Talking About “The Barrier”
Date First Written: December 2013
In the therianthropy community a fairly common (but by far not universal, and far from mandatory) experience among therians is the periods of time in which their perception changes in some way to reflect their animal identity or any experiences where for a time they feel more like the species they identity with. This can include a wide ranges of changes from subtle or dramatic and can vary from person to person. These experiences are referred to as collectively shifts in the therian community, with certain kinds of shifts being given certain names. A fairly common shift among therians that experience shifts is phantom shifting where they begin to feeling nonhuman animal characteristics on their body that are not there. Another common shift among some therians that do shift is mental shifting which is when they begin to mentally think or react more like their nonhuman animal species. So on and so forth among different kinds of shift, some lesser known or not labeled as shifting at all by others.
However, some therians do not experience shifts. For example, there are contherians. Contherianthropy was a term coined by Lion Templin in 1997 with the add-on “con” being derived from the Latin word meaning unchanging or constant. What the term defines is the concept that a person’s human and nonhuman animal(s) selves/sides/natures/etc are one single constant and unchanging part of a person. That there is a constant mindset and experience of being “human/nonhuman animal” and no shifting is experienced.
So, the matter of us is where our experiences best fit into this categorization. See, being multiple effects our nonhuman experiences in a number of ways from how we know what our species is, to how we know exactly what we look like as our species, to how we knew that we identified as nonhuman at such a young age and so on. And for us, our multiplicity has effected our experiences in ways different than a singlet (non-plural person). So to begin to answer the question on if we shift, we first start with the answer of “not really.”
We do not experience shifts as far as we consider it. We sometimes use the word shift to describe some daily experiences over the years, but its not actually what is going on. For whomever is fronting in our system, they do often feel phantom limbs of nonhuman attributes, altered states of consciousness to replicate instincts and viewpoints of our certain species, dreams of being in their “rightful bodies” as far as our identities keeps thinking, and so on; however, these experiences are not something that ever goes away. They are always there and the only reason we act so human much of the time is due to a source outside ourselves and is rather a part of our system structure.
We are always a certain way in our innerworld, but what keeps all the instincts and feelings at bay while we control our body is a sort of “mental damn” keeping us acting mostly human while fronting. It filters out instincts coming from the fronter’s mind to react in certain ways and allows our human brain to keep them thinking in a more or less human way. “The barrier” is what we have come to call the block between our nonhuman instincts and thoughts from coming out while someone fronts. It’s a personal term we came up with to describe the experiences we have and how we have found to best describe some aspects of fronting in our system. The barrier only effects outward behavior and some thoughts in the front, but not any internal thoughts and instinctive reactions the person fronting might actually be thinking. So its not a shift, since its not like the impulses and feelings aren’t always there. They are always there, and rather it is just something else keeping them out of the front to some degree of effectiveness or another. They are always there, its just that we are trained to “keep the barriers up.”
For us, human behaviors and thinking are things we were raised into and “trained” to have growing up. That, over time, we have created this barrier between our natural ways of thinking and feeling from how we should act and think as far as mainstream society considers normal. We like to best describe this mindset like if someone took an animal and gave them capacity to think like a human and raised it as a human. Because the human capacity is there and they were was “raised human”- they can think that way as its all contained and controlled through this constructed barrier in our brain. Similarly, we naturally have instincts and impulses but our raising as over the years trained us to help control when to “let more water out of the damn.”
These experiences depend on how well someone is connected to the awareness of the body and not as aware of their body in our innerworld as well as depend on how much a fronter overrides the barrier with their own will. For the former if the fronter is not as aware of their own body in our innerworld and more in-tune with the Mask (a persona of being a human-undefined singlet) the less animalistic the body will react and the fronter actively think. For the latter if the fronter just allows the barrier and mask to fall as they do, they will naturally leaves the fronter acting more human. However if the fronter pushes the barrier down and the mask away the fronter’s actions and thoughts will shine beyond them. Its is something that comes with the territory of fronting.
So we don’t really shift, but we’re also not contherians though we are constantly of our mentality. Though constant internally, we do not experience a human/non-human sides/selves/ meld. We think on a human capacity because we have a human brain and we ere raised up in a human body, obviously. We don’t feel any sense of human/non-human duality going on in any of us. Thus the concept of contherianthropy is foreign to us.
So that, in short is how our species identity comes out in our daily life experiences. How sharing a body and brain has effected the experience of our species identity of each and everyone one of us. It certainly has effected how we experiences our phantom sensations (our outright full phantom bodies), how we think and perceive our surroundings as a nonhuman with a human body, how we see ourselves in our dreams and what they are about, how we perceive our surrounds with our senses, and so on. Due to the varying connected between our innerworld bodies and our physical human body plus the varying strength of the barrier, our animalistic experiences can sometimes differ. We sometimes just call this shifting through its not exactly shifting at all. Such is our life with being a multiple system fall of nonhuman identified individuals.
