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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 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 1:Today is New Year's Day. I should be thinking about setting goals or making my life better. That's what other people seem to do. But for me, it's a day of trying to put my life together from the last year or two, maybe three. It's always blurry my life.
Speaker 1:Better in pieces. Progress I can see and yet somehow still lacking continuity. I'm all alone today. No one else is here. My girlfriend has gone home.
Speaker 1:My son is in Oklahoma, and I have already Zoomed with the children. And I've just called the husband and and visited with his parents. They lost their dog this week, and it's sad. And I miss the dog I almost had. I miss my family being so far away from them, and these are moments I will never get back.
Speaker 1:But I also relish in the silence here today, giving me space enough in the setting sun. To find myself again, to find my way again. I don't mean to keep getting lost or so tangled in what's happening or not happening, but it's been so many changes so quickly and so much to see and to process. And the world around me seems to change ever more quickly, fast enough I can't keep up anymore, and I think I have stopped trying. When it's this quiet and this still, and I have time and space to be me, to sit with myself.
Speaker 1:And think back on the last year or two or five or ten and realize all we've been through with the children, as a family, and in therapy. When we started therapy, she, the one who works, Doctor e, they call her. Chris, they call her. She worked a job at night at the hospital where unless there was an emergency, we had hours and hours alone in the silence to ponder and think and reflect and write. Those are the years we really wrote the book, trying to get out of us all the layers that have been crammed into us, that were on pause, that had happened to us long before we ever started typing.
Speaker 1:That's when we had time to write in the notebooks, when we worked a job in silence, being paid to wait for crises, barely functioning, but desperate enough for a job and with illusion enough that we could do it, a job no one else wanted. So they were fine giving it to us. And so for those years, we had time and space to do literally nothing but therapy and parenting, homeschooling the children by day while our daughter was in the hospital, and we were in quarantine long before there was a pandemic, and working by night to help those that no one else had time for, to do a job no one else wanted, but which gave us time and space to write in notebooks even if it did not pay enough to feed our family. Back in those years, I was a walking panic attack. My anxiety was so high, and life was so hard in so many ways, and so much was happening.
Speaker 1:I think maybe that's why I finally got diagnosed, because there was nowhere else to hide things. There was nowhere else to push things down. It was so bad that I had those physical symptoms, the ones where it feels like a heart attack, but it's just anxiety, as if just anxiety is such a simple thing. I was not drinking caffeine, And I walked all over the hospital for hours each night, so I was getting exercise at least in that way but could not make my symptoms go away. I was desperate for help.
Speaker 1:I was scared of the voices I was hearing and the time that was disappearing. I was terrified of what I didn't know, of what I should have known, of not knowing what I could have known, or why it was so hard to hold on to my own story. And in therapy, I learned about my diagnosis. I learned about now time and memory time. I learned about my system as it was called.
Speaker 1:I learned about the others of me, with me, in me. I learned to feel my feelings, to know what they were, and sometimes even know where they were coming from or what they were trying to tell me. We moved to Kansas City for my daughter to be closer to Children's Hospital there. And in those years, we drove far for therapy, fighting so hard to hold on to what had helped, to all that we knew, to the good we thought was ours. Those sacrifices, I think, is part of what hurt so much later when it all fell apart.
Speaker 1:But that attached cry, which I know now, those words, was my own and not her fault. And I should have let go sooner. I don't mean should have like a shame. I mean, if I had, it would have already been worked through and not so painful later. But I only understand that now and didn't see it then.
Speaker 1:It was also there that we finally started releasing episodes of the podcast that we had started long ago. We began to make friends in a very far away sort of way with people who had been guests on the podcast or people who wrote into the podcast. Listeners we never thought we would be able to meet or see. It gave us enough courage eventually to come out to ISSTD, that it was us doing the podcast, that we were the voice of System Speak, only to be transparent, to be safe. That community has largely been kind and supportive of us, Although, because we are human and make mistakes and other people are human and make mistakes, there are some who don't favor us, and we've learned to let that be okay because we've also since learned about fawning, about trauma responses, about how the way that we respond to hard things has to do with what our brain needs, does, and how it is designed.
