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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.
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:I had a panic attack today. I didn't mean to. It's actually been a long time since I've had one. But today, I got a phone call, which for me is still new that I can use the phone to talk to people. So it still feels scary anyway.
Speaker 1:Even though my cochlear implant upgrades are amazing and helping me in new ways like never before. But the phone call was from my attorney. And after lots of back and forth discussion, he has finally set a date for me to come in and meet with him in person. Right now, this moment, I am back in the van again in the parking lot of the high school while high school kids drive themselves, honk at each other and wave. And all the doors are opening and slamming, and it's a lot of noise in the background.
Speaker 1:But I dropped my son off for another choir concert. But this time, the girls stayed home, two of them, to watch the new Willy Wonka movie, and I didn't make them come. So this time, I have an hour in the van by myself, which is rare and hard to find time to do a podcast. Just me. So I decided to use my time and try because I have hard things to talk about.
Speaker 1:I said only two daughters were at home because the third has gone back to Oklahoma, my middle daughter. She's struggling to make friends here, and her middle school has such a high population of people who are just white. And quite frankly, she thinks she can get away with more with Nathan, which is fair. And she's been struggling a while. But her goals for why she came here a year ago have been met, and she was just ready to go back.
Speaker 1:And so I let her. I took her to the airport and put her on a plane and sent her back to Nathan. So his father has had to clean out his office so that she has her own room, which she's also excited about, actually, As are the girls here to have their own rooms. Everyone, for the first time, has their own rooms, and they are liking that, which is fair. I tried really hard to remember that we were just honoring her needs and her choices, and it wasn't a shiny, happy failure of parenting.
Speaker 1:But I was still sad. And when she left, I cried for a long time, several times, because I miss her, because time is running out in her growing up, because for this season, it wasn't me that she needed. And, also, that's okay. For her to say what she needed, especially for her specifically, to say what she wanted and needed, it was really important we listened to her. It was really important we responded to her.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't just a spoiling of back and forth, live where you want, go when you want. It wasn't a fawning sacrifice of family funds to buy a plane ticket at the last minute when it's twice as expensive. It was truly, really the right thing to hear her and to respond. I never thought that I would say that her school in Oklahoma had more diversity. But where we are in Idaho, it's true.
Speaker 1:So so we let her go. She's already happier. Not entirely. She misses our food. She misses Jules.
Speaker 1:She misses me doing her hair. She misses our dates and the little ways I would spoil her. But she's happy to see Nathan and the boys and her grandparents, and she's happy to see friends from school. In two weeks, Nathan and the boys will be here, and she will have a week by herself at the grandparents because we had already bought the plane tickets for spring break, and I can't buy more. But she's excited to have a week with the grandparents by herself, so I'm happy for her.
Speaker 1:It's pretty rare to have any time with any adult by yourself when you have so many siblings. It will be good for her even if also we will miss her. The day after Nathan and the boys get here, I will fly with Jules, the ISSTD. The thought of that makes me nauseous, but that's not why I had a panic attack. My panic attack was because today, my attorney called.
Speaker 1:We've had discussions back and forth for a while now. But today, he called and set a date for us to go to his office to look at the draft of the papers. That was my panic attack. When I noticed panic and how dysregulated I felt, At first, I thought, oh, what if I'm doing the wrong thing? What if this is a bad decision?
Speaker 1:What if that's what I'm feeling? Even after all of this time and all of this work and all of this thinking and all of this talking, what if I got it wrong? And like the children growing up, I'm running out of time to fix it. That was my panic. But as I thought about it and reflected on it, I don't think that's the problem.
Speaker 1:I think it's important I ask those questions and feel all the feelings, but I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is Dante. Is feeling like I'm going to be in trouble because I'm breaking the rules. I'm getting off my blanket. I'm done being on the blanket.
Speaker 1:My parents almost divorced when I was in second grade. Things were difficult. We had moved, and I think my mother thought it could be a separation that she can move without my father. She left him in the house, the house with the attic, and we moved A half hour away closer to her work, I changed schools again. But in shiny, happy land, in the land of religious trauma and spiritual abuse, there is no leaving.
