Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Trusting our Therapist, Trusting the Process

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Trusting our Therapist, Trusting the Process · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over: 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.
• 1:00
  Okay. So after a series of not so good therapy experiences that at least helped us in different ways. And after trying different ways of therapy and different people of therapy and trying to find a safe therapist that we could actually work with and feel comfortable with and deal with this whole DID thing. We have officially been in therapy with our therapist for an entire year. So in Nerdtown, the question might be, how do we know we're making progress?
• 1:39
  The answer is, I don't have a clue. I don't have any idea. So while I don't really have any answers to that because I just don't know, I do have some ideas and guesses from things that we have learned that we wanna share. So the first way that we know we have made progress so far in therapy is because we have words for things. So not even talking about, like, dealing with stuff, just having words.
• 2:11
  We know what it's called. We know other people have it too. We know, technically, we know. We're learning, trying to believe that it's not entirely our fault, that it's not our fault, something like that. I guess we don't know it as well, but we're starting to get the idea of it.
• 2:29
  And we learn we know the different terms for things, like inner world or alters or parts or co consciousness. We talked about that again this week in therapy. When we know what's going on externally, even if we're not the one out, If we know what's going on outside it, that's co consciousness. We know those words. We also know a whole lot just about the system, being able to identify who is who and what they do and why they're here or how we can help them or that we ought to be helping them even.
• 3:10
  All of that counts. Right? So so I think that that is legit. Like, all of all of those things about knowing the right words for things, like, knowing that there are words for things and words for us. And who is who, which, of course, just even by default leads to the next thing, which is knowing about how to talk to each other and when to talk to each other or why it even matters that we need to be talking to each other.
• 4:03
  And some of that is and we can do that with the notebook or on the app on our phone or through our therapist or writing notes otherwise or all kinds of different things, email even sometimes. Just learning anything we can about each other in ways that are respectful and let people be themselves and are accepting, which probably is a general rule for good living and life anyway. So maybe we've accidentally learned some social skills. I don't know. We'll see.
• 4:53
  We've also learned some really big things that have actually taken us more than a year to figure out and have words for and even believe. But I really think that we're, at least at some layer, at a new place of being able to hold on to these things being true. And that goes back to what and that goes back to what we shared before in other episodes about things like now time is safe. Our therapist and the husband are in now time, and the parents who are dead in now time, if we see them or hear from them, that's memory time because they are not alive now. So now time is safe, and talking about memory time does not change now time.
• 5:43
  So we can stay safe in the present even though there are things from memory time that we need to talk about. We've learned that there are ways we can talk about things in good and healthy ways, like sharing some things on the podcast and learning about DID on the podcast or documenting our journey a little bit on the podcast. Even though we don't wanna to necessarily use it for therapy, it's not therapy in and of itself. We don't need to disclose a bunch of things here. But we can talk about the process of what we're learning and some of the things we experience along the way.
• 6:29
  It's also okay to talk to the husband or the therapist about most anything and even maybe trying to make some friends along the way with those who understand and try to blend worlds a little bit. That has been scary of getting to know people and opening up and meeting some of them in real life or connecting our our family or our real world to them in some ways has been scary just because not just of trauma in the past but even more recent trauma of just wanting to be like what happened with family services or just wanting to be safe and wise in general about boundaries and not repeating things that have happened to us in the past. So that's another reason to learn more about trauma and how it impacts us because it this is, I can't I'm really having trouble focusing. I thought I had things I wanted to talk about, but it's a gorgeous day. And there are birds, and the children are not home from school, the outside children.
• 8:02
  And so I think I'm feeling this urge to play, which I promise that we can play and even the littles can play, but we need to wait till the kids get home from school because I cannot record while the kids are home from school. So we need to do this now, and then we can play, I promise. See negotiation. That's part of what we learned in the last year. Right?
• 8:22
  Like, I promise I will keep that promise. We will get to play after, but I need to do this. Also, someone is they're building more houses on our road, like, down the street, so all of a sudden, there's construction now when there wasn't. So I'm sorry about background noise, but it's too pretty of a day to be inside. I just can't.
