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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 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 1:I made you lunch and you don't care. I made you dinner everywhere. Come to the table. I made you supper and you don't come. Are you hungry?
Speaker 1:I'm going to starve. Come to the table. Oh, my children. Oh, children.
Speaker 1:Oh, my children. Oh, my children. I tried to make you some lunch before church, and you didn't come. And now you're hungry. Come to the table. Your lunch
Speaker 3:So that may be the worst wake up call you ever had on a podcast, but it's not just so you can see how badly we sing. The point is that your kids don't care what you're trying to do for them even when you know it's best for them, like it's time to feed them. The real point is just that sometimes it's better to sing instead of scream at your kids. And when you can't get them to the table and you're trying to feed them, sometimes instead of screaming at them, it's better to just go ahead and sing and get their attention that way and keep yourself calm and keep them neutral and take all the drama out of it so that you don't even have to deal with it. So wouldn't it be nice if you could do the same thing in life with all the therapy nonsense.
Speaker 3:I'm just saying. And I get that life is not easy. Not only is life not easy, but therapy only makes it worse, you guys. Therapy is terrible. Therapy is a bad idea.
Speaker 3:Whoever invented therapy was cruel and a terrible person and it is not okay. And getting to phase two in therapy is only worse because in phase one they're like, oh, everything's okay. You're safe now. I'm gonna take care of you. And then phase two comes along and is like, what the what?
Speaker 3:Let me kick you in the pants. Oh, you're down. I'm gonna stomp on your face. Like, it's terrible. I hate it.
Speaker 3:And yes, we're supposed to keep revisiting phase one and go back to safety, safety, safety. Well, know what? Life just doesn't feel good sometimes. Let me tell you, you might think it is, but you don't know. You don't know when you're in time.
Speaker 3:You don't know where you're at. You don't know where you live. You maybe lost the last six months of the pandemic, and then, hello, I'm back. Except you don't know where you are or when you are. Right?
Speaker 3:So let me tell you about this morning. This morning, it's all dark and cold and rainy, just like fall or spring, something, I don't know, time gets blurry. But it's all cold and rainy. And so there I am pulling on my clothes. My clothes are familiar.
Speaker 3:It's in the dark like always. I run into the bed because I'm not where I think I am. Like the layout of the room is different, which should have been my first clue, but to be honest, I run into walls a lot. Okay? It's part of being disoriented sometimes.
Speaker 3:And so annoying and embarrassing, but not something that's shocking, right? So I'm still half asleep throwing on my clothes, grabbing my bag, my computer, my phone, my cochlear implant, Bluetooth thing, all the cords that go with all that extra batteries, some Chapstick, not really a makeup kind of person, but I love the Chapstick, and try to grab some notebooks, throw in some pens, and I take a backpack. Also not a purse kind of person, don't carry a purse, but I had a backpack just because of all the stuff that needed to go with me, right? Because it's therapy day and I have to go to therapy. So then I'm trying to find out where the heck am I, what is going on, where are we, I find the bullet journal, but I grab what I need, I can find my stuff somehow, but everything I need is kind of like laid out right around this chair where we always sit to read at night.
Speaker 3:And so I know at least, like, intuitively, my stuff is in the chair, grabbing my stuff, getting everything in the bag, and then try to head out of the house.
Speaker 1:Except it's not my house because we don't live here. I mean, we
Speaker 3:live here, but we've moved, everything has changed, everything is different, whatever. Freaky experience every stinking time. Right? Okay. So then I come out of the house, but it's this cold dark morning.
Speaker 3:It's raining. It's cozy. I have my sweater on over my t shirt, and I get in the car, which is tricksy to find because now the car is on the side of the house, not in front of the house, and I'm just sitting here in the car like, what the what is going on? And I'm flipping through the journal trying to get the scoop and figure out where am I in the dark. I mean the husband was there in the bed.
Speaker 3:I saw him. So I know I've not just like woke up in Europe again or something, right? Like I'm where I'm supposed to be, but the where is altogether different. So now here's always the question that comes up. Is this the real place and the right time and everything I thought was where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be, that was just my imagination?
Speaker 3:Or we time hopped again like or we time hopped again? Or is it the reverse? And where and when I was supposed to be is now messed up because we're here instead of there and I'm supposed to find our way back. Or which one is the memory time and which one is the real time? I don't know.
