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Sharing · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:10
  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.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: The audio today about the Al Anon book, how it works. I know that we are working on step one, which is, like, 45 or something. But because I am completely brand new, I am still catching up on the other thing. So I'm on page I mean, chapter five for sharing, which starts out about not being ready to take action, which I feel like you have told me lots of times, and it's still not sinking in. So I'm practicing pausing, practicing not reacting or responding.
• 1:46
  The first part about recognizing alcoholism, about having accepted it as normal and not feeling overly concerned, I totally can feel that as far as my baseline just being off. Or like, I had a therapy. I had a therapist who I would okay. It's hard. I just went to a grief group for the, like, second time and bawled my eyes out, and it was awful.
• 2:26
  So I'm still a little shaken. Apologies. I was doing a lot of work with, like, war zones and disaster sites and refugees and things and for years and years. And my therapist at one point was like, when do you want to talk about how war is your baseline? Rude.
• 2:51
  My therapist is rude. That was a truth bomb for me. That was unpleasant. But that is what it makes me think of here, about just accepting it as normal. So also because I don't want that for other people too.
• 3:12
  So it's hard, right? Because I want to be of some help. Because it's not okay that anybody's in war, but side quest, and I'm leaving my hat at the door. I'm trying to leave my hat at the door. There's a lot of hats.
• 3:34
  I appreciate the part about ignorance not being a sin or a crime, because I feel like that is going to happen, even just learning recovery and how recovery works and which book I'm supposed to have for which meaning. Like, I love all the books, but it's very contained, right? And this is the book we're focusing on right now. And I am not tracking that yet, so I'm having to watch for clues of which book are we in right now at which meeting. I'm just gonna carry around a whole backpack all the time, I think.
• 4:05
  But also, it's an obstacle to not seeing our situation realistically. And it definitely gets into that more on the next page, on page 22, how few of us manage to survive the chaos, confusion, and pain of an alcoholic environment without developing coping mechanisms that enabled us to protect ourselves emotionally from situations we didn't feel capable of handling. What I want to add to that, and I'm trying to leave my therapist's hat at the door, but what I'm feeling honestly just for myself is that it makes sense we didn't feel capable of handling it because we were children. Children. And children aren't supposed to have to handle all the things.
• 4:58
  But at least I had my own experience of that where and so even parenting my own children has been a lot of doing the opposite. I know what not to do to parent my kids. And Also, those are the bad things and hard things that happen. But with deprivation and then having literally just so literally just nobody there. And so then it's like in parenting moments of, I know what not to do because I don't want to do the terrible things.
• 5:45
  You don't kill your kids. I don't beat my kids. I don't abuse my kids. But the nurturing, how to be present, how to connect the things that aren't deprivation, I can't do the opposite of because it's just a hole. It's just missing.
• 6:04
  It's not there. And I don't know what to fill it in with. And that is what recovery has been helping me with already just this month or so, is learning the things that fill the holes so that I can do that for myself, model that for my kids, also parent better in some ways. I've done my best. I can hold space for that.
• 6:27
  And also, it's like a relational disability some. Like, I'm thinking about my ears and how I can't hear without my ears. Mean, my cochlear implants, right? That is how I can hear. But on the videos, I have to read the transcripts, and I have to use the captions.
• 6:56
  And if I am in a class or a training, I still prefer to have an interpreter. And so, like, there are some things I can do. I've worked hard to reclaim some things about music or listening or speaking. And I worked really hard on those things, but it doesn't make me a hearing person. I was not a hearing person.
• 7:20
  I'm a deaf person. I have good tools and good access so that I am more independent than I would have been fifty years ago or one hundred years ago, and I'm super grateful for that. And it adds passing privilege and all those things I'm aware of. But it doesn't make me hearing. Like, I don't hear what other people can hear.
• 7:44
  I don't know the things other people know. So I'm just feeling lots of layers of that one. And then this next section really was a bit of a sucker punch, throat punch, something. That sounds super aggressive. I might have to figure out the idiom or metaphor there.
• 8:05
  But at page 22 in the middle, emotional survival skills also can alter the way we see past events and relationships. When memories of horrors from the past are too shocking or painful, we may unconsciously block them out. We simply don't remember. We continue living. Yeah.
• 8:26
  So I mean, obviously for me and what that's dissociation for us. Right? Like, I think sometimes there's dissociation, like talking about multiplicity or about parts or even people who have awareness of and access to their parts. That's tricksy language, but I'm going to use it here. Even if you have like awareness and access to parts, it doesn't mean we have awareness and access to everything it all represents, right, like feelings and truths.
• 9:09
  Like dissociation, we can can be not remembering, so like amnesia. It can be not knowing our thoughts about something or not knowing our feelings about something. But it can also be not remembering that what we went through was indeed traumatic or depriving. And I'm just shocked that it's in the literature. I'm shocked, like pleasantly shocked.
