Crisses

<h3>Patrons like you help us create Internal Communities!</h3>
Even for clicking through to check out our Patreon page. If you don't become a patron/sponsor, please make sure you FOLLOW us (+FOLLOW button or … menu -&gt; Follow on the app) and spread the word so plurals, multiples and folk with DID/OSDD have a chance to see that there's an insider's resource for them. If you've been following us for (OMG!) over 20 YEARS!! online — we're thrilled and awed and we really appreciate your support in the world!
 
 
<h3>Why We Need Your Support</h3>
 
We spent the last couple of months of 2016 preparing for eviction. January 4th 2017 we left our keys with the lawyer at the town courthouse, and drove away to drop our older kid off with our ex and planning to sleep in our car for the winter. After dropping him off, we showed up at a friends' house with a stuffie, a suitcase, and burst into tears when they opened the door. We could stay for a few days, then we were on our own in the world. Rewind. We got most of our content and books done during serious dips in the economy (&quot;Well, no jobs are coming in during the holidays, might as well write....&quot;) and with supplemental financial support from others (for which we are, and will always be, eternally grateful). Our business was a hustle 7-days-a-week, and there was no end in sight. If we took a week off, you can see it on the balance sheet. No vacations, no creativity-replenishing moments, no chance to get into a creative zone, and no chance to be ourselves. It didn't work. We had ended up homeless anyway. So, as we lived a nomad's life from couch to couch, and had long trips in the car to think, we also finally had a chance to talk to each other, to ask ourselves what the FUCK we were doing. We decided in 2017, on a road trip to North Carolina to meet with our dear friend and client Linda Borghi of Abundant Life Farm and Farm-A-Yard, that the work we had been doing had to stop. Business-to-business work wasn't what we were put here on this planet to do. And we were going to kill ourselves doing it. 
 
Support or no support, we had already been changing our business to more and more life coaching, which meant taking nearly all other money-making projects off the table. We were spread in so many directions. We were coaching multiples, people with mental health issues, writers, businesspeople and people looking to switch careers. What we really needed to do was the work we uniquely do in the world, not the design or web creation work or even the business coaching work someone else could do better than we could. We needed to move to full-time plural/multiple support &amp; content creation — our free podcast, kinhost.org, and working on our books-in-progress — and that's why we asked for patron support. To make the transition from running one type of business to another. 
 It was 12 years in business at the time with no end in sight — and we decided it had to end.  We have a couple straggling clients still, but they're our best clients. All the others are gone, we're not asking for new business clients, and that part of our hustle is over. We've reclaimed most of our energy &amp; time for our tribe, letting us take our mask off (kinda, sorta — damn mask!) and be ourselves again.  We have returned to being the pioneer our community desperately needs.  We could always use more support — so we are guessing there are more people and plurals out there who are so interested in the cause, and the content we 
have to be fully ourselves to produce, that they’re willing to support us continuing to expand our services and free resources online. 
 
<h2>What have we done with the money?</h2>
We have been keeping our promises!!  We just went over $200/month from our patrons. It's not a lot (especially in New York!), but look how much it has helped us do!  Patrons (plus other singular clients, book &amp; course sales, and having low expenses) has freed up enough of our time that we have been fulfilling projects we said we would work on since we put our Patreon page up. So here's a running list updating what we said we'd do — thanks to our patron's ongoing support — as promised:
 