Speaker 1:Not that we are a behavior problem. It still wasn't always easy. We learned what trolls were. We encountered problems. There's a story that we've never told, but I'll mention it now because they emailed us again today.
Speaker 1:When we were diagnosed the first time back in college, We tried then to help with support groups to learn about DID, and we started a website and groups then. And through that, met someone we thought was a friend. And they convinced us to go on a road trip, to meet others. I don't know why we agreed to this, except that it was in those college years, and we were in such a terrible place. And so to have anyone be kind to us seemed like a big deal and fawning.
Speaker 1:Right? So if we had our only friend, we would do what they said to keep them. And so we borrowed our mother's car because we did not have one and drove from Oklahoma to Texas to pick them up. And then because they wanted to go on this road trip, we drove them to Chicago. It's all blurry.
Speaker 1:I don't remember all of it, and I don't know who does remember all of it. But while we were there, they had us log in to the groups on their computer, and we were young and naive and didn't understand that they were stealing our password. And that's how they stole our groups and our website. And it was devastating. But they still expected us to drive them back to Texas.
Speaker 1:But in Southern Missouri, we had a therapist, and they had a relative in the same town. And so our therapist helped us tell them that we did not feel safe anymore and they needed to get their own ride home. And we asked them to leave. We did not mean to be cruel, but we were young. And they were, in comparison, an adult while we were very young adult, barely an adult.
Speaker 1:And they should have known better. And we were learning better. And they were screaming at us and being unkind. And so we asked them to get out of our car right there in our therapist parking lot. I don't know how they found their way home.
Speaker 1:And I am to this day terribly sorry that that was difficult for them. But it also was not okay what they did to us, and we also felt like we were in physical danger. And we were following the counsel given to us by our therapist. And so we returned the car to our mother, who was not happy that we had driven it to Chicago. Well, to Texas and then to Chicago.
Speaker 1:Now as I remember this, that feels like not even my memory, but as I remember this, I think, what were we doing? And what danger could we have encountered along the way? And how much worse could things have gotten? But that person that we asked to get out of our car found the podcast and sends us emails regularly to let us know they're still stalking us. We have removed ourselves from all of social media because of it.
Speaker 1:Our professional websites, LinkedIn, and regular social media, even Instagram where we used to post poems. We've taken it all down, and that's really why. It scares me because of the danger. It hurts me because it means they're hurting, And it baffles me that twenty five, thirty years later, they would still target us like this because of that day after what they had done. I only share this story because it's an example of the messes we find ourselves in.
Speaker 1:We should not have gone. We should not have driven to another state to pick up someone that was a stranger. We should not have gone on a road trip with someone we didn't know. We should not have signed in on a strange device with unknown people onto a website we wanted to protect. This was in 1997 or '98 or '99, somewhere in there.
Speaker 1:It was not recently. It's not the community, which is very well protected. But that's why I take it seriously. Not because I'm afraid, but because it's happened before. We've never talked about this directly before because I don't want to make things worse, because I don't want to whine, because I don't want to scare people for all kinds of reasons.
Speaker 1:We don't want to talk about it. But also for safety, it seems important to tell my story and that it's been a problem. These people have contacted my school because they don't believe we actually have any degrees, And they say, quote, it will be their life's work, end quote, to prove it. And so the school contacted us that they had been contacted and asked if we wanted to release the information or not. And we said, no, we don't want any information released.
Speaker 1:But, yes, we really graduated, and, yes, we are really licensed, and, yes, we are real people even if human ones. The other thing hard about this story is how it parallels my family story and that actual mistakes, errors in judgment, even foolishness, risking on dangerousness. Leave me targeted for forever, that there is no escaping it, that it haunts me always. And so when I'm with a therapist and they say that it's in memory time, I don't know if they really understand that memory time invades now time in ways that aren't just flashbacks. That the impact of what happened to us when we were little or adolescents without parents or young adults who had already been on our own for a decade How that lack of good leaves us vulnerable and has consequences that continue to unfold no matter how hard we try to do things right or to do things well.
