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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 1:She says, you may have been perceived and labeled by others as emotionally uncontrolled or too intense, when what was happening was that an EP had just arrived on the scene. As we discussed earlier, some of you have tried to solve this problem by dissociating from your emotions and shutting down completely. On the surface, you've always appeared to be calm and emotionally regulated, while in fact you were cut off from emotion and poorly equipped to deal with your feelings when the cover was ripped off of them by life events. These young coping strategies aren't solutions that will work for helping you have the relationships you deserve. Learning emotional regulation so that you are able to have a Goldilocks experience of just right is an important skill for having healthy relationships that you deserve.
Speaker 1:Do you hear what she's saying? You deserve healthy, safe relationships. The other thing she's saying, to make it more explicit, is that when there is dysregulation happening, when we are on an emotional roller coaster, when there is a Venn diagram of hell, those are red flags that memory time is happening. When we are having big emotional responses to what is happening in now time, it means memory time has invaded. That is our indicator to pause, to step away.
Speaker 1:None of that is abusive. It doesn't mean someone is causing it. If someone doesn't let you step away, if someone doesn't let you have a break, if someone then makes things harder or worse, that can be coercive control. But needing to pause, needing to take the break, as long as you're circling back to it, that is the healthy thing. She says, Emotions are bodily experiences to which we have attached names.
Speaker 1:Many survivors only know the numbness or intensity of feelings, but not actually the graduations or the continuum in between or their names. For many of you, a body was not a safe place to be. Bad things were done to your body, things that hurt or confused you, things that overstimulated you or left you numb. Too many survivors I work with have medical problems that they ignored or denied because they simply couldn't feel. The first step toward emotion regulation is learning to become safe enough in your own body that you can feel it to responding to what's happening in the present.
Speaker 1:This is huge. This is huge. Are there some ships you need to get out of or away from because it's not safe? Yes. And, also, are there many ships and most ships you could be safe enough in and healthy enough with if you can tell what is yours and what is theirs, and when is memory time, and when is now time.
Speaker 1:That goes back to orienting to time and space where you are in the world right now. So not just directionally, like if you close your eyes, can you find east or west or north or south? But also, where are your feet? Where are your hands? Where is your head?
Speaker 1:Where is that line of your spine? Where are your ears? Where are your eyes? Where are you in that space between them? Finding your way back to your body by whatever method you find doable and tolerable is going to be worth it, even if it takes time to get there.
Speaker 1:She says, when we begin to become emotionally aroused, our nervous system sends signals that lead to predictable bodily changes in breathing, blood flow to and from the skin and gut, and levels of tension in our muscles. When a good enough caregiver is noticing and naming emotions to a child, that caregiver is seeing those physical cues and mirroring them back to the child with emotion names. This is an example of the impact of relational trauma. We know physical and sexual abuse are bad. We are not dismissing any of that or minimizing any of that.
Speaker 1:And also, the deprivation of care, of emotional attunement, of responsiveness in a caregiver literally makes us unable to understand our own nervous system. As we reconnect to those signals of arousal in our body, we will learn to notice different layers of how we talk to ourselves, which is what gives us information about the world, which is how now time is safe. Not because hard things don't happen, but because part of what is safety is being connected to ourselves so that we know how to respond to danger, how to express ourselves at all, and when and what we can or cannot do about any of it. Emotional regulation will require you to become the editor of those narratives, as well as the author of new ones that are self compassionate, not self hating or shaming. One layer of self talk might be about what's apparently happening now in your ships with another person.
Speaker 1:The next layer of self talk looks and sounds like you're thinking, but you're not. You're actually ruminating. Rumination is the process of repeating a narrative of fear and danger going around and around over the same uncomfortable spot, digging yourself further and further into misery. So this can also happen with ships, where in if we are already practicing self abandonment, and we are already thinking we are not good, and project that onto our other ships, and think they are abandoning us, and they are not good, and talk badly about them, then we reinforce our own narrative that is really about a memory time flashback of I am bad. I will be abandoned.
Speaker 1:Nobody loves me. But we're doing it externally, shaming other people, or talking badly about other people, or lying about other people, or gossiping about other people. In the same way, it can also look like, like for me from a personal example, it was the message was I am not good enough, and no one's going to love me. And so how I ruminated was I have to try harder, I have to try harder, and I have to try harder, until I was literally spent and had nothing left to give. That's how it becomes enactment from our thoughts to our actions, even just with ourselves.
