Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Two Doors

Transcript

Two Doors · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about complex trauma and dissociation.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen: The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling. It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship. Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice.
• 0:53
  Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to. We are all different, and all of our stories matter. As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: There's an old idea in trauma work, older than most of the language we use for it now, about how distress has two doors. One opens outward. One opens inward. The clinical names for these are acting out and acting in. A person under unbearable pressure either pushes the pressure out into the world where it becomes behavior other people can see and name and flinch from or pulls that pressure in where it becomes a quiet rearrangement of the self outside even notices because nothing visibly is happening.
• 2:10
  Most of us know the first door well because acting out is loud. It breaks things. It destroys relationships. It sends the message at three in the morning, slams the boundary, makes the scene, names the enemy. A whole vocabulary is grown up around it because it demands one.
• 2:31
  When someone acts out, the people around them must decide what to do, and so they develop words for the deciding. Harm, accountability, rupture, repair, consequence. Acting out becomes legible. It enters the record. It has words we can talk about.
• 2:53
  It becomes the story other people can tell about you even if you're trying to tell the story about something else. The second door, though, makes no sound at all. Acting in is the person who gets quiet, who stops showing up, who watches from the edge of the room and lets the silence be read as composure, as politeness, as neutrality, as not needing anything. But the pressure is just as high for them. The terror is just as real, except it travels inward and so leaves no mark on the outside world, which means it leaves no mark on the language either.
• 3:40
  There's almost no vocabulary for acting in, almost, because acting in does not force anyone to develop one. It asks nothing from the room. That is precisely its danger, invisibility. So if we imagine a house, most of us, by the time we are grown, are living in some version of the one that Trauma built. The architecture is older than our memory of moving in.
• 4:12
  The load bearing walls were poured before we had words. And like any house that has stood through storms, it has been modified by everyone who survived inside it, each adaptation sensible in its moment, each one now part of the structure whether or not it still serves its original purpose. The houses have two doors, and here's the thing that we often get wrong. We treat them as if they're opposites. The front door where acting out happens is the one everyone sees, so we decide the front door is the problem.
• 4:53
  We post notices on it. We hold meetings about who came and went through it and what they did when they arrived and the aftermath of when they left, storming out and slamming the door behind them. But on the back door where the acting in happens, the door people slip out of so quietly that we record them as simply absent and maybe don't notice at all. We don't think of it as a door. We think of it as a wall.
• 5:24
  We think the people who left through it were never really here. If it's us who's doing the leaving, we try to blend in. Wallflowers, they say. But it's the same house, and they're both doors. The pressure that blows the front door open and the pressure that pulls a person silently out the back are the same pressure, devastated by the same tornado of terror generated by the same unbearable interior looking for the same thing, a way to survive the inside of the house.
• 6:02
  One person's eruption and another person's vanishing are not two different problems. They are two phases of one weather system distributed across different bodies, across different parts of the same system at different moments. We'll come back to this and circle back around because it's the whole argument that we're talking about. For now, hold that image. One house, two doors, one storm.
• 6:29
  Acting in stays invisible because of how invisibility works. Acting out generates a record because it generates a reaction. Someone has to respond, and the response is the record. Acting in generates no reaction because nothing happens that anyone on the outside could see, and so there's nothing to respond to and no record to keep. This produces a quiet injustice.
• 6:58
  We talk endlessly about the harms of acting out as we should because those harms are real, and they land on real people. These kinds of impacts and natural consequences can never be undone. Harmful words cannot be unsaid. Hate cannot be swallowed back down, and accusations cannot be unannounced to the world. But the near total silence around acting in means that the person who copes by disappearing rarely hears their pattern named at all.
• 7:32
  They may go decades without language for it, and without language, they cannot work with it. You cannot tend to what you cannot see, and a community that only narrates the front door teaches as quietest members that their suffering does not count as a pattern only as personality. Sometimes we call it introvert or describe it as shy. We say private or low maintenance or independent, and that seems to be as close to language as we can get. But even in these phrases, there is self erasure, and the compliments are the camouflage.
• 8:12
  So let's make it explicit. If you are someone whose oldest survival move is to go observe an and peripheral, to merge into the wallpaper of a room rather than risk being a figure in it, that makes sense. You're participating in the only way that ever kept you safe. The vanishing is doing something. It's a behavior with logic, and the logic deserves the same careful, compassionate study we give to the louder door.
• 8:41
  For most of us, the vanishing is layered, and the layers do different work and need different responses, which is why folding them together keeps us stuck. The first layer is often the most recognizable once it's pointed out. Straightforward avoidance. The nervous system doing what it learned to do, collapsing the present into the past. A social situation today is not, on its face, dangerous.
