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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:So I guess I'll be the somebody I'm presenting today. I'm Crystal, and the topic is from Ashes We Rise. It's about healing trauma throughout history. So we'll do it without the visuals for you guys. So this is a history of peer support and therapy kind of throughout time starting from the 1800s.
Speaker 1:And I got the idea for this presentation when I was right, I write a newsletter for my job. I'm a peer support specialist slash advocate. And so for my job, I do a newsletter every month. So we're doing one for May's Mental Health Month and just thinking about just how hard it is, like having dissociative disorders or complex PTSD and how discouraging it is when you're thinking about finding help or finding this is what happened last time or finding therapy. It's just really easy to see that like there's so much that needs to happen and that we are not very far at all where we need to be.
Speaker 1:And so I started looking through history and realized that every time like we made some progress, like we kept getting pushed back down, but we'd come back. And every time we came back, it was a little bit stronger. So that's basically what this is about. Throughout history, society has discredited, ignored, and shunned trauma survivors. Yet the tenacity of the human spirit and the power of love continues to shine through.
Speaker 1:We who have been traumatized and oppressed continue to lead the way in building support for survivors and throughout time even when reduced to ashes will rise. Kind of the image of the phoenix coming out of the ashes. And so this is kind of talking about where we're at right now, which is we're in the middle of pandemic for one. But also that has brought an awareness of the need for mental health services and just that there isn't enough and people who have never had or not known that they had trauma or are now in a state of ongoing trauma. So, you know, that's kind of good and kind of bad, mostly bad, you gotta look at the positive too.
Speaker 1:So there's a lack of the gen basically one of the biggest problems with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders, especially coming from childhood trauma, and especially if it's from a caregiver is that there's a lack of awareness around it and a lack of acceptance around it. So for instance, a veteran returning from war is able to get a service dog. There's a lot of agencies that will pay for service dogs and work for that. Another example is that courts will prosecute. Also, I need to give a trigger warning.
Speaker 1:This is a presentation about trauma, and it may be triggering and it may bring stuff up. I won't go into any explicit details about anything, but just please take care of yourself. And if you need to step away or come back or leave, please do that. So courts will prosecute a, say, an assault, let's say that, from a stranger, worse than something that happened from a family member or a, you know, partner or something. And that can give also give the impression that the effect is worse when it's not.
Speaker 1:We all kinda know that the effect is worse when it's somebody you know and having a a connection with or depend on. And so there's not as much compassion and understanding around that. And so I kind of talked a little bit about complex PTSD, which is the result of repeated ongoing trauma, often beginning in early childhood. That includes neglect or abuse, usually from a caregiver. And I separate these out a little bit, even though there's a ton of crossover between complex PTSD and DID and, you know, they both kind of go together.
Speaker 1:So over the decade, there's been some progress in recognizing complex PTSD, even though it's slow. People are still misunderstood. They're over medicated, hospitalized. And we always hear about DID taking seven to ten years before diagnosis, but also complex PTSD or PTSD from stuff that happened when you're a kid can also take a really long time to diagnose. And also it's not as recognized in marginalized populations where people are about to have other diagnosis or just be angry for no reason.
Speaker 1:And so don't always get the support or understanding or acknowledgement. So there are a lot of misdiagnosis, which is depression. And I got a ton of this from System Speaks podcast. So they like really, I'm always like thinking about their stuff whenever I'm writing stuff. One thing is depression which can look like can be tonic immobility which is the free state which is you can't get out of bed because it doesn't feel safe to move, which looks like depression.
Speaker 1:And so they put you on an antidepressant to try to get you out of bed when it's a trauma response or ADD. I'm personally on a medication that's prescribed for ADD. I mean, used for ADD, but it's prescribed for my DID actually because I, you know, switched into a lot of parts and couldn't like do anything. But ADD can I mean, complex PTSD can look like ADD because you're hypervigilant? And so you're constantly aware of everything going around you, which can look like distractibility.
Speaker 1:And then bipolar, and borderline are kind of the other two go tos. So, and then dissociative identity disorder, I wrote, young children can develop multiple identities in order to survive severe and repeated trauma, which gives them the ability to participate in their life and also have an internal support system, which is something that the general media don't always think about that like, you know, this helps me. This gives me a parent basically in a lot of ways. While it's helpful, it's a disorder when there's like amnesia that's getting you in the way of your life. There's a lot of distress.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of internal conflict. And it's affecting your functioning. Just having being multiple or having DID is not I mean, having dissociative identity, or people that's not a disordering method. So I used to, I used to think, well, people say I'm not my diagnosis. And I'd be like, well, I actually am because I'm DID and that has to do with my identity.
