Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / The Ghost in the Mirror

Transcript

The Ghost in the Mirror · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, and there is a button for donations where you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. We so appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are all learning together. Thank you.
• 1:10
  Okay. So we have not talked about our new therapist and how therapy is going for several reasons. One, it's none your business. Number two number two, we wanted to give ourselves some time and space to see how it went. Because talking about another disaster of a therapy experience would not be good for you or for us.
• 1:42
  So we waited a bit, but you guys, I think we have it. And I'm not going to tell you anything about her. Oh, now you know she's a her because I said that. So that's all you get. But I'm not gonna say anything about her because well, her privacy, but also because therapy is my experience, and we need to just keep it safe.
• 2:04
  But I do wanna share some of the things that we're learning. So I wanna go all the way back about three months, actually, and I'm going to share some things from notes in our journal. Because basically, the first three or four sessions, all we could do was cry. Part of that was just anxiety. Part of that was because our therapist had died.
• 2:30
  And part of that was because it felt like the other therapist from Oklahoma, the one from years ago, isn't that weird now to say that years ago? It felt like she had died because we lost her altogether, but also leaving was the right thing. But also it's just all been so traumatic. And then the pandemic got in the way of resolving it. So even the transition we thought would be there, there's nothing.
• 2:57
  And it was so painful and traumatic, we just couldn't do it. So to try to reengage in therapy again after having so many difficult experiences. You guys, it felt impossible. I can't even tell you, except I don't have to tell you because you already understand. But kudos to our new therapist who was very much about starting slowly and being gentle and finding ways to make it safe.
• 3:32
  So one of the first things that happened, and I don't even know how it happened, I don't know if it's because I wasn't there or because it's just a blur. But one of the first things that happened is when we couldn't find words, she asked us to draw them. And you guys, we have not legit painted or drawn in so long because that has to do with the group of us that are so deeply wounded from what happened in therapy last time. And so our determination to protect those parts of us has included not letting them out or pushing them out and just holding all of that in. And so I think part of the very emotional energy that has just spewed forth anytime we try to talk about this and that has been held in so tightly has to do with these same expressive parts that the only reason they were involved in all of this trauma and therapy is because they are the ones who need therapy.
• 4:40
  I mean, really, we all need therapy, you guys. But you know what I mean? And so one of the first things we did with therapy was spend the entire first session just drawing, and it turned into a drawing of sort of like a meadow against the woods, not in a creepy way, but in a very safe way, kind of like where we're living now. And I think it reflects that in a way of, like, Jean Marc camping in the backyard or the kids camping in the front yard. I think it reflects that in deeper ways than what I realized when I first saw the drawing when it was done.
• 5:24
  Now that I'm looking back on it months later, I feel like I can see some of the hiding places where they are. And those of you who have read the book know what I'm talking about. So I think that this was a very powerful beginning for us in a very unexpected way. There's also a girl in the picture in the drawing, and she's sort of looking down and hiding her face and her hair is in front of her face, which is sometimes how we lived before. Oh, I remember when we had long hair before cancer.
• 6:02
  Okay. No. Focus. So this is what the picture is. And there is a depth to it, and there is a sadness to it, and the grief is there.
• 6:14
  But then the therapist also asked us to spin the week for our first week of homework. Our therapist is all about the homework, you guys. For the first week of therapy, our homework was supposed to be try to come up with words to go with the picture. Because the first session, there were no words, you guys. And it's so hard to do therapy without words.
• 6:37
  But words are so hard. Right? And so the words we came up with were simply shy and hiding and unseen. That was literally the best that we could do. She also assigned us to draw another picture every day until our next session and to try to put words to that.
• 7:01
  So the next day, we drew a picture of a girl who was almost drowning and wrote the word overwhelm. And in this picture, she's fully clothed, and her head is barely above water, and the sun is kind of setting behind the water. So you can see her under the water and her head trying to stay above water. And the word that we chose to write under that picture was overwhelm. And the things that we talked about were that's when our vaccination was canceled.
• 7:35
  That's when the snow and ice came. Our groceries didn't get delivered because of the storm. We also got a message from someone who we had hoped to be friends with, but that is not really responsive and so isn't hasn't really become our friend. And so when we do hear from them, it kind of stings and brings up a lot of anxiety because how do you respond to that and how do you navigate that and what does it mean or what does it not mean? And so it's very anxiety producing instead of calming or comforting.
