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Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Over:
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.
Speaker 3:Today, we welcome Doctor. Laura Brown, who visited us in the community in Nerdtown to talk about the book, Not the Price of Admission, which we've been listening to and studying on the podcast and in a book study group. Welcome, my friend and colleague, Doctor. Laura Brown. So a couple things as we get started.
Speaker 3:I wanna say I will probably cry at some point repeatedly throughout. Who knows what will come up? That's always okay. This is hard stuff. Laura.
Speaker 3:Oh my goodness. I'm already crying. You have been so kind. I am so grateful for you. I met Laura through my friend Peter.
Speaker 3:We have this mutual friend Peter. You all have heard about Peter. Peter's been on the podcast. But Laura, you've been so kind to me over the years, and I'm so, so grateful. You have honored consistently.
Speaker 3:You have honored I can't even talk already. You have consistently honored lived experience voice before it was a thing. Laura will talk to me in Hebrew or French or English or sign language. Whatever happens, we'll try to stay in English today. Laura also will be using some AI assistance if needed for her voice.
Speaker 3:Laura, you're also welcome to use the chat, whatever you need that, please feel free. And to catch up, Laura, we have been specifically looking at this book. Laura, I wanna say that because it is such tough material, we have been going so gently and slowly that we started last August, and we're on page 12. So we meet every other week, and in between weeks, because you know recovery, I'm just going to say that's in your book that you talk about and recommend recovery programs. On the opposite weeks, we're in the grief group doing Transforming Our Losses, that book.
Speaker 3:And so we have been really intentional and careful about this with lots of taking stuff back to therapy, and pacing, and titrating, and that's why it's been so slow. And also, we're so grateful. I don't know that there's a single sentence in this book that does not make me want to vomit. And also, it is lifesaving. So talking about embodied healing, that's such an example of it.
Speaker 3:And I just cannot thank you enough. I also want to be really explicit, upfront, and direct or transparent before there's anything that comes out of my mouth, because I don't always know in advance what that's gonna be, that I have been putting up original episodes. There was a season where I wasn't feeling safe, and I was pulling down episodes until I could track on a spreadsheet what was actually out there in the universe. And some of the most recent episodes that were from before I ever left Oklahoma from, like, the pandemic through 2022, specifically the Peace by Peace episode, but also those couple of years, I was already talking about these issues. I was already talking about interpersonal violence, domestic violence, relational struggles, these things.
Speaker 3:So I just want to be clear that if I reference or share anything, it is from that general place of my whole life and my experiences personally. I am not targeting any specific person. And just for safety, I need to say that for transparency, which unfortunately is part of the ongoing issue, right? That's what the
Speaker 1:book is about.
Speaker 3:So Laura, where do you even want to start? I think at the very easiest, softest starting, we are curious collectively about how this book came about, in part because you open with that amazing story about saving the book, rescuing your own baby inside of this writing that was lost in you in such a clever way got it back, and we are so grateful. I mean, yeah, I'll leave that there. But what is this book meant to you? Where did it come from?
Speaker 3:In what area you're comfortable sharing with that? So whatever you wanna use.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for asking me to join you all, and thank you for reading the book and for reading it the way I suggested because as you know I say take it slow, put this down, you might need to put it down for a couple of weeks. So I'll tell you I have a vocal disorder called spasmodic dysphonia which is caused by the stasm of the nerve that controls the vocal cords and right now early in the day my voice is pretty good but if it gets worse later I'll move to the voice AI which has the voice I used to have before two years ago when this inexplicable thing showed up in me. So, why did I write this book? I was a therapist most of my adult life and most of who I worked with, not everybody I worked with, but most of who I worked with, were people who were subjected to the childhoods from hell. And I can tell you that there were no relationship books out there that spoke to being a person trying to have any kind of emotionally interrelationship, whether it was a friendship or a primary relationship or even relating to your therapist.
Speaker 1:There was nothing that was written for that group of people because I tried out all those books myself in my own relationship and discovered that, you know, these things don't take into account that human beings are the predators in your life and getting close feels both necessary and dangerous. So I thought, okay, I'll write a book. That's what I do when there is an absence. You know, my previous book for general audiences, Your Turn for Care, which is about living with the aging and death of abusive caregivers. I wrote because there wasn't any book for that group, and so I just wrote it.
