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Our guest is Elizabeth Power, who shares her story of dissociation in response to medical trauma (sans perpetrator), and how she has used her experiences to help others. We discuss shame, honoring hard feelings, and the authenticity of doing depth work to acknowledge pain and stay present with it so that it can be tended to and cared for well. We talk about boundaries, betrayals, and how owning our big feelings gives us the power to choose our responses.
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.
Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org. And there is a button for donations where you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. We so appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are all learning together.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Nashville based Elizabeth Power is a subject matter expert on trauma informed change, resilience, and alignment work with individuals and organizations. She's also an adjunct instructor in psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center. She's graced the cover of Successful Meetings magazine talking about change, guested on the Montell Williams and Faith Daniels Show Talking About Multiple Personality, and Social Work magazine Talking About Trauma. Her client list includes General Motors, the National Center for PTSD, JD Power and Associates, and many more.
Speaker 1:Powers' work synthesizes sociology, education, psychology, and more. She is a fresh and funny voice in this world. Welcome, Elizabeth Power.
Speaker 2:Hey, let me get doing my hair. Isn't this what we always do first on Zoom is check our hair?
Speaker 1:He's so funny. Are there any questions you have or anything that you need before we start?
Speaker 2:No. But you might want to know if you don't already. I'm looking at two awards from the ISSTD on my wall.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's exciting.
Speaker 2:I didn't realize who you were until I went out and dug around a bit, and it's nice to meet you.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're digging around on me. I'm glad you
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you dig around on me, Annie? You shoulda.
Speaker 1:I I saw you at Healing Together and it was amazing.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess before before I just give everything away, let's go ahead and start. If you will introduce yourself a little bit, then the listeners can get oriented to the sound of your voice.
Speaker 2:Perfect. And I'd be delighted to do that. I'm Elizabeth Power, and across the years, I've done a lot of different things. Everything from repairing shoes, including Oprah Winfrey's shoes, to working to help the nation of Japan create and and conceptualize their model of trauma informed care. Right now, I am an adjunct instructor in psychiatry at Georgetown.
Speaker 2:I'm the founder of the Trauma Informed Academy. And generally speaking, I'm pretty wild around the edges in terms of thinking out of the box. Who said there had to be a box and making sense of things?
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining us today. I saw you at Healing Together, and I laughed the entire time. It was so rich. Like, there was depth to it. It wasn't just silly, but the humor was legitimate, and it was eye opening and fun, but also we were covering pretty serious topics.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. And and that is what I believe to be true. I remember when I was working on my own, was trundling along on my own journey with dissociative disorders and everything was so serious. Everybody had to be so serious about everything.
Speaker 2:I'm going, no. Wait a minute. Let's see where we where we can actually enjoy some of this ride. None of us volunteered to go on it that I know of, but we might as well figure out how to have some good times with it. And there are some things that are terribly funny along the way in the process of mastering the impact of traumatic experiences, figuring out how to make sense of things that don't make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you. I'm very honored.
Speaker 1:How did you start your own journey of learning about trauma and dissociation?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's so easy. I grew up with physical disabilities that are invisible and I grew up in an environment that was highly traumatizing, but not in the way we think about it. I wanna be real clear. It was ordinary stuff. Back in the fifties, people moved a lot because of work.
Speaker 2:We did too. And I was just an infant when that happened. My father died of cancer when I was two and a half. There's no perpetrator there. The physical disabilities, dislocation of all major joints showed up early on.
Speaker 2:So I had a lot of things that we might that people might look at and say, well, that's no big deal or it's a big deal but not that big a deal. My godmother tells me that I was dissociating by the time I was two and a half. And you of all people know that that's one of the most earliest, most primitive defense mechanisms we've got. And if it works well when you use it, well, gee, you just keep going. And so back in when I went to college and realized I just didn't fit in with anybody.
