We believe in inclusive community, and strong advocacy and support for struggling, disabled and stigmatized community members. We advocate for faster diagnosis, better therapies, adjunct & complementary offerings that can help boost the efficacy of recovery efforts on behalf of disordered, dysfunctional and struggling plural & DID systems.
This about sums up our credentials and the evolution that brought us to this website and we’re sorry if it’s long or complicated. Of course we left out a lot of details, this covers a lot of ground.
We figured out we were many in 1986, at age 16, crashed & burned horribly, landing in the ICU for a week and then inpatient. We spent 9 months inpatient, about 4 months into which we told our adolescent psychiatrist that we were “many people in our head”. After several years outpatient, we were discharged by our psychiatrist who had basically done everything he could for us (which was nothing resembling DID therapy). On our own, we found the self-help/self-improvement industry and psychology books, we did about 25 years of recovery work on our own. During this time we worked (data entry, then desktop publishing & pre-press), raised kids, had several polyamorous group relationships of various configurations, and attempted to pursue a psychology degree.
Our first website was begun in 1996 and included information about our system, and some words of wisdom and hope for other multiple systems. We started to get some emails from plurals and their allies thanking us for being so open about it. In 1998, we took over or started several otherkin email lists, and co-moderated an otherkin multiple list (otherkind-hosts on onelist which merged into yahoogroups), and as a community group we decided to transform our modest website resource (which kept growing) into a wiki website (Kinhost.org) and some of the otherkin multiple email list members contributed articles and comments on articles on the site, made suggestions for additional pages, etc. especially for the online “book” Multiplicity: The Missing Manual.
As such things go — around 2001 the person we thought was the host or original in our system fell apart into a subsystem of classic DID alters/headmates with many traumaholders. They were a “kids in a trench coat” as we like to call it, the person we thought they were didn’t exist, and they were all hiding behind their own singlesona within our system.
We crashed & burned out of school, picked up our self-help work where we had left off and attempted to see our psychiatrist again (which failed miserably after maybe 3 sessions). He thought it would be a good idea for us to seek out a DID specialist, but never gave us a tip to try finding a trauma specialist so we couldn’t find one and gave up, and doubled down on self-help work.
In 2004 we moved upstate (in New York), went back to work (now as a system admin), and started our own company. Online communities were moving more and more towards blogs, forums, & social media websites. 2005: we conceived of The Crissing Link series including United Front, started early drafts and sketches of what information needed to be covered and started brainstorming about the series. Contributions to the Kinhost wiki lagged, and we were busy with work, kids and our business. We also had the first boot of the Many Minds of the Issue podcast series in 2005, but we fumbled with poor audio quality and it not meeting our own standards.
By 2006 we were running that company full-time as a web design/print design business, and our plans for The Crissing Link & United Front were back-burnered. In 2009 we wrote our autobiography, self-published it and came out to the local business community. During 2010 we apprenticed with a long established life coach and former MSW, graduated, and wrote our 2nd book (which the Better Spoons materials are based on) about white-collar burn out that has some uncanny parallels to polyvagal theory and mindfulness. We blended life coaching and business coaching and worked with small business owners for several years. In December 2010 we agreed to become a board member of Independent Living, Inc. in Newburgh NY (and we were a board member for 10 years, culminating in being an officer and board chair for 2019 before hitting board term limits) a cross-disability advocacy and service organization, funded in great part by Medicaid and Federal Independent Living Center grants and serving a significant region of New York State. We began attending statewide peer advocacy meetings by the end of our term.
In April 2011 we drafted the original United Front Boot Camp blog series (it’s had minor tweaks since) — a self-help starter blog based on our ideas for the United Front self help book (later, series) to help plural and multiple systems work on internal community. 2012 we got our first plural coaching client.
In 2016 we started The Passionizing Planner, based on self-coaching ideals, bullet journaling principles, and materials from our 2nd book on burnout. Over the years this planner went from a plural-friendly planner and evolved into the United Front Ship’s Log Planner (2021+) which is plural-centric.
In 2017, we became homeless (for 3 years) and decided to dedicate the greater portion of our spoons to working on United Front self-help materials, advocating for plural & DID systems, traveling to and tabling at conferences (2018-2020), etc. We rebooted the Many Minds on the Issue podcast series (2017-present), with much better technical ability (and also helped start and engineer the Farm-A-Yard podcast for one of our business clients at the same time).
Our first United Front-based coaching group was what we now call the “pilot-pilot” in January 2019 with 4 attendees. It touched on many of the points in the courses on this site, and helped us pick out some needs (such as Inner Worldscaping) that the community has alongside our membership in many support communities — but also helped us iron out format and logistics for facilitating short-run coaching groups with a handful of plurals. Now we run all of our online course pilot programs with a similar (evolving) format.
On the tail of that coaching pilot, we presented at the Healing Together conference (partial recording here) and decided, along with the Stronghold System, to create the Plural Positivity World Conference. We’ve presented 14 sessions at the conference’s 3 years to date.
Early in 2020, the former owners of this site decided they could not upkeep it, shut down the site forums, and we offered to take over the domain and keep the resources on the site going. They agreed. Later we asked for their blessing to make it into an online courseware platform for plurals (more below).
Thankfully we got housing March 1st 2020. We ran 3 more pilot coaching groups in mid-to-late 2020 (Building Trust, Internal Communication & Reparenting…which should be added to the site as rebooted coaching groups starting in 2022). Right after that was done, throughout October 2020 we studied for our New York State Certified Peer Specialist (provisional) certification, and earned it. Then in November 2020 set it up this site and start up courses — we started moving our pilot coaching programs and other content we had already created or content that we were in the middle of creating to the online school.
And that’s basically how this site started. We already were selling a written guide for creating online courses on Udemy. We tweaked it for plurals and creating courses on this website, put it up as our own course on creating online courses. Added our upcoming group coaching pilots and created the United Front System Safety Plan course as the first fully-free and will always be free if we have any say resource on the site.
Since then we’ve installed video conference call software on the back-end of the site, so we could run courseware meetings securely. And so on. We have an in with a former system admin in our head. 🙂
We are an autistic, disabled, non-binary, gender-fluid, plural-identified quoigenic DID-diagnosed polyfragmented modular system with about 157+ system members of a wide variety of types. We are geeks, authors, content creators, instructors, healers, coaches, and mental health advocates. We have hEDS, CIDP, Reynaud’s syndrome, several other related issues, and are transition opportunists. We live in upstate New York in the USA, and we moonlight as a pet sitter.
For our full CV, please see https://Crisses.org.