Speaker 1:And this book, the same thing. I write books because I feel a need, whether it's my professional books or my books for the general public. And I'm probably going to now that I have finished the last professional book, I hope please APA do not ask me to write another book because I thought it was done a year ago and that they asked me to write another book and I sent it to them a week ago. But I think I may write besides my lesbian fashion mystery novels, I will write another book for the general public about getting older. And again, I have a lived experience because the reason I write from lived experience is that I am a feminist decolonial therapist and the rule out of the work I have done is the personal is political, the personal is therapeutic, and the people who I work with are the best experts.
Speaker 1:Not some advice on Davis presented about what trauma really is. The best experts are all of you and all of the people I have had the honor to work with over the course of my career. I stopped being a therapist in December 2018 because my heart was getting too full. Something I realized a year before that, I told everybody at my practice a year and a vast to give everybody a year to get done. I said I wanted to end the way we had worked together and nobody left early.
Speaker 1:Everybody stuck around till the December 2018. So what I still do is I still supervise therapists, all of whom work with people with childless repent. A lot of them now are therapists in China where ironical causes the childhood from hell was the one child policy intersecting with misogyny. Being born a girl as the only allowed child in a very patriarchal Chinese family often was a terrible experience. So that's how I came to write the book.
Speaker 1:And then what I realized as I was finishing it is that I needed to read it because of my own history. Although I didn't have much trouble from travel, I do have a lot of drama to attachment and I was reenacting it in my marriage which I ended three years ago. First time I have ever ended a relationship, a primary relationship, it came at some cost and it just freed me enormously. But let's just say lots of personal work and a fair amount of ketamine therapy into that. So I realized I needed the book for myself, that I was writing it for me as well as for the people I was working with.
Speaker 1:And now that I am not a forensic psychologist anymore, I can be more transparent. That's the other thing is that I was a forensic psychologist until this happened. And when you are a forensic psychologist, every aspect of your life gets scrutinized and they try to use it against you. Since I testified on behalf of people who have been discriminated against or sexually harassed or sexually abused or sexually assaulted, I could not talk about history or my own life experience at all of what I wrote. And that has changed, and I'm relieved that I would be able to be transparent about my own experiences in my writing if if I'm I'm in hiding.
Speaker 1:It's really good not to be doing that anymore. It's not like there's a lot of things, but there's nothing that helped me understand as a therapist, a healer, as a supervisor, what it is I was hearing from people. So that's the as Emma knows, I never answer a short question with a short answer. I always answer a short question with a very long answer, which is who I am. It's like there's a lot to say.
Speaker 1:Not being able to talk, there's times when I am at the end of a treatment period when I can't talk at all or days when my voice is particularly bad and that's what the voice AI is for and it's got the file that it plays is speak in my pre disability accent voice.
Speaker 3:I so appreciate your vulnerability sharing with us today. And it's so true about our lived experiences being weaponized or used against us when we're trying to work professionally or trying to do, as we say on the podcast, what's never been done before, not like this. And I so appreciate you sharing. And in the context of even things you've mentioned with what is happening in the world, even just now, we've just gotten the news that the last body has been recovered from October 7. And to have you here on this day with that happening in the background, we have Minneapolis happening in the background with people in the community here who are living there.
Speaker 3:And all of this where I think is really relevant to our discussion because this isn't this isn't like, I'm referencing the podcast because it's an easier way to reference my story, but in the beginning of the podcast or when I was first diagnosed, it was this learning about what is dissociation and separating now time and memory time. But we are living in a situation where now time has not been safe either in a different way. And what this book is about is about the way memory time invades now time through relationship. And that was a piece that I really did not understand until this book, because I kept thinking, if I can see what I was traumatized by and make sure I pick people who aren't doing those things, then it should be okay and it should work or I can try hard enough. I didn't understand that trauma was in me.
