Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Co-Dependent No More (Part 1)

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Co-Dependent No More (Part 1) · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:00
  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 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 we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
• 2:25
  Where do you even wanna start with this? Like, I don't even know how to recap the last couple of months.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: Oh, boy. Yeah. I feel like a lot of this happened in the last couple of months. I'm not sure where to start either. Well, here we go.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: You guys drove the van out here and then flew back to Oklahoma. There was that. It was a very quick trip because everyone was in school and all of that, but we were trying to get the van here before the snow.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: So we didn't even podcast that time because it was just like
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: I had a you know, it was a fun few days drive out to I really enjoyed that trip with the boys. I discovered I really enjoy road trips with fewer than six of our children at one time. The combination of children seems to be variable and I can enjoy different children but fewer children in a car together is more enjoyable than more children in a car. I have learned this.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Right. I think I think in some ways, it's become true generally. And we did talk about this the last time we recorded a podcast where we talked about it just being a hard thing that everyone in our family has been through so much trauma. And in the context of shiny, happy, and unfawning that we had such a big family, that we thought we needed to do this, that we chose to do this. And not that we're sorry or not that, we don't love the kids, but looking back and with all the things we've learned since, how kind of cruel it was to everyone that they did this, and how even some of the kids would have been better if they had been placed in a family with just them.
• 4:20
  So for the the sort of going back to consent or fully understanding what's happening, how hard life was with so much acuity and so much trauma and so many people. I have a friend, who has helped edit some of my books, some of my writing, and she works in an inpatient unit for teens, I think, and has talked about how like, that's what we've done for years is run an inpatient ward in our home on our own, and it's no wonder that things have been so hard. I love the children. They're turning out beautifully and have already done more than anyone ever said they could, and I'm so glad. But it was hard on them.
• 5:13
  It was hard on us. It was a lot.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like if you and I had been farther along in our own therapeutic work, then we probably would have had different boundaries than we had at the time. And it's it's so hard to to imagine what alternate timelines would have been like. Our children definitely most of them would have benefited from having the attention of being an only child, both with the kind of nurturing they needed and also less chaos going on around them.
• 5:54
  But at the same time, I feel like you and I also have skills that have been very helpful to them, which are not necessarily common amongst parents. And I think that's been really good for them too. So all things considered, I think they've, turned out pretty well, and the the situation is is currently much better than it has been in a very, very long time. So I I guess I guess that's not an ending yet, but a happy middle somewhere.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: Happy progress.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Right. And I think it's interesting because I have to still keep having this conversation. Because on the days when someone, any of them, is in crisis, I'm like, oh, this is because we're not there. Like, my brain go like, defaults to shiny happy. I should just stop taking care of myself.
• 6:47
  We need to all go back to Oklahoma. We all have to live in one house. We all have to do this. Everybody has to endure, endure, endure, endure. No.
• 6:56
  No. Everyone's actually, like you just said, functioning happier and healthier than we have ever been thus far, and it's been good for us despite the circumstances and even though it's been hard.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I know that one of the boys here with me has been in sort of a recurring crisis something, like a pattern of recent behaviors have caused a lot of problems for him. And your response was, oh, I need to fly him here so that I can help out. Right?
• 7:34
  And we may still be disc discussing that as an option, but, like, I can also see that having one more child there would be an extra exponential load of chaos and and responsibility for you there. So it it does feel like a form of not caring for yourself in order to rescue all the others. When, really, even though the situation is hard and not always pleasant, we're doing okay. Like, everything's alright here. Well,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: it's so hard. Need
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: to export my problems.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: It's it's so hard to see that clearly, and it's led to a lot of hard conversations, obviously, us not living together. A lot of hard conversations about everything from children to parenting to teenage dramas to finances for the family to, Like, everything just untangling. One of the things I have talked about on the podcast is how it felt like when I left, which was a year and a half ago now, which is wild to think about. But when I left, it felt like everything fell apart because I was doing too many things. And so everything had to fall apart before it could be put together in a more healthy way, which we have seen unfold in what we're talking about.
