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Noticing Littles · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the System Speak podcast, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to longtime 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
  I want to share something. I wrote, I said, I had a part, someone, whoever they were, are, who used to write every day, like, for hours. I created this space in part for them, maybe in a if you build it, they will come kind of way. That makes sense, by the way, from my childhood because we lived in Iowa when they made Field of Dreams. So I have this random picture of me and my little brother sitting there on the bleachers from the movie set.
• 1:55
  I see glimpses of that part. I feel the pull of writing. I miss the writing when I don't. I've written deeply for years and years, and everyone has writer's block sometimes. But this time is not the same, and I think I crave her return.
• 2:19
  Maybe I need her return, which admittedly makes me highly uncomfortable to acknowledge, but it makes a difference in my day and experience and quality of life. I'm bringing this piece here to her, for her, asking for help. From her, that is allegedly me, but is not at all. Because this week, I posted in the therapy chat in the community writing that I am noticing more emotional flashbacks surfacing in some kind of parallel process to little surfacing. Things feel more shaky, more scary, more vulnerable, more little.
• 3:11
  I am also trying to take them to therapy, but it feels like a slippery road to falling apart, which seems terrifying. Then I don't know if I am terrified or if I am feeling their terror. Maybe there's no difference, but it is the most scared I have felt in therapy ever. It is the most vulnerable I have been in therapy ever, and that scares me to death. I wrote this because we've been talking about littles in therapy.
• 3:57
  It frightens me. It makes me uncomfortable. My therapist will say, what is it you're afraid of? I think she's trying to understand and prompting me to express my feelings directly. But what my shiny, happy baby on a blanket self experiences is I am doing it wrong.
• 4:24
  That quickly escalates into being afraid is bad, which morphs into I am bad, which somehow leaps to I can't even be gay right. And then I'm terribly lost because I don't know how we got to that at all. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. Like, that jump wasn't even on topic. It was a pivot that lost its way and fell into the middle of the wrong conversation.
• 4:51
  Who is even here right now? It matters, though, because if I cannot get it right when I share vulnerable feelings, I certainly am not going to get it right in sharing vulnerable parts. So that reinforces the whole lock the door to the littles thing, getting in the way of talking about them in therapy, much less letting them present. If I am not safe to present in therapy, they certainly are not safe. This is my cage match with myself, needing to bring them to therapy so I can heal, so we can all heal, and also needing to protect them from being harmed by therapy again or worse, abandoned.
• 5:50
  That, I have learned, is annihilation, and we'll talk about it in January. But that annihilation, I understand to be the end of me. And I also finally understand that's what happened in 2020. And my very valid fear of it is called annihilation terror, and we will talk about it more later. But right now, what I'm wrestling with, because it's too big and too hard and too scary to look at all at once, So I'm chunking it like my kids' IEPs, taking little pieces at a time, going slowly, carefully, because it's always a fight to stay alive, and that's why it matters.
• 6:46
  And, also, the difficulty is that it is too high of a risk to repeat that trauma of what happened before losing my therapist. And, also, I cannot heal without trying. That's the double bind. To avoid it, I get therapy for all the things, very real things that I need help with and every other aspect in my life except for that. I talk in therapy about divorce, about parenting, about religious trauma, work stress, natural disasters like wildfires nearby, even social skills and trying to find friends and jewels.
• 7:37
  All the things I talk about in therapy except the thing. The thing isn't even littles. It's what's in their story. The truth is that I realized two years ago that the reason I keep seeking out the same kind of therapist was because I was looking for someone super soft and nurturing. It always ended badly because these people had terrible boundaries.
• 8:10
  So I finally found a therapist who does not externally present like a mother or grandmother because I realized I needed boundaries. And she is good at boundaries from therapy rules to her own opinions, and that has kept me safe enough to stay in therapy the last year even when it was cage matchy because of her strengths as a clinician. Hitting up against my own avoidance. But not even and also just but, I'm scared to give her softer side a test run because I can't do another therapist loss again. That's the feeling.
• 9:01
  That's the terror. And I'm avoiding it by saying it as a thought, as a statement instead. I know. I know. I know.
• 9:11
  And that annihilation terror comes in at what if she can't? What if she doesn't even have a softer side? What if I try and she doesn't show up? Jules says, my therapist is only cage matchy because I go in fighting. She's not wrong.
• 9:33
  But it's kept me safe for a year in therapy, but distant from it. And to be clear, my therapist is extraordinarily kind, and we have found a way. She is responsive enough that it is meeting my needs. I know that's why I'm still with her because it's working, because she's doing a good job, and yet it feels all fragile, and I don't know why. And also, I know she's a good therapist.
• 10:13
  She just does not look or act like a shiny happy preacher's wife, which apparently was something I needed in a therapist. I mean, I needed someone who wasn't not repeating the same trauma with people who were. But because the rules are changed even if for the better, it brings up horrifying questions. What if what if she doesn't have a softer side? What if she isn't safe for littles?
