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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.
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 2:We have gotten to the place in our class where we teach about transference. This is really important, I think, because when we have relational trauma, so much of what we experience comes through transference rather than words. It's something that happens fairly energetically through their actual relationship between therapist and client, but also shows up other ways in everyday life. So it's called transference because it's literally transferring what you are feeling to someone else so that they feel it. Often, when we talk about transference or countertransference, people think it is a negative thing because it can go badly when it's not tended to.
Speaker 2:And when that happens, that's obviously a problem. But the problem is the not tending to it properly, not the client or the transference. Does that make sense? So before I read about this a little bit, some easy neutral examples of this might be when you work really hard and do well in school, and then you feel good about that teacher or that teacher is feeling good about you. It's really your hard work that was good, but it gets transferred relationally into goodness because of that approval.
Speaker 2:Right? So it goes back to being connected to the social contracts early in life that we've talked about in our complex trauma book. It can also show up if you follow someone on social media and they are feeling a certain thing, like anger or rage, and then you also feel anger or rage even though what happened didn't actually happen to you. That's transference. It has happened with the podcast.
Speaker 2:We have had people write into the podcast saying, I thought it was falling in love with you, but my therapist said, you're falling in love with yourself. And that therapist was so right. I loved when they emailed that because it was the last two years have been big questions of us asking all these life and identity questions and really falling in love with who we are. And that has been a beautiful, beautiful experience. But through transference, people also experience this falling in love.
Speaker 2:But where did they put it? Because they're not doing it intentionally. And so maybe you are learning to fall in love with yourself in the same way I was learning to fall in love with myself. But it's not the same as if we knew each other in real life and we're falling in love. But it doesn't make it bad or wrong or awkward either.
Speaker 2:It's just transferring those feelings of goodness. It has also happened in the community where there were things happening in the background behind the scenes where I thought, oh, I don't know if I feel safe or if I feel settled. And then people are like, oh, I don't know if the community is safe or settled. And it's so funny because sometimes they'll use the exact words that I used in therapy the week before or the day before or something like that. It's like, oh, this is actually getting transferred through the relationship and through the connection rather than it actually being about you.
Speaker 2:You're not doing anything wrong. The community is still there. And that's a little different than adjusting to boundaries or changes. So for example, I used to be in every single group every single time, and then as part of unfawning, learned that I could not sacrifice myself or my children. So now I miss some groups sometimes or, like, I'm not able to go to Saturday groups as often, for example, because the children are out of school.
Speaker 2:When they get out of school for the summer, it will be harder for me to go to groups. And so it feels like, oh, she's disappearing. That activates our own stuff of, oh, she's gone or she's leaving or she's not here. Except that, also, I am here. You can still hear my voice.
Speaker 2:You still see me posting things. And when I can come, I do come. If I were able to make that my full time job, I would be there all the time because that is what would make it possible. Right? So trying to balance those kinds of things of when our feelings come up and gets activated by trauma, like those old things of abandonment or using even going with that example.
Speaker 2:So then if someone feels abandoned, and then I'm like, oh, the community is abandoning me, like, when my thoughts spin out, except that that's not true at all. And so it can really escalate quickly if we're not tending to things. And because we are so relational based in the community, we are so we have spent so much time on the podcast talking about relational trauma, and it's such a thing in therapy specifically. I really thought it might be important to talk about it more directly on the podcast. So the reason that transference even comes up has to do with different kinds of trauma and the way dissociation is a trans based phenomena.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to be reading some pieces from the book called treatment of complex trauma, a sequenced relationship based approach by Courteau and Ford. This book is one of the textbooks that we use in teaching the ISSTD classes. So it's one I have referenced before when I went through the classes, and it's one we use now in the classes as a teacher. But these effects of trauma and trans really happen simultaneously and interact with each other. So for example, a traumatic transference is expecting your therapist to treat you the way other people have treated you when they harmed you or expecting a partner or someone else to treat you the same way other people have treated you when they harmed you.
Speaker 2:It also shows up frequently in therapy with issues with boundaries. It's not that those of us who have survived trauma don't have boundaries. What happens is that often the dynamics in our families of origin really create internal structures of very rigid or very loose boundaries. So some people have systems where it's really hard to tell what alter or shirt they're landing in or who is presenting or fronting. And others, it's a very rigid.
