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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,
Speaker 3: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 3:Which makes it it becomes, preventative or preemptive, where as opposed to someone did something to me that excluded part of me, like, then I have my power back of, oh, I don't do things that exclude parts of me to it becoming part of consent even upfront of, if I can't include all of me in this, I already know the answer, and it saves me a lot of years of therapy sorting it out later.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. And and I you know, I love that. I I think that, for me, the most important thing about what you just said from a universal sense is the consent piece and the choice piece.
Speaker 1:And I go back to that idea of, you know, safety when we think of society as the source of the danger. And, I'll okay. I'm gonna use this example. When I was moving out to Seattle from Baltimore, after I finished my postdoc, I drove across the country with a very close friend of mine. And she was actually my fellow postdoc at the time, and she's from New Zealand.
Speaker 1:And she needed to get to this coast so that she could fly home, and she wanted to see more of The US. I needed to move, so we made it into a whole road trip. Anyways, despite my best efforts at planning, I ended up having to fill up my gas tank in very rural Tennessee, and this is no shade to anybody from Tennessee. But I don't think anybody would argue with me that very rural Tennessee at a gas station with, you know, two gas pumps and no, you know, other signs of life and miles all around is not a place that generally queer people would find themselves feeling particularly safe.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:And I, you know, went in to to pay for the gas, and I, in thinking through it, made the choice to go in and say, yeah. Hi there. I'd like to get $20 on pump number two. My wife's gonna be filling up the car there, and I was wondering if maybe you could give me that bag of Swedish fish as well. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:I hope you have a wonderful day, sir. Right? Like, that is not how I show up in the world. And I made a selective choice because my value of my own safety was more important in that situation. Doesn't mean that I'm inherently at risk if I'm too gay sounding in rural Tennessee, but I don't know that.
Speaker 1:And I don't have any reason to believe that I I would be that. But there's the shift when it comes to being intentional and and and the shift in recovering is for me to say, I'm going to, you know, not bring the, you know, particularly queer parts of me to this particular interaction is not actually betraying myself in that context. It is it is because I had gotten to a point where I knew that the rejection and the danger that those parts of me experienced was never because it was their fault or it was about them. And so I was able to say, like, hey. I got this and move from, you know, putting on the mask of the, you know, straight seeming southern man with a wife filling up the the car, because it was connected to our value of safety, not because those parts put us at danger, but because the society that we live in may not respect the dignity of those parts.
Speaker 1:And that's okay because I do and because I have communities that do. And and I still felt like that was an authentic way of showing up in the world because that random guy at the gas station in Tennessee, I get to discern whether I'm gonna invite him into the fullness of who I am or not. And in that moment, the answer was no. I'm not. Not because he did anything wrong, but because being in the world sometimes means that we have to make decisions about the level of risk that we're willing to take.
Speaker 1:And no one is entitled to know invulnerability all parts of me. I have the right to discern whether I wanna invite people into that. And that can still be connected to my authenticity, and that can be part of how we help people navigate the world when the world itself can be the source of the danger.
Speaker 3:That's so powerful. That's such a powerful example. And everything from intentional dissociation to the value of transparency balanced with the value of safety looking like the value of boundaries.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. And and, you know, I I don't mean to qualify every one of my one liners, but I just like to prepare people for the fact that some people have big reactions to some of my one liners. And if anybody notices that, I would invite them to just be curious about those reactions. But, generally speaking, I do not believe in the construct of lies of omission.
Speaker 1:And the reason that I don't believe in the constructive lies of omission is because no one else is entitled to my internal knowledge or experience ever. Never. I will I will yeah. I will never give up my right to discern who gets access to my internal knowledge and vulnerabilities. And, often, lies of omission as a construct is a framework that is used by people that have more power to ensure that they always know everything, whether they're entitled to or not.
Speaker 1:I choose in my dignity and my wisdom when I want to invite someone into my truth. And sometimes that can be as as simple as just what I had for lunch that day. Sometimes it can be, you know, more explicit vulnerabilities. But and I also don't hold anyone else to the expectation that I'm entitled to anything that they know. In fact, this I'm and I'm gonna I'm gonna actually bring this back to a clinical realm because I often get students who ask me, well, how do I know if my client is lying?
