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Annihilation Anxiety · 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.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Okay. So, you know we talked about infanticidal attachment earlier this year, and using what I learned from that, I realized I am in these scenarios of reenacting specifically like, y'all, I've been working on this for ten years. Finally, Finally. Finally. Getting to the bottom, not the bottom.
• 1:24
  There's more. I know. Therapy. And also finally getting to the pieces of figuring out what the reenactment actually is. Like, for me, what is it that I'm reenacting?
• 1:38
  All this stuff with church, all this stuff with denying sexuality or orientation and isolating myself from my own cultures, whether that is my indigenous heritage, my Jewish heritage, my deaf culture with getting cochlear implants or my or growing up shiny happy and then getting caught up in culty church, like relationships where I'm completely abandoned in them or cannot be myself at all. And ultimately, having to look at what does all of this have in common. And y'all, it has taken me ten years. You have listened. You have been along the ride.
• 2:25
  Why is she going on this side quest? Why is she going on this side quest? Because I am looking for the clues to my own life, and all of it is relevant, and all of it is about dissociation. If I weren't dissociating, I could see it much more easily, but I cannot. And so here we are chasing breadcrumbs to realizing that my social contract from growing up is that I cannot say no or they will die, but I cannot ask for help when things are bad or I will die.
• 3:00
  Right? So I've made it that far. You all have heard pieces of that that are public. And also, this morning, interviewing someone for the podcast who's in Belgium, you will hear it. She talks about infanticidal attachment.
• 3:20
  When she gave a presentation, I shared some of the information in the community. And then when I was the ask the expert for ISSTD, she came to one of the sessions, and we had this amazing conversation about infanticidal attachment and attachment generally, and we learned so much from each other, and she's also joined ISSTD as faculty. So I got to know her enough to be like, hey, come on the podcast, and let's talk about this. So, yes, it was a lovely conversation. But once again, because dissociation, she's just talking about all the things.
• 3:56
  And in passing, I hear a phrase I have never heard before. And it has been like a key that unlocks everything. I don't even know what to tell you. When we are talking about infanticidal attachment and that feeling like we are already dead or we cannot exist or we have to unalive ourselves or we have to maintain the contract that all of that has already happened or else we will die anyway, those double binds from relational trauma where we are not allowed to exist for whatever reason. Even those folks where the story is not malicious, we're talking about the impact of relational trauma.
• 4:44
  That feeling, the fear itself is called annihilation anxiety. Y'all, it has a word, and we're going to Google it right now. Okay. This says, annihilation anxiety refers to a profound fear of losing one's identity or existence, often manifesting in various psychological conditions. Chicagoanalysis.org blog.
• 5:19
  Let's look at that. Mastering fear, understanding and overcoming anxiety. I will put the link to this in the show notes. This says, what is annihilation anxiety? It originates in early infancy, often before the child has the ability to verbalize or fully understand their emotions.
• 5:44
  It is a primal fear that can be reactivated later in life, particularly during times of stress. This type of anxiety is linked to a weakened ego, typically the result of trauma or excessive aggression, which makes the individual more vulnerable. The form of anxiety represents a deep seated fear of losing one's sense of self or being overwhelmed by internal or external forces. This fear can drive individuals to adopt particularly stubborn defense mechanisms as a way to protect themselves from perceived threats. Okay.
• 6:26
  So, like, in relationships, we feel like we're going to be swallowed up because we already have been as children. For those of us with printfication, things like that, right? And also when it becomes reenactment, then living out what I literally witnessed as an infant between my parents. You all, this is so big. I've already had to talk about it in therapy.
• 6:53
  I don't even know what to say. Like, this is why we get stuck in interpersonal violence. It's why we get stuck in culty experiences. It's why we give ourselves over to those experiences and then cannot leave those situations because we are so sucked in because it feels like annihilation. So there's attunement for those parts that, yes, we should feel dead, and then terror for those who are trying to get away from it.
