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Baby Emma · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Today was sort of a one two punch in therapy. Not even entirely because of therapy. Because I get anxious for therapy, I always go in at the very last minute even if I'm there early. And for the last few months, I've had a routine trying to be calmer so that I can focus in therapy and stay present in therapy. We go to the car wash, as you know, and sometimes we pick up or bring our lunch so that there is food in our belly and the body has been tended to.
• 2:11
  And today, I still got to therapy early enough. I needed to wait in the car in the parking lot. And so while I waited, I listened to an interview on NPR. Just wanting to stay calm, and none of the music felt right. Sometimes we listen to the symphony, but they were having a discussion, and so it wasn't music.
• 2:59
  Sometimes we listen to the Christmas music station, the holiday channel. But today, getting ready for therapy, it was not a happy littles kind of day. It was more sad, littles, so that didn't seem to fit. The coffee house channel or station is easy for my cochlear implants. I can hear music, but it's just a voice and one acoustic instrument like piano or guitar.
• 3:41
  So it's not too complicated for me to understand most of even if I still have to search the words. But today, they kept playing love songs, which doesn't feel very post divorce. And nothing felt right. But sitting for ten minutes alone with the voices in my head before therapy would only lead to chaos. So I put it back back on NPR thinking maybe some adult news or something would at least help me stay present.
• 4:34
  But fresh air was on, and of all the It was Shalom Ozlander who wrote foreskin lament about his religious trauma in the Jewish community. And he was on talking about a new book, about life being hard. I rolled my eyes because because, seriously, how could the universe be more congruent? But before I could turn it off, I heard him say even something like I'm not quoting it exactly. Something like, I could not believe my friends when they told me that a mean, aggressive God was not even real.
• 6:02
  Because if God is my heavenly father, the only other thing I have is my earthly father who is also aggressive and mean. And he was real enough. So how was I supposed to discern that God wasn't? For me, I mean, in a shiny, happy way, even though that's not what they were talking about, except they were. And staying on that blanket is also what we were talking about in therapy this week.
• 7:03
  So I went into therapy with that in my head, and my therapist took us back. And as I sat down, my therapist walked across the room to set up for eye movements as if I wouldn't notice that's what she's doing. I said, are we doing eye movements today? She said it seemed like it would be a good day. I said, I thought we were finished with that.
• 7:53
  She said, no. We're just getting started. And it made me laugh because she's not wrong. And, also, my heart began to beat faster because it is scary and hard. And we have all this year been working on what it means to be hurt and alone.
• 8:32
  It started simply enough just practicing in an easy context, not that it was easy, maybe simple context of my broken ankle, which still hurts and pops and swells, but functions enough I can go on walks. If I'm careful and have good shoes. It has, of course, led to all sorts of examples of being hurt and alone. Tracing back through now time things, the last year things, the last decade things, all the way back and back and back to childhood, to a trauma I didn't even realize counted counted as a trauma. I don't know how because I should know.
• 9:46
  I do know better. If I were my client, I would see it clearly, but it is my stuff, and I didn't. But all the way back to the pieces of being 20 old and my brother being born and my mother's depression that followed, and her being in freeze from her own trauma responses to things I don't wanna talk about today. And continuing to practice my own privacy trying to stay focused with what I do want to share. I will save you from all the side quests we took in therapy today.
• 10:50
  But the place we landed were those very early years where some of my first memories are of my uncle yelling at me and telling me there will only be one baby in the house, and so I will use the toilet from now on. And how he scared me so bad that day. I never used a diaper again. There's more to the story, but it's passed down at family gatherings like a funny story. But I wasn't laughing, and I don't think it's funny.
• 11:57
  That really scared me. And things like being told that someone was taking the baby, my brother, to care for him while my mother couldn't, but that I needed to stay to take care of my mother. This was a thing that happened a lot in my family. Me being the little mother instead of the little child. And it led to a lifetime of trying to take care of my mother until I was old enough to realize that nothing would ever be enough, that I couldn't fix what went wrong, that I would never be enough.
• 13:15
  And I found ways to get away. Except what a whole childhood and adolescence of that had done was set me up for codependency. The very stuff that I thought was now time, just a book someone sent, but so real and left me caring for alcoholics, deeply caring, and not even meaning any shame for them for what they were going through. But I was not enough to fix their problems. I could not make their problems go away.
• 14:05
  It was not my job to make their problems to go away. It was never my fireball. And then Nathan's sadness, so much like my mother's, and so many children, 87 children in five years, six who stayed. Of course, I had muscles for that. Of course, I had been trained for that, but that didn't mean it was good for me.
• 15:05
  And now having set myself free, dancing the line of being uncodependent and also still connected to others, And how sometimes it frightens me. Sometimes it overwhelms me. Sometimes it scares me. But all of that is my fireball, which is why I was back in therapy today for the second time this week to talk about really hard things that left me weeping, throwing up in the bushes outside before I could even get to my car. And driving myself in circles before I could find a park to safely sit and breathe again.
• 16:34
  I never meant to talk about myself at that age. I thought we would work backwards and ease into those things, but I found out all the other things are because of those things. My therapist keeps saying that's why it's all woven together when we work on it, bouncing between memory time and now time and back again because it all fits together, integrating not parts of myself, but my own timeline. Pieces here that connect to pieces there and letting my brain see what is ready for healing, letting me decide what's ready for healing, But being frightened of it because healing hurts, because I can't tend to the wound if I don't see it first. I have to feel it to know where it is, and then I can respond to it.
• 17:51
  But it is exhausting and frightening. And, also, my therapist said, there's a baby in you, a toddler, little ones that need care. And I understood when she said that with such clarity that this is why I have been afraid of littles and avoided it for so long, not just because they know hard things. But because to care for them means caring for me. And because to see what care they need is to recognize what care I didn't have.
• 19:04
  And it hurt. I still try to be sassy and use my coping skills, other parts, and shirts. Like, how I remember being given cheese and crackers on the floor and how we still love cheese and crackers as a safe food. Because sometimes cheese and crackers were the only parenting I got. And at the end, when she's trying to get me back to my safe place and bring me up for air before I leave, that's what we talked about, cheese and crackers.
• 20:12
  And what kinds of cheese and what kinds of crackers? And it made me laugh. It made me smile, and now it's made me hungry. I think that's what we'll do tonight. Maybe instead of or after dinner, have some cheese and crackers.
• 20:45
  And, also, that's my homework this weekend. Writing in nondominant hand. So whoever is writing their nondominant hand, she said that specifically. So no cheating. Writing about what that baby, Emma, needed, she said.
• 21:21
  And then also with our dominant hand hands. What baby Emma needs now. It makes me nauseous and uncomfortable. It wasn't at all where I thought we were going. I thought we were talking about now time things or relational things or parenting things.
• 22:12
  But I guess when therapy started today, There was a baby in the room, and I guess the baby Was me. 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. We'll see you there.