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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 we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Chapter two of Price of Admission by Laura Brown opens up talking about ANPs and EPs. ANP stands for apparently normal personality. Structural dissociation says part instead of personality because they think people are just one with parts instead of different personalities. So A and P means the daily living part. So those adult functioning parts usually that are like parenting or going to work or functioning in the home, like those different parts of us, with EPs being the emotional parts of the personality, or just with structural dissociation, they just say parts, they removed personality from it, thinking people are just one.
Speaker 2:And so EPs can be memory time folks inside. They can be little. They can be folks who were ANPs when you were little, but now are EPs. So for example, I don't need someone who goes to kindergarten because I don't go to kindergarten anymore, but that ANP could still be there. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:They can also be trauma holders, those kinds of folks inside. I just wanna make sure that everyone is on the same page with what we're talking about. Laura Brown describes these beautifully and more pragmatic ways, which I love actually. She says, The A and P is the mask that survivors wear comfortably in superficial and emotionally not particularly meaningful interactions in the world, performing tasks like going to school or work. EPs, however, are parts of the self that are frozen like a fly in amber in the emotions, perceptions, and experiences of the past.
Speaker 2:EPs are the place you go to when you say to yourself that you're feeling little, when you berate yourself mercilessly, when you seem unable to stop being flooded with overwhelming emotions that you know are larger than what is happening now. So then she says, when your primary consciousness in a given moment derives from being swept up in the flood of an EP, you are no longer in your adult self. You are transported back in time to your unhappy or dangerous childhood. So then the reason this matters in the context of relationships is because when we get in relationships with people whose lives are governed by their EPs, the younger parts who believe that there are always prices of admission, then we start getting into relationships where we have to pay for connection or pay the price of admission. This happens especially with folks who have DID because they can be so separated from one another that EPs can take over conscious control of the body without other parts or ANPs having conscious awareness of what has happened, causing them to behave in ways that are markedly incongruent with the apparent age and values of the body.
Speaker 2:Whew, this can be hard for anyone, but she says, Survivors of childhoods in one of the circles of hell have learned to assume that emotional life is full of interpersonal earthquake, hurricane, tornadoes coming, if not every second, then right around the corner. All emotional weather is dangerous weather. That was your life when your deep nonconscious understanding of human beings was forming. You grew up in the disaster zone. You haul out survival kits at the first vibration of the emotional earth, the first sighting of a cloud in the relational sky, or the first breath of an interpersonal wind in the trees.
Speaker 2:You stop looking at what's happening now, like a large truck going by, a normal rainstorm, a slightly more energetic than usual breeze, and go directly into disaster planning and survival mode. Your friend's distracted and distant mood feels like a warning that you're about be ditched for the sin of wanting attention. For you, it's not what it is, which is simply information about another human having less than wonderful day happening in close proximity to you. Whew. I appreciated that description just as a person from Oklahoma because I know those warning signs about tornadoes.
Speaker 2:So having that image in me really helped me have a concept and a visual to be able to attach to those warning signs internally in a way that before has not been accessible to me. I love that vivid language. She says, You come to these conclusions not because you are selfish and self centered and think it's all about you, even though you're already starting to think that. Far from it. You see yourself as so disposable that you cannot begin to imagine that other people in your life would care if you weren't there.
Speaker 2:In your own mind, you're an irritant and a supplicant, not a desired and valued equal. So either I'm the problem, it's me, so the irritant, or the supplicant, like I have to earn and beg and plead for approval to be right enough to be loved. She says, this all makes perfect sense for back then in memory time. Right? Then the place in space and time where you were a child was a series of disaster movies.
Speaker 2:Once you had that figured out, you created your emotional disaster survival kit and used it constantly. One of the terrible legacies of growing up in an emotional fault zone or tornado alley is that it then becomes difficult to see that you might not be living there any longer. Your EPs inhabit that disaster zone. They have difficulty recognizing the milder and more temperate climbs of the present. You're wonderful in a crisis because you've been experiencing a lot of life as a crisis since the emotional hurricanes of your childhood world.
Speaker 2:When your life is calm and good, you can't recognize it for what it is. Sometimes you perplex yourself by finding yourself stirring up the wind so that you can go back and be familiar in an emotional weather system. Everything was going so well. Why did I have to go and do that? Your EP's developed in the context of problematic attachments offered to you by the adults who raised you.
Speaker 2:So then she talks about how, like, that's basically how reenactments happen is because we're doing what we've already been trained to do, not understanding that that's what we're doing and not understanding or recognizing that it doesn't work anymore. She said, or you might be the person whose disaster survival kit consisted of a blindfold and earplugs. Wake me up when it's over. You notice that you can't tell you're back disaster zone until the hurricane has blown off the roof and the storm surge has flooded your house. Then, and only then, you notice that you've been cold, wet, and blown around emotionally for a long time, maybe even years.
