You'll All Be Sorry

An angry rant about the plural community, by an ex-persecutor

It's no secret that the plural community, generally speaking, treats persecutors like shit. If you've set foot in it at all, you probably know what I'm talking about. If not- I don't really know what the hell you're doing here, but I'll give a basic rundown anyway.

The definition of persecutor varies a lot by who you ask, but a broad summary of the most common definitions I see get thrown around is that a persecutor is a person in a system who causes harm to their own system (and sometimes people outside it).

The nuances of this- Whether or not this harm is intentional, the general motivations behind it, if harm to people outside of the system counts- are highly debated and honestly highly individual to the person and system.

As far as I'm aware (and by that I mean don't fucking quote me on this), the term has its roots in medical literature about DID and in that context describes a sort of misguided protector that perpetuates abuse their system experienced back onto their own system as a protective mechanism to prevent external punishment. Sort of a "Mom can't yell at us for being a bad child if I do it myself" type thing- There's also strong ties to abuser introjects coming at it from this angle. I'll protect myself from this bad person by becoming them.

The motivation isn't always preventing external punishment or otherwise CONSCIOUSLY protective in nature- Not all persecutors can be accurately described as misguided protectors and it's disingenuous to say so. Sometimes you just learn to survive by throwing other people under the bus to save your own ass, and when you've got other people in your head, this includes them. Sometimes you just hold fucking horrific shit that the others don't know about and end up dealing with it by re-enacting it onto them because what the fuck else are you supposed to do when you can't talk about it without lighting everything on fire? Sometimes you genuinely, honest to god just fucking hate yourself and take it out on the others by attacking all the bits of them you hate about you. Etc.

Another really common manifestation of this I see is people who intentionally assist their system's abusers or purposely try to get them abused more by aggravating them. The psyche behind this is generally some kind of emotional self harm. We're all bad, so we all deserve it.

Trauma does fucked up shit to people and more often than not makes you a fucked up person. Sometimes you being a fucked up person affects the people around you. This isn't exclusive to persecutors, but to me, the label describes how that idea meshes with sharing your brain with other people. Not all people in the community use it in the same way, though.

Some people use it to literally just attempt to legitimize the idea of "evil alter who can't be redeemed" without actually saying that, because let's be honest, nobody takes that kind of shit seriously and they shouldn't.

A lot of protectors also get mislabeled as persecutors for not being entirely.. palatable, in how they protect their own system. This seems to be exceptionally common in systems that are still living with their abusers and have every goddamn reason to have active fronters who resort to violence as self defense (even if it occasionally gets misdirected). Hell- In 2019 we slapped the 'persecutor' label onto a protector for treating our father as a threat because most of us didn't yet conceptualize that he was abusing us. ..Not our proudest moment, not gonna lie.

I've also seen it slapped on to random ass trauma holders who just cope in ugly ways like self harming, suicide attempts, substance abuse, or trying to drive away loved ones. I personally think it's kind of fucked up? But it's really common.

Some people also just use it as an excuse to be emotionally abusive dipshits to their friends and partners, but that's honestly an entire can of worms I don't feel like opening here. Don't hurl insults at your friends, kids. If someone in your system is, fucking figure out what the problem is and deal with it. That's not a persecutor, that's just an asshole and the rest of you are assholes too if you don't do anything about it.

Generally- When I use persecutor in this post I'm talking about people that primarily hurt their own system, on purpose. You use it however you feel best, I don't give a fuck, but here we're talking about something in particular that may or may not personally apply to you and you're gonna have to just deal with that.

That being said- When you mix the idea of "hurt person that hurts people" with the internet, it goes fucking horribly. You want proof? Go find any piece of media with a visibly traumatized character who did bad shit to survive a bad situation and go read all the discourse about whether or not they can be redeemed for the high crime of not being a pretty, helpless little damsel with only the best and cleanest of coping mechanisms.

To dive deeper into this, I'm first going to explain to you an entirely different community term and the absolute bullshit that's festered surrounding it.

Part 1: Malicitor (It's totally not Evil Alter with a new coat of paint! Promise!)

Funny story- We actually used to be friends with the system that coined Malicitor.

