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Healing is Mine · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: 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. You guys, this week was so big. I mean, so much stuff happened.
• 1:07
  I can't even tell you. We did all of the holiday stuff for the outside kids early, because we thought that way this week would be simple and easy and quiet, and they could play with their new things, and we could all just relax a bit after everything we've all been through in recent weeks and months and the last two years, right? Trying to conserve energy, trying to save spoons, trying to tend to everyone. I thought we were doing it the right way. But oh my goodness, that is not how this week went.
• 1:50
  First of all, our son got life lighted back to Kansas City because of an infection in his brain. He's got a shunt, so it's actually a really big deal. And we thought it was just the shunt malfunction, which is a big enough deal in itself. But it turned out to be this whole other thing that was actually super serious and super scary. And I think part of what was so hard was not just that that was so epic, but that it turned on all the lights of the past from the medical trauma with our daughter.
• 2:23
  So we seriously are going to have to address that in therapy for sure. But we did get him medical care right away, and it saved his life. They saved his life. We are so grateful. The husband got up there with him.
• 2:38
  The children and I followed the next day, and it's just all a blur after that. We had to get an Airbnb to stay up there. We could not stay in a hotel because of exposure risk. So I don't know how that makes it even feasible to do healing together or ISSTD conference in the spring. I don't how are we supposed to with the numbers going up so high and this new variant going on?
• 3:12
  Or is it just here and this is life now? Like I don't even know anymore. But we found a place to stay close to the hospital and it had a fenced in backyard so the children could play outside while we had this random heat wave in Oklahoma. While there were like blizzards where there's not supposed to be snow and here we are Christmas week and the middle of winter, and all of a sudden it's like 80 degrees, and all of a sudden it's like summer. So that helped some that they got to play so that we could still work.
• 3:51
  We had planned to take the week off, but we had to work to make up the money we needed for Kansas City. So it was all just exhausting. But then on top of that, and I'm sorry it's so whiny, this is just how our week went. On top of that, our son picked up strep in the hospital and brought it home to the other children. And so we spent Christmas week with strep just bouncing from one child to another, no matter how much I wipe down the light switches and doorknobs or Lysol the house.
• 4:27
  Children are just disgusting. I mean, I love them, and they are adorable, but they are so full of germs, and we are so sick from being in quarantine for so long that we have seriously been sick since we got out of quarantine. So I don't know that that's any better, because what's the point of being in quarantine if you're going to be sick anyway as soon as you come out? We've been sick for two months with everything, and so it has just been rough. Everyone is tired.
• 5:02
  Everyone is tired of being sick. Nobody feels good. Everyone is extra whiny and extra clingy, which is so suffocating and triggering to us with the children just pawing at us and wanting to be on us or close to us and we want to tend to them. I don't mean that that's bad or that children shouldn't want that. That is what they need and we want to give it to them.
• 5:26
  But also it's so overwhelming and it's super triggering And so it's a real struggle. The struggle is real people because it is so much to be pouring out. But we have all made it home. We are all safe. Everyone has been to the ER.
• 5:49
  Everyone has antibiotics, and all of us so far have still tested negative for COVID. It was just the strep bug that he picked up in hospital, which this mama was not happy about, let me tell you. But everyone is feeling better. We are on the mend, and all of that is good. And can I just say we left the Zoom link open for the thirty six hours to sort of cover the gathering time of families for the holidays?
• 6:23
  And I know everyone has different holidays, but it is a season of gathering and this particular weekend is so especially epic just with such a shared experience of people having to be with their families. And we wanted a safe place for people to be able to debrief or be with chosen family or those who were struggling with no family. And we stayed in there, and let me tell you, you people were amazing. We cried with you. We laughed with you.
• 7:01
  We chatted with you. We colored with you. We sang with you. The way that we came together as a community, sometimes only one or two or three or four of us at a time, other times there were 16 or 17 or 18 of us in there. The way that you all supported each other was so beautiful.
