Stressgenic

Stressgenic is an origin that is usually counted under endogenic, in which stress caused a system to form, but the stress wasn't traumatic or connected to trauma.

While we find this a useful term, the thing is that it requires one to be able to clearly distinguish between stress that was traumatic and stress that was not, at least for the purpose of considering whether this is a traumagenic origin or not.

Certain factors of our childhood were certainly stressful, but it is difficult to say definitively if they were TRAUMATIC or not. This included things like being autistic and experiencing constant sensory overwhelm, having extremely low distress tolerance and lashing out or crying whenever irritated, frequent medical appointments (including operations), and alterhumanity that made it confusing to be in a human body.

We find it difficult to say that these things were traumatic, even though they were stressful. For example, some of those things (e.g. the medical appointments) were just a part of life, and it's better we had them than if we didn't.

It's also difficult for us to conceptualize it as fully traumatic to be alterhuman without experiencing mistreatment for it (which we don't believe we did). While some alterhumans may feel different and we wouldn't invalidate anybody's trauma, we feel that to use "trauma" to describe that experience runs the risk of watering down "trauma" to just "any difficult or negative experience", so that means it's on a case-by-case basis whether a thing like that is traumatic, as opposed to things that are universally traumatic (e.g. abuse).

Because the confusion we experienced over our alterhumanity was frustrating but not intense or devastating (especially in comparison to alterhumans who do report significant distress over their species), we do not feel that "trauma" describes that experience for us, even though compartmentalizing our identity due to alterhumanity may have contributed to plurality.

If a child is very imaginative and prone to intense fantasies, this imagination is likely to contribute to plurality. While an imaginative child could become plural through imagination without adverse factors, they would probably be even more likely to become plural if there were also adverse factors.

This is because it would be easy for the child to pretend that they are someone else experiencing the stressful thing - either someone who is more skilled at handling the problem, or just anybody other than the child themself.

While this is similar to how trauma can cause headmates to form due to overwhelming trauma, that does not always happen on purpose where the child consciously imagines themself to be someone else. Rather, the notion that this occurred in our system via non-traumatic stress is based on the idea that we would pretend to be somebody else due to stressful situations, and that would become a headmate in a way similar to but not the same as traumagenic functions.