Speaker 1:Why is it important if your client's lying? What like, you're not a private investigator. Your job is not to determine, you know, whether they're being honest with you or not. And, frankly, why are you making whether they're being honest about them and not about you? If they're not telling you the truth, the only thing that that communicates to me is I haven't done enough work in my consistency to demonstrate that the truth is safe here in a nonjudgmental way.
Speaker 1:And and if if in their discernment, the truth doesn't feel safe, I honor the wisdom of that discernment, and I'm gonna work in my in in in my understanding of how I'm showing up to continue to be consistent and to show you that I can handle whatever it is that you might wanna bring into the room. And as someone who you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, bad therapist's trauma, a subset of my caseload is people who have been severely harmed or abused by other therapists. And for anyone listening to this, if they ever hear a therapist tell them that they just need to trust them and that makes red flags go up, it makes a lot of sense that that makes red flags go up because people who show up in the world in a in a way that invites trust don't need to ask you to trust them. And that doesn't necessarily mean that if your therapist has said you just need to trust me, that that means that they're inherently harmful, but it does mean that we need to stop pathologizing people accurately perceiving power differentials.
Speaker 3:So much is happening in me right now because that's a huge religious trauma piece of where people in power demand to know all the things about you. And so I can circle back to that later, but can we talk about while I still have you, we talk about power differentials for a moment?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm gonna start with, hopefully, any of the clinicians that are doing this work have learned that the power differential in the room is inherent and that there is no way to create a perfectly egalitarian space. And, actually, if we think we've created a perfectly egalitarian space, all that means is that we're ignoring the power that we have, which creates greater risk of it being misused rather than acknowledging that it is always going to be there. It's also true that power differentials, especially when we think about privilege domains, can be another layer of context, you know, depending on the identities of the therapist and the client. And what does that mean about the power differential in the room?
Speaker 1:What does that mean about the power differential outside of the room? And I think more fundamentally going back to what I was talking about before, how does the way that we have been taught to use that power risk recreating those abuse dynamics. The best strategy for avoiding a power struggle because if a power struggle in the position that you have inherently more power than the other person is is always going to be a high risk of harm, the best way to avoid a power struggle is to not get in them. If I need someone else to believe my version of what I think is going on for them, why do I need that? If if I'm engaged in a power struggle with a client about their lived experience, they are always right, and I am always wrong.
Speaker 1:Because just because I have more power does not mean that I get to assume the right to know more about what they have experienced, what they've been through, and what they know about themselves. And if that's the power struggle I'm engaged in, I need to have a really vulnerable conversation with myself about what need am I trying to get met in trying to convince someone else that my version of things is more valid than their version of things. We love to call clients resistant and guarded and, you know, lacking insight. I have never met a person for whom those things are true in a way that we conceptualize them and we think about them.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:There is wisdom and resistance. And if I can get over my need to be the the expert in the room, if someone is engaging in behavior that that we would generally qualify in the clinical world as resistance, I think, okay. This person knows a lot about something, and I need to defer to what they know. And if, you know, if I can help them do that, that only is gonna help us get closer to, where we're needing to go. If someone is, you know, guarded or or and I have clients I'll I'll use this example.
Speaker 1:I have certain clients that I have done immense amounts of trauma work with, including trauma reprocessing for which the specific details of any particular trauma have never been brought into the therapy room. Because I don't need to know the details for them to successfully reprocess. I need to be the person that stands next to them when they're ready to look at the thing if they need to look at the thing. They don't need to tell me the thing. They get to be responsive to their wisdom about what I get to be invited into, and I need to not have an attitude about that as the clinician because I've been trained that if they're not doing certain things, then this is the label of pathology you give them.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:We we cannot exploit our clients fishing for details or become voyeurs because we want to feel important.
Speaker 1:Yep. And there's also it's also important to the water in the West is that power is bad because power means power over. That is a minority perspective in the world. In most places in the world, power is more intuitively understood as power with. And so unless I'm responding to the, you know, the white supremacist tenant of scarcity, sure.
Speaker 1:If that's where I'm at, then I might see someone else's power as threatening my power, you know, because I have to be thinking about power to do what. But when we're truly in communitarian vow values, me inviting someone else into their power actually helps me connect to my power because in community, when you are powerful, I am powerful. When you are suffering, I am suffering because we are in this together. And as shared humanity and in collective liberation, me inviting someone else into their power helps me in collectively to be engaged to my power and power with rather than power over. There's a a line from one of, Alok Manon's podcasts of, where they ask, is what you're looking for, like, the the right to exist equally or the right to do to others what it has been done to you.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Those are not the same thing.
