Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Facing Terror

Transcript

Facing Terror · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over:
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Okay. Remember how we can read recovery literature replacing alcoholic with traumatic or dysfunctional or depriving or whatever our experience was with that childhood dynamic. I just started chapter six in the Big Red Book, the primary text for ACA, and it says the central problem for us is a mistaken belief formed in childhood which affects every part of our lives. We reach adulthood believing we failed, unable to see no one can stop the traumatic effects of our family. This pervasive sense of failure is self blame, shame, and guilt.
• 1:51
  These self accusations, so like inner critic, right? These self accusations ultimately lead to self hate. And then it talks about how when we feel so much shame and when we are blaming ourselves, that's what leads to isolation. This was a huge piece for me. I know that it's not good for us as mammals to be overly isolated away from friends or community or connections, even in person.
• 2:24
  And also I know that can be really hard for those of us who are survivors. This says isolation is both a prison and a sanctuary. We become suspended between need and fear. Oh my goodness. This is the double bind between need and fear.
• 2:44
  Do you guys hear that? That's everything about relational trauma. That's everything about developmental trauma. That's everything about infanticidal attachment. We get suspended between need and fear.
• 3:00
  Unable to choose between fight or flight. We agonize in the middle and resolve the tension by explosive bursts of rebellion or silently enduring the despair. So bursts of rebellion, like breaking those social contracts in ways that usually become reenactments or self harm in ways that are untended to. So later in therapy, we can rewrite new social contracts in a different way that is safe and healthy, titrated, paced, all the things, and with consent from our systems. But this is talking about when we are still suspended between need and fear.
• 3:44
  Ultimately, isolation is our retreat from the paralyzing pain of indecision. We are isolated when we are stuck between need and fear. This ultimately is not just the decision about what to do or not do because of those social contracts or our indecision about ourselves, whether we are good or bad, which of course it's not that binary. Right? But also it is the indecision about what to do with the grief that we feel because of trauma and deprivation.
• 4:30
  It says, The first stage of mourning and grief allows us to cope with the loss of love and to survive in the face of neglect and abuse. The second stage of grief, it says, is our return of our feelings. So when we start thawing out, memories start to surface. This is the time that is one of the biggest breakthrough points in therapy where people often have these huge developmental bursts where they really grow in therapy or they quit therapy because they are too afraid to let that happen because it has to acknowledge the need. So rather than expressing or tending to the need, they isolate themselves from the help that is being offered by acting out or reenacting instead of staying with the growth that comes from acknowledging it.
• 5:28
  And then they're responding to fear instead of actors in their own life and healing. Genuine grieving for our childhood ends our morbid fascination with the past and lets us return to the present free to live as adults. Sharing the burden of grief others feel gives us the courage and strength to face our own bereavement. The pain of mourning and grief is balanced by being able, once again, to fully love and care for someone and to freely experience joy in life. This is talking about healing that death of hope.
• 6:13
  When Laura Brown tells us that death of hope that we grieve that our childhoods will never be anything different than they were and that our adulthoods are different than what they would have been if we had had safety and care. We grieve that and grieve that, but we do not have to drown in it. This is what it looks like to come full circle as part of healing back even into joy. When we were little, the violent nature of alcoholism, trauma, deprivation, whatever you want to fill in the blank with whatever kind of dysfunction you experienced, It darkened our emotional world and left us wounded, hurt, and unable to feel. This extreme alienation from our own internal direction kept us helplessly dependent on those we mistrusted and feared.
• 7:14
  That is the disorganized attachment. Right? And betrayal trauma of having to having to rely on the people who are harming us or having to survive with people who are not caring for us. In an unstable, hostile, and often dangerous environment, we attempted to meet the impossible demands of living with family and our lives were soon out of control. To make sense of the confusion and to end our feelings of fear, we denied inconsistencies in what we were taught.
• 7:59
  We held rigidly to a few certain beliefs, or we rebelled and distrusted all outside interference. That goes back to what we were reading about how even shiny, happy religion, which is not the same as faith or expressions of faith, how that can sort of co opt that same dynamic of coercive control, or when we reenact that and it gets weaponized against us, that is what coercive control is, the surveillance and the interference and the violation of autonomy. But with healing, freedom begins with being open to love. The dilemma of abandonment is a choice between painful intimacy and hopeless isolation. But the consequence is the same.