Speaker 1:But then I realized that it actually doesn't, the disordered part doesn't have to do with who we are. The disordered part is the disorder and being multiple is who we are and how we work together and the way we get through life. So society and dissociation, DID continues to be disbelieved and downplayed, seen as extremely rare. National Institute of Mental Health doesn't include it as a diagnosis. Last I checked, Kaiser didn't use to.
Speaker 1:I would click on my diagnosis and it would say no information. That has since changed. I'm not sure when that changed, but see, there's a progress. It has changed. Therapist binders don't include dissociative disorders.
Speaker 1:I just learned though, if you Google Psychology Today and DID, it will come up with a bunch of stuff, but you can't do it just from the website. Misrepresentation in the media, which makes it harder for therapists to recognize because they're expecting these really big switches rather than the several teas that people can have. And people still don't believe it takes a long time to diagnose. Miss diagnosis is our probably all the ones that the complex PTSD, but also schizophrenia or hearing voices. What I see often is lots of diagnosis.
Speaker 1:So I met somebody at a treatment center and they're like, Oh, I have all these diagnosis. And I was like, do you have DID? Well, was what I thought. But then I was like, oh, that happens a lot with people with DID. And it turns out they ended up self disclosing that they did have DID and then that became a major part of their work.
Speaker 1:Let's see. The big thing is there's not enough supporters. Therapy is not no longer I'm in California. I'm in Berkeley, California. So therapy is not required for licensed marriage and family therapists.
Speaker 1:It used to be that you had to have one hundred and fifty hours of your own therapy, which was really fifty hours because each hour counted for three. Now they took that out, you can't even count it at all towards your hours, which is really devastating because I think that's the main thing that the biggest determiner of a good therapist. And just not everybody's able to hear, like, your story or or how hard it is or all this stuff. So finding somebody who can hold that and take care of themselves and live live their life. Like, the therapist I have now, like, can just tell that she she's, like, totally present, totally there, but she's also able to go out and enjoy her life.
Speaker 1:I don't watch her go out and enjoy her life, so I don't really know, but I can feel it and she talks about that. Not that much of a stalker. And a lot of a lot of therapists don't take insurance, so that's a huge thing. It's just too much paperwork. All the paperwork's just geared towards cognitive behavioral therapy, and so you kind of have to just translate or I don't know.
Speaker 1:Can Susan P. S. Bennett in her book says it can require years of practice, study, and supervision to become really adept treating trauma. Yet we see generalist therapists with minimal to no training. I'm kind of the believer of better to not have a therapist than to find a therapist that's not able to help you or some actually inadvertently do harm.
Speaker 1:I'll get to that later. Not the harm part, but the therapist part. But all is not lost. There's progress over time and over history, even though it can be slow, and that's kind of what the presentation is about. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So in the 1870s, this was kind of when the first peer movement started. There was the first women's movement. I don't know a whole lot about this, but it's people got together, started supporting each other with peer support, And yeah. And so that was the eighteen seventies and probably before that. I'm sure before that because we don't know all these things and it doesn't always end up in the book.
Speaker 1:Then in 1896, I don't know how to say his name, Jean Charcot, Pierre Jainet, and Sigman Freud all kind of in different countries discovered that the root of hysteria was childhood trauma. And so that was a huge kind of breakthrough in the field. And so for about a decade, there was focus on listening to people and being attuned with them and being present for them. But then, Furry had all these cool colleague friends who were also not so cool colleague friends. And so he started talking about stuff and they didn't like that.
Speaker 1:That wasn't cool. So rather than lose his friends or stand up, he changed his theory, and that's where we get the psychosexual theory. Yeah. But Charcot and Janae didn't, but kinda most people haven't heard about them. I hadn't until the podcast where she was talking about the Judith Herman episode.
Speaker 1:So in 1914, we had World War one and soldiers started returning from war, and they recognized that these people were acting similarly to the hysterical women. And I think because it was a war, you could they could identify it and see that it wasn't just like, oh, these people are crazy. It was like, oh, they're responding to something bad that happened. And then so then during 1907 to 1963, eugenics started, which was where sixty four thousand people with mental health issues were forcibly sterilized so they couldn't have kids and passed on this idea of faulty genes. It kind of came from the theory of evolution and survival of the fittest, like we don't want those people to have kids.
Speaker 1:So people are labeled insane. They're put in hospitals. 1917 was, the diagnosis of shell shock was removed. And so there was decree or somebody was like, you cannot have that diagnosis anymore. So people stopped being diagnosed with that.
Speaker 1:And then in 1949, this is the We Rise. I kind of did like ashes and then We Rise. So those were ashes and this is We Rise. The National Mental Health Association declared May as Mental Health Month to raise awareness of trauma and the impact it can have on physical, mental, and emotional well-being of children, families, and communities. Like, we've all heard about May's Mental Health Month.