• 7:25
  So that is part of the disorganized attachment showing up internally. It is literally a mapping opportunity. I can't even with all of this. Recognizing annihilation anxiety in daily life. While the term might sound clinical, annihilation anxiety can manifest in everyday situations.
• 7:44
  For example, individuals who experience overwhelming stress may find themselves gripped by a fear of losing control or being consumed by their emotions. This can lead to behaviors such as okay. Other behaviors. Oh, extreme perfectionism. That's fantastic.
• 8:02
  Okay. And then it goes to all the things, like acknowledging and coping, professional support, all of that. We're going to skip that. So that was just a little paragraph, but I'll I'll I'll cite it because it matters. Wisdom credit.
• 8:23
  Okay. Here's an encyclopedia. Let's see what nerdy things it has to say. In annihilation anxiety, the basic danger involves a threat to psychic survival experienced as a present menace or as an anticipation of an imminent catastrophe. So y'all, this goes back to relational trauma and why folks with relational trauma can be as or even more dissociative than those with physical or sexual abuse.
• 8:54
  Because if our relationships with our caregivers were not safe and stable, if our caregivers were themselves frightened or frightening, if our caregivers themselves had annihilation anxiety, like if they were grieving, like the story with my mom and my grandfather dying, and so she no longer had anyone to love her, so felt like she no longer existed, then that gets put on to me. So in that way, it's this present menace where everything feels like a threat, or our caregivers cannot help us not feel threatened because they feel threatened. It can be lots of reasons and show up lots of ways, but the point is that as children, even as infants, we feel like there is danger. We're going to get it wrong. We're going to lose approval.
• 9:50
  We're going to lose safety. Something else is going to happen. This imminent danger, this imminent catastrophe, the present menace, that hanging over us leads to helplessness in the face of inner or outer dangers in which we feel we cannot take protective or constructive action. Okay. Here's what is so big about that.
• 10:17
  When we experience fear, that is about an outside threat. But the panic that we have is actually about attachment, not the threat itself. It is the feeling helpless in response to the threat. It's in the brainstem, lower than the limbic system, and it's because of this piece where we did not have the people helping us or supporting us. This is the good that has been missing.
• 10:49
  Does that make sense? So yes, there are outside threats we should be afraid of, but when we have present, safe, caring caregivers, they protect us from those threats so we don't actually feel panic in response even when we are afraid because we're never helpless, because we are not alone and have help. But when we have relational trauma, when we have deprivation, when the good is missing, when our caregivers cannot function as caregivers, then we do not have protection, we do not have support, we do not have help, we do not have reassurance. And that is why we panic, because we do not have attachment. This encyclopedia says, the construct derives from Freud's 1926 view of a traumatic situation where the person is faced with a quantity of stimulation that he cannot discharge or master, which is a failure of self regulation.
• 11:58
  Okay. So taking it out of history and bringing it to what we've learned since, right, updating this, we know two things specifically about the neurological system from the fMRI studies. I mean, we know lots from that. But we know, one, that when there is lots of trauma happening close together, then even if those are single incident traumas, it still neurologically counts as complex trauma because there's no time to recover in between them. And we now know part of attachment is co regulation that children should be co regulated with, that we support regulation in children until they are growing, until they are able to do it more and more on their own.
• 12:46
  So in the context of children, Freud was writing about adults. But with children, self regulation is always going to fail because they cannot. So anytime we are in a place of functioning where we cannot regulate ourselves, when we are overwhelmed and cannot self regulate, it is not because our relationships are failing us or our partners are failing us, it is because we are in memory time younger parts. It is a signal that we are dealing with child developmental stuff. So in the context of relationships, this is what we're talking about when we say we cannot be in adult relationships with children.
