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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:I have this homework from group. It's about self help skills or ways to take care of myself. When I'm having big feelings or being anxious or afraid. I think if I understand from group that it's the same as what my therapist is teaching me about now time, but it gives some skills I'm supposed to practice. And they seem like simple things, but they can be a lot harder than it seems.
Speaker 1:The first one is grounding. It says when I feel unreal or anxious or nervous or frightened, There may even be nothing wrong, but I still feel it. I don't know if I feel unreal. I feel like the things that I hear about me feel unreal. Like, I listened to some of the conference from this weekend, and I learned a lot about DID.
Speaker 1:But hearing that one of me, that one of us inside out I don't know how to say it. The part that did the podcast or that did this session on DID, I that feels unreal to me. I don't know all of those things. The piano at the beginning of the podcast when I listen to those, that feels unreal. I don't know how to play piano.
Speaker 1:Things my husband talks about or the children say we did. I would be too scared to do those things. I don't know who's having those adventures or how that can be fun to them, and it's not for me. That feels unreal. My therapist in her office, that feels unreal sometimes.
Speaker 1:Like, I know it's a safe place, and I feel good there, But I also don't remember it always or often even. And so what if I just made that up? Or what if I think it's real, but it's just one more place in my head? Except I know it's not because we talked about it and because we have the bear and the watch and the notebooks. Like, my other workbook talked about anchor points for grounding, like things you see around the room, and I remember her paintings and the quotes on the wall and what her office is like.
Speaker 1:So I know it is real. But this says that people sometimes feel nervous even when they're in a safe place, and I know that happens to me. Our flashbacks of traumatic memories, It says the memories can be very vivid and terrifying to the point that the painful event seems to be happening in the present moment. So that's when memory time and now time get confusing, and it's hard to sort out. And it says when that happens, when you are reliving the past, that your body repeats the physiological response.
Speaker 1:And that I think has happened to me. I know it's happened to me. There are sometimes when something makes me think of something else. I know it's called a trigger. My therapist taught me that.
Speaker 1:But when there's something that triggers me, sometimes it's like a whole movie playing in front of my eyes or like I'm whisked from one place to the other. And sometimes I can't tell the difference because when I lose time, that happens anyway. So I don't know how to show up in different places and know if it's a memory time or a now time. My therapist says, if she and Nathan are there, it's now time. If my parents are there, it's memory time.
Speaker 1:So that helps, but sometimes it's hard to remember. This says, and sometimes when it happens, I have pains or different things that hurt me, and I don't know why. Or I can't remember what happened that I'm thinking of, but I feel it, and it hurts. This says to stay in the present like in now time, that you have to remember it's safe now. That's why my therapist taught me now time is safe.
Speaker 1:It says grounding helps you do this by telling yourself that you're safe and describing your surroundings. So it says to literally tell yourself what the date is. Like, right now, it's April 2019 and how old you are and where you are and what time it is. It says to say that no one can hurt me now. I'm safe, and I'm capable of protecting myself.
Speaker 1:No one can hurt me now. I'm safe and capable of protecting myself. I think I wanna write that down in the notebook. No one can hurt me now. I am safe, and I am capable of protecting myself.
Speaker 1:It says also to name three things you can see and things you can hear and things you can feel. Another paper says to name five things you can hear, four things you can see, three things that you can touch, two things that you can smell, and one thing that you can taste. And one of the things that I try to taste are peppermints because it makes me think of my therapist's office. It says you can also drink some water or move around a little bit, like moving your feet or squeezing your hands or standing up or sitting down. Sometimes when I'm trying to stay present, I feel like I'm about to float out of my skin, and I push on my feet or my hands, like, as if I can keep me there, as if I can push myself back into my skin, but it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:It says grounding is a strategy to connect yourself with the present, like in now time and in this place. It also says another one is breathing. My therapist taught me about breathing too right in the beginning when I first started seeing her. I had really bad panic attacks pretty frequently, and she taught me how to slow my breathing down and how to take breathe and how to take deep breaths and to breathe it out slowly. My assignment from group says that there are many systems inside your body.
Speaker 1:When your body identifies any potential or actual danger, that the sympathetic nervous system will become active so you can be ready to respond to the danger, that this is a normal function, and it helps you survive. That's maybe the first time I ever felt normal. But it says it becomes a problem when it's overactive so that you still think you're in danger when you want to relax or when the danger is far away. It says that the parasympathetic nervous system balances it out and conserves energy and works in opposition to the other one. And so one of the best ways to calm down is to regulate your breathing.