Speaker 3:I didn't understand about what our friend Steve Gold calls deprivation with the good that's missing. And how all of that is showing up relationally is where those reenactments happen, and also it is therapy, good therapy, that can prevent it from becoming reenactment. Reenactment. I'm just connecting and realizing that's really the gap that it bridged for me, I think.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I'm really honored to hear that. And you're right that the downtime is has become dangerous in ways we never imagined if we live in The US. And you all should know, by the way, I got an email this morning from my friend Beverly Green, who is feminist psychologist, a real leader in our field, and apparently in Utah a therapist's office was approached by ICE, had a therapy record. The receptionist said, come back on the side, release of information, HIPAA, but they are going after therapy records.
Speaker 1:So talk to your therapist about keeping the most bare bones information in their records of you. That's something I always did, but it's particularly important now, especially if you are a member of any minoritized community other than the minority community, which is people with outlet straw goods association. The malpractice is dangerous in a way it has never been before. And there's reasons why people are having their bodies, their neurobiology say danger warning because you don't know what to say in the lot of the street right now. You don't know what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:Even if you look like me, I am white presenting as a Jew, but I have all these intergenerational problems and therefore intergenerational memory is just enough. So I am hyper aware of these possibilities. So please talk if you're not a therapist, please talk to your therapist. I am keeping very, very strict on records right now because that's a way you can affirmatively help yourself closer to safe even though none of us are really going to get safe.
Speaker 3:-When I'm doing trainings, I'm teaching about defensive documentation, those limited records, but also part of our job being to protect our clients for sure. We do have a question, Laura. Let me read this. It says, Do you have any particular encouragement or advice for sticking to not paying the price of admission in specific situations, even in overall long term healthy relationships where neither party actually wants to be doing that to the other, and they're both actively even working on not doing it, but the trauma and deprivation based responses are so ingrained that it's hard to notice until we've slipped into it. I have experienced this difficulty particularly with my closest sibling, but also in some other long term overly very sustaining and sustainable relationships.
Speaker 3:My first advice to myself is to keep reading the book and coming to group and pacing that gently, but is there anything you would add or highlight?
Speaker 1:Well, what I would say is that I don't want it to mark, but the deliberate language is that there's rupture and repair. And the way that we know that we actually can find a person trustworthy is that we can do rupture and repair with them. And the truth is that even if you have both people relationship doing their very best to be loving and compassionate and kind and if they there's a whole nine yards, excuse me, I've got something in my eye here. Even if you've got both people trying, there's going to be ruptures. So if you accept that rupture is healthy and that what you need to do is prepare and that you can say you did not intend this rupture.
Speaker 1:That's why I always use that image from Aikido from that martial because someone's about being aware of where their body is in space. And when that happens, it's like, oh, I'm sorry. Are you okay? Or I say, ouch. And the other person says, oh, did I hurt you because I thought arthritis in my hands?
Speaker 1:And it's very easy to hurt me by just grabbing my hands wrong. And I'll say, Yeah, you grabbed my hand in a place that hurts. And when I trade, I wear grabbing of pads that I, you know, I said, how can I grab you in ways that won't hurt you? I'll say, grab. I grabbed just above my wrist.
Speaker 1:So really what it is is there was a rupture and you may not realize there was a rupture until quite a while later because if you if you're an expert in dissociating bad stuff in relationships, you might not know about the rupture until a day or two days or a week later. And that's okay. You're not, you know, just qualified for bringing up the rupture because you don't be able to know about it later on. But you said, you know what? That's something I realized.
Speaker 1:That there was a rupture. Here was my experience of it. And I need to prepare and here is what prepare would look at. And this is not you being a bad person, this is not you being at all. This is how we actually have healthy relationships.
Speaker 1:I mean I am having the great honor and privilege of getting to be on His rabbi is a really close friend of mine and he's a very well known drama psychologist and his moms are people I've known for a long time. So I get to be on the sidelines of this this small human having the best possible experience is really because this is a very strong and informed family. And so I watch Rapture over here with this kiddo and he's like, spends what he does at night and the grown up says, tell me about it. And he does it actually pretty verbal for a person that age. But rupture and repair is what happens in good enough families.
Speaker 1:And so if you're in a good enough relationship, there's a commitment to repair while the other person says there has been a rupture. Part of how I knew I had to get of my marriage is I would say there has been a rupture and my ex spouse would say, well, that's because you have attachment trauma. And, okay. That was not my attachment. I hear that I had a now what do you need from me?
