I found myself to be a misanthrope long before I discovered theranthropy. Humans have a cruleness that goes beyond nature. Yes there are other highly intelligent animals that do hunt and kill for sport but nothing on the scale of humans.

Years ago I cam across a quote by aristottle "The misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god...” this spoke to me deeply as a lost teen who had been abused and traumatised like so many other creatures are. I think that's when I rejected humanity and opened myself up to finding what I really was. Even now I heavily reject the notion of being human even if my body is. Humans after all and weather they like it or not are still animals.
On that statement alone I would say theranthropy is connected, without one I wouldn't have found the other. Due to my ingrained fear of people I have adapted better to being my kintype because I know spiritually and psychologicaly im not human

I dont really understand why someone would find out their identity and name it something else. Thats like deciding that your left hand is now called Bob and only referring to your left hand as bob, it doesn't make sence.

However if they mean finding your spiritual name, that's different. We all have our standred name, the one given by parents that's written on paper work etc, but that doesn't always say who we really are. I suppose the modern equivalent is having a user name or gamer tag, but the same could be used for a spiritual name. Something we identify with that describes who we are as an individual. Some cultures have secondary naming ceremonies for this reason. Perhaps that's what people are trying to do when they awaken as therians?

Odd, I remember replying to this thread already... Or maybe it was another thread similar to this one.

Regardless, I don't really see this being the case for me personally. Nothing really happened to me prior to me showing the first signs, and while I do feel disconnected from myself, that came later on due to life circumstances. In fact, this disconnect contributed more to me not realizing I'm a therian, not to me being a therian. I also think being born with a predisposition for therianthropy in this case is pretty much just saying one is being born as a therian, but with extra steps. If one is a therian and goes their entire life without finding out, they're still a therian. There will always be at least some signs.

If I were to apply this logic to myself, I'd be a cat. I grew up around them, was pretty much raised by them when nobody else wanted to pay attention to me, and they're extremely imprinted onto me. I see myself in them, but not as a member of their species. I see myself as a member of their family. I'm cat otherhearted through and through.

It's also worth mentioning I used to despise most canines for the majority of my life. I only stopped when I figured out I was a therian, and a canid for that matter. I hated it, but what can you do. Sometimes I feel like it was a punishment or a lesson, but I don't really believe in that stuff.

I also remember mentioning a couple of times that my dad and me share quite a few canine traits. How he described himself when he was younger sounds an awful lot like me. When I told him about my therianthropy he wasn't surprised. Who knows.

Special interests being a major factor is a theory I share. Atleast in the cases where it starts early and the animal seldom if ever changes. Sometimes therianthropy itself might be a special interest and that could be how some people end up with lots of theriotypes?
If you were to discount autistic special interests or general obsessive tendencies (with or without autism), and only include cases where that isn't a factor. I think our numbers would shrink significantly.
I know it's a factor for me for sure, it would explain why I have two types that on the face of it are very different to eachother. The commonality there is lifelong or near lifelong passions. I am my passions, like a patchwork quilt of spinterests past.

People with this tendency are prone to social isolation and bullying especially in adolescence. And those interests are comforting and provide a reliable source of company during a miserable time. I hated being a teenager (and being a younger kid was a mixed bag too). I wasn't cool, I got picked on, didn't go to parties, I had anxiety with knobs on, home life was hell. Escapism is enticing. I have all the time in the world to throw myself into my passions and watch sealife documentaries and mermaid films and imagine being there. I can retreat into reading ape articles, collect figurines and make up fictional worlds about talking apes with a bonobo as self insert.

This is as good a recipe for a therian or otherkin as any. Autistic tendencies + interests + environmental adversity and isolation. Tried and tested formula.

It's difficult for me to pinpoint what exactly caused my therianthropy, or whether or not it was even a choice, because I don't remember when I started feeling this way. My memory only goes back to about the age of five, and I've been acting feline for as long as I can remember.

I was raised around Bengal cats, and was very close to my first cat, an old girl named Squealer. She was like a grandmother to me almost, she taught me how to have empathy for animals and bond with something not of your own species. She was there for my birth, up until she died when I was about seven. It is very possible that she had imprinted on me at an early age, causing me to develop an attachment not only to cats but to spotted, half-wild, or wild cats in particular. That and childhood trauma from being excessively bullied and isolated during my formative years likely could have contributed to the development of therianthropy, it's just been too long, and my brain blocked out too many of the memories for me to remember accurately. When it comes to things like this, I don't want to guess and end up being totally wrong, as that might send me or somebody else into a complete spiral, wondering if we're valid, if we're real, if something went wrong along the lines that led to our current state, etc. Ultimately, I don't care what caused my therianthropy — I still feel non-human and I likely always will, I view it more as a matter of 'what just is' rather than what could or should have been or why it is.

I also would like to add on to what @Jeb_CC said about disassociation: I think disassociation is simply required for some aspects of therianthropy. In order to recognise and accept this part of yourself, you have to willingly detach yourself from humanity, even if only momentarily. Furthermore, when you shift or do something to feel more in tune with your theriotype(s), you are essentially disassociating in order to bring about the animal in you. Disassociation can also be a common way of coping for youth experiencing early or extreme trauma. Somewhere along the lines, amidst trying in desperation to detach yourself from reality, the human and animal sides of one could become muddled and blurry, causing a feeling of non-humanity to develop and, ultimately, permanently stick. But I believe that, without a professional psychologist's perspective, this is honestly hard to determine and, even if it were true, is probably only relevant for a very certain sub-set of therians.