• 13:30
  We can love entire systems, which include littles, and, also, it is our own responsibility to tend to our own littles because if we are in adult relationships with little parts, that is incestuous. That is reenactment. Our adult selves in now time have capacity to tend to ourselves even from memory time folks to use outside help like recovery or therapy to deal with trauma and deprivation, but that cannot be the responsibility of our partner because it becomes a reenactment of annihilation anxiety. The encyclopedia says, the experience of overwhelmed helplessness. Oh, wow.
• 14:22
  This is fascinating. Used to be called okay. Wow. Wow. Wow.
• 14:30
  So the encyclopedia then talks about how that overwhelming helplessness in now time as adults, they used to call it psychotic anxiety. Unthinkable anxiety, nameless dread, biotrauma, basic anxiety, disintegration anxiety because it is happening in memory time. And so what we feel in now time as adults are feeling abandoned, mortified, suffocated, drowned in tolerable feeling states, losing control of ourselves mentally like we're going crazy, dissolving, being absorbed, invaded, shattered, or fading away. These are annihilation experiences that happen to us in memory time that we then reenact and experience in now time, and it is a safety issue. The encyclopedia says, annihilation experiences and anxieties are universal in early childhood where psychic dangers are regularly experienced as traumatic.
• 15:39
  Oh, wow. And they give eight examples that all of us experience in childhood at different times. Fears of being overwhelmed, fears of merging, like not being able to differentiate from the other person, fears of disintegration, like falling apart, fears of impingement, being stuck or trapped, loss of needed support, inability to cope, concern over survival, and responding with a catastrophic mentality. So anytime we are experiencing those kinds of symptoms, that is a red flag that relationship stuff needs to pause. As adults, we need to pause and go back to safety and stabilization because littles are present.
• 16:27
  Even if we don't know them, even if we don't have littles that are, like, have names and ages and all that, you don't need to give that information to anyone, not even your therapist. That is for you and how your system sees itself. We do need to talk about what we're experiencing with our therapist and the feelings about it. This is the influence, whether it's passive influence or direct influence or even switching overtly. These are memory time, little, young states when we experience it in adulthood.
• 17:04
  And when we don't work on it, it shows up through transference in therapy or relationships, and then those symptoms, thought patterns, and affect states and behaviors are especially resistant to change when they're defending against such anxieties. So it's harder for us to receive feedback when we're experiencing these things and harder for us to take it to therapy because we're so defensive that we will not see our own stuff, so we may not even talk about it with our therapist and instead focusing on what other people are doing wrong instead of our own fear of not surviving. So they say then that this can look psychotic, it can look borderline, it can look narcissistic, but it's memory time stuff showing up in now time. So, really, what we're talking about is emotional and relational flashback. Okay.
• 18:10
  So here's another website, which I will also put in the show notes that says she says something that has come to the forefront in the past year. So, like, even in the context of politics and all of that and all the polarization that's happening, especially in The States and our culture, this feeling of anxiety, discomfort, or something that's off that they can't quite put their finger on. They know they're not living their highest potential, but can't figure out what it is that holds them back, even if they've been doing personal development for years. They know about the concept of fear that we have primitive systems that make us believe we're being chased by a tiger even when we're not, the metaphorical tiger. Right?
• 18:56
  But there's something missing from all this that isn't resonating. The reason for this is that it's less about a fear of death and more about how their life and existence is valued by others. So this is the attachment piece, and this is what was talking about the difference between fear and panic. So when we're talking about fear of abandonment, fear of enmeshment, fear of retaliation, fear of being condemned, judged, or punished, these are annihilation anxieties. Being overwhelmed and unable to cope and losing control of ourselves, being entrapped in situations, being consumed by others, the disintegration of our identity, emptiness, meaningless, nothingness, violations and betrayals in that, the abandonment and not getting the support we need, feeling punished and persecuted by those who say they are caring for us.