• 8:06
  And there's a lot of layers to that. And then just trying to do work and homeschool both. So that day, those were all the things overwhelming us. But because we had gotten that message from that person, that reminded us of another picture we had done before that we had not shared. And so we put that picture into our journal for the next day, and that's the one with the girl and all the clocks, which we shared at the ISSTD conference.
• 8:35
  And the words we put under that were starting therapy again, and we wrote, I wish I had not been so fuzzy. I can do it better, and my heart hurts. And then under that, in parentheses, we put the names of our friends and then also the previous therapists. On the next day, we just had a sketch that was not like a fancy painting or collage or something, but just a sketch of someone dancing. Because remember we did that dancing mindfulness thing?
• 9:10
  So we drew this sketch of a person dancing and their shadow dancing also and then colored it like fire red all over that. And I guess now that I say that out loud, that's, like, more significant than I realized, and we can talk about that in therapy. Again, if you read the book, you can understand that. But under there, we just wrote freedom. And I think it's because that dancing mindfulness experience was so powerful for us.
• 9:38
  It really helped us start to feel back in our skin for the first time in over a year and a half, almost two years. So that was, like, three days out of seven that we were able to do our homework, which considering that we have the six kids at home because of the pandemic, that's pretty good. I'm okay with that. And it helped us get engaged with the process. The next week of therapy, again, trying to get us a safe framework from where we could sort of start and talk about things when words were really hard, she told us about two books.
• 10:17
  And neither of these books have we ever read. For you guys, maybe you already know about them, but for us, they were brand new books. The first one is called From Surviving to Thriving. And not only that, she told us to start with chapter six. That was our homework.
• 10:40
  And so still, even today, chapter six is the only chapter we've read so far because she is all about pacing us and helping us to be safe by going slowly, and that feels okay. So we're gonna go with that, you guys, because we cannot mess this up. So again, From Surviving to Thriving. It's by Pete Walker. And in chapter six, it's talking about trauma types, but it doesn't really mean trauma types.
• 11:12
  It means trauma response types because it's about fight, flight, freeze, and fun. So this is really helpful. If you wanna know more about flight, fight, freeze, or fun, that would be a great place to start. It also talks about CPTSD as an attachment disorder, which is building on what we learned from our friend Peter Barish. But you guys, reading this chapter stepped all over our toes.
• 11:44
  Like, oh, yeah. Check. Oh, yeah. Check. Oh, yeah.
• 11:48
  Check. Like, you guys, it was so painful and so embarrassing, except not because what it did was normalize what we have already been experiencing and hear someone else talk about it and learn once again that it feels better when people understand us, and it feels better to know that our brains are doing exactly what they were designed to do in response to the trauma that we've been through and that other people also have responded in similar ways. The other interesting thing about this chapter is that it gives some information about what it looks like when some of those responses are combined. Like, what if you freeze and you flight or you freeze and you fight? Like, what do those kinds of things look like?
• 12:41
  This book was great for explaining some of that. So I definitely recommend this book if you've not already read it, and we will continue to share as we do read it. But so far, we've only read chapter six. The other book she recommended us to start just at the beginning, and this book is called The Stranger in the Dissociation, the Hidden Epidemic by Marlene Steinberg and Maxine Schnall. This is another book we've never heard of, we had not read, and so we just started this book.
• 13:16
  And oh my goodness, you guys, it has so much stuff. Listen to this part just from the introduction. Talking about people who reported dissociative symptoms, they spoke of episodes of zoning out or having blank spells or acting like another person or feeling apart from themselves and watching from afar, not feeling anything, just going through the motions, feeling foggy, not feeling like a real person, hearing myself talking as if someone else is speaking, nothing around you looking real, or feeling confused about who you are. You guys, it's all about dissociation. It also talked about staring into space, losing track of time, being uncertain whether memory was from a dream or reality, feeling outside oneself as an observer and a participant.
• 14:13
  You guys, that piece about whether it's a memory or a dream, that's basically what's happened with our therapist from before. Like, now we think we just made her up. Like, she's a ghost. So in fact, in therapy, when we're doing therapy about therapy, like, when we talk about her, it's like the ghost in the mirror. Like, was she real?
