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Warrior · 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.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: This episode contains emails from our friend Elle in response to the Hallelujah and Rumi's episodes leading up to and after our conversation on the podcast together. As such, please be aware as a content note that this episode contains references to spiritual and religious trauma, suicidal ideation, and self harm. Although the latter two are only in reference in passing and no details or discussion is included. It is an emotional episode. And as always, we ask that you care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast.
• 1:38
  Thank you. I have avoided this for more than six months. Elle, my other friend who was also at the college with me and my first friend that was on Hallelujah and Rumi's, she has now been on the podcast. We finally had our first conversation about it and more since. But she also emailed after listening to the English teacher episodes and after listening to Hallelujah and Rumi's.
• 2:22
  And these emails have been in my inbox for months and months and months because they have been too painful to look at. But now that we're talking about this in therapy and now
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: that I've talked to her on the podcast, and now that
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: we've started groupies, which somehow makes me feel strong and not alone, It's time. It's time to read her emails and feel the things that come with them. I don't know if I can. I don't know if I'll respond, but it's time to read them. And l says, I was washing dishes last night, listening to the last of the English teacher podcasts, which was your response to it.
• 3:25
  And I felt like I had a million things I wanted to say to you. I am so happy you had this conversation with the English teacher because of the things you were able to receive from it. And sometimes I wish I was that person for you, telling you super amazing capital t truths. But there's a couple reasons why I'm not. Mostly, I'm assuming you know these things.
• 3:56
  To hear your reaction, sometimes I'm thinking, oh my gosh. You didn't know x, y, and z until just now. And they are all things about you, who you are, that you are good. So maybe it's time. Maybe I need to tell you things that I think you know more often and just risk looking like a dummy because you might think, yeah, I already know that.
• 4:34
  So just in case, you may already know.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: You may you may already know that you are incredible and kind and a miraculous survivor. And those are truths, not fawning. You may already know that you were not at all a bad person. And the people at that school who rejected you were in fact the people who were crazy. I mean, who had problems.
• 5:17
  They should never have been that involved in your life. They should never have taken control of you. They should never have forced you to go to
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: therapy or to a certain therapist
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: willingly receiving private information about you like the chart and passing it around to use to their advantage. They turned into abusers because of this. Control is something you should have had over yourself at such an important time after escaping your family and others. But even if you needed to be at that school and even if you didn't have the choice to actually go there, you should have had at least the freedom while you were there as much as you could have. I mean, nobody's wearing shorts or anything crazy, but as much as you could.
• 6:26
  While we were there, she says, I trusted the adults in your life, the professors and such, because they were adults and because they were Christians. I thought they were helping you, and I looked up to them. And I know you trusted them too just so you know you weren't the only one. The school was so good at kicking people out who had mental health issues. That's not normal.
• 6:59
  It should be up to the students who are adults to decide if college is too much for them. Or if their grades are suffering, then the school might have to have a chat or something. But that wasn't the case with you or me or my friend or my roommate. And that wasn't just abnormal. That was wrong.
• 7:26
  You could be trusted, and you were honest, and you did have more integrity than they did. I mean that. You do have DID. It is real. You are real.
• 7:41
  All the parts of you are real, and your history is real. The abuse was real. Your response to it was natural and the healthiest option your brain had, and I am grateful for it. Also, I'm sorry if I am overstepping when I said I wanted your abusers to burn in hell. Maybe that's not helpful to hear.
• 8:14
  And even if it is a little helpful to hear, it's probably a shade inappropriate. I'm sorry. But basically, I want you to understand that what was done to you is something so wrong that your friends and loved ones may have a hard time forgiving. And you may have a hard time forgiving and not the other way around. What your bio dad said to you about not forgiving you is so ridiculous to me.
• 8:45
  I'm sure it hurt you at the time, and maybe it still does. And usually as a reader and a friend, I feel sympathetic to you, the heroine. But it was so over the top and literally insane that I couldn't go there emotionally. Because what? I can't wrap my head.
• 9:08
  I can't wrap my brain around a situation where he had to forgive you. Leaving wasn't bad. It was surviving. Staying away wasn't being a black sheep. It was being healthy.
• 9:21
  You are a healthy sheep, and that man is not your shepherd. So how can you rebel against him? So I don't know if that entire paragraph is helpful or not helpful. I don't know if any of this is as helpful. I want it to be.
• 9:58
  I loved the English teacher's point that you are not responsible for protecting people from yourself. And I want you to know that that's true for me. I really hope I'm not bombarding you. It's like I want to email or text every day, and I know you don't have time for that, and you may not even really want that now. And also that time is different for you, so how bad would it be if you're getting all of this at once?