Speaker 2:I'd come from a conservatory at a school a school for the performing arts where I'd gone where I'd run away to. And I thought, I really need to figure out why, you know and I I can't have a conversation with other people because it just don't they they don't get me at all. And so I began to work on growing up with disabilities, growing up where I grew up, and those issues. And, you know, lord knows how many of me were in therapy at that time. But in 1989, '13 people died in my life.
Speaker 2:And I I look at this last year's, and I think that must have been good practice for getting ready to tolerate this and including my mother. And I don't think that my system can tolerate that much change all at once. I had established a stable life. I mean, I was working. I was making a living.
Speaker 2:I had an apartment. I had defied all of my own odds. And then suddenly, here was this. And it's like, well, I had all these all these friends and all this help before. I get to meet new people, make new friends, and see where we go and and figure out what to do next.
Speaker 1:We had a similar experience in that we got through school, got our education, got our license, we were working, doing very well professionally, and then both of our parents died and it was like the rug was just pulled out from under us. And
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:It it it was very, very difficult to not just endure what was going on, but all the layers of what was going on, and that was the first time I became aware of, okay. There's too many layers. Like, there's something is not the same as what other people are experiencing and I maybe am losing my mind.
Speaker 2:And I was pretty sure of the same thing. Truth of matter is, is growing up in the South, when people lose their minds, we just park them on the porch with a glass of sweet tea and let them go. That's you know, we we have had until recently a higher tolerance for people who are eccentric in the rural South. For me, I I you know, I had been teaching about coping with change for a very long time when I was diagnosed. And so quite honestly, the first thing that popped up for me, I and I was talking about difficulties with the mathematics.
Speaker 2:And the clinician said, you know, I think I know how to help you. I think I know where you're stuck. I said, well, you know, I've done flashcards. I've done this. I've done that.
Speaker 2:And she said, well, you probably don't know this. I have a master's in mathematics education. I said, okay. What's 65 more bucks for another hour? Therapy was really cheap back then.
Speaker 2:And she asked me to tell her about how I got stuck in math and as she was explaining mathematics, I discovered a different name, a diff I was sitting on the floor instead of on the couch. I was there was a different name on a piece of paper with a different date. And all of a sudden, was like, okay. What am I gonna do with this? I need to pass.
Speaker 2:You know about passing. We all pass. Everybody passes about something. And it was immediately that whole sense of, okay. You can look at this any way you want to, but it's gonna feel the same as you go through it.
Speaker 2:It's either gonna be a problem or an opportunity. And all you can do is decide which one you want because it's gonna be frightening. No matter what you do, it's gonna feel awkward and all of those things that I talk about. So the diagnosis was very sudden back in 1990, a time when I was working as a contractor in instructional systems design and adult learning at the General Motors Sound Corporation. And I worked my way through most of what I was dealing with.
Speaker 2:I was able to work my way through without hospitalization. I came out at the plant. I did a lot of media around, can you have this and not be crazy? Because too often, the media images just did not work and I wasn't willing to be trapped by them. And I'm so sorry that your system was unable to tolerate the losses of both parents and I totally understand.
Speaker 2:I totally understand. You've gotten so much order and so much sensibility in your life and so much of where you wanted to go. And, man, that just took it right out of all the boundaries.
Speaker 1:It really did. And I think that you've said something significant about all of the changes and trying to cope with that and then Mhmm. Not wanting to fit into those stereotypes and the stigma. Uh-huh. It was I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's it it's been very difficult and challenging both to educate people around me about what DID is and what it's not as well as facing even some of my own stigma that I didn't even realize was in me and having to do that work to peel away some of those layers. And then there's there's I loved what you said about being healthy within that context of what you're dealing with because I feel this pull with the plural community online to come out and to be proud and to accept everything and all of those layers. But then at the same time, every piece of that work is really traumatizing because of what you're accepting as part of that. And for some of us, it's not always safe to do so. So coming out to the ISSTD that we were the ones doing the podcast or releasing our memoir that's coming out, these were huge steps, huge steps.
