Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Valerie Sinason

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Guest: Valerie Sinason · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the System Speak podcast, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to longtime listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
• 0:57
  Valerie Sinason is a poet, writer, child psychotherapist, and adult psychoanalyst. She has worked with disability, trauma, and dissociation for over four decades. Her first novel, The Orpheus Project, about VIP abuse was published by Sphinx Books last year. She founded the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in The UK. Welcome, Valerie Sinason.
• 1:25
  I so appreciate you doing this really and truly, and, I think it's really important both for clinicians, especially we have so many well, I think it's really important for people who are learning about this, but I also think it's really important, especially for clinicians who have not had, at least here, enough psychodynamic training. And I know we work on that a lot with PTP, with ISSTD, and trying to emphasize that when we teach our courses. But, pieces like if they're missing those basics, then pieces like this that are so specific, they really miss. And so I really appreciate you having the conversation today.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Well, I really appreciate when experts from lived experience and have done the training as well are actually transforming the the scene. So congratulations on all you've done.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: That's very kind. Thank you. Do you want to introduce yourself just a little bit so that listeners can get acquainted to the sound of your voice?
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you very much. Much. I will indeed. So hello. My my name is Valerie Sinason.
• 2:43
  And Sinason is in fact the name from my first marriage, but because it's the name of my children, and it was the name in which I started work, I I have kept it. And I'm a poet. I always put that first because that's been from when I was tiny right through. I trained as a child therapist and then an adult psychoanalyst, and it's been in the last forty years that I've been working with trauma, disability, and dissociation, especially. And I'm now 77 and retired from running my clinic seven years ago, and really remain profoundly interested in this work and helping organizationally.
• 3:40
  Now I don't do the clinical work that I used to and carry on writing.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: I love what you said about your name because I just got my name legally settled after a divorce. It is legally Emma Sunshine, and my name has been different on every book I did, every meeting I've done for ISSTD. So it's been quite confusing. You were wise to keep it the same. I I also appreciate your disability work.
• 4:13
  I am deaf. I have cochlear implants. And, so I I appreciate that that is part of your work as well. I I I have so many questions, but before we jump into our topic today, what do you wanna share just generally about how you even began to learn about trauma and dissociation?
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: I'm only just realizing in my seventies why it was that this work should be drawn to me and me to it. And it feels quite ludicrous that I didn't realize earlier. My lovely loved grandmother, my mother's mother who lived with us till she died, had a mild learning disability. And we always were brought up knowing she was illiterate and that she'd had a traumatized early history, but somehow the word learning disability didn't come in. It was seen as a kind of political issue, how appalling she hadn't been given a proper education.
• 5:25
  And it's only now I realized that's why I understood disability. And Nan loved her children and her grandchildren. So I learned the hugest issue that you can get extra support to help with things you can't do. But if you don't love and can't love your children, there's nothing that's gonna make her that transformation for your poor children. But if you love your children, whatever your situation is, something wonderful will get passed on.
• 6:03
  And the second one is my father who, became a professor of learning disability, forced his staff to stop beating children. It was the horrendous period all around the world where teachers could assault children with canes and straps. And he was head of schools for learning disabled children, and he transformed them. So and he always said having a mother who's illiterate and a grand a mother-in-law who's illiterate was the best training for him. So those he and with the support of my mother also had the fact that their parents were refugees from the Ukraine.
• 6:57
  So there's something about a circle being completed that there was trauma that led to disability, then there was the wonderful contribution the next generation make, and then often it's the third generation that suddenly realize, my goodness, there was terrible trauma there, and weren't they all courageous, and won't they only survive?
