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Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Over: Welcome to the System Speak 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
Speaker 2:we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care
Speaker 1:for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you. I know that this is not trauma and dissociation specific, but it is part of my own trauma story, and we've been trying to talk about it for over a year. We've been living it for two decades, three, four even. That's a long time.
Speaker 1:And while I know some people would like for us to stop talking about it, We need some place to land to move forward. And not talking about it at all is dissociation. And so it's important that we do talk about it. That I learn to tell my own story, that I find words, that I find the ovaries to express myself directly, the ways that I want to, not just in words, but in presentation and confidence in my own healing. So one last episode for now about sexuality for me.
Speaker 1:My apologies to Kim, who will be laughing and rolling her eyes, but also holding me safe. From a thousand miles away, but a friendship forged over almost a decade now. And I am grateful for her and for others who have listened to me, who have been there, who have stayed through the hard questions while I looked for me again. And also for those who, like my friend Peter, have continued to be kind and supportive of the husband who has been nothing but good and kind to us and who has always been a best friend. You know him from the podcast even if you've not met him in person yet.
Speaker 1:He is who he is all the time. It's one of the things I admire about him. He's no different in real life than on the podcast. I want to be me all the time, but that includes knowing who I am and being all of me. When I was about in fifth grade, aunts and uncles, even my parents, sometimes grandparents, started asking me about boys.
Speaker 1:It made me uncomfortable, not because I didn't wanna talk, but also because it was unexpected, this sudden interest in me and my own sexual development that I didn't yet understand. This is complicated, of course, by trauma. And when my mother was divorcing my dad, She asked me questions about him. Attorneys asked me questions about him, and I have been blamed for it ever since, for talking, for telling stories, for being uncomfortable. But the discomfort also was because when suddenly they are paying attention and asking what at the time felt like grown up questions, I wanted to have answers.
Speaker 1:I had older cousins, and they were dating, which I thought was awkward and uncomfortable. And I knew I was not as old as them. And to me, it felt dangerous, not fun. I was afraid. And the idea that the older I got, the more these things would happen to me terrified me.
Speaker 1:I was scared, not just anxious and full of angst, as all of us are in development, but trauma scared. I could not imagine what was yet to happen to me or that it could be worse than what had already happened to me, and I could not imagine wanting it. I think that maybe was the culmination of the dissociation from my own body. But I also couldn't answer their questions about which boys were cute or which boy I liked because I hadn't noticed any boys. I hadn't noticed any boys because I couldn't stop staring at the girl who sat three seats away from me.
Speaker 1:I was relieved when our teacher changed our desks from sitting in a square to rows so that I didn't have to see her every day because I couldn't stop looking. And the rush of warm that I felt when I saw her or when she talked to me was something I didn't know what to do with. No one gave me words then for gay. And back then, queer was still a slur. It was one more reason to feel shame.
Speaker 1:It was one more reason to stay quiet. It was one more reason not to talk to anyone. Don't talk to boys because they would hurt you. Don't talk to girls because I don't know what that feeling is. Don't talk to anyone.
Speaker 1:That's how I felt. That lasted until eighth grade. When we were homeless for a season and lived in a hotel for a season, paid for by the VA where my mother worked In what was the beginning of my years with no parents, my father a thousand miles away, my parents divorced, and my mother working until long past bedtime. In ways I now understand myself as I struggle to feed my own children. And so we were on our own, and I was thrown into my first junior high.
Speaker 1:And there was a boy on the bus who did things with a girl on the bus in the back. And I tried not to sit close to them so that I would not see them. But they weren't hiding much, and I felt sick to know what I knew that they were doing back there. I felt ashamed, not judging them for maybe what for anyone else would be normal and consensual. But for me, it felt like trauma.
