Brief History of United Front

Coming soon: News, updates, offerings, and self-help…

This is United Front. A series of self-help materials to help plural & DID systems work on internal community.

In this newsletter:

• Meme (exercise)

• About the United Front Substack

• United Front History

• Today’s News

  • Launching Ongoing Coaching

  • Work Around Challenging Shame

    • More about shame and why we're doing this: Please exercise selves care!

  • Work in Progress: Updates to the United Front System Safety Plan Course

• Subscribe (to the United Front Substack) for Updates

Meme (exercise)

Some well wishes and a tiny baby step practice for improving safety, security, belongingness, and inclusion in your& system…

On a dark sunset background:

Take a moment every day to turn inside with a loving pause and say: “You all matter.” — The Crisses, LiberatedLifeCoaching.com

About the United Front Substack

We need a place to wrestle all United Front news, updates, and followers under one umbrella so that the work can stand on its own feet rather than being spread out far-and-wide. The things already out there will stay where they are, but this substack will help tie it all together and give folks who want and need this work one place to go for information, news, and updates — as well as continuing the conversation. What does everyone need? Where will we go next? Will there be only 3 volumes or more?

United Front History

Circa 2005+. We have been creating a book series The Crissing Link about a bunch of plurality-related experiences, and each book had a different style or theme with a funny, ironic or punny title.

Our autobiography and poetry chapbook (“Poetic License”) is the first one we actually published in 2009, and it’s available on Amazon. We also have a lineup of other books for the series that are in various states of progress, and some are available while we’re still working on them via LeanPub. For example, our memoir is Split Decision, our past-life stories is Case Histories, and musings on our personal philosophy is Core Discoveries, while our arguments with the industry (a polemic) is Alternate Merge.

The self-help book in the series was going to be The Crissing Link: United Front — one big chunky volume of self-help tips for plural & DID systems. We wanted a kick in the pants to get started so in 2011 we wrote a starter series of blog posts on the topics we thought would end up in the book — the United Front Boot Camp, and at first it was published on The Crissing Link website (now defunct — everything was moved to other sites) and now lives in the Blog sub-site on the Kinhost.org wiki.

The Boot Camp blog series started to attract attention and folks really liked the self-help series and that it was all freely available online, procedural, easy-to-follow, etc. We started writing United Front — and it became clear that what we were working on was going to be much too large for one volume — so we decided to pull it out of The Crissing Link series. It split into 2, then later 3 volumes. Now it’s also got companion books (the Ship’s Log Planners and there will be a workbook), and online courses. United Front has become its own franchise or brand in itself.

Today’s News:

Launching Ongoing Coaching

This substack launch also coincides with us starting the United Front: Missions Group Coaching that is open for applications. The current state of therapy availability is highly concerning, and people need alternative supports while on waiting lists, while scrambling to find appropriate treatment, get diagnosed, or more. So we’re going to provide an option for dedicated support around all self-help materials & self-care routines, whether part of the United Front brand, or from other resources, or personal goals.

Work Around Challenging Shame

Upcoming dates & times: all New York time zone: February 21st at 3pm… please contact us directly to RSVP and get the link.

We're holding "Let's Talk about Shame" conference session watch parties. These sessions are good for anyone who might be triggered by the content but is still interested. We help folk take breaks, breathers, and ensure they remain or return to the present. We also pause to give additional disclaimers, warnings, tips, and check in to make sure folk aren't lost in flashbacks.

More about shame and why we're doing this: Please exercise selves care!

Shame is the feel that monitors threats to belongingness. It also gets triggered in more toxic varieties from ridicule, blame, toxic messages, and it can be introjected from abusers.

It's pretty easy to point a finger to what we call "Toxic Shame": bullying, ridicule, blame, public humiliation, etc. It's harder to uncover or realize that we’re victims of gaslighting which often leverages the power of shame.

It's even more difficult to spot and root out carried/introjected shame.

Carried (introjected) shame causes us to develop internalized messages that we're not worthy, that we ought to disappear, that we aren't worthy of normal regard, that we're less-than, that we shouldn't exist, that we should make ourselves small.

Where normal shame is "Oops I've made a mistake! I better fix that." and toxic shame is "I can't help but make a lot of mistakes!" or "I can't do anything right!" Carried shame says "Of course I didn't do anything wrong! There's something wrong with me."

It's very helpful to get support when naming and talking about various types of shame. It’s incredibly important to feel like we have support and belong, that we have community that values us and will not abandon us — especially while discovering & working on carried shame.

While pointing out how shame is transferred to us from others, including intergenerational shame, it’s helpful to be surrounded by others with similar experiences, get additional content warnings and presence nudges to help people stay present & grounded.

Work in Progress: Updates to the United Front System Safety Plan Course

We’ve been going back to basics, and updating the free Safety Plan course on PluralityResource.org: we’re tweaking content and working in anti-procrastination & anti-perfectionism modifications such as adding a System Safety Plan Speed Run video, a How to Use a Safety Plan video, adding new TL;dr sections to the top of each article, and working on modifying some of the language in the lectures. We’ll keep folks updated on the progress, but anyone who has joined in recently likely has seen some of these changes already.

Subscribe for Updates

This will be the place to stay up-to-date on what we’re up to around all of our United Front plural & DID materials and offerings, updated articles, book progress, future coaching groups or other opportunities — and more.

We’ll keep the majority of our works free, sliding scale, low cost — and we’ll give some options, such as a paid tier on Substack, for folks to support us. We’ll also have a higher tier for professional followers which will help keep the rest of our works going for all of y’all.