Speaker 1:Kansas City is also where we started trying to find new therapists. And then the pandemic happened, and we were sent to the country. And it was during that time that we finally typed everything up into the book. Our historical and autobiographical experiences, connecting with the stories of others, writing three books in two years, trying to offer something, trying to share our story, trying to find words, trying to offer healing, trying to find hope. Despite the ghosts that haunt us and the trolls that stalk us.
Speaker 1:I don't want to cause harm. There is nothing malicious in what we have shared. It has just been vulnerability. The podcast in a way, its own submit response, rolling over to lay it all out as vulnerably as we can. To say not only is this my truth, but, yes, we are weak.
Speaker 1:Yes. We have been unwell. Yes. We have been unparented, underdeveloped, undersocialized, whatever you want to accuse us of. It is all true except for those things that are not.
Speaker 1:And while they may call out the shame of my diagnosis or place stigma against me to keep me down, to hold me down like they did by force. The difference now is that I am an adult, and I do have a voice. I have been in therapy, and I will not be silent. And so we spent the pandemic, those years grieving, grieving the loss of a therapist, grieving the loss of hope, grieving the deaths of our parents, grieving the loss of our own innocence. And maybe it's hard to talk about directly, and maybe it's hard to stay present enough to say.
Speaker 1:But, also, we spent those two years becoming aware of our own story, learning to tolerate our feelings while holding space for what has happened to us, how much has happened to us. And in doing so, I grew weary. There are reasons so many of us fight to stay alive. Because it really has been that hard. Because the bad does not go away, because the ghosts still haunt us, because the trolls still target us, and because the nightmares don't go away.
Speaker 1:The husband left Valentine's Day. 2021 to go live with and care for his parents. We didn't know it would be so long, and he had already been traveling there and back to stay with them mostly unofficially before then. And before the pandemic, I had been deployed for months. So it has now been more than three years since we lived together.
Speaker 1:Since the 2019. And quarantine was hell for all of those therapeutic reasons. But we fought our way through, and it was sacred for what we accomplished during that time, the release of our book and all its mistakes and the revision since and the workbook and the compilation. But most sacred of all, for that time with the children, literally hiding from the world for their final moments of childhood. As if we were given back the time together we never had in the beginning before they came to us.
Speaker 1:And so as much as it was hell, it was sacred also. Any most powerful experience I wouldn't trade for anything, but also don't think I could survive again. And it has taken an entire year since coming out of quarantine to heal, to recover, and to grow again. We finally found in that year a new therapist who helped us process our grief from our previous therapist and also listen to and process through all of the podcast. It was like a new version of the notebooks back when we unboxed ourselves meeting each other inside on pages written in colored pens, online paper, notebook after notebook.
Speaker 1:We finally heard each other's stories, each other's voices, each other's perspectives, and maybe in some ways became friends. But as the whole entire world went back to normal, there was no more time to lose hours and days writing in notebooks or doing work for therapy. And it was time again to balance life and work and parenting and therapy. The husband struggled on his own with his depression as he shared with you himself, and it grew worse. We moved closer to be close to him, and still he struggled, And so he stayed with his parents as I continued single parenting the children whom I love.
Speaker 1:But no one should be the only provider of an inpatient unit. And it broke me in a way, those hard years, shattered me, crumbled me. I dropped my basket, as they say. It was difficult. And as they began to lift emergency orders, my work contracts were dropped, not because I had done anything wrong, but because funding was not renewed.
Speaker 1:And so last summer, I was laid off and scrambled for work to provide for 10 people. The husband has always been kind to me and has always helped in the ways that he could with the children, But he is a writer, which I knew from the beginning and so have not been betrayed. But he does not have income consistently to contribute. And so I could not only single parent six children, but also those two years that I did, I was also working, working in every way that I could find. But when I lost those COVID contracts, I was only making $200 a week, sometimes 10 or $20 a week, as I scrambled to find work and make new contracts and apply for new positions or expand my role to work like I had done before the pandemic.
Speaker 1:And so we had six months of not being able to pay our bills, of not being able to buy food. The children ate at school and at the youth center. And I just kept applying and applying and ultimately had to take another deployment, which meant leaving my family, which meant the husband returning home to the children, which meant his parents struggling on their own, and all of the weight of it on me. It was the best that I could do. And so last summer, we moved.