• 9:03
  But it has been a a painful untangling of uncoupling from rescue and from unfawning and all of this that all of a sudden now, this is what we're actually gonna talk about today. Like, I I don't mean that that was a smooth intro, but just for context, you're throwing out the word codependency, like, all the time now. Like, you've been in your own therapy. All this is coming up, and we haven't even necessarily talked about, like, what you've been learning in therapy, although specifics comes up from time to time, and we touch base. But you're just using this like you can recognize it and know what it is.
• 9:47
  And I was like, we need to talk about this on the podcast. So, like, what is that? How would you even explain what codependency is, and how have you learned about it?
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Well, it started from you, actually. We, I had, you know, as part of doing my own work, I am working on learning how to trust other people with my feelings. I I grew up in a wonderful home. I love my parents very much. I didn't have any physical trauma or that kind of stuff.
• 10:36
  So my trauma lives on a different scale than a lot of your wonderful listeners. It's, But I I lived in an environment in which I did not feel safe sharing my feelings because my mother would eat them. They would become her feelings. And it was like I couldn't have my own thing because then my mom would be upset about this thing. Not supporting me, but it would become her issue.
• 11:02
  And so I had to hide all of my feelings away from her because it wasn't safe to talk about them. And so I'm working through my own process of learning how to trust that I can say things even even things that may be hard for well, in our relationship, hard for you to hear, and trust that you're gonna be be okay and that you can prime as, not feeling like I have the right to my own feelings, but also not feeling scared that I'm going to be hurting you with them, if that makes sense. And this is this is never been, like, my feelings are not, I'm mad at you and I'm gonna be angry scary. That's not what I'm talking about. But feelings of insecurity or uncertainty or, even frustration or anger about something.
• 11:52
  But I'm I'm just not I'm just not a ragey kind of guy. So, my feelings are not literally endangering anybody.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: But it's interesting it it is interesting to me that you say trust someone with your feelings, and then you explained why, like, with your mom and what that was, like, growing up. For me, my therapist asked me, like, why am I protecting you from my feelings? Why am I protecting Jules from my feelings? Why am I protecting the children from my feelings? And it really took me aback.
• 12:35
  Like, I didn't know how to answer that. And as I thought about it, maybe I am in some ways, but also or and also, I think I was protecting me. So maybe that's similar to the trusting thing. Like, you're using that word, and I'm trying to wrestle with what that looks like for me. For me, when people do not accept my boundaries or my feelings or my experience when I share it, and they fall apart, it makes it harder.
• 13:17
  Yeah. So it's not that I don't want you to feel my feelings. You can ask the children. Like, I'm so direct. Right?
• 13:24
  And they're like, you have to remember our feelings too. Don't just give us the information. Like, oh, yeah. Okay. We're working on that.
• 13:33
  It's not just that I wanna protect you from my feelings. It's that I want to protect me from what happens when someone can't handle my feelings. Like, I can't I don't I have so many balls in the air, like, juggling so many things that when a ball falls, when something drops, it messes up so many everythings in my life that I can't function. So then it becomes this cycle where I just have to keep juggling because things will fall apart if I stop, which is what happened last year. So what I've learned is you're not actually supposed to have that many balls in the air.
• 14:28
  So I'm working on that, and that's a whole other conversation. But I just wanted to give a different like, a frame of what that looks like for me.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: I think another tricky layer on that is that, is time. Because if I think back to times in our marriage where some I'm not thinking of a specific situation, but, like, something that you have said or something that you are struggling with, if that has upset me, like, that must feel like a crisis. Like, I'm imagining it from the other perspective. Right? Except I'm actually fine.
• 15:09
  Like, in the moment, I may be shaken or upset or have my own big feelings, but that's not how I'm gonna be forever. And because I'm still committed to us and because I'm committed to my own, like, emotional healing, I get better. Things the boat might be rocky for a little bit. But that one moment of things being out of control is super terrifying, but it's just not forever. And how trained to be super sensitive to anything being out of control, how do you then just like, do you white knuckle it through until things settle down again?
• 15:48
  Like, that's gotta be really hard.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: Understatement? I I had a dream about marriage that really upset me. I don't I don't actually remember any of the details of the dream at this point. I just knew a lot of times I have dreams that I find very insight insightful. And this dream, I woke up and I could not understand what I was supposed to learn from the dream.
