Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Pandemic Response, Part Two

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Pandemic Response, Part Two · 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 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.
• 1:01
  You guys have blown up my mailbox since hearing the therapist on the podcast. I'm so glad that you found it helpful and so glad that you appreciated hearing from her. I know that all of those who have ever written in saying how much that the podcast has helped you have really been learning from her more than me because she is the one who helped me and taught me and I appreciate her sharing her videos and letting us share them with you. I'm glad that you found them helpful. It did take me some time to look at them and not just listen to them, and I think what helped was talking about how what I was really feeling was grief and that grief is a big trigger for me in different ways that I had not even realized or not connected for others inside because of different things from the past.
• 2:13
  And so realizing the context of some of my big feelings the last six months and what's been going on has been helpful in facing some of the hard things from the past, but also dealing with the present where things have transitioned and are really okay. Like the husband told us that time about endings not being forever or a betrayal or saying goodbye not even having to be an ending Because really the therapist is there and we are here and everything is okay. So I was in the end able to look at the videos and watch them And there was a very deep response of many layers inside about others inside getting to see her and hear her. And it all sort of came rushing back to me in different ways of feeling in that co conscious way of more things I remembered and more things I felt and more things I learned. And it was really good for me, but it was also very hard, but in a good healing way.
• 3:35
  And I even talked to her about this and mentioned it, and she said something that was actually kind of powerful about how all of this healing work. And these these are my words of what she said, not not a quote. That's just private. But she said something about inviting them to the present. It's not about keeping them quiet, and it's not about pushing them away, and it's not about locking them up.
• 4:08
  It's just about inviting them to now time and that they get to leave memory time. And so I'm going to have to think about that some more and maybe we can talk about it more on the podcast, But it was really helpful to watch the videos. Listening to both videos several times, we tried to focus and think about how we could help if there was any other ways that we could do something. With all the children at home, it's hard enough already to do the podcast. So the podcast may have fewer episodes as it is.
• 4:45
  We can't really add videos to that right now for other people just because of our own boundaries on time and energy as we care for all the outside children. But one thing we were able to do one morning before the children were awake was for doctor e to write an article, which I will read here and has already been posted. And then there's also actually a third video from the therapist between the time I decided to share the first two and then was able to edit this before it was released. So the article that Doctor. E wrote is on the blog if you want to read it, but I'll read it here as well.
• 5:31
  It says, The impact of COVID-nineteen has caused changes and chaos for most of us across the world. Whether we have gotten sick or know someone who has, or whether we have made significant lifestyle changes to help flatten the curve. We have learned about how viruses multiply exponentially, witnessed the shutting down of schools and businesses, and watched as hospitals filled and equipment ran out. But we have also seen creativity and connection, enjoyed the slowing down of our busy lives, and refocused on being present with our own families. In neuroscience, it's the mammal brain or higher brain that turns you toward your caregivers when you are in danger.
• 6:17
  This is the pull toward home whether it is your own parents or your chosen family. This is why children whether ours or those we teach or love turn toward us for learning how to handle a crisis, how to regulate our emotions, and how to feel about all that is going on in the world around us. It is the reptile brain, or lower brain, that tells us to run from danger. That's what helps us remember to wash our hands. That's what makes us strong enough to stay away from neighbors and friends and family that we miss during social distancing.
• 6:53
  That's what cringes inside us when we hear stories of people being exposed, getting sick or so many people dying. There are times in life when the brain gets both signals at once, causing a conflict that makes it feel impossible to respond. For example, with child abuse, the brain wants to turn toward the caregiver for safety, but the brain also wants to run away from the caregiver who is causing the danger. And yet the brain knows the body is dependent on the caregiver to stay alive because they are only a child despite the danger that is also present. That is trauma, not just when you get hurt physically, but when the external situations leave no way to get out of what is causing danger but also no protection from that danger.
• 7:39
  To make things even more challenging, your brain itself doesn't actually perceive context. It just knows signals it receives from your body and the chemicals rushing through your body. So sometimes even the experience of this dynamic either relationally with others or only the perception of danger is enough to tell your brain that you're in danger and initiate a trauma response. When your brain gets the signal that you're in danger, one of the things it does is send a message to the vagus nerve, which goes from your brain to all your major organs. Because it branches off along the way, it is called the polyvagal nerve.
