The Lotus System’s List of Plural Resources

Note: These are just the resources that we’ve personally found helpful, and the ones that best align with our experiences and perspectives. There’s plenty more resources out there made by thousands of wonderful plural systems, so keep exploring and finding the material that resonates with you most <3

Links that we’d recommend:

Starting point:

  • MoreThanOne.info is a great introduction / summary of what it means to be plural.
  • This TED talk on 'How to talk to the worst parts of yourself' is honestly a wonderful introduction for anyone who’s not familiar with plurality, and wants an insight into what a well-functioning plural system can look like, without going heavily into plural language.
  • The ‘Allies of Plurals’ magazine by the Plural Association is an incredibly good resource for friends and family, as well.

The Crisses:

  • Kinhost hosts a bunch of articles, podcasts, ebooks and other miscellaneous resources by the Crisses about building a happy internal life together as a system. In particular, their United Front Boot Camp is a really accessible place to start, and their System Trust Issues series of podcast episodes is great for any system currently struggling with inner conflict <3

  • Plurality Resource (run by the same people as Kinhost) has a tonne of pay-what-you-can courses (available at $0 for those who request it), going into the same topics in much more depth
  • They have a great flowchart here to guide people through their content, recommending different courses based on what you’re currently working on

The Stronghold System:

  • The Plural Positivity World Conference has tonnes of videos from various plural activists, exploring a tonne of wonderful plural topics from an incredibly supportive and inclusive perspective.

  • The Plural Association is a plural-only social network that runs a private Facebook-esque group for plurals, with weekly text chats and monthly video calls. It's another pay-what-you-can service, so you can access it for $0 if that's what you can afford. They're currently putting together a mental health warmline (i.e. for issues less urgent than a hotline) by and for the plural community as well.
  • Power to the Plurals is another organisation run by Stronghold and the Plural Association, with a bunch of useful articles about plurality 

Other notable resources:

  • Portrait of a Hydra and Median Talk are both wonderful descriptions of median systems, or systems with less clear boundaries / separate personhood for each of their headmates

  • The Plurality Playbook is a wonderful resource for plural workers and their employers, talking about how to accommodate people in the workplace. It was originally written for people in Google, but you can take plenty of inspiration here and apply it to other workplaces

  • The Dragonheart Collective generally has some great guides about plural topics, especially this one for people questioning if they’re plural.
  • Feathersong has a tonne of wonderful guides for teaching core plural life skills to any system (for any combination of origins). We especially appreciated Feathers Guide to Fronting and Switching, which we found really useful in our own life <3
  • Being Many is likewise a really nice collection of articles about plurality, including some from the links above. Lots of the guides are especially good for people who’ve only just discovered their plurality, with Advice From Those Who Came Before being particularly good.
  • Tulpamancy guides (i.e. guides for people who want to intentionally become plural) are often full of excellent advice for plural systems of every shape, size and origin. They’re full of specific exercises that you can do to enhance particular aspects of your inner life, from switching to internal communication to expanding each headmate’s sense of self. We haven’t personally used any of these guides, but Tulpamancy: Guide Into the Strange and Wonderful, Abvieon's Guide to Fast and Effective Tulpa Creation and the resources on /r/Tulpas are good places to start. 
  • On Dating My Partners is a really cool article about dating plural systems, from the perspective of a singlet person dating a plural system <3
  • Other similar lists of resources include one by the Rings System and one by The Body et al., which might contain other resources you’ll find helpful <3

Stories that inspire us:

  • Beginnings is a short article / comic about the experience of discovering your system and growing from 'barely knowing each other' into an internal family. When we first realized that we were plural, this comic gave us so much hope about how things could get better.
  • Note: Since the pictures are unavailable at time of writing, I’ve linked to the Wayback Machine version of the story that includes the pictures.

