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Our guest today is Maureen McEvoy, who volunteered to talk with us about re-enactment. She provides three examples, including one that references sexual consent in marriage. She clarifies that intrusions (like flashbacks) are when memory time invades now time, but re-enactment is when the same dynamic is actually happening again in now time (with different people or circumstances). Trigger warning to passing reference to “home movies” which she uses in references to old messages and memories from the past (not child exploitation materials).
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.
Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, and there is a button for donations where you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. We so appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are all learning together. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Our guest today is Maureen McEvoy. Many, many years ago, Maureen was a volunteer with the sexual assault center in Ontario. Intrigued by that experience, she changed careers, going back to school to earn her degree in counseling psychology. Since then, she has worked with many survivors of trauma, both historical and recent. She works with individuals, couples, and groups.
Speaker 1:She is a long standing instructor with the Justice Institute of British Columbia, teaching other counselors skills for working with complex trauma. She provides clinical consultations to a number of counselors and agencies. She has written several articles, including one co authored with Maggie Ziegler on countertransference in trauma groups. She also wrote Balancing A Counselor's Guide to the Legal Process. A believer in lifelong learning, Maureen has continually updated her knowledge and skills through both individual and couples therapy approaches.
Speaker 1:Consequently, Maureen draws on a broad knowledge base from recent advances in brain development to approaches that include eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, somatic experiencing, sensory motor psychotherapy, developmental needs meeting strategy, and art therapy to assist deep healing work with individual clients, including those with complex trauma and dissociation. She does extensive work with couples where one or both of the partners is a trauma survivor, either recent or historical. She has taken many trainings to develop skills in couples work, including relationship therapy, the Gottman method, emotionally focused therapy, The Developmental Model, and most recently Stan Takin's Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy. She's a Certified Therapist, Advanced Clinician, Clinical Consultant. Along with her business partner, Tamara Adelman, Maureen also presents Getting the Love You Want Weekend Workshops for Couples.
Speaker 1:The link to her website is on the blog. I'm especially grateful for Maureen coming on the podcast to talk with us. We had a specific clinical question about reenactments, which we were starting to notice in our sessions and with ourselves personally. We wrote to the listserv asking clinicians if there was someone who would like to come on the podcast to talk about it, and she volunteered. I'm very grateful for her response and her continued support.
Speaker 1:There are two trigger warnings for this podcast, besides the general warning for trauma talk. One is that she references a couple's case and sex as the clinical issue specifically. Two is that in our discussion of reenactments, she uses the term home movies to refer to those past experiences and memories that we sometimes project onto other people. I clarify that and mention it upfront as it may be triggering to some of us with child exploitation materials in our background. Nothing like that is discussed, but the phrase is used in passing.
Speaker 1:As always, care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you. Welcome, Maureen McAvoy.
Speaker 2:So welcome, everybody. My name is Maureen McEvoy. I am a trauma therapist in private practice here in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I have been a trauma therapist for the last three decades and have learned a lot along the way, of course, from the people that I am privileged to work with. And one of the things that I have had to learn about is this thing called reenactment, which we're gonna talk a little bit about throughout the course of this podcast, and to come to appreciate how that shows up and in the different ways that it can show up and what we need to be able to do as trauma therapists to respond to that.
Speaker 2:Almost all of my clients, like ninety nine percent of my clients are trauma survivors of different kinds, either recent kinds of events or historical events. So I'm sure that people do reenactment who are not trauma survivors. I just don't know that much about those folks because that's not who I work with.
Speaker 1:How did you get involved in treating trauma in beginning of your career?
Speaker 2:So at the beginning of my career, I was actually a journalist, and I was doing volunteer work for a sexual assault center and would be on the crisis line and would be responding to people and being very intrigued by some of the ways that people presented over the phone. And that was got me intrigued enough that I eventually decided to switch careers and go back to school to get the, credentials that I needed to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:How do you explain what complex trauma is? I know that's a big question, but just generally when you're trying to sort of define things for people as they get oriented.