Speaker 1:Which is what I would try to offer when they would say there's been a rupture. I'm realizing that it wasn't very on one side of it, and our balance miserable. So he can have the process. Well, that's for taking myself then and took me a while, but I got out. Point being, if you have a commitment to repair a rupture so that when you say to the other person there was a rupture instead of the same, well, that's because you're dissociative.
Speaker 1:That's because of your childhood trauma. That's you. You're only feeling that because of you. And there's a commitment to say, you know, I didn't intend it, but I that it has. And and tell me about it.
Speaker 1:And I know other people could do that. I have seen people We all do. I want to want to hear that we have done something that was for a focus on what we want, and we're going to. If we can't close enough to be loving, we can't close enough accidentally bump into each other in ways that might hurt or to drop each other when we should be holding each other up because we're frail and we're human ourselves. So having all kinds of agreements and talking about them very explicitly, I think is essential for all relationships, particularly those where anyone who has
Speaker 3:I so appreciate that. I experienced that in my own way of avoidant attachment, specifically being weaponized, of you're shutting down or you're avoiding, you're avoiding. But then it wasn't until I had a therapist that understood attachment that said, That's not an attachment problem. That's a you're being harmed problem. We are avoiding harm.
Speaker 3:And I also really appreciate what you shared about repair because I think one thing I struggled with in the past was the price of admission being I had to try hard enough, keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. So I thought that the trying hard was the repair as opposed to things not getting better and it continuing to be punitive, which is not the same as repair. How would you speak to the difference there?
Speaker 1:Well, here is the person who was armed has a reasonable request for change. For example, for example, so if you are aggravated by somebody raising their voice and the person has been raising their voice a lot, then a reasonable request for repair is to say, you know, I don't know if you're aware of this, but you have been raising your voice a lot recently and you know that that is really for me. It's scary for me. I'm asking you to be more aware of your vocal tone. What did you do to be more aware of your vocal tone?
Speaker 1:And then the other person says, well, you're right. I had no idea I was raising my voice. I'm not very aware of my vocal tone because you know what? I'm a very auditory person. And I am gonna try to be more aware of my vocal tone.
Speaker 1:Can you maybe we can come up with a safe word so that when I'm raising my voice, you can say the same word to me and that way I'll know and I can then, you know, break it down. So there's an elaboration because if you're not aware of your vocal tone. I mean, before my voice went bad, I was a singer and I was a speaker, and so I was, you know, and I'm very auditory. I'm acutely aware of vocal tone. So if someone says to me, I need you to bring your vocal tone down before this, I would be able to do that with some degree of skill because I know how to move my vocal cords right as I used to before they went haywire.
Speaker 1:I know people who are not particularly auditory and unaware of what's going on with their vocal cords for whatever reason. And so they knew that they want to respond to the request repair and they're not saying, will you tell me what to do? They're saying I need a collaboration on this. And so you collaborate. So the next time that person is raising their voice, you say orchid, which is the safe word or whatever the safe word happens to be.
Speaker 1:That might be a safe word. And they're like, oh, am I going to see my voice? And you say, yes. And then they say, okay. I will bring it down.
Speaker 1:I will be flattered. And you for letting me know. So you're empowered to bring it up without punishment because there is an agreement that you are going to do that. And they have agreed to make the repair. And so there is a shift in the relational dynamic from paying the price of admission which is putting up with the activating vocal tone or blaming yourself for not speaking up because you're not being assertive because, you know, the research on assertiveness going back fifty years, it's almost impossible to be assertive on people who are close to you.
Speaker 1:And if that, what we were doing assertiveness rated in the seventies, those were the data that had the age of one bit. So rather than, okay, I have to be more assertive, I have to learn to be more assertive. It's like, it's been a rupture, there's been a repair. There's an agreement. We are collaborating.
Speaker 1:Each of us is responsible for being the relationship we want to have. Rather, it's repeat.
