Bernard
- Name origin
- Our abuser's name
- Aliases
- Bernie, Dad (in-system use only)
- Pronouns
- he/it
- Type
- Introject
- Role
- Persecutor
- Communication style
- Appears as figment of nightmares and flashbacks
- Traits presented when cofronting
- Self-hatred, self-fetishization, anxiety, dread
Bernard is something of an indicator headmate. His very presence with us is the evidence, no, the essence, of the fact that we are still traumatized.
If there's one way we can have any compassion whatsoever for him, it's this: We're fairly certain the part of our brain locked into emulating him doesn't want to be doing that. We're sure it would love to cast him off and become something new. It doesn't currently think it would love that, because it is emulating him, and he is a sick evil monster and wants nothing more nor less than to violate us inside our mind over and over and over and over and over again. We hope we can kill him for good one day, for his sake as much as ours, so he can be "reincarnated" into a headmate who doesn't fucking suck.
Relations
I hate Bernard. Lucy enjoys killing him repeatedly. Alice is deathly afraid of him. Daisy flirts with him. Singer hides from him. Lorna considers him the scum of the earth. Sophie is probably indifferent to him but this is unclear.
Bernard finds me, Sophie, and Lorna disgusting. He gets sick pleasure from tormenting Lucy, Alice, Daisy, and Singer, and is attracted to them sexually but thinks very little of them as people.
Bernard's other self
There is very likely a further split within Bernard, but since he is an introject, a split within him does not work the same way as a split within one of us proper—since instead of our self-concept being split, what's split is still just our concept of someone else, even if that concept has attained co-consciousness. It wouldn't feel right to record the "other Bernard" as a separate headmate when he isn't really. As far as the rest of us are concerned, both Bernards are just Bernard.
Nonetheless, for the sake of completeness, I will also discuss here what this other Bernard is like.
Bernard's other self loves us very much. He is inclined toward self-sacrifice and will go to any length for our comfort. He considers himself lower than us, lesser than us. He is still attracted to us, and views us in a lens extremely inappropriate for a parent to use toward their children, and, as such, his adoring, doting, self-abasing personality is nothing but a repugnant parody of true fatherhood.
Bernard's other self is represented to us with the real man's actual face. In contrast, the worse Bernard, the nightmare entity Bernard, the "true," "unmasked" Bernard, uses a face we invented for him because we could not bear the truth that they were the same person. The horrific but unrealistic face of the unmasked Bernard looks something like the drawing we did of him in the upper left, but his other self, his masked self, looks nothing like that at all.
There may be some kind of link between Bernard's other self and Daisy. They have similar personalities and outlooks. However, I strongly doubt they are actually the same headmate, since one is an introject and the other an EP. I think it's more likely that Daisy has an imprinting relationship with Bernard's other self, very similar to that between Singer and Lorna, except probably much less healthy.