Speaker 3:Where is now time? I don't know. When is now time? I don't know. So I'm in my car because we have pretty much lived out of our car several times in the past.
Speaker 3:Several times we have been homeless. Several times we have had jobs where we basically lived out of our car. For all of those reasons, the car is a safe place, which in many ways is very ironic, but that's a different story for another day. And so I'm in the car, which is very grounding and orienting for the most part. I pop in a peppermint.
Speaker 3:I'm going through my bag trying to put pieces together. I find a journal and I flip through the familiar pages where we track what's going on and who we're talking to and how we're feeling about things, what we're doing to take care of ourselves, if we're eating or if we're not, how much we're sleeping, about nightmares, like all the DID kinds of things that we have to track, right? So it's in the journal and I'm flipping through trying to get to our page. Oh, and it's like, oh, look at this. I remember when that was our therapist and that was our therapist and that was our therapist.
Speaker 3:Our therapist kept changing. We went through so many therapists. It's so annoying and exhausting. But then, so I'm trying to find where we are and I get to March. I get to March 2020 and it's all about getting ready for the ISSTD conference.
Speaker 3:It's all about getting ready for the award that we were getting for the podcast. It's all about all of these things. Turn the page, bam, coronavirus it says, and there's a big old picture of the coronavirus, and then there's a little drawing of somebody with a mask on, and like, that's it. It is blank. There is nothing else in the journal and I look at my phone and it's freaking September.
Speaker 3:What the what? What has happened to the last six months And what am I supposed to do about it? And why is it always me that has to clean it up? I am sorry for the loud singing and shouting on your podcast today. What am I supposed
Speaker 1:to
Speaker 3:do? This is my life. And it feels like a morning we would be going to the therapist in Oklahoma. Like on our long four hour drive from Kansas City to Oklahoma, that's the kind of morning it feels like. And so I could at least get motivated to like get in the car and go and go deal with this and that's what it feels like I'm doing, except I'm not because we don't have her anymore because we messed that up.
Speaker 3:And so here I am on my own trying to figure out pieces and what to do. Right? So I'm going through my phone. I'm trying to read messages. There's not a lot there, and there's, like, nothing in the messages inbox.
Speaker 3:Like, we're not talking to anybody, and we're not keeping any threads. So there's nothing there. So I try to go through the email, but I can't get the email to work. Why won't the email work? I don't know yet because my life is a puzzle.
Speaker 3:So what am I supposed to do trying to put things together? And so finally I think, oh, our watch. Our watch keeps messages of everything by default. And so I can find more information there that was deleted on the phone, but was not deleted on the watch. So I get all kinds of information there from text with a husband over the last week.
Speaker 3:So basically, through all of this and emails I can get on my watch that I can't get from my phone not working, I find out several things. Number one, we have a new therapist. Her name is Beth. That's the therapist of the day. So from now on, we can just talk about Beth.
Speaker 3:Because we called the therapist the therapist for so long, even that word is triggering. Like, everything has been disrupted and everything has changed. But all of that's our own fault and I get it. That's part of the pressure. And number two, I find out where we are which is back in freaking Oklahoma.
Speaker 3:We have moved to Oklahoma sometime this summer and this is where we live now, which is both awesome and the worst thing in the world all at the same time. And I can't even talk about that right now. And then third, I find out, like all of the problems happening like that we don't have internet here, that we don't have good cell coverage here, but that right now because of the pandemic and something about the mail being messed up, our bills that we paid have not gotten to where they're going. And so because we have paid them, they just haven't arrived yet because we pay them through bank check, through the mail, like we just get online and pay our bills on the bank site and the bank mails the checks. Because they haven't gotten there yet, we don't have any utilities.
Speaker 3:So on my watch I learned that we have water which I knew because I brushed my teeth this morning. But it's not just dark because it's four in the morning. It's dark because we don't have any electricity, and we haven't had electricity for four days. So thank you, pandemic, which is what brings me back to the sing song with the children because do you know what it's like to do laundry for eight people without electricity? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm pretty much living in the Wild West. I'm gonna be a pioneer with my own children out here in the country where think I'm going to my car to go to therapy where is the only safe place in place or time but no that therapy has been stolen from me by myself because we messed it up and instead of like finding myself safe in therapy, I find myself face to face with an armadillo digging a hole in the rose garden that I didn't even know I had. This is my life, you guys. I can't even. What?