Speaker 2:You were so exhausted by the chronic danger in your childhood that you became numb to it unless and until it ratcheted up to life threatening proportions. Your little central nervous system couldn't tolerate being activated into terror that often, so you became able to go from numb to terrified in a split second. I would like to validate that statement, that that is so true. When we are used to such chaos, we don't recognize when we're in it because it's so familiar. When we are used to being harmed by people, used to not being kept safe by people, used to not being seen or known by people, we don't recognize that the relationships we are in are not just these difficult attachment experiences, but also literally not even knowing us because of all these other trauma responses happening.
Speaker 2:And then my therapist said, adding into that the parasocial dynamic where people already have a story in their head about who I am, that it is too complicated and it just doesn't work. So it's so painful because I can learn that now of like, okay, so I have to get to know people differently, or I have to be more verbal about who I am and who I'm not, and I have to make those things more explicit. But in the meantime, I can't do anything about not having known that before. So then instead of shame spiraling, I keep reading the book so that also I can have healthy friendships and relationships in the future. Theoretically, that's the plan.
Speaker 2:She says, This profound commitment to present time living is at the core of many of the strategies we'll discuss for having the quality of love and attachment that you want and deserve. To stop paying the price of admission to love and connection, you need to be able to differentiate between the past and now. So this is so critical, we literally cannot be in a healthy relationship with anyone else until we can tell the difference between memory time and now time, which includes being able to notice when we're in now time and when we have slipped back into memory time and includes when we are in our A and P adult self state and when we are being influenced by EP self states. Because when we are in EP self states, that counts as emotional flashback and is different than present day reality. It doesn't mean it's not important information.
Speaker 2:It doesn't mean we don't need to tend to those parts. We do, in fact, actually need to tend to those parts. And also, we need to distinguish between tending to those parts because of memory time things and what is actually happening to us in now time. So she says literally in bold letters, perfection is impossible and unattainable. It's impossible and unattainable because you are human.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness. I literally said to my therapist, why is it so hard for me to remember that I'm human? Like, why do I deny myself access to humanity? That that's just part of who I am. I'm a mammal.
Speaker 2:So I need to be safe. I need to be stable. I need connection that reinforces and supports my safety and stability, not that disrupts those things. Like, why is that so hard if it's so simple? She said, Because that's how abuse works.
Speaker 2:Ugh, rude. That was so rude. She said there cannot be abuse without there being a violation of our humanity. And then when we are trained through abuse to deny our own humanity and reenact relationships that deny our humanity, then we literally dissociate from it because that's how we've been trained. She said trauma and deprivation cannot happen without the denial of our humanity.
Speaker 2:I mean them denying our humanity, not us. We learn it from them, from those experiences. I can't even describe how painful this is and how nauseous it made me. Laura Brown says, humans learn by falling down and getting back up and then falling down and getting up again. We talked about that.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, toddlers learning how to walk, that's why they're called toddlers because they toddle, and no one is like, Baby, you're failing walking. No, we cheer them every time they take another step, every time they get back up, but why don't we do that for ourselves? She says, You've been led to believe that the reason your childhood was so painful was that you were imperfect in ways that were intolerable for the adults who raised you. Falling down and getting up was not seen as normal, but as some kind of major problem for your caregivers.
Speaker 2:You can see no gifts in being flawed, only risk and sorrow and disruptions to connection. Yet embracing imperfection, living life in the full humanity of yourself, is absolutely necessary for living a life without a knot in your gut. It's a secret that people who were raised with good enough attachment already know, one that allows them to feel safe enough even during difficult times in their relationships with others.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2:So even with the whole thing about how healthy about how all relationships have ruptures, but healthy ones repair them, The reason that's I've worked so hard in that in so many ways, I can't tell you because I so desperately wanted to be healthy. And now I'm finding out from therapy that I was ableism ing myself again. Like I was being ableist against myself, internalized ableism, expecting that if I tried hard enough, I did good enough, I stayed long enough, that I would get good enough, safe enough, stable enough, better enough for things to feel okay. When in reality, the reason healthy people with healthy attachment in healthy relationships are safe enough to do repair is because they have capacity and access to safety and stability. And when we do not have access to safety and stability, we cannot repair ruptures because we have literally fallen through the cracks.
Speaker 2:She says, Perfection was necessary so that the bad stuff would stop happening or the good stuff might show up again. You would try and try and try, and when whatever you were doing seemed not to work, you tried and tried again. You had only a few strategies to choose from because less than good attachment leads to less flexibility and more difficulties with expanding past the one or two strategies that occasionally did work when you were young. Failures of apparent perfection had painful and sometimes dangerous consequences for you. That paragraph literally changed my life in ways I don't even know how to put into words right now.