Speaker 2:They're very different experiences. So sometimes it's interesting because that shows up in diagnosis as OSDD as opposed to DID when really it's the same thing, just different boundaries and structure mixed with how much awareness we have of what's going on. And that awareness may even shift depending on who is out front. So then boundaries become challenging because we may have boundaries that are too rigid, like shiny happy people kind of boundaries for us, where internally, there are very strict rules, and we've had to learn to loosen those rules. But then other times, those boundaries become too loose or too fluid because of developmental gaps not having the experience or common sense I know she's been talking about to know how to navigate that properly.
Speaker 2:So then we sometimes don't have boundaries where we should have had boundaries and have to learn that by experience. But because boundaries become a relational experience, then that's one of the places it can really intersect with transference. Another place that it can show up similar to this is thinking that the relationship or the person can fix everything, that that is the care that will heal. And it's really tricky because it is true that connection brings healing, but the healing work is yours. So the podcast can support your healing if you find it helpful.
Speaker 2:The community and the groups can support your healing if you're actively participating. Your therapy can support your healing and sort of help with things like containment or processing or the witnessing by another. Those things can help, but it's your work that is doing the healing, and it's you who's actually doing that work. So even recently, when she talked about there's no one coming to rescue us, part of that is that therapy isn't going to undo the trauma that has already happened even though it can tend to it. So it's another example of more than one truth being true at the same time.
Speaker 2:We've talked about this in the past in the context of the children. No matter how much we love the children, who are now adolescents more than children, but no matter how much we love them, we cannot undo the trauma they experienced before they came to us. So even though we do our best and love them well in lots of ways and also are learning to do better in ways that are impacted by our own trauma, they still have their own developmental experiences where the impact of that trauma that happened before they ever came to us comes back and shows up in new developmental stages, and they have to sort of reintegrate that. And by integrate, I mean, the experiences, the sensory, the memory, the relational aspects. All of those things, they navigate over again every developmental phase, and we do that the same.
Speaker 2:So what happens in things like the community where over the years now, like, it's really been years, we've developed close relationships for especially those who have participated in groups consistently. Because of the growth that comes out of that, we then enter new developmental stages or phases where all of our stuff, whatever our stuff is, and everybody's stuff is different. Right? But our stuff surfaces again, and then we have to look at it in new ways and reintegrate it in new ways. And it impacts relationships and transference.
Speaker 2:So then it feels like, oh, this is a challenge or I can't do groups right now or I don't know how to connect or why am I feeling this about places that used to feel safe. That's actually part of the healing and developmental process. It's literally evidence that we are growing up. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So in therapy specifically,
Speaker 2:when clinicians respond to those aspects of transference, it can actually be very supportive and healing. But when they exploit those, then it can be very damaging or even retraumatizing. And in peer support groups, it becomes really important to remember what is your stuff and what is other people's. Are these the things I am feeling, or are these the things other people are feeling? Sometimes that takes a lot of work.
Speaker 2:For example, we've talked on the podcast before where Mars asked if we were poly and identifying as poly. So what made it so hard about living away from the husband or dating other people or what that could look like? This was actually a really good question and not unfounded. When we were relistening to original episodes, we found, I think it was within the first ten episodes, we've referenced something from the poly community that we identified with. But the way that we said it in English was that we identified with the poly community, which is not what we meant to say.
Speaker 2:What we meant to say was that the concept of compersion, we identified with the concept, But we didn't say that clearly, so it made sense that Mars said this. But when they brought this up, it gave us a lot to think about because we were in a place of unfawning, and so learning to ask the question and also unshiny, happy ing ourselves. So it meant when a question was asked, we were holding space for the questions. So when they brought up again, we thought you were poly, so what makes this difficult, which is my paraphrase, not what they said. But it brought up the question of, is that a possibility?
Speaker 2:And we spent months really wrestling with the question because we wanted to answer it authentically. Is poly something we could identify with? Is it something that we could use to describe our life? Mars also taught us later that we could identify as being in a relationship with someone who themselves were identifying as poly, that just even the relationship didn't have to change my identity. So that's another good example of separating what is my stuff and what is other people's stuff is that I could identify my own way that a relationship doesn't identify me for me.
Speaker 2:So that was really helpful and good to learn, but we spent much of last year or the year before asking the question if that was something that is helpful. Not within our faith tradition, obviously, which is really ironic, but that's a whole different podcast. Focusing on us right now and talking about transference, we had to sit with the question so that we could answer it authentically rather than reactively or because of transference. How do we identify? How do we want to identify?
