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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: 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 long time 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
Speaker 2:we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care
Speaker 1:for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you. I have another recovery thing to share, so you can skip this one if you aren't interested. But it helped me a lot in talking about families. It was in the big red book, which is the book for ACA about adults who grew up in dysfunctional families.
Speaker 1:And it's in section one, chapter three, talking about how you didn't have to have parents who used alcohol to qualify as an adult child of a dysfunctional family. It says, we identify with the mistaken belief that we were responsible to heal or fix our families. We understand the don't talk, don't trust, and don't feel rules. I think as we experience reenactments, those get reinforced. And as we go through more hard things, it feels like that's still true.
Speaker 1:I know in my head that it isn't, but it feels that way. It says, since the beginning of ACA, ACA groups have seen new members from different family types, even those that did not include alcoholism or addiction. It says those families can be labeled nonaddicted, but there may be overlapping issues like children with chronically ill parents if they were not available or misused drugs. It gives five family types that can produce adult children of dysfunctional families even if alcoholism or drugs are not involved. It says homes with mental illness in the parents, homes with hypochondriac parents, homes with ritualistic beliefs, harsh punishments, and extreme secretiveness, often with ultra religious, militaristic, or sadistic overtones, homes with covert or actual sexual abuse, and perfectionistic shaming homes in which expectations are too high and praise is typically tied to an accomplishment rather than given freely.
Speaker 1:Then it also talks about foster kids as well as adoption trauma, and I think that's something we definitely could keep talking more about. I know we've mentioned from time to time, but it's a really big issue. It says move from home to home while growing up. These children understand abandonment at the same depth as adult children from alcoholic homes. Adults from divorced homes understand shame and confusion and also identify an ACA.
Speaker 1:But then it said this part. Children raised by parents abusing prescription drugs learned to anticipate when an addicted parent would be loopy after taking a tranquilizer or when the parent would appear up after taking a stimulant. The children also became aware of psychosomatic illnesses created by a parent to get drugs. These children heard about endless backaches, headaches, or other ailments that only a pill or a shot would fix. I thought about how my mom coming off of pain pills made her extra mean.
Speaker 1:And, also, along the lines of having a blameless inventory where we don't focus on what other people are doing wrong and have compassion for all of us as part of humanity, that the doctor shopping and and trying to get different medicines, I know that humans should have attention and care. And if they're getting it, they wouldn't have to try so hard. So then I had questions about what doctors were not listening to my mom and how back then counseling, especially for marriage, really wasn't an option. And she tried so hard to get help and couldn't find it. I don't mean making excuses for her, just understanding the context in a greater way now as an adult.
Speaker 1:It says, we are more alike than we are different. Our experience shows that the codependent rupture, which creates an outward focus to gain love or affirmation, is created by a dysfunctional childhood. The soul rupture is the abandonment by our parents or caregivers. The abandonment sets us up for a life of looking outward for love and safety that never comes. That reminded me of the book about infanticidal attachment called soul murder, so we need to circle back to that.
Speaker 1:It sounds brutal. That's why I haven't read it yet on purpose. I wasn't ready. And, also, that looking outward for love and safety that never comes, that's in our limbic system. When we're focused on the danger and focused on what other people are doing wrong, We're coming from our limbic system, which means memory time is activated rather than being focused in now time and how we as adults can keep ourselves safe.
Speaker 1:As adult children from various families, we focus on ourselves for the surest results. The foundation of ACA identification describes a personality who fears people, has difficulty expressing feelings, and who can tolerate a high level of abuse or neglect without realizing the effects of such behavior. We live in fear of being shamed and abandoned. And in the hope for today book, it talks about the behavior of people who hurt us and says, once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. If I'm still suffering in reaction to a specific behavior that has occurred three or more times, I need to stop hoping they will change and instead detach and start changing my attitudes, expectations, and responses.