• 8:19
  This is what prepares your body to respond to danger. When your trauma response is activated, the polyvagal nerve presses down on your organs so that you are ready to respond to danger. You can't detect danger and then decide to respond and then tell your body to get ready for it. For survival, your body has to already be ready to respond to danger as soon as it is detected. When you are not in danger, it means you are feeling safe and others around you also feel safe.
• 8:50
  Your brain knows this through tone of voice, content and rhythm of pacing of conversation, and facial expressions. Your body matches these as part of a safe mode. Your affect is brighter. Your voice is modulated, goes up and down in pitch, and so you feel calm and good and happy. But when you feel there is some danger or your body senses it, then the nerve is activated against your organs so as to prepare your body to respond to that danger.
• 9:18
  Your body doesn't have to be an actual danger. It might just be perceived danger. Even just another person's facial expressions or tone of voice can be perceived as danger. Then your own facial expression goes flat and your voice goes more monotone, and your heart and lungs are pumping in preparation for flight. This often is where panic attacks happen.
• 9:41
  If you aren't able to feel safe again quickly and you still feel in danger, then your body now thinks your life is being threatened, whether it is or not, and you drop down another stage into fight. Because you couldn't get away from the situation, now your body wants to fight. This is when verbal aggression increases or you feel the tightness in your arms and legs instead of your just your chest. When you can't win at fighting, even if it's just because someone who argues better or differently than you do, even if that's not oppressive or even abusive, then your body goes into shutdown mode or freeze. Your mind goes blank.
• 10:20
  You basically dissociate. You don't respond to anything. Falling down that ladder from safety to flight to fight to shut down always happens in that order, though some stages may happen more quickly than others for some people. And to get back to safety, you have to go back up the ladder in the same order you came down. So back up to fight, being willing to confront a situation or something you were avoiding or something you need to try to do differently.
• 10:50
  And then up to flight, getting away from what isn't healthy, what isn't until you get back up to safety. Right now, with the COVID-nineteen experience globally, we as individuals and as communities are experiencing trauma response. There is no way you can actively fight the actual virus itself and there is no way to get away from the experience of the pandemic flight. It impacts us in every area of our lives and has impacted all of the people around us. No one is safe and everyone around us is also responding to the same experience.
• 11:33
  Response. It is important to remember that all of your feelings are valid as you adjust to all of this and feel the impact of it in many ways. Everything you feel is okay and all of your feelings are normal. It makes sense why you are responding the way you are. You may feel more tired, slow, or less motivated while in the freeze response.
• 11:54
  It may be difficult to focus, pay attention to others, or complete tasks. You may be hypervigilant in other ways, like staring patterns of tile in the bathroom or at light dancing on leaves outside. You may struggle to focus on conversation, tolerate the noise of children, or stick to any kind of routine. You may feel pulled down by gravity, struggle to smile, or forget to laugh. Time may get slippery, the days blur together, and the hours disappear.
• 12:25
  You may feel less real or like you are watching yourself or like the world around you is unbelievable. The word for all of this is dissociation, which is a continuum of the freeze response. You may also experience some grief responses for your loss of normalcy, the loss of your routine, and especially loss of contact with friends. You may also miss the ease with which things were accessible while still taken for granted. You may crave the earlier stability you experience from your work or other routines.
• 12:58
  You may feel at a loss without the validation that you are busy enough, doing enough, or productive enough. But you are enough. What you are experiencing is a trauma response, flight, fight, or freeze. With COVID nineteen, that fight could look like anything from irritability to an increase in bickering with children or arguing with adults to actual aggression. Flight could look like avoidance behaviors, such as scrolling on social media for hours at a time, eating too much of unhealthy foods instead of keeping things balanced, too much screen time instead of using some of the time to organize or clean while you have the chance, isolating in your bed instead of interacting with others who live with you, or disengaging from family and friends instead of finding creative ways to connect.
• 13:50
  Freeze then could look like staying under the covers instead of being able to get up for your day, feeling sleepy or lethargic, staring into space for long periods, or needing extra sleep, or being overwhelmed with tasks as you try to work from home, or if you are still having to go to work or if you are having to help children learn from home. There are others as well which may be your style besides just the common fight, flight, or freeze. Fawning is when we try hard to be very good so that we are not caught or blend in or fly under the radar. This is a very common way for children with relational trauma to behave so as to not upset the parent. It also happens frequently in domestic violence situations.
