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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.
Today, have chapter three from Not the Price of Admission by Doctor. Laura Brown. She says, humans are primates. This short sentence sums up in a few words why attachment is central to our development. Being a primate explains why wounds to attachment and relationship are so powerful and long lasting for us.
Speaker 1:Humans are hardwired from birth to seek connections with others of our species and with species that relate to us, such as dogs. Being connected gives us feelings of safety and comfort. It allows the developing infant brain to calm down in moments of fear. Attachment soothes pain so much that we feel pain less when we are in physical touch with, or even close proximity to someone whom we are attached. That's a reason why it's considered a form of torture to subject a human to isolation from others.
Speaker 1:Humans are all people who need people. You guys, this is why the community has meant so much to us, and also why it was so painful to be kept away and to not be able to access it, And also to feel the impact of y'all missing me too, and me being away. That was not okay. It was unnatural. And it was a form of torture.
Speaker 1:Do you hear that? I just When we grow up with that in our homes, when we are little, it is such a part of dysfunctional families that we don't even realize it, because sometimes we are alone even in the middle of our families. So we don't even realize that's a baseline that's being set, And yet it is torture. She says, As human children, we need adults in our lives to care for us and to put our welfare first until we are able to fend somewhat for ourselves. You guys, this is why coming out of isolation is such a big piece of recovery work.
Speaker 1:When we're talking about recovering from dysfunctional families, when we're talking about tending to our littles or our inner child, we can't do that without connecting to others because we are mammals, right? So this goes back to the whole thing where, because we have that limbic system that some people call it the lizard brain, we experience fear in the face of threats. And threats are danger that our limbic system knows to run away from. But because we are mammals and have mammal bodies, we experience panic as an attachment response that tells us where to run. Run towards mama, run towards caregivers.
Speaker 1:So when our caregivers are the danger, and that danger could be actual harm, or it could be lack of nurture, right? The trauma and deprivation to our brain are read the same kind of life threatening. The lack of good is actually worse in our brains neurobiologically. So when we are little or if we are in an interpersonal violence situations, or when we are having systemic violence because of things happening because of politics or war or different things in the world, then we have fear and panic. Then it creates this loop where our brain is telling us to run, which gets interpreted and weaponized as avoidance.
Speaker 1:And when we try to run to, turn toward, we are harmed. We are hurt. We are neglected. And so it leaves us in a loop. So then when flight does not work and we try fighting, that does not bring us closer to others.
Speaker 1:And so we freeze and shut down, or we fawn as a matter of compliance where if I try hard enough to do what you want from me, maybe you will accept me, maybe you will choose me, maybe you will love me. And that does not work. She says, As human children, we need adults in our lives to care for us and to put our welfare first until we are able to fend for ourselves. This is the contract for care. Adults must relate.
Speaker 1:They must attend to the child, interact with the child, teach the child how to put words to emotional experiences, and model how to manage vulnerability. They must teach the child how to trust and when to be suspicious. They must train the child to become members of the human tribe and to know the rules by which humans play. And y'all, when we don't get that growing up, it is our responsibility as individuals, as adults, to get that in therapy. It is not the responsibility of our partners or our friends to do those things for us.
Speaker 1:We can do them for ourselves alongside others in a parallel play kind of way as adults, as littles, as middles, we can do that, but we cannot do this work for someone else. It will never be enough because it is their work and their muscles and they have to do that work. Someone else's trauma is not your problem. Someone else's attachment wounds are not your problem. We can be sensitive and supportive while they tend to those things, but we are responsible only for our own.
Speaker 1:She says, exacting prices from you that children can't pay without suffering or that adults can't pay without suffering damages the developing sense of self and capacities to be in relationship any kind. She says you wanted to be someone who could be counted on, loyal, committed, engaged, and decent. So you haven't known that it's okay to say enough already or no, Stop it. You haven't been able to figure out that you don't have to be the only person holding up the bargain in a relationship. You don't quite grasp why it's perfectly moral to drop your end when other people drop theirs.
