Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / ReEmpower-ing

Transcript

ReEmpower-ing · 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
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you. There are things I want you to know or maybe I want me to know. I'm practicing orienting to time and place and space, people and attachment. I don't even wanna say attachment anymore because it means something so different to me now.
• 1:28
  But for practice, here we go. It is currently the July, the week after our bowling event last weekend with friends. Their children are still gone. My therapist is practicing the fairies with me. And when the children come back, everyone is coming back, Nathan and all the kids.
• 2:02
  We're going to take them to the whales, like, out on the ocean in an actual ocean kind of boat to see orcas because my therapist has taught me that I am not a dying whale. And my friends have taught me that just like there is grounding, there is also watering. Sometimes we swim deep into the darkness for conversation, for therapy. Other times we surface to breathe, to feel the sun, to reset before going deep again. With my tribal friends, we talked about this and how that means there is also airing, adding the good things that alive us, which I think is the opposite of deprivation.
• 3:17
  And that is what these months have been, putting my own life back together again, reclaiming myself, my homecoming, my podcast, the community, the nonprofit, my family, my life, my lungs, and it feels amazing. There is also firing things that ignite us with passion and advocacy, even healthy anger. And today's therapy was a fire kind of session. We did talk about the actual fire today, the memory time one. That feels private though, and I don't wanna talk about it more today, which I think is a fair boundary, which I'm also practicing, that no one has the right to my internal world.
• 4:47
  Like Chuck said when we interviewed him on the podcast. My therapist said that it's true the fire is a tragedy. In now time, it is a tragedy, not just memory time. And also, it's something sacred and beautiful, Not the fire itself, but the relationship with them I had, being loved like that for a season when I was little. But just like Christine Forner said, it's impossible to be a bad child.
• 5:35
  She said all children are capable of secure attachment. If they have even one model of it, then we have capacity, full stop. No one can put a label on our head that says we don't. And if we go through hard things, then therapy helps us remember it. That it is in us already the capacity for secure attachment.
• 6:12
  And even if you didn't get the model when you were little, that's what therapists are for. They become the model. So as long as you had one experience or a good therapist with good therapy who knew how to give good help, then you will have secure attachment. And that when we are anxious or avoidant or disorganized, it's because we are not getting good help or having a good therapist or something that is traumatic is bringing that forward. And even then, we should notice because it means something is wrong.
• 7:06
  Not we are wrong or our attachment response is wrong. It's never wrong. It's always information. I don't mean that it's easy. My therapist says we have this script.
• 7:24
  The way we talk about in symposiums with social contracts, where acts of kindness have been transactional with our abusers, where we think we owe them something if we receive kindness or care or attention. But that leaves us constantly in emotional debt, and that is always abuse. And adding to that shiny happy, she said, I have years to overcome. But all of it, memory time or now time, is a lie to control me. She said it's not true, that all kinds of people all the time can do nice things just because they want to.
• 8:25
  That I can do nice things just because I want to. It doesn't have to be transactional. She said when we are held in debt emotionally or mentally, verbally, financially, that it is gross, that it is a very bad abuse of power, that it is toxically conditional support, and that is not relationship. That made me so nauseous. I transitioned instead to talking about the kids and how what I had been through impacted them and the moral injury of that.
• 9:13
  And she said, no, no, no. They are okay. They are not in crisis because you protected them from the crisis. You distracted them. You empowered them.
• 9:34
  You gave them different things to do. And when that wasn't working, you left, and you fled with them to safety, which did protect them. And protecting them is repair. And spending time with them and processing with them now is healing. They are okay.
• 10:07
  And that made me weep. But therapy, she said, will help you not do that again, will help you not go back, will help you not repeat this anymore. Anytime someone is telling you that you can't set your own schedule, that you can't go see your friends or spend time in conversation with other people or go to meetings or do what you want to do or say what you want to say when you cannot say no. That is always abuse. I told her that made me want to cry and vomit at the same time.
• 11:14
  She said I can. It's just awkward, and it made me laugh. She's so funny. She said the reason that that happens, that isolation, is because the only way the only way groomers and abusers can get what they want from us is to isolate us, whether we are young or whether we are grown. And that she said is a sophisticated system of control.
• 12:10
  Refined, exploiting the wounds already in us to get what they want from us. And that our body's responding to that is appropriate, is correct, is right, is exactly the thing our bodies are supposed to do. And even when we are fawning for safety, that is our nervous system locked in appeasement. We are trying to keep the peace and that is not consent. That is compliance.