Speaker 1:And every year you see the ribbons and stuff, but I didn't know that it was specifically to raise awareness about the impact of trauma, which when you think about it has a huge connection to stigma, because it's the whole idea of what happened to you versus what's wrong with you. And then in the 1970s, we had the psychiatric survivor movement, which I'll get into that a little more later. Veterans coming back from Vietnam brought an awareness to trauma, and that's when we got the diagnosis of PTSD and it was added to the DSM. Patients' rights advocates started. We had the women's movement.
Speaker 1:And then so veterans started their own peer support and would meet in groups, all these different and the the women would meet in groups. So people basically were like, we gotta support each other. And then so Jay Moeller, I've met Jay Moeller. He was one of the leaders in the psychiatric survivor movement. He just passed away May 15.
Speaker 1:And he went to school in Berkeley and became really involved and concerned with the civil rights movement and people, not being treated the right or equally. And he ended up staying up for four days straight, danking his sleep, had a psychiatric break after which he was hospitalized. And he stayed there for ten years and was, went through all kinds of trauma, all kinds of stuff happened to him over the course of ten years. And so somewhere in there, I don't know if he got out and then was somewhere else, but he met Ed Roberts, who was the kind of founder of the disability rights movement. And they started talking like from their hospital beds.
Speaker 1:And he, that's how he got involved in the psychiatric survivor movement, which he said is the last civil rights movement. People are still oppressed more than any group in society. That's his quote. And then he worked so that people who needed mental health support were treated with dignity, had basic human rights, and for services to be provided by people with lived experience who have great empathy because of what they've been through. And like a week, a month before he died, he was in bed zooming into advocacy meetings, working still not like, just like you're sick, watch a movie, like, but he would be there and he would like come to everything and yeah, it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1:And so then in the 1980s, PTSD was added to the DSM. Therapists started really focusing on helping people. A lot of stuff around like childhood sexual abuse started coming to light and therapists were really caring about people. This is when the multiple personality diagnosis and people became aware of that. Lots of people were being diagnosed about it and so with it.
Speaker 1:So the parents freaked out and formed the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and started suing the therapist. And this was also when there was a shift from the kind of insight oriented therapy to manualized treatment, I. E. Evidence based therapy, quote unquote, actually not evidence based. And that replaced relationally focused therapy.
Speaker 1:It let's see, affects how people with trauma are seen. The research doesn't follow people past like six months. So what will happen is in six months, somebody will start doing CBT, which was started by Erin Beck, who is also part of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. They'll start doing CBT, basically like, oh, well, there's no evidence for my thought that my dad hurt me. I don't have any evidence for that.
Speaker 1:And so I'm gonna have positive thoughts. This is my version that I came up with on my own. So take you that with what it is. So I'm gonna deny that and I'm gonna just think positive and and that will make me feel better for six months. And then they stopped following people.
Speaker 1:And then when they look back in a year and a half, some of those same people that were improving are now doing way worse. But the studies don't show that because studies show what you want them to show. And so, okay, so the 2013, the trauma section was added to the DSM-five. 2019, the false memory foundation dissolves. Also 2019 complex PTSD was added to the ICD, which is the International Diagnostic.
Speaker 1:And then 2021, the mental health parity was expanded. So it used to be and this is some of this is California that you had unlimited. You have unlimited therapy that your insurance had to pay for. If you had certain diagnosis like depression, bipolar, maybe schizophrenia, but they added, they expanded it to include trauma. Wasn't quite sure if they expanded it to include like all diagnosis, but it was for sure that they expanded it to include PTSD.
Speaker 1:And then so here's the part that I put together on finding a therapist, which is extremely hard to do. If you have complex trauma and if you, I guess, don't settle for or something that isn't ideal. So the first, the first thing is to trust your intuition, especially if you have been through trauma because your intuition is usually really good. You're really aware of stuff, but what happens is people, have been taught not to trust it or to second guess themselves. So that can make that really hard.
Speaker 1:Like you go into the first appointment and you're like, I don't know about this. You then you get home and you're like, oh, well, they were actually really great. That was probably nothing. It was probably just the lighting or my PTSD or whatever. Another thing to think about is it's the relationship that heals.
Speaker 1:So even if you get get a therapist who doesn't know anything or a peer supporter or friend or something, it's that relationship with the person is what brings the healing, not the theory they use. And so you wanna look for somebody who has empathic attunement, so it really feels like they're with you. And if you can't find a specialist, you can look for somebody who's willing to learn. Sometimes somebody who's brand new, an intern, or just starting out, you'll tell them, this is my diagnosis or this is my situation. And then since they're new in their career, they're like, oh, I want to know all about that.