• 8:42
  That's another example of things we've learned in the last year are, like, self care things of things like how to get help with sleeping, how to make sure that someone is eating enough, make sure that we can drive to therapy and back safely, all of those things. Okay. Again, I'm totally distracted because I'm sitting on the deck in the back of our house, and the grass is so green, you guys. It's so green. I can't get over it.
• 9:24
  Part first of all, it's a gorgeous day. There are no clouds in the sky, and it's warm but not hot. In Oklahoma, the sun can come out, and you can just cook by default, like a fried egg on the sidewalk. Sidewalk. Like, it's it's so hot.
• 9:39
  And here, it's warm and it's gorgeous, but it's not too hot, and I'm just baffled. Because also in Oklahoma, the grass is brown. Like, there's always a drought or there's always dust and dirt because there's not enough water, and people need to feed their livestock and grow plants and vegetables and food and farming things, and you can because there's a drought, and that's a problem. And so I'm looking out here after these months and months of snow, and we went from brown in Oklahoma to white in Kansas. And now the snow is gone, and it's just green as far as I can see.
• 10:25
  And I don't know if I've ever in my life seen anything like it. And that feels like symbolic of the last year of there is hope. There's this book that is our favorite book in the whole world, and it is called Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. And in the book, she describes hope as green poking through the snow, and that's totally what I'm feeling right now. It's overwhelming me a little bit in a good way.
• 10:54
  It's just beautiful, and we're at peace, and everything's okay. So let's just call part of it what it is and just I thought I had a plan of what I wanted to share today, and I came out here to start recording because it was so nice. But there is an incongruence between what I was wanting to share and what was coming out and, like, how I'm feeling and the way I was presenting it. Like, it was just like, I don't but this is really overwhelming me. Part of it is what happened in therapy.
• 11:32
  I feel like if I were getting to describe what's happened in therapy recently, which, first of all, is, like, not really my business because it's not my stuff. But I know because we're talking about it. I know what's going on. Well, I mean, I don't know, like, details, but, I mean, I kind of know that for, like like, we came back from spring break from therapy. We came back ready to work on things in a new way.
• 12:06
  Like, we are actively not just trusting our therapist, but being able to maintain that and hold on to that between sessions, which is new. And we still use, like, lots of different props. I don't think props is the right word. That's what you say when you have a musical theater husband. Like, 's the word?
• 12:25
  Like, grounding things. Like, we have the watch, and we have the teddy bear, and we have our notebooks and pens, things like that, that we use to help keep us grounded and some things to smell or peppermints or whatever to taste. And so all of that is really helpful and keeps us super grounded. And so we still need those props. Like, we rely on it, but they work, and we're able to do it, and that's new.
• 12:51
  And when we can hold on to that, that she is real and we are safe, it's like a whole new level of therapy. And I don't mean that it's always easy or that it's as easy for everyone as it is for others. Like, even internally as a system, you have to respect where everyone's at and their differences and their unique places on the healing journey. But it's huge progress for us. And maybe if we're talking about how we know we're making progress, this is an example because we're able to hold on to that.
• 13:26
  And because we can hold on to that, it's like all of a sudden for the first time, there's enough safety to work on other things, like, you know, actual trauma history stuff. I don't know. So we came back from break really ready to work on some things. But every time we went to therapy, something happened that was different than what we thought of, like, how it would go down. And I don't know why we think or make plans because it never happens like we think.
• 13:58
  And we're not people who can be like, okay. On the first and third week, you go, and on the second and fourth week, I go. Like, some people have these schedules, or they go lots of times a week, and one day is little's week. One day is little's day, and one day is this day or whatever. Like, no.
• 14:17
  We're just not that high functioning. We are not that high functioning, but what we can do and what does help is we're just not that high functioning. The sun itches me because it's been so long since my skin has felt it. Oh, man. It's a beautiful day, but I need, like, an air mattress or a hammock and a swimsuit.
• 14:56
  I'm just in regular clothes because winter. Oh, springtime. You tease me. Okay. See, I'm having trouble focusing, but I'm trying.
• 15:08
  It's because Emma is trying to be here, like, all the time. She's kind of getting in my way of, like, trying to stay present and trying to be aware of what's going on, and I don't need her all up in my business. That's part of what's wrong. So much of her functioning. Ugh.