Speaker 1:If your price of admission, what we learned in childhood, those social contracts to relationship is to get people back to happy or calm no matter what, you will fail that, and you will tell yourself you are bad, wrong, and shameful. That was my childhood. My job was to keep my father calm and my mother happy. I could not calm my father and my mother was not happy. So my concept of self in childhood was about I had already failed both of those things, and yet it was expected and demanded and assumed I would continue trying.
Speaker 1:That is the double blind. She said, think of an introject as an undigested representation of the adults who were cruel to you. It's not you, and it's not telling you the truth about you. It's loud, and it sounds authoritative, and it sounds like you're talking to yourself. And it's as wrong and alien as it is loud.
Speaker 1:These often are those protectors that we think are so tough, and they're so nasty externally or even internally, but are often those echoes from childhood very, very early, which is why under all the masking and all the loudness and all the nastiness, they are so young and so little. The ruminative self talk about attachment and connection that was authored by your less than adequate caregiver simply causes you ever higher levels of emotional distress. That distress in turn activates other even more problematic inner narratives in which your distress ramps up higher. These are narratives of shame, self loathing, and abandonment terror, and they activate these emotional states. It's EP land, sometimes introject land.
Speaker 1:That's memory time, you guys. That's not now time. Those are not good places to live. They are not places in which emotionally meaningful relationships can flourish. Okay.
Speaker 1:This is huge. This is huge. This is probably the one thing I have learned over ten years when maybe I should have learned a 100 things, but the one thing I learned is that there's not actually anything I can do to make someone else happy. There's not actually anything I can do to make someone else calm. There's not actually anything else I can do to make someone else believe they are loved.
Speaker 1:And there's not actually anything anyone else can do for or against me to make me believe I am loved. Those are all memory time wounds. And when memory time wounds invade now time relationships, there is nothing either of you can do that's right. Because no one is going to get fixed, and no one is going to get rescued, and it will continue to feel like abandonment and harm. And if we ruminate instead of tending, instead of responding, we will continue to see the other person as bad because it is a projection of being told we were bad or taught that we were bad.
Speaker 1:And in badness, nothing is going to flourish. In memory time, there was trauma and deprivation. And when we bring trauma and deprivation into now time, that is not health. That is not healing, unless we are responding to it ourselves within our own system in the context of therapy. Our partners or any other ships cannot be the parents we never had.
Speaker 1:Even our therapists cannot be the parent we never had. Our therapists can care a great deal. Our therapists can support us and cheer us on and be there and witness for us, with us, so many things that have waited so long to be heard or seen or witnessed. But it's not undoing what happened in memory time. It is tending and responding to what happened in memory time.
Speaker 1:I underlined this. I highlighted this, and I put a star by it. She says, when your problematic narratives have taken over the experience of being around someone who's feeling any unpleasant emotional state and your EPs get activated, you start dishing out payment for connection big time. So once their ship is in memory time, whatever our social contract was in memory time, that's what we start acting out. So for me, I'm gonna try harder.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna try harder. I'm gonna try harder. Someone else's distress leads us to believe that we're in huge emotional debt, that we've got to start paying down fast before we get dropped, and you'll start doing whatever you can to rebalance the emotional account. So we may become over salacious or apologize for not having done something perfect. How many I'm sorrys can you say?
Speaker 1:You might try to be the entertaining baby telling a joke or giving fistfuls of compliments. Anything to allay the other person's unpleasant emotional state. You might be apologetic or overly grateful when someone is simply decent. You will be in reenactment. We have shifted from enactment, when memory time surfaces, to reenactment, when we are responding to it in memory time as well, instead of responding in now time to memory time.
Speaker 1:That is the Venn diagram of hell. That is the emotional roller coaster. That is not safe. It was already trauma and deprivation the first time, and it is trauma and deprivation in this now time, and it belongs in therapy. Ships cannot save us from memory time.