• 9:10
  But if the social formations of childhood were where the daily terror lived, if being seen as a young queer kid in a particular kind of room and exposure to real threat, then the body does not distinguish finely between that room and this one. It reads the gathering, the group, the eyes, and it routes you toward the back door before the thinking mind has weighed in. It's barely a choice. This layer is, in a sense, the simpler one, not because it is easy, but because its mechanism is clean. Old danger gets mapped onto new neutral ground, and the disappearing is the map being followed.
• 9:58
  The deeper layer is harder to see and harder to speak because it lives in attachment rather than in fear. Beneath the avoidance, there can be a merger, a fusion with an attachment figure whose love came with a condition that you remain pure of problematic dynamics, that you carry none of the mess, generate none of the friction, stay clean of the very ordinary human entanglements that any real presence in a community produces. Sometimes this figure needed you that way because your purity was their function, or them getting credit for you functioning was what mattered. The thing that let them keep feeding on you as a redemption and punishment figure, alternatively saving and condemning, needing you spot less so the cycle could continue. When that is the architecture, showing up fully is not merely frightening.
• 11:00
  It's a violation of a contract you signed before you could even read. To be present is to risk becoming a person with dynamics, a person with dynamics that break the purity that merger requires differentiation, individuation, a separate self, your own being. So you learn to disappear, not only to avoid danger, but to keep faith with a bond that demanded your absence as the price of belonging. It's literally agreeing with the rules of childhood to stay invisible, fly under the radar, and not actually exist. That's the infanticidal attachment again.
• 11:46
  These two layers ask for different things. The fear layer wants safety, slowly established with the body taught over time that this is not that. The merger layer wants something more like grief and disloyalty, the willingness to break a contract that part of you still believes keeps you alive. When we treat them both as one problem, treating all of it just as anxiety to be pushed through or calmed down or quieted or ignored or dismissed, we run straight into the merger and retraumatize the parts of us keeping the old social contract. The disappearing has to be approached as the layer it is actually lived in.
• 12:35
  You cannot fully examine your own avoidance until you have first sorted what is actually unsafe from what your nervous system has merged into the unsafe category by association. It's like an order of operations and also the order's not operational. The discourse around avoidance usually runs the other way. It says, you're avoiding. Avoidance is a problem.
• 13:05
  Here's some criticism of your avoidance. Now do better. But criticism of avoidance led in too early before the safety sorting is done does not reach a free person making actual choices. It reaches protectors doing exactly the job they were built for and tells those protectors it's wrong to protect. The result then isn't growth at all.
• 13:33
  The result is shame layered onto an already overloaded system and a deepening of the very pattern that criticism is meant to left is meant to lift. The sorting has to come first. Before any honest look at avoidance, a system has to be allowed to ask without rush and without judgment. What here is genuinely dangerous, and what is being read as dangerous only because it resembles something that once was? That is very slow work.
• 14:12
  It's also the precondition for everything else because only after this hurting can avoidance be examined without it being an attack on the parts that kept you alive. You earned the right to question your own disappearing by first honoring what the disappearing was for. And here is where the two doors rejoin, the same house, the same exits, because this is why naming acting out openly matters so much to the person who acts in. Talking frankly about harmful behavior, about what crosses lines and what wounds, is not separate from the work of showing up. It's part of it.
• 14:59
  The open vocabulary of acting out is the very tool the acting in person uses to do the safety sorting. If a community refuses to name harm clearly, the person at the edge of the room has no way to distinguish a relationship that is actually unsafe from a relationship that merely feels that way. And if we widen that lens, because none of this happens in one house alone, a community, especially a community organized around shared survival, dissociation, and trauma, is a body made of many houses, and it behaves like one. A community like that or our systems inside of ourselves, almost by definition, are full of systems and parts holding avoidant postures toward closeness at all times. The parasocial intensity that gathers around shared vulnerability, around public figures and shared language on top of everything else, and the feeling of finally being understood is exactly the kind of charge closeness that sends trauma organized systems towards the backdoor.
• 16:09
  So at any given moment, a large portion of such a community is quietly acting in. This reads from the outside as ordinary calm, a quiet room, most people not saying much. But it is not calm. It is a coordinated protective hush, many systems independently slipping toward the edge, and the stillness is the sound of a great deal of avoidance happening at once. This has consequences that show up eventually at the front door, When so many of the discerning, observant, peripheral members are watching from the edges rather than standing in the middle, the middle empties of exactly the people most capable of moderation, the members with the most refined sense of what is genuinely unsafe by temperament and history, the least likely to step in now.
• 17:05
  So when a rupture begins, the room that has to handle it is disproportionately populated by whoever is willing to be loud, and that signal gets dominated by the front door because the back door took the moderators out before the trouble started. The avoidance of the many is what leaves the field clear for the eruption of the few. There's also displacement at work, and it's worth understanding without flinching from it. When a system cannot act on the relationship that was actually unsafe, the original attachment figures, the pressure doesn't go away. It looks for an escape.
