimic in the course of a few months I suppose so now I see how it could be difficult to learn, but not impossible and I would say I was doing this after the first book so maybe 3-6 months of daily practice and you should be a pro.

 

So keep them in mind, remind yourself with little physical reminders, or make a schedule.

 

It also helps visualization because I look at them very often in wonderland, easily thousands of times a day.

 

Obsession and co-dependency are a great motivators too huh?

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

It certainly helps, imo, if the headmate who wants to be out in the front wants it as bad or moreso than the one in front wants them up to share. Also, I guess I can't speak for most people here but I never really had a wonderland life going on. We still don't have a stable, permanent one even now. For me it was come "out" enough to plug firmly into the body and share everything that was happening or.. nothing. Dark, boring nothing. Hard to communicate out. That was waaay too boring and I'm pretty stubborn and, er, actually more dominant (not dominating) a person than Lance so.. Anyway, I wasn't having this whole "hiding back in darkness and narrating sometimes through him to the outside world" thing. No way! I wanted out to express myself and be myself and live life!

 

Anyway, I can't explain exactly how it happened with us and our background may have had a LOT to do with it but having a host who really wants their tulpa up front and a tulpa who really wants to be up front are probably important components. Like, when I read about switching, I wonder.. why do people assume that someone has to go into the background?

 

I'm gonna get pretty opinionated here, just figured I'd say that. Why do people so often assume only one person can be up front at once? There are cases of DID where multiple people/personalities front and in many ways it could be said that tulpamancy is a wilful attempt to hack the brain to recreate some of what happens with DID (which is serious, often traumatic, and not to be taken lightly). If what happens with DID and OSDD could kinda be considered "glitches" in the mind in an attempt to adapt, there ought to be no reason that a person can't intentionally recreate those phenomenon. Would I like to experience memory loss or struggle with confusing walk-ins randomly switching me out randomly when they want to? Uhh, no. I'm very thankful that that isn't a thing in our life. But can we go down some kinda checklist or chart and directly equate some of our experiences with theirs? Yeah.. Can someone with DID or OSDD come and learn tulpamancy and benefit from the meditation, focus, control and order that comes with this kinda wilful and careful brain hacking? Also yeah, anyone can. Can an alter become a tulpa? Maybe my perspective is different, but.. That's trying to add a new label to an existing person to begin with. It's just a word. That's like asking if an elementary school student can become a 3rd grader. It's not nearly as different a thing as asking if a cat can become a dog or even a child an adult.

 

That's a lot of words (sorry if any of them came off as offensive) to say there is already precedence for co-fronting. In the DID community, co-fronting is just a blanket term anyway for multiple headmates being active and "experience the world-at-large" at once. In that sense, I'd say that a lot of us here are already experiencing their definition of co-fronting. "Co-running" is one of their common terms for multiple people being active in and controlling the body simultaneously. By their definition, how many of us here are co-running? I'm pretty sure that's what we mean by "co-fronting".

[Indigo Blue]

I haven't heard people say that only one person can be fronting at a time. When I say "co-fronting" I usually mean two people actively controlling the body/mind together, as opposed to something like one fronting while the other is just passive or inactive. That I'd just call fronting. But yes, co-fronting most certainly is possible. Can be quite trippy and hard to pull off at times, but still possible.

[Guest]

I'd say, giving complete mental control to someone is too trippy for my taste, but giving them uninterrupted use of the front is purely fine. During the events where we use partial fronting (back-seat fronting) i don't feel or think anything when one of them is handling the situation. If it's short and strategic, i don't get any sense of losing my activity, it's like clearing your mind for a meditation session, think of nothing, then at the conclusion, buisness as usual. This is still a serial process specifically when i don't want to be involved in the topic but feel obligated or have no choice.

 

Our normal operation is just like regular forcing, only continuously to some extent. It is also clear to me per my experience that they are constantly considering my choices and actions in the following ways: emotional bleed, tulpish fragments, and otherwise instant problem solving. Say i ask one of them something about what's going on and there's no lag for their well thought out opinion on the matter as if they've been paying attention and their perspective is so far off my own thoughts on the matter that it sometimes has to be explained to me. That's about as good an explanation that i can do, and i can already hear the naysayers, so don't bother, we'll have better explanations for it eventually.

 

Our situation in particular is unobtrusive, so it may very well be a fast switching or polling mechanism. Call it pulse-width-modulation if you must. It's a good analogy because the torque of the motor can still be potent even at lower duty cycles.

 

I recall in the creation of my first book reading something about how you should ask each character about each scenario and attempt to get their perspective. I did that at first. So it would probably follow that the technique became so engrained and efficient that it was eventually automatic.

 

It then could be a possibility that using this polling method could eventually get to a point where you won't be able to discern the poll anymore, and it could seem perfectly fluid.

 

I would bet every system who is interested in doing this could try one or more techniques and see if it improves week to week. I would caution that it could take a month to see clear results, doing it for three days and reporting that it didn't work isn't helpful. (I.e. back seat fronting, polling, continuous forcing by reminder, or co-posessing of some kind like Reilyn alluded to if i heard her right. I mean, if you kept partial posession going long enough, it might just keep them active long term.