• 8:53
  So whether we are praying the price of admission like Laura Brown talks about or we're pendulum swinging the opposite way of staying completely isolated so no one can hurt us, Either way, we are depriving ourselves of safe, healthy connection, which is what brings healing, which is what brings hope. Even that rebirth of hope that is not a toxic positivity or a shiny, happy version of bypassing or dismissing all of the pain and grief. But having grieved and being comfortable with grieving makes it possible for us to begin again, which I love. Like, I'm thinking about it in this time of this year, this moon that we've had to be shot. Like, it is the birth of spring is coming, or as Clarissa says, the green poking through the snow.
• 9:57
  That's what we're talking about here. So when we ask how do we get caught in reenactment, it's because we see in other people the mirrors of what was already done to us. And when that is raw and not tended to, then we think the people in now time are the problem instead of tending to the wounds that it's reflecting. Then on page 85, they tell this story about this research. I'm just they do it very briefly, but it's super painful.
• 10:30
  It says, Renee Spitz, in his classic study of infants and fondling homes, discovered that babies who were left alone for long periods of time could not tolerate the isolation and lost the will to live. The despair of not being held except during basic care left the infants without hope of receiving the comfort and love they needed to feel safe and secure. Children in an alcoholic home or dysfunctional home, traumatic home, depriving home exist in a constant state of basic insecurity which begins when the cry to be held is met with hostility and rejection or simply ignored. Self soothing is not possible in an atmosphere conditioned by violence and fear. And adult children are always close to the feeling of despair.
• 11:31
  I actually appreciate that they said this so explicitly because there have been times, maybe because of my conditioning with shiny happy, there have been times where I was really struggling and felt shame or guilt that I could not shake that off or that I wasn't more grateful. There have been times I have been told I should be more grateful or therapy can be ableist when we are expecting people to do frontal cortex exercises when the frontal cortex is not available. Like first we have to get up into our frontal cortex through connection, orienting through attachment, not just what colors are in the room, but whatever it takes to get us back into that place to actually orient to now time and orient to healthy and safe relationships and orient to our own values so that we're congruent to those healthy and safe relationships internally. Because until we do that, then we are still experiencing the violence of danger. And when that's our atmosphere, we cannot self soothe.
• 12:54
  So it makes sense that there are times we are trying to do everything that's on the workbook pages or all the self care we can do or all of the worksheets or workbooks or whatever it is are the doing things. But when we're in a right brain experience or when that sense of self is not connected or online, we literally can't do those things. And then it's like we're becoming ableist against ourselves with these impossible expectations where we can do all the things but that doesn't mean we're going to feel better if we are still isolated or still alone or still in danger. It says on page 86, under abuse seems normal and acceptable. Y'all this was so painful to read.
• 13:50
  It literally just made me so nauseated. It says, An alcoholic home. Again, dysfunctional, traumatic, depriving home or relationship, any ship with that dynamic and that chaos is a violent place. It is a violent solution to the problem of pain and anyone trapped in its lethal embrace is filled with rage and self hate for choosing this form of denial. So this, I think, is what I was trying to say about rage all the way back in 2023 when I was talking with Laura Brown about or even in 2022 when I was talking with Laura Brown about the difference between feminist rage that is like self advocacy or social justice work and the kind of rage that's just hateful and mean and targeted, where it really becomes like what recovery talks about as an obsession where it's just super hyper fixated on other people or other things or other situations that we can't actually control anything about instead of focusing on ourself and our own healing.
• 15:10
  That's this kind of rage. That's why I was saying two, three years ago, four years ago, I can't identify with that kind of rage because that's not the same as response to injustice. That is something else that is reenactment in a externalizing or projecting kind of way of where almost like an interject of like I'm becoming what was done to me and that is not healthy. I don't wanna do that to myself and I don't wanna do that to other people. So I'm not saying we can't have big feelings or angry feelings and I know my therapist has even talked about rage, but talking about rage in the sense of injustice and rage in the sense of memory time harm as opposed to hyper fixating on other people.