Speaker 2:Are we living congruent with that identity? If we are or are not, why is that, and what is that about? Who do we want to date? Do we want to date at all? What is that going to look like?
Speaker 2:How does it feel if we try? Can we say no if it doesn't feel good? How do we know when to say no? When we try to say no, do they listen to us? And can we go through all these steps of learning what a healthy relationship is when those are developmental gaps and lack of social skills, not because we're not a good person, but because of trauma and deprivation.
Speaker 2:So by default, those pieces are missing. So even just asking one unrelated question led us to a whole journey of answering a thousand other questions that ultimately led us to a place of feeling pretty secure in what our choices are and how we want to identify, what we don't identify with, what feels good to us in relationships and what doesn't, and how to navigate getting ourselves into and out of relationships that are healthy or unhealthy, and how to tell how to do that. Like, it was such a good exercise, but really literally took us months and months, maybe a couple years even, to answer a simple question that maybe other people could answer very quickly. So that's an example of the intersection of those developmental gaps from trauma and deprivation that otherwise would be fairly simple things if I had access to my whole self all the time. Another way that this shows up with the intersection of all of these relational issues are with ruptures and repair.
Speaker 2:When we grow up through with trauma and deprivation, we often do the binary thinking, working model in our approach to other people, thinking they are very good and so idealizing them or thinking they are only bad and so criminalizing them in that way. So we do the same thing in therapy. Our therapist may be the very best or the very worst, and it feeling like there's not a middle ground. When, really, what we need is a therapist that is responsible enough, attuned enough, good enough at what they do relationally and psychodynamically that they can be safe enough for therapy even if they are not perfect, and not every mistake is going to be harmful or the end of things. This book I reference says, a perspective that relationship errors and missteps occur are to be expected, are open to discussion, and frequently provide opportunities for growth even when they feel like a major crisis.
Speaker 2:That is a good starting point for therapists to take, but is likely to be contrary to what the client has experienced previously and, therefore, what they are expecting. Wallen in 02/2007 encouraged therapists to actively initiate repair for even small ruptures. Such sequences of disruption and repair, particularly repair initiated by the therapist, strengthen the patient's confidence that the relationship can be relied on to contain difficult feelings and help resolve them. In the process, they build the patient's capacity to make use of interactive affect regulation, which is a forerunner of self regulation. So when we feel safe enough and contained enough and tended to enough, it doesn't mean that hard things don't happen or miscommunications don't occur.
Speaker 2:It means we can navigate them together so that it's not just us dissociating from, oh, that didn't feel good or us only projecting through transference of that didn't feel good, so they must not be good. But being able to hold space for both and navigate it in a three-dimensional kind of way. In peer support, this can be really tricky when there may be ruptures and people actually leave, and so they're not there to repair with or tend to. That can be very distressing and feel retraumatizing, especially if we have issues of abandonment already. Remember that our feelings are just information.
Speaker 2:So when we experience something through transference, it doesn't mean something bad has happened or that anything is even problematic necessarily. It means there's information that we can respond to and tend to, and that can be really useful, especially when it's being brought up from early trauma or deprivation. That means there's an opportunity for healing. In chapter 10 of this book, the authors write, Gartner in 1999 offered this succinct definition. Transference refers to all feelings and reactions to the therapist or the peer support people, conscious and unconscious, enacted or not, reality or fantasy based, that originate in and are located in the patient.
Speaker 2:So be careful because this is not a gaslighting thing where it means that you're responsible for the problem even though you're not or that what you're feeling isn't real. These are real invalid feelings. It's just coming up from memory time and being applied to now time through the relationship. Does that make sense? Burch in 02/2002 added, Bowlby proceeded from the assumption that early childhood representation of self and parents with their corresponding attachment and exploratory strategies are reactivated in the transference.
Speaker 2:This is a state found in object relations theory as well. So transference issues are seen as arising from personal reactions of the individual that originate in his or her formative relational experiences with caretakers that have been internalized. Although clients with complex trauma are aware of many feelings and issues in their current lives, the fact that these feelings are associated beliefs are transferred from relational dilemmas that incurred implicitly earlier in life and is largely outside of their awareness. It is usually obvious to therapists that something more is troubling these clients and can be accounted for by current life circumstances and relationships. So part of the challenge is determining what is being transferred and how to best help the clients recognize what is disconnected.
