I'll post again on this topic as a reminder, since Dusty pinged me.
There is a significant number of therians who do experience their therioside in a way which can seem like a different entity. This is a kind of dissociation. It is not plurality or DiD. The early community had lots of individuals who felt this way, and the transition of conscious they experienced was a big influence in the early ideas of mental shifts. It's even in the term "therioside", it is literally a different side of the person. As more of the people in the community were or became more fully integrated, the idea that "
your therioside is you" came to dominate and drove a lot of incompletely integrated therians away. When I was on Amino, I regularly got messages thanking me for talking about integration from therians who felt they had to lie about their experiences because they worried about judgement due to experiencing their therioside in a way distinct from their own consciousness.
Lenowill, on werelist, created a kind of summary of the sorts of perspectives that existed ten years ago.
You can find it here.
I experience my bear side in a way that is distinct from my human side. Not completely so, but more like hot and cold water taps -- my daily experience is somewhere in between. Extreme emotional states, for instance, can push me further towards bear, and when that happens, my body language changes, my vocalizations change, etc. Casually, it's a shift, but my inner experience can be somewhat extreme.
I do hope that over time the original views on this take hold again. This perspective that one must always be completely integrated is very recent -- last ten years or so -- and hopefully will be replaced with a more nuanced perspective which allows for incompletely integrated therians to once again be part of the community.