• 16:15
  Like, the things I could understand maybe parts of it, but it didn't come together, and it left me feeling very unsettled and frustrated. Yes.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I remember part of your dream or the theme of the dream was you were in a different marriage, and it was easy instead of our marriage, which has not been unsafe. Like, we're very safe with each other, but it has not been easy. It has been hard. Like, we have been, like, in the trenches with parallel lives the whole marriage, which is not the same as your dream, which was interactive and easy and sweet.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: That's right. I had forgotten about that. And I think part of why it upset me was because I'm still fully committed to you. Like, I wouldn't choose an easy life over the life we've had because I value you, and I value the life we shared together. And so I was desperately wrestling with what my brain was telling me, and I wrote you a very long email in which I sort of shared all of my insecurities, basically, about relationships and marriage and me as a person.
• 17:33
  And, and it was one of those times where I was just doing my own white knuckling of trusting that I could say what's was inside my heart and mind and that it would not destroy you somehow or that you would not then be in your own crisis. And you weren't. You were, very positive and you're like, hey. Let's have an actual phone conversation about these things or whatever it was. I can't remember if it was Zoom or phone or whatever.
• 18:03
  We said, hey. Let's let's talk about this. I was like, okay. That's good. And so we sort of went line by line through all of my insecurities and talked about, things from your perspective and and how things work together between the two of us.
• 18:19
  It was really wonderful. And then you said something like, so the rest of these things on the list, I I feel like they're just sort of examples of of codependency. I was like, I don't really know what that is. And so you explained to me and and how kind of the whole idea of of feeling like my value comes from someone else. That I am only of worth when I am helping someone or, getting praise from someone or, you know, all of my worth, is coming from someone else.
• 19:01
  And I had never thought of it in that framework. And it really struck me and stayed with me. And I over like the next week, couple weeks, I just sort of had breakthrough after breakthrough of seeing, oh, this is a pattern of codependency in my life and this is a pattern of codependency. And it was really illuminating. It was very helpful.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: I remember that it was such a hard conversation. Your email was really hard to receive, but good. So, like, I had my own big feelings, and then it was in the same time frame as my therapist asking, why are you protecting others from your feelings? And so it felt like a very good opportunity from the universe to not protect you from my feelings. And it was hard because they were questions about, like, are we ever going to be married?
• 19:59
  Are we going to be living together? Are we what about gayness? What does that look like? And, like, all of these very pragmatic questions that we haven't exactly avoided, but because of circumstances with the kids, we haven't had to resolve either. Because by default right now, like, you and I very publicly are kind of taking the hit for our family living apart.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: And it's true that I took a job here and moved here. That's true. And, also, there are things that happened with the children that are not appropriate for us to talk about on the podcast that Yeah. Just because of the level of trauma and the acuity, they cannot live together right now. So Yep.
• 20:47
  No matter how much I think, oh, if this is my fault because I left Oklahoma, that's not even actually true. Like, when I have those feelings and thoughts, that's shiny happy. That's Dante. That's that's him in crisis because of Dante. I love, by the way, that you talked about that the last time we recorded together, and it's been very powerful.
• 21:11
  And I've had my own breakthroughs because of that. We can come back to sometime. But but it's not even about us. Like, this is not an example of where I need to try harder even though I'm learning not to try harder because it's not actually about us in that. Like, the kids cannot live together right now.
• 21:32
  We can visit together. They self contact with each other. We're still, like they're all siblings in a family, and everything is okay, and they've worked through those layers. But just for safety and functioning, they're much better how we have things now, and so that has to continue. But because of that, a side effect is that right as things sort of came to a a head or a climax or whatever, like, culminated in our discussions about sexuality and religious trauma and consent and all the things, pragmatically, we didn't really have to resolve it because we couldn't anyway.
• 22:15
  And your email was having the courage to say all of those things out loud of how is this going to resolve. Like, are you ever coming back? What is this going to look like? And it hurt my heart because not because the message was bad, not because you were saying anything bad, but because for me, still in therapy, it feels like a very binary experience that is a reenactment of my childhood. We shared in the book, the memoir, that experience with my mother finding out that I had a girlfriend and her screaming at me, tell me the truth.