• 15:24
  Okay. Deep breath. Just kidding. Okay. So what I'm trying to say is that we have this expectation of what we were gonna do in therapy and then the real life of what actually happens in therapy.
• 15:39
  And, also, as it turns out oh, butterfly. As it turns out, there is okay. All the littles take a back seat. I promise we can play outside in a minute. Seriously, just let me finish this.
• 16:02
  So there's, like, a gap between what we expect to happen in therapy and what actually happens in therapy. And then also, like, which is really slow in therapy. Like, what feels like a really big hard two hours is like a sentence. It's like a small little piece of something that for us feels really big, but, it's like turtles. Like, I don't know how the therapist can even sit there for two hours because I would be jumping out of my skin.
• 16:35
  But we're trying. Okay? So since spring break, we have been working on a specific thing. Like, I don't wanna go into details of it because I'm not trauma dumping on the podcast. We're just not gonna do that.
• 16:47
  But I will say, like, a specific memory that is connected to specifically part of why it's so hard to disclose things. And there's always a layer of that in any kind of abuse. Absolutely. And there are lots of people that have different specific aspects of that. But for therapy, recently, we've been working on just one particular piece because Molly had the idea because she knows so much now that maybe if we work through that piece a little bit, it would, like, lower the resistance, so to speak, of talking in therapy so that talking in therapy would be easier to talk about all the other stuff we need to talk about.
• 17:35
  So I don't know if that actually works, but it was, like, the first time we sort of made a group decision in meetings, like, as far as content, we needed to talk about therapy. So in a way, it was, like, a huge breakthrough for us and kind of a big deal. But, also, at the same time, there's, like, 800,000 of us. Not really. Not really.
• 17:58
  Seriously. Not really. I'm exaggerating. But when you have all these different perspectives of the same thing, it's still really hard to get all those pieces out, much less put them together. And we're not even doing any putting together.
• 18:10
  We are literally just practicing talking to our therapist. Because if it's safe to do so, then we need to do so. And so it was like, here's a year of writing out all these secrets in journals. So now let's pick the one that says why we can't say these secrets out loud. And maybe if we can talk about that, then maybe we could talk about these other pieces, which some of some of them we already wrote down, not like everything and not in detail.
• 18:42
  But there's enough pieces to know that if our therapist couldn't handle it, we would have already changed therapists. But she can handle it, and here's how I know. Because she is strong enough, and she is smart enough, and she is present enough. And for us, that is what we needed. We need someone who was stronger than, like, our scariest moments.
• 19:06
  We needed someone who was smart enough to understand us and to keep things, like, in context of knowing we're not completely crazy and someone who was present enough to endure with us and to not give up on us when things are hard or quiet or slow. And she's a rock star at all three of these things. And so we are not just keeping her, but maybe have finally started to actually participate. Like, maybe a year or two or three in, we are actually doing therapy now. Five years in, if you count all the other experiences, who has to go to therapy for five years just to learn how to do therapy?
• 19:53
  Oh my goodness. So, yes, after a year of working with her, we are finally starting to talk to her. That sounds so crazy, except I know you guys understand what I mean. So it's been a rough couple of weeks. It has has been a really hard couple of weeks while we worked through this one specific thing, and not that we've even, like, talked about it at all other than literally trying to get the story out.
• 20:22
  Like, Emma doesn't know about it. We haven't, like, put all those pieces together. It's not like we've done anything with the memory. I just mean literally getting it out, like putting the pieces on the table so that we can play with the pieces. We're not even too playing with the pieces, but at least there's a picture on the box.
• 20:42
  Okay. There's your puzzling for DID today. Does that make sense? So we've been working on that for weeks and weeks and weeks. But this week for, like I don't even remember what I was talking about.
• 21:06
  Something about puzzle pieces, and that's how puzzling it is. Because as soon as I'd, like, tried to capture it, it totally just, like, slipped through my fingers, and the whole idea of what I was trying to say is completely gone. Dissociating, foggy brain. Fantastic. Man, the sun feels good, you guys.