Speaker 3:I think that that is such a huge piece of the healing and part of the repair though is that presuming goodwill and the actual changes in behavior. And that's part of the evidence, at least for me, externally, seeing this relationship is safe enough, not because I'm trying hard enough or they're perfect enough, but because they are making the changes or they are responsive, as opposed to I'm just staying in
Speaker 1:trouble. We
Speaker 3:have a question that says, What if the person says they see the problem but that it just might be something about them you have to accept as part of the relationship? How do you evaluate the importance of the relationship versus the infraction that is not likely to change? Someone already commented, Al Anon.
Speaker 1:You know, I went to Al Anon for quite a while until I realized that what was going on with my ex was the way she was using the neurodivergent as her all purpose excuse for not making any changes. And I could tell you that I know neurodivergent people who when you give them feedback they are very willing to do their best to do things differently in relationships. So it's not like, oh I'm autistic, no I can't help it, which was what was going on there. And the reality is that each of us has our particular neurobiology. And our particular neurobiology is shaped by drama, and shaped by neurodivergence, shaped by the cultures we unraveled, it's shaped by our healthy history and genetics.
Speaker 1:We've all got things that are about us. Like Laura always looks like too much in one sentence because that's how I am. But I better talk and if if if I was five months old, apparently. Yeah. Well, I've got a word list from when I was 22 old, I put, like, 2,200 words on it.
Speaker 1:So yeah. I know. Big whack. Yeah. But all of us have things that are about us.
Speaker 1:And the question is, what do we do with the things that is about me? And if they just are the person that I'm in relationship with, do I pay attention to it? Do I say, okay, that's the thing that's about me and it's alright with me that you're dictated by it? Rather, I know you have to be nice and say, well, that's okay that you're that way. I have said to the person I've been dating for the last couple years, it's really important that you let me know what I'm getting on your nerves because I know I can get on people's nerves.
Speaker 1:I do get really done acting. Art is finding research at that dinner. In the middle of lots of social conversation, turn to Doctor. Brown, the expert pulling out some data from somewhere. It's hilarious.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, giving people permission, knowing myself really well and saying, you know, this is who I am, and if I get on your regular, it might be scarier, it might be something. It's okay to tell me it's not a thing that seems to be amenable to change. It's not a thing that I'm doing to you. It's not bigwig or making me do. It's like my hair is sort of used to be brown before I started to tear gray.
Speaker 1:My eyes are brown. And I can get on people's nerves by being professor Brown when I'm supposed about who you are. If there's a thing that is an approvable object and you are a relatively approvable object to you, here's the thing. What's not okay is for someone to say, well, I'm just an asshole and I get to be an asshole all the time. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:That's not an immovable object. It is not an immovable object to be violent. It is is an unimovable object to be not accountable. All of those things are nonimovable objects. And if a person says, well, I just can't help that I get really can't help that I throw things, And you'll have to live with that.
Speaker 1:It's like, nope. I'm out of here. So the things that are improbable on here are annoying and not dangerous. They are annoying. I think things that is violent, that is disempowered to you, that is This is how I was raised.
Speaker 1:So this is who I am. It's like, no. No. That is an odd and abovable object. That is not merely annoying.
Speaker 3:I think it's something that honestly really saved my life was how clear this book is about safety and that that really that's not something I have to try hard for. I should already have. And also in an Al Anon way, it is my responsibility to keep myself safe or get myself safe. And if I am not safe, then I have to do the hard things of getting to safety and it can be right to run. And that is so hard to hold space for when we have been trained since children that we are responsible for making the relationship work or for other people.
Speaker 3:And you the whole book is about this in different ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Excuse me. I said now I'm not anywhere. It's hard to get the vocal boards going, but I could get the blowing. The pandemic was a real eye opener for me because I came home from teaching in Israel on March time, it's funny and then of course we had the shutdown within a week.
Speaker 1:And I realized that after a few weeks of check out, one of the ways I had been coping with the situation I was in was to be away a lot. Was to be at work at an office, was to be on trips, was to be physically different, away when I was home to be very withdrawn and shut down or away a lot. I wasn't there with the person very much. I did the best. Having shut down, I couldn't go to my office.
Speaker 1:I couldn't be away. I was there. And it's like, okay. This is something I and I'm not the boy anymore. This is something I can't do a workaround for because I think we're all really good at doing the workarounds.