Speaker 2:When conflict trauma is in the picture, this challenge includes determining how to help clients distinguish trauma infused beliefs and body and emotion states from the beliefs and feelings they experienced when not in post traumatic or dissociative condition. This then involves the process of identifying or modifying their ways of thinking and feeling about themselves, other people, and the world through the use of of therapeutic strategies, their physical and visceral sensations through experiential and sensory motor therapies, and their relationships through interpersonal approaches to individual treatment and in groups. So an example of this is yesterday, Jules drove me to work. I have an eye issue because of Sjogren's that sometimes causes problems. I couldn't see well enough to drive or keep my eyes open, which is required for driving.
Speaker 2:It was not safe for me to be driving. Now one might argue in the context of trauma and deprivation that if I can't keep one of my eyes open because the pain is so bad, that I probably should not be working. And so that's a different discussion. But I was determined to work. I miss so much work sometimes because of the children or because of other things that it's really hard for me to just take a sick day off if I'm functioning.
Speaker 2:So I was hurting, but I was functioning. And so I made the choice to go ahead and continue working that day. And so Jules picked me up to drive me to work. When we finished our workday and we're driving home, we passed a man in the neighborhood who was taking out his trash. The man was not doing anything wrong, but something about the energy of him, how he was presenting himself in the world or experiencing the world.
Speaker 2:Like, I don't even know what happened. But at the same time, Jules and I were both like, oh. Like, there was something really uncomfortable and not good there that we both could sense even though it was not ours. So, like, that's how simple transference can happen and how somatic it can be. And at a neurobiological level, it can really impact what we are thinking and feeling even when we have greater context for other things.
Speaker 2:So we may have a good history with the therapist that we know feels safe, and yet we feel unsafe when there is a rupture or something because as children, that was very threatening. We cannot survive without our caregiver. The same thing can happen the other way when we have a therapeutic situation that does not feel safe, but we stay in it for a long time trying really hard because we think we might be the problem or maybe they'll figure it out rather than listening to what our body is telling us. We do the same thing in relationships. So really sorting out what is it that not just what are my feelings, but where are they coming from.
Speaker 2:Are they mine? Are they someone else's? What is the information that is coming from them? There's really so much to look at. The chapter says, just as transference reactions may be the best way the client can cope with and implicitly communicate about extremely threatening and distressing past experiences, and current states of body and mind, countertransference responses may be the therapist's best way of understanding the client's dilemmas and countercommunicating.
Speaker 2:Countertransference, as the name implies, is the therapist's own transference reactions to those of the client. If unrecognized and unexamined, countertransference can lead to non therapeutic or even harmful actions actions by the therapist based on their own emotional biases, conflicts, or attachment or trauma history. The problem of hurtful or even harmful countertransference based actions by therapists is even more acute when clients' transference involves intense posthebranic stress, such as feelings of rage, disgust, or hate. However, when therapists take steps to be aware of their own countertransference issues and to regulate the strong emotional reactions that accompany their activation, these can be invaluable sources of information and lead them to an empathy with and understanding of their clients. At a peer support level, we see this sometimes happen online when someone has a strong emotional or physical or visceral response to something someone else has shared.
Speaker 2:So they receive that transference from someone else, but then have that strong reaction in response. We experienced the same thing through the retreat where the boundaries we set about the close at the end of the retreat were changed, and then they felt unboundaried, which then I felt I did it wrong, which then they felt it was unhelpful, which then I experienced as I was bad, and then they experienced was this bad. Like, this was like a ping pong game of really communication because we had been working on very deep stuff. And so it was a back and forth of transference and countertransference and how to contain that and how to transfer into something new where, ultimately, what it was about underneath all the layers was the double bind of can I get better or not, am I gonna believe it or not, and do I have something good to offer the world or not? And just to speak for myself, the way I experienced that is how can I offer anything now if what I have to offer is bad?
Speaker 2:Right? That is my core trauma, shiny, happy, so it left me in a stuck place and without resolution because it was a double bind that really was trauma and not about the retreat at all. And then they also have their own versions of this and their own experiences. So it's not about gaslighting. It's not about who did what.