Speaker 2:Sure. So you're right. It's a big question, but my very short short answer is that it's when a person experiences traumatic events, often abuse, early and often, so that some of the predictable developmental milestones get compromised. And that, therefore, that person, you know, emerges into adulthood less prepared for to adult, really, to be in that kind of place because of the various unfinished or really interfered with developmental pieces. That's how I would describe complex trauma in a nutshell.
Speaker 2:And along with that comes some very predictable things. So, typically, if we're we're there's gonna be a constellation of things like dissociation, somatic kinds of responses. The body chemistry goes a little bit awry when we're subjected to that kind of ongoing kind of stress, and attachment is a bit wonky, and therefore, relationships as a young adult and onwards can often be problematic. It's, complex trauma is the gift that keeps on giving, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:How do you talk about dissociation? What about that piece? How do you explain it?
Speaker 2:Well, dissociation is the very, very best survival skill that many trauma survivors, particularly those who are being in traumatic events as children have. And it's a way to try to compartmentalize myself into the me, not me, to be able to say, this cannot be happening to me. So I'm gonna put that over there, and I'm going to carry on with the rest of my life as best as I can, compartmentalizing that. And that I think is sort of the baseline that happens for many people with trauma histories. But if it's repeated kind of trauma, if it's very violent kind of interpersonal betrayal trauma, for example, then one's gonna need more and more and more kind of dissociation.
Speaker 2:Basic compartmentalization of me, not me isn't quite enough, and so it gets further divided. And people move along the continuum and all the way down into having, you know, dissociative disorders as defined by the DSM.
Speaker 1:And you talked about how trauma impacts relationships. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Well, the simplest way might be to explain it would be to say that if I am a person who's had complex trauma, then that typically means that my relationships, the caregivers growing up, was probably not very positive or not sufficient. And either I was neglected or I was intruded upon. And as a result of that, I will, have quite high likelihood of having some kind of insecure attachment. And as you probably know, Emma, there's the, you know, avoidant kind of attachment. I'm okay.
Speaker 2:I'm just a little island. I'm gonna be fine. I don't really need people. Then there are gonna be those who are more in the anxious, preoccupied kind of category, like, do you really love me? Do you wanna spend time with me?
Speaker 2:You know, am I good enough for you? That kind of anxiety pervasive through it. And then we have another group that often isn't talked about in the world other than inside the trauma world, which is something called the disorganized and disoriented attachment. And and that really is going to be for those people who had caregivers who were either frightening or frightened and therefore couldn't really attach very well. So the long and short of that would be that if I had some of those experiences, I'm now gonna go into a relationship with a little wonky attachment, and it's going to get played out there somehow.
Speaker 2:It's going to get played out in that I might, for example, develop a a very rigid defense and say, I'm not going to let you in in order to protect myself. I'm gonna stay on that island. But then in the end, you might break up with me precisely because I don't let you in, and you're gonna say something to the effect of, you know, I really can't stay with you because I I you won't let me get close to. Or it could be the opposite where I am gonna be very, very clingy so that I don't get abandoned, but then you might be in the position where you're gonna tell me, I can't manage your neediness and your clinginess. I have to break up with you.
Speaker 2:Or if it's this third category of the disorganized one, the relationship, there's a lot of drama around it, a lot of breakups and get back together again. And the partner is quite likely to say something like, I just never know who my partner's gonna be on any given day. And so in any of these three kinds of strategies are problematic in order to be able to establish a good relationship. That makes sense?
Speaker 1:Yes. It makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate you sharing those patterns. And in the context of relationships and trauma and those kinds of patterns that are so common, how did you run into reenactments? What is that and how did you see it show up and learn about that?
Speaker 2:Okay. So three, examples that came fairly early on in my career, I guess, and, I'm grateful that I got to learn it early because then once I began to look for it, of course, I could see it everywhere. So one example very early on was I have an all purpose client that I call Kelly, and that's just sort of the way that I refer to my various people as Kelly. So this particular Kelly had given notice on her apartment and told me that she was going to be moving next month. And I said, okay, great.
Speaker 2:And at that time, we were doing processing around what had happened when she was about 16 years old. She disclosed what was happening with a family member. Her parents, particularly their relative, the parent that was a relative of the family member did not believe her, said that she was, you know, making up a crazy story, and essentially kicked her out of the house. And that was very painful, as you can imagine. But how it got reenacted was that although she had given notice for her apartment, she somehow, and I think to this day, would still not fully understand how she had done this, had not arranged to be got the dates mixed up, and so she was gonna be moving into the new apartment a month later.