Speaker 3:Right. Being it it reminds me of crab theory with the pulling down and then abandoning to to think that's the way out of the bucket as opposed to getting through together or knocking the bucket over together so we can all get out and continue together. That that is the difference. I've talked about that some in the community, the system speak community in the context of people coming and going. Like, it's not a bad thing when someone leaves.
Speaker 3:That doesn't have to be a moment of drama. If they need to take a break or pace themselves, that is healthy. If it's not meeting their needs and they leave, that is healthy. If it is overwhelming and they leave, that is healthy. If there are other places that are more their vibe, that is healthy.
Speaker 3:There's nothing wrong with people leaving.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 3:What what else did you want to talk about today? I want to make sure you get your voice amplified and share the things that you want to share while you're here.
Speaker 1:I think, you know, a lot of what we've talked about are sort of kind of specific aspects of what I would consider a broader takeaway, which is we are trained throughout our lives to investigate, identify, and then address what's wrong with us. And I really want to invite people in their own relationships with themselves even when they do something that they don't like or that doesn't feel consistent with their values. Are you able to stop and think with compassion and curiosity? Okay. What was the wisdom in what I did?
Speaker 1:What is the need that I was trying to get met, and how can I honor the wisdom of meeting my needs or at least attempting to? How can I honor the wisdom in in being exactly who I am and what's original to me even if it's not consistent with who I'm supposed to be? Because at its core, treatment is not about getting rid of symptoms. It is about claiming for yourself the you that you have always had the right to be in the world even though the world may not have given you access to that.
Speaker 3:There's so much compassion in that. I've just cried this whole time we've been talking. I am so, so grateful. Any last words for clinicians?
Speaker 1:You don't need to be an expert in trauma and dissociation to anchor yourself in what makes sense about what this person is telling me? What is it what is what they're telling me tell me about what's important to them? And how can I start from that place of what is the wisdom and what makes sense and then invite them to look at that with me and figure out where we go from there?
Speaker 2:I love this. Anything else for folks with dissociative abilities, as you say, which I will use. There
Speaker 1:is no other person in the world that is exactly as unique as you are. And regardless of how anyone else has ever made you feel about your uniqueness, never fear your own resonance in being all of the beautiful ways that you are. Thank
Speaker 3:you so much. I can't even with all this. Thank you. I'm so grateful, truly. I feel like we say liberation, right?
Speaker 3:And we help our folks see clearly and claim and reclaim and all the things. And when we're talking about attunement, even before attachment, it's just about understanding and being seen and heard. And I feel seen and heard with myself in ways that are really uncomfortable, but also very powerful. And I am so grateful. And also when we have that, then what comes next is, Oh, everything suddenly makes so much sense.
Speaker 3:That's the liberation in this moment of, Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:I make sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's way better than I'm the bad one or the black sheep or wrong or bad or ashamed of myself or whatever. Just I make sense in the world. You know how they say no as a sentence. Like, this is the other sentence.
Speaker 3:I make sense in the world, period. That's enough.
Speaker 1:That's enough. You know, whether we're we're the perfect version of ourselves that we wanna be, we never will be because that's just that's part, like, that's part of what life is. Life is using the feedback from every experience you have to tell you more about who you wanna be tomorrow. There is no arriving at me. You know?
Speaker 1:Who we are is contextual, and we learn more about that every single day. So today, I'm being the best version of me that I can based off of what I understand about what that means. And as I experience the things that are happening around me and and what that tells me about what's important to me, that helps me come up with a template for who, what what who I am tomorrow looks like.
Speaker 3:I think for me it shifts into being more me instead of less me. That's the feeling of getting power back and just
Speaker 2:having it. It just is as opposed to it being taken.
Speaker 1:There is no one else that exists or that has existed that is uniquely you. So why not own it and be the fullest you that you can be?
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, truly, truly. I look forward to learning more from you, to reflecting on this, having a lot of therapy on this, all the things, all the things. Thank you so much for coming today.
Speaker 1:You bet. It's been my pleasure. I enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I appreciate it, really. And I will ponder all this and get back to you again.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I look forward to it. So, yeah, I hope you have a good weekend. Take care of yourself.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:We can chat again soon.
Speaker 3:Okay. Bye.
Speaker 1:Yep. Bye, Emma.
Speaker 2: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 2: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, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too. That's what peer support is all about.
Speaker 2:Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.