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Wow. That brings full circle even to us because it is one of the times I got to talk to you individually. The first time was when I was working with refugees after what happened in Ukraine, and you were being supportive of that. And I appreciated that at the time and on Dysoc, but I didn't realize you have that personal connection as well.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I'm only properly appreciating this factor of aging, of seeing why things were the way they were and what the influences on my life were and working with Ukrainian therapists who weren't trauma therapists. They were wonderful general therapists, and suddenly, they were working with tortured members of their community and not knowing if that was about to happen to them. And of course, that's relevant for therapists all over the world in troubled areas that are trying to understand trauma work better while also in the middle of it themselves, which is, a terrible double position to be in.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: It really is. I don't think it happened generally to us until COVID. But in those pockets of the world where there are disasters or war zones or refugee situations, it absolutely is a position people find themselves in.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: And in those positions, I think what comes over really profoundly is without any more, therapy, That is what brings us to our to do.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: That is what brings us to our topic that I would rather talk about even Ukraine than talk about this because I do want to let listeners know that it is a heavy topic today and quite serious. So always caring for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. But my partner and I had an evening where we are both clinicians, and we are both members of ISSTD and both teach in the PTP courses for ISSTD, and we had an evening where the children were tended to and things were settled, and we thought we have a little extra time. It's what's an which is unusual. What should we do with our evening?
• 10:22
  And so, of course, we thought, let's go to CFAS and find a previous webinar that we were not able to attend, and let's just watch a short one. And so the one that we ended up finding was yours from last fall. And there was a whole day presentation of psychoanalytic material, and it was such a good presentation. And we had watched several of them, but yours was the next in line for us to watch and we hadn't seen it. And we thought, oh, this will be good.
• 10:59
  We've seen her. We know some of your work. I was excited to get to see you present something, and we thought, oh, look, it's only ninety minutes. What could happen in ninety minutes? And it completely changed my world internally as a clinician.
• 11:20
  I had never before this, had never heard the phrase infanticidal attachment, or any of these concepts that you were teaching. And so I emailed you right away and said, please, can we talk about it on the podcast? And that's kind of how we got to now, but where do you even want to start to explain what this is?
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: Well, I I think following your lead, this this is a really painful word. It's not hiding anything infanticidal. So for anyone listening to that this this is this is painful, and it is the basis of what what so many children who have a learning disability face, and what so many children who are being abused face. So I think even though the word is really painful to listen to and grasp, what comes from it, I think helps people to reduce the shade they carry because it does make sense of why people can't let go of toxic attachment figures.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: Do you know when I heard this, and then you referenced several things in your presentation, of course, so I looked up those citations and traced down those articles and began reading. And as I studied this, there were things in my life that suddenly made sense. All of my children are adopted from foster care. There were lot things in their lives that suddenly made sense. I thought of other colleagues or other friends with lived experience where suddenly things they have said made sense.
• 13:20
  It is one of the moments in my healing journey, in my clinical professional journey, where I literally felt a neurological shift in my Like, I don't know how to explain how profound and powerful this was. So, yes, it's hard. Yes, it's difficult to look at. And also, I agree with you that understanding what it is and what is happening and that we can heal from it has been one of the one of the most liberating experiences and also the most validating because it is something that in all of these scenarios, whether with myself or any of these loved ones that I have not had words for. And to see that there's it's it's it reminds me as cliche as this is, it reminds me of that that moment with Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan when she's pumping the water and she says water and it starts to click with language.
• 14:28
  That happened in my body when I heard your presentation.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: When we hear, an insight that's relevant to us and, there's there's a a psychoanalyst, in America now called Kit Bolas who came up with the term the unthought known. And it's where someone says something and it resonates with you because you know it, but you haven't thought about it. And it brings it into proper consciousness. And when we get that, that is such a bonus. But I think there is we could have a very quick walk in into it by looking at the easier aspects of attachment just to describe them.
• 15:23
  So people, have got a safe structure before we get to infanticidal. If I just describe what the secure and insecure attachment is first. Is that alright with you, Emma?
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. It's okay. And for greater context, we have talked on the podcast about even anxious and avoidant and so disorganized. I also they have heard my plenary presentation for ISSTD about where I said, instead of earn secure, saying learn secure. So they have they listeners who who follow the podcast do have some language for that.