• 14:34
  Was she not? What was safe? Why was it not? What was good? What was hard?
• 14:40
  What happened? Where did she go? Why was there a pandemic? And what does that mean? And where are we now?
• 14:48
  You guys, it's such a blur. In some ways, it feels like it was yesterday, and it's a very memory time invading now time kind of emotional flashback anytime we get any trigger of her. Other times, it's like it never happened at all. I don't even know how to explain it. And in some ways, I think part of the grief is that it's slipping away.
• 15:12
  Like, we can't hold onto it and she's gonna disappear. And so it feels like she's become a ghost. And anytime we've tried to fix it or put that into words or explain it, like, it's just gotten messy. And so it's like, just stop. Like, delete everything from the phone.
• 15:30
  Block everything. Like, just no. Don't. Don't. Don't.
• 15:33
  Stay out of it. You guys, it's like a Bex. Like, don't be the Bex. Don't text your Bex. No.
• 15:40
  Like, we can't. It's not fair to her. It's not fair to us. It's so toxic. Not because anyone is bad or doing something wrong, but because it's not going to be different and we can't fix that.
• 15:52
  And so we need to just accept that and let it go. And so a therapist is not your mother. A therapist is not your friend. And then when you leave therapy, they're not your therapist anymore. So, like, it erases them.
• 16:05
  Like, you don't have access. You you that's why it feels like a ghost. Like, it's really hard transitioning therapists, even when they were a good one. And certainly, again, those of you who have read our book, when you go through difficult therapy experiences that are so violating, it makes it really, really hard to try to trust the process again. And so this is where we were in the ghost in the mirror.
• 16:32
  I mean, the stranger in the mirror. That's a little Freudian slip there. Yeah? Okay. So other examples it gave, watching your life as if it's a movie, missing parts of conversation, and trying and not being able to remember things you just did.
• 16:50
  Not feeling that you are real, being unsure that other people are real, not knowing how you got somewhere, looking at the world through a fog. All of these examples of dissociation, reading that in black and white was somehow so settling to even my body because I could recognize it and realize this is actually a thing. This is something my brain does because of trauma that I've been through. I am not crazy. You guys, I don't know why that's so hard to hold on to because it sure feels crazy.
• 17:33
  But recognizing and realizing and feeling and reading in black and white that I am not crazy, this is how my brain handles trauma, for some reason that helps so much and it's so regulating in a top down kind of way. So then they talk about the SCID and developing the SCID, which is really interesting if you're a nerd and really not if you're not. But then in chapter one, they give a definition of dissociation, an adaptive defense in response to high stress or trauma characterized by memory loss and a sense of disconnection from oneself or one's surroundings. And when you think about that definition and it being true of, like, childhood trauma, and then add to that the trauma of the pandemic and the trauma of quarantine, while we were already experiencing a traumatic grief and then had more traumas on top of that, no wonder that we're losing like the whole memory of experience of the years before. Like, it's so slippery.
• 18:48
  Everything is changing. This isn't just about changing hosts. This is about flipping the system entirely. It is about we are here, but that is gone. And all of what was now time is now memory time, and we don't even have access to it.
• 19:04
  Now it makes sense. Like, now I understand how that could happen, and it's been exhausting trying to hold onto it. But it's okay to just let go and to survive and to stay alive and then use therapy for what therapy is supposed to help with. Now that we have a therapist, we don't have to hold on so hard to everything to stay alive. We can just focus on the staying alive part and then work in therapy on the memory time stuff.
• 19:35
  Because, you guys, even if it's recent memory time, we just don't have capacity yet to hold on to both. We are in now time, and those who are present with us in now time and participating with us in now time, we are learning new basic skills and have come so far. There are friends that we are able to connect with every day or every other week or so, and those relationships have been brought into now time, are being developed in now time, and we're able to do that. But this stuff from memory time or these random reconnects, we don't have skills for that yet. And just learning to accept that and be present in that without judging other people or ourselves is huge.
• 20:23
  Like just being okay with where we are instead of punishing ourselves or falling apart or not being able to breathe through the triggers of it because it's too much, like the overwhelm, Just managing that by simply accepting that it is what it is. This is our brain. This is how our brain works. And we are just in this place just like our kids with their physical challenges. This is our mental challenge, and it's literally our best.