Speaker 2:So there was a period of a month where she did not have a home. And the only way I could explain that to myself and to her was to say that somehow some part of you really wanted us to understand the impact of being kicked out of the house when you were 16 years old so that we had to recreate those variables. And so that really kind of took me by surprise and was, okay. Gotta pay attention to this. The next Kelly that came along was one who was describing to me a very challenging situation with her boss.
Speaker 2:And we did work around trying to set boundaries and role playing setting boundaries and doing those kinds of things, But it wasn't until a friend of hers said to her very clearly, you know, it sounds to me like what's happening with your boss is that you are reenacting all of what happened with your father, only now it's happening with your boss. And that made a lot of sense to that, Kelly, and it made a lot of sense to me. And Kelly was able to say to me, you know, you need to be able to recognize this when it's happening with your clients, Maureen, because if you can't see it, then there's no way that I can see it because I'm in it. And it wasn't until my friend said this to me that I could all of a sudden see I'm in it. Now it makes so much sense why I feel so paralyzed, why I can't stick up for myself, why I can't, you know, actually do the role plays that we're that we've been doing, why I can never ever actually see it.
Speaker 2:It's because I'm responding to my boss as if I was the five year old. And that was very sobering for me. And this particular Kelly was also a fantastic artist and did this amazing painting, which hangs in my office, to remind me. Alright. Is there something going on here that Kelly might not be able to see that I need to see?
Speaker 2:And then the third example that I'll give you of reenactment was a couple who came in. Now, again, Emma, I need to tell you that almost all of my couples, one or both of the partners are trauma survivors. I so, again, there's lots of things that couples do that I might not be aware of because of my particular niche that I work with. So this particular couple came in, and, again, I'll I'll call her Kelly, and I'll just call him Sam. And they reported to me that they were trying to have a baby.
Speaker 2:And so as a result of that, they were having sex every day. And I tried to do a little psychoed that said, you know, really, there's only certain periods of the month that are your most fertile period. Here's how you can check that out and get to know what your cycle's like. And there was something in the way that that information was received that kind of got the hair on the back of my neck standing up a little bit. And and basically Sam told me to butt out and that this was the way that that they were going to make sure we that this was to make sure they were going to catch the fertile days.
Speaker 2:And then what happened was that Kelly's dad was in the hospital, and Kelly had to do quite a long trip to go visit her dad in the hospital. And then when she would come home, she would be very tired and fatigued and just wanna go to bed, And Sam would want to be sexual with her. And she was saying, you know, that's not really, what I wanna do. I'm just, you know, really worried and upset and tired. You know, please, can we not?
Speaker 2:And he said, no, that we need to do this. And he couched it, and we need to do this in order to have a baby. But when I heard all of that story, I separated them actually. And I talked with Kelly, and I said, so, Kelly, I need to check out what I'm hearing because what I'm hearing is that you say no, and that's not respected. And that is sounds exactly like what happened with your father growing up.
Speaker 2:You know? And her eyes got very wide, and she could see in that moment that, yeah, this is another example of reenactment. So those are three examples from three different particular ways of reenactment happening.
Speaker 1:So when we talk about, like, kids, just to make it neutral for a minute, when we talk about children, outside children, and we hear people talk about children acting out, they're referring to that internal stuff showing up in behavior, like actors on a stage, right? That's where the now it has such a negative connotation. We sometimes forget where that comes from. And this is a reenactment, meaning behaviorally, literally living out the same thing again externally, what is sort
Speaker 2:of stuck inside. Right. Right. Exactly. So and it's a very nice distinction you're making there, that acting out is kind of showing through, you know, words, behavior, actions, what's happening inside.