• 16:06
  So I think I I think that's an excellent place to start for just safety and orienting.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Okay. So, everyone everyone, listening, you you then had something of a good background. And it's worth noting that John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst, now sadly dead who I had the pleasure of knowing, he was the originator therapy. And unless he offered something to the mother as well, And unless he offered something to the mother as well, so she had him too, she would destroy the child's therapy. And his supervisor, a sort of very fine Kleinian psychoanalyst, well, Melanie Klein herself, said no.
• 17:09
  No. His therapy has got to be separate. And the mother did destroy the therapy, and he didn't forgive himself. And he decided he wanted to research something that no one could disagree with because it was completely scientifically proved. And he decided to look at attachment patterns and he called it attachment instead of love because he felt love was a very complex word that had lots of feelings linked to it and attachment was a safer word to examine.
• 17:48
  So the point where attachment, developed were two of his followers, particularly, Mary Maine and Ainsworth who developed this strange situation where a baby, and a toddler, are with with an experimenter. A parent and baby are left alone, then a stranger joins, parent leaves, infants left alone, stranger returns, parent returns. So you you can actually watch what happens with loss and reunion. And brilliantly, and this has been all over the world, this has been validated. A secure baby can explore and play while the caregiver's in the room and can engage with the stranger.
• 18:45
  The secure baby will be distressed by separation, but will be easily reassured when the parent comes back and the caregiver is sensitive. So that's the luckiest one. Then two other forms of attachment were noted that were a different kind of insecure. Insecure avoidant is the famous British stiff upper lip, where you don't show any distress at separation. You don't seek your parents on return, but there's a high level of body stress.
• 19:27
  And the caregiver is either dismissive or interfere interfering. It doesn't mean they don't love the child, though. And children that get that type of insecure attachment are still loved and can be loving partners and parents. Then there was insecure, anxious, ambivalent, where there's distress before separation, the child is clingy and difficult to comfort when the caregiver returns, and the caregiver can be insensitive and unpredictable. And again, that insecure, anxious ambivalent, you are still loved and can be loving.
• 20:15
  But there was a more distressing group of children who couldn't be coded, and Ainsworth called this disorganized, disorientated. They were frightened in the presence of the parent, and the parent appeared frightened or frightening. And this was very painful research because it showed that for a baby, a parent that's frightened of the baby because the baby's sex reminds them of an abusive childhood or something else awful or themselves as a hated baby, for the baby, the baby feels the violence in that rejection, and it makes no difference if the parent is frightened or frightening. For the baby, it's the same. And the the the toddlers, when you watch films of this, could be walking in circles, crawling round, wanting to go to the parent, not feeling safe, crawling back again, and that was that was really painful.
• 21:33
  But what several of us felt we were witnessing in the field of dissociative disorders was a further subsection of these double d babies, disorganized a double history. It was my because it's got a a double history. It was my colleague, Brett Carr, who first created this term when working with children who had a parent who was schizophrenic. And he was looking at a particular sample where as part of their mental illness, there were really death wishes going from the ill parent to their child. At the same time, myself and colleagues in the learning disability field were using terms like internalized death wishes.
• 22:46
  This is where children and adults with severe learning disabilities can feel society's wish to be rid of them. During COVID, within The UK, Half of all deaths of people with learning disability were from COVID because they weren't given jabs, they weren't protected and this was a horrendous sign of the infanticidal attitude. Wish you hadn't been born, wish you were dead, wish you'd been aborted. And because the group of us all worked together, we then felt that Brett's term would be a very useful one within the field of dissociative disorders to look at the horrible situation where a parent or parents, although it's bringing up the child, have a death wish towards that child, and the child knows that. And Adar Sacks, another good colleague, has taken it a step further in looking at literal infanticidal attachment and symbolic infanticidal attachment.
