[Content note: discussion of trauma, child and sexual abuse, sexual violence, lack of self-worth, dissociation, PTSD, flashbacks, DID, personality disorders; some mildly graphic examples of abuse and trauma mentioned in text form]

I have spent over two years doing emotional support for people who had survived long-term childhood trauma, and in these cases spawning agents to deal with unbearable suffering while having no escape from it is basically a standard reaction that the brain/mind takes. The relevant psychiatric diagnosis is DID (formerly MPD, multiple personality disorder). In these cases the multiple agents often manifest very clearly and distinctly. It is tempting to write it off as a special case that does not apply in the mainstream, yet I have seen more than once the progression from someone suffering from CPTSD to a full-blown DID. The last thing that happens is that the person recognizes that they "switch" between personalities. Often way later than when others notice it, if they know what to look for. After gaining some experience chatting with those who survived severe prolonged trauma, I started recognizing subtler signs of "switching" in myself and others. This switching between agents (I would not call them sub-agents, as they are not necessarily less than the "main", and different "mains" often take over during different parts of the person's life) while a normal way to operate, as far as I can tell, almost never rises to the level of conscious awareness, as the brain carefully constructs the lie of single identity for as long as it can.

-- shminux

As the above comment suggests, the appearance of something like distinct subagents is particularly noticeable in people with heavy trauma, DID being the most extreme example.

This post will interpret the appearance of subagents as emerging from unintegrated memory networks, and argue that - as shminux suggests - the presence of these is a matter of degree. There’s a continuous progression of fragmented (dissociated) memory networks giving arise to increasingly worse symptoms as the degree of fragmentation grows. The continuum goes from everyday procrastination and akrasia on the “normal” end, to disrupted and dysfunctional beliefs on the middle, and conditions like clinical PTSD, borderline personality disorder, and dissociative identity disorder on th...