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Hereticness · 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: I'm going to talk about a horror
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: movie. Nothing gory, But to
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: make it more fun, the children are all here for Thanksgiving, so you may hear them screaming or playing in the background. But they are happy and contented and playing a board game right now.
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: The movie I'm talking about is Heretic. So if you don't want
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: to listen to it or hear about it, you can skip this episode. But many of you may have seen it or heard about it by now. And, also, it's hard enough for some of us that some can't or won't or haven't. But I wanna share some things, especially since we've been talking about religious trauma. The movie premise, of course, is two female young missionaries because they're always young.
• 2:03
  If you didn't know, boys would go for two years when they're 18, and girls go for eighteen months once they turn 19. So they're almost always young unless they are what we call senior missionaries and older adults who are retired. But the movie premise, yes, is two young missionaries who knock on a door of a man who invites them inside to have the discussions, which is what they're called, discussions, but ends up locking them inside and keeping them, and they have to find their way out of the home. That's the easy version of what the movie is about. The suspense, of course, is them trying to get out of the home and what happens to them along the way, but it's not the focus.
• 3:09
  The focus is metaphor after metaphor about what it's like to join the church and try to leave it.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: It was powerful timing in my life that it came out when it did, and that's why
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: I wanna share about it. So some things may be spoilers if you haven't seen it yet. And also for the context of the podcast, I will keep things as gentle as I can, but there are some things I need to say. For lots of us, it's super activating, Like, literally a movie made about all of your deepest triggers and wounds and activations. It's pretty horrific.
• 4:03
  Not the movie itself. The movie itself is mostly just suspenseful with the only two or three scenes of gore that are related not to the movie itself, almost seeming irrelevant, That is part of the metaphor. Because what happens ultimately symbolically is that the sister missionaries move from room to room in the house in an descending fashion, which is an inverted temple ceremony where we move from room to room in an ascending fashion, meaning we go higher and higher symbolically and literally. This is not anything that's inappropriate to share. Anyone who goes to the public open house of a temple can experience that or see what we're talking about.
• 5:01
  That when you go to the temple, there's a room where you sit and learn, and then you go higher into a different room, like up a ramp or upstairs, depends on the temple and how it's built. You go into another room. In the second room, you participate differently rather than only being instructed. And then you go up higher up a ramp or into another room. Up a ramp or upstairs again, depending on the temple.
• 5:34
  Into, like, what is considered the holiest room, literally to meet God. And in a movie, they start out in one room for the discussions and then go to another room to participate,
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: and then go down the stairs to another room to receive their consequences
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Really is what it is. Right? Whether they are blessings or punishments. The result of our choices, that's part of the religious trauma experience, That we deserve what we get. That my difficult circumstances on earth are because I didn't qualify before I was ever born.
• 6:24
  And that blessings I receive are because God has approved of me. Again, I'm not speaking to people's actual faith. I am talking about religious trauma specifically. There's a difference, I think. When the missionaries first arrive at the home and he first opens the door, one of the first things that they mention, which is true to life, is that they cannot enter if his wife is not home because they are females and can't be alone with a male.
• 7:02
  That's true. In the church, we're not allowed to be with opposite gendered people without our spouse present, And it's true for the missionaries, male missionaries, because it's all very gendered. Male missionaries cannot be alone with a female investigator is what they're called, people they're bringing into the church. And sister or female missionaries can't be alone with a male person without another female present. So that is true to life.
• 7:40
  But what he tells them is that his wife is inside baking, and so she will bring them pie so they can come in because his wife is home. It is one of the reasons I wanted to join the church, because I already had a sense of a feminine divine, and they were the only church that named it explicitly. Oh, yes. We have a heavenly mother. She's in here somewhere.
• 8:22
  Come on. Join us. Come in. Come in. But, of course, there is no wife.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: And, also, there are many, but
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: that's for later. The other thing that happens so quickly, you almost don't notice it until you've reached the end of the film or go back to rewatch it again, where he says, you can come in if you don't mind steel walls and doors and ceilings.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: But, of course, when you're entering a home, you don't think about what it's made of. So they just sort of laugh it off and enter, thus consenting to their own entrapment.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Except not really because they didn't know the implications. And that happens at the temple too, where you have to prepare to be able to go. And that includes a lot of following rules and shiny happy blankets To be worthy. No coffee, tea, or alcohol. Laws about chastity.