Speaker 1:My therapist also gave me some things I can smell. I wasn't there. I got it from the boy one, But he left me a note about it, and it really helps a lot. So there's something I can smell to help me remember with my to help me with my deep breaths. The third thing my paper from group says is coping with triggers.
Speaker 1:It says triggers are the things that stimulate you to have negative emotions or flashbacks of painful memories. It says that everybody has different triggers and that anything can be a trigger because it's not just personal, but it's specific to what you went through before. My therapist taught me about triggers last summer, and so I've been tracking them. I haven't told the others, and I haven't written about it to the therapist yet. I'm not sure why, but I don't want them to know about it because I don't know if I don't know how to talk about triggers with the others inside because I don't want to trigger them.
Speaker 1:But I'm also, honestly, a little afraid of what I'll find out. I'm not sure that I want to know why it's a trigger. I'm trying, but that overwhelms me so quickly. It says to identify your own triggers so that you can better prepare yourself and try to think of what triggered your emotions or symptoms before. There are some triggers that I know just make me lose time.
Speaker 1:Like, if I have a nightmare and open my laptop in the night, then I lose time because that one just works already. I know that if I hear my children needing things instead of just snuggling with me or having appointments instead of just going to the park, that I lose time because that mother one does those things. So I've learned a lot. But I also know that there are other things that trigger me because something is hard, but I don't know what the hard thing is. I just know it causes me to have feelings or memories I don't understand like those flashes.
Speaker 1:Or sometimes it makes my body hurt in ways I don't wanna talk about right now. Those triggers are harder, but I know a few of them. One of them is having my picture taken, even taking my own picture. It's even hard to take my picture with my children. My therapist said the memories are really important to them, and so it's something I'm working on of being able to take my picture with my children.
Speaker 1:But I don't like it, and I'm not in the videos when they make videos, not very often. There are some foods that trigger me or, like, the dentist or anything else in my mouth. I don't like that. Sometimes I don't know what's wrong. Like, last night, we were driving home from therapy, and I had my son with me, and we were having a lovely time.
Speaker 1:And I was trying to spend time with him while I could while it was just him by himself. Nothing was wrong. There were no problems. Nothing was bad. We were safe, and everything was okay.
Speaker 1:But we were driving through the rural areas of Kansas, and people were burning their fields to start for the plantings for spring. So I know that it was just pasture burning and field burning and that it was just to get ready for the soil for the spring. I know it's a thing they do here and part of farming and just a cultural piece of agriculture, like families get together and do it, and it's just a thing. So I know nothing was wrong. It wasn't like a wildfire or an out of control.
Speaker 1:It's called a controlled burn, and they do it on purpose, and they manage it, and they do it safely. So I know nothing was wrong, But I got really scared, and there was something that made me think of something. And while I was trying to drive, I kept seeing something else. And I don't wanna talk about it right now, but the things that I saw and the things that I felt were really terrible. It should have only taken me three hours to get home.
Speaker 1:I had already driven one of the hours from the therapist to my in laws where my son was, so I only had three hours left to drive. It should not have been hard, but it took seven hours just to get home. I had to keep pulling over because I wanted to be safe while I was driving, especially with my son in the car. And I couldn't stop crying. I didn't even know why I was crying.
Speaker 1:I don't know what it is I'm so sad about. I don't know why fire would make me sad. So sometimes with triggers, I don't know where it goes, and I don't know if it would be more scary or less scary to find out why. I almost want to look like in the notebook, but also I don't want to. This says some triggers cannot be avoided, like feelings inside or memories that come up, and so you can use grounding or breathing to cope with that.
Speaker 1:Like, one time, I was going into therapy, and there were a bunch of men standing by the elevator, and I couldn't get around them or through them to get to the elevator to get up to my therapist. And I almost missed therapy that day because it was just so scary, and it was just so triggering. But, also, at the same time, I knew in my head nothing was wrong. Those men were working on moving somebody's office or something, and they were very polite and respectful. They didn't do anything wrong, but I just couldn't handle it.
Speaker 1:So sometimes I don't know how to cope with triggers because not everything you can avoid and not everything you can hide from. Not if you wanna get better. I want to be better. I want to be stronger. I want to know how to handle these things.
Speaker 1:So I have got to learn. So I have to learn how to practice these grounding things and these breathing things. The fourth thing my paper from group says is relaxation exercises. It says some of the breathing things I have already learned about count, but you can also do a body scan, like from your head to your foot very slowly, focusing and concentrating on each small part of your body step by step, being mindful and focused and noticing your feelings. It says when you do this, not to try to change anything.