• 24:13
  Symbolic is where somebody says, oh, I could kill you, And the number of adults that make sentences like that without realizing the history and power behind such language, it always comes back to trauma however many generations back. I could kill you if you did that. But literal infanticidal attachment is where the child is the victim of near death experience. And with mind control and with organized extreme abuse and ritual abuse, that this is part of what we found has happened to hundreds of people. So that that's a pretty painful description to have to hear.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: It is it is it is very painful to hear and to just for people trying to apply this, I wanna review what you said about it being or let you what would what was it you said could you say again the part about the different types of unwanted children because also I would add to that, and I know some of the literature does, also talks about replacement children as well or
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. I can, it's another thing that I I can add in terms of a baby that died before I was born. So although I'm the oldest living child, I was the second child, and I could see that there was both joy and loss in my mother's eyes looking at me when I was little. And I would say that, the mother that has lost the baby is looking with loss at the baby that is there because that is a loss she is never going to get over, will always be there. So you can be a replacement child that is picking up a loss in your mother about her death, and therefore, you have a different kind of training in trauma and loss.
• 27:02
  But But if your mother loves you, it's very different to where if there is a child that was really loved before you and you are hated and seen as an unfair survivor, why did you survive? Then of course, a child is getting another unbearable kind of attachment. Yes. Was that what you were meaning, Emma?
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Yes. That that that in I just wanted to include that piece. I know that it is one you have talked about or written about or, and is in the literature. I just wanted to add it to our conversation. Thank you.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: And just recently, I I was doing some work for an open university research project by professor Sarah Earl and doctor Maddie Blackburn on young people with life limiting conditions. These are people with very severe physical disabilities and something that means they are not going to get beyond their twenties or early thirties. And they wanted me to be involved in this to see how it linked with learning disability, and I was shocked to see the deaf wishes coming their way in a way I had not appreciated before. And I've got a a a horrible COVID more personal one to add. Being in the elderly population, there is now this way you're asked when you go to hospital.
• 28:49
  Do you want an r or a DNR? DNR, do not resuscitate. Resuscitate. And elderly people like myself were encouraged when we had COVID to ask for a do not resuscitate so that we could so we could die naturally and easily and not face worse illness if we were brought back to life. And I said, sorry, because my husband has dementia.
• 29:23
  They wanted this on his on his phone, and we both discussed this and said, no. We want our resuscitate. And this just could not be heard that different consultants were all coming saying, and you you want r on your medical or you want DNR on your medical notes. And I wrote about this in in the chapter I wrote for this Open University book because I'm just learning. It's more than one group that are facing death wishes.
• 30:02
  So you're absolutely right, Emma, over the groups you're bringing in. And the invisibly unwanted that look as if all is right on the outside where they're not being sexually and physically abused, but something's gone horribly wrong, and there is no emotional love. And that's toxic and bringing in a a a terrible deathly feeling.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: We had a similar experience in our family during COVID where I have a medically fragile daughter with a complex airway who has a g tube and oxygen. And when COVID first hit at the very beginning before we knew what it was or how to treat people, they the the medical equipment company showed up at our house one day unexpectedly and said they had orders to remove all of her equipment because she was already going to die. And so she had been triaged out of the crisis response and would no longer be supported until things were settled. And I've worked a lot of emergency rooms, and I've worked a lot of disaster sites and war zones and refugee places where I understand at a very real level what triage means and the importance of it. But that was such a shock and that she was so quickly and easily just dismissed.
• 31:43
  She's going to die anyway, so she does not need help. And she's on palliative care, and so she does not need comfort, except her air was her comfort. You're pretty uncomfortable without air. It was really disturbing.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: It's more than disturbing. It's it's criminal. It's denial. It's dissociation. And unlike dissociation that comes as a way for brave people to have a manage to find some sort of life, this is one that is damaging when it becomes part of an institution.