Speaker 1:And it was too much. And I did not want to grow up into that. He got mad at her once because she wouldn't do something he wanted to do. I don't know the details of that now, and none of it has to do with me except that when she wouldn't, he came after me. He lived in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1:I wanted to protect her somehow, not understanding that I cared more about her than him. And so I let him come to my house and sit on the porch and talk to me and tell me things and ask me for things only for a summer, the summer before high school. She lived further away. No one yet had cars. And when school started again and I also had denied him anything he wanted, when what he wanted was to touch the body that I was trying to pretend did not exist.
Speaker 1:And then he once again had access to the other girl, and so he no longer needed me. I realized that's all it had been about, the attention, was what made him feel good and that nothing he had said had been true or real. And I felt tricked. And because of other triggers that I don't want to talk about right now, because boundaries. I knew that I could not save her, and I knew that I wanted away from him.
Speaker 1:And so I started walking instead of riding the bus. And I did not date again in junior high school or high school. I never had the fun experience of someone choosing me for me or coming to pick me up or asking me to the dance or bringing me flowers or going to prom. I didn't do any of those things. And it is strange watching my children now in eighth grade, the triplets, doing those things safely, carefully, and having fun at church dances, talking to girls on the bus but not touching them, being kind and sweet, writing poems, drawing pictures, sending tender messages for little hearts, sometimes with little hearts.
Speaker 1:And it's adorable and strangely normal and okay because it's nothing like what I experienced. Thinking that moving a thousand miles away and living with only my mother, that those days of trauma might be over until other things happened from other people and realizing that it might never be over. That's how I felt. I only studied in high school. I did what I was supposed to do.
Speaker 1:I worked, but I did not learn how to date. I did not learn how to drive. There were pieces of adolescence that we skipped, partly because of trauma and partly because there was no one there to teach us. There was no one there to help us. There were always people to abuse us.
Speaker 1:I didn't know things about consent. I didn't know things about safety. I didn't know that I could keep my body safe away from other people, not just dissociating it from myself. And things like my mother moving in, a scary man who looked at me and drooled in grotesque and character type ways to not make me interested in dating. It was revolting, and I had zero interest in dating.
Speaker 1:I knew that he would rape me if I did not leave home. And so I ran away. I ran away to save my own life. My aunt, my mother's sister, says she tried to get us away, tried to foster us then. And maybe that would have changed things.
Speaker 1:Maybe that would have given me enough parenting to be acceptable to my family. Maybe I was too far gone by then. I don't know the answers, but as it turned out, as you know, we landed at a religious college where women were only there to be paraded, to get married, the MRS degree, missus. You know, that's the joke. Except that it's true.
Speaker 1:But it is not what I wanted. And I could not learn about dating while locked in my room, not just studying, but because of all the other family drama going on at the time, because of getting diagnosed at the time. Because of all that was happening at the time. And so I only had my two girlfriends, the ones who have come on the podcast. They were not girlfriends like dating.
Speaker 1:We never dated. We were only friends, both of them and me. But they were safe, and I had not had much of that. But when I landed from there with a therapist who moved us in in a world of liberal Catholics because she took me to book groups, hosted book groups in her home that I listened to from far away because I was scared of people by then already still. But I read the books.
Speaker 1:It's how I found the wolf's book, actually. And it opened up worlds to me, understanding other peoples, places, cultures. I think it's why we left the country because the people in our world had not told us the truth. The people in our world had not shown us the truth, and we needed to see it and experience it. And traveling taught us so much about the world, about other people, about places that are not white America, about places where people look different than me, talk different than me, think different from me, and are often more right than me or write differently than me.
Speaker 1:And the world showed me other people and languages and cultures and ways of thinking and cooking and doing and loving. I'm in Australia. Still one of my favorite places. There was a girl that looked like that girl in fifth grade. And I think I loved her as much as a young adult can love in the very, very beginning while learning what love even is.
Speaker 1:And her death by suicide because of getting outed was devastating. When I came back to The States, I tried to come out to my family. I write about pieces of this in the memoir. It did not go well. My family did not accept me.
Speaker 1:They mocked me. They yelled at me. They already thought I was strange. They already thought I was wrong. They already knew I was bad, and I already knew their shame.