• 23:00
  Tell me you're not gay. Tell me the truth. Tell me you're not gay. And, like, like, which do you want? I can't do both.
• 23:10
  And the email felt like that in experience, not because it was malicious or hurtful, but in experience because it was, like, in a binary and I know it's not really, but just reading through it, receiving it that first time, it felt like having to choose between you or me. Do I get to be holy myself, or do I go back to fawning and codependency to make you happy so that I can care for you? Because I do care about you. And so I knew it was going to be a big enough discussion and take enough time and that I needed to be contained enough that we actually had that conversation on the phone while I had my walk at lunchtime.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. That's right.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: And we did just take it one question at a time, one piece at a time, not protecting you because those were very hard conversations about like, I can't. I've made enough progress to understand that I cannot un gay myself. I've I've done enough religious trauma work to know I cannot re shiny happy myself. I've done enough learning about the unfolding status and history of our church that I know I cannot be fully me and fully safe with everyone. It doesn't change my faith, but it's not a safe environment, which is maybe why I spent years, like, in the van, literally.
• 25:01
  Right? We talked about that before. So I thought part of it was just because of triggers from memory time, but I hadn't understood until just the last year that it's literally not always safe for me to be myself. I can't say the things that I think and feel and who I am fully there, which makes it not safe. And I'm in a place of not doing that to myself.
• 25:26
  So what happens when all of those environments collide where being in my family the way it was is not safe, being in church as it was is not safe, being who I am wholly, fully myself is without those things? None of that feels good. So I could have had a fawning conversation and said, no. It's fine. The kids are gonna grow up.
• 25:56
  We'll work it out. It'll be okay. Don't worry. That's what would've been I was so, so tempted of just saying all the right things because I so care about you and want you to be healthy and well and happy and have enough shiny happy in me and enough trauma in me and what we know now as codependence to say, if I am good enough, if I try hard enough, you will make I will make you happy. But that's not about us.
• 26:32
  That's about my mom who really needed me to be the perfect person so that she could be the perfect mother so that she could be accepted. But I'm not a doll. And I'm also not perfect because I'm human, and I could not save my parents. So then in therapy, being back in therapy and having a good therapist and making progress, I could not not see is like undissociating. I'm not even talking about associating.
• 27:18
  I just mean undissociating. There's this waking up out of the fog where I cannot see that I am reenacting what happened to me as a six year old, seven year old, five year old child in charge of saving my parents' marriage. I I can't do that. I can't save my parents' marriage. And now time, I know they're dead, and that that should never have been put on a five year old.
• 27:48
  And I can work on therapy about, oh, this is why I go to war zones and work with people in conflict. This is why I'm a therapist. Because I was always the therapist for my parents, and I never should have been. Right? So, like, there's all those layers for me to go back to and keep working on in therapy.
• 28:06
  And I can talk about all those things in an in another, like, episodes, other things. But it was a hard, hard conversation because I had to say all of those truths. And instead of just saying what would make you feel better in the moment, like you talking about your mother eating your feelings. Like, not eating her feelings, eating your feelings. Like, I could not be the dessert that brought you comfort.
• 28:48
  And it was so painful.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: If But the amazing thing is that you not fonding and not saying the sweet nice things, but holding on to your own truth and authenticity was what I really needed. Was there, you know, some undeveloped part inside of me Speaking as a fish tank, I'm not I'm not DID, but I've been doing a lot of family system therapy with my therapist. And so I've
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: About, like, part of me. Yeah. So I know somewhere inside me, there's definitely pieces of me that really just wanted to be coddled and told I was a good boy and sent on my way. But what I need as as an adult, as a human being, was to know the truth so that I could know how to correctly understand things. Like to understand truths about our relationship or truths about me and about you, even if they're not simple or easy.
• 30:00
  That was so much more helpful to me than just being coddled and and told something nice. I'm so grateful you were able to hold on to that in that moment. For real. That was that was key.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Well, then it's been exponential. You have had one breakthrough after another since that conversation.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It's been pretty wild. And I feel I feel like I've come by leaps and bounds. I still recognize patterns of of codependence in my life. Even just a minor one, yesterday, we we had been talking about all of these different things that I needed to do with the kids over Zoom, and we were trying to figure out when to fit them in in the day.