Speaker 3:I don't even have a response to any of this anymore. So in one of the journals, I find an outline. I find an outline that should have been in our journal if they knew what they were doing, but at least it was written down somewhere. And I find in this notebook a list of all the things that have happened like our friend's friend died and we have this other friend and she's important because of this and this and this. Because having DID means you have to write your own talking points to yourself.
Speaker 3:If you want to have a friend, here are the things we need to be talking about and you need to follow-up on and you need to check on because how are you gonna remember if you don't? And if you don't, you're not gonna be taking care of that good friend. And so if having these good friends in your life is part of what you need for survival, then having a plan for survival of the friendship becomes part of the deal. When did this become my life? This has always been my life.
Speaker 3:And this is where we live and here's what's going on and what's happening with the children and we have to homeschool homeschooling them since March and where we have to go to pick up boxes of food and where we have to go to pick up school lunches and breakfast for the children, like clearly this is not a pleasant time happening and yet we're enduring because that's what we do. Like it literally says on my arm, she who endures. I have that tattoo. You guys, when you go get a tattoo, you need to be very careful what you choose as your tattoo because that is the tattoo I got. Mine says she who endures.
Speaker 3:Who chooses that for their tattoo? What is wrong with me? I should have picked she who is wealthy or she who has friends who give a fly and flick about her. She who is safe would have been nice or she who lives in one house for a long time would have been nice. That would be great.
Speaker 3:Let's try that. It's time for a new tattoo, guys. I'm over this endurance stuff. And every time I'm in this car and it's like one of those mornings where we would be driving to therapy, only it's not, it's like yanking the scab off, pulling out all my guts like entrails back in the old days. Right?
Speaker 3:I have been quartered. Like, no. It is the worst feeling. Except it's not the worst feeling because the only thing that could be worse is actually being there and realizing you're in the process of destroying therapy and that therapy is already over, but you're still sitting in the office. And so I'm glad we're not still sitting in the office.
Speaker 3:So we've made progress at least to have gotten ourselves out of there because that was a really long year. But it was our fault for messing it up and so now we have this new therapist Beth and I see the notes about what we've talked about so far and what we've not talked about and what's coming up and the biggest source of information, the podcast. Thank you self for doing a podcast so that when you wake up six months later, you can listen to what's been happening or at least listen to yourself talk around what's been happening so that I can almost at least find out where I'm supposed to be investigating because everything else is missing. So let's fill in some holes and make sure the whole world knows how entirely flipping crazy you are. Good job, cupcake.
Speaker 3:And then on my phone, when I look at the calendar of trying to figure out where we're supposed to be or what's supposed to be going on. We're supposed to be helping with an ISSTD conference in two days. I don't know what we're supposed to be doing or not doing. And if we don't have Internet and we don't have electricity, how am I supposed to do that? But I did figure out that's why I'm in my car at three in the morning because I'm supposed to go find a McDonald's to sit in the parking lot and use the Wi Fi to email before they flip out that we're not working right.
Speaker 3:I don't mean any of that for feeling helpless or not trying. I'm just saying, why does my life have to be so hard? Why can't I do anything the easy way? And then the English teacher, the entire series of the English teacher, oh my goodness. I have been listening to that for three and a half hours, and I cannot believe all of that is going up on the podcast.
Speaker 3:But there you go. Welcome to phase two. These are memories, except we're not gonna put all the detailed memories on the podcast because that was the agreement from the beginning. But what I see on the podcast and what I see in the therapy notes is that we're starting to form this outline, that we're starting to fill in the timeline. This happened and then this happened and this happened.
Speaker 3:And the English teacher, we have known since eighth grade. So the stuff that we're sharing about how hard it was our entire adolescence and young adulthood and how messed up that stuff was, all I have to say about that besides, thanks for a whole lot of disclosure out into the universe. How has that ever gone wrong? Just kidding. That's terrifying.
Speaker 3:But can I just point out that that's only since eighth grade? So if you wanna talk about like the first thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, I don't know, how old are you in eighth grade? Like, you wanna talk about the first fourteen years before eighth grade and how messed up those years had to be so that we were in that position at eighth grade and how hard and terrible things were, like, I can't even. We're not gonna do those details on the podcast by the way. Like there's no appropriate way to share those pieces and even though we have this outline now for some of our memory work of phase two stuff like it talks about in the notebooks, it's still my podcast and we're still not gonna trauma dump other than sharing those experiences because that was one person we could interview about it.