• 9:58
  Rules about other expectations of what you are supposed to do as a faithful member of the church, meaning loyalty to the church. Not just faith, which again is something different. I mean, this specific church organization, this specific company. That's what they call it actually inside the temple. There's only so many seats.
• 10:34
  Right? Again, that's public information. You can see it at any open house. But each group that's going through the temple at a time, you know, like a little class, that group is called a company.
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: But they don't mean company like organization necessarily, not explicitly. They mean company like the groups of pioneers who went west after they were chased out of Missouri.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: There's a whole history to it. They were poor and had nothing, many of them, and either walked on their own or using hand carts that they pulled with their own bodies even when they didn't have animals to pull them for them. They are called the hand cart companies. So it all overlaps in history and time, memory time and now time, memory time that wasn't even my time. The later implication that they don't realize they're consenting to when they enter the house is that their cell phone won't work inside the house, which is why they can't call for help.
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: Inside the temple, there are promises or what is called covenants
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: that you're required to make. I'm not going to give this explicit details of that, but it's all public on the church website, so it's not secret. It's sacred, they say. But the covenants include not talking about what happens inside the temple
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: and about giving all of your resources to the church and all of your obedience
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: and not having sex with anyone except your spouse. So it's similar to the movie and the metaphor of the movie of their consenting that isn't consent at all because they don't understand the implications. That's what happens with the temple too. You don't know until you're there to what you're consenting to, and then it's too late, like the girls who can't call for help.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: He also lights a candle that you don't know until later in the scene is the source of the
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: smell that they think is the pie that the wife is making. Except she's not there. This reminded me of how they say that they support women or how women participate, and also it's only on the terms of men.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: It's not real. Even the scripture they say dedicated to the praise an encouragement for the role of women, even the wife of Joseph Smith, was
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: actually her punishment and her shame when she would not consent to polygamy. This is what starts the movie, that candle and that concept. And the movie ends with women in cages, women who have already been trapped, representing polygamy,
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: which is part of the church history and
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: the entrapment of women through submissive roles and oppression,
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: containing them where they still willingly stick out their fingers for their nails to be trimmed when their fingers are cut off.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Those are the only gory scenes that I will reference. What I have already said, the wounds being symbolic of the punishments and happening in the same place where the punishments are said to happen. That if you talk
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: ill or against the church or disclose the temple secrets of how severely you'll be punished in mortality and specifically how those are the symbols of where the injuries happen and the different places in the movie.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: And then this finger. Nothing else is gory, although there are some jump scenes, and most of it really is suspense. But I'm not talking about a review of the movie. I wanna talk about the metaphors. I need to say the things out loud, the metaphors in truth, literally.
• 16:22
  In the next room, he plays the music over and over and over, not just the discussion of how songs are taken from earlier songs and rebranded and remixed and sold to new generations, But the metaphor that is for intergenerational trauma, the passing down of hypnotic induction, and the moral injury that results
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: like bugs coming out of the pipe. There's a whole scene where they use monopoly, a game invented by a woman and stolen and sold by a man rebranded, and then the different versions of it since as
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: metaphors for the rebranding of religion in different places in the world, different populations in the world, different generations in the world. It was a painful piece for me still too fresh from finding out what I thought was directly sourced as just being copied and plagiarized Her mother works and documents known at the time.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: So while it is an intense and thought provoking scene, mostly I just felt sad. But the throat punch of grief that came when they had to choose between doors
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: of belief or unbelief. And both doors took them down to the same room with no way out. It was devastating. In talking about it with my therapist today
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: and other hard things in my life and recovery. It reminded me of the ship from 2020, not just the pandemic or being isolated and quarantined with the children in the country, which was the right thing for them,
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: even if hard for me, but also the losing of my therapist and being left in that metaphor of being on the ship trying to get to the other side. And then just left in that storm all by myself. And now it took me four years to get to the other side, five now. To be safe, to be well enough to try again, to continue my own journey of my own life and its healing, my healing. And by the time this airs, I will have been with my therapist for more than two years, which is epic and powerful.
• 20:06
  It means we are connected and working well together and just getting started. And she has said to me before, there's no way out except through, meaning through the hard things. And, also, that can get us trapped to or even in danger.