• 10:34
  So feel free to set boundaries if mean me. One more thing. I promise not to promise to always be in your life because it doesn't need to be said. My our roommate and I used to make these kinds of promises, and they were broken too. I think when promises like that are being made, unless it's covenant stuff between couples or between parents and child, it's out of desperation.
• 11:10
  In other relationships, people who say those things know there are reasons, obstacles to staying in each other's lives. And so we tell each other we will always be there just so the writing on the wall is saying otherwise. So tell me when I'm overstepping and it will be okay. Tell me whatever things you want to tell me, and I'll tell you if you're ever overstepping too, although I don't imagine that's an issue. So as you are,
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: love Elle.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: This is why she's still my friend. Leaving wasn't bad. It was surviving. Staying away wasn't being a black sheep. It was being healthy.
• 12:08
  You are a healthy sheep, and that man is not your shepherd. So how can you rebel against him? Have to read it again. Leaving wasn't bad. It was surviving.
• 12:37
  Staying away wasn't being a black sheep. It was being healthy. You are a healthy sheep, and that man is not your shepherd. So how can you rebel against him? I have been punished for and punished myself for something that was never even real in the first place for decades and decades and decades.
• 13:14
  The shame I have carried for something that never even was real. Leaving wasn't bad. It was surviving. Staying away wasn't being a black sheep. It was being healthy.
• 13:39
  You are a healthy sheep, and that man is not your shepherd. So how can you rebel against And then a month after we started talking about this in therapy and a month after she sent that email, the news came out about the headline said, Southern Baptist leaders routinely silence sexual abuse survivors. For and the article just opens. For twenty years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, including the former president now accused of sexual assault, routinely silenced and despaired sexual abuse survivors, ignored calls for policies to stop predators, and dismissed reforms that they privately said could protect children that might cost them money if abuse victims later sued. And this has just been sitting here in the articles and the list of names that came out.
• 15:13
  And my own experiences of things that I can no longer deny or try to explain away as stories or metaphor or crazy. Things that no one knew, things that no one saw, things that no one believed, things that everyone knew, things that everyone saw, things that no one did anything about for a decade. And then go to therapy. And because of what we've been through with therapy before with our previous therapist, I can't even switch, like, in an overt way. We have this, like, blended practice for therapy that I don't know why we're doing it, but keeping those walls up, but including whoever needs to be there, but not showing it and not doing it externally.
• 16:34
  But she trusts us and she trusts our system and it's working. But those guards up externally because even therapy hurt so much and cause so much pain. So where the hell are we supposed to get help? How are we supposed to figure out that I was a child? And even the college and everything that happened there was 18 and 19.
• 17:33
  They would never do to my nieces and nephews what they did to me. They would never do to my cousins what they did to me when I was only 18 or 19, and that's not even child of things. And it impacted every area of my adult life From physical pain and autoimmune disorders, my ears, financially, educationally, professionally. I have to mean it again. I can't hold on to it.
• 19:04
  I can't hold on to it. He's talking about when I ran away from home and went on to school and being away from my family in those years and years and decades now. Leaving wasn't bad. It was surviving. Staying away from them wasn't being a black sheep.
• 19:40
  It was being healthy. You are a healthy sheep, and that man is not your shepherd. So how can you rebel against him? So another month later so at the beginning of the summer, I guess, when we're dealing with all this religious trauma, Already dealing with it. That's the whole reason we did this season's episode because we were recognizing these layers and this because we were talking about this in therapy and because it impacts every everything and every relationship and every choice and everything I have found out about myself and my past and my history and being alone in all of it and betrayed by so many and continuingly to walk into those situations where I get hurt because I don't see the reenactment because everyone says the trauma is not real or because I'm dissociating from it, and I can't recognize it.
• 21:03
  And so I spent this summer facing it, and I spent this summer starting to really get into it in therapy and doing the eye movements and working on it in therapy, and it's changed everything because I can't stay not knowing Once I do know, everything changes. So a month after that, Elle wrote again, and she said, this is before we recorded the Elle episode. She said, I have hard things to write to you about, again, about the college. I'm not sure if anything below will be new information. I hope not that you were aware, and this won't be too jarring.
• 22:09
  I love you, and you are safe from these people in now time. On the podcast, you mentioned the list of sexual abuse among Southern Baptist pastors. I found out about this too but never looked at the list myself. But I did find it, and now, holy cow, it is overwhelming. I just scanned the list, and I have no words.
• 22:36
  Are you okay? I am not okay. I am not okay at all. It's so much. And I fold things and I fold it and I fold it and I try to talk about it in therapy and so much is happening and so much is happening all at once.