This was sometime in late 2020 or early 2021. They were, at the time, a very clearly traumatized 14 year old who'd coined a little term to try and describe why certain headmates of theirs felt different from how they personally understood the label persecutor (With all the lack of nuance a 14 year old tends to have)- And then watched it fucking explode in the community with several definitions that didn't even resemble the original in the slightest and generally were all a way to designate certain headmates as Evil Alters separate from the nuance. ..And watched a bunch of sysmeds and otherwise bad faith actors use the term and its altered definitions as rage bait.

It was actually really fucking bad. There's an entire other blog post we want to write at some point about how teenagers should never have a platform. This kid was subject to so much harassment.

This is the earliest definition of Malicitor I'm able to find, circa November 2020, hosted and spread via the now defunct Blossom bot/database (Aka, the Pluralpedia before Pluralpedia):

"A system member who is actively malicious, rarely with the intention to genuinely help the system. They may target those within and outside their system and can administer their abuse in a variety of ways. Although it's absolutely possible for them to change, they often refuse to. The term was coined as an alternative to malicious persecutor and hopefully lift some of the poor reputation off persecutors as a whole; however, it has sparked controversy due to people using it to label people as irredeemable, but this is not what the term is meant to describe. This term, like all others in Blossom, is a self-label and should not be applied to a person without their consent."

In their own words, from Discord chat logs circa January 1st, 2021 where Piper directly asked the kid what they originally intended with the term:

"the intention was mainly to lift bad rep off of persecutors and separate members that hurt when theyre trying to help and members that just. ugh. hurt for the fun of it (and as ive told many people i wish i could say this isnt the case but It Is) but anyways yeah. weve gotten a lot of shit for the term because people think it just means “aggressive persecutor” or smthn like that and we’re just treating our members as irredeemable when. urgh. its rlly not that hell my (headmate) used to be a mal but hes reforming from that now. we’re not saying they cant be redeemed just that they do really, really, really bad shit and its not with the intent to benefit the system i think the idea that headmates cant be That Bad stems from sysmedicalist rhetoric including how everyone in a system is formed based on/to help with trauma but the reality is that headmates can be wildly different from the “base” (like the og/core/whatever). and its important to accept and acknowledge that this very much extends to some headmates being as shitty as the literal shittiest people out there"

So basically, taking the idea that not all persecutors are misguided protectors and making a separate label to distinguish the misguided protectors from ~the bad ones~.

..You can tell all this was thought up by a 14 year old.

The definition of Malicitor is as follows on Pluralpedia (a largely circulated community resource), and it pretty closely resembles the original intention:

A malicitor is a system member who seeks to harm others for their own personal gain, rather than than to the benefit of their system.

Because of its nature, the term should be used only for self identification, rather than in an accusatory fashion.

In some cases, they can be redeemed and reformed, but it may be difficult and dangerous to attempt. Some malicitors harm others because they feel they need to in order to protect someone they care about.

Malicitors typically know that they are harming others, and usually want to continue doing so.

Some may identify using the term because they will lash out without reason, but others may use it only because they could do it under specific circumstances.

You.. see the problem with all this, right?

Like. Fuck. At least they took the word 'abuse' out of the definition between 2020 and now, but this is still ultimately just a way to either ostracize people in systems who have ugly coping mechanisms for trauma or excuse being emotionally abusive to other people.

Even the modern definition contradicts itself in an attempt to hide the problems with it. 'Some malicitors harm others because they feel they need to in order to protect someone they care about', but they also apparently do it only for their personal gain and can only be redeemed in some cases and may be too much of a threat to even fucking bother.

Yeah. So, news flash- Even the persecutors that fall under the misguided protector definition still tend to do really fucked up shit. They still can have a distinctly different moral code from others in their system. Most of the misguided protectors will never fucking admit to that being the logic behind their actions. A lot of them don't even realize that's what they're doing because that shit can be entirely subconscious. A lot more of them will even intentionally try to convince people that they're evil when they're not because that, too, is a defense mechanism to protect themselves from harm.

Genuinely. Taking a persecutor's word at face value when they tell you that the only reason they do this shit is getting a kick out of it is one of the dumbest things you can possibly do. That's an entire real person who's only talking like a cartoon villain because people believe them for some god forsaken reason.

This all is really just slapping a label on the mentality that you should cope in a way palatable to others, and people finding excuses to say that "no, this one really IS redeemable!" and not put in any effort to help their own headmates. By claiming Malicitor is an attempt to take bad reputation off the persecutors who are misguided protectors, all you're really doing is making it very clear that you have standards for who's dealing with their trauma in a god-honoring way.