• 32:26
  It becomes criminal. Well,
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: then so when you're talking about this societal relational trauma, even if it's not dyadic within the family, or or or bigger than that, the for listeners, part of what you're talking about is this extreme version of misattunement. We have talked on the podcast a lot about the difference between trauma and deprivation, and how that is more than only neglect and the relational components of that. And so this is this is an example of it, the infanticidal attachment. It is not a bruise that you can point to because you have a black eye. It is a relational wound in the space between us that we carry around.
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. Emma, did you did you succeed in fighting them?
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: Oh, with my daughter? Yes. We did not. We continued to try. Ultimately, what happened is that she just held on.
• 33:38
  I I know that I shared a poem on the listserv, and so in that group with you and Warwick, I shared a poem about that experience, but I ultimately, what happened is that she just held on, and it was really frightening for about six months. And then as as we started to learn more about COVID and what it was, then by summer, they had not reopened, like, the children's clinics and things like that. And what they did was prioritize her, I think, in part to silence me, but I prioritized her, which I'm not gonna argue with. Thank you. That's what she needed.
• 34:25
  And did an airway reconstruction with her being the first one in before they reopened those clinics. And so she she had surgery that she needed and got equipment that she needed, and that was quite helpful, and she had done better since then. But it was terrifying, and it was it was horrific to watch.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: I will go I will go back and reread that poem, Emma. But in a way, for everyone listening, it's those things that every human being has got somewhere in their family even if it's past generation that we actually experience the reality of these situations, the reality of the trauma everybody goes through. There's such an attempt, an arrogant attempt to refer to our communities as postmodern when we can see all over the world, it's only tiny little steps forward in giving children a true sense of childhood, only in a few lucky places in a few lucky countries. But it it is a painful place with moments of great richness and love, and it is the hope when we actually recognize something and bear witness to it and share it and make something more processed. We make the world a better place around us.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: That that is so beautiful and such a contrast to the darkness. There's an article that I will share in a recap and another episode on the podcast, but one of the articles you referenced where it uses that imagery of the light and the darkness, and it made me think of Persephone actually,
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: and
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: and Yeah. That story. But when we have this disenfranchised experience of relational trauma or misentunement or these death wishes, and no one sees it happening or understands that it's happening, and yet it's so common amongst us. And I think it's so, so important that even though this is a really hard topic, why we're gonna be talking about it on the podcast or in our community is because
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: when
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: when when there is that understanding of to be wounded, to feel like our lives are in danger, to experience a death wish. You do not have to have this kind of abuse or that kind of abuse even though sometimes that also is happening. Because I think what happens, there sometimes becomes this hierarchy in lived experience that is not actually real. There's an illusion where my pain only matters if it's this kind, or my trauma only counts if it's this kind, or I don't have any trauma at all because it I didn't experience this or that. But a death wish is pretty brutal and this extreme version of relational trauma is absolutely a thing and it's way more of a thing than I ever realized.
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: Yes. Because whatever the pattern you grow up with, you've taken it into yourself with no filter. So in in a way, you could say everybody's could rest of our lives, taking the good we got for granted and struggling with the bits that weren't resolved by parents or or or grandparents. But when it is a death wish inside you to feel you have a right to live, a right to be happy, a right to feel you are a proper member of your community, and you have a right place to be there. That's a sort of forbidden area.
• 39:24
  So in a way, when we think of people finding toxic partners that invalidate them and hurt them, and then they feel so ashamed that that's what they, quote, chose, It's not something as conscious as choice. All of us as human animals look for something familiar. And every partnership is is, if you like, made in heaven as well as hell. But if you're looking for someone as you can't help doing that's got something a bit like mom or dad, then you you are falling into that whatever the attachment pattern was. And I I get very angry, when I see people say things like, well, I'm not working with with her anymore.