Speaker 1:There is no separation, and there certainly is no divorce. And she got in trouble. I don't wanna talk about that right now, but I remember it clearly. And I think that was maybe emotional flashback that I felt today with my panic. And so I cried some more, maybe for me, maybe for her, maybe for my daughter.
Speaker 1:But that night when I was only eight, which is how old my youngest daughter is now, and I look at her and I think, how could that burden have been placed on me at that age where I spent days and nights going back and forth between my parents negotiating their marriage, being sent with messages, demands, counter requests. That was not my job. And it's why I don't like marriage or couples therapy today. I just can't. I already did that my whole childhood.
Speaker 1:And I think that my mother knew she would not be able to stay there where her parents lived, where her family lived, and where his family lived and get away with divorcing him. And so she left. That's when we moved to Iowa. I was in fifth grade then, and we lived in a tiny townhome. Pashy found us a house and got the VA to pay for it.
Speaker 1:It was the first time I took the bus in the city with a babysitter who took us to campus so she could see her date. I don't wanna talk about that right now either or what happened that day. But then my mother found a house, and we moved again. And we settled there for several months quietly, strangely, peacefully while she worked too much. And my brother and I got ourselves into trouble.
Speaker 1:My brother and John Mark got themselves into trouble. There's a story about being unparented one day and playing in the living room when we were supposed to be folding laundry and putting it away. And we balled up all the socks, But then we lined the socks up on the ceiling fan blades and turned the fan on to watch the socks fly. And we did it over and over while we did laundry, and we laughed hysterically. This is a memory that came to me today.
Speaker 1:And then I honestly don't know if it was my brother or John Mark or who had the idea, but we decided to line the ceiling fan blades with small ketchup packets instead of socks. Except we heard and felt the rumble of the garage door opening, meaning our mother had finally come home. And so we raced to finish the laundry and forgot about the ketchup packets until later in the summer when my mother's mother came to visit. And on a warm summer day got too hot and opened the doors to the sunroom and turned on the ceiling fan, and ketchup went everywhere. That is maybe one of my favorite memories of childhood, one I've only recently uncovered, one that is good.
Speaker 1:How much trouble we were in was not good. But I will never forget the sight of it or how funny it was or how hard we laughed that day. Seeing our very fancy, shiny, happy grandmother covered in ketchup. Laughter didn't last long. My father found us and moved in when my mother thought he would never leave his family.
Speaker 1:But choosing her and controlling her were not the same thing. Things got loud again. There was hitting again. There was screaming and crying again. This is where I lived when my father hid his credit cards under my mattress so my mother wouldn't find them.
Speaker 1:The beginning of new secrets more than others before them, leaving me still torn between them. This was before I knew what double binds were, where you can't win, where part of you is hurt, and part of you has to do so that it doesn't hurt as much. Or all of you know it's going to get worse. And things did get worse there. Maybe because they were both away from their families and so isolated without support in new ways.
Speaker 1:I don't know what made the difference. But things escalated in ways I don't want to talk talk about right now, culminating in ways I can't talk about right now. But leading up to a day that I told my therapist about last December, A day where my family sat around the table, and our parents told us they were getting divorced. At the time, I felt like I almost didn't even know my mother and had always been favored, not entirely appropriately by my father. My brother who had been sickly for so many years, it wasn't until there that we knew why with his allergies.
Speaker 1:But my brother had always been close to my mother, and so I thought he would go with her and I would go with my father because that's how things work. But that's not what happened. My father did not want me that day. That's oversimplifying. I know.
Speaker 1:Because of other things that happened, I could not go with my father. But it was that moment I found out I would be going with my mother, who felt foreign and strange to me, scary and unpredictable, chaotic and angry, sad and disappearing before my eyes. And I knew in that moment that even though I had never really had parents, I also never would again. To make things worse, it was in the following weeks that my sixth grade class opened letters that we had written to ourselves at the beginning of the year. The year of finishing elementary school, the year of the body talks in science class, the year of getting ready for junior high, the year of my first crush who was a girl, but having to tell everyone it was the boy sitting next to her.