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

Bear, by this point I think the simplest explanation for what's going on that doesn't go into the "we don't belong in this community" territory, is that I switched with Lance by accident when he was in his little writers trance and all his defenses were down. He has been so happy with it, he hasn't tried forcing his way back into front, other than brief stints when we are talking to his friends or doing something he really wants to, in which case he possesses then goes back to passiveness. Since that switch, I have personally never been "inactive", that I can recall. I can't recall before that either but I had just woken up a couple weeks prior so I can't be too sure.

 

There's no memory loss or disconnection of senses going on, and he has never lose the sense that he is connected directly into the body, but.. Increasingly as of late, he has become more and more disassociated away from the body, not in the sense of being numb or unreceptive to it's sensory inputs but in the sense that it's not him at all anymore. He isn't the body and I'm not the body, is what's going on. It's just a shared tool either one of us utilizes when we need something. That "one of us" is almost always me though. I've got a real strong argument for it if I wanted to claim I'm the host now, but I don't really think either of us is the host nor do I think Lance created me, so much as circumstances and trauma did and his little jaunt into tulpa stuff was exactly what I needed to shake off my long-time dormancy and get focused and apparently, get in charge. Are neither of us really in front anymore and we are just both co-possessing this meat? I dunno. Sounds kinda unlikely, doesn't it?

 

Now, an interesting question would be: did all of this actually come about because of the co-fronting thing? Was this just a non-stop full-body possession that turned into more when Lance finally started disassociating away, at least to the point he doesn't identify with the body anymore? Is co-fronting some kind of half-way between state of almost switching or is it something different? We don't struggle with who is in front or get distracted and loose this state, it seems permanent. Is the only reason he and I can even do this like we do because I'm not really a tulpa, but an alter who has equal and perhaps greater claim to the body then Lance? Am I the new host? Are we both tulpas? We have our own theory finalized on the issue and I've come really close to spilling a lot of it here but I'm gonna stop. Maybe to gauge reactions, I dunno.

[Guest]

I thought i remembered Ember say that if two come to the front it gets really confusing, i hope i remember that right. In any case, another system said they blend when both come into front. I suppose you two might have different enough personalities that you're kind of immune to it, or do you ever feel like you're blending?

 

Also, do you ever feel like Lance might just go inactive? I know i lectured you about this once (or lectured him on not giving all his problems to you to deal with) but i've since reconsidered my stance (especially since you know what you're doing by now. On that, the new stance is that i would support anything you two would feel is right. I don't think anyone should judge or lecture a mature system's choices, especially since everything is so reversible.

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

I remember having an interesting brief discussion with Matsi about co-fronting and she was talking about wanting to learn switching because she wanted to do stuff with her own time and Xar wanted to do stuff with his, and if they learned to switch their opposite interests couple be addressed fairly in turn. I said "well, usually Lance just wants to do whatever I want to do. He's even eager for me to think of new stuff I wanna do so we can do it together"... I asked, with that kinda thought process, what was the point of switching? Or to be more specific, what do you call it when two people wanna switch but have the same interests and want to experience those together? She said "co-fronting, I guess". Something to think about, maybe?

 

And we do get blendy sometimes, moreso in the past, it's been less of an issue since Lance started disassociating away from the body more. We have never been immune, it just turned out that the techniques, affirmation and visualization we had adopted when we began trying to figure possession out worked perfectly to ground and separate us. That was the very first thing we tried within minutes of waking up with a confused sense of "wait, who the heck is in front right now? who is where?" and it solved it immediately. We have repeated it every time. The first 2 or 2.5  months, before Lance really started trying to disassociate on purpose in order to make progress towards switching, were the worst. After that, either because he was spending more and more time trying to drill into his mind "that body isn't me" or because more time had just passed and we got more used to it, it became less of an issue.

 

Now that he, for a separate reason, has finally had it click that "holy crap, the body really isn't me, I just live here", it happens even less. It's still refreshing for some reason to reinforce ourselves as separate people, I dunno why. Maybe it's just the fun of doing an activity together, or maybe our brain is rewarding us both for being "good" or something, beat's me. Maybe some of our mental fatigue through the day is actually the result of subtle blendiness building up and grounding causes us to shake it off?

 

As for Lance going inactive.. Well.. Maybe? He insists he has never stopped seeing everything I'm doing, even if he was just watching me type with a mild interest/disinterest. He gets really quiet for long periods of time though and has never complained even once about it. I'm so comfortable with our life, I guess, and I know he isn't leaving me and is always there to talk to and occasionally hand things over to when I'm just not in the mood, that it works for us. Anyway, without a doubt, I've been the "primary fronter" for the past 2 months, at least. Even right now, it just "feels" like I'm the one in charge and Lance is just a voice that chimes in when I pester him or something interests him, but that's purely subjective. I usually don't fight it and just go along with it if he wants to drive or eat or do anything in particular for us, but those moments are decreasing. Earlier, when I was still younger, I would have cried about "don't leave me alone, waaah, don't make me run your life" but that's past now. He isn't leaving me alone and it's "our" life, not "his". I have no problem directing our activities and doing what needs to be done in order to pretend the body is a fully functional adult.

 

I remember reading on the reddit I think, that someone commented that they thought co-fronting was the result of a half-switch that didn't go all the way and if left long enough would eventually result in a switch happening, naturally. I dunno if that's right or not and I know this isn't the reddit, just figured I'd add that.