Speaker 1:And they'll go and they'll learn about it and get supervision. Then also another option is an associate or an intern who is supervised by a trauma specialist that can also be helpful. And then if you're struggling to find somebody, you're not alone. Healing from complex trauma can be intense and painful process, which is why it's important to work with somebody who you connect with. They're they can be hard to find.
Speaker 1:And you may have to travel. Like I know Emma traveled four hours one way and other people do stuff like that. It's like unbelievable. Or people pay out of pocket when they don't have any money. Sometimes therapists are able or willing to see somebody pro bono or just extremely lower rate.
Speaker 1:I went to the next slide. So some suggestions, look at therapist finders. They don't all have like a DID section. Emma just put out a couple of podcasts about finding a therapist. She has a couple on there, which I think are helpful.
Speaker 1:A lot of therapists don't return calls for whatever reason. They no longer return calls. So you could call 20 people and two of them call you back, which I don't know what that is. You look at their website, see how their website feels. What do you learn about them?
Speaker 1:You how do you feel on it? Email or call them. Set up a a free consultation. If they're not willing to do a twenty minute consultation with you on the phone, then they probably aren't gonna be that willing in the room or whatever. That's just my perspective.
Speaker 1:Meet them for the first time. Have more than one meeting with people say I'm really ableist when I say this, but try to meet with more than one person for like a couple times. Because when I was just looking for a therapist, I met with three therapists and I'm in the Bay Area, so there's a lot more. One of them, I was like, Oh, okay. This is one that I'd also met with before and didn't like, but she gave me the little piece of paper with System Speak website.
Speaker 1:And because I didn't like her, I didn't do anything with it. And it floated around my apartment for like two years until finally I was like, either listen to this or you throw it away. So I went back to her and left and was like, she's okay. And then I went to the therapist I have now and she was amazing. I was actually doing therapy.
Speaker 1:I like cried in the first section. I felt really cared about and connected. And then I was like, that other therapist was horrible. But I didn't know that because I hadn't met the other lady, even though I had a good therapist before. And then I went to a third therapist who's actually probably a good therapist, but I'm a therapist.
Speaker 1:And so we just talked about therapy, like I talked into the colleague rather than actually doing therapy. It's nice to have somebody who doesn't let you do that. And then if you're burnt out, take a break, find other support. Therapy isn't for everybody. Not everybody heals through therapy.
Speaker 1:It's one way that a lot of people find useful. Some questions. I always ask them, why did they decide to become a therapist? Which is interesting. A lot of people haven't been asked that.
Speaker 1:And two of the therapists, when I was just looking for people, both said that they had done their own therapy and got a lot out of it, and that's why they decided to become a therapist. And then the other question is, why did you become interested in in, I say, like, in DID? Because it's such a specialty. Like, I want to know what drew them to that and what their process was with that. And what do you what do they like about what they do?
Speaker 1:Are they receiving supervision or part of a consultation group? You can ask, like, their training or degrees. That's probably easy to find somewhere else. Have they been in therapy? How did they view the healing process?
Speaker 1:What theories do they use? Do they use any creative modalities? Yeah. And if there's something that you really have liked, you can ask them about that. And then after that, even after the phone call, ask yourself, did I feel like they understood me?
Speaker 1:Did they take me seriously? Did they feel rushed, especially on the phone? Were they easy to talk to? Do I feel like they care? Did they answer my questions?
Speaker 1:And then how did I feel in my body? If you're able to fill your body, we're not always able to do that. Did any strong feelings come up? Did I feel supported? Do I think they can help?
Speaker 1:I've seen I've been pretty lucky with therapists actually. So three therapists that I've seen, all of them within the first session, probably the three, four, maybe best therapists I've ever seen. All of them within the first session, had a feeling of this person going to help me in a feeling of hope. I might not have felt that in the second session when we actually started doing something and then stuff comes up, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, you know, you need to have that, You don't need to feel safe with them because you might probably won't feel safe, but are they somebody that you could begin to feel safe with or that there's a sense that they're an okay person. Are they do they respect like your boundaries or if you tell them something isn't working? That's true for anybody. Then, yeah, trust your intuition.
Speaker 1:You can usually sense if you're found the right person. You can also kind of have a sense of if you're making progress in therapy or if something is off or needs to change, that can be really hard to talk about, but it can also be really when you're looking at the relationship is what heals, that those things are actually where the real work is, in my opinion, which I'm really seeing now is that the work for me right now isn't even talking about what happened in my trauma. It's talking about what's happening in the room and what's happening between me and her and what she's seeing or she did something that made one of my people upset. And how do we work through that? Go slow to go fast.