Speaker 1:It was a big year, and I wondered what I wrote to myself in the letter the day they passed them out on the last day of school because I couldn't remember. My letter said, I was glad my parents weren't divorced because so many other parents were. And by then, by the day I opened my letter, mine were too. It was done. After my parents got divorced and with lots of pieces of the story I can't talk about right now, My mother moved us a thousand miles away to Ohio.
Speaker 1:A fresh start, I guess. Trying to still get away, I guess. Teaching me flight, I guess. And that's where I started junior high. I never really had parents again.
Speaker 1:My mother had to work so much, and we could not visit my father. Lots of driving from Ohio to Iowa to Arkansas to Iowa to Ohio on holiday breaks where the days of the visit were spent in the car. So many stories I can't talk about right now. So many stories that come to my memory now that we're talking in therapy. I think it would have been really great to have parents.
Speaker 1:And, also, it was nice to not be in danger anymore. So sometimes I learned divorce is the healthiest thing. Divorce is the right thing sometimes. Nathan and I have been separated since 02/2019. We haven't lived together.
Speaker 1:We have lived parallel lives while he cared for his parents. I tried to live close until two summers ago when I just couldn't anymore, when what the family needed and what I needed was to break out of that codependency and find myself again. And I moved here, and it was sad and hard and a big transition, but really, really good for me. And Nathan and I continued to talk, not only deconstructing my faith or religious trauma, but also codependency and untangling from that. They were really hard conversations.
Speaker 1:And even now, I have nothing bad to say about Nathan. He has co parented with me. He remains a good friend. He has always been good and kind to me. And, also, when he was here at Christmas, I told him I cannot continue in my healing and also continue in the church or being married to a man.
Speaker 1:I have no ill will towards Nathan, but I cannot be good enough to un gay myself. And I'm a point in my healing that I really just need that to be congruent and for myself to be free, to be released from the blanket, to be let go. He is sad because of daydreaming. I am sad because of grief. And, also, we agree it's time.
Speaker 1:It's been five years in practice. That's why the attorney called because it's time to put it on paper. He's scared, maybe a little, because for him, it's an act of faith. But I told him, even after this life, even if everything the church says is true, I don't wanna be un gay in heaven. I just wanna be me from now on, whatever that means, whatever the cost.
Speaker 1:And I'm scared too even with politics, but I can't survive this and not be me. And he understands that, and he supports that even though it's really hard. And even though he sees his own progress since I left, since working on codependency with his therapist, He gets it even though it's hard. And I hope that we can do all of this smoothly and well so that it's not ugly or terrible or an ending of our friendship so that coparenting stays easy. When I talked to the kids, I said the same thing that I don't know how to continue my healing or move forward in my therapy and working on shiny happy things without just being myself, that I'm not safe or welcome in our church as I am.
Speaker 1:And then I cannot be whole and happy in healthy relationships while married to a man. When I talk to them, I have that image of me at that table with my family that day. And it felt like I was doing to my children what had been done to me. And I cried because of emotional flashback to that day and because I was worried about causing harm to my children. Even though we have already lived apart for so long and the children have learned to come and go freely as they need, like my daughter this week.
Speaker 1:But when I talked to them about getting divorced, they laughed at me. And they said, mom, we thought you did that years ago. What is taking you so long? We just want you to be happy. And not in a funny way, but in a tending way.
Speaker 1:And it turned out the children were already okay. And I am already healthier and happier. So maybe some people are going to be upset with me, and maybe some people are not going to understand me. And I know some people will judge me. But when my therapist asked me months ago, what will it look like to get off your blanket?
Speaker 1:I think that for me, this is what it means. It means setting myself free. I just wanna be free. And that means the day after I get back from ISSTD, I go sign papers that will get filed, that will get served to Nathan even though he already knows. And everything will unfold after that.
Speaker 1:I just wanna be free. I want off my blanket. For me, that's the next step in healing, And that feels good even if also hard. And it feels gentle even if also very explicitly boundaried. And it feels like forever opening up before me even if also being very final.
Speaker 1:I think I've come far enough in therapy to feel all of those things at once. I think this is part of creating a brave space for myself. Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemspeakcommunity.com.
Speaker 1:We'll see you there.