• 19:57
  She says psychic trauma and its related fears have a philosophical or existential flavor to them. They're hard to describe, but once someone is able to identify that their fear, sadness, rage, overwhelm, or hopelessness is tied to one of these types of psychic anxieties, they are able to explore this in new ways that can help them get to a place of internal safety and peace beyond anything they have experienced before. So if we were to keep using the example of being chased by a tiger, it would be more resonant for many people to pinpoint why being chased by a tiger has such a lasting and lingering effect on their nervous system. The way to truly resonate with the human experience of fear is to acknowledge that along with having a parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, we have a social nervous system. Here we go.
• 20:55
  This is attachment. When we are faced with challenges and dangers, the lasting physiological imprints from these events are deeply tied to the meaning we make about how we are supported and valued by others, as well as what we contribute and how we are needed. If a person is being chased by a tiger, the actual deeper, darker feelings of fear that will continue to haunt them long afterwards may be tied to the idea that if they were being chased, it implies that they had been abandoned, betrayed, punished, or no longer needed by their tribe, family, or social group. Fears that are tied to this may be related to our own shame and guilt about not being enough. Then there's a quote from the book Adaptive Disclosure that says, even when service members talking about the military trauma, even when service members develop a life threat based stress injury in theater, meaning in the field, arguably the most pressing problem is not high states of fear and arousal, but rather the self condemnation and guilt that may arise from letting peers and leaders down because of a perceived or real temporary incapacitation in the field.
• 22:18
  So relationally, the same thing shows up when we cannot be what our partners are asking of us. In friendship, if we cannot do for our friends what they are needing from us, the self condemnation and the guilt and shame from that is enough to kill me. It feels life threatening. So she talks about how most of the research on trauma and post traumatic stress is focused on the physical danger side of threat. But with Bill Nash and Ruth Lanius, who is someone we have scheduled so many times to be on the podcast and they have things keep happening with scheduling, that it is an element beyond the fear that is affecting them.
• 23:06
  So she quotes Ruth Lanius as telling this story where she was working with a patient who was a war veteran, and the veteran was having trouble looking her in the eye. And Doctor. Lanius asked if he could tell her about this, not being able to look her in the eye, and he said, quote, I cannot look anyone in the eye for fear they will see the stain on my soul. Y'all, that's moral injury. So for me, that comes up with that I brought up children in shiny, happy world.
• 23:42
  It comes up for me that anytime I make a mistake in the community, that it has a ripple effect of making life harder for people instead of better like I wanted, that is moral injury. We also have experienced this as children when harm has happened not only to us, but also to siblings, or if we have witnessed parents in domestic violence, or if we have not been able to rescue our parents or our siblings. Y'all, that was my whole social contract. I was supposed to save my family, and I could not because I was a child. But what we experience is the life threatening event, the traumatic loss, the moral injury, and that is subdivided into bearing witness or perpetrating or failing to prevent, which gives us moral injury symptoms of guilt, shame, anger, disgust, and betrayal.
• 24:46
  When that gets tied to infanticidal attachment that's already there, it feels like evidence proving that we should not exist, which connects us back to annihilation anxiety, where when something distressing occurs, we feel that we are to blame for it. We didn't do enough to stop it. We were betrayed and unsupported and abandoned, and we are responsible for someone else's well-being beyond our capabilities. It feels like if we talk about all the ships, it feels like I am going to drown or die. Right?
• 25:31
  I'm going to drown. It's like a barely coded phrase that is easier to say than I feel like I'm going to die. I am going to drown trying to save you from the water because my job is to take care of your ship, and I don't even know that I have one. That is annihilation anxiety. That is the ultimate fawning where I am sacrificing myself to save you, and that will kill me every time.
• 26:08
  We cannot survive that. Oh my goodness. This is so much. I wanna look at one more. I found a forum on my ptsd.com.
• 26:18
  Again, I'll put the link for wisdom credit. I'll put it in the show notes. But this person is talking about annihilation anxiety. They said, Apparently it is not the type of anxiety that leads to flight, fight, freeze, or fun. It is much deeper.