Speaker 2:It's really about what we are feeling together because we were looking at those feelings. So in context, it makes sense. In process, it makes sense, but the content really is stuff for us to work out in our own therapies. And so moving forward together looks like supporting each other through that, but doing that work individually in our own therapies. And that took some time, but it's been a really beautiful thing to see how relationships unfolded since then, as well as recognizing our own internal boundaries of what feels safe enough and what doesn't and why that is.
Speaker 2:So for me, that landed me face to face with Dante of how can I offer the world anything good if I am bad? Right? So it's not about those being true statements. That's about the affective experience as a result of those early social contracts. This chapter says hypervigilance in relationships with others, including the therapist, is therefore to be expected as these clients characteristically are on the lookout for ways that someone might take advantage of or hurt them.
Speaker 2:Shevitz noted how this can result in the therapist getting caught in the countertransference trap of proving him or herself better than abusive or neglectful others and, in the process, avoiding negative emotions. It behooves the therapist to acknowledge base emotions and motives, the shadow, and the related potential of all humans to have these emotions. It is ironic but understandable that when therapists are able to accept and acknowledge such feelings, clients may experience them as more real and, therefore, more trustworthy. Therapists are also less prone to act on their feelings when they have identified and even embraced them. So, again, our feelings are just information.
Speaker 2:There are no bad feelings. All of our feelings inform us about the world and how we are experiencing it and how we are responding because of it. Happiness tells us something is right. Sadness tells us something is missing. Anger tells us there has been injustice or that something is wrong, and that's really important information to listen to.
Speaker 2:This can also intersect in other ways. So, for example, with my first therapist, my Kelly, one of the things that became distressing and confusing was whether she listened to the podcast or not because I didn't know, and it wasn't clear for a long time because we are not talking about it directly even when we tried. And then at some point, she said, I'm not going to listen to it because I don't wanna go anywhere uninvited, which actually was very respectful and gave us clear information about boundaries being hours to set about who has access to different parts of our lives. Later, however, she did listen, and then I was in trouble for things that I said, which is a very shiny, happy thing and was actually very retraumatizing rather than it being something we navigated together one way or the other. It's not that I need her to listen to the podcast or not listen.
Speaker 2:It's that I needed to know what was happening so that I could be on the same page about the reality of it. So with my therapist now, my Linda now, one thing that has been really helpful is that there was an introductory time where I needed her to know the podcast was a thing and what it was like and why we're doing it. But once she understood that, I didn't need her to listen to the podcast anymore, and she has since explicitly said she's not going to listen to the podcast anymore so that we can focus on what is happening in therapy. That's acknowledging both the overwhelm of listening, her listening not being her style, and the things that are her stuff being explicit so that it's on the table and I'm aware of it rather than it being implicit where I can tell something is happening, but I don't know why it's happening, and then making up stories with myself about why that might be or what that means to me. It doesn't actually have anything to do with me.
Speaker 2:It is her preference. And knowing that helps me understand what is going on, and I don't have to tell myself stories about it. The book says, traumatic transference occurs when the patient unconsciously expects that the therapist, despite overt helpfulness and concern, will covertly exploit the patient for his or her own gratification. Traumatic transference reactions may emerge in indirect or paradoxical ways. The client with complex trauma who seems only to have a positive transference and who idealizes the therapist as the best may be superficially compliant, eager to please, and not alienate the therapist.
Speaker 2:So fawning. Right? So this is one thing I love about my current therapist. It's not I we joke with Jules that it's not a tea party, that she does tea party therapy. That's not true.
Speaker 2:They talk about hard things. Right? It's just teasing. But for me, really, what I'm teasing about is how superficial therapy was before compared to how deep and rough and hard it is now. So we talk about therapy now as a cage match.
Speaker 2:I don't actually mean adversarial. My therapist and I are on the same team, and we make plans together. And my therapist actually works really hard to make sure that my preferences and needs are included and part of the active process. Like, my therapist is not making plans for me. We literally plan it out together.
Speaker 2:And then also that consent is there every step of the way. So it's not actually adversarial. That's just a metaphor and teasing because we're wrestling with hard things. Right? But I love it because it's messy.
Speaker 2:So I know it's not fawning because I practice saying no. There have been whole weeks where I said, I'm not coming to therapy this week because it's hard, and I don't want to. And it was more important to honor the not wanting to as part of unshiny happy than it was to show up in therapy against my own choice and to force myself through it. Now if I only avoid therapy, I'm not gonna get much therapy done. Right?