• 30:46
  And and, I said, okay. I'm available. And while I was waiting, I sat down to to write another very long email to you about an entirely different thing. And then when I finished the email, I checked my phone, which had been on the floor. It hadn't been anywhere near me.
• 31:03
  And I got this long list of messages from you saying that you've been waiting with the kids for, like, an hour or two, and I hadn't showed up. But I was like, no. And I I'd had a little meltdown. Like, I felt like my whole life was ruined. Like, this one moment felt like suddenly because I had done something that had not worked out for other people.
• 31:26
  I had done something to inconvenience people or to make them feel bad. Suddenly, my whole self worth was in the garbage for a while. But the last time I had that problem, you told me to take a walk. And so this time, I, well, I wallowed in bed for a little bit. And then I went and took a walk around the block.
• 31:45
  And and I just sort of trusted that everything was okay, and eventually, it actually was okay. It was just a wild roller coaster to feel like I was doing great and feel like I was doing terrible, and I feel like I was doing okay.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: I I feel like that is an example of it showing up for me because a year ago or two years ago for sure, when you were in that sort of crisis, I would have felt like it was my job to rescue you from that and, like, call and talk to you, talk to the boys, like, do whatever I need to do. But over the last year, I have slowly and then more abruptly resigned from being the counselor for our family. Yeah. I'm sorry that you're hurting. I can be with you in your hurt, but it is no longer my job to solve your hurt.
• 32:49
  And so when I got your message, I even had your like, the contact up to hit call, and I heard I was like, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. And so I sent the text of these are the things that have helped before. Do one of these work for you?
• 33:06
  Is there something you can do right now? And, you but you did it. You did that. I didn't do it.
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And when I was down because of codependency, I I wanted the loving gaze of someone else to say that I was okay. Right? So I definitely was checking my phone every few seconds to see if you had texted back. Yeah.
• 33:30
  And and it was like I could feel myself as a pouting child, like, waiting for mom to come in and make me feel better. But you didn't, which was frustrating, but also exactly what I needed because I just needed to put on my big boy pants and take a walk, and just accept that sometimes even my best efforts are not gonna, you know, are not gonna do whatever it was that I hoped they would do. Things happen. I didn't do anything bad. I just didn't check my phone.
• 34:06
  And and in the end, that's okay. Like, your system is taking everybody is okay.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: And it worked out fine. They still got to talk to you. Yeah. Yeah. I think what you just said was significant too because when I am only rescuing or only solving everybody's problems, and then, like you said, put on your big boy pants and just go take care of yourself, two things happen for me.
• 34:36
  One is that that resonates really loudly. Can you say that? Resonates loudly? Yeah. Big, deep.
• 34:45
  I don't know the right word. But it it feels it feels accurate and significant because then at that point, I am parenting you instead of being in a couple with you, like, in a relationship. So then it makes sense why there were times I was so exhausted with so many children. It wasn't just those children. It was also your little part.
• 35:15
  But also, at the same time, it is hard for me to like, I can't say go put on your big boy pants when I am coming from a place of having not been parented at all. Because for me, I had to do that since I was a child and never should have had to do that for myself. And I think this comes up a lot with people with relational trauma or developmental trauma, DID, OSDD, all of these, because we've already had to parent ourselves. So when we start talking about, like, oh, you need to parent yourself, like, sometimes that just makes me wanna cuss. Like, that's the whole point.
• 36:00
  I've had to do that all along. So for me to set the boundary to bounce that back to you when it's your stuff, I think it triggers some fear and hurt and sadness in me that is like, I don't wanna do that to you, what was done to me. I don't wanna be the perpetrator. So then we start spinning around Cartman's triangle. Right?
• 36:28
  Rescuer, persecutor, victim. Like, we just start spinning. And so part of letting go of that is knowing when tending to and being responsive is healthy and appropriate even for those younger parts, whether you have DID or not. And when it's doing for instead of letting you heal, because then I'm enabling, which doesn't help. So I think part of that was I needed to have experiences where I could see the difference between someone I was enabling or times when I'm enabling and times when it's exponential and healing because it's what they need.
