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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 longtime 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:There are things happening in the news, the news cycle as they call it, that are so directly relevant to so many of us as survivors, especially those of us with CSA, child sexual abuse, and especially, especially those of us who were trafficked in any way. It can be really activating, and, also, it's a really important conversation. And so it feels extra important to talk about it together. Keep breathing. Make sure you can feel your feet.
Speaker 1:You don't have to listen to all of this at once or at all. And even if you do, you can pause it or step away or come back later. Ongoing consent is everything, and pacing is yours to choose. I'm, of course, talking about the flood of attention renewed now because of what's happening in congress with the Epstein and Maxwell cases, the documents, the files, the headlines, the social media commentary. As part of your consent and listening, I want to be clear that I'm not going to talk about the details of the Epstein and Maxwell cases or files.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to analyze the evidence or rehash the news. I'm not even going to get into the different documents or people involved or things like that. What I do wanna talk about is what happens inside us when this kind of news takes over public space, when these kinds of experiences have to be news at all because that part that part is so real and is so now time and memory time. And that part happens in our bodies and our systems, our relationships, and in daily functioning. That part is important to be present with, but we don't have to do it alone.
Speaker 1:We also can do it with our left brains so that our right brains aren't just experiencing all the affective responses, the big feelings, the memory time, the chaos. Using our left brains to balance that. Someone said recently in the community about how we use our left brains for healing. I didn't mean that we use our left brains instead of our right brains. But when it is our right brains that are activated, we can use our left brains to balance that.
Speaker 1:Other times, we use our left brains to avoid what we need to feel in our right brains. It's always about both learning to work together, our brains and our systems inside. For this, let's name the truth gently That when the world starts talking about trafficking or exploitation or powerful people abusing vulnerable people, even if they don't know our individual stories, even if we don't share it, even if it's not safe to speak up, even if we've already worked so hard in therapy, our bodies still respond. I've gotten emails that said things like, the news is making me shaky. Another one said, I can't stop checking updates even though it hurts me.
Speaker 1:Others have said, I feel numb. Another one said, I feel like I'm back inside something I thought I had already worked through. And several said, I don't know why this is affecting me so much even when it's not my story. It just reminds me of my story. If you're feeling any of those things in response to the news, you're not doing anything wrong.
Speaker 1:Your system is not failing. You're not overreacting. Your nervous system is recognizing a pattern that it learned the hard way. And when that pattern shows up in the world, your body rings the alarm. That's the amygdala.
Speaker 1:Right? The detector of danger. Even if you're consciously aware and know that you're safe in now time. Your nervous system responding to danger, to memory time, to other people's danger, That's just how our bodies work, and it's part of trauma and dissociation, and it's part of survival. When something like the Epstein files hits the headlines, the public conversation usually splits into two extremes, either outrage and moral panic or curiosity and voyeurism.
Speaker 1:Both of those can be super activating, and neither of them are actually very helpful for us because the world is fascinated by a story, but we're remembering a life. The world wants insider information and interviews and disclosures. We remember how secrecy was used against us. The world wants to know who all was involved. We remember what it was like to have no one show up for us.
Speaker 1:The world wants a narrative arc. The bad guys, the good guys, the victims, the villains, the fall, the justice, the moving on as if boxes were checked off, and it doesn't matter anymore. But it does matter. And just moving on isn't how trauma works. Trauma is not a plot line.
Speaker 1:Trauma is a wound. Trauma is a memory that lands in our bodies even though we never invited it or asked for it. Trauma is a rupture in the sense of safety and self, the loudness of deprivation when we are not protected as women and girls. Trauma is a rupture in the sense of safety and self, even deprivation, that lack of protection when our bodies are not respected, when our bodies are violated. So when the world turns a real story of exploitation into a cultural obsession, survivors feel the cost of that often quietly, often alone.
Speaker 1:And when the world gets tired of the story and moves on to something else, that feels too familiar. I've got deprivation that was lack of care, lack of follow through, lack of being believed, not being heard. I want you to know I see you. I believe you, and your reactions make sense. I think it's also a good time to remember that grooming doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Speaker 1:In trauma therapy, we talk about grooming as a set of tactics used by perpetrators to gain access to a victim. It's about the barriers people have to overcome to hurt other people. But feminist and liberation frameworks remind us that grooming is not only interpersonal. It is also structural. Grooming is a relational strategy that relies on a cultural context that already normalizes power over, not power with.
