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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 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 we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Today in therapy, my therapist said again that all the ships, all relationships have potential to heal. And I thought that meant I had to stay in all the relationships, keep trying all the ships. She said no. Even boundary ships can be bridges to other things, tending to parts of us that didn't know how or get to have a voice before, even creating new pathways in our brains as we learn. She used the example of how when we first met, I didn't even realize saying no.
Speaker 1:Thank you was an option. That no is boundary enough. I mean, I knew it in consent because we always talk about it in consent on paper, in lectures. But in life, why doesn't it feel like no is enough? She said it doesn't feel like no is enough when no doesn't work, and that's trauma.
Speaker 1:But now I know it's enough, and I can tell when my body knows that it is enough. But now I have more experience with saying no instead of putting myself in harm's way. Part of that is being more connected to my body. I know you heard about our day at the beach. There, my body felt so open and free and relaxed that all kinds of parts of me were there participating, I think, blurry in a way about healing in now time, not just memory time invading, but medicine applying to memory time.
Speaker 1:That's what my therapist talks about with all the ships having potential to heal, even relationships with myself within myself. In contrast, when hard things are happening or my no isn't heard, my body feels shut down and small and icky, and we talked in therapy about how it took me a long time to notice that because it was my baseline. So sometimes feeling regulated did not actually mean safe. When my normal was being violated or even neglected. Like at work when I have sessions back to back that are already running behind, and so I just don't stop to get more water or go to the bathroom because I'm worried about those ships that I want to be tending to the people waiting on me already.
Speaker 1:I can't make them wait another moment, so I just don't take care of me. Until now, as we learn to take care of me differently, that I'm one of my ships, that my ship is me, which means things like saying no long enough to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. It's such a simple thing. I asked her why it's so hard when it's so simple. She said, because we have trauma scars, and we have trauma wounds that are open.
Speaker 1:The ones that are scars have left their mark, but we've processed them or resolved them or tended to them until those wounds are closed even if they leave their evidence behind because we can't make them unhappen. But open wounds are still raw, untended to, memory time flooding into now time, sometimes in ways that feel like drowning, sometimes subtly in ways we don't even notice, but people around us do. She said it's important to remember that wounds are not our fault. Wounds happen. We didn't ask for it.
Speaker 1:We didn't cause it like I learned in Al Anon. But even if they're not my fault, they're still there, the wounds. And when we have wounds, we need respond to them, whether that's with stitches or Band Aids or splints or casts. But we get to choose how to respond and if to respond. If we're going to respond, then wounds need the right medicine.
Speaker 1:I have to talk with my kids all the time. How do we know when to use ointment antibacterial ointment and when to use Aquaphor? Because all my kids use Aquaphor for everything skin related. But sometimes a fresh wound needs antibiotic ointment first, and then Aquaphor can help it keep healing. Or how do we know when we need a band aid or stitches?
Speaker 1:Or when I broke my ankle, making sure the cast is on the ankle, that hurts. It doesn't help my broken ankle any to put the cast or the splint on the other foot. Or when my child got their cochlear implants one at a time, each time just to be sure they operated on the correct ear. I wrote Rock On in Sharpie on her neck on that side, just under the ear. Which was a reference to an inside joke between me and the surgeon, who had also done my surgeries as well.
Speaker 1:So if we're going to respond to our wounds, our wounds need the right medicine. But my therapist said, We can choose not to respond to our wounds. That is a choice. But it doesn't give us the right to walk around with open wounds and wipe blood on people. No one has the right to keep open wounds and fuss at us for staining their clothes.
Speaker 1:I was shocked when she said that because whether my childhood trauma or shiny happy or both, I think I have thought I was responsible for all the wounds all the time. My therapist says we can only heal our own wounds. This took me a long time to get because I'd been in double binds. Where other people had wounds that were not mine to heal, but I was being punished for them. I couldn't get away because I didn't know right to run was an option until now.
Speaker 1:And also, just in my heart, I didn't want to abandon others like I was abandoned. So I stayed trapped, trapping myself. My therapist said again, It's not our fault if we had trauma, but it is our responsibility to heal it. We can choose not to, that's a choice, but we will bleed on others. It is not our fault that we had trauma, but it is our responsibility to heal it.
Speaker 1:So we talked about my ships and why I think I'm responsible for all of them, all of them in the whole world. Where did I learn that I was responsible for other people's ships? And I know that came from my mom. That's where I learned to be responsible. That's where I learned to trap myself, trying to heal other people's wounds that were not mine to heal.
Speaker 1:And how to be so punished when I failed to heal them. So we talked about my mom, maybe for the first time in therapy so directly beyond her just being killed in the car accident, driving, and it all comes full circle in the most nauseating way. My mother was a person who did not feel loved by anyone except her father. I don't know why him, what about him communicated that to her, But that's how she felt. Except then when I was barely a toddler, My grandparents came over on Mother's Day.