• 26:36
  I think of myself in certain situations where something comes over me and it is so intense that I feel like I'm going insane. And I have to be honest, I can't even describe it. Like a state that is so terrifying it feels out of this world. It affects those of us who have been traumatized in our developmental stage of life, meaning like babies, infancy. Oh my goodness.
• 27:04
  He asked, does anyone have ideas what to do with it? And someone replied, cling to life with all you've got. That is maybe the most truest profound statement I have ever heard. Someone else describes it as nonlife. Here's what someone says from lived experience.
• 27:23
  It is a feeling of becoming totally unwound, shattered. For me, it is a feeling that I'm going completely insane. For others, it is the fear of death, but it is beyond fear. I don't have the capacity to use the four f's, flight, fight, freeze, and fawn, to escape from it. So although it is an anxiety, it does not follow the flight, fight, freeze, fawn responses that are typical because it's attachment.
• 27:50
  It's not response. An feeling of impending psychic or physical destruction. Okay. So this is interesting. Then someone else describes an article they found, and they basically sum it up saying that all infants at different times have their first experience with fear and that infants can comprehend fear.
• 28:18
  And when infants feel afraid, healthy attachment with healthy caregivers who are safe and attentive and responsive reassure the infant of safety through touch and warmth and being fed and clean, like all of those things that we do to take care of babies and holding them, the attachment. And the caregiver gives them this, and that reassures the event and teaches them that when I feel afraid, help comes. But when no one comes or those fears are dismissed, or as we grow up as children, our feelings are dismissed or our caregivers are not available, malicious or not, for whatever reason, our caregivers are not available to reassure or respond to us, and that includes like hypercritical parents, then that settling never comes. So our fear, our fear from whatever the threat is, then becomes the panic from lack of attachment. Because without the caregiver, we are helpless in infancy, but growing up as infants and children, but then as adults, we have not yet learned differently.
• 29:41
  So we stay in relationships that harm us. We stay in relationships that neglect us, or we drown ourselves, reenactment, in relationships, reenactment for me, in relationships where we cease to exist because we lose ourselves in caring for others. Y'all, we cannot survive that because to survive we have to exist, and to survive as adults, we have to care for ourselves. So, So to recap, healthy babies, infants, and young children encounter threats that cause them to experience fear. That is a natural and normal response.
• 30:37
  The child is not doing anything wrong. With safe and attentive, healthy caregivers, that fear is tended to through attachment experiences in which we are empowered to settle and regulate because of the attachment with our caregiver. But the panic that comes when we do not have responsive caregivers develops into a learned helplessness in response to fear. So not just that we re encounter the same fears or still have the fears, but we have already learned no one is going to help us. We are alone in them.
• 31:30
  That is that feeling of no one is throwing me a life raft here. It is why I didn't know as an adult I even had a ship. Okay. So I found this actual journal article that says individuals actively reenact past traumas as a way to master them. And then also, of course, reenactments occur inadvertently and result from the psychological vulnerabilities and defense strategies characteristic of trauma survivors.
• 32:07
  So the more we process our trauma, including the deprivation that allows trauma to happen, the more we decrease our chances of becoming involved in destructive reenactments. Okay. This is amazing because it's a free access article, and you can get to the whole text. It's an older article, but it's super helpful in some ways. I will link to it in the show notes as well.
• 32:38
  It talks about reenactments in the context of interpersonal violence or what they said back then, domestic violence, and revictimization. It says, we can find ourselves in reenactments, even as spontaneous behavioral repetitions, even if what we are repeating or reenacting was never verbalized or even remembered because we're expressing our internal states through physical action rather than words. And then points out that when we're infants, especially, our parents don't necessarily use words with us. We just witness and experience relationships and care or lack of care. I also like in the article how they talk about if reenactments are master things, then why do we not actually end up mastering them?