Speaker 1:It is a context where certain people are entitled to access others' bodies, labor, time, and silence. From a liberation perspective, grooming mirrors colonial dynamics, coercion framed as care, exploitation framed as opportunity. Grooming also depends on inequality, age, gender, race, class, citizenship, neurodivergence, disability because predators seek vulnerability created by society, not by the survivor. This is not your fault. Grooming often happens in communities, institutions, and networks because those structures create cover, credibility, and opportunity.
Speaker 1:We know that grooming escalates not because survivors fail to speak, but because perpetrators embed themselves inside systems that reward loyalty and punish transparency. I've used some really big words, and I wanna make sure we're on the same page and that you're still breathing. Your feet are still on the floor or tucked under you. Where are your feet? Do you know?
Speaker 1:Can you feel them? Are you breathing? From a feminist and liberation perspective, exploitation is never just individual harm. It is a systemic condition. Exploitation happens where people have unequal access to power.
Speaker 1:Naming that in myself as an indigenous lesbian or Indigiqueer and disabled because of my deafness. Who also experiences poverty, I have less privilege and power than most. And, also, there are lots of reasons I have more than many people in the world just because of where I live or what help I have or because my skin is lighter. The hierarchies are normalized. Dissent is punished.
Speaker 1:Secrecy is rewarded. Marginalized people are dehumanized. Truth tellers are shamed, and those in charge are allowed to operate without accountability. In this sense, exploitation is not a moral failing. It is an outcome of a system that is working exactly as designed.
Speaker 1:Patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism are not abstract theories. They are lived structures that tell us whose bodies matter, whose voices matter, and whose pain is disposable. I am here to be sure that your pain is seen and heard. To say that your body matters, your voice matters, that you matter. Liberation psychology teaches that power is always operating, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Speaker 1:In systems of exploitation, patriarchal power tells us that men are naturally dominant, women are naturally compliant, and gender minorities are suspicious or dangerous. This is not true. This is a lie. Racial power tells us whose innocence is assumed and whose trauma is doubted. That is not okay.
Speaker 1:And that aggression is not micro. That oppression must be lifted. Economic power says that wealth equals credibility. Every voice matters. Institutional power lets leaders define the narrative and shut down dissent.
Speaker 1:This is why we talk about institutional betrayal when victims are not heard or protected, when whistleblowers are shamed. Cultural power normalizes obedience, silence, and deference to the powerful. That's not even fawning. That's just compliance. But it's compliance with perpetration.
Speaker 1:This is why feminist scholars insist it's the system protecting itself, not the individual perpetrator acting alone. Because predators thrive where structures make it easier for them to access victims and harder for victims to access justice. Besides all this, grooming is a social process, not a private one. Feminist theory reframes grooming as a relational strategy supported by culture. Every grooming tactic flattery, isolation, dependence, secrecy, mirrors broader cultural dynamics.
Speaker 1:Be nice. Don't make a scene. Trust authority. Be grateful for attention. Don't ask questions.
Speaker 1:Don't talk about private things. These messages are not individual they are social. They prepare people, especially marginalized people, to tolerate exploitation and doubt themselves when something feels wrong. So when we understand grooming through a feminist and liberation lens, we see. It doesn't just happen between two people.
Speaker 1:It happens inside systems that make grooming seem normal. We've talked before on the podcast about Jennifer Fried, who developed betrayal trauma theory. When she applied that to institutions, she described what happened when organizations that the survivor depends on failed to protect them, deny the harm, and minimize the disclosure. She describes what happens when institutions punish the whistleblower, defend the abuser, or silence the truth to protect their reputation. Liberation psychology pushes this even further and says institutional betrayal is not a glitch, it's the engine of systemic exploitation.
Speaker 1:Liberation psychology pushes this even further and says institutional betrayal is systemic exploitation. Institutions protect themselves because the system relies on them to maintain the hierarchy. A school, a church, a workplace, a political network, these entities are designed to preserve stability, not justice. This is why for the last year on the podcast we have been talking about coercive control and escaping to safety, leaving organizations that were not caring for us, protecting us, or keeping us safe. Survivors often describe the institutional betrayal as more traumatic than the original harm.
Speaker 1:Feminist theory validates this saying that betrayal comes from a trusted structure, not just a person. Systems use survivors instead of supporting them. A feminist lens helps us see that in patriarchal media driven culture, survivors' stories become commodities and survivors themselves are consumed. Their stories are used to get ratings, generate political outrage, reinforce moral superiority, create teachable moments for people who never protected them, justify harsher systems that won't protect future victims, sell healing products on the backs of someone else's pain. This is exploitation described as awareness.