Speaker 1:Or the slower you go, the faster you get there. So if you're healing from trauma, and I don't like the word recovery because I think it kind of implies that there's an endpoint, which I think can be really shiny when you're working really hard and doing everything you know to do and you're not getting better, or it doesn't seem like you're getting better. A lot of times, if you look back though, like, like with the pandemic, had a lot of PTSD and new stuff come up. But then I look back ten years ago where I was having flashbacks and nightmares all the time and couldn't work and couldn't do anything and I'm not there now. I'm not where I want to be, but I'm also not there.
Speaker 1:So recovery as defined as a process of change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self directed life and try to reach their full potential. That I think is definitely possible where you're living a self directed life, you're, you know, improving your life, you you're coming to have things that are meaningful or important or that you enjoy. May feel like you're not making progress or that the suffering or pain will never end, but you are making progress. Just being here, you're making progress. And so then thinking outside of the therapy room, because you can't always find therapy and there isn't always therapy and therapy may not be for everybody.
Speaker 1:One thing is we're the experts. Survivors have taken it upon themselves to educate their community and the world through conferences, podcasts, YouTube videos, and Facebook groups. This has totally exploded since the pandemic. Like before the pandemic, know like a bunch of different, like the Redwoods, they're a system that's done a lot of advocacy. They started Zoom groups that were meeting really regularly at the very beginning.
Speaker 1:And then the Chris's have done some some groups and done some alumni groups there. You can look them up on kinhost.org. System Speak started their community. Jade Miller started a community. I started a Zoom group in May 2020 that's still going.
Speaker 1:Healing Together connected people, and then those people, therapists with DIDs, started their own community, and then they started another additional Zoom meeting. And so, like, just in the last year, things have, like, completely exploded as far as peer support for dissociative disorders and multiplicity. The yeah. And so now now their peer supporters are recognized all over the country as people who are experts in the field because of their lived experience. They have knowledge and viscerally in their body, a way of connecting and understanding that you just don't if you don't have the experience.
Speaker 1:There are wellness centers that have been started, peer support, respites. I go through some of these. The Hearing Voices Network started in 1987, which was to challenge stigmas around different experiences. The POCC Poll of Consumer Champions, which is now peers organizing community change that was started by Jay Moeller. It's in Alameda County, the county I live in, and it's basically an advocacy group to there's a couple groups that work to change laws and to provide, you know, to make sure that people with lived experience have a say in what the services are and how they're done.
Speaker 1:Infinite Mind started in 2008 to educate and advocate for people with trauma. One thing I like about Infinite Mind is it's one of the only places I know of that well, systems speak community too, that connects therapists and people with lived experience, like fully accepts and validates both. Like, so often you have organizations that are like really desperate therapists and you have organizations that are really hate therapists, and it's really hard when you belong to both camps. You kind of have to deny part of yourself in a multiple space, which is ironic. So that was started in 02/2008.
Speaker 1:02/2015, the System Speak podcast started. Their community started, like, this year. 02/2019, Plural Pride started where they had the first Plural Positivity World Conference. And 2020, the Plural Association became a nonprofit. We are biplurals for plurals nonprofit to empower plurals where everyone who identifies self identifies as having more than one individual within a single body.
Speaker 1:Let's see. I'm skipping some of this is able to, like, shape their own lives and be a part of the community. Then wherever you are at your in your life, whether you're working or not or can't get out of bed, like, you matter and you make a difference. Like, when you tell your story, that affects the world. Like, it affects the person you're talking to.
Speaker 1:It breaks stigma. It brings understanding. And then the ways we help each other, the ways we live our truth, that we are bringing change to the world. And then my last slide, it says, even when reduced to ashes, we rise again. It has a picture of the phoenix coming up and somebody holding a sign like this that says hope.
Speaker 1:Let's see. And then I have some resources, some hotlines. And another another point that I had on here is we're kinda I don't know the time frame because I think this is the first one for the the nerd count. So what I had, and I guess this can be the end of the formal, the formal presentation, just that hope people can have some hope that things are changing and that we're making change. We're creating stuff for people.
Speaker 1:We're building resources, and we got a long way to go. But we gotta, I don't know, hold on to the to the inches forward that we make. So the last one of the last slides, I it's it's says it's called what helps. And so if people want to stay on, if anybody wants to check-in about some things that help them, maybe some things that aren't like therapy, any kind of things to do to support yourself or your system or when you're having a hard time or a hard day, like, what helps you get through that? Do you want us to just unmute or raise hand?
Speaker 1:What do you prefer, Crystal? I guess that's a good question. You're super quiet on my computer. I guess you you can just un unmute and then or raise hands, whichever. Sure.
