We have been having a wonderful time traveling Boston-New York-Virginia. We are about to head down to the Communities Conference to give our Workshop “Together As One Body.” We’ll be joined by many exciting activists and community leaders from around the country.
After flying from California to Boston and staying with friends, we attended the World Hearing Voices Congress and found it to be way more multiple than expected! We went out of solidarity with what we perceived to be an alternative framing around the schizophrenia diagnosis, an also stigmatized group that is often painted as contrasting with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Turns out the Hearing Voices Network is so much more than that, and includes many multiples. The global network of weekly groups (40+ in the US, 160+ in the UK alone) provides a non-judgmental space for people to share about many different experiences, and appears to have attracted many multiples over time.
As a result, many at the Congress were not only interested in supporting multiples, but identified that way themselves. We expected to meet one or two systems but ended up meeting more than a dozen! (A big deal for a population that in 2017 rarely finds each other without much effort.) This led to many amazing side conversations with people from the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, and more!
Thanks to everyone we connected with at Hearing Voices. We definitely hope to find a way to take part at the Hearing Voices Congress in September 2018 in The Hague, Netherlands. Europe tour 2018?
We plan to continue to dialogues with leaders and members of the Hearing Voices Network at the local and international levels, and will report any results here.
Z: (<– this means that Z specifically is sharing. If we don’t annotate the author you can assume the Redwoods decided not to specify a speaker, either because the writing is consensus based, or casual and discerning who exactly said what doesn’t feel relevant. At other times, folks understandably want to speak or be recognized individually.)
Thanks for the intro editors. Anyway, On a personal level we found the experience pretty intense.
anon 13 yo (A13): (for safety/privacy, we do not publicly give names of all members of the Redwoods). Yeah it was really exhausting.
J: Basically we were experiencing new levels of exposure and coming out – instead of maybe coming out one or two times a day…
Z: We were coming out several times an hour, and often in great depth, or briefly but to hundreds of people. Fulfilling because we were reaching audiences were strongly connected to our work personally or in solidarity. Yet still counter to the internalized narrative of tell no one.
A13: Breaking through! Yeah, we talked to a lot of people.
The Alternatives Conference immediately followed, where we focused on running two successful sessions regarding multiplicity (details in a later post) and caught as many other sessions as we could, while also taking a break to look at the 63% eclipse.
Next we’ll share about New York and Virginia. Coming up after that is the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference!
We are still looking to make more connections in the Northeast, including presenting in New York. So reach out if you’d like to connect with us while we are still in town.
With joy, care, and appreciation!
the Redwoods
P.S. youngest anon kid: the eclipse was coooool!