• 33:33
  So he talks he says that's just one category, that there's three other categories where reenactments are inadvertent and unintentional and can be caused by affective dysregulation and cognitive reactions that get responded to by other people. So what's interesting is they're talking really these are my words, not the author's words, but really this hypnotic induction that happens or can happen even with coercive control, which we'll circle back to later, where to super simplify it, like my friend said, when our picker is broken and if you hold up your and it's this visual they did for me where they held up a finger, like their pointer finger with all their other fingers down, like you're holding up a number one. But if your picker is like, you are the one I want for a friend, for a relationship, for whatever your ship is. Right? But if instead of pointing, if your picker is broken, then it's hooked.
• 34:37
  So, like, your finger is bent at the knuckle. Right? So then you have this hook. In sign language, it's like an x. But you have this hook.
• 34:45
  And if you connect with someone else who also has a broken picker, then those hooks hook each other. And then you are hooked into it, and it is really hard to get out of because you are literally hooked. So talking about learning to tell the difference between what feels good in my different ships in all my different ships, what feels good because it helps me grow and heal, and what feels familiar because it's really that hooking of the same social contract that I grew up with. And that's an example where dissociation comes into play because we're not always aware of what's happening. So it gives this example of a woman who was abused by her father and blamed herself for the abuse because that's the infanticidal attraction.
• 35:44
  Right? I deserve to be punished. I deserve to be harmed. I should not exist. I should be less than human.
• 35:52
  Found herself with someone who was themselves abusive. The unconscious attraction was rooted in a desire to get them to treat her well, which would have ameliorated feelings of self blame and badness. However, because it was reenactment that didn't work, so rather than actually mastering the inter the rather than actually conquering that, those feelings of shame, they just were brought to the surface as she continued to be involved in a destructive relationship where her needs were not met. Oh, this is really interesting. It says that in animal research, they have found that when animals are hyperaroused or hypervigilant, like, because of trauma, they actually avoid novelty and perseverate in familiar behavior regardless of the outcome.
• 36:51
  But in low states of low arousal, so healthy animals, they are the ones who seek novelty and are curious. So for those of us who have been through trauma and have experienced trauma, we can fall into dealing with other people at while in a high arousal state, sometimes even erotically, because past relationships were marked by terror, anxiety, and fear. So we perceive it as passion, but what we are attuned with is danger, which is why it's not actually good or safe for us because it is reenactment. Oh, so two people can get hooked together, like, with those finger hooks and that visual, if they are seeking out either powerful or caretaking figures in effort to solidify their own shaky self-concept or fragile sense of self. Survivors of childhood abuse who suffer from self hatred, an internal sense of badness, and a sense that they deserve mistreatment may gravitate to others who resonate with this also and thus reenact it with each other when they cannot save themselves because they themselves still need healing.
• 38:15
  I think we have seen this all over the place in friendships, in the community, and part of why we are staying we work so hard to stay present with healing rather than present with the trauma details, why we have to stay out of trance to stay present with the now time because it's our adult selves that can bring healing to the memory time. It gives another example. A man who was constantly preoccupied with abandonment because he had been abandoned continued to be plagued by unresolved dependency. To ensure that he was never again abandoned, he developed extremely possessive and clinging relationships with women. Since he was so suffocating, the women typically left him and he re experienced the pain of abandonment again and again.
• 39:13
  Through his own behavior, which was designed to prevent the loss, abandonment, and terror, he inadvertently caused the reenactment to occur. And then they give the example of when we've not integrated our feelings about our trauma or our emotional responses from memory time, we can then get flooded and overwhelmed by them in now time. It says, Intense anger, disappointment, and fear can be triggered in interpersonal relationships, and the present situation can be perceived and responded to in the same way as the old trauma. For example, a man who had not worked through his parents' neglect of him became flooded with rage, hurt, and disappointment when a friend failed to return a phone call. The man understood this omission as proof he was not cared about, which was a reenactment of his earlier relationship with his parents.