Speaker 1:I was just going to comment that a lot of times I do my best parts communication work while I'm working out, which sounds kinda strange. But, like like, Wednesday, I had a lot of activation, and we sort of, like, went through each part that needed to talk and, like, sorted it out while, like, punching it out and, like, lifting weights. And it sounds so random, but it actually really helps my system. So, yeah, just thought I'd share that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think for us, we have specific people that we haven't wanted to let them have time, but they're also the ones who work out, and they're the ones who hold a lot of the anger. And so working out is a really good way to like kind of get them space and it's good for our body too. I wanted to ask if you might clarify a little bit both as a therapist and somebody who attends therapy, what you mean by the third therapist you met with. You talked more about what you had in common as therapists than actually doing therapy. Can you clarify that difference, what that felt like or like what you mean by quote unquote doing therapy, I guess?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's actually a really good question because I think it can be really nuanced and really like you don't even realize that you're doing it. For instance, the the third therapist I met with, we don't even know what we were talking about, but so like I'm talking about myself and my experience, but then somehow it goes into talking about the problems with DID in the world, or we're talking theory, we're talking about maybe what helps or what but there's a certain kind of disconnection, like there's a certain kind of like professional person kind of being present in the room where you're connected, you and you're caring, but it's more about other people than about yourself. Whereas the second therapist, like as soon as I sat down on the couch and it felt like she was the expert in the room kind of or that I was able to let her be the expert whether or not I know more, I think isn't so much the point because I've worked with interns for many years, whereas I had a therapist degree and lots of hours and they weren't even graduated. But kind of the ability to be vulnerable in a certain way and that they are able to kind of redirect you, like when you're because it's kind of a defense, I think, to, I don't know, like, theorize.
Speaker 1:And and then people will be like, oh, you have such good insight, but it's not really so much insight as it is, you know, stuff and you've learned stuff and you're kind of regurgitating it, but you're not processing or connected or feeling. I don't know. Does that help? Yeah. I think so.
Speaker 1:Thank you for talking through that. Yeah. If anybody has any questions or anything. Well, I really appreciated being able to share with all of you, and I especially appreciated people who had their videos on and I could see them laughing. And that was super encouraging because when I can see people like connecting in some way, like it's it's just makes things easier.
Speaker 1:So thank you and everybody who doesn't have their video on, I'm really glad that you're here and just that you're here is supportive, you know? Yeah. Was gonna say that the thing that helps so much, think, is what this is, right? Which is just the container of support, peer support being so helpful because even if you have therapy, it's never enough sometimes. And so having like, just meeting other people who understand on some level and knowing they exist out in the world sometimes is enough to just make it to the next So I really appreciate this as do others inside.
Speaker 1:So thank you, Crystal. Think that's such a good point. It's like, and it's hard, like friendship is hard. Like I can have an attachment to a therapist, but I can't have an attachment to a friend. I can have attachment maybe to a client, these one way relationships, but and it can also go the other way of it being easier to attach to a friend and harder to get attached to a friend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. The paying for a therapist gets me, it's very difficult. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:For me, I just attach way more. Maybe I have more experience with it because I've been in therapy for so long. And I don't know, kind of my my view is that there's something that I came up with is that I feel like this is controversial before saying it. I I feel like it's the only opportunity you can have to experience unconditional love because nobody can love you or be present for you all the time, but somebody could be present for you for fifty minutes. Like but any longer, like don't know.
Speaker 1:That was just kind of something I came up with when I was, I don't know, maybe studying. For me, paying for therapy has a lot of echoes of paid caregivers in childhood involving of babysitters who were paid to care but didn't really care and is one of many, you know, all of that. Like, I know what the issues are, but. Yeah. It's super hard.
Speaker 1:I my previous therapist sorry. I keep getting distracted by the chat. My previous therapist, I saw her and I was on Medi Cal, and then I had worked enough that I got switched over to Medi Medi. And when that switch happened, I can no longer she wouldn't be paid and I couldn't pay because I was on Medi Cal and you're not allowed to take money. So she saw me for an additional seven years or something for free and gave me like, treated me no different, gave me calls basically until she retired and she just couldn't come into the office anymore.
Speaker 1:But then I had to like, it was really weird switching over to paying somebody. Like, I kept forgetting to pay her or just felt weird. And she's giving me a big discount too. I have a lot of sessions right now and she she gives me it's $50 a session. So but still it sometimes gets like, I don't know, weird sometimes.
Speaker 1:But I also know that you have to live and I don't know. I don't think that helpers should have to be on poverty's edge all the time. You can speak to the part about therapy going well and then ruptures. Okay. I'm trying to think of what happened.