• 20:52
  So chapter one, as it defines dissociation, then gives a whole list of different quotes that are different people's experiences of trying to describe dissociation, and they are profound. That list of quotes is just worth the whole book right there, guys. And it was just like one check mark after another. Again, like, I didn't even bother highlighting the whole page. I just like, check mark, check mark, check mark.
• 21:21
  So some of the descriptions are a little harsh in the way that they describe dissociation, but they're not talking about DID is good or bad. They're not trying to shame DID or people with DID. They're describing the brutal experience of learning to face it. And you guys, it's painful. Facing your own dissociation and seeing what there is to see and knowing what there is to know hurts viscerally because we are in this body and we have such big feelings about what we have endured and the attachment literally doesn't work in our brain like it's supposed to.
• 22:01
  So interactions that mean something to everyone else don't mean the same thing to us. And we literally can't interpret them the way that they're intended because our wires are all crossed. But the hope is that with safe healing environments, we can heal that wire crossing. So that's what chapter two is about, is about how it's a healthy defense designed to protect you during trauma and in response to trauma. But later in your adult life or later on when you have the support and the resources to get help, that things can get better.
• 22:40
  It talks about different kinds of memory with different kinds of trauma, whether it's a one time trauma or an ongoing trauma or trauma for adults versus trauma for children. All of that was pretty interesting. So for example, a quote, normal, healthy person will have a dissociative experience while they're in danger, like during a car accident, for example. But people with dissociative disorders who have endured a lot of trauma and so now their brains just function at a dissociative level, they have dissociative symptoms even when there is no danger. People who go through mild traumas or a one time difficult trauma may have memory gaps for that specific period, like not remembering the car accident, for example.
• 23:32
  But people with dissociative disorders, those memories are actually alarming, terror filled, and replay repeatedly in the mind. So instead of forgetting it, we forget the normal stuff and replay the hard stuff over and over and over again. So this even happens if you have a difficult interaction. You forget what the good interaction is, and the negative interaction just replays again and again. And the same with stuff from our childhood.
• 24:03
  We may lose entire gaps of time we don't understand or know about, although another part of us might, but the part that replays for us are the flashbacks when the memory pops up when we don't want it to, or emotional flashback when we have big feelings that are from the past, but we don't have the memory to attach it to or know why we're feeling that that we're feeling, which is so terrifying and exhausting. So they explain in this book, that's where adaptive and maladaptive come from. You guys, do you remember that back in the old days of the podcast about adaptive and maladaptive? Here's what they say. An adaptive or even lifesaving response to a traumatic event posing grave danger to a person somehow persists and recurs long after the danger has passed and so becomes maladaptive.
• 25:05
  Meaning when the trauma first is happening, all those dissociative symptoms are adaptive. They're helpful. They're protective. They are a way to cope with what's happening in the moment. But when those symptoms are happening later, it's maladaptive and not actually still helpful, obviously, or we wouldn't be in therapy.
• 25:24
  Then it goes into polyvagal theory a little bit and about the brain a little bit, about your amygdala and your thalamus and how all of this works, the memory system, how one track is for emotionally charged material and the other track is for factual information and what that has to do with dissociation. You guys, if you love brain stuff, read chapter two of this book. And then it also talks about how common it actually is, that it is a myth that DID or dissociative disorders are rare. That's not actually true. It says that one in three women and one in five men are vulnerable to dissociation.
• 26:09
  Chapter three has all the myths that dissociative symptoms are always a disorder. That's not true. There are people who are highly functional with dissociative disorders. Myth number two, that dissociative disorders are rare. We already talked about that.
• 26:28
  They're not rare, actually. In fact, the rates of dissociative disorders are as high as the rates of depression or anxiety. Myth number three, that multiples or plurals are easy to spot. That's not true. It says multiples are able to function at a high level and pass as healthy by dent of an elaborate inner world and exhausting always on guard compensatory strategies for avoiding detection by others.
• 27:00
  That's where we are. We're like walls up. You can't get in. We're not letting anything out, so we're just going to mess up everything that we thought we had been learning how to do because we're in protective mode. Right?
• 27:13
  Myth number four, most memories of abuse are created in therapy. That is false. And it talks about how memories are not retrieved, just compartmentalized, and memories are real. Like, all of that drama goes back to the memory wars, which were started by a couple who were themselves accused of child abuse. And so that's just not okay.