• 7:22
  I can't even tell you. I'm just so grateful and it was just a beautiful thing to witness. And I'm so, so grateful for the care that you all are giving each other in the community. The other thing that happened this week is that we got a Christmas card from our previous therapist. And we actually got this when we were on our way out the door to go meet the helicopter for our son's life flight.
• 7:54
  So it was terrible timing, which was not at all her fault, but we basically just threw it in the car because we didn't have time or space to deal with it. I was hoping that's not what it was, and then it was just a misunderstanding or we didn't even notice or something. And then we found it in the van later once we got to Kansas City. And so I was really grateful that the children had, the outside children had a place to play outside so that we could take some time to process this in the middle of everything else going on. Because we wept.
• 8:33
  We cried and cried and cried and it was so awful. There are so many layers to this and I'm trying to remember what we talked about in therapy about it. And what I want to do and so what I tried to do was to remember the pieces that I know Instead of only being overwhelmed by the affective response or the emotional response, I'm trying to remember the context of the pieces that I know, not to dismiss or ignore the feelings, but to help everything stay in context so that we can honor the experience as a whole. So for example, I know that her sending Christmas cards out is about her culture. I know that it's her culture.
• 9:26
  There are lots of people that send Christmas cards, and I don't mean Christmas cards are a bad thing, but it is not my thing. I don't send out Christmas cards like who am I going to send a Christmas card to first of all? Okay let's just start with that. But she is known for being kind and for reaching out to people and connecting people and so it makes sense that Christmas cards are a part of her world and a part of her expression of self. And so as part of her expression of self and as part of her culture, I can understand that and respect that and I can hold space for that being about her, not about us.
• 10:13
  So that's one thing I know. The other thing that I know is that by including us in her Christmas card list, she was intending to be kind. Now, this is an assumption I'm making, but because my experience with her tells us that she is not malicious and is not intentionally trying to harm us, then I can break this piece down enough to hold space that she was not trying to hurt us by sending a Christmas card. She was not being a bully by sending a Christmas card. So I can hold that for context, those two pieces.
• 11:02
  But I can also hold space for the fact that it does hurt, that a Christmas card is something that is literally addressed to Hello, family and friends. And I am not either family or friends. And I can hold space for how the content of what she said in her Christmas card, like the content in the apology letter that we got, reveals the confirmation of the misattunement we were already experiencing and confirms that leaving was the right choice. I don't need to get into the details of that, but I'm just saying holding space for where she is and what she's saying and what she's presenting reflects what we noticed a year before we ever left therapy and confirms to us that it was the right thing. So I don't mean to keep hashing this out, but it came up again because we got the card.
• 12:13
  And because we got the card and had really big feelings about it, it was another example of how to break this down and deal with it and process it in ways that were appropriate for us. I feel like we cried enough to honor the grief that it triggered, but also were not entirely overwhelmed. We were able to finish the week with our son in the hospital, get everyone home, get them taken to the ER one by one, and do what we needed to do to care for our family, which is really, really important. I did also talk to a friend about it who said like we just need to not have contact from them anymore, which makes sense and we can say that. But also the more that I have tried to explain myself the less I have been understood.
• 13:12
  Like instead of repairing this situation, it's just increased misattunement, which has been more difficult for us and more shaming for us. And so I think that there are some situations where it's okay to just let go, and there are some situations that it's okay to just not respond. I mean, we still had to deal with that there was a part of us who set the Christmas card on fire and burned it. So there's that and there was that emotional expression and that response that maybe just needed to come and settle things and let it go. But I think that even is progress because the Christmas card is not on our fridge where we see it every day and it gets brought up every day and this passive self harm that we were not aware of that we were doing before that just kept things festering.
• 14:11
  So this is the difference between, okay, we appreciate she's someone who's trying to be kind. This effort is actually causing us harm. We've tried to express that. It's not being understood. So we can just let it go, respecting her culture and traditions, but also having the boundaries to care for us.
• 14:32
  And that felt good. This was progress. Think that if we were not in the middle of crisis, what we could have done was just return to sender. Because we've moved and so it actually got forwarded to us And I think that we could have very easily returned it to sender and just not even opened it if there hadn't been all this other stuff going on. So it was also an example of giving ourselves grace and space and having compassion for just we have a lot going on and so anything is hard to deal with.