Speaker 1:There's there's a rupture and then there's just a difference of opinion. It's not necessarily a rupture and it's not going to get resolved in the same way. For instance, my therapist, she determined through consultation or whatever that what was best for me, and I think I kind of mentioned this offhand somehow, that what was best for me, for us, was that we have no in between session contact, which was super hard because our previous therapist, we could call her anytime and she set the boundaries, but this therapist, it was a whole different thing. And we got really upset. We kind of broke the rule and emailed her.
Speaker 1:Then she that kind of made when we asked, she said, yeah, did feel a little bit mad about that, but I'm still here. I still care about you. I love you. She said she loved me, which was crazy. And so that wasn't really something that we were going to agree on because it was a limit that she was setting, but the experience was like was upper rupture.
Speaker 1:And so we spent a lot of time working through that. And another time was, I think I came into session, one of us came in and we wanted to talk about a specific trauma and she was going be going out of town. It was something that happened on my birthday and she was going to be gone. And so we wanted to talk to her before that. And she was like, well, we need a session or I don't think you're ready or whatever.
Speaker 1:She didn't want to do that. And then later, maybe the next session or something, she came back and she apologized and said, I don't know what's best for you in your system, and I want to honor that, and I want to kinda repair that. So one one thing that she does that I haven't seen as much is that she's hyper aware of, like, those little little misattainments, and she brings them into the room and says, how do you feel about this? She does a lot of mind reading too, but her mind reading is usually correct. Like, I could imagine that this felt this way, and I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I did this, and I'm gonna work to not do that again and to repair it. Like, she doesn't just say I'm sorry, but then she tries to, like okay. Somebody asked a question about how I got through the thing with my therapist who didn't want me to contact her. Not easily. It was extremely hard.
Speaker 1:It took like a year. And the whole time I was thinking, but I can, I was thinking of her sitting in supervision or consultation and the other people saying, oh, but look at what good material this is bringing up, and you're dealing with all the I don't know if she's actually doing that, but but it did, like, bring up a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff to work through in a different way? Don't know. I think I maybe just had to, like, accept it. And then I think part of me realized that maybe she was right, that that it was really stressful for me to email her or call her or whatever and then not to have her return that or not to know just to kinda be like, is it okay?
Speaker 1:I don't wanna break the rule. And because it kinda started because she said, if you're in imminent danger of hurting yourself, then contact me or a crisis line or whatever. And I was like, how in the world do I know if I'm in imminent danger of hurting myself? I don't know that. And so that was just way too confusing.
Speaker 1:And so the I was, like, in the hospital or something. And then after that, I said it would almost be less confusing if I could just couldn't talk to you. I didn't know she actually do that. But but, I mean, we added sessions. But, yeah, it was it was really, really hard.
Speaker 1:Now, like a year later, I I feel like a lot of work came from it and a lot of, like, seeing that she could set that limit and she actually cared, and it was because she cared even though I didn't get it, even though it was hurting me at the time.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Sorry. I just got back in a car, so I can talk a bit easier now. That's so helpful because oh my god. I hate therapy.
Speaker 3:Like, it's just so hard, and I'm like, I don't understand, like, Hi, Tristy. Hi, y'all. Like, a great, theory maybe or, like, what's happening in my brain as to, like so last Friday, my therapist was sick. Like, she was sick. And, like, I quit therapy.
Speaker 3:Like, I just like, it was just catastrophic, and I'm like, I don't understand what's happening here. And it could be, like, something like that or, like, you know, she normally emails me on Tuesday or whatever and she couldn't because she was busy. Like, there just seems to be like, I don't know if it's, like, trying to find reasons as to, like, not trust her or, like, like and, obviously, it's some sort of, like well, not obviously. I don't know. But it seems like it's some sort of theme that happens with people with DID.
Speaker 1:I'm like, what the
Speaker 3:hell is going on here? Like, what is this? And how do I fix the What's
Speaker 1:the the thing that happens with people with DID? You'd say it again.
Speaker 3:Like the like the I mean, ruptures probably isn't the right word, but like the, you know, if something happening with the therapist and then getting these, like, well, in in my situation, it's like a catastrophic response to something really normal. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because if she's sick and she cancels, like, it's the end of the world. Like Yeah. Like, when you've kind of not really felt that connection or that care from somebody and you're, like, starving for it and then you get it and then you're expecting it because that's what's you're living on and then they cancel. Like, it is it's a crisis.
Speaker 1:Like, we could go into crisis around it. Like, it's crazy. And I think understanding that that that's typical, I guess, kinda can take some of the shame out of it. I think that's one thing that she was really attuned to. Sometimes it gets annoying because she's like, I'm going to be taking Labor Day off.
Speaker 1:How is that for you? What comes up for, like What I'm like 30. You're taking Labor Day off. You don't take the other holidays. Like, yes, and it's hard.
Speaker 1:Talk about that.