• 14:33
  With COVID-nineteen, it may look like too much hand washing or overly isolating indoors in cases where you are properly socially distanced and can relax some in your own home. Following is what happens when you go along with things despite the danger. In abuse situations, it looks like doing whatever the abuser says to do in hopes that joining with them will keep you safe. In COVID-nineteen, it looks like people who minimize the danger and refuse to self quarantine in effort to avoid feelings of anxiety or admit their own fears. Fortifying is when we make our walls higher and stronger to defend ourselves better than before.
• 15:13
  In abuse survivors, this may look like disruption in relationships or increase in dissociative symptoms. It can look like social disconnect instead of social distance. With COVID-nineteen, it could be hoarding toilet paper or stockpiling medications with no evidence to actually treat the virus. Fabricating is when the story is changed so it's not so scary. This is a kind of denial more than it is an attempt to actually deceive, though deception is what happens by default.
• 15:43
  In abuse situations, this could look like a child making up happy stories about their parents. In domestic violence experiences, it is telling yourself someone loves you despite the pattern of them hurting you. With COVID nineteen, it shows up when recommendations from doctors and scientists are dismissed or downplayed. None of these are bad or wrong. They are trauma responses.
• 16:07
  Your brain is literally trying to catch up with the processing of what is happening to you. Remember that your brain does not know context. It only knows the signals it receives and the chemicals flowing through, which right now is a lot of stress information with so many changes as we protect ourselves from a virus we can't actually see or fight or get away from right now. Your brain may interpret that as danger without understanding you are doing everything you can to be safe and to continue functioning. Feel all there is to feel.
• 16:41
  Let it come up. Notice it. Acknowledge it, but then let it go. You have the power to choose your response. All of your feelings are valid, but your feelings are not reality.
• 16:53
  They only give you information about what is happening in reality. Receive the information, but then empower yourself to choose your response. Facilitating is a way of coping that empowers yourself for positive change and healing even if in little ways. This almost always happens in connection with others through attunement experiences where your emotional needs are noticed, reflected, and met by safe people around you. Any step towards this counts, whether it is telling the truth about abuse, they are not your secrets to have to keep, or unsubscribing from the toxic issues of others, or not taking the bait and negative thoughts in yourself or negative interactions with others.
• 17:34
  Be gentle with yourself. Give yourself breaks. Let your body rest. You may literally be exhausted from the trauma response happening in your body, even if you are not sick at all. Connect with others in the ways that you can.
• 17:49
  Be both safe and creative in how you do it, but do it. Do deep, slow breathing periodically to help that polyvagal nerve come off your organs and remind your brain that you are safe. Regular practice of progressive muscle relaxation would also help reinforce those signals to your brain so that it knows you are safe and aware of the situation. These very simple things that almost seem too silly make a huge difference for your brain. Find ways to laugh and smile.
• 18:20
  You have to do it intentionally until your brain knows you are safe. But the more you smile and brighten your affect, the more safe people around you will also feel. Then they will start smiling too and feel better themselves, which also helps you feel better as your brain notices that. Smiling makes a physiological difference. I promise.
• 18:42
  It makes sense you feel like you've fallen down a ladder because you have, but you also have the power to climb back up again. So that is the article that we put out, and people have shared that, and I hope it is helpful. It's just so difficult to be on lockdown and not just in quarantine but to not be able to help people and so trying to be creative in the ways that we can help people even while we're still dealing with things ourselves. So that was one thing that we could do to be positive and to help and to try to encourage others and explain what's going on so that they understand better what's happening and feel less crazy or frustrated with themselves so that people can have more compassion for themselves in the same way that us learning about DID has helped us understand more about what's going on with us. After we shared the first two videos, the therapist did release a third video.
• 20:02
  So we're going to go ahead and just play the video.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Hi there. I am jumping on again here for the third time. This is my third video just trying to be of some benefit to some people who are experiencing some symptoms of the coronavirus that are not physical. So I am deeply concerned about how this is affecting us emotionally and mentally, and today I just wanted to jump on here and kind of just give a quick lesson on the anatomy of stress. You see, our bodies are well equipped to manage danger when it is imminent.