Speaker 2:Reenactment maybe at its best is an an attempt to have some kind of mastery, have a different outcome, have a redo with a more positive outcome. You know, good old Freud, you know, did talk about something called the you know, our wish to have mastery and how sometimes we can be really driven to do something over and over again until we get a better outcome. I I think that what might help us to understand this is to just sort of take it to a a pretty common experience that lots of people have. Which would be I could grow up in a family with a alcoholic parent. And I could say to myself, well, when I grow up and when I get in a relationship, I'm not gonna have, you know, an alcoholic partner.
Speaker 2:And lo and behold, I, in fact, do exactly that. And then I take myself off to therapy. And the next partner that comes along, I really interview them and, in fact, grill them about their substance use. And they don't use substances, but they are some other kind of process. Perhaps they're gambling or something like that.
Speaker 2:And so I take myself off to some more therapy to understand this more. And the third partner, I check about all these things and no, no, no, no substances, no processes or anything like that, but it turns out the person's a workaholic. So there is a way that we can understand that more simply in in the sense of wanting to have a different kind of outcome, and that there's a place where because we actually didn't get a chance to be in a different role, we stay in the same role that we had as a young person. And then once we have a chance to do enough work on ourselves, then we are able to find a partner who doesn't have any of those attic kind of tendencies in any kind of way but is more present to us. And that is partly because we have done the work internally, which means we don't have to do it externally anymore.
Speaker 1:Oh, that makes sense. So when it resolves inside, we don't have to keep living it out outside externally. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that one of the things we forget, you know, sometimes when we're on the outside, we can be kind of a judgy and say, well, I wonder when that person keeps doing that. You know, can't they see it doesn't work for them or something like that? Well, we sometimes forget that people repeat things because they haven't had a chance to learn the skills or the capacities to do something different. You know, if if I were to ask you to do some kind of amazing gymnastic handspring or something like that, you know, you're probably gonna politely decline unless you have that skill be able to say, no. I don't know how to do that.
Speaker 2:I'd probably kill myself. So no thanks. You know? Well, we forget that the same is true for people in terms of setting boundaries, being able to negotiate conflict, being able to ask for what we want. If you are a complex trauma survivor, you didn't get to learn those skills, and so therefore you can't really do them.
Speaker 2:You know? Before I I came on this call with you today, Emma, I was working with a young woman, and that's exactly what we're working on is setting boundaries and me trying to break it down into the different steps so that it becomes much more doable in terms of a series of small steps as opposed to this thing called, you know, setting boundaries, which she knows she needs to do, but she doesn't have a clue how to.
Speaker 1:How does someone who is sort of repeating those cycles, how do when because they're not meaning to do it, they're not trying to do it, they're not even aware that they're doing it. How do you help bring awareness to yourself or to a client to help them see that so that they can start small steps to make something different? Because otherwise it feels very hopeless, and any of us who are survivors or who work with survivors know that sort of trope that everything just keeps repeating and it just keeps going. And so it's so easy to feel helpless and hopeless because stuff just keeps happening. I'm not even doing it on purpose.
Speaker 1:How, like, it it would be feels like you've lost all your power, and what you're saying is that people can get their power back. How do you do that?
Speaker 2:Well, it, you know, begins by becoming aware of the pattern and making the links between what's happening now and how it's familiar to how it was growing up. And that is something that somebody can do on their own or it's something that they can do with the help of a mental health professional. And once you become aware that it is actually happening and then you can begin to understand the different roles that you might be playing. Typically, reenactment involves some familiar roles. The role about being the victim, the role about perhaps being a rescuer.
Speaker 2:If you grew up, for example, with alcoholic parents, you probably are parentified and know how to be a fantastic rescuer. For all of us who have trauma histories, we are at risk for having some part of us be like the perpetrator. Some part of us has learned how to be mean and angry and cold and cutting and all of those things. And many of us also have learned the role of being kind of the helpless bystander, the one who can't do anything different. And that might be certainly true if something happened to a sibling, for example, that we were helpless to prevent.
Speaker 2:So those are the very familiar roles that show up over and over and over and over again. And so I invite the people that I'm working with to let's explore and how this pattern that you're describing, how are these roles familiar? Let's be curious about the ways in which you are picking people who are going to step into their assigned role beautifully to get the reenactment going. Let's be curious about the times where you might actually be provoking it a bit. Know, when I was talking about the rigid defenses earlier, Emma, about, you know, being an islander, being in clingy, that's a place there that we can set it up so that we provoke it all unconsciously, of course.