Speaker 1:Therapy prevents memory time from invading now time. If you're in reenactment, you might do a version of emotional dysregulation going from narrative of shame to the narrative of anger or martyrdom. These narratives of shame and anger are paths to shut down and disengagement, not to regulation of emotions. Compassionately noticing and interrupting your ruminative self talk is a next step in emotion regulation. When you can change your narratives from those of shame and self hatred, to those of curiosity and open mindedness, your emotional state will give you information about what's happening now.
Speaker 1:You will stop traveling back in time to do the relationship with your less than adequate caregivers. You'll stay in now time to do the relationship with your ships. Your EPs, your memory time folks, your littles, your trauma holders have an accurate understanding of memory time. They do not have an accurate understanding of now time. She says, quote, the EP's perspective is inaccurate about what's happening now.
Speaker 1:This is why it matters so much, because when memory time invades now time, it is not that the partner in whatever ship we have is our abuser in now time. I mean, are cases when that's true. But the dynamic of memory time and now time becomes abusive when we treat our ships like memory time. So we either become the abuser, or treat or respond as if we are being abused, and that is a vicious cycle that will not stop until we pause now time long enough to say, Woah, that was memory time. That's not what's happening right now.
Speaker 1:She says naming, giving language to experience, is the step that moves emotions from indefinable feelings in the body to known and familiar phenomena. Naming links up our prefrontal cortex with our limbic system so that they can work together in the present to have the accurate narrative of daily life. So just like we have to learn to use our left brains and right brains together, we also want to connect our prefrontal cortex to inform our limbic system. So when we get alerted from danger, we can still feel we are being alerted to danger. That is important information.
Speaker 1:But our prefrontal cortex can help us know if that danger is happening now or already happened in memory time. This is why it's important to slow down. She says, If you struggle to assess whether other people are trustworthy, your safety plan will probably include giving yourself sufficient time to gather the data necessary for accurate assessment. It will include strategies to reduce betrayal blindness, and increase your awareness of what you're feeling in the moment. If your old pay the price belief is that the only way someone will relate to you is if you give yourself away and have no boundaries, your safety plan will involve noticing the cues that activate your narratives of worthlessness before you give yourself away, before you override your own boundaries, while also including work on identifying and setting boundaries.
Speaker 1:The goal of a relational safety plan is to help you stay out of reenactments or leave them as early as possible. Because the ruminating means it's cycling, right? Which means each time it gets worse and each time it gets more dangerous. She said instead of asking ourselves, what was I thinking idiot? We need to say to ourselves, what was I doing, thinking, or feeling when this got to be too hard to do?
Speaker 1:And walking ourselves backward to the point where we struggled with safety and asking ourselves what we needed to tweak in order to be able to be more effective in our safety plan. This walking it back strategy is called behavior chain analysis. This is really interesting that she talks about this here because it's also happening as I put up original episodes again. I'm literally walking back through what happened since I lost my first therapist and what were the chain of events that unfolded since then, and how things were connected, and what that means, what it tells me, how it informs me, and what I can learn from it. That is coming on the podcast next year.
Speaker 1:You will hear it. She says, Because boundaries are outgrowths of what we feel, want, know, and think, many of you who had less than adequate attachment experiences don't do so well with the skill. You guys, if boundaries are about what we want, and know, and think, and feel, we cannot have boundaries, much less enforce them, when we don't know who we are. When we don't know what we want, when we don't know what we feel, when we don't know what we think. That makes so much sense.
Speaker 1:She said developing boundaries starts with seemingly simple things. Again, the senses. Study yourself again, doing little experiments, noticing what you like and what you don't like and why you feel that way. Give yourself choices that allow you to compare and contrast. Notice if you feel mad, sad, glad, scared, or numb when you have this experience or around this person.
Speaker 1:How can you tell which feeling that you're feeling? Feelings are information about our boundaries. Practice giving the feeling a name. Make a list of feeling words to carry with you, and try them on for size to see which feeling names fit. My favorite example of this is actually a worksheet from ACA, which I think is being changed to be called ACDA because it includes dysfunctional families even if the family didn't actively use alcohol or drugs.
Speaker 1:And it's really, really helpful. It's the needs a needs something. I will see if I can find it and put a link in the show notes. She says also notice when you're not having feelings or feeling connected to your body, that that is always a signal that EPs are present, because your EPs would prefer you to not have or feel your body. We need to soothe them.
