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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. We have finally started looking at memory time in therapy. It's not easy and worse than unpleasant, But also with my therapist, it's almost tolerable. I mean, I guess that's part of the point of staying within that window of tolerance and holding that dual awareness of memory time and now time.
Speaker 1:That I was there alone in the past, but I am not alone now. Sometimes that's easier than others. But with all the work we did in our notebooks with our previous therapists before, pouring all the stories onto all that paper and then organizing them into chapters for the book even though it's not in order, and even though it still needs to be sorted, and even though real and not real is still hard. Like PETA and Katniss trying to find their way in the middle of war. Except this time, war is not someplace out there where we go for work.
Speaker 1:It is inside me. It is in the past. It has already happened. It just feels like now. That's why it gets confusing because it is real, but it is not now.
Speaker 1:I accept also it feels like now, even though now it is not real. And my brain hurts trying to wrap around it, trying to hold space for what safe enough creates. With boundaries enough for me to be free, to heal, to feel, to love, to move and have my being and a life that I'm still creating. It's hard. It hurts.
Speaker 1:I have cried all last night, and I have cried all overnight. And I have cried all this morning, and I am done crying. My tears have fallen like rain, and that is only poetry because it has been a 115 degrees outside for three weeks. It's the July, and the leaves have already turned yellow and brown and are falling from their branches as if summer is already over. And I don't want it to be because summer was like a dream.
Speaker 1:And I don't want to wake up. But dreaming is not real. And if you want to feel all the feels of dreaming, you have to wake up and you have to see reality even when it's really, really hard. And so to contain the hard, we have organized things into lists, like categories or topics, things like chapters in the book. And because we spent the last year listening to the whole podcast with our therapist.
Speaker 1:Our transition into memory time has been the English teacher episodes. There are four of them. And we took those episodes and listed all the things that we need to address in that content. So that we are not drowning or overwhelmed but still can hold space for awareness that these are the things we need to talk about. These are the things that need to come up and out of me.
Speaker 1:She keeps telling me over and over again that that feeling of wanting to vomit is good. It is disgust, not with myself, but with what was done to me. Sometimes it's all I can do not to throw up in her office. And now that I'm back on telehealth only, it's easier when I can't keep it down. And that vial, she says, is my body trying to get it out of me, that it's not mine to carry, that it was never mine to carry, Not my secret, like an echo from the past.
Speaker 1:Something good from my previous therapist that is only now starting to feel real or understandable, a piece I can hold on to tangible, not my secret. And not just that they're not my secrets, but that I am not alone anymore. I don't have to carry them alone anymore. If summer is changing to autumn, I have awakened myself in a family that cares in the ways they know how and are able and with a community that understands and cares and that I can access when I am able. And out of this love like I have never known before.
Speaker 1:Where all of me is welcome. Where all of me can be held. And this, I guess, is what makes it safe enough. So when it is safe enough and I am with my therapist in her office or on the computer. When it is time to go into memory time, I pull out the cookie tin and take off the lid.
Speaker 1:We're inside are a thousand paper cranes. Memories and flashes folded away, contained away, stuffed inside until later. Except later is now. And so we pull them out one at a time to look at them, to talk about them, to feel them. And when it's time to do eye movements, she wants to know what is the most distressing thing that we need to deal with out of all the things there to deal with in this origami of my life.
Speaker 1:And I told her that right now, as school gets ready to start and the triplets are going into eighth grade, and the twins are going into fifth grade, and our youngest is going into second grade, That these are significant ages. Ages where my life fell apart. The end of the childhood I never had. Second grade was when I learned that nothing I could do would be enough to hold my family together. That was my lesson of second grade, was that I had failed everything that I thought I was born to do.
Speaker 1:That is the shame of second grade. In fifth grade, my parents divorced, which feels acted out when the husband has been gone for two years already. Except also, he is not going anywhere. But also, I am loved well. When my parents got divorced, I never saw my father again, except for two short visits until I was in college.