• 15:14
  We don't have a lot of space to make room for dealing with new hard things right now. So when hard things come up, like our sun being life flighted, it really takes all of our attention. And I know one thing that happened with that is that we immediately reached out to the System Speak community and there were notifications of updates and all of this. And I know that that was a lot and I'm sorry. I appreciate though that we knew that that was our safe place to turn to because there isn't anywhere else.
• 15:51
  And we are just now starting with our new therapist, which I think is working and I think is a good thing and I think is going to be helpful. But because we're just starting it was not even a thing of, Hey, maybe I should let my therapist know that my family is in crisis. No. Of course, we said nothing because we are still recovering enough from our previous therapy experience that we are afraid to rock the boat. And what we understand is part of that is about fawning, part of that is about relational trauma, and part of that is that we have not been safe enough to say, Hey, this doesn't feel good to me and here's what I need instead.
• 16:38
  But what has been helpful about this postcard and sort of confirming what we were experiencing before but did not have words for is that some of the things that we are experiencing I think just had to do with her burnout and her compassion fatigue or her not wanting to be in her office. And so the more that we find out about this, the more we understand it really was her stuff and not our stuff, which helps a lot as far as understanding how any of this happened instead of it just being drama. Because initially and for so long part of what was so difficult was that we were experiencing things relationally and having emotional responses to that that were getting shut down and dismissed. And that was triggering because it felt like gaslighting, right? But we were picking up on what she either was not aware of yet or was not expressing directly yet.
• 17:47
  And now since it has been confirmed and we can see, Oh yes, this is what's going on. She really wants to do this over here, not have an office over here. So understanding that, even though it's still hard and all that grief is there, is what helps us hold on to the good and helps us address some of those, like littles in particular, who think that they did something wrong. When in this case it wasn't about doing something wrong, it really was kind of an abandonment issue, which we could address in a 100 different ways. And the podcast is not really the place to do that.
• 18:30
  But having the context to give understanding, to confirm and validate our own experience and our own emotional response to that really, really matters because it's what gets us out of the loop of repeating this cycle of waiting for her, or waiting for things to get better or waiting for repair when that's not going to happen and when that's not coming. That's different than a healthy relationship that will repair and tend to those experiences, which is when it's worth sticking around and doing the work for that. The last piece I want to address with this and then really just let it go and move forward is that understanding of how much grief played a role in all of this and understanding better how that was because what we were experiencing was abandonment. We did not understand that, maybe even until just now when I said the words out loud, and that that is what was triggering. It was not just the shame or just the misattunement where not all of us felt safe sharing everything, or we weren't able to express or confront situations or ask for what we needed because we didn't actually feel like we really had permission to do that.
• 20:00
  We just felt permission to be good. And so what we've learned from that is that any time we are required to be good to feel safe, that is fawning. And anytime we are fawning, that is in response to trauma, which is confirmation that we are indeed not safe. And that is really important information to have. And then that other piece about the abandonment is that it really helped us as we traced back those reenactments, which we talk about a little bit in the email episode of System Speak that is the very last final farewell of that podcast.
• 20:45
  So if you don't know, our podcast started on System Speak. It went for five years, and we just this week released the final episode of that. And we kind of talk in that episode a little bit about how we realize that part of the loop was a reenactment, which is where we kind of keep experiencing the same trauma over and over again with different people. Not acting it out on purpose, but it keeps happening and we keep experiencing it. And it's important to learn that because you need to heal those pieces.
• 21:22
  Those pieces are important to tend to and learn from so that they don't keep happening. And so recognizing that part of what was so triggering about everything we went through and why it was so devastating and why it took us so long, like more than two years, to pull out of that, is because of that abandonment piece. And so it wasn't just a grief of a loss, it was grieving the loss of someone who had promised to care for us and then just let us fall through the cracks. Now, not every experience that we went through growing up was an intentional letting us fall through the cracks. But there were lots of significant experiences that we had growing up, where loss meant getting sent back into danger or put back with our family or losing the care that had been promised or those kinds of things where it's almost like an attempt at a healing experience in and of itself is a risk for danger.