Speaker 1:We moved for better work, enough work, enough pay to catch up six months of bills for 10 people. And went back to deployment working in disaster sites, but this time not war zones anymore. Because I've already learned in therapy that war zones are not my baseline, and I'm trying to hold on to that. But it feels hard to believe when it keeps happening, when the ghosts still haunt us and trolls still target us. The thing that was different, though, from 2019 is that where I landed for work Also happened to be where it lived.
Speaker 1:We met early through healing together, the community, as clinicians, as friends. Getting to know each other through groups, through professional work, through sharing, and then landing in the same classes with ISSTD and becoming friends then and exchanging numbers. And then we met in person in Seattle. When I was so scared of people and so shy of meeting them in person, when it was so hard to do in person what I had learned to do on the computer. But she was there for my coming out.
Speaker 1:She was there when we got the awards from ISSTD for the workbook, bookending the moment when we were supposed to get the award for the podcast two years before, when the conference was canceled because the pandemic was declared. She was there before I presented in person for the first time for ISSTD. She was there to cheer me on. She was there to talk to you after. She was there when the days were long, While I was busy with my job with ISSTD and trying to moderate sessions and everything happening at once and I was overwhelmed and worn out and hungry, she was there with soup and a sandwich.
Speaker 1:When I wanted to be myself and just a person, not the system speak voice, but also known because of the podcast and greeted because of the podcast and swarmed because of the podcast. She was there, sitting with me at the table talking to pioneers in the field, talking to colleagues who became friends through interviews, through committee meetings, through the humanity that we share. When I was scared to go to dinner and overwhelmed by all the social conversation, not just from anxiety or trauma, but because of cochlear implants. She was there in the quiet of the evening just to chat. We had so much in common, and she was kind and safe.
Speaker 1:And we became friends. I saw her again in Denver and another friend from my church who's also a clinician but attended that conference. And we spent the weekend together, the three of us laughing and talking and learning. And I thought, this is the miracle of healing, that I'm now experiencing what I thought I never would three years ago, in person friends, that I feel safe with, that I can laugh with, who are real and kind, with whom I can be vulnerable but also challenged by, who respect my own growth and my voice and my truth and still love me anyway. The only other person I had ever met like that was the husband, and you know he is good and kind and safe.
Speaker 1:And then after that, my therapist started asking hard questions, and that's when we began to talk on the podcast about sexuality and religious trauma. The husband and I have shared our vulnerable conversations about some of those things from therapy, even about our marriage, about sexuality, things we went into our marriage knowing, none of it is a surprise. But trying to find our way to make meaning of it now ten years later. What does that mean, and what does it look like, and how do we move forward? I can't speak for him, but for me, I've never been unhappy with him.
Speaker 1:I've been very safe, and he's very kind. You know this because you know him. That's who he is, that authentic in person or in the podcast. That's just him. But I was also facing the very real reality that as things were, things could not stay.
Speaker 1:We were in crisis financially without my job. And healing meant setting different boundaries. Not hateful ones, not marriage in a crisis ones, but thoughtful, intentional, gentle ones. Boundaries like, I cannot be the therapist for our children. I am just their parent.
Speaker 1:Boundaries like, I cannot save you from depression no matter how much I want to. You need your own therapist. And boundaries like, I understand you don't want to use labels and that you're okay being ace. But I'm not, And it's hard for me. And what do we do about that?
Speaker 1:And the thing about healing is that when you've done too much for everyone, just trying to be safe, just trying to be enough, that when you realize you're not and you stop, everything falls apart for a little while. And that's what happened. The family realized that if I don't work, they don't get food. No one went hungry, I assure you, but life changed. I had to turn away people from workbooks because therapists kept telling their clients that they could write to me and get a free workbook.
Speaker 1:But people had stopped donating them, and I no longer had resources to give them. I couldn't go to groups the same as I could during the pandemic, during quarantine, because I had to take any work I could just to keep going, just to feed my family. And so without any running away, but also with great confidence. I made the difficult but very correct decision for me to leave my family, not running away from them, not abandoning them, but to go where I could do what they needed me to do, which was to work and provide for the family. And also to take respite from the level of acuity in our home and to care for myself the way I had cared for them.