Speaker 2:She said learned helplessness is the psychological result of being trapped and unable to change your painful situation no matter what you do. You figured out that you could do nothing that would work, and so you stopped trying. My therapist said, that's why we get into relationships and situations and jobs and environments that are not healthy for us, but we don't know to leave or that we can leave or any nuanced or more complex options in between the binary of staying or leaving, that we don't see this clearly because of this piece right here, because of the learned helplessness. And not just learned helplessness, but Laura Brown says it is the notion that safety must be earned. And she says that is a lie.
Speaker 2:As a human, as a person, you have a right to safety and stability without having to earn it or prove yourself. And my therapist added that if we are having to earn it or prove ourselves, then it is not safety or stability because it is trauma. Laura Brown says, again in bold, Here's the truth. What was happening to you when you were little had nothing to do with any real or imagined failures on your part. You were not the problem.
Speaker 2:I promise. She says, Children are supposed to be difficult, selfish, fearful, needy, demanding, out of control, messy, snot nosed, oppositional, and disruptive. All of those things are true about children. They are just fine, okay, normal things about being a child, not descriptions of something wrong or intolerable imperfection. That reminds me of what Christine Forner said about it is impossible to be a bad child, because all of those things that are hard, even as a parent, I can say all of those things that are hard are just because we're learning to care for other people, which is part of evolving after the pattern of learning to care for ourselves.
Speaker 2:It's only impossible when we haven't learned how to care for ourselves. Right? So that is where intergenerational trauma comes in, but none of that makes the child themselves bad or wrong for existing. Laura Brown says in bold, bringing your EPs out of their frozen past state and into the present requires living by new rules. Number one, the first new rule is that perfection is impossible for all human beings.
Speaker 2:I'm saying that having the good stuff is as possible for you as for anyone else since no one gets a perfect version of love and connection. To get the good stuff, the real stuff, or to see that it's already there, you have got to make deep changes within yourself and your view of how to operate in the world. You can start by giving up perfection. She said, if these last two sentences sound unfair or like I'm blaming you for difficulties in relationship, then that's your EP speaking again already. Notice how quickly those EPs latch onto comments about you and swoop down the wormhole of time back to the lying rules of family system where they were formed.
Speaker 2:The truth is that the power to heal and transform is within each of us. You have the power to make your life become closer to what you want, closer to your dreams and imagining. No matter where or from whom you get help and support, the power to transform your life is yours as an adult, and it is available to you. This isn't always good news to people who have had to shoulder emotional responsibilities long before they should have. So then she talks about how, like, the whole reparenting concept or our inner child or littles, whatever phrasing you wanna use for yourself, when we are having to care for ourselves and we are folks who have always had to care for ourselves, then the idea of continuing to care for ourselves is exhausting and traumatizing because we've had to do it all along.
Speaker 2:The difference is that now as adults we can and should, but as children should not have had to, and it is fair and good and right to mourn the loss of that time at the childhood we never got to have. She says, Before we embrace the power to change our lives as adults, it's sometimes necessary to spend time creating this space to grieve the theft of the opportunity to be cared for, safe child in the arms of adults who were responsible to and for you. Most of us have never had that. Most of us who are survivors with dissociation, we never had that. She says in bold, I will never ever blame you for your wounds.
Speaker 2:I will never ever say that you are at fault for the difficult encounters you have had in your attempts to find connection and love. I will ask you to look at your part in things because that's where your power lies in seeing yourself with compassionate eyes and making changes. I will not ever blame you, And also, you are not helpless now. As an adult, you have the power that was never available to children. You have choices today that no child has.
Speaker 2:I will ask you to examine your part of the difficult interactions so that we can better understand the effects of your early wounds. And also, I stand here in awe of your courage, your persistence, and your willingness. You have stumbled and fallen just like any other human. You have not yet learned perhaps to look at the stumbling and falling as skinned emotional knees with compassion. I'm not here to shame you.
Speaker 2:We are talking about what was done to you when you were so little that you could not make sense of yourself, much less what is happening to you. We do damage to others, not because we are evil or bad. We do it by accident. We fall into people. We bruise them emotionally.
Speaker 2:We talk about that in the step four stuff. In fact, fellow travelers, other people in Al Anon told me to be careful with step four in the context of trauma, because it's so easy to see ourselves in a negative connotation that it's not actually what step four is about, which is seeing ourselves accurately. So to see ourselves not just as a series of behaviors, or I made this mistake or that mistake, or I failed here or I failed there, but also to see the stories and the narratives and the concepts, kind of like when Kathleen Adams was the guest and talked about children speaking in metaphors. It's this similar thing of listening to the whole narrative of how we got to where we are and looking at what we have done and said and not done and not said as part of our trauma responses to what we were already doing. Laura Brown says, We do damage not because we are evil.
Speaker 2:We do it by accident. We fall into people. We bruise them emotionally because we are full of humanity. And you're trying to heal those wounds rather than blame them on the person you fell into. That's a very big thing that sets you apart from the people who failed in caring for you when you were little.
Speaker 2:There is hope and compassion in that, that things can be different, that this hole of deprivation, we actually have the power to fill in with good. 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.