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The Essay · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about complex trauma and dissociation. It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling.
• 0:41
  It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship. Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to.
• 1:06
  We're all different, and all of our stories matter. As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Late last night, I found words unexpectedly and woke with clarity about them and the concepts I've been studying for almost two years. So this is unusual in that this morning, I just wanna read what I wrote and share that. It says, there were two episodes ready this week. I had them lined up the way you line up stones on a windowsill, each one chosen, each one sitting in the light it had earned. The first was about learning to talk to my body, the slow miracle of what happened when I stopped narrating over the top of it and started listening underneath.
• 2:26
  I had spent so many years treating my body like a hallway, I rushed through on my way to somewhere more important. When I finally stopped in that hallway and stood still and said, without irony, without performance, I'm here. What do you need me to know? My body did the thing I had been most afraid of and most starved for. It talked back in tightening, in flushing, in the particular nausea that means no, and the particular looseness that means maybe.
• 3:04
  I had been waiting my whole life for a voice that was inside me the whole time behind a door I kept calling locked because I was the one holding it shut. The second episode was a John Mark one. It was a yes day in the city. One of those days you give yourselves when the system is carried too much for too long, and someone finally gets to be the one who says where we eat and how long we stay and what we look at and whether we buy the ridiculous thing in the window, a day built of permission. I loved that episode.
• 3:45
  I still do. I will never forget that day. It was truly amazing. From the train ride to painting the ocean to swings over the bay to in person therapy to a boat ride to the aquarium and back home on a train again, all without getting lost. It was the best day ever.
• 4:07
  And then tonight, I heard someone talking about something completely unrelated, and something in me or someone in me went quiet in a specific way that is not peace or serenity. It was the quiet of a held breath, the quiet of the room going still before you know why. I have learned slowly and against everything the rule book taught me to treat that quiet as information rather than malfunction. So I paused. I pulled the week's episodes, both of them, the body one and the yes day one, back off the windowsill and into my hands.
• 4:54
  And then came the part I want to write about because it's the part no one warns you about. The part where pulling the episodes is so quickly followed by the question of whether I had any right to. That's the trauma rule book. I grew up fluent in a language I did not choose. And I didn't even understand this until I was in twelve step recovery for partners and children of dysfunctional families.
• 5:20
  Don't talk. Don't trust. Don't feel. If you have never lived in a house where those three rules are load bearing, They sound like cruelty, like something a villain would say. They are not experienced that way from the inside.
• 5:37
  From the inside, they feel like wisdom. They feel like the only intelligent response to a world that has demonstrated repeatedly and with evidence that talking gets you hurt and trusting gets you betrayed and feeling gets you overwhelmed in a place where there is no one to help you carry it. The rule book is a survival contract from childhood. I want to be precise about that because the recovery world sometimes treats those three rules as pathology, as something broken in the person who follows them. And that framing has always struck me as a second injury laid on top of the first.
• 6:21
  The rules are not broken. They worked. They are the reason I'm alive to write this. A child in a war zone who learns not to talk, not to trust, not to feel is a child doing brilliant, adaptive, lifesaving work. Claudia Black named these rules in the context of family systems organized around addiction and dysfunction, and her insight was never that the rules were stupid.
• 6:48
  It was that they were faithful. They keep faith with a danger that was once real. The trouble is what the rule book does once the war is over. It doesn't know the war is over, and it cannot read a calendar. It is global, and that globalness is the tell.
• 7:07
  The rule book says don't trust. Full stop. Everyone. Always. With therapy and recovery, I learned to grow this into the whole experience of a sentence.
• 7:19
  Don't trust that particular person who has shown you who they are. The rule book says don't feel. But with therapy and recovery, I learned to stretch into be careful what you feel in front of someone who will use it against you. The rule book paints with the widest brush it has because terror does not do fine motor work and shame does not do nuance. The rule book is powered by those two engines, terror and shame.
• 7:53
  And neither of them can tell the difference between a person who is dangerous and a person who merely reminds me of danger. To the rule book, to memory time, those are the same person. That's hard to remember when now time gets slippery. So I lived a long time inside a social contract from childhood, memory time, that kept me small enough to survive a room I had already left in now time. The rule book does not keep you alive.
• 8:27
  It keeps you stuck, alive in the place that required the rules. That is the cruelty in it, but the cruelty is structural, not intentional. It is the cruelty of a smoke detector that will not stop screaming long after the fire is out. That's reenactment. When memory time invades now time and it can be hard to tell the difference.
• 8:52
  So that's why we need therapy and recovery. Yeah? Here are the sentences that took me years to be able to say and mean. I do talk. I do trust.
• 9:05
  I do feel. And also, I get to choose with whom and how much and based on what's real. That second half is the entire revolution. The rule book is global and recovery is not the opposite of the rule book. This is the part I had wrong for the longest time.