Speaker 1:You've overridden your inner warning signals too many times and trusted people who were dangerous to you. That's not our fault when we're children. When we're adults, it is not our fault, but we are responsible to recognize what is happening, to come out of isolation, to reconnect with others, and to do the healing work to separate from danger, to reconnect with nurture, and to care for those parts of us and for ourselves in healthy ways where relationships are safe and stable with reciprocity and mutuality and not a price of admission. She says, In the families where you grew up, this human norm was often violated. One or more of the adults who had the responsibility for your care when you were little were inhumanely impervious to were so impaired in their capacities that they were unable to respond consistently in the evolutionarily correct fashion to your normal infant and child behaviors and needs.
Speaker 1:They sexualized your cuteness. They mistook their arousal for an invitation from you to behave in ways that children never wished to act. The adult's impairment had consequences for you then. Their errors continue to reverberate today in your wounded understanding of what makes relationships happen. This is something I think we don't talk about enough.
Speaker 1:And I want to be very gentle while talking about it, but also very explicitly direct. When those of us who have had CSA or child sexual grow out to be dissociated folks who also have littles, some of those littles are sexualized. Not because they are bad, but because that is the trauma that happened to them that impacted their development. Those littles need to be so safely protected. And that includes being very wary of being sexualized or exploited for sex or normal healthy relationships being eroticized.
Speaker 1:This has happened to me because of the podcast where I would think, Where I would think that I could talk about something, that doesn't mean I always got it right. Even my friend Ken tried to warn me, don't talk about that on the podcast, don't go there on the podcast. Like she tried to warn me, right? I should have listened to her and I am sorry. And also normal development of age appropriate parts, learning all the things in healthy ways, is not the same as consent to being sexualized, or consent to being eroticized, or consent to being used for sex in some way.
Speaker 1:And when boundaries are set or when no means no, retaliation for that is that person's anger at their abuser. That doesn't even have anything to do with me, and it is important I don't personalize that. The same with you all. One of the things that I think about are all the littles, like, at Healing Together. It has become so littles centric, and I really have mixed feelings about it.
Speaker 1:I love the mission of Healing Together, and I love that it is safe enough, littles feel safe enough coming out. And also as a clinician and as a peer, I hear so many stories of that being exploited, of people being wounded, of people being vulnerable and at risk and not taken advantage of. I just really think that as a culture and as a community, we are not fully understanding the depths of our own trauma and need to be more careful with our littles and more respectful of the privacy of systems. And I honestly have come to a place where I do not think it is safe for other people to have access to our systems. We will talk about that more later this year.
Speaker 1:Laura Brown reminds us that attachment systems are also neurological ones and that even the best caregivers or partners will not always meet a need or understand a communication. Good enough isn't the same as perfect. When these missteps and miscommunications occur as they inevitably will, the good enough caregiver repairs the breach in a way that communicates love and care to the infant or person. Good enough caregivers don't blame or shame the infant. Someone who loves you does not blame or shame you.
Speaker 1:Caregivers assist children in distinguishing between me and not me. Healthy adults do not blend together in enmeshment or forced co regulation. Infants who are well cared for begin to understand they are not the caregiver and the caregiver is not them. The caregiver is still as present and available as humanly possible. There is disconnection and there is reconnection.
Speaker 1:This still fulfills the contract for care even when the caregiver is not there constantly. For example, if the caregiver becomes depleted, as any caregiver of an infant will, in a good enough situation, the caregiver has others on whom to call for support. And the good enough family, the caregiver can safely hand off the infant to another trusted adult and get a chance to replenish their own resources. So even when an infant's needs are met neither perfectly nor instantly, they are still treated with love, respect, and reasonable calm. That is how infants learn about attachment and relationships.