Speaker 3:But even then, like she talked about the brother very specifically, I'm not gonna talk about other siblings, but the brother very specifically denies all of it and says none of that happened. But he also remembers nothing before getting married at 16. And so I feel like that's called dissociation if you don't remember your childhood. But also we protected him from a lot of things. So of course his perspective is different and I totally respect that he disagrees with us on all of that.
Speaker 3:And it's obviously a very sensitive thing and we have come to agree to disagree, which means that I agree that he is right despite what I know and feel in myself. Because gaslighting is a thing that you do in dysfunctional families. It's great. It's awesome. It's just what happens.
Speaker 3:You're wrong. Whatever you think, guys. You're just wrong. No. I don't wanna dig into that and I don't wanna talk about family members because I don't want to open myself up to that.
Speaker 3:I don't want to make the podcast about that. I'm just acknowledging that on days like that, when that's what you're getting from the outside, because those people in your family are obviously the only other people you have known your entire life unless you had the fortunate or unfortunate experience of living in the same place your whole life. We move so much, we don't have a lot of continuity that way. And the people we do have history with, they don't remember because we were just in and out so fast. So for to us it's significant and to them we're just like one of a thousand people that don't matter, right, that just came in and out.
Speaker 3:Which feels super incongruent and is part of the confusion of, okay, maybe I didn't make all this up. Maybe I don't even really have DID. Maybe DID doesn't even really exist. Maybe I'm not even here. Maybe this right now even is just a bad dream and not even real.
Speaker 3:I don't know what's real. Everything I thought was real is taken away. You guys, this is part of dissociation. That snowball in my head causing an avalanche every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. That escalates in my head so fast that it's very hard to regulate.
Speaker 3:It's very hard to remember the things that I've learned, and it's very hard to tell what is real and what's not real. Everything that I thought was now time is safe just totally turned out to be an illusion like the footprints episode, which is why we shared that. I read that in the journal. See how smart I am? So footprints episode, one of the things you have to listen to if you've not listened to because that's exactly what therapy felt like.
Speaker 3:I thought it meant all of these things and it was really just an illusion and a misunderstanding and it wasn't real at all. And I think that's why everything broke down last spring. That's what I'm putting together. That's what I'm trying to put into words. And it cost us six months of time of progress, but really even longer than that because it started a whole year before that.
Speaker 3:So it has been almost two years. This is September. We are weeks away from the anniversary, weeks, weeks away from the anniversary of when we left the therapist in Oklahoma. And we knew almost a year before that we tried to leave. And we tried to warn her we were leaving and we tried to say it because it's so hard to talk in therapy that it's really hard to say things like that.
Speaker 3:And we tried to say goodbye. Littles tried to say goodbye. Different ones tried to say goodbye because we knew it was happening, but we already knew. In fact, if you go all the way back to the Emma's top 10 episode, that's part of why we did that episode. That was supposed to be like a goodbye.
Speaker 3:Let's make it positive and healthy. These are all the good things that we're gonna take away from therapy, all the good that it did. We're gonna keep these things and move forward instead of continuing to put ourselves in this situation because then it feels like the trigger becomes like a domestic violence. Like, I just keep going back for more, and I just keep asking only to be slapped back into reality again. And, like, let's just keep acting that out over and over again every week.
Speaker 3:I think this is what it means. This is what I wanna feel. This is what I wanna get out of this. And I go and I realize, oh, that's not actually what's happening. It's an illusion and it's this and that.
Speaker 3:And like, these are the things I was reading in the notebook and I'm like, what is going on? And how did she how did we have this part feeling all these things and we didn't know how to fix it or stop it sooner? How do we mess up our own stuff, sabotage our own health? Or were they right all along? Was she right all along and it was not good for us and these are really the reasons why and that's why we had to leave?
Speaker 3:And if so, why did it take us a whole year to do it? So now that means it's been two years since she knew and figured out that it was not really a safe place for us to be or a good place for us to be, made that decision, and it cost us two years of our life, which I think is significant and part of what she was upset about. Because all the time it took for us to figure this out and make this happen in a way we could get away with it, because you can't just up and disappear from therapy, and you can't just say threatening things and get out of like, you have to do if you're gonna leave therapy, you have to do it safely. Whether that's safely for the therapist or safely for you or safely for your treatment or safely for your team. Whatever reason, whether it's because it's just time to move on or whether something's happened or whether something's gone terribly wrong.