• 23:14
  This list of abusive pastors being published is definitely a good thing, but it is so so painful. I hate secrets, especially institutional ones. But it was time to focus on therapy. This is when my therapist and I had gotten through listening to all the podcasts, gotten through processing the loss of my previous therapist, and we were ready to get back into therapy for therapy. Like, it's just time to deal with the hard things.
• 24:00
  That's when Elle wrote to me about the lawsuit against the college. She said, unfortunately, it was decided in their favor. To summarize, the mom of a child who was molested by a pastor learned that he was hired because of a letter recommendation from the school, and the school knew about it and covered up the fact the pastor had resigned from his previous job because of allegations of child molestation. They were complicit. They were complicit.
• 24:29
  It was such a school thing to do. Here's the article, and she sent me the link. Because the facts were not disputed, I guess that means that the school as an institution admitted under oath that they did not just look the other way. They actively recommended an accused child molester as a pastor, and the pastor was found guilty. So there's that.
• 24:56
  I also wanted to thank you for your interview with my roommate and your discussion with the husband about it. So she's talking about the episodes Hallelujah and Roomies. I've listened to both of those podcasts many times now. It's really cleared up so many things for me. I blamed myself for what happened with her.
• 25:25
  I thought her suicidal ideation was my fault, that I was codependent and enabling her even though I didn't know those words yet. And I thought that I didn't have good enough boundaries, so I made everything much worse. Even though I knew there were plenty of other factors, I couldn't see them clearly. Your episodes have helped me understand the weight that was put on all of us by the college, the rejection and the judgment, the control and the condemnation. It has been twenty three years.
• 25:57
  I used a calculator to check. And I shut all of this out because I couldn't deal with it. How terrible that all three of us for twenty three years thought we were the ones at fault, thought we were the bad ones, that we suffered together but also suffered alone with these burdens because we were told we were responsible for them. We each had different experience, and you had so much more going on. So I'm not sure what I went through was religious abuse, but it was something.
• 26:35
  I would not have been traumatized by taking care of my roommate if she wasn't traumatized by how she was treating there. I left the school with PTSD like we all did. And a college that kicks out or manipulates heavily to get them to leave, people with mental health issues puts an unbearable burden on students. It creates the need for secrecy, and it adds to the shame. But knowing that I wasn't at fault the way I thought I was is slowly starting to change things for me.
• 27:17
  I reached out to my roommate, who I've not talked to all this time, to let her know she could ask me questions if she has any about that time. After talking on your podcast, she responded and cleared up a couple of questions I had, and I have survived to tell the tale. Literally, I will come on the podcast and talk as well. We need to tell our stories. What I asked her about was my meetings with the dean of women.
• 27:50
  I don't remember them, and I don't think they happen very often, but
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: I did have one or two. She didn't remember me mentioning things. I know
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: you did, Elle. I know you went. And, yes, she was using you to get information on us like I'd tell her diddly squat. And then she talks about some more private specific things.
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: And then a month later, Elle wrote to me again. Now in August, just before we recorded our episodes.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: She said, I don't know what's
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: the matter with me, but I've never read Women Who Run With The Wolves.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: But the illustration of hooking the skeleton and it chasing you home feels like what happened today. Oh, that must have
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: been the day that we did our recording of our episodes. We didn't run from what we hooked, and we are both pretty amazing to face that skeleton. Yeah. We are.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: Along the same lines, I don't think I said this,
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: but the image of the college being a whitewashed tomb keeps coming to mind. They are a clean, pure looking place full of dead men's bones. Yes. Yes. Oh my goodness.
• 29:53
  I'm gonna have to think about that some more. Yes. I have to remind myself that it's okay to be hard on them because it's good to validate our own experiences. It's good to hold court and find them guilty. They are
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: not the ones who should be judging us.
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: It is our turn to judge them.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: I
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: had a hard time after my roommate was kicked out, and I dropped out. My parents weren't supportive, and they felt like I had failed. Oh, I think I didn't know this when we recorded. I'm so sorry, Elle. You know the song, beauty school dropout from Greece?
• 30:34
  Replace beauty school with Christian school, and that was the sentiment my parents had for me. That's so traumatic. Oh my goodness. We all carried so much shame and hate from our families. It got much better, but they don't see me that way at all now.
• 30:50
  But at the time, it was awful.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: I forgot to mention that I started cutting while I was there at the college. That sounds like really personal and serious and triggering thing,
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: so I don't know if you'd even want that in the podcast. But if it comes up sometime when you're reading emails, it's okay with me to say it because I want people to know the level of harm they brought on us and the kind of damage that can be done when an authority figure spiritually condemns someone and when they demand perfection or secrecy. I still feel so sick when I think about the way you, my friends, were treated. I feel so sick about it. And then she says, it's time for me to quote some scripture.
