Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Limerence and Control, Part 1

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Limerence and Control, Part 1 · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over: 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 long time 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
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you. So if I am learning in therapy that I am my own ship and have been learning since at least 2022 because of those original episodes, I heard this. Tell myself this. If I am my own ship, then I am the one who has to rescue my own babies, my own inner family, my own inner child, my own parts with myself.
• 1:38
  We as a system have to work together to do that. Whatever language I wanna use, whatever language you wanna use, we rescue ourselves. We don't have to do it alone. We can do it parallel with others. We can do it in therapy with that witness of our therapist.
• 2:00
  We can do it with each other internally. We do not have to be alone anymore, and, also, it is our work to do. So Then very carefully looking at the difference between what is healthy relationship and what happens when we get tangled either because of enmeshment, because we are so hypervigilant, and it is so much easier for any of us who are survivors to attune to others instead of ourselves. So things will surface relationally because the wounds are relational in memory time. So new relationships bring those wounds to the surface, and we tend to them relationally, but it is good therapy that keeps it from being reenactment or drowning.
• 3:19
  Like, I had that vision of the drowning whale where, like, I cannot breathe. I am not going to survive this. My life is in danger. Not just because of politics and not because anyone is trying to, what other people are doing is not my responsibility. Right?
• 3:36
  I learned that in Al Anon and ACA recovery work. My responsibility is to myself not to not care about others, but my caring is an offering of what I have from caring for myself. So how do I tell the difference between all of that and then learn what healthy love is and healthy relationships are if I had not gotten to experience that? So we talked about the difference between all of these things and the way trauma shows up relationally. And for me specifically, my therapist said that one of the big themes is always going to be coercive control happening to me and reenacting that being caught in that because of shiny happy, because of the way things were growing up, because of sort of the ritualized nature of not just abuse, but also deprivation and the patterns of care being conditional.
• 4:54
  So I know this is tender stuff, and I know some of us have been told we're too much or we should be grateful or we're not doing it right. All of these kinds of things. I know we confuse intensity and intimacy, but learning that a yes from our body is what is real as opposed to a yes out of fear, which is compliance. So taking deep breath, I'm I'm finding myself like, I had to stop and roll my shoulders even and stretch out my jaw because these are hard things to talk about. This was actually really helpful for me because ISSTD has asked me to present on this in 2026.
• 5:47
  And so to look at my own things first is really, really important even while delving into the literature. So consent is kind of where we have to start, and consent is not just I can't say yes if I can't say no. That's an important part of consent. And that piece I've had for a while, I know we've talked about it on the podcast. And also, if we are fawning and dissociated from our terror, we may not be aware that parts of us and our body may at different times be saying no in ways we didn't realize.
• 6:37
  So for me, this circles back to the rage piece where that distancing, not just avoidance, but distancing happening because my I'm feeling violated and having to push it back from feeling violated, like the trauma response of pushing back, which is not the same as being avoidant or trying to get away from harm. I realize that being avoidant is a response to harm. I'm trying to get out of harm's way. That is a lack of consent. That is a saying no when that is happening.
• 7:19
  When that rage surfaces, even if it's very quiet, even if it's very still, that is a saying no. It is a pausing. It is not consenting. I need to listen to it differently. In the recovery group in the community, they posted something from the big red book, page, I think, three fifty six, three fifteen seven, somewhere in there.
• 7:45
  In chapter 10, it said this is how we learn to abuse ourselves. It says, quote, it is the sense of self betrayal and self abandonment that is the source of rage and despair in ACA. Adult children live in two realities, attempting to meet the needs of a mature adult while seeing the world from the perspective of a frightened child. So that in itself becomes reenactment. I'm being parentified and adultified while in a child state, and I cannot do that.
• 8:23
  I am not capable. My littles are not now and were not then capable of being an adult. It says, quote, neither aspect of the personality fully comprehends or understands the motives or actions of the other. The adult need for interdependence and self expression seems to be in direct conflict with the child's need to be dependent and gently controlled. I don't like the word controlled there.
• 8:54
  I think that's an old word, but we mean parented and structured and contained in healthy, safe ways the same way I would not let my little ones just run into the street. Right? So when that is not being done for us when we're little, we grow up into people who try to control others or going back to what John O'Neill said about control turning into conspiracy and then telling ourselves stories about others. They must be bad. They must be trying to hurt us like everyone else.
• 9:26
  I'm gonna find evidence and trying to look and trap people into that or ourselves. We must be bad. I'm gonna look for evidence that we're bad. And then that coup of Littles taking over adult parts, it says, quote, the frustration of being forced to choose between two competing points of view builds into rage as each side of the personality struggles to be heard by the other. Rage turns into despair when we realize the legacy of insanity.