Speaker 1:When he came to visit me and I didn't get to see him and then never got him back. It is a hard thing to go from being groomed to being rejected. That's what I learned in fifth grade. Not even counting the layers and layers of things I don't want to see from that time, things that are still folded into paper cranes at the bottom of the 10. And in eighth grade, I tried to talk about it, except I didn't have words and no one would listen.
Speaker 1:And I used metaphors like Kathleen Adams talked about in her podcast episode with the girl and the fire. When you try to find words as a child for things even adults cannot comprehend. And so reflecting all of this in memory time and the synchronicity of that with having worked through the podcast with our therapist, except for the English teacher episodes, to transition into memory time because they bridge from college all the way back to eighth grade where we first met her. And so I told my therapist that what is most distressing out of all of our lists is that which leads up to the therapist who moved me in and all of the religious trauma at the college, that all of this started in eighth grade, and that what's freaking me out about it is that the triplets are going into eighth grade, and it is distressing to me. And the twins are going into fifth grade, which is when everything culminated with my parents.
Speaker 1:And that our youngest daughter was hitting the same age for almost five just before the pandemic, but that that got paused because of 2020, and it's just been hanging there in the background. And now she's going into second grade, which is its own trigger and significant ways. So my therapist said we can start with these pieces because they are the most disruptive to now time. And with those narrowed down choices, we decided to start with eighth grade because the other layers may be struggles. But I didn't have parents after eighth grade.
Speaker 1:We were left on our own, which is why we both left home. It's more complicated than that and not my story for telling on the podcast. But it matters because I don't know how to parent eighth graders or high schoolers or young adults because I had no one. But deciding on eighth grade gave us a specific place for finding targets, and so we made another list of targets for eye movements for eighth grade. One, meeting the English teacher.
Speaker 1:Two, a trauma with a math teacher. Three, getting knifed on the school bus. Four, being homeless and then living in the hotel. Five, trying to rescue other abused kids, which ultimately led to toxic friendships that I didn't have the skills to navigate on my own. I couldn't heal in them what I needed to fix in me, and none of us had grown ups who saw us or heard us or helped us.
Speaker 1:But then I also had this memory just out of the blue. As we made that list of being in trouble that year for telling a lie. That's the metaphor like Kathleen Adams was talking about in her episode. Long before school shootings were ever a thing and not at all saying that this was okay or excusing my own bad behavior, I told that lie in eighth grade. I said that my father was a sniper and going to kill all of us outside the school.
Speaker 1:That's the Reader's Digest version, and it was not at all okay. They called the police, and I was in a lot of trouble at school and at home. I had to talk to caseworkers again. Our family got sent to therapy again. What the therapist told my mother was that it was a cry for help.
Speaker 1:The therapist told my mother that it meant I felt no support. The therapist told my mother it was a response to my family's divorce and the violence we had seen that led up to it. The therapist told my mother that it was because of trauma. The therapist told my mother that because she had escaped into her work for the previous three years, that we children were still on pause from what had happened to our family and our family and our childhood and that my story was symbolic, that a single moment had blown everything up and that my world had fallen apart and that I felt afraid. But that fear was not tended to, because she was a single mother and she was doing all she could in the way she could with what she knew how to do as best she could.
Speaker 1:And so it was an insult to her to say that that was not enough. And I did not have permission to complain. And it was not safe to acknowledge fear. Because what that therapist did not know was that my mother was already bordering on collapse herself. And there was nothing left in her to deal with me or my fear or the degree to which I had always been alone.
Speaker 1:She herself had always been alone, feeling as if she were not liked by her family, feeling unloved, struggling through so much, so many things not my story to tell. And then with my father, their issues and the domestic violence or our problems growing up aside, she worked so hard because he could not keep a job. And in seasons and years and culture where it was the man to provide for the family, She felt that he had failed her. And she felt alone and burdened raising two children while his family shamed her for working outside the home. But someone had to.