• 16:06
  So rage for myself in healing, I'm gonna have to keep wrestling with those words to find them. But it says here, Children exposed to such violence come to believe that they are to accept punishment and abuse as a normal part of existence. So like me thinking I have to be on the shiny happy blanket. Me thinking that if other people say I'm bad, it must be true. Me thinking that if other people are trying to harm me then I deserve it.
• 16:42
  That's not healthy. That's not even the same as accountability. It says they identify themselves as objects of hate, not worthy of love, and survive by denying their underlying feelings of despair. This is part of, I think, what I was feeling three or four years ago with the rage stuff. This is it.
• 17:06
  It's one thing to feel anger, but it's another thing to weaponize anger when what the feeling is despair. So that goes back to DBT or something. Right? Because that's like secondary emotion stuff. And when we are isolated without nurture or comfort or connection, we have no way to get an accurate mirror on that.
• 17:31
  And that really impacts reality testing. It really impacts knowing what is actually even happening. And it really impacts the choices we make and is the difference between having memory time surface and tending to it in therapy and having memory time surface and it becoming reenactment. On the other hand, when we have safe and healthy ships, then we are reflecting each other in safe and healthy ways. It says, A positive self reflection increases our sense of security and feelings of self esteem and gives us confidence in relating to others.
• 18:18
  We see respect for our means to be protected from harm and to relate to authority with trust and not fear. We come to believe we have value because we are accepted and loved. This felt so big. I just had to talk about it for a minute. I want to keep it.
• 18:44
  I want to hold on to it. And it is why it's so important that we are connecting in parallel play ways where we're tending to inside ourselves, inside therapy, in recovery, whatever it takes, and not becoming part of that Cartman's triangle with rescuer, perpetrator, victim. Because we don't have to villainize each other or ourselves the way reenactment does. Like, that's one of the signs that reenactment is happening. One of the other signs reenactment is happening is that how memory time is getting weaponized.
• 19:42
  And the other sign of reenactment is how is when we are focused on others instead of ourselves. And so finding a way to have words for some of this is one of the things I love about recovery. Finding ways to fill in those gaps of missed developmental skills or missed social skills or fill in the holes of deprivation where the good that was missing can be added now as we reflect safety to each other and health to each other. I think this is amazing. I know it all comes slowly and I can have compassion for myself in that as I'm practicing.
• 20:36
  And, also, it's the staying with it and the practicing that keeps me from being a complicit bystander even to myself internally. And like how Laura Brown said when she came to the community group, how it was good and right that we were going so slowly with the not the price of admission book because that's how she wrote it. That's what she intended. That's what she says at the beginning. Go slowly.
• 21:14
  And with this recovery stuff, we do the same thing. We go slowly, as slow as whoever any of us need inside, like the slowest, the slowest one. Not just the youngest one, but the slowest one. And when our feelings are this big and this raw, that means go really, really slow. I don't know.
• 21:41
  It felt like a big reading this morning and helped me understand that part of what is so scary about all of this is that we're literally facing terror in now time, even if it's from memory time or when the world does not always feel like a safe place, that is terror. And even when it's now time terror, it our bodies remember memory time terror. And that terror can come between us and our values, between our frontal cortex and our system and in our bodies. It puts us back into our limbic system. So being able to get grounded back in who I am, grounded back in what is safe and healthy for me, like therapy, recovery, groups, meetings, book studies, whatever it is that helps me.
• 22:42
  And part of that needing to be connection in safe and healthy ways so that I'm not alone in it, that's the difference. That is the difference. That is everything. And also, that's part of the terror. When we have paid the price of admission and held onto ships because we believed in those ships, because we loved those ships, because we cared for those ships, even though those ships were not good for us, Then that goes back to the betrayal trauma piece of maintaining the relationships instead of caring for ourselves.
• 23:30
  Because there is such terror in being isolated without those ships. And also the only way to get to a healthier place is to disconnect from what is not letting us move. And moving into or alongside or with healthier ships, that is lifesaving. That is recovery. That is healing.
• 24:09
  And that's where we get our hope back.
• 24:36
  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.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: And healing brings hope.