• 22:36
  So you can talk about this with attachment. You can talk about this with relational trauma. Like you can use whatever words you want, but it makes it so, so difficult to ask for help again, which validates the experience of why is it so exhausting to try and find another therapist and try to start again? And part of that is because reaching out for help in therapy literally feels like a threat to my own survival, even though I also feel like quitting therapy or giving up or staying out of therapy, that we would not survive it. I don't mean that as any threat or intent or plan.
• 23:27
  I just mean that I don't think we can survive without therapy. And yet at the same time, because of these experiences, reaching out for help and saying, I need to trust you because I need help from you, is the exact relationship that has been dangerous all along. When we are little, we are dependent on our caregivers. We rely on them to survive because infants cannot survive alone. Young children cannot survive alone.
• 24:10
  And yet the very people who are meant to care for us are the people also harming us, which puts us in this bind where we can't get away because we rely on them to be safe, because we rely on them to stay alive. But we also can't turn towards them and rely on them because they are fundamentally, intrinsically unreliable, because they cause harm instead of offering nurture. So we talk in the workbook about how this is part of what we dissociate from. It's not just that we dissociate from each other inside or we dissociate from the pain that we're feeling or we dissociate from the difficulties of the external world. It's not just that.
• 25:10
  We are dissociating from that loop that we are stuck in of needing to rely on the people who are harming us. And that's why the last two years have been so hard and so hard to pull out of why can I not get my feet back under me when we had been doing so well? Because it wasn't just about a loss. It wasn't just devastating that our safe place was taken away. It was if I'm going to be so brave and bold in therapy, and to speak things truly out loud, to see what there is to see and feel what there is to feel.
• 25:53
  It's that what we thought was our safe place caused harm. That's what was devastating. And even just saying that now makes me cry enough that it's hard to speak. It's hard to talk about. But also stepping back from that, while being aware of it, which is different than dissociating.
• 26:20
  Staying present with those truths helps me validate what my own emotional experience was, and helps me honor those parts of me who said, No, this is not okay. And those parts of me who said, No, we need something different. And those parts of me who said, Some of this has been helpful, but it's not being helpful now. Helpful, or we're grateful for this, but we're also aware we need something else. And that's okay to feel.
• 27:02
  That's okay to say out loud. Now, we didn't know how to say that out loud at the time. We literally wrote a letter from another country and broke up over text, except it was letter, right? So that was not the healthiest thing, but it was the best we had at the time. And then we talked about on the podcast, which was not the healthiest thing, but it was the only container we had at the time.
• 27:30
  And so it becomes messy because people are human and because people are struggling and because people are doing their best. And so trying to untangle it all. No wonder it feels like drama because there is so much drama in it. And I don't mean drama as in dismiss the bad behavior. I mean drama as in acting out what you're feeling because you're so not aware of what you're feeling and trying to show yourself what is happening, what it is you're seeing because what you're seeing is so painful, you can't look at it.
• 28:11
  And so we keep acting it out until we get our own attention, until we have exposed ourselves enough times to ourself to realize, Oh, that's what happened. Oh, that's what's going on. Oh, that's how I felt about it. That's why it hurts so much. And yes, tolerating that pain or tolerating those big feelings is awful.
• 28:41
  It is. It's very hard. It is not a pleasant experience. We were devastated. We struggled for two years just with this one experience.
• 28:54
  But also coming out on the other side of that, we had grown to a place to say, Oh, here's a postcard. To say, I feel shocked. I feel sad. I feel frustrated. I still feel betrayed.
• 29:15
  And then also to choose what I want to do about it. Do I want to put into words all the reasons I have these feelings and send that out and defend my own heart in saying so? That's one option. But also, am I aware that my words have not been understood? And so I don't actually think that's an effective plan in this case, which means I have to let go of the illusion of being heard because I'm not being heard.