• 9:40
  Not that I'm happy people struggle with this, but that they're addressing it so directly and that it's a thing other people also experience. Like they say later in the chapter, being less alone in that. And also being responsible for healing it, which is unpleasant. But it is continuing to control our lives by limiting or altering our behavior. Without being aware of it, we continue to react to the traumatic events of our past rather than to the reality of our lives today.
• 10:15
  When life went from loving and peaceful one minute to chaotic and dangerous the next, so that we never knew what to expect, many of us coped with the resulting sense of helplessness and confusion by simply by choosing to believe only one of these realities. We had to to survive because we're mammals. It's really hard. You warned me about intellectualizing. It's really hard.
• 10:43
  And, also, I know that because it's so hard for me to tolerate the right brain stuff and the feeling stuff that, like, my left brain has worked really hard to find language for it. So I'm trying to make lace out of that, trying to hold both the experience and what I'm learning and the language. But dissociation is rough. We denied ourselves the enjoyment of kindness, love, pleasure, and goodwill. We remained perpetually on guard.
• 11:17
  We forgot we ever had feelings. We succeeded in insulating ourselves so well that we no longer participated enthusiastically in life. That reminded me of what you've taught me about consent, that consent isn't just like you can't say yes if you can't say no, But also enthusiastic consent. But I've been thinking about that as I begin recovery and my steps. What does enthusiastically consenting to my own recovery even look like?
• 11:58
  It means I have to read this book, and it means I need to share with you. It means I had to show up to that meeting today and cry in front of people I don't even know. I'm on page 23. Few of us intentionally refused to see the reality of our lives or the circumstances in which we found ourselves, but we had unknowingly blocked out whole segments of our past and present, unconsciously convinced ourselves that what we saw happening simply wasn't so. We were doing the best we could at the time trying to survive, to adapt the way our lives were affected by alcoholism before we found the help.
• 12:36
  This is where I'm at right now. Here's my step zero on my way to step one. We come to see how much energy was previously spent on escaping, ignoring, fleeing, and denying. We recognize that today our energy can be put to more constructive use in healing ourselves and our relationships. Reality interfered with our plans.
• 12:59
  Crisis shattered the fantasy. Our perceptions proved unreliable, and we were increasingly less able to cope. We couldn't even trust our own memories. This is where my life being unmanageable showed up for me. And if I'm going to survive, I don't mean that as a threat at all.
• 13:25
  But I mean survival is going to have to mean me choosing to live and show up in my own life. And I just went to this loss meeting, and I was profoundly struck by how many people talked about loved ones they had lost. And I shared my story briefly, but we were talking about how I can't talk about meetings, right? I'm just talking about my piece. How much words, English?
• 14:05
  How many of us share the experience of having lost someone who could love everyone else or who were struggling with their own trauma or whatever the story is but could not receive that love and care for themselves. And I am like, it got my attention for the first time that I'm in that category. I don't think my life is in imminent danger. I don't have any plans to harm myself or anything like that. And also, I will not survive if I do not learn how to ask for help outside of myself because I wouldn't be in this or as unmanageable if I could do it.
• 14:42
  I've already tried really hard, impossibly hard, desperately hard, and it's not working. So I need something outside of myself to help me. But I need that to be healthy, not waiting for rescue or more people that are going to harm me. I need safety. And I have to show up for myself and do this work for my recovery.
• 15:21
  So developing an ability on page 25, developing an ability to see things as they really are and to find healthier, more appropriate ways of dealing with the people and circumstances we encounter is not always easy or uncomfortable. I have been highly uncomfortable since beginning recovery and talking to people. I am super introverted. I do not like people. I have talked to more people in the last four weeks than I've ever talked to in my whole life, like, hands down.
• 15:58
  It has been a lot. That is what it feels like. It has been a lot. And also, it has been safe and liberating in ways that have been completely unexpected. So here's the part that hurt for me the most.
• 16:21
  That is my now time crisis. Lots of memory time stuff. I need to work on childhood stuff. I need to bring recovery to those pieces of my life. And also my now time is this line on page 25.
• 16:34
  The people we have turned to for love and acknowledgment are incapable of giving it or to recognize and recognizing our own stuff. So that is my reenactment. That is my rerun. That is my rerun of how I'm doing to myself what was done to me in childhood. And that's not okay with me.
• 16:59
  That is not okay with me. So I have to heal and grow and care for myself in ways that no one has. But it's really hard to figure that out. As long as we continue to hide the truth from ourselves, it will continue to fester inside. We may have needed to tough things out alone, but we are no longer struggling alone.
• 17:31
  That's the piece that keeps making me cry, the not being alone anymore part. 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.