• 17:47
  It finds a target close enough to feel like attachment but distant enough that rupture feels survivable, and parasocial relationships are almost engineered for this role. Any public figure, a community leader, or other system you've never met in person, near enough to carry the charge, but far enough that the catastrophe of direct confrontation feels bearable. We can say to them or about them all the things we cannot say directly to the people who hurt us. We can say to them or about them all the things our abusers used to say to us. We can do to them what we could not do for ourselves when we were little.
• 18:32
  Some of the largest conflicts a community sees are at root misrouted. The intensity belongs to a private history. It lands on a stand in like a substitute. This does not make the resulting behavior acceptable, and it does not erase the harm that acting out causes, but it explains why a conflict can rage far past anything the precipitating event would predict. The event was never the real size of the feeling, and the event was never in now time.
• 19:08
  The childhood family contract sharpens this further. If part of a system is organized around an attachment figure who required them to be clean of problematic dynamics, then encountering someone else's problematic behavior can be genuinely destabilizing. Because it threatens the contract they're still unconsciously honoring, the reaction can be wildly out of proportion to the actual harm because what is being defended is not only the present boundary. It is the internal arrangement that kept the old figure fed and the self intact. This is part of why some conflicts escalate past sense.
• 19:48
  The escalation is defending something invisible from long ago, way before adulthood. And then there is the way disorganized attachment behaves under pressure because this is the mechanism that turns all of the above into cycles a community knows do well. In calm conditions, a person with both and capacity can hold two true things at once. This person did something harmful, and the response to it has also become harmful. In activation, the capacity collapses.
• 20:24
  The structure splits. One valence wins, the other becomes intolerable, and the person flips, sometimes within minutes or hours, between idealizing a figure and condemning them with the little stable ground in between. This is not malice. It is what disorganized attachment does when the heat comes up. It cannot hold the contradiction, so it alternates between the halves.
• 20:50
  It swings collectively between protecting someone and destroying them with little durable middle. It puts people up on pedestals so they can be torn down. The same figure is a beloved guide on a Tuesday and a danger to be expelled by Friday, and the speed of the reversal is the tell. The internal system is not reasoning its way through new information, The bothand that might have held, this harm is real and the response is also a harm, cannot survive in the heated room, and so the room takes turns being each half. The avoidance and the violation are the same package.
• 21:32
  The big conflicts that wound a community are not the failure of the quiet members to show up, plus a separate and unrelated problem of loud members acting out. They're the same. It's one system, not just in communities, but within ourselves. The peripheral absence and the eventual eruption are two phases of a single unsorted safety map enacted across different people at different moments. The members who disappear out the back door and the members who blow the front door open are doing the same thing with the same pressure through different exits, literally within ourselves, not just in communities.
• 22:18
  A community or a system that learns to see only the front door, the whole meetings about the eruptions while recording the disappearance's absence, will never resolve its complex because it is treating half a weather system and calling it the whole storm. Disorganized detachment makes this bothand collapse precisely when it is most needed. Under pressure, the structure wants to rank. The acting out is the real problem. The acting in is just sad, or the avoidance is the real wound, and the eruption is just a symptom.
• 22:57
  But the work, the genuinely difficult work within ourselves, is to refuse that ranking, to hold the problematic behavior and the problematic avoidance as parts of one package, neither one the true cause, both of them expressions of the same overloaded house with its two doors and its single storm. If the lifelong habit is to slip out the back door before anyone notices you are figuring out how to leave, then the showing up can be terrifying. But that terror is coming from protectors, even if they are very young and very little because they are the ones who were given that family contract. We do not need to override them or silence them. Their concern is valid even if our context or our false conclusions because they don't have all the variables that adults have in now time.
• 23:52
  This is not about anyone being bad or even wrong. This is an invitation to do the sorting first, slowly, with all the compassion you would extend to anyone who survived what you survived, to learn room by room which danger is here and which danger is memory. We must grieve the contract that required our absence from existence. We must discover that breaking the family contract does not end the world. We must learn that the redemption and punishment figure was never actually fed by our purity and only convinced us that it was.
• 24:30
  It's okay to stop feeding the tiger yourself. Showing up in our own lives feels like terror because it pushes us to the edge, and memory time folks inside know there are people who would push us off. And also, showing up means the edge stops being the only place where we are allowed to stand. There are other places to be ourselves, other relationships that are safe, other ways to enjoy a quality of life that includes our fullest and freest existence. It means the backdoor becomes a door again, a thing you can choose rather than a wall you mistake for the shape of your life.
• 25:18
  And it means for the community as a whole learning to watch both doors at once, to grieve the disappearances as carefully as we name the eruptions, and to hold against everything the storm wants, the bothand that keeps a house from tearing itself apart. It's making lace out of really strong web. One house, two doors, one storm. That tornado of terror, it's in memory time. Our work now in now time is to stop pretending the back door is a wall and to love the people slipping out of it enough to leave a light on without ever telling them or ourselves that they or we were wrong to need the dark.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing,
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: and healing brings hope.