• 29:48
  And since I'm not being heard, then what I need is actually more boundaries to contain myself instead of working harder to pour myself out to a place where someone's just going to spill me. I don't need to be spilled out more. I need to be contained. So instead of giving more pieces away or trying harder, all of these fawning behaviors, I can stop and say, Woah, that's not actually going to help. Even though those feelings are natural feelings of wanting to work it out or wanting to repair.
• 30:27
  That's how it's supposed to be. But if it were healthy, we would not already be at this place. And recognizing that says, okay, so I don't actually want to respond to this. And even though I have my phone in my hand ready to text an essay, what I need to do instead is go drop in the group and just be with other people, even if I can't tell them yet what's going on or why it's so important for me to be there that day. I need to reach out for support or ask for help or do what I need to do to keep me from engaging in what is not healthy, because that's what made it toxic.
• 31:14
  It's not that these are all terrible people. It's that for me, this situation is toxic and trying harder is not going to make it better because the problem is not that I am not good enough. That's not the problem. I am not the problem. I am enough.
• 31:34
  I am good. As we tell the outside children, you are good already. You are a child of God. That is a given. Nothing changes that.
• 31:47
  So choices are about learning here in mortal life on earth. Right? It has nothing to do with your value. Your value is intrinsic already to who you are. And so that's true for me too.
• 32:03
  So responding to them or getting their approval or finally being understood doesn't actually change who I am. I already am who I am. And understanding that and holding on to that helps lessen or decrease or lower the intensity of the need for them to understand me. They're not going to understand me. Do I think that's sad?
• 32:34
  Yes. Do I think it's tragic how it's all played out? Yes. Are they missing out on a really cool person in their lives because they don't understand me? True story.
• 32:47
  But also, me trying harder isn't going to change it. I don't need to fawn, and fawning isn't going to work. There are sometimes, especially when we're young, or for those of us who still have abusers who are alive and in our lives, there are sometimes you have to fawn to be safe. That's a thing. Survival and safety matters.
• 33:16
  But when I have my own life and we have moved and we're doing our thing and they are not participating in my life for over a year, Like where where have you all been? I don't know why there's a Christmas card. But I don't have to re engage with that just because their cultural expression landed in my mailbox. Which actually is part of what tells me about what's going on because that is about who they are, not an invitation to know who I am. That's the difference.
• 33:56
  Do you see? So when I go to group, for example, and there are people who let me take a turn even if I rattle on and on and on, and they've already had to listen to us so much because of the podcast. Like, when I get a turn and they listen and validate and share and respond, that's tending to me. When someone sends a Christmas card because it's their cultural expression, that's about who they are. It's not actually about me at all.
• 34:31
  And so I don't actually have to respond to that. It's okay to just say, Oh, there's a Christmas card. So what that tells me, all that tells me, is that they are people who send out Christmas cards. It doesn't actually mean any interest to me. There was no personalized note.
• 34:51
  There was no handwritten anything. Like it was a stack of all the other stacks. They probably sent Christmas cards to a 100 people or more. It has nothing to do with me. They may not even be aware that my address label was included in their stack.
• 35:09
  Like maybe they added it last year and don't know it's still there this year. I don't know. Maybe they feel good about themselves for reaching out to me even if I'm so unlovable. Like I don't know, but it's about their expression and we can respect that and hold space for them seeing how they want to present themselves without dismissing my own experience of how I feel in that relationship. And so we can honor that by not engaging just because we got something in the mail.
• 35:51
  We cannot respond. Just because someone texts us, or calls us, or sends us an email or says pretty words does not mean we owe them anything. It does not mean we have to engage. It does not mean we have to even respond to that. We burned the Christmas card.
• 36:17
  That's how we responded. We cried and we set it on fire because it has hurt that much and leaving it on the fridge all year is not going to help us. And having more promises of, Oh look, I remembered you. When there's actually not been any remembering, there's not actually been any reaching out. The behavior and the words don't match.
