Overall system design
How the whole is arranged: which groups sit near each other, where the gates are, and what has always been off the map.
System design and information
General layout, internal lands, and inner functions — including the structures placed there by others and what we have learned about undoing them.
Written as understanding arrives, revised often.
This is the shape of our inner world as we currently understand it. Some of it grew on its own, as a child's way of surviving. Some of it was installed deliberately by people who wanted the structure to hold. We record both, and we mark clearly which is which whenever we can.
How the whole is arranged: which groups sit near each other, where the gates are, and what has always been off the map.
The system is layered rather than flat. Some layers were only reachable through specific doors, and finding those doors took years.
Who fronts, who switches, who signals, and what happens inside when the outside world becomes too loud.
Colours were used to sort and command insiders. We keep the record of them, and we are slowly giving those colours new meanings of our own.
Where daily life is managed. Bright, busy, and staffed by the parts who learned to look ordinary.
Quiet, cold places where memory was stored so the rest of us could keep functioning. We visit gently and never alone.
Repeating shapes built to keep parts circling. Naming the pattern was the first step in stepping out of it.
We write about programming the way we would write about weather that shaped a landscape: as something that happened to us, that left structures behind, and that can be studied without being obeyed.
Roles, rules, and internal instructions given to parts before they were old enough to refuse them.
Barriers between layers, colour and number cues, and the deliberate blocking of inner communication so parts could not compare notes.
Slowly, with a therapist, with consent from the parts involved, and with everything written down so no piece of understanding is lost again.