Speaker 1:The world uses survivors as symbols while ignoring their actual needs. Liberation psychology warns us when a society benefits from someone's pain, that society will never truly protect that person. This is why many survivors feel sick during public cases, not because we don't care, but because we've seen how the world turns our trauma into content and still abandons us anyway. When a high profile case hits the headlines, survivors often experience flashbacks, loss of time, dissociation, fear, shame, and confusion, even body memories, along with the emotional overwhelm. It may also show up more subtly in ways we might not notice, like self doubt, hypervigilance, anger, numbness.
Speaker 1:We may even have little ones resurface internally, our inner child saying, nobody protected me. This is not overreacting. This is that pattern recognition, the body remembering a system that once harmed to them and continues to harm others. And because systems of exploitation operate through power secrecy and disbelief, a public case reenacts the same dynamics that originally silenced the survivor. Feminist theory says that when the culture repeats the pattern, the nervous system repeats the response.
Speaker 1:This is not cynicism. This is documented reality across feminist legal scholarship, liberation psychology, and critical race theory. Perpetrators are protected by money, which buys privacy, silence, and respectability status, which makes them appear trustworthy race, where whiteness is often equated with innocence or misunderstanding while marginalized survivors are scrutinized connections, which make institutions hesitant to disrupt their own social networks reputation, which becomes a shield stronger than collective safety and gender because patriarchy still socializes people to excuse male aggression and distrust male and gender because patriarchy still socializes people to excuse male aggression and distrust female pain. We call this structural power, the web of advantages that a person may never notice because the system is already built around them. Perpetrators don't just hide within systems systems hide them.
Speaker 1:This is why feminist activists say, It's not a predator problem it's a protection problem. Predators act because they can trust the system to deny, delay, minimize, or dismiss the survivor's truth. So when the public expresses shock at these kinds of cases, survivors are often confused or even enraged not because they want to cause harm themselves, but because they have known their whole lives that this is how it works, that this is what they're doing. When we look at Jennifer Freid's work on institutional betrayal, we learn that trauma is amplified when a trusted institution fails to respond with honesty, accountability, or care. In feminist and liberation lens, we take it further that institutional betrayal is the system reproducing the same harm the survivor has already experienced.
Speaker 1:So first the abuse itself harms us, and then the school or institution dismisses the disclosure, the church or organization protects the leader, The family or organization prioritizes reputation. The legal system delays and delays and delays. The media treats pain like a spectacle. Therapists even can minimize or pathologize if they're not paying attention to pain. Communities turn away because it's too uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:That's why it's really important we talk about it today. Are you still here? Are you still listening? Are you still in your body? It's tricksy because our nervous system has learned that telling doesn't bring safety, talking about it brings more harm.
Speaker 1:We will get punished for talking about it. So even this episode talking about the talking about it feels dangerous. Liberation therapy calls this secondary oppression, the crushing weight that comes not from a single perpetrator but from the entire ecology of silence, avoidance, and complicity. And this is why public cases hurt so much. Every headline can feel like a replay.
Speaker 1:I wasn't protected. My truth didn't matter. No one intervened for me. People with power get to walk away. And then when survivors are used instead of supported, it becomes one of the deepest wounds named in feminist trauma work.
Speaker 1:Survivors' stories are regularly instrumentalized for political agendas, exploited for media rankings, distorted into clickbait, flattened for documentaries and podcasts, romanticized as resilience narratives, scrutinized rather than believed, used to prove someone else's argument. This is testimonial exploitation when the world wants the survivor's story but not their liberation. This is part of the coercive control and the unsafe dynamics we've talked about for the last year. When we are not safe because we are not believed, when we are objectified to be possessed but not cared for, when support is conditional, and help offered is temporary and about helping other people feel better about themselves rather than actually empowering us or liberating us. That's white savior even when it's relational, even when it's institutional.
Speaker 1:Survivors become symbols, not people. Their pain becomes proof, not a cry for justice. Their humanity disappears behind the public's hunger for drama, villains, and redemptive arcs, or someone to blame. And the hardest part? Most survivors get attention only when harm is involved.
Speaker 1:Not when healing is happening, not when they're rebuilding lives, not when they're resisting systems, not when they're rising. So when the news people say breaking news, it's news that has already broken us. It's not new information for us. It's not new news for us. It's a reminder of how we have already been treated.
Speaker 1:Survivors live in a world structured by power, patriarchy, and silence. When we lay all this out, we learn from feminist theory that survivors live in a world structured by power, patriarchy, and silence. We learn from liberation psychology that trauma exists not only inside individuals but inside systems. And from neuroscience, we learned that bodies remember patterns long before minds have names for them. In this way, the news cycle isn't just news.