Speaker 1:My father had not mowed the lawn. And my mother and her mother were upset in a shiny, happy kind of way. And they were arguing about it with him, my father. I don't remember all of this, of course, although I do remember the smell of my grandfather's tobacco. But the story as it's been told to me is that instead of getting sucked into the argument, my grandfather just went to Moe.
Speaker 1:I don't know if he was avoiding the fighting or fed up or just wanted to be outside. I wish I knew. But that's not my story or my ship, not that piece of things. So he went out to mow because my father had not. And then he came inside and cleaned up a bit and was holding me and had a heart attack and died.
Speaker 1:My parents had a lot of problems, most of which I don't talk about here because it's about healing and because I dissociate them. And also, I don't want just a parade of trauma or to activate people too much. But this piece about my father not mowing the lawn that day and my grandfather doing it for him, and then him coming inside and holding me so that I have memories of mowed grass and tobacco that I can still smell outside sometimes. But that day of him mowing the lawn for my father who hadn't done it, and then him coming inside to hold me, and then dying, I think aside from all the other problems they had, my mother never forgave my father for that. Maybe me either.
Speaker 1:For my mother, it meant she lost the only person who loved her. That was her perception, which also meant the rest of us around her spent the rest of our life trying to prove to her that she was lovable and it never being enough because she had already decided. So I could never win that. Even as into my adolescence, it became my job, and it became my job to keep her alive. One suicide attempt after another.
Speaker 1:These were my first ships. They were not my wounds and not my responsibility, but I didn't know that. I didn't know until Al Anon that I didn't cause it, and I couldn't fix it. So even in all the other traumas and deprivations with my mother and the challenges of our relationship since until she died. I was not allowed to say no to her or she would die.
Speaker 1:That was the contract since I was a toddler. And then the one time I did say no and wouldn't drive her that day, she did die. I know in my left brain, in my adult brain, that me saying no did not cause her to die, but that's what it feels like. And it runs parallel with another ship from childhood where with all things trauma and deprivation, we don't tell and we don't complain. And the one time I saw someone tell and file a complaint, They were killed.
Speaker 1:And so I learned, don't tell or I will die. This is the double bind of my childhood with my two parents. Don't tell or you'll die. Don't say no or I will die. As if those were my choices.
Speaker 1:So in all those adult relationships, so often with alcoholics and domestic violence, I was alone and isolated in it because I couldn't tell how bad things were or ask for help or I would die, and I couldn't say no or they would die. My therapist said, That's like not only being responsible for other people's ships. It's like not being allowed to have your own, which goes back to my other first ship of having to choose between myself and my brother, which I won't talk about right now, which is choosing. Right? So no wonder I feel like I'm drowning when I'm not allowed to have my own ship, when I've been thrown into the water and told to get to the other side but not given a ship.
Speaker 1:When being told to walk on water in the middle of a storm, Of course, I'm going to drown. And I said to my therapist, as nauseated as this makes me feel, the peace that's hardest is coming to therapy and finding out I've had a ship all along, and how many people in my life would not help me get on it. How many people watched me drown or pushed me under? Or who threw me rescue rings or flotation devices and told me I should be grateful instead of helping me onto my ship. And still, even then, I'm so responsible for their ships that I am in distress when they are sad that I leave their ships to finally climb into my own.
Speaker 1:Like Nathan being anxious the first time, he did summer school with the kids because I wasn't there to do it. My therapist said, when you climb back onto your own ship, the other ships around you don't have to feel not sad or not distressed. It's okay that they do. Them feeling sad or distressed because you can't do something or be something for them is a correct response. Remember that our feelings are information, and sadness tells us something is missing.
Speaker 1:And you are what's missing when you set boundaries. So it makes sense that they have feelings about it, and those feelings are entirely valid. And, also, it's okay for them to just feel it and to sail their own waters because that's not your ship, and you're not responsible for rescuing them. They're just sad, not sinking. I cried for a really long time in therapy today, and I thought I was going to vomit.
Speaker 1:And she said it again, if sadness tells us something is missing, What do you think has been missing? What are you feeling right now has been gone that you have found again? And I knew the answer was me. My ship, I have been missing from my own life because I was so overwhelmed taking care of all the other ships that were never even mine. And I have missed me being me.
Speaker 1:And I think it's impacted everything from the podcast to the community, to my work, even parenting. And it has felt so good to be myself again, to find and climb back into my own ship, to land it safely, and laying on the beach in the sun, and hearing the distant laughter of my children and feeling the sand in my hands and on my feet so warm and seeing the flowers and the birds and the waves and tasting the salt that I breathe and smelling the fresh air fill my lungs now that I am safe and no longer 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.