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: I have been holding myself hostage,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: which itself is a reenactment. Through hard things the last couple of years, trying so hard, trying harder and harder, wanting to do it right, clinging to hope and daydreams. While my therapist is saying, danger, danger. While my intuition is saying, danger, danger. While I know it felt safe enough to step into the house, I also had awareness that maybe I shouldn't have, not because all houses are dangerous, but because I wasn't ready, because I didn't know what I was consenting to, because I couldn't see clearly, because I didn't have all the information, because I need to focus on me and my therapy.
• 22:12
  In the movie, he tells them there's no way out of the house except to go through it. And, also, he says at one point, almost in passing, you saw my house, that it's built on this cliff. And when I watched it, I thought, oh, that makes sense because there's no just back door into a yard that you can get out and go through. But the girls are just pushing through and pushing through to get to the back of the house to get out. And he pointed out that his house is built on a cliff.
• 22:54
  And I use that in my memory time to understand that it was built underground, and that is why they had to go down and go through because that is what my memory time house was built like. And I have for months used that analogy against myself that I have to go through it to get better. So stay, don't run away, Try harder. Get through it. It will get better on the other side.
• 23:30
  Like the ship. I just have to get to the other side. If I just keep trying, that will be moving forward. It will get better. But today, it was my therapist who said, no.
• 23:53
  When she gets to the very last door at the very end of the movie, if she had opened that door,
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: she would have fallen. The house was built on a cliff. There was no way to win.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: If I had stayed in the church as a gay person, I would have been cast out anyway. If I am not safe in relationships, I will be hurt anyway. And it's not even about what other people are doing or not doing. It is about what I'm doing myself to myself. I'm the one opening the door.
• 24:56
  I'm the one who's stepping out. I'm the one who's falling off the cliff. I hadn't even connected on my own that if she had opened the last door, she would have fallen off the
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: cliff to her death.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: And I have felt that in my life. This will be the end of me. I cannot win this.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: And my therapist said, don't open the door. This doesn't have to be the end of you. In the movie, she goes backwards, back the way she came, following her own path to the beginning
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: to find a different way out. She will fall off the cliff if she goes through the back door, and she has no control over the front door. Literally, the controls are hidden, and even he knows how to find them, but she doesn't know how to work them even if she did find them. So when hard things happen or there is trauma and deprivation, Sometimes we can't get out. Sometimes we can't control the situation.
• 26:38
  Sometimes there's not a way to make it better. In therapy, when we talked about the controls for the door, she said, They were hidden right there behind the switch. And I said, I know, and I feel like that in my own life, that the control is right there. I'm so close to being able to figure it out, but I can't. And she's like, no, that's the problem with trauma and deprivation.
• 27:06
  You don't have access. You don't have knowledge. You don't have what you need to be able to do the things. I had so quickly turned to trauma. I had so quickly turned to
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: myself to blame and shame, what I could not do and what I could not control instead of just recognizing it as that and finding a different way out,
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: following my own path back to safe enough. So if
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: I am in a situation that is causing me to be in danger, or if
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: I have followed my own path that put me in danger, I don't have to stay in danger.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: I can find a way out. I don't have to jump over the cliff and fall into the abyss.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: Even if I can't undo what has already been done,
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: I can find a way out, back to what is safe enough.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: And like the girl at the end of the
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: movie collapsing on the ground,
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: in the grass and weeds with nature all around her.
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: Part of getting back to safety is getting grounded
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: and waiting for help to come. Pausing, sitting down, taking a rest, having time and space to recover while help comes and letting help come. I don't have to stay in the house. I have come too far and worked too hard to create my own life, to lose it now, to be lost now, to give it up now.
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: I have to choose me and follow my own path back to safety
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: and then collapse on the ground, allowing myself to receive help and care and doing my own work to be grounded and safe. It's one of the hard pieces of therapy, of healing and recovery, to own my own path of healing, that no one is coming to rescue me, that even though what has been done to me and not done for me is not my fault, it's still my responsibility to heal me. That I want to be well, that I choose to be well, that I do the work to be well. And the memory of what is good,
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: Even when therapy seems scary and the journey is hard, that good stays with me like a butterfly landing on my finger
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: when I'm safe again.
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: It is not lost on me indigenously, wolf womanly, wildly,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: that my journey has taken me through the waters of tears, of being my own ship to get to the other side, And now through the earth, through a land of terror, through a house of entrapment
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: That I have been through water and earth to now find air again.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: And for me in therapy, that means facing the fire again.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: 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.