• 37:15
  So we do the same thing with the children. There's times where we can do for them because it's appropriate care, and there are times we cannot do for them because it would be enabling, and they really have to learn how to do for themselves. But that's not the same as the relational trauma where you're just growing up without a parent or abandoned in existence.
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah. As as we're talking about this right now, it's an aspect that had not occurred to me before is sort of filtering into this discussion where, so one of one of my frameworks for thinking about the mind is is transactional analysis. We've talked about this before that I read, I'm okay, you're okay as a teenager and stuck with me for the rest of my life. And in in that framework, just to very quickly recap, the idea is that you have these sort of three parts of your awareness. And this is not like DID parts because each part of a person with DID is going to have these three aspects.
• 38:30
  Right? It's like ego and superego and it, basically. But one of them is essentially recordings of your experiences when you were little, and one is a recording of your caregivers when you were little, little, and one is your current thinking self. And it's in different situations, you slip into different recordings for whatever is needed at the time. So, like, creativity and playfulness sort of come from those early childhood recordings.
• 39:00
  The caregiver recordings contain a lot of things like anger and scolding, but they also carry the instructions on how you do something, how you do your laundry, how you cook chicken soup. Those are parts of the parent recordings, the caregiver recordings. Right? And then the job of the what they call the adult brain is to monitor when those things are coming up and to say, oh, this part is very useful. I'm gonna keep track of that.
• 39:27
  This is not relevant anymore. We're gonna get rid of that. That would be in the perfect functioning head. Right? And I feel like for myself, it's very easy for me to slip into that child self that says, I am small and vulnerable.
• 39:43
  I am not able to care for myself. And the only way that I can survive is if an outsider is protecting me and soothing me and helping me to feel better. As an adult, what I need to know, what I need to learn to do better is to provide that for myself so that I am the one making sure that I am safe and suiting myself and protecting myself. But what you were saying just a moment ago, the reason why I thought of this in particular is that you were saying that in the moment where I had shared all these hard feelings, what you really wanted to do was to to care for me and soothe me and take care of me, right, in the in the parent role. But what really struck me is that that would not be an authentic representation of what you recorded from your parents.
• 40:35
  That's not who your parents were. Wow. It would be maybe a recording of how they acted in public.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: No. I think it is what I was supposed to do for them, which means I was treating you not like a child, but how I was as a child having to care for parents. That's interesting.
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: So it was what seems like a parent brain caring for a child brain is actually the child brain doing an impression of a parent brain of what they know that caregiver should be doing if they were a safe person.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: Which means it is a child brain caring for a child brain.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: Oh, snap. That's why we get along because we're at the same level. It's not a cross. Right? It's not a conflict of roles.
• 41:32
  It's just neither of us are in there. Wow. That just blows my brains.
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: But it turns out what I really needed was an adult conversation between both of our thinking brains and saying, yeah, we have these feelings, we have these inclinations, whether it's insecurity or wanting to fawn or care for somebody or whatever it is. But in this moment, what is most helpful is just, like, going through the boxes of of stuff that we haven't said in a while and sorting what's what does this one mean or how do we process this or we'll put this in the drawer for later and we'll get to that at some other time. But not having that sense of my brain is now a junk tour full of stuff that I haven't thought about in months, but it's still taking up space. And because you were able to hold on to that, that sort of thinking brain and not try to fawn and not try to save me, we were able to make so much more progress than than we would have if you tried to rescue me.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: It's so interesting that being regulated on my own and regulating myself and responding to that child part of me, like, I feel those feelings. I hear those thoughts. And, also, now is not the time to act in that way. So, like, thoughts and feelings and behaviors. Right?
• 43:16
  Like, I know that we care about Nathan. I feel the feelings of being sad that we cannot rescue him. And, also, the behavior of rescuing is not actually good for us or good for him. That choosing to stay in that adult space, but not in a neglectful of child parts kind of way, responded healthier to you and to myself.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: This conversation will continue in the next episode. Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org.
• 44:27
  If there's anything we've learned, it's that connection brings healing. We look forward to connecting with you.