I don't know of many people who actually take the term Malicitor in its default form seriously anymore- I know I'm kind of preaching to the choir here. The reason I included such a long section about this is because the history behind Malicitor is the fucking poster child of everything wrong with this community and the way they all treat persecutors. The term isn't the problem- I'd go as far as to say there are probably ways people use this term that are.. fine.

The people and the ways they willfully use shit like this, Malicitor or not, to shit on trauma survivors are the problem.

Part 2: Headspace Jail (Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect 20 Dollars, And Definitely Do Not Fucking Do This)

I introduced myself to my system June 1st, 2020 after years of being a main fronter and just pretending to be other people with this grand, melodramatic entrance where I self harmed a bunch and then forced Piper (our host at the time) into front to force him to deal with the pain while threatening him and taunting him for being upset and crying about it.

I did this in front of our entire friend group, in our friend server, with the explicit intention in mind of provoking them into lashing out at me for hurting their friend.

The first person that responded to this- Actually Luce from the system we're now engaged to- was mildly disgruntled but otherwise treated me like a normal person. We had, like, an actually productive conversation where I was very clearly distressed by her insisting that she thinks we're good people and that everyone is redeemable, including me.

Piper came back to front after I got scared and fled with another vaguely threatening message. He calmed down pretty quickly and talked about what happened with Luce. On fucking day one he pinned what was going on and described it to all of our friends better than I ever could despite us being emotionally volatile 16 year olds because jesus CHRIST he's terrifyingly perceptive. Here's the direct copy-paste of the chat logs (with names and pronouns edited):

I just realized something else about Laine- He wants attention. They self harmed enough for me to notice when I came in, but not enough to cause any actual physical harm. They put up a vaguely threatening status. They started asking you what good you see in us likely because they just wanted to hear that someone genuinely thinks of them good, even if they shot down the things you brought up. That's probably why he finally made himself known instead of pulling strings behind the scenes like he used to. And, believe it or not, it's actually a sign that they're already on the mend. He's gotten sick of just fucking with the system with the system hopeless to stop him, he wants to be noticed. He wants people to notice his tomfuckery and likely secretly wants them to notice the trauma that's causing him to do these things.

...

If he truly was trying to hurt us, he's proven already that he's more than capable of doing so without us ever being able to stick a name or a face to the things that happen.

...

Laine just wants to be.. Noticed. And, when someone's that desperate for attention, they stop caring whether it's positive or negative. He's "proudly" admitting to everything he's done now because he wants people to be angry at him, because in his mind, it's still attention. ...

They probably got frustrated and left because your replies were incredibly neutral and non-reactive. You handled that extremely well, Luce.

Like. Yeah. Fucking Christ. No notes. Dead on the nose, direct, concise. I tried to create an entire spooky mystery to solve to get people to run after the evil alter and this little fucking twink with a flannel filleted my psyche like a fish and laid my bones out for everyone to see the second he stopped crying. There is something deeply fucking wrong with Piper, and I mean that as a compliment.

You'd think our friends would see this and understand what's going on the next time I come in and start bragging about intentionally hurting my own system, right? Right?

Lol. Lmao, even.

I'll keep this brief and just give you a sampling of copy-pastes of things people we called our friends, including ones we'd known for years, said to me or about me in 2020.

(In response to someone asking what I even gained from doing a harmful action) "Chaos, from someone who sought purely chaos I’d wager." ('He's literally right there, why would you say that?') "I’m aware he is."

"I’ll keep my feelings on Laine lidded because I know it won’t go over well with many here (as a hint: I don’t like them)."

"I don't hate people, just in general. I can't get myself to do that. But I would punch you if I could."

(In response to Gavin, my own headmate) "Gavin what Laine did was too much too recently for me to forgive them period"

"What he did was despicable, and I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to talk to him."

"Laine's actions should not be excused, and while I don't think he should be completely ostracised, I don't think I would ever be comfortable being his friend. Knowing why someone did something or acted the way they did does not excuse them."