Speaker 1:We need to respond to them. We need to help them notice that we're in the present in now time, and that now time is safe enough because we are taking care of them. Now time is safe not because there's no trauma in the world, not because there's no natural disasters in the world, not because all of the politics are everybody's favorite. Now time is safe because I take care of me. There's a Taylor Swift lyric that talks about I protect the family.
Speaker 1:Right? We're talking inner family. N T I S because I protect my inner family. Learning first what colors you prefer or which music you like will help you work your way up to more challenging boundary statements such as, I don't like it when you respond to my request for you to pick up your clothes by calling me OCD. I don't care if it's true or not, I want you to stop saying that to me.
Speaker 1:I experienced that response as contemptuous and dismissive, and that's not okay with me. She says, that's a black belt advanced boundary skill, and you can get there. Oh my goodness. Your newly developing capacity to give up the price of admission that require giving away your boundaries in exchange for relationship. Do yourself the courtesy of acknowledging how hard it is to practice this new set of behaviors.
Speaker 1:Don't expect yourself to master it quickly. Let yourself be a beginner, even if an advanced beginner, before you ever take on being an intermediate student. Take longer than you first thought you would need. Be a tortoise. No need to be the hare.
Speaker 1:My friend says she's a snail. The more important someone is to you, and the more you want to stay connected to that person, the more difficult it may be to have your boundaries with her or him to speak even small truths about how you're not going to do what they want. You'll be surprised by how many of the people in your life are just fine with your boundaries. She says, it's not unusual for people to have their boundaries challenged by others' intentional or inadvertent use of guilt or shame inducing statements. Guilt and shame are invitations to give up boundaries.
Speaker 1:This was huge to me to recognize rather than someone shaming me or guilting me, even if it's false guilt, that that is not truth about me. It is actually a manipulation or an invitation for me to give up my boundaries, which is the point where trauma and deprivation come between me and my values. That is the moment I have to choose myself. She says, you might take some of these voyages into guilt or shame as you start to practice boundaries with someone you've known for a while. The other person might feel that you've been dishonest about your actual feelings and needs.
Speaker 1:They may think you're changing the rules of the relationship mid course and might even apply or even say directly that this is a bad thing. That's time for self compassion. They're a little bit right. You are changing the rules. But that's not the point, and neither is shame nor guilt.
Speaker 1:You had not been able to be with them or yourself as you are until now. You were not as clear about what is and isn't acceptable to you. You might be changing up some of the unspoken agreements between the two of you. None of these changes are a reason for you to feel guilt or shame. You are not a bad person.
Speaker 1:You are not a liar. You are not a deceiver. You are what all of us are: human and changing. You are also healing from wounds from less than adequate attachment, and learning to stop paying prices for relationship. We do not promise others that we will never change when we enter into relationships with them.
Speaker 1:We do, explicitly or implicitly, promise to be as honest as we know how, to keep commitments as best we are able, to take responsibility for our errors, and to accept apologies with grace when others miss the mark. We do not promise that we will never change. Listen to this boundary of all boundaries. I couldn't even believe it. I literally wrote on the page like, what?
Speaker 1:You can refuse to accept the false belief that guilt or shame is a price you must pay for staying connected to someone when you start to have clearer and more accurate boundaries with them. You can offer empathy to them for how weird and unpleasant this whole thing is. Yes, you're right. I am changing, and this is confusing for you. Without fussing with the other person, without losing yourself, and without withdrawing your boundaries.
Speaker 1:You can be truthful. Yes, I was not able to tell you this before. Of course you feel lied to. I wish I could have found my capacities to be honest with both of us a lot sooner. And you can do that without being cruel to yourself or falling over yourself apologizing for your own existence.
Speaker 1:Some people in some ships feel better when they don't have to deal with the weird stuff that's evoked in relationships when people are praying an unasked for price. And some people turn out to be absolutely committed to you paying that price and unhappy that you're no longer paying it. It's a risk. This is all true anytime you change, no matter what method you use. You don't have to be in therapy to incur the risk and benefits of change.
Speaker 1:Having boundaries in your relationships and refusing to pay the prices set by your less than adequate childhood caregivers carries risk. And I would say, others are fully committed to your growth and healing, and that is actual love. That is relationship without a price of admission.
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.