Speaker 2:Let's be curious then about the ways that you might project it. You might sort of project your own home movies, your own home experiences onto your colleague, your partner, your friend in a way that doesn't really match them, but we're projecting it onto them. So I invite people to be really curious about all of that and to track themselves and to notice. And it's very valuable on two fronts. One is that it gives us information about that which is really needing our attention in terms of processing and healing because clearly then it's something that's so alive, so vivid, so raw and unprocessed that it is being reenacted.
Speaker 2:And it also gives us some strategies then to to develop some strategies about how do I wanna be differently. If I'm in this role, how do I wanna be differently? Then we get to figure out what are the small series of steps that are gonna get us that way. It's typically about figuring out how to do a little step forward that is small enough but doable enough. Small enough that it actually could be done within the next twenty four hours.
Speaker 2:It has to be that small and specific. And then we build on all of these small steps in order to be able to learn these particular skills of, say, setting a boundary or asking for what you want or any of those kinds of things in a way that sidesteps those roles and is more in an adult place saying backing myself in showing up in that more conscious, present kind of way.
Speaker 1:I feel like that's so packed full of things. I am going to be wrestling with it for a year. There are so many pieces to it. But one of the pieces, just again, keeping it super basic, I feel like this is an example of why survivors really need to stay in therapy and why therapy is so important, because this is an example of what we cannot do by ourselves, what we cannot see by ourselves. It really takes that outside person to help us recognize what's going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that what you're saying is so so true. And and one of the things I would say is that in the last while, maybe the last decade or so, maybe even last, that within the trauma field, we have been coming to the awareness that trauma therapy is not simply processing difficult events. That trauma therapy is is broader than that, and it's about how those experiences show up in your life today and how those trauma experiences leave you vulnerable to certain kinds of reenactment, that there are internal ambivalences that are gonna show up as a result of those childhood experiences. And those aren't things that you can, you know, talk about once in therapy and then it's done.
Speaker 2:Those are the things that it's definitely a process to come to understand how the things that I've been describing in a very broad kind of way, how do they show up specifically for each person, and then how do we begin to take some steps to do that differently? And that is, you know, the somebody said to me once a long, long time ago, you know, why do I wanna do all of this, you know, horrible trauma work? And I would say, so you can get your life back so that you can be the director of your own life, the driver of your own bus as opposed to those events and those trauma beliefs being the driver of your life. And it is not a quick fix to be able to do that. It's a process.
Speaker 2:And people often underappreciate the importance of that stage of the work.
Speaker 1:So it's not just the small steps, but the time that it takes to practice those small steps and the work it takes to sort of also practice a relationship in that way, staying in therapy, staying with a therapist, and practicing the things that you can see. So as Christine Forner says, you can see what you see and know what you know.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. Because, you know, when I say practice these small steps, I need to also be really clear that as soon as you step out to do those small steps, you are gonna end up being confronted by your trauma beliefs somehow that says that you're not allowed, you're not entitled, bad things will happen, nobody loves me, I'm damaged goods, you know, whatever the trauma beliefs are. And so then you have to, you know, wrestle with those as you try to make these small steps. So it is not, a simplistic process at all.
Speaker 2:It involves us taking steps, but then having to attend to whatever gets kicked up even as we contemplate taking those steps because what gets kicked up are the trauma beliefs that about self and others in the world that got formed as a result of the traumatic experiences, particularly as a child.
Speaker 1:So it's not even just the checking off the boxes of this step and then that one and then that one. It's literally here is what would make things different. But then in the process of practicing that, having confront having to confront what's always been the same and doing that change in that tiny step.
Speaker 2:Right. So if I were to think of an example about that So again, another Kelly who has a friend who's incredibly intrusive, very needy, clingy kind of friend. Okay? And that's a lot like her mother who has some mental health issues. And so every time she even thinks about setting some kind of boundary with this friend, saying to the friend, you know, it's not okay for you to send me a a billion texts while I'm at work.