• 21:27
  I'm hungry for it. I've pulled up my sleeves, and I can feel it on my arms and on my face, And it feels so foreign, but so good. Like, as good as the winter was hard. Like, therapy. Oh, yeah.
• 21:46
  Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was saying. Like, therapy. Because we've worked so hard these weeks to get those pieces out.
• 21:56
  And Sarah, who is, like, friends with Jean Marc. I don't even know their whole story. I just know their names and that they hang out. But she has a lot of the words, like, not even the experience or the memories. Like, when you read in the workbook and it talks about memory holder or trauma holder, It's not so much that because it's not her stuff, but it's like she knows things and can talk about them.
• 22:37
  As far as telling the words, I don't know. I don't even wanna explain it all, and I don't wanna just, like, tattle on her or tell her stuff. But she talked in therapy, like, this week and talked and talked and talked, like, the whole time. And not necessarily about one piece or one thing, but just holding that of, like, being with our therapist and able to talk to her and being with her and able to say things, it was so good. It was so, so good.
• 23:12
  Like, I can't tell you. Well, I really can't tell you because I don't know. But since then, like, since we since we left there and drove home and today, the next day after, it has been amazing. Like, we are so calm and so at peace, and everyone's so chill. Like, the littles are excited to go play outside on this beautiful day.
• 23:40
  They are not freaking out. They are not having, like, memory drama. They are not all about triggers, which is where we've been for two or three or four weeks, maybe six. I don't even know because that's a time question. But it's been really good.
• 24:11
  And I don't know how to describe it other than, like, as if we've been under this intense pressure and therapy this week, like, just turned the valve and let off some of that steam. And I feel like for the first time in a year, two, five, twenty, I don't know how many years, like, we're okay. And we're at, like, a new baseline that's a normal baseline. I don't mean things won't be hard again, and I don't mean that there's not more hard stuff to talk about or even this stuff we've been trying to talk about. But something has shifted where the safety level has, like, settled through the layers of all of us into something that is brand new and being able to talk about things differently and in a new way.
• 25:09
  And now when we're struggling, it's because things are good, and everyone wants to experience that at the same time, like sunshine. Right? And so that's an example of progress. That counts as progress. It's annoying, but it counts as progress.
• 25:26
  There are other things like not being stressed out about work, all of our bills being paid. What else? Like, making friends, like, trying to connect with people from church where we used to be super involved. And now, like, we still go to church. But since we moved, it's been harder to make friends, and we're starting to make friends at church.
• 25:54
  And then two friends who know about our DID, like, sharing more of our story with them and sending our books to them or connecting to them in new ways and trying to, like, reach out and learn what it means to have a friend and be a friend. And then other people who have been so kind and patient while we try and learn not just how to do that, but also the boundaries of it of, like, what is us and what is not us. And and so what that looks like, like any of our friends in the history of our whole entire life and however many thirty or forty years, like, we're just not online people. We just are not messenger people. We've never had messenger until we got on these online groups, and it's not gonna be a source of, like, comfort or reaching out or a first thought for us to check it.
• 27:07
  And even the notifications are turned off. Like, we just don't do a lot of PM ing, and we've done more in the last six months than probably we're comfortable with. So we're probably backing off of that a little bit just to stay congruent with who we are rather than the external pressures of who that looks like or how we can practice that. And part of it was the intensity of first connecting in the groups and sorting out who is safe and who is not safe. But now kind of knowing who our friends are and and who we can reach out to and ways to do that in different ways make it easier.
• 27:46
  So I'm probably even just gonna delete messenger from my phone because it's just not a thing. It's not a place where we hang out. And in fact, our church even our church and our family actually has a lot of rules even about screen time. Like, we don't even have a television in our house. We don't have a television.
• 28:06
  Not that other people from our church don't have television. We just don't have television. Like, we're just really strict about screen time in our family, so it's just not our place to hang out. Plus, we're working on being more grounded and more present, and that includes, like, in the physical world and not the virtual world. So while I'm grateful for, like, Messenger or email or whatever to stay connected to people, and sometimes it's part of friendship is staying connected or reaching out or making phone calls or something like that.
