Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Baby Whales

Transcript

Baby Whales · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over:
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the System Speak 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.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: I have been so sick this whole year so far. We're in the fourth month, and it has taken me ages to recover. My body has just been through a lot. And with the flood at the beginning of the year and then getting pneumonia, it has been really hard to shake it off to recover from that. My doctor says that's what happens when we go through hard things and then find ourselves safe again.
• 1:47
  All of everything our body was holding on to starts to release. But we have to feel all the things in our body that we hadn't been feeling all along. I don't know how that works or what that's called. I just know that the better my life got over the last year after some hard ten years or more, if not my lifetime, the sicker my body got, which was frustrating. And also my therapist said, maybe it makes sense.
• 2:46
  It was finally my body's turn to focus on surviving now that I was thriving. This made me curious, almost as if my body was apart. I don't mean that exactly, but something about being in conversation with my body. It feels as if my body knows I have been trying With nourishment, more rest, less overworking, Even more balance in things like parenting and playtime. And I have shared already about my massage therapist who has been so good for me and kind to me and safe with me.
• 4:17
  And also part of what she does specifically for me is work with that lymphatic system because of things my body has been through, because of autoimmune, because of all the things. And so she flushes that through, and then I feel it. It's good because it's coming out of me. And, also, I had no idea how much I was storing in my body. That's how it started actually after the flood.
• 5:14
  She was working on me one day, and at the very, very end, she did something near my throat. And I started coughing like I have never coughed before. I don't know what she pulled up and out of me. I don't even know how to describe it. But I lost my air.
• 5:39
  And I coughed for weeks after that, months since then. I was telling this to my therapist, trying to downplay how hard it was even to talk, how tired I was even to sit up. After sleeping through so much of this year already. And my therapist said that in Chinese medicine, which I know nothing about. That that sort of illness in your chest has to do with grief.
• 6:28
  I thought that was rude. I don't know anything about that perspective or what that means. And if she wants to tell me, she will explain it. I don't want to appropriate it or dig into what isn't mine. And also, it makes sense.
• 6:59
  Coming out of the year of grief, decades of grief, a lifetime of grief. And then, like clockwork, I got the message that my very first therapist passed away. Not the first therapist I was seeing on the podcast. The one I lived with in college. The one who took me out of shiny happy and into Catholic mass.
• 7:57
  The one who moved me in, where I reunited with the English teacher. Who is still my friend forty years later, thirty years later. It's been a long time since eighth grade. She's actually become a grief coach herself and is super excited about it, making meaning out of her own life since the loss of her husband and all she's learned about grief. She wants to come on the podcast again, which I think is really funny and delightful.
• 8:43
  We'll be happy to have her. But I called her, like, called her, like, on the phone with my Bluetooth ears to talk about what that was like, the complicated experience of losing that therapist, and what we had been through with her. What was hard and what we wanted to keep because it was our own, including our friendship. I also talked to my friend, Elle, who's been on the podcast, my friend from college, one of them, who was there during those days. Not just the chaos of the days of getting diagnosed, but the grief of recognizing shiny happy, the betrayals of shiny happy, and the escape from shiny happy.
• 10:14
  How either of us survived that college, I don't know, But we did. And I'm glad we kept each other, that we've stayed friends. I think over the last year, I named grief group in the community. What I've learned really is that grief isn't just about losing people. It's also about losing places and spaces, hopes and dreams, daydreaming, which I think now I understand so differently because we've had to learn who people are by how they treat us rather than the potential we see in them.
• 11:45
  And recognizing daydreaming isn't always helpful for anybody when it's not real. And also, that doesn't have to be binary either. We can keep vision and visioning. I don't know what other words there would be. When it is real and when people are showing up and when people do stay and when I'm showing up for myself when there is actual progress, when there is moving forward.
• 12:41
  But we cannot daydream instead of grieving. I was watching my youngest play this morning, lining up these little animals and telling stories with them. And I had a room full of teens sitting on couches and chairs around her watching. And I looked at them and smiled, a kind of comfortable grief, maybe. And they looked at me and I said, I remember when I had six of those.