  • The Sunspot Chronicles are a series of wonderful stories set in a society that fully welcomes and normalizes plurality, where the plural protagonists are offered nanobot exobodies to allow headmates to physically manifest in the world. Our favorite thing about these stories is how they explore all of the nuances and intricacies of plural life, entirely separate from all the societal stigma that comes with plurality in modern life. It’s one of our favorite pieces of fiction, and it would have been life-changing if we’d read this earlier in our plural awakening.
  • Petals of a Rose is another great piece of representation for plural systems. Unlike most of the good plural representation out there, it’s actually set in our everyday world, which makes it easier to directly relate with. We personally prefer stories that focus less on the hard times and the challenges of trauma-based plurality, but there’s plenty of people out there who’ll find it useful.
  • From our experience, stories about ‘many people sharing one body’ in a fantasy or sci-fi sense are way better representation than stories intentionally written about plural people, because it bypasses most of the stigma.
  • In particular, Steven Universe is an awesome piece of representation, and Stronger than You is basically a mission statement for our system.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is another personal favorite, since it shows two side-characters sharing a body and building a strong relationship with each other (although it takes a while for that plot aspect to develop).

General advice that we’d give to most plural systems who are early in discovery (take with a grain of salt if this doesn’t apply to you):

  • Everyone in your system matters. Everyone in your system is equally a person, and equally deserving of a good life.

  • Headmates are rarely just one thing, but they might look like it if they're stuck in the middle of a PTSD loop. As people start feeling safer and come out of their trauma responses, they can show the rest of their personalities and begin exploring the rest of their life.
  • Equally, headmates that started out as a small ‘fragment’ (whatever that means for your system in particular) can often grow, develop, change over time, and move in the direction of a more whole sense of personhood. Maybe they’ll ebb and flow over time, as they combine with other fragments in your system, or retract into a simpler form to go through stressful times unscathed. The most important thing is recognising the capacity for all of your headmates to show full personhood, rather than assuming they’ll remain a fragment for all time.

  • Holding regular conversations with everyone in your system is so, so valuable. Checking in, seeing how people are feeling, listening to what they want, and just having a happy time together where you reaffirm that everyone in your system is valuable and belongs here.
  • Having physical representations of people in your system in the outside world is so good for feeling that you belong and that you have an equal share in the system's collective life, as well as giving an anchor that helps with fronting triggers. We personally have pictures of everyone in our system up on our bedroom walls, along with personal plushies for some people in our system.

  • Music time together is absolutely wonderful - it's so much fun to jam out as a system, switching in and out as you sing different songs <3

  • When it comes to spirituality, we treat our system as an interfaith worship space, and make an effort to include and accommodate people with all combinations of beliefs. It's gone incredibly well for us, and we strongly recommend it <3

  • Being plural comes with a lifelong obligation to challenge your biases (against people of any given age, gender, race, species, religion, or any other defining factor), because you never know when someone like that might emerge in your system. If you have a bias against people in the outside world, then anyone who matches that bias in your inner world might not be comfortable enough to reveal themselves.

  • We've been making a strong effort to let go of any rigidly defined roles in our system, such as 'protector' or 'caregiver' or 'trauma holder'. From experience, most of those roles come down to different trauma responses - whether people have a tendency to fight, flight, freeze, fawn and so forth - boiled down into labels. We've been shifting more towards having teams of volunteers handling different aspects of life (such as an internal support team, a housework team, a professional work team, etc.), where different people can tag in for those different roles based on how they're feeling that day. It makes everything way more flexible and fluid, giving people room to try something new or take a long holiday if they don't want to volunteer for something, and it helps all of us to become more well-rounded as people. We've gradually been defining ourselves less by our stress responses and more by the things we enjoy and value, which has been really good for us in the long run.

  • We assume that everyone in our system is acting with the best interests of our system at heart, and that any challenges that emerge come from counterproductive methods rather than malicious intent. For instance, if someone's flooding our system with feelings of worthlessness, we try to find out how those feelings have protected us in the past from something worse (such as conditional self-worth and feeling "I'm only a good person if XYZ..." actually being an improvement from once having no self-worth at all). Those approaches might not have scaled very well over time, but it was the best that people could do under those circumstances. Recognising the good intentions behind those responses and reaffirming how much we value those good intentions, while also supporting people with adjusting to our safer circumstances in the present, has gone a really really long way <3