Speaker 1:Someone had to be the adult. Someone had to be the grown up. And so she worked all the time. It was her escape. It was her safe place.
Speaker 1:It was necessary. There was no time for my stories. There was no tolerance for metaphors. So we did not keep going to therapy. Instead, I got in trouble for lying, which is fair.
Speaker 1:But I didn't just get in trouble for a lie. I got branded as a liar for forever, for everything, true or not, story or not, metaphor or not. And it is part of that for which I will not be forgiven. And it is part of why I stopped talking until I was grown and far from home. Years and years of almost no talking at all to anyone.
Speaker 1:Because I felt the shame that they put on me, the shame I brought upon myself. And if I am bad, then fawning can't work. But I need fawning to stay alive, and so words out of my mouth were no longer permitted. Words on my hands were no more public until now, running my mouth on a podcast, putting everything at risk to tell my story, to find my way through it, to sort through metaphors and trauma, what is real and not real, trying to find myself because I never meant to be bad. I just needed help.
Speaker 1:And when help was denied, the need never went away. And so I have lived decades on pause, shamed and branded, trying to be who I am supposed to be even when that means turning off me, which works fine until healing finds me again. And so we did that in therapy, eye movements for eighth grade, for lying, for shame, for silence, for finding words again, for forgiving myself, for having compassion on myself, for not being alone anymore, for holding space and making time for healing. I pointed out to the husband that of all the examples in the world that Kathleen Adams used in her story about trauma metaphors that look like lying but are cries for help, That she used the example of a fire. And he said, the only times you talk about it, your face still turns red from the flames.
Speaker 1:And I said, maybe they are flames of shame. My therapist said there are eye movements for that too. She asked if I was ready to try, and I begged her to save my immortal soul from myself. She said we would get to that later. I said, I don't know if I can heal from all of this, all of these things in memory time.
Speaker 1:She said, I don't have to. Just one piece at a time. I said there are too many pieces. I am broken into too many pieces. She said that when I say I'm broken, that what I mean is that my attachment is broken.
Speaker 1:And in the context of the English teacher who said at the end of the last episode or in one of them that I avoid getting close to people who care about me in order to protect them from me. The English teacher said that day, you are not dangerous. Don't you know that you are not dangerous? We talked about that. And my therapist said that keeping myself back prevents them from knowing too much, from knowing how much is in me.
Speaker 1:Because I am afraid of causing them to be overwhelmed or to produce a sense of pity or to love me out of obligation and then to feel that love that I felt never was. And that when people realize they can't fix me, they will leave me. And so my protecting them is protecting them from attachment that was doomed to be broken. And that, she said, is where the target is for eye movements, underneath all of those layers and all of those stories and everything from eighth grade. What I got from eighth grade was the belief that the more I share of myself, the more likely the relationship is to fail.
Speaker 1:And so that's where we started with eye movement. Eye movements we've been working on slowly, carefully, for weeks and weeks. That's where I spent my summer, was learning that I could risk relationship, that I could feel feelings without being overwhelmed or overwhelming others when I choose wisely who the others are, that I can create and maintain my own boundaries and respect the boundaries of others in order to create a safe zone where I am free to be me. And that all of that together is what makes it safe enough without overwhelming me or them, where I can find healing, deep healing, through connection with others because attachment and that any risk of attachment is hard and hurts, but that not all hard and hurt causes harm. Sometimes it hurts, like the heat of summer, but that's exactly why swimming feels so cool and refreshing And the falling of leaves into autumn means I will be able to see the animals play again in the woods unveiled from the curtain of green.
Speaker 1:It means I will be able to walk again when the air cools off. It means the children will go back to school for a season with their masks on, And I will have time again and spoons and space and privacy to do the healing work that is mine to do. There is risk in seeing and in being seen. But like the deer that I watch who do not harm me, and I do not harm them. Maybe part of safe enough is also close enough to feel connected, to do the work of connecting, but also staying present enough to believe it.
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.