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Emma shares about complex trauma, deprivation, and dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID). Educational, supportive, and inspiring, System Speak documents the best and worst of life through insights, conversations, and collaborations. An archive curated for dignity for all.
Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about Complex Trauma and Dissociation. It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling.
Speaker 1:It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship. Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to.
Speaker 1:We're all different, and all of our stories matter. As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
Speaker 2:As we've been talking about fake claiming last week and this week, It brings us also to about accountability, having a shape. This one's about parasocial standing, network outrage, and the difference between holding someone accountable and taking someone apart. The objection it answers is a good one. Communities do need to hold people accountable. Survivor spaces in particular have a documented history of charismatic figures who exploit the people who trust them, of clinicians who cross lines, of organizations that misuse money, of people who monetize other people's worst days.
Speaker 2:Anyone who has been around this world long enough has watched it happen and watched it get covered up. The instinct to protect the community from that is correct, and I have no interest in writing or saying anything that dulls that. And also, this is where I sit parasocially. I hold a clinical license, and that requires actual professional legitimate background checks, fingerprints, to confirm that I am safe to do what I do every day. I teach for a professional society with an ethics board and process.
Speaker 2:I direct a five zero one c three, a nonprofit that has a board and outside regulatory agencies that make sure we do what we need to do. I also have the podcast, and I write on Substack. Every one of those is a form of power, and every one has a mechanism attached that exists precisely so that I can be held to it. That's the ground I'm standing on. There's a difference between accountability through those formal processes that continue to verify me without me needing to be defensive or protect myself because they are formal processes already in place and the taking apart that is cruel and abusive.
Speaker 2:Horton Wall described something in the early years of broadcast that has only grown more powerful since. Mediated performance produces the illusion of a face to face relationship. The audience responds to the performer roughly as they would to someone in their own circle of peers. The authors called it intimacy at a distance. In a survivor community, the intensity of this multiplies because the content is the most intimate content there is.
Speaker 2:You've heard my voice for over a decade. You know how I sound when something has gone wrong. You know how things about my interior that most people don't know in my daily life. You have done parallel play alongside me, processing your own material next to me. Even if our systems are not the same, even if our stories are not the same, I may not even know your name unless we have met or connected or had time to get to know each other in real life.
Speaker 2:That asymmetry is nobody's fault and everybody's problem. It generates a felt sense of standing that is emotionally honest and structurally mistaken. Friends have a standing to ask hard questions of each other, and the relationship genuinely feels like friendship on one side of it. That feeling is real. The mutuality is what is missing, and mutuality is where the standing actually comes from.
Speaker 2:But the consequence of this shows up in ruptures. When a parasocial bond breaks, boundaries are set, or the sense of betrayal scales to the imagined closeness rather than to reality. In that, in my observation, and in the pattern I keep hearing about from others in this position, those episodes so rarely begin with a harm. They begin with the limit, the boundary set, a collaboration declined, a no delivered kindly and received as a wound proportional to years of imagined intimacy. That makes sense in memory time.
Speaker 2:Naming that pattern does not mean every complaint against a visible person is a wounded parasocial attachment, and I would be doing the thing I'm arguing against if I implied that. Some complaints are simply true. The pattern is worth naming because it tells you where to look and because the people caught in it are usually in real pain that has a real cause somewhere other than where they are aiming it. It was Marwick in 2021 that built an explanatory model for why people participate in network harassment, drawing on interviews with targets and platform trust and safety workers. The model runs like this.
Speaker 2:A member of a network accuses a target of violating the norms. The accusation triggers moral outrage. The outrage propagates, and the resulting harassment functions as enforcement of social order. The finding that matters most for us is what participants believe they are doing. They understand their actions as morally justified and grounded in the target's conduct.
Speaker 2:Nobody in a pile on thinks they are in a pile on. They think they are protecting people. That single fact dismantles the most common sense of these episodes, which is some version of they really believe she did something wrong. Of course, they do. Sincere moral conviction is not a bribe a byproduct of the mechanism.
Speaker 2:It is the fuel the mechanism runs on. The subjective certainty of the participants tell you the process is working as it was designed and tells you nothing whatsoever about whether the accusation is true. This has been true in history too. This is in the history of the police force that came out of the history of slave catchers. And when we have folks with imbalance of power, this kind of abuse continues to be racism and classism and ableism.
Speaker 2:This means we need tests that do not rely on how convinced anyone feels. Because in all of history and even in current politics, people think they're right and feel strongly about it, even while actively causing harm. So there are seven differences that hold, and that's what we need to talk about. There's scope. Accountability is bounded by the power actually held.