• 27:41
  Myth number five, someone who was abused would never actually forget it. That's false. And they talk about how the gray matter and the amygdala and all these different parts of the brain and dissociative amnesia and how that works. They do a fantastic job explaining that. Myth number six, DID is not a real illness.
• 28:02
  That is false. It says DID is a real illness with a consistent pattern of symptoms, characteristic course, and chronic impairment if untreated. There you go. Myth number seven, DID can't be cured. False.
• 28:16
  What is necessary in knowing how to comfort oneself when distressing memories or emotions emerge. Yeah. You guys, we aren't there yet. And then the last thing I'm gonna share about this book is simply part two. We're not through part two yet, and I'm not gonna read about it by every chapter, but it takes the dissociative symptoms and gives these rating scales for you to be able to report what your symptoms are and how severe they are and get a score from that and then talk about that with your therapist.
• 28:52
  So part two is super helpful. We will be doing that. She asked us to do that. So that's an idea if you wanna go over that with your therapist. And that's all I'm gonna share about that book today, because that's as far as we are.
• 29:06
  But what that section of the book helped us do, well, both books really, the complex PTSD book and the Stranger in the Mirror book, which we call the Ghost in the Mirror book because the previous therapist who is invisible and does no longer exist and it is heartbreaking. Oh, you guys, it's like a whole musical in our head. I can't even tell you. Okay. Because of those two books, what she asked us to do and the thing that we were able to do next after talking about the books for several weeks and continuing our drawings where so much pain started coming out after holding it all in for two years, we were able to start a new list of triggers and a list of coping skills.
• 29:52
  And so this was really helpful. We put it in our bullet journal. We just wrote triggers at the top of one page and coping skills across the next page. And then, you know, we did washi tape and all of that to decorate it, but then we just let people start putting their own things down. So someone wrote loud voices.
• 30:12
  I think we did that one in therapy. Someone else put syrup. Someone else put therapy. Someone else put fire. Someone else put birthdays.
• 30:22
  Someone else put night. I think we also did that one in therapy. And someone else put being seen. So just as some examples, there's other things we've added since then that I don't need to share on the podcast. But those are ones we've already talked about publicly, either on the podcast or in the book.
• 30:39
  So I can share those as examples. Coping skills, we just started a list of things that we were working on in therapy. So we had already started working on the box breathing or square breathing with our therapist who died. So we put that down because we know how to do that now. Although I saw in a training, and I don't even remember which one, but someone was talking about how four, eight, 12, 16.
• 31:14
  Someone else was talking about, I think it was gold, Stephen Gold. No. I don't know. Someone was talking about how you have to have a specific count because it actually ends up matching your heart rhythm. Can't remember.
• 31:30
  I don't know. Anyway, box square breathing is a thing, and that was helpful. And our therapist who died of COVID taught us that. And then we've also learned about mindful movement from Jamie and her presentation at the Healing Together conference. And so we're doing that sometimes now, just locking ourselves in our room, turning on the music, whatever playlist we want, and then just doing mindful movement with that, just like free dancing or free moving or yoga or something to just be in our body and practice that.
• 32:03
  That's working for us, which is shocking, shocking, you guys, but it is. And then the whole thing about the things that you can see and hear and touch and smell and taste. We also added our hammock and our swing, our hammock inside our office and our swing outside by the fish pond. Drawing and painting, going on a walk is always very powerful for us because it connects the mind and the body. And then also our therapist added reading a happy or comfortable book out loud to ourselves because it makes our brain and body work together.
• 32:38
  So we added that from her, which was genius. And you guys, that might be part of what's so regulating for us about the podcast. Because if you just asked us in real life, hey. Do you wanna do a podcast? We would be like, no.
• 32:54
  And yet here we are four years in, and I think that's why or part of why it's been so helpful. It has to do with whatever she's talking about with that. But then we also talked in therapy about the flight, fight, freeze, and fawn as trauma responses and how we feel, how we felt at the worst of our childhood, but our memory is not associated with it to understand why, and that this is an emotional flashback. And when we feel bad, like triggered, the inner critic also gets bad, increasing or getting louder, which actually is serving the purpose of trying to protect us from the emotional flashback. And then number two, toxic shame inhibits us from seeking comfort and support.