Speaker 1:Just accept everything as it is. That's really hard. I think there's something important there that I'm learning to practice anyway and need to learn to practice. Like, it's taken me two years, three years just to accept about the others inside and that I can't change it, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away. And trying to change them or ignore them usually makes things worse.
Speaker 1:So maybe it's the same in myself too instead of trying to feel my instead of trying to change my feelings, to just be present with them. But that's really hard when your feelings are really scary. It also talks about progressive muscle relaxation, tightening and loosening one set of muscles at a time and going through your body one way or the other, or yoga, or going for a walk, or listening to music. Those I'm getting better at, I have a really long walk. I go for a really long walk almost every day now, which is also helping me feel better, like, better than I've been since cancer.
Speaker 1:So I think that's a good one, and I'm trying to walk. It also says there are imagery based techniques. So it says when you have a strong emotion that's a negative one to try and visualize it and then visualize what you would like to do with it. It says, is it like a black ball or a red box or something else? Would you throw it away or give it a hug or pick it up or lock it away?
Speaker 1:I don't really understand this one. I'm gonna have to ask the group person more about it because I don't understand that one. But it says it's helpful when you don't feel safe even when you are. And it says you can also do a different thing of when you're know that you're really safe, you just don't feel safe, that you can close your eyes and imagine that you're in a different place, like a beach or by the lake or in a field, and to imagine and experience what you see, hear, feel, and could do in such a relaxing place. I think I could do that one a lot easier than the first one.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to do that when I feel scared or anxious. I can imagine my therapist's office when I'm scared or anxious. So maybe that's a starting place. But I also worry about it because I feel like imagining on purpose is like dissociating on purpose. And when that happens, then I just lose more time.
Speaker 1:And one thing I really wanna learn from group and from my therapist is how to stay. So I don't know how to stay if I'm imagining going away because then I do. It also says to remember that imagining and relaxing yourself through imagery doesn't actually solve any problems. So it says, for example, it could help you temporarily control an emotion while you're at work, but then in therapy, you still need to talk about that emotion. This is another problem I have because there's lots of things I would really like to talk about in therapy, but I don't get to go to therapy.
Speaker 1:It keeps happening without me. And I'm gonna try really hard next week to go to therapy even if I can't stay for the whole two hours, even if someone else comes. I'm trying to be present and accept that I want to at least show up. There are things I'm supposed to do for group, like practice my grounding in her office that I haven't even gotten to do because I don't even know when therapy happens. I just miss it.
Speaker 1:It also says that if you're using imagery, you might see people or others inside your inner world. I don't know much about that. I know I heard the podcast about it. And so because of the podcast and because of the notebook, I know about the attic and some other things And the house that the husband says is where I lived when I was little, I don't remember it. But I don't know how to be in that place or how to go to that place.
Speaker 1:I only read about it in the notebook or hear about it on the podcast until therapy yesterday when I saw it for the first time. I didn't mean to. I wasn't trying to. It just happened, and I'm not even sure what happened. I didn't even know I was at therapy.
Speaker 1:And then somehow, everything was foggy, and it's like I could hear my therapist from a long way away. And she was saying her name, and she was saying, this is my office, and you are safe. And then she said it again, my name is, and said her name. And then she said, this is my office, and you are safe. And it was like I was getting closer and closer, But, also, everything was still foggy, like I wasn't even really there.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's when I felt like I wasn't real. I'm not sure. It's never happened to me before what happened yesterday. And she said it again. My name is and she said her name.
Speaker 1:This is my office, and you are safe. And then she said, you're not a little girl anymore. And she said that as part of a conversation that I didn't even hear or have the whole context of, but I heard that part. And when she said that part, it somehow, like, sent this jolt through me that I don't know how to explain, but it was visceral. I felt it in my physical body even though I, at the same time, did not feel like I was in my physical body.
Speaker 1:I know it sounds crazy. I don't know how else to explain it. But in that moment, it was like as fast as you could snap your fingers, all of the fog disappeared. Except then when I woke up there, I wasn't in the therapist's office. I was standing in the attic, and it was like I saw it for the first time.
Speaker 1:And I saw the children there and Molly there, and I knew who they were even though I didn't speak to them and they didn't speak. And it was all just an instant, just less than a second, only a moment. And directly across from me and a chest under the window, When she said you're not a little girl anymore, the lock that was on this chest broke off and fell to the floor like it crashed to the floor. I felt it hit the floor. I saw it hit the floor.