• 9:26
  I thought healing meant flipping the rules over. Don't talk becomes talk. Don't trust becomes trust. Don't feel becomes feel. I thought I was supposed to fling every door open as proof that I was no longer afraid, that openness was the metric, that the more I disclosed and the more I trusted and the more I let myself be flooded with feeling, the healthier I was getting.
• 9:53
  I confused recovery with the absence of walls. Do you know who told me that was the metric? A union supervisor in Shiny, happy land twenty five years ago. How did that one thing stick with me this whole time for so long before I ever realized it was getting me caught in the quicksand? Because it was the only other information I had besides childhood.
• 10:22
  So yeah, that's why we, me need therapy and recovery both. The rule book was never wrong because it had walls. It was wrong because it had only one wall, and that wall was poured around everything and everyone with no door in it. This became a castle with no drawbridge. That made me a castle under siege.
• 10:52
  It's the problem of trying to keep all the bad out. You keep the good out too. Recovery is not the demolition of the wall. Recovery is learning to build a wall with a door in it, and learning that I am the one who holds the latch, and learning that holding the latch is not the same as being afraid. So I talk, but I decide to whom.
• 11:18
  I trust, but I decide how much. And I let that trust be calibrated to what a person has actually shown me rather than to what I wish they were or what I am terrified they might be. I feel, but I get to decide where I set those feelings down and in front of whom because some feelings are sacred and some people have demonstrated that they handle the sacred carelessly. The revolution is not in the talking, trusting, and feeling. The revolution is in the with whom and the how much and the based on reality.
• 12:02
  That's why un daydreaming and undissociating have been so important. And that's why recovery introduced me to the word detachment. I had to wrestle with detachment for a long time before I trusted it. Detachment, it sounds so cold. It sounds like the rule book in a nicer outfit.
• 12:24
  Don't feel, but make it sophisticated. That is not what it means. Al Anon literature describes detachment as a practice of not getting tangled in another person's process, their reactions, their crisis, their version of events, in a way that requires me to abandon my own. Detachment says, I'm not going to hook into other people's stuff. I'm not going to take a feeling that belongs to someone else and swallow it as if it were mine to digest.
• 12:55
  I'm not going to reorganize my entire nervous system around managing a reaction that was never my responsibility. Detachment is not the absence of love. It is the refusal to fuse. And then there are boundaries, which are the close cousin of detachment, but not the same thing. Detachment is about what I do with what comes at me.
• 13:22
  Boundaries are about what I allow to come at me in the first place. A boundary says, I get to decide what access you have to me. I'm allowed to say no. I'm allowed to step back. I'm allowed to change my mind.
• 13:39
  That last clause is the one I keep having to relearn. The rule book is rigid because rigidity is what survival required. There was no room once to change my mind because changing my mind in the war zone could get me killed. So I built a self that treated every decision as permanent. Every door is either bolted or flung wide.
• 14:02
  No in between, no revisiting. Recovery boundaries are not like that. They breathe. I can say yes today and no tomorrow. I can open a door a crack and decide that crack is enough or decide it was too much and close it.
• 14:20
  And that closing is not a betrayal of the earlier opening. It is the latch doing exactly what a latch is for. A wall with a door in it and my hand on the latch and the right to move the latch in either direction whenever the truth of the moment requires it. That's a boundary. It's not a fortress, and it's not an open field.
• 14:44
  It's a threshold. I get to govern. Underneath the detachment and the boundaries, there is something more foundational, and it is the thing that makes the other two possible: safety. Specifically, the practice of believing my own perceptions. The rulebook taught me to distress my own read of a room, because in the original war zone, my accurate read of danger was inconvenient to the people causing it.
• 15:13
  And so it was punished, mocked, reframed, denied. I was told the thing I saw was not the thing I saw. I was told the danger I felt was my own oversensitivity. I learned to override my own instrument. I learned that the needle swinging toward danger was a flaw in the needle.
• 15:35
  Recovery safety is the slow, stubborn work of recalibrating that instrument and then crucially trusting it again. It sounds like this. I believe my perceptions. When someone shows me it is not safe, I believe them. I act as though it is not safe because it is not safe because they showed me.
• 15:57
  This is not paranoia. Paranoia is the rule book, the global wall, the assumption of danger everywhere with no evidence required. This is the opposite of that. This is evidence based. This is me letting a person's demonstrated behavior count as data and refusing to talk myself out of the data because the data is inconvenient or because believing it would mean I have to do something hard.
• 16:21
  When someone shows me what they do with my trust, the healthiest and safest thing I can do is let that stand. Not relitigate it, not explain it away, not give it 40 more chances in the name of being generous or open or healed. Just let the data stand. This is what listening to my body is in the end. My body is an instrument that registers data faster than my conscious mind can argue it.
• 16:51
  The held breath tonight was data. The going quiet was data. My job is not to interrogate the instrument until it gives me the reading I wish I had. My job is to believe it. This is where it gets hard, and this is the real subject of everything I'm circling because the rule book and recovery can produce the same outward behavior.