Speaker 3:Like, anytime I think maybe that's just our trigger trauma thing is, like, you have to have an escape route. And you have to have an escape route that will cause the least amount of damage and get you out safely without being committed or having consequences for telling the truth or for talking about what they can't even see yet or understand yet, but that you can see so clearly and has just destroyed everything. And no wonder it was so hard on us and no wonder it was so traumatizing for us. And putting those pieces together with what the English teacher shared, with what happened in high school that we remembered like in the Footprint episode, is what connected the pattern so that now when I read it in the journal and listen to those episodes, I can see the pattern of us enduring this over and over again where this keeps happening. And how on earth to get ourselves out of repeating this process so that it keeps happening to us because it's not okay and it's so painful and it's so awful that other than avoiding people altogether, how do you get through this or how do you interact with people or how do you find safe people who are also healthy and who will also do what they say, who will also be present with you, who will choose you back and keep you taken care of?
Speaker 3:Like, don't even know what's real anymore. Between what I read in the notebook, what I heard on the podcast, what I found in these notes, the emails of therapy, the messages I tried to sort out, like, with all this information, I feel like we have spent these early morning pre dawn no electricity hours putting pieces together from not just the last six months and not even just the last two years when Courtney was all upset about this, but also literally the last thirty years of this has happened over and over and over again and why. And like it said on the podcast, if we're the common denominator, then how the heck do we make it stop? And is anything even real at all? I feel like we have either made a huge breakthrough of just accepting life as it is and what our role in life is of how people are going to treat us and what we can have and what we cannot have in relationships, or we have totally regressed back to the beginning with more reinforcement of why everything is re traumatizing and none of that was healing at all.
Speaker 3:Like it feels like a huge place where we're either gonna get our act together or we're gonna fall apart. And I think that's why the internal response and protection system was so strong, which makes perfect sense. So how do you navigate that? How do you turn what is so hard and so frustrating and so overwhelming and so exhausting into a little sing song? Not to what did they say on the podcast?
Speaker 3:The toxic positivity? Oh my gosh. That was awesome. But not I don't mean fake it till you make it, and I don't mean not being real about how hard things are. I mean, how do you get yourself through it when they are that hard?
Speaker 3:Plus a pandemic. The what is this going on? And it looks like from what I can tell, most people think the pandemic is over. Like they're not worried about it anymore. Everyone's just going around talking to people, meeting with people, hanging out with people, doing their events, whatever.
Speaker 3:And we're like, we're still in the house with masks. Like, we're the people left over after the nuclear fallout and we're still in our bunker and everyone else has restarted their lives with new whatever and we're just like, yeah, we're not coming out. We're still in quarantine. What is wrong with you people? Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3:And if you're somebody if you're somebody who doesn't know how to take this seriously on an external temporal level when things really are not safe, then I no longer believe anything you have to say. Then I no longer believe anything you have to say about internal safety or about that you have any idea how to tell when something is safe or not safe. Because let me tell you, I don't care what your politics are, a pandemic is not safe you guys. So if you don't know how to live in a not safe world, suddenly I'm the expert and you are clueless and I have nothing to gain from you. Like you are not any help to me at all.
Speaker 3:So everything is flip flop. So how's that for a trigger? So the rug is pulled out in every single way. I don't even know what's going on. I barely found my car.
Speaker 3:Stupid armadillo. You guys, I was not mean to the armadillo. It just scared me to death. Okay. But let me tell you, it's just like in therapy.
Speaker 3:I scared that armadillo just as much as it scared No. Oh my goodness, you guys. But for real, that's exactly what phase two is like. Phase two is like, oh, you think your memories are bad now? You think your flashbacks are bad now?
Speaker 3:Well guess what? They're not just dreams. They don't just go away. This really was your life and so now you get to remember that and just hold on to that and feel that. It's terrible.
Speaker 3:It's terrible. It's worse. Like why would you do this to yourself on purpose? There's a reason you dissociate, you guys. Why did we work so hard to know all this stuff that our brains had already known we were supposed to forget?
Speaker 3:There's a reason. Our brains were like, no, we're just gonna wall this up.