 
<ul>
	<li>Continual work on the United Front series &amp; the The Crissing Link books. These have been in progress a long time, and even though they're not complete (folk can and have purchased the books while in progress), the work on these projects has filtered into many other projects, many of them listed below.</li>
	<li>We promised that we'd work on online courses - such as a live United Front Bootcamp — or full United Front program. This dream has become a reality. Patron support helped us take over administration of, and completely reimagine &amp; recreate <a href="https://pluralityresource.org/" target="_blank">https://pluralityresource.org</a> as an online school. The former website owners could no longer maintain the forums there, we got their permission &amp; blessing to remake it into a school, and patron support helped us have the free time to devote to getting the school up and running with several courses available as soon as it went up. We've run a pilot of all courses we had planned, and have only 1 more course for the United Front program left to put up on the site (as of this August 2022 update). The site is open for other plural instructors as soon as they're ready to host their own courses on the platform. We now have up: a course for helping plural instructors create courses (free), a peer specialist training based System Safety Plan course which is and will always be free, and all but 1 of the United Front based courses for free or at a sliding scale of $0-10 (only Building Trust is $0-25). The last course we're working on this autumn is Internal Communication.</li>
	<li>Patrons have supported the free group coaching pilot courses that became the self-led courses on Plurality Resource. There's 1 course remaining — our health has been pretty stable, and we're accepting applications for Internal Communication, and finishing up the last couple weeks of United Front: Reparenting now (August 2022).</li>
	<li>Updating <a href="http://kinhost.org">http://kinhost.org</a> - Encouraging Internal Community - this site is always a work-in-progress: with patron support, we've been updating dozens of pages, adding articles, completing draft articles, looking for orphaned pages, writing up articles for Stub content, and adding/refining some of the oldest but most important pages on the site (such as expanding the pages on internal communication, insomnia, emotional regulation, finding lost/stuck headmates, reparenting system kids, and much more). We have a list of the 50 most recently edited pages on the homepage of the site, so that folk can always check what we've been up to lately.</li>
	<li>Our patrons helped to free up time so we could expand our social media presence over the last several years to spending more time on Twitter, Mastodon, Quora, and Discord (as possible), and we're able to directly help more plural folk across a wider audience. We're constantly leading people to our free resources: the United Front Boot Camp, System Safety Plan course, Self-Help Indexes, System Trust Issues podcast series, and specific Kinhost.org pages to supplement answers to people's questions around the internet. </li>
	<li>We've been working on cross-indexing the Kinhost site, as we promised: we created a whole page of <a href="https://kinhost.org/Main/Self-HelpIndexes">Self-Help Indexes</a> with patron support — tagging more pages, making the self-help content on the site much more discoverable, and cross-posting conference materials, blog posts, podcast episodes, and online courses with the pages on Kinhost.org that pertain to similar material.</li>
	<li>With patron support we have brought back the <a href="https://kinhost.org/ManyMinds/HomePage" target="_blank">Many Minds on the Issue podcast</a> as a serious endeavor rather than something we tried recording in our car during commutes — we have a team of helpers working on episode transcripts. When that's done, we'll start adding more episodes to the podcast again.</li>
	<li><a href="http://crisses.org">http://crisses.org</a> - this has become a personal CV site and a hub for all our projects. This site hosts our stories, poetry, etc. We've added our whole media resume, links to all our sites and social media presences, etc. for folk who want to follow us. It makes it easier to track what we have been pouring our time into.</li>
	<li>Attend conferences, trainings, and certification courses: we committed to expand our knowledge base and add more disciplines and information into the work that informs the movement.  We have gotten our MHANYS CarePath™ Coach certification, NYS Peer Specialist provisional certification, Emotional CPR certification, attended trainings on trauma and intersectionality, and more. We commit to doing more such as: selfcompassion.org MSC trainings, shamanic counseling, shamanic soul retrieval training, etc.  Bring a peer perspective to these forums as well as bring information back to the community and into our writing and practices.</li>
	<li>In addition to this, we helped found the Plural Positivity World Conference, maintain the Plural Events website, co-ran the conference for 2 years, presented all 4 years, and personally contributed to <a href="https://pluralevents.org/Presenters/TheCrisses" target="_blank">many many sessions for the conference</a>.</li>
	<li>Activism — as promised, we reached out to the ISST-D (which led to them working on new guidelines, due in 2023) and have been working on plural activism to get better treatment and care of all plurals, whether they have dissociative disorders or not.</li>
	<li>Revive a community forum for multiples - THIS we have yet to do!! Still a work in progress. Since there are some already out there forming, I'm not sure whether we'll keep this goal or not. Something we're thinking about.</li>
	<li>Also still in progress: the work on Plural Haven as we now call it. This is on our roadmap for our business to come up with workable plans for Plural Haven during 2025.  This idea has become a plural ecovillage and respite center where folk can come for a time then return home, or those who lose their housing but can work with others and follow the agreements of the center can potentially stay on as staff. We hope to see this at least taking root during our lifetime. If we get a LOT more patron support, this could happen faster and definitely could be seen in our lifetime but right now it's still something a committee in our head is working on slowly. The former promise for this line item was: Create the plans for community centers of Harmony — and create one or gift the idea to the world. We don't have to build them, we have to get the plans out of our head to make room for other stuff. And add in a makerspace and more. &quot;As Inside, So Outside &amp; Vice-Versa&quot;</li>
</ul>
This work is not done. There's more work to do, some of these projects are hitting major milestones — some of these projects are ongoing. We wanted to be held accountable to those wondering what we've been doing with their funds. EVERYTHING! We have been doing almost everything we said we'd do. In fact, we were a little surprised we said things like we'd run online courses, and checked that off etc. — we haven't looked at this list, and fulfilled things we forgot were even on this list. :) This is a good thing. This list is always in the back of our mind anyway. Even down to the Harmony Center idea that we're morphing into Plural Haven.
 