And, mind you, I was never even intentionally harmful to others in the group. Strongly worded and stand-offish, but definitely not aggressive. The entirety of what I did was just rant about how life sucks and everyone is evil and brag a bunch about intentionally hurting my own system. I had people calling me a fucking abuser and telling my own headmates that they can't make judgment calls on whether or not I deserve mercy because they're ~victims~ over self harm, suicidal ideation, internal trauma re-enactment, and intentionally triggering my headmates.

Like. It literally got to the point where people were insinuating I was a bad person for wanting to kill myself because I'd be taking the rest of the system with me and running away from the consequences of my actions. I watched from co-con as people suggested to my system that they lock me up and my own system go like "What the fuck? No?". I watched my own headmates get ripped apart for defending me for hurting them.

Some of these people were grown ass adults too lmao.

You have no fucking idea how often I see this kind of shit- Including and especially systems perpetuating it onto their own fucking headmates.

Look me in my metaphorical, text-based fucking eyes. Read this next line very, very carefully.

YOUR HEADMATE IS NOT YOUR MOTHERFUCKING ABUSER.

We posted "Your alter is not your abuser" on Twitter once upon a time in 2021 and got multiple people starting a harassment brigade against us, flooding our notifications with horrific un-CW'd traumadumping and saying they wanted us dead where we could see it. Multiple times we have posted things like "I love my headmates, stop saying DID is only ever misery" and gotten replies with people likening their headmates to irredeemable abusers and even other systems fakeclaiming us for insisting that recovery is possible for everyone. And it's that exact reason that I'll never stop saying it. (Or ever use Twitter again.)

I don't care the magnitude of harm they've caused. I don't care how remorseless they seem. I don't care who they are, where they're from, what they've done in the past, none of it.

If you treat the people in your own system as rabid dogs to be caged or problems to be solved, I do not fucking trust you and will inherently assume you are ableist to trauma survivors as a whole.

This is a sweeping generalization I am very comfortable applying to everyone, because if you're willing to go this far to publicly attack your own headmates for ugly trauma responses, you damn fucking well will do the same to others. Persecutor or not.

Because it's not about the fucking persecutors at all. It never was. Just like malicitor, all that word is to half the community is a front to demean trauma survivors.

If you want the truth, pretty much everyone who grew up in an abusive home or otherwise experienced emotional abuse and turns around to pull this shit on their own system is by definition a persecutor themselves. Publicly berating, ostracizing, and outright punishing people for showing visible signs of being mentally ill sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Good rule of thumb: If your deadbeat dad would say it, and you find yourself saying it to or about your or someone else's persecutor- Congrats! You're perpetuating trauma you experienced onto your own headmates.

And is being a persecutor bad? Fuck no. In this situation it just makes you a hypocrite, which is worse. Maybe you all could learn a thing or two from your persecutors about sticking to your own principles.

Part 3: Scorched Earth, New Life

So here's where I tell you exactly how I became a persecutor, and exactly how I grew out of it, to illustrate my point.

So- I actually didn't start as one. I wasn't split off for that. Originally I split off to hold CSA trauma and generally it affected me in the opposite direction- Was a huge fucking people pleaser and let people walk all over me.

That's kind of what did me in, though. At some point before syscovery I started fronting more because I got really, really attached to the person we were dating at the time to the point of pretty much being the only person in here to talk to her, and she ended up not really.. treating us great. Toyed with my emotions intentionally to an insane degree- Ended up breaking up with us because she got a crush on someone else and then tried to come crawling back when that person rejected her, and I was just like.. What the fuck? No. We can still be friends but.. No. And then she ended up just basically dangling friendship in front of me and intentionally yanking it away for an entire year beyond that on the premise of me being too emotionally unstable, and I just kinda.. Snapped? You can go back to 2018 and find the exact breakdown where this happened even though it was before we knew we're a system, it's actually pretty fucking on the nose with "Yeah no, I'm done being a people pleaser, if nobody liked me I wouldn't get hurt anymore".

And from that point on I was just fucking batshit. I would do things like carve insults towards the others into our body, purposely reveal secrets about the others to our friends for the sake of humiliating them, purposely aggravate our abusers to make them abuse us more because I thought we deserved it, generally just perpetuate the same ideas on the system that our abusers at the time would, purposely tried to wreck our friendships and drive people away.. Etc.

A large part of what our friends called me an abuser for was internally re-enacting our CSA trauma on other headmates before the others even knew we'd been through that.