Speaker 1:And it was lovely coincidence that where I was sent for work was near And that's the contract that I got. And by the time I scrambled to get housing, everything happened so fast. But as I drove across the country with only what could fit in my car, was already here, Picking up the keys to my little house, finding a free couch and moving it in, setting up a bed so that I would have a place to sleep. And finding towels and blankets so that I could live. And sharing a keyboard and a guitar so that I could bring music with me too.
Speaker 1:And so I worked those first weeks and months in a very empty house as my home base. But also this time and deployment, I was not alone. We had technology now to stay connected to the family with Zoom, And the children were old enough for phones and could text me or email or call. We could hear and see each other. And it was not ideal, but it was more connected than we've ever been on any deployment thus far.
Speaker 1:Ange was here, caring, being beyond generous and helpful with our family, with me, helping me to see me, and with capacity to love me. And then my son had to come and move here because he was struggling and has not been safe. Not because I left, but because his body is growing bigger and faster than his emotions and social skills can regulate, not because he is bad, but because he is healing, and he needs the space and time to do so safely. And so he joined us here in our little house without even a bed, only the mattress from my car that I used to camp as I drove here when I crossed the country. It has been a difficult and scary year financially and emotionally and publicly.
Speaker 1:My most vulnerable pieces out for the world, for people to judge, to hate on, or to appreciate. But they are my pieces, and it is what we are learning. And I'm staying true to that. The children came to visit, the boys at Thanksgiving and the girls at Christmas. Not to be binary, but that's how they organized themselves and decided it would be best.
Speaker 1:It was a wild week at Thanksgiving when my son who was living here could not regulate with them, except it was holidays, so that's an okay time to not regulate. It's an okay time to be extra wild and extra loud and extra physical and not sleep much. But when they went home again, he did alright again in our little routine and quiet environment. That works well for autism and TBI, which means traumatic brain injury from when his skull was broken when he was two. I can't fix a TBI.
Speaker 1:The damage he has endured is still there and always will be in this mortal life, visible scars mirroring the invisible relational wounds none of us can see. I can't undo his autism either and don't think that we need to, but he does need accommodations to navigate the world, to advocate for himself, and to have what he needs to be successful and healthy in whatever ways that means to him. And so he's here, which brings me to the shock of realizing that I'm here longer term than I knew I would be. And so it just is. I have found myself in another life that is once again my own, even my own doing, but not at all the same as it was before I began to dream.
Speaker 1:And the moments when I can accept and hold on to that it's actually good and right for me and best for him, everything is okay. But most of the time, I struggle with guilt for being away. Except that when the children were here for Christmas, they said it's okay, that they understand, that they only miss me when it's a holiday, that on school days, they're busy and don't know any way. I can't believe that's entirely true, except also I trust what is good for us and what purpose there is. That is we are driven about in the wilderness as they say.
Speaker 1:That we will be where we need to be, doing what we need to do as best we can. And as I saw the children at Thanksgiving and Christmas, they were happy and more relaxed and healthy as they grow. And so it just is. We're all doing our best. No one abandoning anyone, but all of us finding ways to add what's been missing, what we've been needing to be healthy and happy, even when that's restructuring.
Speaker 1:I got restructuring from a therapist's website when I was looking for a new therapist here, and one was talking about religious trauma. They said sometimes with trauma, that's what we need is restructuring. That in the beginning, we stay in our lives and look at what's been hard. And then as we start healing, sometimes we have to change our circumstances or make decisions that are difficult or invite new life experiences. They talked about how we can't think our way out of trauma and the impact on our bodies and how trauma is stored.
Speaker 1:But that sometimes what we need is restructuring to move forward. Not just talking about what's happened in the past or redefining for ourselves what's happening in the present, but literally deciding to create our future. Even if also because of trauma, we move slowly and pace things and are gentle with changes. It reminds me of what we learned about how childhood trauma happens not because of all the bad things done to us, but because of the lack of good. And so now I think, when I look back on it all, I think I spent five years learning what the bad things were and five years grieving the good that was missing.
Speaker 1:And now for the first time, I'm putting the good back in so that finally, my life is not just safe enough, but also good enough.
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. And healing brings hope.