Speaker 2:So that's not the answer either. But as part of Unshiny Unhappy, I really had to practice saying no and see that I'm not fawning and experience the messiness and the challenges of disagreeing. One time, we were practicing just practicing, like, calm, safe place and using our imagination for that. And we were cooperating, and it was working, and we were doing the thing. And our therapist was like, okay.
Speaker 2:Just for practice, let's try closing our eyes just for sixty seconds and hold this image and see how it goes. And I was like, no. That is not happening. I am not closing my eyes in here. I can't do that right now.
Speaker 2:And my therapist was like, okay. Okay. That's okay. And so it's actually really, really important and really, really healing as part of the process that I'm not idealizing my therapist, that I'm not fawning for my therapist, but it feels messy. This chapter also points out another thing about fawning, how it can be a disguised traumatic transference in which the therapist is reacted to as a perpetrator, not as a perpetrator who is doing a bad thing in the moment, but a perpetrator who must be catered to, excused, and protected in order to avoid eliciting the trauma or deprivation.
Speaker 2:Does that make sense? So, again, carrying for the perpetrator, this goes back to the root of fawning, the being good at being good to be safe. Not just being good at being good, being good at being good to be safe. So it feels unsafe when we're not good. It feels unsafe when we're not caring for the people around us or sacrificing ourself for others or pushing ourselves beyond our capacity because that's what we had to do with perpetrators.
Speaker 2:And, really, that is tied to grooming, which is also an uncomfortable topic and maybe another topic, but that is also a relational trauma. Grooming is relational by nature, and fawning is in response to grooming in memory time. In now time, it comes through transference and countertransference where it feels like it's about now, but it's really about memory time. So it gets a little tricksy. Right?
Speaker 2:This is why this becomes an advanced topic because it's a lot to untangle. The chapter says, the therapist who can appropriately, without any direct or indirect blame, criticism, or retaliation, acknowledge negative or other thorny feelings as they emerge in the transference and countertransference and who communicate to the client that any and all feelings are acceptable and expectable provides a valuable model and a responsive context. As noted, learning that individuals can be angry or have any other emotion with one another and remain in a relationship is often eye opening and growth producing for survivor clients. It is a clear counter to the relational lessons from insecure, disorganized, and otherwise abusive backgrounds in which disparagement, invalidation, and emotional or relational cutoffs were the norm rather than respect, encouragement, discussion, resolution, and repair. So when I say no to my therapist, whether it's about the sixty seconds with my eyes closed or about a therapy appointment, my therapist doesn't cut me off.
Speaker 2:My therapist doesn't say, well, now you can never have therapy again. I don't fail therapy. I actually heal myself because the relationship remains intact even though those things are hard. If my therapist sets boundaries with how they are going to interact with me and where and when, that's not actually cutting the relationship off. It's actually protecting the relationship.
Speaker 2:If I say if I say no, I don't want to date my friends, I'm actually protecting the friendships, not rejecting the person. And someone who is also doing their work and being healthy receives that, and together, their friendship is protected. And when that is rejected, it was not a friendship to begin with, or they're not in a place to receive those boundaries, which is not the same as me not setting boundaries at all or me fawning, thinking, oh, I don't want to lose this person and then doing those things. So consent is really important here even when the consent ends up being not consenting. That still honors a relationship.
Speaker 2:Jules and I have talked about this a lot in the context of our relationship and how it has unfolded, and it has not been like, they make jokes about U Haul lesbians, right, moving in together very quickly. Jules and I do not live together. There are things that there are boundaries that Jules has or boundaries that I have. Like, just trying to make it neutral and safe, things you guys already know where I'm not disclosing things without Jules being here. Like, kids.
Speaker 2:I have kids. Right? I can't not parent my kids. And so that means those are boundaries we have to negotiate around. What is that going to look like?
Speaker 2:Developmentally, as our skills and capacities increase, what is that going to look like? Or we've talked in the community about times when cameras are on or cameras are off. We always want everyone to feel welcome in groups. We don't require cameras to be on. And, also, we're more attuned if they are.
Speaker 2:And, also, there are times where someone is eating or struggling or shy or new when their cameras are not on. That doesn't make it bad. It doesn't end the relationship. As a deaf person, it's easier for me visually to be able to see the person. But if I can't see the person, it doesn't mean they're causing harm to me.