Speaker 1:Resentment erodes love and goodwill in my relationships with others. Obsessive worrying raids my willingness to accept and enjoy life as it is. The Courage to Change book talked about the contrast when we have safe, healthy people in our lives. Instead of trying to solve my problems for me, they allow me the dignity to do so on my own. They offer their experience, strength, and hope, and in the sharing, I often hear just what I need to help me with a troublesome situation.
Speaker 1:Love is not a point system. I don't have to earn love from others. It's given freely as a gift. I don't have to earn my place in the sun. I can just relax and be myself.
Speaker 1:And then I also shared this in the community when we talked about the detachment pamphlet. It says, early one morning, I stopped to watch a colony of bees. A little intimidated by a frenzied motion and intense buzzing, I reminded myself that if I didn't poke my nose into their hive, I wouldn't get stung. If I chose to maintain a safe distance from a dangerous situation, I would be fine. To me, that is exactly the lesson detachment teaches.
Speaker 1:The choice is mine. When I sense that a situation is dangerous to my physical, mental, or spiritual well-being, I can put extra distance between myself and the situation. Sometimes this means that I don't get too emotionally involved in a problem. Sometimes I may physically leave the room or end a conversation. And sometimes I try to put spiritual space between myself and another person's alcoholism or behavior.
Speaker 1:That doesn't mean I stop loving the person, only that I acknowledge the risk to my own well-being and make choices to take care of myself. It was so interesting because I'm learning from Al Anon how to focus on my own choices and my own behaviors, and I'm learning from ACA how to more intentionally care for my inner system. And I know that the inner family that ACA talks about is sometimes is, sometimes isn't the same as dissociation or systems. And, also, there's a lot of overlap, but the language is so gentle and intentional. It's really been helpful to me.
Speaker 1:And in ODAT, One Day at a Time in Al Anon, it said, someone said something unkind about me. Are my feelings hurt? Yes. Should they be? No.
Speaker 1:How do I overcome my hurt? By detaching myself, turning it off until I can figure out what lies behind it. If it was retaliation for an unkindness I did, let me correct my fault. If not, I have no responsibility in the matter. Should I ignore or challenge?
Speaker 1:No. I will let it go. Lee said, soonest mended. Nothing can hurt me unless I allow it to. When I am pained by anything that happens outside of myself, it is not that thing which hurts me but the way I think and feel about it.
Speaker 1:So that goes back to my inner family again. Like, my own system inside me, No one's responsible for that or not just the baby, but everybody else too. No one's responsible for that except me. In the loving parent guidebook, it said, our inner family members want to be seen. They want to be heard, and they have positive intentions.
Speaker 1:I think that is really one of the ways we can tell the difference between now time and memory time. When we, as adults, are focused on now time, we understand that most people most of the time have positive intentions, including myself. But when we are in memory time or get tangled in memory time, we sometimes forget that because when we were little, not everybody had good intentions. So when memory time invades now time and we forget that people have good intentions or we forget to give people, how do they call it, assume goodwill, Or in therapy, they talk about unconditional positive regard. Even if we're setting boundaries with ourself or choosing for ourselves how much we wanna interact with any of the ships or in what kind of interactions we wanna have with any of our ships, we can assume goodwill in now time.
Speaker 1:But when memory time invades now time, we don't always do that, and that can be called traumatic transference, where we think other people are acting in the ways our abusers acted. And then we start thinking people are bad, which is then binary, which confirms that we're working it through our limbic system again, which yeah. That's memory time. So then no matter what we're going through, our conclusions aren't always accurate even cognitively because it's getting filtered through memory time instead of staying present in now time. In Tony a's version of the laundry list, which maybe only makes sense to recovery people if that's okay, it says, we cannot return to childhood and ask our parents to love us in the way we needed to be loved.
Speaker 1:It just can't be done. We need to learn how to nurture and fulfill ourselves. We need to look within and find the origins of our feelings and come to understand our difficulties and the role we play in causing them. Our parents, or the people who raised us, were children of trauma themselves. They did not receive the love and guidance they needed from their parents, so they could not pass this love and guidance down to us.