• 13:41
  Little ones on the outside of me playing with cars and toys and dolls, telling stories, making little child sounds. Even as this one starts to grow out of it too, with dresses and outfits and music. Big plans for her life. Big plans for my kitchen. A kind of daydreaming that's not not real so much as developmental.
• 14:33
  And in that, I could hold space for it in myself too. That maybe some of my daydreaming was also developmental. Being glad to find people to play with, to learn with, to grow alongside with, to love with. And, also, it goes back to skipping steps again where I have to learn how to do all of those things with myself first, and then I can do it better with others. There is also grief that is really good for me.
• 15:38
  The letting go of what was not instead of waiting for what I hoped it could be. I was conditioned for that through religious trauma, seeing the best in others, believing they wanted to grow and heal, cheering on their goodness. And overlooking my own suffering until my body has said stop No more. And, also, I have stopped in the ways I have learned. I knew I could not fight more battles, and so I moved my family to safety.
• 16:46
  Safety. My oldest saw the news that the state we lived in before made it illegal for them to go to the bathroom. I know that's oversimplifying it, but that's how they experience it, and those were their words. And they said for the first time, thank you for cutting us out of there. Now being safe enough where we are.
• 17:34
  With the beauty of spring unfolding before us, bookending our years since we moved. With magnolia blossoms and daffodils and tulip beds bursting forth in color and feeling peace and a cozy kind of comfort that is giving my soul rest in the same way my body has needed rest and recognizing from my reading Doctor. Teuma last year that I needed to work less. Seeing my children grow up into teens and almost adults where they need presents more has been good for me even though it was part of what has changed and what I have grieved in a letting go kind of way. No more over functioning kind of way.
• 18:49
  Painting again, writing again, time for therapy again, And not worrying about the things that don't fit within those bounds of safety, my therapist said, it's like a new beginning, a new birth, just like springtime. You making it to this place of being able to once again do therapy for therapy. And we talked about seeing the news that for the first time they had caught on video a new whale being born. And how we saw as it rushed into life in the water with the blood rushing around it, the other whales that had surrounded them for protection during the birth took turns lifting it to the surface for air. And I thought, yes, this is why we're here.
• 20:03
  This is what we do. This is what the community is about. And also, even in that, we have to rescue our own babies. And how do I do that for myself inside? Especially now that it is my body that is saying, please, just let me breathe.
• 20:39
  But it felt significant as a bookend to the drowning whale a year ago that we see in now time, a year later. What that looked like, the literal visual of what that looked like. The opposite of deprivation to be lifted to the surface to get air in our lungs while we learn how to swim and breathe and simply be who we are and that be enough. It was beautiful, and I had hope. And I feel like as hard as this year has been, that is what is coming out of it, is that not only connection brings healing, but healing brings hope.
• 21:39
  And the hope is what is sinking deeper and deeper into me all the way down to my toes even while my lungs surface so that I can breathe again, so that I can recover, so that I can continue therapy, so that I can continue enjoying my life. I don't know if I have ever enjoyed my life the way I enjoy my life now. I didn't even know that was an option, I don't think. There were things I like doing. There were people I enjoyed.
• 22:19
  There were ships that were fun or that I learned things with or alongside or adventures I have had. But to just be resting and enjoying my life, this is new, and it's something different than ever before. And I think it makes me happy, not in a toxic way and not despite everything that's hard, but just as part of the reality of it even while grieving. And also, that is part of the grieving, the being lifted to the surface for air again just to keep going as part of aligning ourselves. The rebirth of hope, the renewal of air, and the replenishment that comes in not being alone in it.
• 23:38
  I really truly am just in awe, and it's a cozy, cozy day of just resting with all the windows open and all the birdsongs coming through and the fragrance of spring like nothing I have ever experienced before. I love it so much. And it is a gift to myself to be present, to be able to experience it. And I'm so, so glad of it. Even when life is still hard or I am still slowly recovering, There's nuance in complexity, even in grief and certainly in therapy.
• 25:06
  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, and healing brings hope.