• 40:22
  We we spent so much time to get her into a safe house, and now look, she's found another abusive person. Well, to my mind, that's like saying, come to me with your drink problem when you're dry. Come to me with your drug problem when you don't have one. You don't go I I try and, explain it this way. Imagine if somebody brought together a whole group of happily married couples who had children that they love and said to them, look at you, you pathetic codependent imitators.
• 41:05
  You all had parents that loved each other and loved you. And look at you. You've done exactly the same as them. Unless you leave your partner, I'm not gonna give you a job or work with you. And we can hear how utterly mad that is, but somehow when a loved, lucky child finds a loving, lucky partner, it's seen as due to their goodness rather than their attachment pattern.
• 41:35
  And you don't choose your attachment pattern. But the rail light in this is that your attachment pattern can be different for different people. So amazingly creative children with, a horrendous abusive mother and father can find a teacher or a neighbor that they know cares about them, who they feel allowed to care for. So there will be some rays of light where somebody has found somebody, but of course, for some people, there isn't a person. There might be a pet.
• 42:25
  There might be a religious belief. There might be a political belief. There might be something. Art, music, gardening, nature. There might be something that gives at least some bit of hope or beauty, but it really matters.
• 42:46
  People realize they did not create this pattern. It's what they were given and has become part of them, and that means they've got a harder job than a lucky person in having a good good support network around them. And I do have permission of one, amazingly brave woman with DID that was a long term patient who said after a decade of therapy, I think I'm beginning to think I might trust you. But, of course, you could have been nice to me for ten years just to betray me even worse after that.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: Yes. I think there are many of us that feel that. I wanna ask you about that before while we have you in the conversation. Can you speak to what happens when someone has had this experience of the deaf wishes or infant societal attachment, which is hard to say for a deaf person. But, speak to what happens when we do absorb that and then it gets internalized in a system with different parts that, feel like they are dead or think that they are dead or want to be dead or ghost parts, these kinds of things.
• 44:21
  What do you want to say about that piece?
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: I want to say what an intelligent defense, first of all, that if you're facing violence and fear and threats, then to actually consider yourself dead, ready to die a ghost is at least a temporary protection. And why would you want to feel alive and face the level of terror? So so one is to think that what everybody is doing in a system, even if they aren't aware of it, is trying to offer some sort of help, some sort of protection. One of the hardest issues is an an addiction to near death, and this is very difficult. Apologies.
• 45:27
  Where somebody is taken to a point almost of dying where they're ready to welcome death, and that's the point where abusers want them back alive again. And or they're suddenly looked after and hugged because they've obediently been ready to go to their death. And where they only felt a parent had any good wishes towards them if they were almost dead. And if that's your experience, then it's understandable that you are expecting a partner, thinking of one one, very brave woman who was trying to understand why she kept getting abusive partners that would take her almost to death. Because if she didn't, she felt like an orphan because risk of at at the risk of saying something that can cause really painful reactions, there are the people who I didn't help when I first worked with them, and I spoke about your abusers instead of your family.
• 47:06
  And the issue was that they love their family because it was their family. Now I'm not speaking there of those that somehow have it in them to be able to leave and be orphaned and find something else. I'm talking about those that stay in abusive families for the rest of their life can't leave, then what what they're what they're doing is keeping their parents alive, and it's a loving thing they're doing, and no one realizes there's something loving. And then if they gave this up, they feel they would have nothing of a family inside them. So when people have got parts, others, whatever word people are choosing for themselves, those that love the ones that other parts of the system know are causing pain, they're also doing it to have the strength from feeling they belong somewhere.
• 48:22
  And these things can feel very shameful to discuss.
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: Well, and to over oversimplify it but also make it a little left brain because that's so heavy, so so good, and so so hard at the same time. So it starts to feel a little transy. But just to bring up the left brain for listeners, that that oversimplifying that dynamic, it becomes a double bind where I can't be loved if I'm not here, if I'm not alive, if I don't exist. And also, the best way to have approval from my family or to prevent punishment from my family is to be almost dead. So then we also have, like, almost this unconscious fawning of I'll be as close to dead as possible because that is safest.