• 17:13
  And from the outside, and sometimes even from the inside, they look identical. I pull the episodes. I pause. I close a door. Did I just take care of myself or did I just obey the rule book?
• 17:29
  Was that a boundary or was that avoidance wearing a boundary's clothes? Avoidance has a particular voice and I have learned to recognize its accent. Avoidance does not actually sound like don't feel. That's too obvious. I would catch it.
• 17:49
  Avoidance sounds reasonable. It sounds like self improvement. It says, you're too much. You're overreacting. Everyone else can handle this.
• 17:57
  You should just get over it and respond anyway. Opening this door is what a healthy person would do. And your reluctance is just the old fear. So push through it. No.
• 18:08
  Avoidance in the mouth of someone in recovery weaponizes the language of recovery itself. It uses don't be avoidant as a way to make me be unsafe. It tells me that my no is the symptom and my yes would be the cure. That's the cunning of it. Avoidants learn to talk like growth.
• 18:31
  So how do I tell them apart? The difference is reality. The difference is data. Avoidance is global and anticipatory. It closes the door against what might happen, against the danger it is imagining, against a fear with no evidence under it, against people in general.
• 18:52
  But the boundary is specific and evidence based. It closes the door against what already happened, against a danger that has demonstrated itself, against this person who showed me this thing about who they are and how they treat people. When I close a door because I'm afraid of a feeling, that is avoidance. When I close a door because of something that already happened, something a person already showed me, something my body already registered as a true reading, that is a boundary. That is me taking care of myself.
• 19:27
  The question, it turns out, isn't whether or not am I closing a door. The question, like Bluebeard's new wife, is what is on the other side of this door? And how do I know it's there? If the answer is, I imagine it might be there, then I look harder before I move the latch. If the answer is, it already came through this door once and showed me its teeth, I close it, and I do not apologize for closing it.
• 19:59
  When I do this well, when I close the door based on real data, it does in fact help me avoid something. The rule book would call that proof. See, you're avoiding. You said you weren't avoidant and here you are avoiding. But the thing I am avoiding is not feeling and not trust and not connection.
• 20:21
  The thing I am avoiding is reenactment. Reenactment is the trap underneath all of this. It is the way memory time trauma tries to restage itself using new now time drama. It is a gravitational pull toward the familiar wound, the way I will walk toward the exact configuration of harm that hurt me before, because it is familiar, because some part of me believes that this time I will get it right. This time, the ending will be different.
• 20:53
  This time, if I am open enough and trusting enough and accommodating enough, the story will resolve the way it never did before. Reenactment dresses itself up as openness. It tells me that walking back into the burning house is bravery. It is not bravery. It is the rule book's evil twin, the one that does not keep me out of the war zone, but keeps me marching back into it.
• 21:20
  So when I let the data stand, when I close the door against the person who showed me what they do with my trust, I am avoiding. That's true. But I'm avoiding the reenactment. And avoiding reenactment is not the same as avoiding life. It's the precondition for having one.
• 21:40
  Which brings me back to the windowsill and the two stones I picked up tonight. I heard someone talking about something unrelated, and a held breath happened in me, and I pulled the episodes, the body one and the yes day one. And immediately, the rule book's voice and avoidance voice, which I am now better at telling apart from each other, but which both showed up, started in. You're overreacting. The episode about your body has nothing to do with what you heard.
• 22:12
  You're being avoidant. Real recovery would post them anyway. You're letting fear run the show. But I have learned to ask the question, what is on the other side of this door, And how do I know it is there? And here is the answer I found when I looked.
• 22:32
  I do not yet know. The held breath is real data, but it is data I have not finished reading. Something in me or someone in me registered a need to pause, and that need is not nothing, and it is not avoidance to honor a reading I have not finished decoding. It's the opposite. It's me believing my instrument enough to say I need more information before I move the latch.
• 22:59
  Pulling the episodes is not me bolting the door forever. It is me holding the latch still while my body and insiders have the conversation about what feels safe enough and when and for how long. And that conversation gets to take the time it takes. This is the thing I keep having to give myself permission for. I can change my mind.
• 23:24
  I can release these episodes next week or the week after or now or today or tomorrow or decide one of them is right or one of them needs to wait or decide both were always fine and I post them tomorrow. Or maybe I could read this essay instead. There are so many choices and none of them are failure. The latch moves in both directions. Rather than being a verdict, the pause is the space in which the verdict gets to form honestly, at the speed of my own nervous system in a body I'm finally listening to instead of overruling.
• 24:02
  I get to talk. I get to trust. I get to feel. And tonight, I also get to pause. And the pause is mine, and the latch is in my hand, and that is not the rule book keeping me small.
• 24:19
  It's not a shiny, happy blanket. It's me, finally taking up exactly as much room as the truth requires, no less and no more. I am not too much. I am not overreacting. I am listening.
• 24:38
  And the episodes will still be there when my body and my selves have finished saying what they need to say.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: 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,
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: and healing brings hope.