Speaker 2:A clinician's conduct as a clinician, an organization's money, a podcast claim. When the material being circulated wanders outside the role into someone's medical history, their family, their old court files, their diagnosis, The scope has told you what this is. Nobody investigating a nonprofit's finances needs the founder's custody docket. My clinical conduct is held to the fire by the boards. The nonprofit's finances are held to the fire by the finance team, internal audits, and external audits.
Speaker 2:On the podcast, we offer wisdom credit and give you the citations so that you can see and learn from yourself even when you disagree with us. Next, we also have direction of travel. Real accountability starts with a specific harm and looks for evidence of it. Abuse starts with acquired material and constructs a harm that will fit it. If you can establish that the document was obtained before the accusation existed, you've learned something decisive about the sequence.
Speaker 2:And the sequence is one of the things in these situations that can be checked. There's the forum. Every kind of power available in this community has a corresponding forum with a process attached. Again, the licensing boards, the IRS, employers, ethics committees, platforms, courts, auditing agencies. Choosing a thread instead is a choice, and it is worth asking without any snideness why a social media thread offers something that the professional form does not.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the honest answer is that the form is failed before, is inaccessible, or moves too slowly to prevent imminent harm. And those are real answers, and we can take them seriously. But usually, the answer is that the audience and the claim will never be tested by anyone empowered to find it false. But legal, financial, and professional claims go through those professional processes. And while it may be overwhelming and take time and energy and spoons, there's nothing to fear if we've not done anything wrong.
Speaker 2:We just trust the process and wait. And then when it's done, the answer is settled no matter what has happened on social media. We also look at who is at the center. Herman argues that survivor center of justice begins by asking the harmed person what would make things right as possible for them, and that our inherited retributive processes fail survivors because they were never designed around that question. What if we apply that here?
Speaker 2:How often would the outcome being pursued actually repair anything for them, even if it succeeded completely? When the person on whose behalf the outrage operates is absent or unnamed or was never asked, something other than the repair is being served. A definable end. Ask what would have to happen for this to be finished. Real accountability can answer.
Speaker 2:A specific change, a return of funds, a policy, an acknowledgment, a resignation from a particular role. If nothing in the world would constitute enough, then a change in behavior was never the object, and the process has no stopping condition because it does not want one. If the person is already available for private conversations and no private conversation is in truth offered, it was always about making things public. If funds are returned, disagreements and policies acknowledged, and the onslaught continues, it was never really about policies or funds. And then where the cost of being wrong lands.
Speaker 2:A board complaint that turns out to be unfounded is survivable. There's an investigation, there's a finding, both parties participate, and the accuser is not destroyed for having raised it. And a networked crawl out, being wrong cost the target their reputation, their livelihood, and their health, while costing the accuser nothing. Any process that loads the entire risk of error onto one party is not built to find out what is true. It's built to produce an outcome.
Speaker 2:And then we also need to consider whether the material was ever yours to have. Your own account of what happened to you is yours to tell always. And no essay of mine or anyone else, any podcast episode, any social media post gets to tell your story. And a commercial data file that's not even accurate does not tell your story. A court document recording the worst year of someone else's life without any complexity or nuance does not tell your story.
Speaker 2:The provenance of the evidence is on the part of the ethics of the claim, and a case built on material taken without consent is a violation and is doing the very thing it says it's punishing. In 2025, Loretta Ross described herself as a reformed call out queen, and she's explicit that call outs have their uses. What she offers is a spectrum of responses rather than prohibition so that the intensity of the response can be matched to the situation instead of defaulting to maximum every time. This is the whole argument I'm making these two weeks stated more generously than I have imagined. She says concretely, if you simply do not like me or you find my work grating or something about how I hold myself in this community sits wrong with you, that's allowed.
Speaker 2:Say so and leave me alone. Recommend someone else. That is a complete and legitimate response and requires no record request, no dossier, and no verdict about how real I am or not. And I will hold myself to the same. I will not speak about people who are not in the room.
Speaker 2:I will not circulate documents even when I have them about anyone that they did not consent to have circulated. When I have concerns about a colleague, I will take it to them or to the body with a process, including professional boards who address unprofessional behavior. The instinct that drive these episodes is protective, and I do not want to talk anyone out of it. Survivor community absolutely does need to be able to say when someone with power is causing harm quickly and loudly without waiting for permission. What I want alongside it is a process with enough structure that it can reach the people it is aimed at and enough structure that it can be wrong about someone without ending lives.
Speaker 2:I would rather be accountable to you than protected from you. I am asking for a version of accountability that could survive being mistaken. 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, and healing brings hope.