Speaker 1:We're all, like, like masters at the workarounds, and so I couldn't do any of my workarounds anymore. And that's that, and then the cancer had put out wanting to die in a bad relationship. It's like okay, like I need to really get out of part of what my challenge was was that I knew that left the person would be devastated because I their history. I had their own history of history. And I was right.
Speaker 1:So when I left, they were devastated, and they've been very clear with me how much pain they are in. And I know that I'm not responsible for their pain, and I'm not responsible for their devastation. Thus, I gave them as I think of it using a baseball analogy, I gave them three strikes, and I did eight for them. I did eight for them. That was a few more innings of overtime that they needed or they deserved.
Speaker 1:But their devastation is real, and I can't fictl it. And I certainly doubt that I'd rather fictl it by going back into that relational sphere wasn't interesting. Is, so I finally admitted that I had a terrible relationship picker. Terrible, horrible dad. And so when I started to date again, I was like very very careful, cautious, thorough, and have my friends.
Speaker 1:Then again this person I was dating like really raking them over the coals and I kept saying to this person we need to keep a distance. I 've been very clear. We will never live together. We're not planning towards marriage. And so I've done it hopefully.
Speaker 1:We definitely have taken my own advice, and I'm glad that I did. And, you know, I keep checking with my health and checking with the people in my life. It's like, is this really different? I get really different. She's really different.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay. And I continue to be careful and thoughtful and assessing and not trusting my picker. My picker is better, but I won't trust that part of me because that part of me was affected by
Speaker 3:I think you sharing that is part of what helped me realize that leaving what was for me a dangerous situation was not impossible because I had already been running. And so then when I was in a situation where I couldn't run and it was like all my coping skills and my support was being taken away, that is when I got that feeling of I can't die like this. There's no air. I can't, I can't, I can't. And so recognizing that the price of admission that I was paying with myself and I was no longer existing, that that was unacceptable, then yes, I understand that in your experience you are devastated, and also that is not my responsibility.
Speaker 3:My responsibility is to keep myself safe and care for myself and my system, not in a cold way, but in a that's literally who I'm responsible for. And we are both adults. I cannot be someone else's parent or therapist. I can't save someone else. In the community, we talk about saving our own babies, like that it would be weird if I took my kids to the park and ran off with someone else's kid from their stroller.
Speaker 3:Like, that's illegal and weird, but we can't do that with people's internal children either, especially with system overlap. In the chat, we have several questions. One going back to the earlier thing about if it is annoying but not inherently dangerous, then it is okay to prioritize the relationship, even if it's something they can change but don't. That feels like a struggle because it feels like paying the price, because it feels like I'm not worth the effort. But also that annoying thing is not the whole of the relationship, and I hate to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, that's a really good question. So if the person I gave me wouldn't tolerate that I have this vocal disorder because I have hard to hear, and it's not a pleasant sound. But it's nothing I can do anything about. And what I would look at is what what about a space is taken up by the annoying thing? If the annoying thing takes up a little bit of space occasionally, I've asked the people who say no no no my parents were A parents, usually they were A parents.
Speaker 1:Believe it is wonderful family that I am having a chance to witness. I can say they are actually like B plus A- family, but they are unusual because they are such a draw very important family. I think that really you have to look at are you getting value relationship and what I call, this is something I made up, the used Kleenex index. How high is your used Kleenex index? Because with my ex spouse, I had an extraordinarily high use ofleenex index after all stiff or even copper sages.
Speaker 1:I would use up at least That's an actual physical manifestation of nothing's going on here. If my used Kleenex index is low, like, you know, might have a difficult conversation and so I use a, you know, what half a box metric for us and they have a relationship is good enough. Once in a while you will have a Kleenex for three or 10, but it's not frequent, it's not regular, you are not having to buy Kleenex at all to support being in this relationship. That for me has been a very useful method because I realized finally that, wait a minute, I have been dating this person for a year and I I don't come away from our interactions crying. Oh really?
Speaker 1:That's interesting. What's wrong with this picture? What's right with this picture? So it's sort of a question of the used Kleenex and the other thing is the degree of seriousness of the problem. Is this a way that the person is, what does she do in some way for how you are?