Speaker 2:Every time she even thinks about setting a boundary, she gets this huge wave of fear. And the fear is related to the fact that when, as a teenager, she tried to set some boundaries with her mother, her mother, you know, made a suicide gesture. I'm not even sure that it was a suicidal attempt, but she certainly made a gesture and made it very clear to to this particular Kelly that this was happening. So now as an adult, Kelly is trying to set a a boundary with this friend, but the fear that rises up is that if I she does that, then, oh my god, something is really gonna happen bad. And it's not even a, you know, one to one.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm afraid my friend is now gonna attempt suicide. It's just this big amorphous fear of something bad is gonna happen if I try to set a boundary. So we have to kinda I have to at least appreciate, well, you know, Kelly's not gonna go set a boundary with that friend until we resolve this big amorphous fear and do some work around that and process that and do all of that. Then we return to the question of, okay, how do we begin to set a boundary with this friend? So it's this back and forth, up and down, you know, this intersection that we are always working with in the therapy, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:It makes a lot of sense. I feel like you're describing almost a different shape of dissociation or a different aspect of it in that having to tolerate what you can't even see and yet having to see it to get better and having to sort of reassociate that and realize what's going on and why that's what's going on.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Exactly. Exactly. And that it is probably quite likely that there is a part of Kelly that holds the raw experience of her mom making this suicidal gesture and the fear of that, the terror of all of that, that she's not aware of most of the time in her regular life. But as I say, when she tries to set a boundary, it gets kicked up.
Speaker 2:And then that which was compartmentalized, dissociated away, however you wanna frame it, now all of a sudden is very present and is being returned to us, and so we need to attend. And once we've attended sufficiently, then there's a possibility to do something different.
Speaker 1:That tending to seem significant in a relational kind of way, especially with all the research that's come out in the last year or so, that whether that's, you're doing that with your therapist or practicing it on your own, just recognizing what's coming up and responding to that seems hugely significant. I
Speaker 2:think it is. I think it's, the, a very essential piece of the work to whenever I mean, we're talking about reenactment today, but it would be also true if you had a some kind of a visual flashback or if you had some kind of a emotional implicit memory experience or something like that, whenever that material is returned to us to be able to say, ah, ah, okay. I get it. I understand now a bit more about what it was like for you back then. Thank you for telling me about this.
Speaker 2:And and, you know, to even I coach my folks to, you know, put their hand over their heart to kinda rub their heart area a little bit and say, okay. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes so much sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm right here with you. Thank you for telling me that kind of, internal attunement. Yeah.
Speaker 1:A beautiful example of attunement. That's exactly the word I was looking for. Thank you. How does someone tell the difference between something that is really not going well or not safe or actually that difficult or unhealthy externally and something that is a reenactment that they actually could do something about more directly?
Speaker 2:Well, that's such a good question. I think that the reenactments tend to be patterned. So if I had a one off situation with my boss, for example, where I went really badly and I didn't feel that I could stick up for myself or say my piece or whatever it was, and that made me feel really bad and made me feel really helpless and all of that stuff, that makes sense. That would probably be true for most of us. But if I have this pattern where it shows up with my boss, with my friends, with my romantic partners, you know, the pattern is there over and over and over again.
Speaker 2:Well, then probably I need to really look at that. And it's probably a neighborhood inside my own world that I don't go to very often, and it's probably a neighborhood that I shouldn't go into alone. I should go in with a a guide or somebody to accompany me because it is very dangerous territory with all of the dissociation that goes there. So it's almost, I think, that it has to happen to us enough times and have somebody invite us to say, so what's the pattern here? What goes on?
Speaker 2:What how is this familiar in terms of your feelings or in the rules? And inviting us to get curious about that, then we can begin to really identify it as a reenactment as opposed to some of the experiences that all of us have. Just being human has these different difficult experiences. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:How do you hold on to that piece of, I can look at this pattern, I can find a safe way to go visit that neighborhood and see what's really going on that's causing the pattern, as opposed to and hold on to that framework, as opposed to just that shame and despair of this is all my fault, and it's been my fault so many times because I'm the common denominator.
Speaker 2:Right. And how easily that feeds into that whole damaged goods and and all of that stuff. Right? Right. So part of it is to is to simply say some of the things well, first of all, to say it's not your fault.