• 20:34
  Our brain has hormones and neurons that fire when there is danger that we need to do something about, that we need to respond to, and so it sends messages. The primary thing that happens in our biology is notified that there is danger in the area, and the vagus nerve runs from the brain down to all of our major organs, and its primary job is just to get us ready to fight or flee. It constricts around the heart so the heart will begin to beat faster. It constricts around the lungs so the lungs begin to breathe more shallow. It will tighten our muscles so that we are ready to fight or flee, and this is actually a really effective biological response when there is danger to deal with.
• 21:20
  But when the danger is invisible, ongoing, consistent, and sometimes consistently intermittent or intermittently consistent, it's random, then our bodies don't have that fight or flee release. Because you see, when a fight or flee moment occurs and it's successful, I remove myself from the danger, then my body gets to go back to a normal state of being. The vagus nerve relaxes, the heart goes back to a normal rate and rhythm, my breathing begins to normalize, and I go back to a healthy state of physical being. But if I don't have that response haven't changed, then my body actually stays at this heightened place of awareness, and that's actually not good for us at all physically. It decreases our immune system.
• 22:11
  We have responses that change our sleep. Many of us it changes our appetite or our appetite patterns. It can cause migraines or headaches. Some of us grind our teeth. Some of us have bowel issues, and that's how our stress manifests in our body, and it really takes us to a place where physically we're actually more vulnerable to disease or discomfort because we've changed our biochemistry.
• 22:37
  And so I just want to real quick teach you something that can help circumvent, this stress dynamic in our biology. It's basically a way of changing your body's reaction when you can't change your circumstance, And so it's a breathing technique called diaphragmatic breathing. For those of you who are singers or yogis, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's just really super deep breathing. Okay?
• 23:04
  So you breathe in through your nose all the way into your stomach. We're supposed to feel it way down there, and then a lot of mental health material and research says that if you will take twice as long to exhale as you do to inhale, then that will fast forward and give the vagus nerve like this massive amount of permission to just chill. And so what that looks like is breathing in, one two three, breathing out, one, two, three, four, five, six and then doing that for at least three minutes. And here's a way to sort of push the fast forward button on helping the vagus nerve chill, helping your body return to a state of normal. If while you are doing that you will also trigger one of your five senses or several of your five senses on purpose.
• 23:57
  That helps change your circumstance even more. It also does some brain stuff, some left brain, right brain stuff, and some different things that really just help us relax. So find a comfortable seated or laying position, Begin your deep breathing and you can activate the sense of touch by touching a blanket, rubbing a teddy bear. One of my clients uses the rough side of velcro and just rubs it back and forth. Getting yourself in a position where you can smell using essential oils like a candle that you really like, use a lotion, maybe rubbing your own hand lotion in while you're doing it with a scent that is pleasing to you.
• 24:42
  You can change some visual stuff by looking at photos, looking at a wallpaper on your computer, literally moving yourself outside or to someplace that you find in the house that's more pleasant or less stressful. You can play music or go outside and hear the birds chirping to activate that sense. Put in a piece of peppermint candy for taste. And, anyway, that just helps this relaxation process while you're doing the breathing. And so remember this is not just a physical fight.
• 25:12
  This is a fight that is affecting all parts of our being and I want you to take care of all of you. So please pay attention to that. Do the deep breathing for at least three minutes and do it two or three times a day while this danger is still out there, while it's invisible and inconsistent. I promise you it's messing with you because you're looking at your news feed or you're watching the news or people around you are being affected and your body is probably more stressed than you realized. So take care of all of you.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: The therapist is not someone who seeks out attention at all And so I know this was a really big deal for her and it's a big deal for me as well. But I also know that these are very serious times. We just want people to understand who she is and that we appreciate her. And many of you who have also learned from the things that she taught us, you could write. If you would like to express your appreciation, we can pass that on to her.
• 26:22
  And I would just add my appreciation that she gave permission for the videos to be played on the podcast so that you could hear them. And I know it will be so helpful to so many. So remember the things that you already know how to do and remember the things that we have learned together and remember that now time is still safe even though there's a pandemic and so many people are suffering and so many people are afraid of suffering. It is a time to show courage and it is a time to be cautious and it is a time to connect with each other so that we are not alone as we go through this together. And that's what makes now time still be safe.
• 27:35
  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, and you can join us on the community at www.systemsbeat.com. We'll see you there.