Speaker 1:If someone is not respecting you, if someone cannot stay calm with you, that is not love. That is not attachment. That is not now time. In addition, babies also learn an equally important lesson that the differences between infant and caregiver don't undermine safety or take away the chance of eventually having its needs met well enough. In the same way with healthy relationships, differences between you or different needs should not undermine your power to be safe in that relationship or take away from your accomplishments or experiences in life.
Speaker 1:She says, When caretakers are as attuned and responsive as possible to the infant, the infant learns the world is safe, I am good, and people are predictable. This is what is referred to as secure attachment. If someone is requiring of you to be the source of their secure attachment, that is displacement. That is not what secure attachment is in adulthood. She says secure attachment allows a child to learn that being apart from the caregiver doesn't destroy safety or connection, and that connection and safety will return.
Speaker 1:Children who are securely attached eventually internalize that belief so strongly that the actual presence of the caregiver gradually ceases to be necessary for the child to feel safe. The caregivers remain pretty much who they are and constant in their love and connection. They trust that the bobbles and missteps in the dance of relationship will be repaired and replaced with reliable love, care, and connection. Caregivers don't have to be robotically consistent. All they need to do is be consistent enough, present enough, and able enough to repair ruptures in relationships that are increasingly inevitable as infants get older and are more able to directly articulate their needs.
Speaker 1:The child comes to trust that no is neither arbitrary nor punitive, but simply part of life. It's not cutoff or abandonment. It's a boundary that is tolerable even when no one enjoys it. Saying no is not abandonment. Infants and people are still loved and cherished even when they make mistakes or push limits beyond what is acceptable when they have good enough parents and safe enough partners.
Speaker 1:Securely attached teens know that they can become angry, disagree with their parents' values, and generally act like an adolescent without ever risking the love or connection even when the parents are unhappy or apply consequences for teens' actions. They know the parents will do their utmost to prioritize safety and soothing before giving a lecture of how to avoid this experience in the future. Love comes before consequence, and learning, not punishment, are the goals of parents who create secure attachment for their offspring. In healthy adult relationships, love is not withdrawn or transactional based on your performance or behavior. In healthy relationships, it is understood that you have a right to be loved and to be safe enough regardless of any errors that you make.
Speaker 1:However, she says, when we have to grow up in families that are dysfunctional or when there is trauma or deprivation, then being a survivor means there was an absence of secure attachment experiences. The infant is met with other than adequate or even truly terrible parenting, and that always affects attachment. Caregivers who, for whatever reason, are not consistently able to tolerate the normal needs of an infant and respond by being emotionally unavailable or disconnect from the child by withdrawing or withholding affection, or force the child to be silent through intrusive intensive engagement that is meant to soothe the adult's distress rather than the infant's, create children who themselves can only poorly tolerate connection with others. Connection with other humans quickly becomes painful for these children. Because those babies still crave connection, they are put in terrible double binds.
Speaker 1:Self-concept and contact with other people are marked by anxiety and feelings of being cut off rather than by calm and connection. Connection. Okay. Here's something that she said I wanna highlight something from this paragraph that's really, really important. As adults, regardless of attachment and what is happening, as adults, it is only a healthy relationship when you are meeting your needs and expressing and offering what you want to do for someone else.
Speaker 1:When someone else is expecting of you and requiring of you in a transactional or conditional way that is not healthy or safe. She says, without intervention, babies finally give up. Infants turn away their faces, withdraw, and shut down. A baby tries again to convey its love and engagement, and once again gives up, shuts down, and turns away. You guys, when we try and try and try in a relationship, but you don't get to actual relationship, you give up.
Speaker 1:We can't. We cannot be in a relationship by ourselves, whether we are infants or whether we are adults. That is not relationship when we are still alone. This kind of problematic relational dance repeated endlessly creates beliefs about oneself and one's relationships. These beliefs yield powerful unconscious information to the survivor about how the relational world works.
Speaker 1:It's an inner voice saying, you must try hard to connect, but in the end, you'll fail. Oh my goodness. I can't even with that. It's a message that says, your love will never be reciprocated. It's those daydreams, guys.