Speaker 1:Do they haul out there what ever it is only when you are vulnerable or dissociate or ask a person they've been fired from them? Or does it just show up randomly because it's a random part of who they are? So there's this question of the relationship between the big and how you are with the relationship. Because if somebody is annoyed sometimes, but it's just, you know, the brown eyes, and the rest of it is good if you use plain ex, plain ex is low, then you get to assess. I can't tell you if it's okay to be in the relationship.
Speaker 1:And the other thing is, what's your body telling you? What's your body telling you about are you in a place that's okay if you are going into shutdown, if your dorsal ganglion is shut down or on, if you are activated, if your your nervous system is going danger warning all the time, and the other person says, Oh, you don't have to worry about this. This is just me, but you are really going danger warning. You need to take it to therapy and see this is an activating phenomenon. What happens also, the more you realize that it's versus weaponizing the agreement that they're allowed to be annoying by being more annoying than they really need to be.
Speaker 1:So it's looking at all these levels of variables. There is no one right answer here. I really want to be clear about this. There is no one right answer. There is what is your answer and what is your piece of it?
Speaker 1:Here's the question. If I use the answer, it gets this high because I'm triggered by what portion is my responsibility? The one person says, okay. So let's a both hand. Just to think because I know that I need to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:I have a beloved family member who has who doesn't guess that sometimes we are just too bloody blunt. They say things and I know their intentions are good, but the way they do it feels like they're beating me up. And when I have said this to them, they're like, well, you're, you know, you just need luckily, there's also really not the biological member of the family who was in hell. I had to be so excuse me if I you were too blunt, and that's not a good way to show up as but you'll often remember that I called you on out with the kids. So sometimes people are really deeply unaware of how they are.
Speaker 1:And I also, and I also put this because I love methods of siblings, am more easily activated by them channeling one of our parents than would be by someone else channeling someone similar to our parents. So it's always there's a piece of both ends. We are responsible to ourselves to heal. We are responsible to ourselves to pursue healing as much as we can, and we are responsible to ourselves to protect our younger parts and our hearts, and we are responsible to ourselves to say to the other person, it's not okay to talk to me like that. I mean, with the person I'm talking about, there was one time when I got up and literally left the building because they wouldn't I said, you know, stop.
Speaker 1:Don't need to be that way. And I'll pick up my side. I'm leaving now. And that shocked when they did their senses. They were like, oh, okay.
Speaker 1:It really isn't okay for me to talk to a world like that. And they came and they made a really hard fella. Just act regularly because this is something they do and they get caught on and about pretty regularly. So it is complicated. It is always complicated.
Speaker 1:There is no such thing as the perfect other human being. What there is is the other human being who is willing to do their part. Yes, there is.
Speaker 3:That really answers the other question too about how to tell what is safe or what is memory time and those tricks that are so challenging, and the question that has to do with about the left brain and trying to feel that in the right brain, not just knowing it on the page, but experiencing it. I would add for both of those, to your example, Laura, the data point of whether you are connecting in the struggle with your support system or if your person, the ship, whatever the ship is, coming between you and your support system because that is part of that pattern and coercive control as well. And the example I can think of from what you've shared is even the difference in our conversations from your previous relationship and now if you went on a trip before it was, this was the hard piece or the hard conversation or whatever was going on. And now it's like, we got to do this or we got to do this or I enjoyed that and feeling that difference and learning that with myself. Am I feeling closer to my support people and the community that helps me support living with all the trauma?
Speaker 3:Am I going to my meetings and that's part of my support for all the trauma and deprivation? Or is that stuff getting between me and being able to access those things? So those being some right brain relational data points too.
Speaker 1:Okay. Are we done? So how do we want to finish up?
Speaker 3:We can finish up now. We just wanna close with our gratitude. We're so grateful for you, Laura. Thank you so much for coming today.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you for allowing what I wrote to be important to you. And I am so grateful. So that match all. Thank you, Laura. Emma, thank you for being in my life.
Speaker 1:I am so glad that I'm so glad that Peter introduced us.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much, truly.
Speaker 1:Alright. Will you all be as safe as you can be. Okay? Alright. Bye bye.
Speaker 3:Totes adorbs. I love her so much. I'm so grateful. Thank you all for being here. Thank you so much for coming and for sharing space with Laura.
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.