Speaker 1:We are lovable and worthy and always have been. Our parents' inability to love us consistently was never about us, but rather about their dysfunction and what they didn't get in childhood. When we think about reparenting ourselves or caring for our own babies, even if those babies are inner teens or inner middles or littles, we can know we're doing that well when we care for our physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being, when we feel the physical sensations associated with openness, softness, lightness, stillness, and ease, when we offer ourselves comforting words or touch, when we have loving thoughts or mental images that reflect kindness and compassion. That's what we need in the driver's seat of our awareness. Whenever other folks take over, we can pause and access that care and tend to them.
Speaker 1:We can say things like, I'm here for you. I'm sorry you feel so sad. We're going to get through this. Those phrases were really helpful for me because when we have deprivation and no one talk to us that way, it's hard to know how to talk to ourselves in ways that are gentle and responsive. And I know I am not the only one who struggles with the phrase of inner family when family is such an activating word and is so difficult in lots of ways.
Speaker 1:But when it's talking about an inner critical parent, we can take that that inner critic. We don't have to call it a parent, but we could think of the parent as in that transactional analysis way from the episode TA with Papa, where we talk about the parent and the adult and the child parts of ourselves generally and how we really need adult to adult for healthy communication. But memory time makes it child to parent or child to adult where the lines cross, that is going back several years to the podcast. So I don't know if you remember all that, but it helps me reframe in a visual way. The other way I can reframe it is dropping parent altogether because that can be really activating for us.
Speaker 1:And instead, just focusing on inner critic, which we actually learn not from recovery but from Pete Walker's book, From Surviving to Thriving. And we also talked about that during the pandemic on the podcast. And here in the loving parent guidebook, it talks about that as a part of us that tries to control our behavior and our life. So we can think about critical as in the way we talk to ourselves for sure. So many of us have those echoes of criticism and shame that we continue to be really hard on ourselves.
Speaker 1:But looking at the process and the functionality of that really comes back to trying to maintain those social contracts. How can we get care, and how can we avoid harm? That's the kind of control it's talking about of just trying to control the variables so that we can be safer. So remembering even while we want to shift that criticism into more gentle interactions internally, even that is trying to keep us safe. And sometimes I forget that.
Speaker 1:And then it reminds me also on this page how the inner child, where people may generally talk about that, For some of us further along the continuum in dissociation, that may be more parts y. But those young vulnerable parts of us, that can be anything from those little ones even before that in utero all the way up to middles, and then in our teens being middles up through early adolescence. It says, our abandonment, neglect, and abuse happened within a childhood relationship when we lack the skills and safety to express our hurts and fears. This was really powerful to me. I know we've talked about trauma as the hard or bad things that happened and deprivation as the good that's been missing.
Speaker 1:And, also, I've always thought of that as, like, I didn't have protection that kept me safe, or I didn't have provision of enough of this or that or these things or care or attunement. Right? But I never connected the impact of the implications of that, that because of deprivation, I did not have capacity or safety or skills to express hurts or fears. And when we don't do the work to learn how to do that in safe ways and effective ways without becoming the perpetrator, then the reenactment becomes we are depriving ourselves of gentleness and care. When we allow ourselves to get sucked into memory time and acting out for memory time instead of being in now time and assuming goodwill and also having healthy boundaries and communication, then that trauma just continues and then gets weaponized against people and relationships.
Speaker 1:It says at the moment of the wounding, parts of us froze and became trapped in the past with a fixed set of beliefs, emotions, unmet needs, childhood reactions, and memories. By establishing a relationship with the frozen parts of ourselves and meeting their needs, we create the conditions for them to heal and release false beliefs. In so doing, we free ourselves from the shame and blame that are carryovers from the past. And that goes both ways internally and externally. If we are shaming and blaming ourselves, we know we're in memory time.