Speaker 1:It's reenactment, psychological, emotional, relational, and systemic, reenactment of dynamic survivors already know in our bones. The powerful are protected. The vulnerable are discredited. The institutions are complicit. The public is entertained.
Speaker 1:The survivors are overwhelmed, and the system is unchanged. This is not about one case. It is a pattern as old as patriarchy and as modern as every current institution. It is not just people in the past. It is about people failing us in the present.
Speaker 1:Survivors may feel activated exhausted or even angry. We may feel detached. We may feel blindsided. We may even feel fragile. That is not a symptom of weakness.
Speaker 1:It is a sign of wisdom, of accurate pattern recognition, and of the body's attempt to make meaning of something it should never have had to learn in the first place. So how do we take care of ourselves? All the things in all the ways we've talked about before. Limiting exposure. We can mute, block, step back, unsubscribe, log out, take immediate break.
Speaker 1:Anchor into our bodies, noticing our breath. Those feet, did you find them? Where are they now? Giving your system a chance to feel the present moment. Reconnect with safe people, not to just download or disclose trauma details, but to remember the world contains safety too when I am connected to my chosen family and my safe friends and attending my meetings, I can do almost anything because there's enough connection even when I feel afraid.
Speaker 1:But when I only feel alone, everything is harder. It's also important to keep our daily rhythms if we can. Remember to eat. Let yourself sleep. Try to move your body.
Speaker 1:Make sure that you're hydrated. Stick to your routine with the tiny moments of ordinary life to help you stay in the present. It's also okay to name your truth. In therapy, my therapist has been talking with me about the difference between safe people who are my friends and safe people who are just friendly. And my therapist said one of the ways you can find out who is who is by being vulnerable with them in small ways.
Speaker 1:People who are your safe friends will respond and tend and reciprocate in some way. People who are just polite or friendly may not respond at all or in little ways that do not necessarily offer reassurance. And if they don't respond at all, they may not be as friendly as you thought. It's really helped me sort out a lot of things and people, ships, I guess, over the last year. When you know who your safe friends are, it's okay to say this is what happened to me, or this is what I read and is activating to me, or this is familiar way too familiar, or this is my body protecting me.
Speaker 1:We can also remember that no one gets to control our story. The news cycle does not get to demand that we share. We don't owe anyone details. We don't owe anyone a reaction. Our story is ours.
Speaker 1:No one needs to have access to our system. Our system is ours to tend to. If your system is stirred up with all of this, if memories feel closer to the surface, If you feel confused or even ashamed about your responses or reactions, if you feel angry or numb or scared or tired, please hear me. Nothing is wrong with you. Your body is responding exactly the way a survivor's body responds to renewed talk of exploitation.
Speaker 1:You didn't choose this reaction. You didn't call it in, and you're not making it up. Your body is doing its best to protect you. Your system is trying to keep you safe. Your little ones or younger selves or inner child are doing the only things that they ever learned, noticing danger even at a distance.
Speaker 1:And you're not alone in that. We get it. We see it. We feel it. We hear you.
Speaker 1:We are here with you. We may have been helpless as children and so sometimes feel overwhelmed or stuck now when those parts of us or those memories are close to the surface. And also, as adults with adult resources, we can tend to those parts of ourselves. And those same feminist liberation frameworks we talked about already, they don't just tell us the problem or what is going wrong or why we're feeling what we're feeling. They also show us the way.
Speaker 1:We center survivors, not institutions. We believe people the first time. We shift from secrecy to accountability. We challenge hierarchies that allow exploitation to flourish. We build communities where trauma connects instead of isolating.
Speaker 1:We recognize the inner system of a DID survivor as its own liberation movement. We replace obedience with agency, actual freedom to choose, and we celebrate both our freedom and our choices. And we remember that we can always change our mind. We replace silence with those choices, and we replace the power over and doing to, both of which are course of control. We replace them with power with and doing with.
Speaker 1:Liberation is not about leaving a system. Liberation is about every small act that interrupts and disrupts the system's power. Each boundary, each truth spoken, each dissociative part welcomed, each moment of self trust restored, each refusal to carry shame that was never ours, each survivor who chooses community over isolation. These are acts of resistance. These are acts of liberation.
Speaker 1:Systems of exploitation are built socially, politically, economically, and psychologically, and they can only be dismantled collectively. Every time a survivor chooses themselves, challenges a pattern, or refuses silence, the system loses a little bit of its power. Liberation begins in the body, but it doesn't end there. We are not alone. And your voice matters.
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. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
Speaker 1:We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community. I'm not there for dating and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too, being human together.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.