Speaker 1:So what was there to lose? And so somewhere between college and graduate school, I came out to my biological family and told them I was gay. It did not go well. I tried dating in that rural America town, and my first girlfriend turned out to be the little sister of my aunt's friend. And so that did not last long, though it lasted long enough for her to steal my mother's Xbox.
Speaker 1:But it's okay. I was the bad one. And and when I got my last pair of hearing aids and found a church where some people knew sign language and turned my voice off so that they would learn sign language, which is how it's done in deaf culture. My family told them I was lying and told them that I had dated that girl. And the lady who had been kind to me with sign language from church told her gossip girl who owned the shop in town, who told everyone that I was gay, and so I was outed in that town and lost my job.
Speaker 1:And the gossip spread enough that the lady who was renting a house to me and my roommate, who was only a roommate, I never dated her. But she kicked us out of our house. We were evicted because I was outed. And it's the girl in that town who stole my mother's Xbox, of all things, is that she's the one who said that I was too girly to be butch, but too ugly to be femme. And that was my experience of trying to come out and being rejected by my family, losing my girlfriend to suicide, losing my job, and losing my housing.
Speaker 1:And so I learned again that the world is not safe and that sexuality is not something you talk about and that I am very, very wrong and that I am very, very bad. And so I did not date anyone for a decade, almost two. There are other stories in there like that that are not uncommon for those of us who are queer or who have asked or who have had questions or who have been traumatized. The husband told me this week, and I have permission to share this, that they talked in his therapy about how he missed his entire adolescent development, somehow going straight to adulthood from somewhere in fifth or sixth grade. For all kinds of reasons.
Speaker 1:And he can share about that someday, but it is not uncommon for those of us with trauma to have missed or disrupted adolescents. And so it makes sense those of us with trauma and dissociation struggle with these questions even if they're not queer questions and struggle with sexuality or development or identity, whatever that means to you. I know I am not the only one here, which is why I have to talk about it. It's also why I thought it was safe. When my ballroom dance teachers told me about a church where people didn't drink, which to me sounded like where people won't beat you up, and a church where they help you be good by learning how to keep promises, which mattered to me when no one had kept their promises, and where they had a place that if you weren't a member, you couldn't go inside, which meant if I was a member, they couldn't get to me.
Speaker 1:And so it made sense for me to join the church. And I had a faith that needed certain things that I also found there. And so, yes, I know on this side of things, it sounds crazy. Why are you even in that church? Why are you even trying church?
Speaker 1:That's why. That is my story. It made sense to me. It felt good and right and different than anything else I had experienced, and so it made sense to me. And when my parents died and I was desperate, And at the time, I was working a job and fighting for accommodations because I did not yet have cochlear implants, and I needed an interpreter at our office meetings, and the agency I was working for would not give them to me, and I had to fight them for it.
Speaker 1:But that meant, that meant they resented me and the money it costs to pay for the interpreter. And so I needed a job where I could be safe, but also do what I was there to do. And so I started working for the counseling services for the church because I was not safe in my other job. And I know this because my boss once accidentally texted me something he was trying to send to the other clinical director about how much work I am, so could they please handle my text messages? What he didn't know is that I already knew I was too much and that I already carried shame and that all I needed to know was that he wasn't safe.
Speaker 1:And so I resigned and never went back there to work again, even though I had fought so hard for an interpreter. This is why it's not always safe to fight for your rights. You have to be careful because there are always implications no matter what the law is. And no, it shouldn't be like that. But yes, sometimes it is.
Speaker 1:You can't come out just because it's coming out day, whether that's queerness, whether that's DID. You have to be safe first. That's always most important. And so when my boss says, I have a cousin who's single, maybe you should date him. How do I know if that's funny?
Speaker 1:How do I know if that's neutral? How do I know that I won't be fired if I don't accept the date? And that's how I met my husband, which is not his fault at all. And he has been good and kind, and I have nothing bad to say about him. And I will not.