• 10:47
  The truth is that I just discovered this morning is that it's not even about that. It's not about what if she doesn't have a softer side. The real question, the one that actually made me vomit was this, What if she isn't missus Lowe? And I know what that means, and I know that she isn't missus Lowe. Of course, she isn't.
• 11:15
  I know that. I know that. And I know that I know that. But when I think of littles, it goes like this, which I also shared in my post in the community. Oh, here are crayons on the desk again.
• 11:36
  So embarrassing. Oh, I don't even remember crying in the bathtub last night. Shame. There's salsa on the counter again. Eye roll of irritation.
• 11:52
  Like, there's the avoidance because of trauma and dissociation. Sure. And also a much harder layer of deprivation. So when people say approaching littles with curiosity, thanks, Jill Hosey, I still avoid them. I think, oh, I'm so curious why someone left me a mess.
• 12:18
  Or, oh, I'm so curious why anyone would think that was okay. Like, these are mean and punitive, shiny, happy Dante kinds of statements. It's not receptive or open or actually curious, even if I'm using the word. That hurt deeply, seeing me behave that way, even if to myself or selves. I want to have compassion for them, truly, but attempting connection literally terrifies me in that annihilation kind of way.
• 13:04
  For me, littles are not healing together cutesy. They're terrifying. And they smell like smoke, which I know is because of a month of nearby wildfires that have shaken my system to the core. I know that's flashback. I have never been so vulnerable in therapy.
• 13:25
  Let me keep saying it. I know that's what it is. And, also, it's the deeper question, the emotional flashback part of the question, not just seeing a fire or smelling a fire, but asking the question beyond what if my therapist is not missus Lowe. The question, I cannot speak out loud, which is why I needed the writer to help me type it until I could say it. What if my therapist is not missus Lowe?
• 14:08
  Because missus Lowe died in the fire. That's when I literally vomited. That's when I realized I am afraid of seeing littles as people, as children, as those waiting for care. Because them in need of care brings up questions about why are there children inside of me in need of care. And those are the questions that make me feel nauseous.
• 14:42
  So I learned today, I avoid even more by distancing myself further. Instead of thinking about littles, I think about the evidence of them. Salsa, Crayons. Crying. I pretend they are irritations rather than people.
• 15:04
  Nuisances instead of children. And work instead of in need of care. Because that's how I was treated. It's reenactment, and that also makes me nauseous. That's not the kind of adult I want to be.
• 15:25
  That's not how I treat my outside kids. I don't want to be the reenactment, treating myself the way others treated me. It's a whole shame spiral of its own as the next tactic of avoidance because it literally is easier to feel the shame of this than to face the littles themselves. But in the community, when we reached out and posted, some replied with attunement, agreeing that terrifying was a good word for the experience. And attunement means connection.
• 16:06
  And I realized connection isn't just external, but also internal. And they brought up a point that I had never before considered, that littles have feelings about me and that I am probably not helping by treating myself or them so harshly. And I realize that some of my feelings of terror in approaching them is actually their terror of me and if I am going to act like my parents or not. Someone in the community replied to me and I share it here with consent. Quote, I wonder if you might relate to this.
• 16:58
  Littles seem to have terrifying feelings toward the big ones meeting them, like simply the sheer surprise of being discovered in the midst of hiding, end quote. They also gave the example, the scenes where the kids discover E. T. And scream out of shock and surprise. So then the curiosity questions become, what are you doing here?
• 17:26
  How did you even get in here? These are questions of interaction in reality, not just evidence of possibility or presence. Then just when receiving that was too hard, they contained it through visual metaphor, which is so often helpful to me as a deaf person. They said, quote, I let myself be fascinated by investigating details of what exactly the vantage points are of different distinct ones, like birding. Is it a tiny one with green feathers?
• 18:03
  Or a medium sized one with orange feet? Maybe that's getting out of feeling sometimes, and yet there could be glimpses in greater open hearted moments too, getting closer to welcoming discovery, end quote. I don't think it is getting out of feelings because I am having lots of feelings about all of this. I do think it's a kind of containment that helps with pacing and maybe makes it safe enough. I've had therapy homework for weeks about what does baby Emma need, and maybe we have to start with permission to exist.
• 18:51
  And maybe I'm the one who has to give permission. And as I thought about this, reading it out loud today, My mind drifted back to cleaning out my desk recently and finding the journal that I had during the pandemic. When I would draw the therapy questions that were too hard by using a profile of a person, just the outside line of the face, no head in the back, facing the question bubble from the therapist, asking something, like, are you feeling small, or what are you feeling right now? But inside the head of the person, who I guess was me, were all the different answers in drawings or handwritings. Maybe that's how I got curious before.
• 19:53
  Maybe that's how I asked about the different sized birds or noticed things from different perspectives. Maybe it's time to go back to that if it was something that helped before. Maybe knowing about your system isn't just knowing. Maybe it's about feeling and experiencing too. Maybe.
• 20:29
  Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemspeak.com. We'll see you there.