United Front: Inner Worldscaping Course
Inner Worldscaping Background Info
Hi, prospective applicants, and welcome back alumni! 🙂
Here’s some of the prep work and “background info” for this topic.
Why this course?
The gist of this course is to help fill gaps in other courses and discussions online regarding how to broadcast external information and how to make inner world changes, so that students can employ this knowledge as a self-help process/skill/tool.
Indeed we’ve stumbled across some folk with the wrong ideas about what an inner world even is. As singular therapists have learned from their clients (or from other therapists who learned from their plural clients) that the inner world is a helpful therapeutic environment, therapists have attempted to encourage clients to develop their inner worlds as a tool in their recovery. This is fair up until a therapist uses their own inner paradigms to attempt to teach their client how to work with their inner world.
Many will instruct their client to imagine a place. They may or may not inquire whether such a place already exists. Then the client may use imagination, which is quite different from the inner world, as the place in which to attempt to have meetings and build functional devices that will assist their recovery. And they become frustrated when these do not work, misbehave, disappear when they’re not paying attention, etc.
The inner world is not an imaginary world. It is a place as real to plurals as the external world. We cannot say every plural has one, but when they do it’s usually a place that came into being without thought. It usually came into being out of need.
As there are many useful things that can be done with an inner world, we think it’s important to correct misconceptions and cultivate skills in being aware of it and leveraging it for our recovery process.
How did we develop an Inner World?
To us Crisses, how we think it came about is more like some of us ran away when things outside were not going well. Either we could go out of body (but then we’d just see the things happening from out of body) — or we could go into our body, but we had to go deeper. And to go deeper, it had to have a front, and a back. And to go far enough back that we felt safer, we had to go very very far back. This is how the sense of place inside happened, we think. Not a fantasy world yet — not a place with features. Probably not even a place with a sense of light vs dark. At first, I think our inner world was a place with here versus far away.
That does sound a lot like dissociation. But we weren’t just disconnected from the world, we weren’t really in this world any more. Someone else was. If no one is there to do so already, our body, our mind or our system, makes someone to fill the void.
“Nature abhors a vacuum.” — Aristotle
What is the Inner World?
So what is this place? It is the place from which we move “into” the front interface, and the place we return to when we back out of it. It may be a holding space at first. We may not have much sense of it at all. It may be a grey expanse. It may be a place we can see or feel or sense each other. It is a place that maybe has only directions, but no faces in the grey or dark.
We think spacial, kinesthetic and audial, so your mileage may vary. However it is that you perceive that things are close or near in your& system – volume of sound, ability to reach out and touch, you can see it way over there, etc. will suffice.
But if you “know” that voice or entity is near or far, to the left or right, can feel others within your system, etc. — the inner world is the space in which y’all are sensing these things.
How can someone be “close” to front if front is not in a fixed place, if they are not somewhere in relation to where front is?
What then is “Front”, in the inner world sense?
Front is liminal in that it is both inside and outside.
- relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
- occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
A door is liminal. It’s both inside and outside, it’s part of a boundary, or the threshhold between spaces. The front is often viewed as a doorway, portal, window, or some type of interface that faces both inwards and outwards (though sometimes only one or the other) at the same time.
Some folk talk about rapid switching as a “revolving door”.
So front is a liminal construct that is both in the inner world in that we access it from inside our inner world or our collective mind — and the person who is fronting is also simultaneously “in the (shared) body”, having what appears to be a singular experience to someone external.
So if there’s an external, there’s also the internal, and Front is the “doorway” between them that one or more headmates (if co-fronting) interface with to deal with external life.
Plain or Elaborate Inner Worlds?
While our inner world, after almost 40 years of consciously knowing about it and over 20 of actively and consciously working on it, is certainly technically detailed, it’s still not colorful, beautiful, or artistic. It’s well-articulated, suited to our needs and routines, how we interface with each other. If you like Martha Stewart or colorful spaces you might not want to visit our inner world spaceship, which is considerably less decorated and colorful than Star Trek’s Enterprise.
For many of us it’s there by habit or nature, we just don’t realize that that’s “all it is” — some of us call it our brain or our mind, but how it looks to each other inside, not what it looks like in an MRI machine. Our subjective experience of our mind or brain as a place in which our headmates all reside.
Folk who have been working with their inner world for a long time, or gateway systems, etc. may have much more elaborate inner worlds. Ours started out as just a space we could sense more than see — and soon after we realized we were many people, we started describing it in terms of rooms. The space was finite. Wait, there’s a wall here. Oh, here’s a door. Oh this thing we joked about years ago is here — it’s real! (We had a “filing cabinet” in our head we would say — and mime taking things out of a drawer in our forehead. That filing cabinet is in our inner world to this day.) [We have a gateway system — we just hadn’t been categorizing it that way for the longest time until watching this presentation (optional: All about Gateway Systems from the Plural Positivity World Conference).]
This is very different from imagining it. Why would we imagine an apartment? Wouldn’t we imagine something much more fun than an apartment? That’s not to say your inner world might not be (or become) somewhere much more fun or fantastical. But it’s surprising it wasn’t the castle at Cair Paravel from Narnia or something far “safer” and desirable.
So if y’all have built something fun and think it’s likely “just” imaginary, that’s OK — just let’s find and work with your inner world even if it’s boring or trite. Y’all might already have transformed or eventually transform your inner world to match what y’all would ideally desire. If your inner world is elaborate and complicated that is fine too. Take what y’all have and work with it.
We have more tips on discovering your& inner world and some of the points we’ll be working with in the course are here on this Kinhost.org webpage (highly recommended, at least skim it and become familiar with it. Y’all don’t need to read it all now; the page will come up again). We’ll make it clear what sections of the documentation there (and some linked pages) applies in which lessons. It’s a good read if y’all are in a hurry to start working on some of the concepts in this course or like to have an introduction before diving deeper into concepts.
Good luck with the course!