Speaker 1:They're so painful. You become someone who is shut down emotionally, detached from feelings of love, and unable most of the time to be vulnerable with other people because the pain of losing connection was too great for you to bear. That's that mammal cycle. Right? She says, you're wrong.
Speaker 1:It's simply hidden from you so that you don't keep feeling the broken heart of having love unreciprocated, an expectation that was hammered into place before you even had words. I would add to that before we even had narrative memory. Right? Caregivers that did these things to us, it happened so young we did not yet even have capacity to form memories. This is why it's in our bodies.
Speaker 1:That long painful minute in the video lasted for years of your childhood. Oh, she's talking about this still face video. If what is reflected to an infant is that she or he is difficult, demanding, frightening, or too much, if love is met with silence or if nothing is reflected at all, then that is the self that the infant sees and comes to believe in. This can show up in a lot of ways too, right? Like I remember one time working really hard on this painting and I was gonna give it, and I was trying to give it to someone and they like looked at it and put it down and then just kept talking.
Speaker 1:And I was like, I literally spent days on that for you. Like, that is me offering to you. So like, you can't tell me I don't show up for you, that I'm showing up as me. It's okay if you don't like me, but that doesn't mean I'm showing up, right? And that's in contrast to another time I gave a painting and the painting was like, oh my goodness, this is too sacred.
Speaker 1:Hold this for me. Let's talk about what it means to you, and going on from there, right? There's such a contrast of what it means to be seen and heard and known as you are rather than someone else's expectations or demands. She says, honestly, wolf parents in the wild do a way better job than most of, with their pups, than most of your parents. Rather than talking about us having disorganized attachment, the locus of responsibility is where it belongs, and we should speak of disorganizing caregivers.
Speaker 1:She said, these children know that the world is completely unpredictable and that caregivers can be both comforting and terrifying. Comfort is frequently closely associated with terror, leaving the child bereft of consolation. The child who had a disorganizing caregiver also knows that you can never tell when one thing or the other will be true or for how long one state will persist in a caregiver until another one appears. Oh my goodness. I can't even read this without, like, wanting to just be nauseous from the roller coaster of it all.
Speaker 1:I can't. I can't. This disorganizing parent turns on a dime from happiness to rage, from calm to chaotic, and is unpredictable. You guys, when we have relationships like that, there's no safety because it is not stable. We have to have both safety and stability.
Speaker 1:Sometimes disorganizing caregivers are not dangerous themselves. Instead, they are so disengaged and uninterested in the child that they expose the child to danger from others. Being repeatedly unprotected from violence or sexual abuse that's perpetrated by people outside your family because your caregiver simply doesn't care or notice is another form of disorganizing experience. Oh my goodness. I have so much to say about this, and I don't think I can say all of it publicly.
Speaker 1:But I think this goes back to, like, what happened with the website. This goes back to folks not being cautious or kind online. This goes back to shocked when predators take advantage of them. These kids know in their guts that they are bad, wrong, selfish, intolerable, dangerous, and shameful because that's the version of self that was reflected back to them in the mirror of their disorganizing caregivers. You guys combining shiny happy with interpersonal violence is a mess of the depths of shame that you cannot crawl out of because getting off the blanket is not an option because succeeding in relationship is not an option.
Speaker 1:It is so disempowering and so abusive, and it is suffocating. The disorganizing caregiver's denial of a child's separate self is an outgrowth of the blurring of boundaries between children and caregivers. Children caught in these relational traps are driven to over attune to their disorganizing parents and attempts to achieve some brief and occasional temporary safety. Same with adults, you guys. This is why we fawn and comply as adults because it is temporary safety, but it doesn't work and it doesn't last.
Speaker 1:And if we stay in those situations, we are betraying ourselves. She says, The terrible dilemma for the child with a disorganizing caregiver or partner as adult is that there is no right. What worked to create a moment of calm and safety yesterday stops working with no warning and no apparent reason today. One day it's okay to cry when you're sad. The next moment, they are screaming at you to stop.