Speaker 1:Because he has been safe and taught me that, and I want to offer him the same. And I'm not bi. I've never been bi. That's just the circumstances I was in to get married. It's the way my life unfolded, and I am still grateful that the husband has always been so safe and good and kind.
Speaker 1:But my story is not limited to him. My story is all of me and the whole timeline. And having access to all of that, all of the rest of me means it's me I'm adding back in. It feels scary, not just in a coming out way, but in the seasons and times and politics of today. The world does not always feel like a safe place.
Speaker 1:The world rarely feels like a safe place. So how do we find ways to be brave, to heal, but also be wise? That's why we got to ten years later, my therapist asking the question, when are we going to talk about you and your husband are both gay? And what are we going to do about it? Which is what led to playground fences discussions?
Speaker 1:Which is what led to adding? Which is what led to how do we care for ourselves by adding the good, not just preventing harm. Which is what led to seasons, which is what led to the year of sorting through religious and sexuality trauma, not just sexual abuse, but all these other layers too. It's critical work. We have to do it.
Speaker 1:But it's also that important. So even when what we wanna talk about is trauma and dissociation, for us, this has been trauma that we have dissociated from. And when we have tried to be ourselves, people have dissociated from us. And those betrayals have been more trauma. What we have already learned this year is that the fundamentals of what we need, what all of us need, what all humans need, is connection and protection.
Speaker 1:And when some of these high risk vulnerable places or areas of our lives are not getting that, It is more trauma for all of us. And when there is intersection like disability and sexuality and developmental trauma and religious trauma or whatever your intersectionality looks like. Those are really hard pieces, and they have really deep layers, consequences that impact who we become and who we are becoming. Because those are parts of us, even if they're not parts of us. Or sometimes more than one part of us, even if what we say now is self state.
Speaker 1:I cannot heal if I say, in my life, these self states are the only acceptable ones. Because that is to betray myself. Those betrayals already happen outside of me. I don't just mean in the main society and everywhere else is okay because that's not true either. I am a person of faith and have wrestled hard to figure out what that means exactly for me and how I want to honor and express that.
Speaker 1:And it is sometimes difficult in the queer community to be a person of faith. The same as, it is difficult to be queer in a faith community sometimes. I know that there are safe places, and I know that there are ways to navigate that, but this is how I navigate it. And that's why I've had to talk about it the last year to sort it out for myself, because I have a faith that I have chosen and I have developed and I have nurtured. I have a faith tradition that the husband has grown up in and that the children are growing up in, and that matters to me.
Speaker 1:So what does it look like to be me in that context? What does it look like to be me with the background of my experiences from college now in this community. This is part of why chaplaincy was so attractive for us, I think, for Molly. Because becoming a chaplain is never about forcing someone or about proselytizing or about making someone think what you think or believe what you believe. Being a chaplain isn't about a specific church at all.
Speaker 1:Being a chaplain means being available and open and safe to people of all faiths and people of no faith in ways and experiences and stories and life events that are beyond just mortality, but also everything mortal. And so that made sense to me. Finding these podcasts the last year, which we linked to in the seasons episodes, the new seasons episodes, we put those links in there because the ones we found for us have changed our lives and helped us do the work of navigating this so that I'm not giving up or giving up on any part of me but moving forward with all of me so that when I say that I am queer and have always been queer, it does not mean I don't love God or that God does not love me. When I say I have found a way to add what was missing in my life in ways that nurture me, it does not mean I am abandoning my outside children. It does not mean I am abandoning my family.
Speaker 1:My choices are my responsibility. And finding ways to honor all of these parts of me and to meet my own needs is actually a very mature and integrated and wholesome thing that I was supposed to learn decades ago. So maybe I'm late to the conversation. Maybe I am delayed in development. But you know what?
Speaker 1:I'm doing it now, and I'm learning now, and I'm growing now. And now nothing is missing from my life. 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.
Speaker 1:And healing brings hope.