- Mist
In the therianthropy community a fairly common (but by far not universal, and far from mandatory) experience among therians is the periods of time in which their perception changes in some way to reflect their animal identity or any experiences where for a time they feel more like the species they identity with. This can include a wide ranges of changes from subtle or dramatic and can vary from person to person. These experiences are referred to as collectively shifts in the therian community, with certain kinds of shifts being given certain names. A fairly common shift among therians that experience shifts is phantom shifting where they begin to feeling nonhuman animal characteristics on their body that are not there. Another common shift among some therians that do shift is mental shifting which is when they begin to mentally think or react more like their nonhuman animal species. So on and so forth among different kinds of shift, some lesser known or not labeled as shifting at all by others.
However, some therians do not experience shifts. For example, there are contherians. Contherianthropy was a term coined by Lion Templin in 1997 with the add-on “con” being derived from the Latin word meaning unchanging or constant. What the term defines is the concept that a person’s human and nonhuman animal(s) selves/sides/natures/etc are one single constant and unchanging part of a person. That there is a constant mindset and experience of being “human/nonhuman animal” and no shifting is experienced.
So, the matter of us is where our experiences best fit into this categorization. See, being multiple effects our nonhuman experiences in a number of ways from how we know what our species is, to how we know exactly what we look like as our species, to how we knew that we identified as nonhuman at such a young age and so on. And for us, our multiplicity has effected our experiences in ways different than a singlet (non-plural person). So to begin to answer the question on if we shift, we first start with the answer of “not really.”
We do not experience shifts as far as we consider it. We sometimes use the word shift to describe some daily experiences over the years, but its not actually what is going on. For whomever is fronting in our system, they do often feel phantom limbs of nonhuman attributes, altered states of consciousness to replicate instincts and viewpoints of our certain species, dreams of being in their “rightful bodies” as far as our identities keeps thinking, and so on; however, these experiences are not something that ever goes away. They are always there and the only reason we act so human much of the time is due to a source outside ourselves and is rather a part of our system structure.
We are always a certain way in our innerworld, but what keeps all the instincts and feelings at bay while we control our body is a sort of “mental damn” keeping us acting mostly human while fronting. It filters out instincts coming from the fronter’s mind to react in certain ways and allows our human brain to keep them thinking in a more or less human way. “The barrier” is what we have come to call the block between our nonhuman instincts and thoughts from coming out while someone fronts. It’s a personal term we came up with to describe the experiences we have and how we have found to best describe some aspects of fronting in our system. The barrier only effects outward behavior and some thoughts in the front, but not any internal thoughts and instinctive reactions the person fronting might actually be thinking. So its not a shift, since its not like the impulses and feelings aren’t always there. They are always there, and rather it is just something else keeping them out of the front to some degree of effectiveness or another. They are always there, its just that we are trained to “keep the barriers up.”
For us, human behaviors and thinking are things we were raised into and “trained” to have growing up. That, over time, we have created this barrier between our natural ways of thinking and feeling from how we should act and think as far as mainstream society considers normal. We like to best describe this mindset like if someone took an animal and gave them capacity to think like a human and raised it as a human. Because the human capacity is there and they were was “raised human”- they can think that way as its all contained and controlled through this constructed barrier in our brain. Similarly, we naturally have instincts and impulses but our raising as over the years trained us to help control when to “let more water out of the damn.”
These experiences depend on how well someone is connected to the awareness of the body and not as aware of their body in our innerworld as well as depend on how much a fronter overrides the barrier with their own will. For the former if the fronter is not as aware of their own body in our innerworld and more in-tune with the Mask (a persona of being a human-undefined singlet) the less animalistic the body will react and the fronter actively think. For the latter if the fronter just allows the barrier and mask to fall as they do, they will naturally leaves the fronter acting more human. However if the fronter pushes the barrier down and the mask away the fronter’s actions and thoughts will shine beyond them. Its is something that comes with the territory of fronting.
So we don’t really shift, but we’re also not contherians though we are constantly of our mentality. Though constant internally, we do not experience a human/non-human sides/selves/ meld. We think on a human capacity because we have a human brain and we ere raised up in a human body, obviously. We don’t feel any sense of human/non-human duality going on in any of us. Thus the concept of contherianthropy is foreign to us.
So that, in short is how our species identity comes out in our daily life experiences. How sharing a body and brain has effected the experience of our species identity of each and everyone one of us. It certainly has effected how we experiences our phantom sensations (our outright full phantom bodies), how we think and perceive our surroundings as a nonhuman with a human body, how we see ourselves in our dreams and what they are about, how we perceive our surrounds with our senses, and so on. Due to the varying connected between our innerworld bodies and our physical human body plus the varying strength of the barrier, our animalistic experiences can sometimes differ. We sometimes just call this shifting through its not exactly shifting at all. Such is our life with being a multiple system fall of nonhuman identified individuals.
- Mist