• 13:05
  That is shiny, happy. And she said, the third person to tell me this, attachment cannot be weaponized. We are not responsible for someone else's attachment problems. That is their nervous system talking to them, not to us. If anyone tries to make us responsible for their attachment problems, that is displacement and enactment, which I didn't even know was not the same as reenactment.
• 13:49
  It's similar, but not the same. It means acting it out instead of talking about it. And there's no space for consent in that either. I told her how I got caught in that loop, where I couldn't ask for help because I thought I would die, but I also couldn't say no or they would die. My mother would die.
• 14:29
  These echoes of trauma, my foster parents would die. And my therapist talked about disempowerment and the vulnerability that I have been in. She said, You are an indigenous disabled person in poverty. And anything that makes your life harder is abusive. Anything that does not make your life better is not love or support for you or of you.
• 15:27
  And she said, it is bad enough, gross enough for you to be oppressed with that kind of aggression. But when others exploit you and use you for their benefit and take away the little good that you did have, that's colonization. She said colonizers steal people and land. Even when it's metaphorical or internal with someone else's internal hellscape polluting mine. This reminded me what Chuck said about the colonization of safety as being the absence of danger.
• 16:45
  But safety was never about the absence of danger. It has always been about community and nurture. She agreed with this, my therapist, and said for me to be punished for wanting to be with community was gaslighting, was domestic violence, interpersonal violence. And it was the exploitation of shiny happy, That that's what happens even with church, where we are so desperate. Where in that shiny happy context, there's the binary thinking of things as good and evil, me as evil, trying so hard to get to God who is good.
• 17:58
  That I align myself with the oppressor because attunement, because the mammal need for community, for safety. But that means internalizing myself as bad with the false shame that was never mine to carry, not in memory time and not in now time. Because no one who loves us shames us. When we are also targeted by threats, whether those threats happen when we are little as part of the abuse cycle or when we are adults, whether that abuse cycle is interpersonal violence, online bullying, or parasocial eroticizing, which is in itself sexual violence, even if we never have contact. This is religious trauma weaponized, attachment wounds weaponized, hypnotic induction of If you try hard enough, I will give you approval.
• 19:52
  But approval is not the same as love, and I will not love you because you are bad. So you must try harder and harder and do more and do more. And I will punish you for being so bad until you are good at being punished. These are double binds. That is not parenting.
• 20:25
  That is not relationship. That is not healthy, that is always abuse. And as adults, when we land in good therapy, what matters is that we stop doing that to ourselves, that we don't betray ourselves anymore. Because here's the thing, attunement comes before attachment, like Chuck said. But when there are threats, we attune externally to our environment.
• 21:21
  And this is the birth of fawning when we are attuning to others instead of to ourselves. But when our environment is safe and all of our ships are safe enough, we attune to ourselves, and we don't have to be anything for anyone else. We don't have to do anything for anyone else. What we do and what we give is expression and what we choose and what we want because this is who I am. Not because you said I was bad if I don't.
• 22:18
  Not because it feels like failing if I can't. Not because you'll tell the world how bad I am if I don't give you what you want. That's blackmail. That is not relationship. That is entrapment.
• 22:43
  That is double binds. That is abuse. And we are adults with adult resources and good therapists and safety in the world despite all they are trying to do to it. And when we are firing, we have had enough. We are done.
• 23:12
  We release that as Doctor. Tema talked about in her interview, and we come home to ourselves. We be who we were born to be because we were born this way, because this is me, because this is who I am and how I take up space in the world. And if you truly believe in me and want me to be all that I can be because you love me, then it means empowering me to take up space, to create, to have breath in my lungs so that I can speak and write and sing and paint and do all the things that keep me alive. You are responsible for keeping you alive.
• 24:19
  And when we can do this parallel on journeys side by side, it is a beautiful and sacred thing. But if someone tries to steal your breath, that is abuse. That is violence. It is an act of war on your soul, and it is not okay. We cannot get distracted by all that is wrong in the world that we forget who we are, that we forget to be ourselves, that we lose touch with the reality that is inside us, that we let go of the ground beneath our feet or the sky above our heads or the sun upon our faces.
• 25:15
  And when it rains, let the earth cry with us. And when the wind blows cold, let the earth embrace us. And when we are hungry, let us feed our souls. And when we are thirsty, let us learn to care and receive care. And when we are foggy, let us come back home to ourselves again, centered in who we are, reclaiming our lives for what we want them to be and recognizing who around us is empowering us to do that, to be ourselves, and immerse ourselves in that world that is safe enough.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Don't hide yourself in regret. Just love yourself when
• 29:25
  Speaker 4: you're set. I'm on the right
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: track, baby. I was born this way.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: 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. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
• 30:12
  We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too. That's what peer support is all about.
• 30:40
  Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.