Speaker 1:Why would you it's like
Speaker 3:going fishing for a shark. Like what are you thinking? What is wrong with you? Why are you in therapy doing this on purpose? What kind of self depreciating masochist are you doing this to yourself on purpose?
Speaker 3:Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. But here's the thing, if there's anything that dissociative people know how to do, it's how to hunker down in a crisis. And that's what you do in Oklahoma when there's a tornado, you hunker down. It means like take cover and stay put until the storm blows over.
Speaker 3:So if I don't know what's happening or how to solve it or what exactly went wrong, then we stay put and we don't move until we know what is the safe move. Also let's stop moving but that's not what I'm talking about. But we can't just hide if we also want to get better. That's the difference. In the past we had to hunker down because we were in danger and that's why walls went up because it was not safe.
Speaker 3:But if the whole point of what we have learned in therapy is that we are able to keep ourselves safe now as an adult, then hunkering down looks different when you're a grown up than when you're a child. When you're a child, the goal is to stay alive. When you're an adult, the goal is still to stay But also how to solve the problems and figure out what's going on and how to care for yourself. You don't have to wait on someone else to do it. So yeah, it hurts if nobody is, and yeah, it hurts if nobody has, and yes it hurts when nobody has stayed or chosen you back or done what you needed to be cared for and nurtured.
Speaker 3:That's okay to acknowledge all of that pain, but it's also okay to say I can do this myself and I'm a grown up now, I know how to keep myself safe and how to take care of business. So what you do is sing your song, come to the table, you bring all of your people together, you put all the pieces on the table and say, Okay, what I thought was you sabotaging therapy was actually really important information and I'm sorry I didn't listen to you sooner. Because you were right, even you were right when you noticed this and this and this and saw those as red flags that something wasn't right or something wasn't the way we understood it. And therapy won't work if you're not all on the same page whether you're talking about you and your therapist or you inside. And sometimes those people who are not cooperating in therapy are because they have important information you need to stop and listen to.
Speaker 3:Even if you can process it differently or interpret that information differently, it's still important information and that part of you is still an important part of you and you will do better to listen to them early and process what it is they're picking up and figure out what those pieces are and put those pieces on the table and look at them honestly even when it's hard to see what you see and know what you know. It's important and critical work no matter what phase of therapy you're in that over and over and over again you are listening and including all the parts of yourself. All the parts of who you are matter and all of the parts of you have important insights that belong at the table. But this is absolutely critical because this is part of your truth and you can't learn to trust yourself until you actually have all of the information from all of the parts of you. Then you can learn how to discern what is what and how to sort through it, but that's a different task.
Speaker 3:You can't do the sorting through until you have all of the pieces. And you can't get all of the pieces if you're not listening to yourself. I have always hated the image that therapists use about a board meeting room and having a big table where all the parson come and talk together. I hate that because it's such a manly, white, rich, corporate image. Like it's not real life for most of us.
Speaker 3:But adapting that image creatively, whether internally or in your imagination or with EMDR or whatever, to make that look like what it needs to look like to you or what is familiar to you, like us singing a song trying to herd cats to get all the children at the table for lunchtime. Like we have to come together and work together and you can figure out what that looks like for you and you can design that space to what is comfortable and safe for you, but we as a team, as one system, as a group sharing the body are not going to make progress until we're working together. And sometimes it takes you six months to stop and listen to something that one part of you has been trying to tell you for two years. And sometimes you have to take the time to stop and say, okay, what you've been saying for two years was actually more important than I realized and I'm sorry. So even though it's painful, let's look at this piece and see what we need to do with it and what comfort and care we need to bring to it and how does that transform what all of us together are experiencing as opposed to just making one part of you the bad one or the rebellious one or the one causing problems or the one not cooperating.
Speaker 3:Maybe you're the one not cooperating with them and that's why it feels so uncooperative. I'm just saying as someone who is really great at not cooperating, I'm just saying, right? We need to all come to the table. You can make your table whatever you want to make it look like. You can design your chair to be different than someone else's chair.
Speaker 3:You can have your seat look whatever. You can have as much space around you as you want, but you all need to come to the table if what you want to feast on is healing. If what you want to feed on is comfort, if the nurture you need is having your needs met, then you've got to come to the table. That's all I have to say this cold and rainy morning.
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.systemspeed.com. We'll see you there.