• 33:52
  And so we isolate ourselves to helplessly surrender to humiliation and isolation. You guys, that's awful. That's awful. And so three is self abandonment, which is actually a reenactment of our own trauma. And it includes a vicious inner critic and social anxiety so that we don't allow ourselves to go to our safe places and our safe people, which then reenacts our trauma because we have been abandoned by ourselves.
• 34:31
  Mic drop. What? Let me read that again. When we don't allow ourselves to go to our safe places and our safe people, that reenacts our trauma through self abandonment. And it's almost always, you guys, she said it's almost always a response to emotional flashbacks.
• 34:55
  So let me tell you what we have learned. We have learned that we actually have a lot of emotional flashbacks. We had no idea, but do you know what we do know? We know we are really good at self abandonment. Shutting out the people who are trying to help us, not finding safe places and safe people when we need them, isolating.
• 35:21
  You guys, all these things as reenacting our trauma. Are you kidding me? And now ever since we learned this, we see it all the time. You guys, we probably do this every other day, if not multiple times a day. Oh, it's so embarrassing.
• 35:39
  It's so humiliating. Except, oh, you know what that is? That is my vicious inner critic. I hate therapy. Here's what else she taught us about that.
• 35:50
  If you are stuck viewing yourself as worthless, defective, or despicable, then you are in an emotional flashback. Yes. You heard that correctly. Let me repeat it. If you are stuck viewing yourself as worthless, defective, or despicable, which is, like, basically all the time.
• 36:16
  Right? Then you are in an emotional flashback. And what you are doing in response to that flashback is self abandonment when you don't seek out safe people and safe places. Oh my goodness. You guys, this is one of the things that we have had to write down and literally tape to our mirror so that we can remember what's happening.
• 36:42
  Because when it's happening, you don't know that that's what's happening unless you can catch the pattern and recognize it. And that, my friends, is going to take some practice. So what was our homework that week? Well, practicing that, of course, because, I hate therapy. So what we had to do was write down what our critic was saying and write down the truth.
• 37:09
  So we don't actually have someone named the critic. We're not talking about a specific person, although for you, it might be. But for us, it could come from several sources. Okay? Because apparently, we're really good at the critic thing.
• 37:24
  So for an example, I am bad. The truth is I am good because of who I am, not because of what I have or have not done. Another example, no one can help me. The truth is we do good work together in therapy. I learn a lot.
• 37:44
  I feel lighter. The critic says, I can't. The truth is I showed up and she was happy to see me and we got a lot done and enjoyed our time together. Oh my goodness, you guys. It's so brutal.
• 38:00
  It's so raw. It just hurts me. I feel, because I'm practicing this. Right? I feel in my body right now as I read these, like someone is doing that nails on the chalkboard thing, except they're doing it down my chest from my collarbones, down my chest all the way to my belly where then they then, like, sucker punch me.
• 38:21
  That's what it feels like in my body, which is huge that I even know that. So I think it's working. Right? That's why we're still going. But then the last example we came up with during homework week was it's all my fault.
• 38:36
  And then the truth we talked about in therapy was, I am not responsible for the choices of others. I am responsible for my own progress, which naturally includes a learning curve. Phew. Oh my goodness. I hate therapy.
• 38:52
  It's so brutal.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: But this is where we're at and how we're doing. We have therapy every week. We have group every week, plus the group of other therapists who have DID. We have that every other week. And then on opposite weeks, we have our consult group with Peter.
• 39:19
  And then there's another consult group about dissociative disorders that we can go to every week, but we usually miss because of the children, but we try to go and that's a lot of support. Maybe more DID specific support than we've ever had, and I think it's making a difference, and I think we're starting to feel like we're climbing out of that hole a little bit, like things are still hard, things are not the same as they were before, and I don't think they ever will be. And all of what was now time has now been, is now memory time, and coming to terms with that and letting go of that is a whole different skill set and different layer of grief, but we have support in that for the first time and finally, which I think will keep us alive. It makes all the difference. It's everything, you guys.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us for System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. This podcast is available on any podcast player and on systemspeak.org. If you would like to know more of our story, our memoir, If Tears Were Prayers, is now available at systemspeakbooks.com. Thank you for listening.