• 28:37
  Like, part of the work that we're doing in therapy right now has to do with being actually present and participating in the world. And so I have to be sure that, like, making friends who also have DID, and so they're online by default because they don't all just live in Kansas City where we do. Like, everyone lives all over. Right? So by default, part of that relationship is online, but that's different than me hiding online or avoiding being online.
• 29:09
  And so it's a tricky balance, and all of that is like progress. We are having to negotiate internal and external rules, rules being, like, using very broadly. That's just I don't have a better word to use for it right now. But for having friends and for functioning and not just hiding in the house. Like, these are new things.
• 29:30
  And things like being out on the trails instead of just on my computer all morning or making friends instead of just hiding in the closet. Those are different different experiences, and it makes our days look different. And participating more with our children differently and being more present with them also takes away from screen time and things like that. And so it's just a lot of pieces to learn, but all of it counts as progress. Being able to share our art is a new thing.
• 30:06
  I myself am not any good at art, but to see Katie's paintings or some of the things the littles do or ideas they have, that's pretty special for getting to know them, but also just the progress of being able to express ourselves, trying to take pictures with our children, an assignment we have from therapy so that they have memories of us with us in pictures is something we're working on that is really hard for us just because of some of the things that we endured as a child that was related to having our picture taken or videos and things. And so being sensitive about that, not just for protecting ourselves and DID, but but just in general, trying to heal more and share more pictures and participate in those ways, there's just a higher dose of normal in our lives somehow. And, again, not because everything's easy or because we have it all figured out. We're just making progress. Like like, we're starting.
• 31:28
  And it maybe has taken us a year to get started, but we are starting, and I think it counts. And so I wanted to talk about that because it can be so hard. Okay. All of that to say that guess what our chapter is this week in our group homework? It's about overcoming the phobia of inner experience.
• 31:53
  Okay. So I can talk about it, but Emma's just gonna have to read this chapter and do the homework because me doing it for her kind of defeats the purpose. Right? Like, she's gonna have to figure out how to be present and stay and do this. Except she is, and it's crazy because it's changing things and stirring things up in a way.
• 32:16
  And she, like, is more aware of what's going on, and she's out, like, longer and longer. Like, I haven't seen Cassie in weeks and weeks and weeks. How can our life be so good we don't even need Cassie around? Like, what is that about? But it says our inner experience is what we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan, and predict.
• 32:48
  All that is already above my head. But it says she has to become aware of, learn to tolerate, regulate, and even change how she responds to those inner experiences. So, like, when stuff is happening in life or stuff is happening in the inner world, like, we, all of us, not just Emma, but all of us have to become more aware of what's going on internally and externally. I think I think that's it. Is that it?
• 33:25
  It does say that it's actually impossible to change our inner experiences if we're avoiding them. Well, we're really good at avoiding. That's why we have DID. It says, you might avoid them if you're afraid, ashamed, or disgusted. Well, I don't disgust you.
• 33:50
  You disgust me. Not really. So let me think about that. Afraid? Yeah.
• 33:58
  Check. Ashamed? Yeah. Check. Disgusted?
• 34:03
  I am not disgusting. Let's just put that out there. You might be disgusting, but I'm not disgusting. So that is when you avoid, but serious avoidance of your inner experiences is called experiential avoidance. I can't even say that, but I'm not going to repeat it because I do not want hot mail.
• 34:28
  I do not want hot mail. I meant hate mail. No offense to anyone using hot mail. That's not at all what I meant to say. I don't want to hate mail, so I'm not going to repeat it, but it was hard for me to say.
• 34:45
  It's also called the phobia of inner experience. So a phobia is fear and avoidance. Like, you feel fear, and so then you do behaviors that avoid what triggers that fear. That's what it says. And then it talks about panic attacks and nightmares and flashbacks, all of which they call intrusions and say we do things like dissociating to avoid that stuff.
• 35:16
  So you might even be ashamed not just of, like, what happened to you, but feelings you have about it. So, like, maybe you're ashamed of getting mad because only bad people get mad when that's not true. Anger is like a legitimate feeling that has its own place, and you can feel anger without being abusive to someone. But if you don't if you don't know that, you might just be ashamed of anger and try really hard not to feel it. And then also talks about being afraid of inner voices from other parts.