Speaker 3:My therapist was like super good about it. Like, she texted me. She was like, I know this is really hard. Like, I would never not come to therapy unless I was really sick. Like, she did all the right things.
Speaker 3:But, like, we were just exactly that, like, in crisis, like, more crisis that we've been in in a long time. Mhmm. For, like, a whole week. Mhmm. And then we rang up her reception, and we're like, we're not coming back.
Speaker 3:Like, we're not gonna email her. Like, it's over. And then, like, two days later, we're like, come back. You didn't leave us. Where are you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's just so hard to navigate. And when you're in that, like, I don't know the brainy stuff, but I feel like she talks about, like, I don't know, something about prefrontal cortexes or something, like, your rational brain isn't able to to rationalize it because it's not online. Mhmm. But I'm like, I also don't know how to fix it because, like, seriously, it's happened, four times in the last, I don't know, couple of months.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And it's just catastrophic. And then, like, the last time it happened so if I'm rambling, I don't know what else to do.
Speaker 1:We're still recording, but it probably doesn't have to be on the podcast. But we're still recording. Yeah. It's it's it's hard. I think it's
Speaker 3:oh, it's that whole, like,
Speaker 1:that whole infancy thing. Like, if you're an infant and your mom is gone or your caretaker is gone, it's the end of the world and you might die. Like, literally, you might die. And so I think if those wounds are there and that's kind of the relational and attachment stuff that you're working on in therapy, then that's why it becomes such a crisis is because it's the end of the world. Like
Speaker 3:Holy shit. I'm not feeling like that. That mean I have DID. After all.
Speaker 1:Know. That's hard. Makes what it's mean, it's not just DID, but it's the complex PTSD too. It's just, like, drives it all. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, in my I think the last time she canceled, because canceling is way is a lot worse than like if she can't show up and she's Yeah. When she's going on holidays. Yeah. Yeah. And she hasn't really canceled.
Speaker 1:My old therapist canceled all the time because she had health issues and stuff and would be gone for, like, a month, which was horrible. I lost my thought. This happened. People hijack the conversation, and then it can't get back to what I was saying. I get Right.
Speaker 1:The last time I ended up going and hanging out with a friend. I ended up or, like, going hiking or doing something, like, outside the house or something that's, like I think especially when you have therapy in the house, like, being in the place where you have therapy and then not having her there at the time, like, whereas like last Labor Day, I there was a barbecue that I've never been to a barbecue in the whole last year and a half, and there was one. And so I got to go to that, and I wouldn't have been able to have therapy. I would have still rather had therapy, but it was probably better for me to do that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's what I was gonna say too. I think the other thing like is that like none of our our husband doesn't know, our family doesn't know, no one apart from our therapist and our GP knows. So it's like oh yeah, there you go. So I think like having that safe, just having that safe space to just be like, and
Speaker 1:just let whatever happens happen. Like I think the loss of that in our week is like another reason why it's so catastrophic. Well, like for us, we can call a friend and talk about what's going on and get support, but the person getting support isn't the person who's struggling or the person who needs support because that person doesn't have a relationship with our friend. Like, they don't talk to her. They're and that person can't even talk.
Speaker 1:So, like, in therapy, that person can just, like, be in the room or she's patient enough or it's safe enough, but I have pretty good friends because I've been working on friendship for a long time and not as good a friends as I want. I mean, not no. They are very good friends. They're very good friends. I'm not as attached to them or connected to them as I would like, even though I decided to start focusing on two friendships instead of a 100,
Speaker 3:which is
Speaker 1:a way to It's a struggle. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, therapy is the only place that that those people can get any kind of support or be seen in any
Speaker 3:way. Yeah. Like, it's safe enough to just go there and be who you need to be and talk about what you need to talk about and Mhmm. Yeah. Let all the parts of you be seen,
Speaker 1:I guess. Even though we get into the chair and then everybody can't decide who gets to talk or who gets to say what, and so then we just can't figure it out. That's half the test.
Speaker 3:And then she's like, are you still with me? Like, don't know where I am. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's been really helpful. Thank you for talking to me about that.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're welcome. Yeah. I wish I had known that I was supposed to start. I guess I couldn't. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thanks for letting me know your question.
Speaker 3:Thank you. It's been super helpful. It's been really nice. It's been kind of like a like getting a new podcast in some sort of ways. You know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because I
Speaker 1:pulled in all the stuff from all of the podcasts. You did great. I yeah. Because I write these newsletters for work, and so then I just, like, took all of my newsletters and put them together.
Speaker 3:You did a great job. And that was an amazing find. Two guitars. Like, what the heck? Well, I
Speaker 1:guess you could have seen the PowerPoint.
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. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
Speaker 2:We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also 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. I'm there to heal too. That's what peer support is all about.
Speaker 2:Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.