Speaker 2:But it's okay to talk about those things out loud. That's not shaming someone or insisting the dynamics go a certain way. It's honoring what the dynamics are and making it explicit when we're able to have conversations about it. The chapter says, quite ironically, it is at the moment of increased attachment and vulnerability that the relationship is most protectively disengage, a process that may be so automatic as to be outside of conscious awareness. At those points in therapy, the most accurately empathetic communication by a therapist is a frank acknowledgment that the client's past experiences understandably, have made kindness or compassion seem to be dangerous or deceptive.
Speaker 2:This can be followed by a clarification that one goal of treatment is to understand these reactions and their origin, and another is to assist the client in developing knowledge and skills to make fully informed choices about whom to trust. The client's reactions are not perceived as threats to therapy, a personal affront to the therapist, or a source of conflict between them, but as a first step in learning to differentiate safe, reliable, or trustworthy others from those who are not. This is why all the feelings are valid even when the process has to do with trauma from back in the day. It's so important that we tend to it, that we stay, that we repair, that we come full circle in things because that's where the healing happens. The part where we panic, the part where we flight, the part where we wanna run away, the part where we want to quit, that is where we have run up against the wall of trauma in memory time happening in now time.
Speaker 2:But if we stop at that point, then we don't actually move beyond it. The vision of this for me, personally, I don't mean this therapeutically. I mean, the way I hold this in my mind when things get really hard and I just wanna be done, except staying is the healing thing, is I go back to, of all things, that lost show, and it was so traumatic how it all ended. Right? I know.
Speaker 2:But the people who died in lost were the people who ran away from the monster. The people who survived the monster, remember that black cloud, the clickety clickety thing? Whatever that was, we never really got that fully answered. Whatever that was, the people who turned to face it were the people who survived it, and that is what relational rupture and repair is about. That is what transference in a healthy way is trying to do.
Speaker 2:The chapter says, throughout the course of therapy, the client may consciously or unconsciously test the therapist in attempts to reinforce the belief that no one really cares or is truly trustworthy. While simultaneously craving it, the client with complex trauma fears the therapist caring due to his or her predominantly negative self perceptions and fears, increased vulnerability to possible judgment and criticism, ultimately leading to abandonment, rejection, and reprisal. Such a relational trajectory may be seen as inevitable to a client who fears being seen, as the client judges themselves as rotten to the core and then as secrets related to the past are disclosed. Clients who have been repeatedly subjected to double bind communication, when we can't win one way or the other, tend to place therapists and peers in double binds that replicate those from their own troubled childhoods, Having had to defend themselves psychically against betrayal and abandonment from an early age, these clients are acutely perceptive about other people's points of psychic weakness, conflict, or pain, Thus, in their own repetition of attachment instead of attachment, it is not uncommon for them to zero in on their therapist's most vulnerable personal issues when testing his or her ability to maintain integrity in the face of opportunities for reenactment.
Speaker 2:This transference can be used to better understand the client's schemas about self and others. Transferential testing and resultant crises in trust should be expected to intensify or resurface. Crises, by definition, are times when the need for proximity to the caregiver or attachment figure is greatest. Jules and I have talked about this for, like, two years now. We are most distressed with or about each other when we are apart.
Speaker 2:When we are together, we feel so regulated and connected that even really hard conversations are possible. But when we are apart, it is so easy to become distressed. And I could not understand what this was about until Jules explained it like a dog. And I don't mean in any sort of disrespectful way to us or our relationship or to each other. She was not disrespecting me.
Speaker 2:She was not calling me a dog. That's what I'm saying. But, like, how dogs will be really close and follow you around and just want to be close to you, sort of parallel play, whatever you're doing, they might run off, but they come back and touch base. That is proximity the way a puppy or a dog or, like, if you have a really close relationship with a dog, the way it will stay close to you, that is proximity. And proximity matters in ways I never knew before.
Speaker 2:And so that may be something we come back to in a whole other episode, but it is everything, and it is so healing. And so I think it's one thing that happens that's distressing when I can't make it to a group in community or when I miss people that I have worked so hard to become friends with or when there's a rupture. When we lose proximity, proximity, we feel far more distressed and dysregulated than when we can be together and just have a conversation. So connection brings healing, and sometimes we need that in person. Sometimes we need that closeness.
Speaker 2:It's why things like healing together are so powerful because there's proximity. So I will leave it at that because we need to come back to that, the talking about proximity.
Speaker 1: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.systemspeak.com. We'll see you there.