• 9:58
  Again, an old word there from older literature. We're talking about the lack of serenity or peace missing, the distress and dysregulation happening internally. We inherited this from our alcoholic or dysfunctional home, and it does not provide for the well-being of either the adult or the child. So then my adult folks inside and my children inside are not getting their needs met, And then it makes sense I can't meet the needs of someone else or don't feel safe or someone else or not being able to connect relationally. It says, this is the origin of emotional intoxication.
• 10:41
  To withstand the intense pain of living with this and to have any sense of control, we must deny our feelings and hide our vulnerability. Without the guidance of our emotions, we become dependent on others to direct our behavior. So for me, this this is really, really hard and really, really yucky. But when I have been in shiny happy, where other people told me what to do, what were what to wear, what to eat, when to do what, how to worship, when to worship, what worship to look like, when to fast, when not to fast, how to spend my money or not spend my money. All of these things, when I have been told everything of what to do, what not to do, and when to do it, And when dissociation separates me from my own thought process or emotional responses, then when I start to feel activated or concerned or that rage comes up to push back of, no, this is the boundary where I am, and it's okay that I'm different from you.
• 11:48
  It doesn't mean we can't be intimate or we can't be close or that we're not relationally connected. We are just not the same person. We're So the rage pushes the distance in. So that can look avoidant, but that is not just avoidance. It's also an act of pushing.
• 12:06
  And that pushing is trying to be not just protective, but say, I am here. I want to be here, but this is me. And if you don't let me be me, I can't be here because then I'm not agreeing to exist, which then becomes a reenactment of infanticidal attachment. So I can't feel all of that. All of that is life threatening.
• 12:31
  That's what I'm saying. Like, I feel like a drowning whale. I cannot survive this because it's reenacting infanticidal attachment where literally the only way to win is to not exist. That's not safe. That's not stable.
• 12:48
  And so I can't feel that. So have to dissociate from that And instead, just wait. Just tell me what to do. What do you need me to do? I will do the things.
• 12:58
  I will not do the things. Give me the rules. But then we have shifted into compliance instead of consent. It's heartbreaking. That then is not relational.
• 13:12
  Then I am back to being a punished child, not an adult in a relationship in any kind of ship. Right? It says, quote, we move from an internal sense of direction based on our own perceptions of the truth to a dependence on the dysfunctional authority interpreting our reality. We get caught in the trap of being obedient to someone else's systems of beliefs and behaviors that are actually the cause of our confusion and pain. That's when we feel gaslit by each other because we're not listening to each other.
• 13:48
  We're tuning to other people's trauma responses from our limbic system instead of tuning into our own systems to give us accurate information about what we're experiencing. And it says, quote, we continue in our obedience to that dysfunctional view of the world because the expected consequence of disobedience is even more terrifying. That's the annihilation anxiety, the terror that we will no longer exist or that the people we love will no longer exist, that we will lose the attachment we're trying so hard to do even though it's hurting us. It says, we cling to the familiar pattern of unthinking reactions and seeing anything as new as a source of confusion and a threat to our tumultuous sense of control. We avoid the terror, that annihilation anxiety, that terror of abandonment by holding fast even stronger to our childhood beliefs.
• 14:52
  That's what knocks us back to memory time. And then we are no longer present in now time, in our now time relationship as adults. We are littles back in memory time, applying our childhood rules with someone else. And then that person is in a relationship with our parents, and that's when it starts to feel incestuous, and that's when it starts to not be stable, and it starts to not be safe. We become the punished child of someone else's parent.
• 15:29
  That's not who we consented to be in relationship with. It says we pay the price of enduring the abuse, which comes following the family's distorted idea of reality. That is, as Laura would say, the price of admission. So going all the way back to consent. Consent is not just the absence of a no.
• 15:53
  It is presence of an informed and enthusiastic yes. And in trauma recovery, this is hard. When we grow up in environments where our boundaries aren't respected, where affection had strings attached, or where silence was safer than speaking. Our body learns to say yes even when our hearts are saying no. Or we override our bodies when our hearts are daydreaming.
• 16:24
  We see the potential and we see the good. But if the attachment has gone faster than the actual relationship and steps have been skipped or our expectations are finished at a relationship even though the relationship is at the beginning. Right? So let me think of an example. At the beginning of a relationship, someone else is not going to be in charge of parenting my children.
• 16:50
  At the beginning of a relationship, I'm not going to talk about all my finances with someone. At the beginning of a relationship, I am not going to be blending my professional world or co creating from the start of projects I'm already involved in. Right? Because that is part of who I already am and what I already do and where those boundaries are. This is my skin over here, and your skin is over there.
• 17:23
  We could talk about those things parallel. We could work towards those things in parallel ways. We could have those things as goals, but we cannot make an assumption that the other person owes us that when we're at the beginning of a relationship, even if our attachment itself is strong. 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.
• 18:27
  Connection brings healing.