• 31:42
  Luke seventeen two. He said to his disciples, it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come. It were better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, then he should offend one of these little ones. So there, she says, I guess the best that I can do is eventually forgive them and just deliver them to God's judgment. But that will come after I'm done making my own.
• 32:16
  I imagine it's just a really difficult process doing that. I've heard that stages of grief do not happen in order that people move between them. So I expect to be going through some different things from one day to the next.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: You can always reach out to me if
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: you want to. And on a lighter note, I went biking this morning and thought of you and Jean Marc, and it was a really wonderful time. Thanks for the tip about doing that.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: Al, I don't even I don't even know what to say other than Other than big feelings, when I read these emails or when I had our conversations with
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: Al, part of it was emotional because of trauma and pain,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: but also part of it was emotional from not being alone. And part of it is emotional from feeling that difference between being alone in the trauma, the difference between not being alone because others also endured it and witnessed it, and the kind of being alone that comes after betrayal. Whether that is a parent or a therapist or an institution. And there is grief there for all of it, layers and layers and layers of grief. And being able to talk in the book and in the podcast and in therapy about what happened at the college blends not only my timeline, but parts of myself.
• 34:49
  And for me, because of how that part of my timeline unfolded, it really does connect all the way back to eighth grade. And so I know that's not everything, and I know I'm not finished with therapy, and even this needs so much more processing. Like, know that. I know. I know.
• 35:11
  I know. But also, even though this really, really, really hurts, And even though it's really, really, really hard, I feel like I'm getting part of my life back. I don't need my life back as in the people in it that were there hurting me. For so long, that's part of fawning. Right?
• 35:46
  For so long, I thought I had to be good enough or fulfill what they wanted from me, to be accepted, to get them to keep me, to get them to remember me, to get them to care. I knew I would not be loved. I never even wanted that. But I don't need that part of my life back because I understand now that that was part of the trauma. The part of my life I'm getting back is me.
• 36:26
  Parts of me. Parts of me that could not endure those things and also keep going. Like, Iris. Those of you who know me or who know the pod cast and you know what I mean when I even just say that word, Iris, because of that episode and how hard 2020 was and all of those layers, you know what I mean when I say it. And the reason it means so much to all of us is because Iris isn't just about 2020.
• 37:17
  Iris is about what it's like when you're betrayed by those who are supposed to care about you the most. Iris is about What it feels like when people who are in charge or people who are supposed to be your caregivers or people who are supposed love you are the same ones putting you in danger or betraying you or causing harm. College for me was an iris. Eighth grade for me was an iris. The English teacher episodes about what happened between the college and that therapist that moved us in was an iris.
• 38:13
  It never was just about losing that therapist. It was about losing everything that she represented. It was about losing the illusion that things would ever be made right because some things are so wrong and so damaging that they cannot be fixed. And that is the depth of iris. That is the pain of iris.
• 38:53
  But here's what's on the other side. What's on the other side is that it's not me who's broken and it never was. It is not our fault. It was never our fault. We were the children.
• 39:20
  You and me and all the things we have endured, it was never our fault. And even this religious trauma, which I don't know how safe it is to even get into more on the podcast, but for therapy. Okay? When I talk about reclaiming my faith, let me be clear that it is not meaning or not about thinking I have such a need for an institution or an organization to tell me who I am or who I should be. That is not what I'm talking about.
• 41:04
  When I am talking about reclaiming my faith or holding on to my faith, it is because there are things I have endured that no human should be able to endure. And to me, that is something beyond this world. When I talk about reclaiming my faith or holding on to my faith, I am talking about the depth of friendship and the depth of relationship that gives evidence to me that we have known each other so much longer than this planet has been alive. When I talk about my faith or church with Kim, I'm talking about church with you than a meeting on Sundays with clinician friends who don't just see me as someone who's been abused, but as a person who happens to be a clinician, who happens to have a story, who's trying to tell a story to the world to help the world listen so that they will listen and change for the better and so that the rest of us can have hope together. That's what I'm talking about.
• 42:41
  I'm talking about the way the sun spreads in the morning when the sun rises. I'm talking about how the air smells different after the rain. I'm talking about the way birds sing and butterflies dance. I'm talking about the shades of green in the trees. I'm talking about how your spirit knows when it hears truth.
• 43:27
  And to me, all of these things are miracles That when I am struggling and feel alone, that I can close my eyes and see your faces and remember your names and know I am not alone. That's what I'm talking about. That's God in me and God in you and God all around us, and that's what I'm talking about. I am not talking about those awful people who have so badly represented any good in the world because they were so, so bad. And maybe I still have it wrong.
• 44:34
  And I know that I am often wrong, But I will not let these people steal the good that is left in me or the good that could still be. I choose to hang on to that.
• 45:22
  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 us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing and healing brings hope.