Speaker 2:It's not your fault in the way that you're framing it up here. Yes. You are part of the common denominator, but let's look at why that happened. And to really say, you didn't get to learn, experience these kinds of things growing up. You didn't get to learn to negotiate conflict or to ask for what you want or to be able to set boundaries or, you know, so why would we be expecting you to learn that?
Speaker 2:And I go back to my handspring thing. Or I might use the metaphor. I'm not gonna expect you to go out there and run a marathon until we do some training. And we're gonna start with the training and, you know, which might be run for thirty seconds, walk for two minutes. That's how we have to start in order to for you to be able to address the deficits that came in the way that you were parented.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I do explain, and I I am happy to use my own self as an example around that, in that my father was very, very sarcastic. I hated it. And yet, Emma, guess what's my very best defense? If you push me far enough, then I'm gonna come out, you know, using my tongue as like a sword, and I will be incredibly sarcastic. So I learned at the feet of the master, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Well, these different roles that get thrust upon us, we learn from them, and we've, you know, adjust to them, and that's part of what happens. It's not some failing in me that that happened. It's what happens. And therefore we want to be able to say if you had had a different experience growing up, you probably wouldn't have that. But you had the bad luck to be born into this family with all of its issues, and so now you have some baggage.
Speaker 2:And let's if you're willing, let's start to unpack that baggage and do something different with it.
Speaker 1:So even that really that feeling really is its own kind of reenactment as far as Mhmm. All of the criticism or the terrible things that happened or whatever growing up of, I can't win, it's not going to get better, I can't get away. So now this is who I am. And so that feeling feels like, I can't change this or I can't get better or it's all my fault because every time I'm the common denominator. And really that's a reenactment of the trauma as well.
Speaker 2:Right, because I'll say, Oh, well, of course, this makes so much sense because the I'm sure that back in the day, you felt really helpless, and you were probably given some kind of messages about how this is your fault or the sense that you were powerless around it to make any change. So that in and of itself is part of what we have to do in terms of this internal work in before we were able to see the capacity to take steps to make it be different in the external world.
Speaker 1:So that's also part of why feelings can feel so big, or even things like despair can feel so exponential, because it's really that original feeling plus all those echoes because it's not resolved yet. And so it's still it really has added up sort of cumulatively until you can heal that or bring healing to it or comfort it or tend to it.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. So, you know, the another metaphor I use a lot is that if we've compartmentalized, say that helpless, hopeless, despair, the enduring eternity kind of feeling, which is very, very, very common as you know. Well, I probably, you know, compartmentalized it somehow because that's pretty hard to get on with normal life while I got all that going on. So I put it over here to the side somehow, and I use dissociation as a way to keep it away from me.
Speaker 2:Well, when it comes back, it's gonna feel, you know, huge, and it's gonna color everything. And the metaphor that I use is I think about if you had a glass of water and you put a just a couple of drops of, say, you know, food coloring in there, then it would change all of the water in the glass. So when a compartment of really raw feeling comes forward, it colors everything. It flavors everything. It it seeps in and around all of what we're trying to do, and it really does feel as if we are back in that time frame.
Speaker 2:And it's important to be able to recognize when that happens so that you can say to yourself, ah, okay. I get it. Part of what I'm feeling is how I felt then, but it is now 2021. And I'm an adult, and I have much more capacity than I had before. And so I am willing to be with this feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, despair, whatever the language the person might use so that I can attune to it and do it differently.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's it's just so beautiful, and I just it gives us so much to sit with
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And respond to because every layer, there's more to see.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. And and why? Again, I'll say that we now understand that trauma healing, trauma recovery isn't simply about processing, say, with EMDR or something, brain spotting, whatever technique you're gonna use, the specific events. It's much more about the surround and how that got shaped and how it's showing up now.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else that you wanted to share about reenactments or anything else that we didn't get to cover before I let you go?
Speaker 2:I think we have done a pretty comprehensive, scope of of this particular topic. You've asked some really good questions, Emma, that I've enjoyed answering.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:All right. It's been a pleasure to do this with you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us with System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes, or follow along on our website, www.systemspeak.org. Thanks for listening.