 
Patrons stuck with us through homelessness, through getting housing, through the pandemic (to date), and we thank you all. This is truly a blessing. You've made a difference both to us but to hundreds if not thousands of plurals out there through us. This is huge.
 
 
We have been doing this work nearly full-time, still taking some dogsitting appointments and keeping a few non-plural clients.  Our next big life goal will be to move into permanent 55+ senior housing in a few years (we are turning 53 in 2022), and hopefully be able to be fully self-supported while continuing to do this work. We will not be getting much if anything for social security income later on. So this would be a huge commitment for us and we hope that we can make it work for the remainder of our life, and we need it to work even if chronic illness severely hampers our ability to work and be productive.
 
 
Here's some of the ongoing expenses that your support helps us out with, and why we can still use more support than we're currently getting through our patrons:
 
 
Expenses related to online content production, website hosting (we run a dedicated server), podcast and video hosting, internet connection, phone &amp; data plan, equipment purchases &amp; upgrades, virtual assistant and per-gig services, software, transcription/captioning services, accounting/bookkeeping services (the stress of doing our finances is a big issue — we need to offload this!), etc.  Some expenses are recurring, others are one-shot periodic expenses.
 
 
We have much content that needs to be made more accessible and updated, such as taking an article and making it into a video like this one:
 
 
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H4WQUZv7JV0" width="560">
</iframe>
 
<h3>The Story</h3>We had been there for each other as long as we could remember, playing games and singing together as children, defending each other from the crap we went through. We thought everyone had different voices in their head all the time. In 1986, we discovered that we &quot;had other people in our head&quot; — we started to introduce ourselves to each other by name, share stories with each other, and try to figure out how to run a shared life together. At just about the same time, our life crashed and burned. We ended up in a mental hospital for 9 months and coming out the other side, we decided we needed to get our act together. We devoured everything we could about recovery, self-help, self-improvement, psychology, spirituality, holistic arts, and more. We sought out help, we figured things out. We knew we were already an old soul, and thought maybe we should start to teach people about their massive blind-spots. But we figured that in our early 20s we were also not going to be given the credibility and respect that we would need, and we should probably wait for the grey hair and wrinkles so people would take us seriously. <img src="http://kinhost.org/art/bubblemap32304.png" style="width: 339px; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;">In 1996, on our first AOL website, we started to put our stories and poems online. People found us, we got fanmail from people who read our stories and information — people found them inspiring, helpful, people didn't feel so alone, had questions, and needed answers and we'd email them back with anything we could send them to help out. Around 1999, we became the co-founder of an email list by and for people who are multiple — people with DID. By 2000, the website had morphed into Kinhost.org, an enormous community resource that now has over 400 pages of resource materials and articles, by and for multiples/plurals/persons with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID or MPD), and related disorders (OSDD or DDNOS &amp; C-PTSD). By around 2004, article contributions dropped to a standstill, we got a full-time job, and we just continued answering fanmail — we also tried starting a podcast but our equipment wasn't good enough and we were stuck. Then in 2006, we lost our job and started running our own business. We wrote the first book in The Crissing Link Series — our this-life autobiography titled Poetic License — in 2009. Since then we have done part of the work (and released in-progress drafts on LeanPub) for other books that will be in the series: <a href="https://leanpub.com/multiplechoice">Multiple Choice (manifesto, free)</a>, Split Decision (memoir), Case Histories (past-life stories), Core Discoveries (philosophy), and Missing Persons (polemic - an argument with popular doctrine). In 2018 we decided that the book United Front (selves-help) would have to become a series of at least 3 books: <a href="https://leanpub.com/b/unitedfront">Recruits: Building Internal Community, Rebels: Reforming the Good Guys, &amp; Adventurers: Enjoying External Life</a>. These are all available on Leanpub while being written. We also rebooted our 2005 podcast, adding new episodes and creating some vital precursors to United Front: Rebels on the podcast. Now we have an online school, work on live group coaching pilot courses that then morph into self-led self-paced online courses, and we're working on a professional training course ahead of the changes to the treatment guidelines expected in 2023. 
<h2>About Us</h2>
	Ninja Swiss-Army-Knife or Revolutionary Brainstormer — you decide. We are The Crisses, soon to be Criss Xes, alias Rev. Criss Ittermann née “I Don’t Care What You Call Me, Just Don’t Call Me Christina&quot; bringing you our offbeat — but always at least wryly amusing — content productions. Whether it’s a ComiXes episode by Frank of Crisses, a video course, a new book, a rant, an article, or more.
 