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's beautifully put. It's nauseating. It is awful. It is so cruel.
• 49:31
  It is so cruel. And the blame that people get for the positions they've been put in that no one else would have survived. So that's why this subject is so important that the baby cannot filter what it takes in.
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: One of the things that we have talked talked about, the podcast before and frequently is how you can't tell the baby that they're safe. Like, you can't say, go be safe, baby. You're fine, baby. Like, babies experience safety through being held and clean and warm and fed and all the things. And so mixing that concept that listeners know from the podcast already with what you just said about babies can't filter what takes it what they take in, and they also have no control over what's actually happening to them in a trauma way or what's not happening for them in a deprivation way, that's so big.
• 50:39
  These wounds are so deep.
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. They they are huge, but what's amazing is how a child has got an some some private part of themselves that somewhere can know this isn't right, however tiny and nonverbal or preverbal that is, which can eventually find an answer.
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: So if a person or a system has parts that are dead parts or suicidal parts or ghost parts or high risk parts that are looking for those sort of trying to in a fight response kinda way, trying to provoke the near death experiences or lots of reenactments going on. These death wish experiences that get personified in parts really I mean, ultimately, they're relational wounds, which means healing also comes relationally through connection safely a little bit as we can tolerate?
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. And one of the benefits that comes from a greater understanding there is now of DID BID is that there is more therapy around than they used to be. There is more capacity to know this is real. And there's more chance as well, painful though it is, for people to educate therapists that didn't have an education in this. Because unless you have had an expert from lived experience as your therapist, practically patient by your knowledge, patient by your knowledge.
• 52:45
  And also know that through podcast, through the work of experts from the experience, and the therapists that have joined together around the world caring about this subject, there is a greater chance than ever before of getting comfort and understanding and where shame can be reduced and relational healing can begin.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: That's so beautiful. I I so appreciate the compassion, the seeing clearly that this was even happening so that now we can even talk about it in conversation and with our therapists and with other clinicians. Are there any other pieces? I know it's such a big one, but are there any other pieces of this topic that you really wanted to cover today that we didn't get
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: to yet? I think we we have covered the the important things, which is a baby deserves to be held, to be loved, to have food, to have drink, to have a community, to be in a safe place, to not be a victim victim of stigma, of racism, of abuse. That is what every human should be having. And the fact that some precious people have had the worst starts in life is is something that we're all beginning to realize more, and what can we do to ameliorate that. And that relational healing, even from the worst wounds, if we think of for its first words, he wanted to talk turn a raw, weeping wound into a faded scar.
• 54:45
  There will be scars, but you know there's a Japanese form of art of beautiful vases that are made through cracked pieces, and it's over the beauty of cracks and scars. So I think there's some think about accepting the war wounds of the brave children that grew up in an environment no child should have to face on their own.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for talking to us today.
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: Thank you for inviting me, and apologies to anyone I've triggered. I'm sorry. This is this is so painful, and I'm so grateful there is this podcast, Emma, and thank you for all that you do.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: It was a really powerful and important conversation and so so needed for people to understand, especially what's about to happen here politically. It's gonna get nasty. And just having language to acknowledge rather than gaslighting ourselves and being confused about why we're feeling activated or all the things. There's so many different reasons it was so, so good. Thank you.
• 56:05
  Speaker 2: But your ease and your kindness over the help in making that safe enough for people, now they've come together. So I'm really grateful to to to have this contact with you. And, oh, I'm glad that you have got that to give your children.
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: I hope so. I'm trying. I am trying. Oh, I am so grateful. Thank you.
• 56:37
  Thank you, Trudy. Thinking of you and your husband as well and this late hour. Thank you.
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: Right. I'm off to bed now. Love to you.
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemspeed.com.
• 57:18
  We'll see you there.