Speaker 1:If we are shaming and blaming other people, we know we are in memory time. That's not now time stuff. In this other book called A Woman's Way Through 12 Steps, it talks about how often the things we are accusing other people of are things that are true about ourselves. And about step four in the inventory, it says, when you take inventory, you also have the chance to understand why you've behaved this way while ignoring the wrongs of others had done. Oh, and then it talks about when we take an inventory of ourselves, the things that we've done, the traits that we have, that we come up with an extensive list of the things we've done wrong because that inner critic is so loud.
Speaker 1:Right? So it's really easy to see all of our mistakes. But, she says, we ignore the wrongs others had done or the wrongs perpetuated by an unjust society. By erasing others' wrongs from our minds, we forget that our behavior is often a response to our environment. So she says, as we do our inventories in step four work, we can also ask ourselves, what other options did I have?
Speaker 1:Could I really have done better considering the circumstances and who I was at the time? What was I responding to in the environment and in myself? And she says, what does it mean to be fearless about our inventories? If we waited until we felt no fear, we'd probably never get started. Rather than wait for fearlessness, we can refuse to let the fear stop us.
Speaker 1:We can move ahead even if it's scary, even if we feel overwhelmed or ashamed. Courage doesn't mean the absence of fear. It means acting in the face of fear, and we can ask for help to get us through. When we reach this point, we need to stop, slow down, or just work through the tears, outrage, and discomfort. And, also, when people actually have caused us harm, it says we need to address it.
Speaker 1:When someone behaves abusively toward us, it can feel safer to ignore it. But how do we feel about ourselves when we deny what's really happening? We cannot make excuses or blame ourselves. Confronting an abuser may not always be the best option, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to deny the abuse. We can hurt ourselves more if we try to tell ourselves that the abuse doesn't really matter or that it's our fault.
Speaker 1:For many reasons, we haven't told the truth about how we feel or what we think. We haven't stood up for ourselves or stayed true to our feelings. We've gone along with someone else's agenda and haven't even asked ourselves if that's what we really want. When we are unable to stay connected to our inner selves, we experience anxiety and distress. It's important to remember that the fourth step is about balance.
Speaker 1:Think of it as a way of where you're seeing what is unbalanced. That includes creating a list of strengths along with our limitations. What do I do best? What are my successes? When have I done the right thing?
Speaker 1:What do I like about myself? I think answering those questions are so much harder than answering the things about what we've done wrong. And, also, it's an example of not just being in the limbic system, but coming up into our frontal cortex where we see nuance and complexity, where we see context and environment, where for the first time, we're not responsible for the whole world or everything that goes wrong. I needed those reminders this week. I've been really sick since the flood.
Speaker 1:I've had pneumonia, and it's been several weeks of coughing and trying hard to breathe. There's also been a lot of grief. Seeing my life more clearly, understanding ships more accurately, and letting go of the things that I can't control. It's been really hard and also really good too. Finally, having recovery so that I can address some of these things of deprivation and not just drown in all the things that are hard, feel so much better even though it's also still really hard work.
Speaker 1:And even if almost every day I bounce back to step one more times than I can count about most all the things, it's still a starting place even when we're back in the beginning of learning to look at our own things and deciding for ourselves how we want to respond, grow, change, and even heal. It's a lot. Especially learning to love my critic, I kinda don't want to. It's really hard when critics are judgy and loud, point out all the wrong things, make life harder, and don't listen to any context. It feels so much like when we're little and being abused.
Speaker 1:So even trying to address the critics feels like the littles get louder. And, also, that's mapping. And my job is to stay with my adult self who can see all of that clearly so that I can choose wisely what's good for us, listen to what they're needing, and tend to that really intentionally so that all of us can be back in balance. And all of that is just part of learning to love myself. That feels uncomfortable and definitely is new.
Speaker 1: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.