• 36:47
  And that's abusive. That is confusing. That is distressing. And in this particular case, this was our therapist who said she is not our friend. And yet this is an example of sending us a postcard that literally says, Dear friends, And then in the letter talks about how she doesn't wanna be in her practice anymore.
• 37:14
  Like, that's like, I oh, oh, I can't even. It just is a rejection of betrayal, but it's also even that, you guys, even that is not personal about us other than we broke her. She broke us and we broke her. She broke us and us telling her that she broke us broke her. I think is what happened.
• 37:42
  So clearly the whole thing is our responsibility and everything is our fault. Those things are still true. We haven't dealt with that yet. But this piece we made progress on. And so it was hard.
• 37:58
  It was upsetting, but we connected with friends. We talked about it in group. We did not respond, and then we let it go, in this case through fire. But we let it go and did not just hang onto it, hoping for something that isn't actually real, which tells us something else actually. This is more important information.
• 38:27
  It tells us that the person that we knew and felt safe with in that office at that time, which is now a memory time, right? That that was just in our head. We did not know her in real life. And everything we know about the real life person, we do not need in our life. And so we can let go of even worrying about that and just focus on, this is what was good about therapy while therapy was good, and we can keep those pieces.
• 39:11
  We can keep what we've learned about now time is safe. We can keep what we've learned about how memory time can invade now time but can't change now time. We can keep what we've learned about how to breathe and how to care for each other inside. We can keep what we learned about how these things are not our secrets. Including this that we're talking about with Christmas cards.
• 39:44
  The Christmas card is not my secret. And so practicing that and holding on to those good things that we learned keep the experience that we had that was helpful real and good and helps us have a both and experience. That experience was good, and also the real life experience was not good. So do I want to be a part of that? So that brings like object relations development.
• 40:17
  It keeps things from being black and white. It helps us see the gray. It helps us balance what our work was, which is all that internal work. Like she can't just like, no one can just be a good therapist by themselves, right? You and the therapist together do the work to create the safe space that is your relationship, and that itself becomes a container in which therapy happens, in which healing happens.
• 40:55
  And so we can hold on to our own contributions to that and keep what was ours because that work is ours. And I think one thing that really happened for us was that we thought all of that was attached to our therapist. So when we lost our therapist, it was like we were so disoriented and so dysregulated beyond being devastated, because it felt like we lost everything, even all of our work in therapy. And for a long time it felt that way, but we did some hard work to reclaim it. I think that's how the memoir happened.
• 41:36
  I think that's how the book came in, because we wrote that from the journals that we had done for five years in therapy because we didn't want only her to hold those pieces and because we needed those pieces back and because we were too devastated to keep the notebooks and also didn't want the notebooks just around the house where like the outside kids would find them. And so how do you reclaim that? But typing those things up and putting it together in the book, even though we still haven't processed it, even though we still haven't gotten things put in order, we at least built our own container. We built a new container in the book. We built a new container in this new podcast after finishing System Speak and letting that go.
• 42:31
  And we are building a new container that is ourselves. And I think that's how we transition back into therapy with a new therapist. Because we don't have to walk into therapy again expecting to be in the same place. When we had therapy this week, she talked about how she doesn't expect us to just start off with telling her all the hard things or expect us to start off with telling her all about our system. And we were like, what system?
• 43:12
  Nobody told you about a system. What are you talking about? System, whatever. But seriously, we don't have to start with all of that when we are just meeting a new therapist. We are meeting a new therapist and building a new relationship that will be different and unique to our new therapist and the space that we create together between us.
• 43:44
  But it also doesn't mean that we have to start completely over, because we have learned a lot and we have made progress. And when we create that space between us with the new therapist, we bring all of that with us. And that's how the both and thing can help. That's how seeing the gray can help. That's how holding on to the good, even through a painful experience can help, because it means we're not starting from scratch.
• 44:17
  These pieces are mine. This progress is mine. My therapy does not belong. My healing does not belong to my therapist. My healing belongs to me.
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: 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 to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
• 45:34
  We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too. That's what peer support is all about.
• 46:01
  Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.