As for what got me to stop, well.

There's two major elements to what got me to change- One that was a very good thing, and one that was a very bad thing.

First thing- Piper.

His initial response to me fucking with him like that on day one once he was done breaking down was.. completely devoid of anger or fear. He was actually just genuinely concerned more than anything. By the time he realized what was going on I was like.. Just sitting in co-con watching, intentionally masking myself so he hopefully wouldn't notice. And he just kind of called back into the void "I don't know who you are, but if you can hear me, I forgive you".

That fucked with me. Bad. Got harsher towards him specifically and he didn't bat an eye. Even when our shitty friend group at the time kept ripping me a new one and lowkey trying to convince him and the others to treat me the same.

I, like. Grabbed a journal we had that had a bunch of preset writing prompts and wrote responses to a bunch of things Piper had put in there. Reflected my general cynicism at the time and taunted him a bunch, but also just like.. Why. Why are you like this. Piper saw this and ended up grabbing a different color pen and writing responses to my responses that didn't hold a drop of annoyance or anything. He then went and grabbed a blank journal from Barnes and Noble and we communicated back and forth in it for months. He basically just refused to acknowledge the insults and whatnot and kept insisting that it's okay and the world is so much kinder than I know, and.. Yeah. That did shit to me. I ended up deciding to leave him specifically alone, and that was the first step. (..We're dating these days lmao.)

Second thing- ..Well.

I had to change. I had no choice.

What ended up happening was that at the end of 2021, we got into a close relationship with someone who uh. Ultimately fucked us collectively up so bad we basically blacked out the entirety of 2022 and had to spend the next two years retracing our steps to figure out what the fuck he even did to us and how.

It kind of.. started with me. The system wasn't yet aware that we had been through CSA- The possibility had been acknowledged, but nobody had really looked it in the eyes and nobody wanted to. But like. I knew. Of course I knew. I was there. I remember it. Just was very good at keeping my mouth shut.

This guy pretty much went out of his way to specifically gain my trust- I had already started to loosen my grip a bit and have normal social interaction with people. And I ended up actually liking him.

And then he, like. Used me as the launch point to force my system to suddenly uncover a bunch of fucking horrific trauma they had no idea about at once. Purposely triggered me in a way that I age regressed, then used that vulnerable state to get me to say a bunch of shit I remembered, then screenshotted it all and showed everyone else in the system without my or their consent.

All those realizations happening resulted in a suicide attempt that landed us in the psych ward in the beginning of 2022. And even after that he just kept fucking going and ripping up more and more out of a mix of some fucked up savior complex and.. Well he later used a lot of the information he got to take advantage of us in ways I aint elaborating on here. Intentionally hijacked switch triggers, amnesia, etc for it.

And that started with me. And I kind of just sat there watching the fallout like.. Holy fucking shit. This aint about me anymore. The others think this guy means well and he is gonna get us killed if I don't do something.

So I ended up taking on a much different flavor of emotional protector. I let this guy think I liked him and used the leverage to lie to his face about a lot of shit about our system and past. He was literally like taking notes on it all and I managed to convince him to show me them- Which served as great evidence for when the system realized he was abusive later- and went through redacting a lot of his notes with outright lies because he trusted me to tell the truth and knew that I did actually know way more than the others. Even convinced him I'm a gatekeeper when I'm not.

Something about that entire ordeal really just shifted my priorities entirely, even after that dude was out of our life come 2023. Something about watching the sky falling around you and being one of the only people around to protect everyone from the rubble.. Yeah.

I'm an emotional protector these days. Ended up practically carrying us through dealing with our shithead dad too until everyone could learn how to stand up for themselves and then we actually got out.

You think any of that would have happened if my system didn't stick up for me when nobody else would? No. Fuck no.

If it weren't for that, I would probably either still be a bitter bitch or just gone these days. One of the few people who had the balls to consistently stand up to our abusers wouldn't have given a single fuck to try to help.

You're all stuck with each other, whether you like it or not. Ostracizing a member isn't an option. Help them.

And if you're the type of person that polices other people's persecutors and tries to be the rest of the system's savior or whatever- Fuck you. Genuinely, fuck you. The scars I and so many others have from people like you will likely never go away.

How fucking dare you look at the people who dare bare their teeth in the face of adversity and try to wrench them out.