• 40:06
  The man then withdrew from his friend, which further recreated his isolation and loneliness. Then they talk about how we are susceptible to reenactments and repeated revictimization, like being harmed all over again with fresh trauma in relationships, when we lack the internal resources to know that we even can separate ourselves from our abusive partners, to separate ourselves from abuse or exploitation or even culty situations. With that, and then with the difficulty we have in trusting others or even knowing we're allowed to ask for help, much less having capacity to ask for help or turn to others to get the help that we so badly require. He says, this learned helplessness model also plays a role in our tolerance for abuse since we believe nothing could be done about it anyway. Deep seated disturbances and identity, self-concept, and security in the world can also render individuals vulnerable to being enticed by others who resonate with encounter these ego deficits.
• 41:20
  Because of early trauma, a person can feel helpless, fragile, and out of control. In turn, the person may be extremely susceptible to anyone who can take control, who can gratify dependency needs or elegantly counter the individual's extreme sense of powerlessness, insecurity, and vulnerability. And this often leads to sexual victimization. And then it gives examples of abusive relationships and even therapy violations. Trauma survivors often tolerate mistreatment and abuse because of their habitual use of dissociative defenses.
• 41:59
  Whether it is physical abuse, abusive remarks, emotional neglect, individuals with a history of trauma seem to minimize, block out, not see, and tolerate such abuse. Although this may have an adaptive value since it allows the person to tolerate the situation, simultaneously, it will inhibit appropriate action resulting in the past abuse. So then it's we as adults allowing ourselves to be harmed in ways we had no choice about when we were little. That's why we cannot stay. We have to leave.
• 42:35
  We have to choose safety. We have to say the things. We have to write the things. We have to do the things to choose safety. We cannot rescue those from memory time and bring them into a now time that is no different than our past.
• 42:53
  It says, Ongoing reenactments are a reflection that a patient is continuing to act in stuck and rigidified ways that lead to revictimization and feelings of shame, helplessness, and hopelessness. As the patient becomes aware that a pattern of dysfunction is evident, the therapist can suggest that it might be useful to be curious about it and understand it using framework and explore which of the patterns of reenactment could be playing a role and how annihilation anxiety might be part of the dynamic. It may be more helpful to intimate that a pattern of destructive interaction appears to be occurring, and then explore further how this takes place, rather than to say explicitly that we're reenacting a trauma. Oh, wow. It says we're not, this goes back to attachment.
• 43:51
  We're not actually reenacting past traumas. We are reenacting traumatic relationships. That is a game changer to understand. I am blown. Once both the patient and the therapist understand what the patient is doing that contributes to the reenactment, the next task is to explore why the patient feels and acts in such ways.
• 44:16
  Inevitably, this leads back historically to the traumatization that triggered and continues to cause the resulting behaviors and feelings. And then talking about doing memory work and memory time work, the overwhelming fear, terror, and related beliefs that the patient originally experienced in childhood must first be validated and acknowledged. Then in order to break the pattern, the patient must process and work through the entire traumatic experience throughout therapy. Oh my goodness, we have to say the things. There's no way to get better and not say the things, even though it feels like I'm gonna die if I say them.
• 44:56
  I have to say the things. And also, we have to be in a safe enough place to do so, so that we can develop that ego strength to be able to do that memory work. We have to be solid enough in who we are and safe enough in now time to be able to stay in now time while going back to memory time, which explains why all of that work for me paused for five years after I lost the therapist and has only just now restarted. This was so helpful. I have so much more to say about this, but I need to take it to therapy.
• 45:34
  We will be talking about it. I'm gonna put all of the links I referenced in the show notes. And I know it was oversimplified because I'm trying to wrestle with it in real time and pragmatically, not just talk about difficult concepts clinically. So I hope that was helpful for someone just even getting language for the feeling. So if disorganized attachment is the response to the kind of care we received when we did not get care and our care givers were harming us or harmful, frightened or frightening, then the feeling that results is annihilation anxiety, which is absolutely an appropriate response when we are in process of being annihilated.
• 46:23
  Oh my goodness. This is epic.
• 46:39
  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. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
• 47:06
  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.
• 47:34
  Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.