Speaker 1:I heard it sit. I heard it hit the floor. It was to me in that moment as real as holding my phone in my hand, as the computer, as my bed, as anything in the therapist's office, as real as anything I could touch, as if I was really in this place that I thought was not really a real place. And all of this happened in just a split second and only a moment, but it felt like hours and days. And when she said that, you're not a little girl anymore.
Speaker 1:The top of the chest, like a cedar chest, the top of the chest opened, and this little girl stood up. And when she said, you're not a little girl anymore, that girl in the attic looked right into me like I could feel her eyes into me, looked directly, like, through me almost. But she repeated what the therapist said but changed the pronoun for herself and said, I'm not a little girl anymore. And when she said that, it was like the room spun around. And I don't know what happened.
Speaker 1:I don't know how it happened, but my perspective entirely changed so that then I was standing in the chest looking back where I had been standing where the little girl was now like we switched places. I can't even explain it. And then just as fast, like, another snap of the fingers, and no one was actually snapping fingers. I just mean that fast. I was waking up in my car, and the therapy was already over.
Speaker 1:And I don't even know how to explain that or what to do with that. And from what I read in the notebook, that's not even what we talked about. So I don't even know when that happened or how to place it with what it means or give it any context or know what else she was saying the therapist was saying or I was I I I don't know what it means, but it doesn't feel scary. It feels profound. It feels like a breakthrough.
Speaker 1:It feels like a connection or something. It feels like progress. It feels good, except I don't know what it means or what the progress is or what to do with it or even what happened. But something happened. I know it did.
Speaker 1:I wrote about it in the notebook, and I wanna try really hard to be there at therapy, at least in the beginning, and tell her about it even if I have to read it from the notebook because I wanna stay present long enough to tell her and see if she knows what happened because I don't understand it. But something happened. My worksheet from group says that it's okay to feel anything you feel, even to be sad or afraid or even to be angry, and that when we were little, it was not always safe to feel feelings. But when anything happens to you, even something good, then it's a natural thing to feel feelings. And that feelings have purposes and that every feeling has a purpose.
Speaker 1:Like, anger can help you get energy to do something about something that's wrong, or fear gets your body ready to move to protect yourself from danger. But now as adults, we have to learn how to express our emotions in safe ways. It says you can do it with sports if you have a lot of excess energy, or you can do it through art, drawing or writing or painting or painting. I know that we have someone who does a lot of art. That's another example.
Speaker 1:I cannot do art. I cannot draw or paint. But there are drawings and paintings everywhere all the time. Sometimes they're little child's drawings, but my children didn't do them. And sometimes they're really fancy drawings or really fancy paintings.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to paint, and my husband didn't do them. It says talking out your problems is also really important, and, like, it's part of why staying present in therapy is important. Even if you're not present the whole time, that connecting with your therapist helps you learn how to talk about what's wrong. So I wonder if just going to therapy is part of what I need to practice. It says that that just in itself is its own skill, just getting into therapy no matter what happens once you're there, and that an altogether different skill is staying there when you're there.
Speaker 1:And then an altogether different skill is staying there and remembering at the same time. That feels pretty daunting, but it says that that feeling of it being too hard is a kind of internal conflict and that conflicts in the mind are common. And so using coping strategies keeps you from using other strategies that can leave you in danger or be high risk or hurt yourself in some way. And so it gives alternative strategies for staying safe and staying grounded and staying present. So my assignment is to make a mental first aid kit and to have something that has items I can touch and see and feel and hear and taste and smell.
Speaker 1:But I think I already have that. We have our pen bag, the bag of markers and crayons and pens and pencils that we used to write in the notebooks for therapy. And there's little toys in there, little bunnies and ponies, and someone really likes Winnie the Pooh. And so there's already little things in there, and I have cello music on my phone and peppermints to taste. This oil to breathe that my therapist gave me.
Speaker 1:So I guess I just keep trying. But this week, what I really wanna try is just to go to therapy. And so I wrote my script. It says at the top of the assignment for group. And so I wrote mine, and it says this.
Speaker 1:Now time is safe. Now time is safe. Memory time cannot change now time. You can stay in now time while talking about memory time. Now time is April 2019.
Speaker 1:You are not a little girl anymore. You can feel relaxed and calm. You are strong. You are safe. No one can hurt you.
Speaker 1:You are safe. You are capable of protecting yourself. The hard things to talk about in therapy are in the past, in memory time, but you are in now time. You are safe.
Speaker 2: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. We'll see you there.