I'm not a misanthropist as my default setting. As individuals and as a species we are all capable of compassion and cruelty. Like any social animal. I am however critical of civilisation for a bunch of reasons, but from an anarcho-primitavist perspective, not a "humans bad" perspective.
I don't think humans are meant to exist in gigantic, anonymous populations. It's the anonymity of these masses that brings out the most destructive behaviour. Leaders don't know their subjects personally, so they're not held accountable for what they sign off on. If ever I am feeling "misanthropic", it's actually grief for a version of humanity that once existed. And will never exist again without a huge disaster and noone wants that.

Humans are complex like any animal and full of good and bad traits, the negatives behaviours don't matter that much when scaled down. Warfare between tribes is different to warfare between nations. Clearing a patch of forest for a settlement is different to clearing the entire amazon for soya beans. I have sympathy for misanthropes to an extent because people around us are indeed a faceless mass. A force. Not just the individuals we live with and the strangers on the other side of the valley. That does also of course mean that good deeds are scaled up too! It's not all bad. I'm sure some people would call me an ecofascist but I don't particularly care.

I'm curious to know if endangered or exploited theriotypes correlate with misanthropy at all. It could make for an interesting poll. The newer planet of the apes series are my favourite films. My sympathies are pretty one-sided. I have a tattoo of the Caesar symbol. Irl I want nothing more than for the zoos, circuses and other facilities to be empty so the entire third act of Rise makes for very cathartic viewing. The way humans have historically treated their cousins is abysmal, and still is now. Not to mention habitat loss etc. And that fact brings out the egdelord in me for sure. I am prepared for bonobos and other apes to go extinct in my lifetime. The only remaining populations will be in captivity. Existing in a vacuum with no effect on their former ecosystems, a living museum exhibit. They don't even look or act the same anymore because being stuck inside 4 walls makes them mentally and physically ill.
Though like I said before, for every large scale act of cruelty, there are equal acts of kindness. And people who make it their aim to combat the damage done are wonderful and I couldn't be misanthropic towards that if I tried.

For me, getting older and learning about the world made me realize that where my anger at "humanity" comes from is actually from power structures and... topics that may be too political to mention? The point is, humanity isn't bad, it just has bad tendencies when there are bad motivations, and bad power structures create bad feedback loops. These things aren't inherent to humanity though, and you truly need look no further than many indigenous communities for evidence that it's not "simply human nature" to devolve into those exploitative power structures. We don't benefit from denying that it does happen for the sake of "loving humans," but we're the only ones who can fix what we've done, so it's best to not shoot ourselves in the foot as a lost cause either. I'm only in my second week of classes but I'm already seeing a lot of this (embracing that we are the solution) in both my political ecology class and my environmental management class. Also, being exposed to the way humans rise up to push back against those power structures for the sake of strangers they will never know, that also gives me great hope.

My therianthropy has never intersected with any misanthropy, and I think part of that is because identify as a jaguar person, someone who is both human AND jaguar. It would be self-loathing, and frankly, I just don't care to do that, when I know it's far more productive for me to look for the good and focus on what I can contribute to, like my degree. Which, in essence, is so I can leave the world better than I found it.

I have a username that I use on therian-centric forums, in order to keep my therianthropy posts online separate from my legal name as well as my gaming nick. But it has no deeper meaning. Susitar is literally the Finnish word for wolf (susi) + a feminine suffix. So in English, it would be something like "wolfess". Just a placeholder to protect my real identity.

When I was 14 and started to awaken, before I found the therian community and didn't really know what was going on, I did create a "wolf name". I loved the novel Watership Down, so inspired by the rabbit names there, I gave myself a "wolf name": Sea Breeze. I had also seen some furry art (without knowing that it was an entire subculture), so I drew some art of this "Sea Breeze", a fox + wolf hybrid with water magic. So in a way, I made a fursona when I was 14?
But it sounded more like a pirate name, to be honest, and I never did use it for anything in the long term. I also realised I was a wolf, and not a fox at all (even if they are my favourite animal) and abandonded all ideas about a "magical hybrid with water powers".

Susitar was something I came up with much later, I think I started to use it on Tumblr first (2010). I realised that Tumblr was much more public and open than say, Werelist. On Werelist I had used my normal gaming handle at first. But my irl friends knew about that username - and I didn't want them to know about my tumblr account. Later, I went back to change my username on Werelist to Susitar as well.

Like many others in this thread, I don't think most wild animals have names in the ways that humans do. Maybe dolphins or something have names, but wolves don't really need that.

Tl;dr: I have a username on therian sites. It's not a "spiritual name" or "therian name", it's just an online handle.

Omg Bag, congrats <3
I never thought I'd ever see this happen

Therians having names for their theriotypes really confuse me, your theriotype is supposed to be YOU. I understand if you were a pet in a past life, or maybe you have an identity disorder where you sometimes don't feel like yourself, but past that I really do not get it at all.