 
	We've been told by people who study the great thought leaders that we, The Crisses, really stand amongst them. Just a lot quieter in general. And with less followers. We think. Collectively, we are writers, instructors, life coaches, ministers, otherkin, sex educators, mental health activists, home cooks, herbalists, healers, and environmentalists. We are counter-culture, earth-wisdom, boot-stomping activists, neo-shamans, spiritual messengers, artists, poets, and oh — did we mention? — writers. And whatever else we forgot to mention. Yes, we said 
writer twice.  You can double that again. 
 
	Patron support has been absolutely vital in helping The Crisses get back into housing, out of the fee-for-service hamster wheel, and into full-time content creation. You can't write and market at the same time.  Armed with a list of books and courses that we want to produce, your support can help us release amazing amounts of creativity into the wild. Just like it has been for the last several years. Your support will keep more of the same coming for years to come!
 
 
 Don’t let these 156(+) minds go to waste! Become our patron on Patreon today!
 
 
<a href="http://www.kinhost.org/pmwiki/uploads/Crisses/2017_remodel_headmap_Crisses.png"><img src="http://www.kinhost.org/pmwiki/uploads/Crisses/2017_remodel_headmap_Crisses.png"></a>

Free

Tired of missing out of all the brilliant stuff that comes out of our delightfully dappled brain?  <ul><li>Access our private patron-only feed with quips, pokes, oxymorons, spoonerisms, word nonsense…i.e. Crissisms!</li><li>Updates on my progress, and maybe an occasional hint, tip, etc. about what's going on behind the scenes.</li><li>You'll know when all the great new stuff comes out!</li></ul>

Crissisms

We have a certain special sense of humor.  Beyond the occasional Crissism, we do occasionally come up with witticisms that go even farther above and beyond.  <ul><li>Stories and banter podcast-style noting our massive and minor observations of the paradox that is life</li><li>Letters we write for (environmental &amp; human rights) activist agendas. You don't have to download them. But repurpose them if you need to</li><li>And we'll be ever SO grateful knowing you turned down a latte to show us some extra love</li><li>Plus all previous rewards</li></ul>

Crissteria

You know we’re a writer. There’s really few limits to the genres we’ve written in, or at least attempted to write in. We're also a cook, artist, graphic designer, crafter, even 3D sculptor both digital and clay, etc. <ul><li>Screengrabs or photos of tidbits while in progress</li><li>Early access to posted content as possible</li><li>Recipes! Nom nom nom</li><li>Plus all previous rewards</li></ul>

CrissLit

You’ve probably been following us for a while. You know what we’re worth. Or at least how much what we write is worth. Lots more in my noggin, let’s get it out before age brings serious mental decline. <ul><li>Frank’s ComiXes, inner rants, tidbits of history, peeks into the real Crisses</li><li>Early previews of online courses</li><li>Live chat Q&amp;As</li><li>Plus all previous rewards</li></ul>

Crissvironmental Activist

At this level you’ll guarantee we can find the time to really start digging into the huge vault of memories in our head. Your support will help us dedicate time to writing some really serious stuff. <ul><li>Access to notes and babbles related to our ongoing project to create our memoir</li><li>Early previews of writing projects — memoirs, fiction, etc.</li><li>Exclusive scans of some original documents in our journal box</li><li>Plus all previous rewards</li></ul>

Crissistorical Society

You really think we’re all that. Or you’re a stalker. Either way, you definitely help us pay the bills — and for that we thank you. 
<ul>
<li>A courtesy copy of our LeanPub books/bundles in your 2nd month</li>
<li>2 - 30 minute life coaching sessions a month</li>
<li>Plus all previous rewards</li>
</ul>

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