• 35:52
  No. Other parts are just annoying because I'm trying to do a podcast. Emma is totally afraid of inner voices, and I think Emma is too because I've seen it in the journal, so we've talked about that. So they got some homework to do, yo. It may also be validated by actual experiences.
• 36:10
  So, like, if you're afraid of being crazy, but then you've also had, like, a really bad inpatient experience or went to the ER for help and they dismissed you or something like that. Like, those are retraumatizing in a way because they, like, reinforce what you're actually afraid of happening. Does it make sense? So that's another reason it makes it harder to get help or to talk about things. So then it says the avoidance can look like lots of things like working too much.
• 36:40
  Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
• 36:42
  Ow. Not paying attention to yourself, like hygiene or taking showers or brushing your teeth. Those may also have other triggers besides that. But those kinds of things can also be like trying to outrun memories. So, like, if you stay busy enough, then maybe I won't have to think about memories that are surfacing.
• 37:07
  I am down with that plan. No. I'm just kidding. I just wanna lay in the sunshine. Please just lay in the sunshine.
• 37:14
  Drugs and alcohol can also be ways to avoid. We are past that, meaning that every day we don't drink. I used to drink. I do not drink now. In fact, this fall will be my ten year sobriety anniversary, so boom chickabaw.
• 37:36
  Then it says you can also avoid not just your inner experiences, but try to avoid other parts, which I think is where Emma's been for, like, twenty years. Are you listening to me, Emma? It can be conscious or unconscious, but trying to be aware of it and that it's going on and that the others are there, all of those things help you pay more attention and be more present. They say in this book, what I'm reading from is chapter five from coping with trauma related dissociation. I mean, I'm not actually reading from the book.
• 38:13
  I'm reading from Emma's notes from the book because I'm a little spy, and I wanna know what's going on in the notebook. It says this phobia of inner experiences can develop for three reasons. One, you didn't get help learning how to cope, and you didn't get, like, reassurance or help or support. And two, what we said earlier about, like, thinking your feelings or your responses are bad, and so then you're ashamed of them. And three, acknowledging inner experiences is like a signal to your brain that something bad is gonna happen.
• 39:01
  So this goes back to what doctor e talked about on the polyvagal because it doesn't matter if it's happening now or if it's happening in the past, and it doesn't matter if it actually is dangerous or you just perceive it as dangerous because your brain can't tell the difference. So until you have safety, like I was talking about with our therapist, then you can't really talk about hard things because, number one, you have to be able to differentiate between now time and memory time. And number two, you have to know how to tell your brain that you're safe, like, through grounding or breathing or whatever, even when it thinks you're in danger because of memory time. So those are, like, important things, and that's part of why it takes so long to start really talking in therapy. And it's okay that you take a long time feeling comfortable with and safe in therapy before you start dishing out stuff because you that's true anyway.
• 39:56
  Like, even with just friends down the street or whatever. Like, I'm making that up. But you know what I mean? Like, just friends, you don't just tell them everything right away. Like, it comes out of your relationship that you build over time, and it's the same with a therapist.
• 40:10
  So so here's why I'm sharing this. Because, like, we felt everything was all calm and stable and good and, like, the best and strongest we have felt in years and years and years and years and years. Like, I'm not kidding about that part since therapy. Right? Except guess what?
• 40:28
  The homework for this week is to write every day answer, like, these whole questions about what's happening inside and the, like, internal experiences and what your phobias are and what your fears are and what you're feeling and, like, being present with that. So what? Because now she's getting up in everybody's business trying to learn and pay attention to what's going on and to notice and feel things and be aware of things. And what does that even mean? And, like, what's gonna happen?
• 41:00
  So now my polyvagal is tripping out because she's getting better, except not. Except yes. Except that's progress. So, ugh, therapy. So here's my point is that sometimes it gets harder before it gets better, and sometimes it's really hard work just for things to be easy.
• 41:28
  But even that counts as progress, allegedly. We'll see. 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.
• 41:57
  Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemsspeakcommunity.com. We'll see you there.