Speaker 1:One minute, it's okay to cuddle, and the next moment, their hands are on you. Yeah. This is so painful. She talks about internal working models. I'm just gonna go to the next section and how this is the paradigm through which humans make sense of themselves in relationships to others.
Speaker 1:It's about who we are and how we should relate and what we can expect. She says your internal working models are riddled with distortions about who you are and about what to do with your own needs and feelings. With children wrongly assigned to soothe and meet the needs of adults, they grow up and into relationships where they are supposed to soothe and meet the needs of adults. Oh, we cannot, we cannot, we cannot. But we have been taught that soothing and meeting the needs of others is the price of admission to relationships.
Speaker 1:This is reinforced when we are adults and either punished or threatened if we do not. You learn that safety only comes at the price of losing relationships. This is a terrible dilemma. Be connected, which is human, and feel terrified or be safe and isolated, which is dangerous. This instructs you that you can never truly be safe if you want to be connected.
Speaker 1:Connected. The survivor must give more than half the energy in a relationship in order to simply be attached and connected, and they will still get it wrong. Love and care in return, reciprocity and equality of commitment, the expectations of safety and protection from the other person are all frequently absent from this internal representation of the relational world. And when we act that out in relationship with enactments or reenactments and our partners do not protect us or stand up for us or help us or empower us, that is deprivation. That is a lack of safety, even if they are not physically harming us, but often physical harm will be part of that or sexual harm.
Speaker 1:So, this is impacting even our experiences of inter personal violence in the world as adults. She talks about EPs, the emotional parts, and she says, They are cruelly critical of you in a confused attempt at self protection and are going to be yelling at you as you read this book or listen to this book. You can only be somewhat safe if you hate and are mean to self, a stance with which I'm going to be disagreeing frequently and forcefully. Learning to think about yourself and your own humanity without hating yourself is essential for this book to be useful. And my therapist, which we will talk about more later, you will hear it, I think in the fall, talks about how when people hate you instead of themselves or to avoid their own hatred of themselves, that is displacement and is still trauma being weaponized in now time.
Speaker 1:What Laura Brown is saying that we need to do is compassion, the practice of observing oneself or others mindfully in the moment without critical judgment. It is being fully and visibly human with others and creating a space where you can be and feel more genuinely loved. You will feel more safely connected because you have been transparent about your humanity. So, this is another reason why we are not responsible for other people's attachment wounds. Because they have to be in now time with adult selves working to tend to memory time young self wounds and being transparent about their own humanity rather than displacing the anger and hate they feel for themselves and their abusers.
Speaker 1:She says self compassion is a powerful tool for healing from the crappy gift that kept on giving your avoidant, anxiety provoking and disorganized attachment experiences. Observing yourself in the present without negative judgment, putting your humanness including errors that you believe to be your worst ones into the framework of your courageous efforts to remain connected and human will all be vitally important. So this is, for example, that even though these years have been so hard and the side quests have been so painful and the messes have been so public, here I am still using my voice, still trying to show up, still podcasting, still coming back to the community, still fighting to be myself. And she's saying, when I can say that about myself with compassion, that is everything. Compassion means you can truly effectively observe yourself when you act in ways you wish you wouldn't.
Speaker 1:Self compassion improves your capacities for engaging the power of personal change. The more we accept that we are who we are in this moment, the more we are able to choose differently should we wish in the next. The easier we can set ourselves free from what is not good for us. The more we can learn from our errors when our anxiety is lowered by the practice of self compassion. We can learn from our errors and how to recognize unhealthy relationships when our anxiety level is lowered by the practice of self compassion.
Speaker 1:Not everything is our fault, and also we have the power to do something about it now. The capacity to observe ourselves and change is key to having the emotionally meaningful relationships that we want where we don't pay prices for connection. 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.
Speaker 1:One of the ways we practice this is in Community Together. The link for the community is in the show notes. We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually.
Speaker 1:I'm there to heal too. That's what peer support is all about, being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.