Speaker 1:Also so very healing, but it's been really challenging.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's incredibly challenging, you know, and and I was advantaged in a way. I had had mystical experiences in when I was about five and a half or six that were fully dissociative that were validated in terms of knowing things that were going to happen and knowing what had happened to people and somehow I had had that experience of of knowledge. And to me, when I look at how flimsy the construct of reality really is as we understand it given physics, I think some of the challenges have to do with the way in which people get concretized around what things mean. And I found within the community of clinicians, I'm hired and fired the right good number of them because they were always so insistent that I had to be so very sick.
Speaker 2:I had to meet their expectations instead of mine. And there's nothing about client centric therapy and there's nothing about human development that says that I should live up to their expectations because what they think of me, unless it's a a legally mandated matter where I'm about to be sectioned or or confining it's my will, what they think of me really isn't my business. What I think of me is much more important. And I always advocated back then that we should look at the functional stuff. If a person is able to you know, the the the early pathological commentary, the thing is if I could had appropriate age appropriate communication with all parts of me on the inside, if there was not excessive personalization of one state at the expense of another, and if there was not conflict that was unmanageable, then what was the problem here?
Speaker 2:You know, and everybody was so fascinated with working on the dissociation instead of grabbing just enough. I don't think, you know, this is one of the funniest things I've ever discovered. Back on Microsoft Word four, if you typed in the word, Bill Gates' spell checker would come up with barbecue, and they ain't nothing like it. I'll tell you, abreacting in a memory is a lot like a barbecue. But I don't think we have to go whole hog that far into I think we only need to go far enough into a memory to grab what we need to be able to learn and process and help it resolve itself in a way that makes it more comfortable to live with.
Speaker 2:Some memories shouldn't be comfortable to live with. We still have to, you know, kind of craft a place where we can hold the things that we don't talk about and and realize I've got neighbors across the street. I can see their garage. I know they don't tell everybody everything. There's no need for me to either.
Speaker 2:But I kept finding models of functional multiplicity multiplicity all around me that really indicated that the the position that people were holding about the disorder were positions based primarily on their own lack of experience with it personally and their own inability to think outside the box. I just got real, really up on my high horse about it and said, look, you know, if if I used to sit at the Saturn plant and I'd work on a Mac computer in one hand and a PC on the other on two different documents just because I wanted to I was tired of the kind of I was somehow supposed to be less than. I'm not less than and I'm not more than. I'm just perfect just like I am. And if I'm paying my bills and have good relationships and have a reasonably stable physical self, I'm not really sure why people get so weird.
Speaker 2:Did I say that? Yeah. I did.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a good point and I think it matters even for some of the issues we've gone through or or as we face our stuff, so to speak, and honoring it for what it is that it's not always bad. Went through a significant betrayal about a year ago and it changed everything so that last year was absolutely, aside from the context of the pandemic, was absolutely a year of grieving for me, the loss of this relationship and acknowledging the pain from it and that there was no going back to it and sort of triggering those layers from childhood for those of us who had abusers that the people you're supposed to get comfort from you can't because it's part of your or part of what's toxic or part of what's not good for you and it was so so difficult and then the pandemic on top of that we were so isolated and there was no opportunity for repair. I think if very early on we were able to just have some conversations, I think it would have worked out. Very simply, it it would not things would not have been the same, but it would have been an easier thing to resolve.
Speaker 1:But because we couldn't, it just sort of stayed there and there was no one. We didn't have a therapist at the time. We were trying to get another therapist, but there was no one to help us sort of navigate that. And so the year, because of this context, the year was so difficult in so many ways. And there were people trying to say like, it's gonna be okay, this will be over soon, da da da da da da.
Speaker 1:And it was not a time that we needed positivity. It was a time that we needed to honor the pain that we were feeling. Like, we worked hard to learn how to feel that pain and asking us to ignore it was more dissociation, dissociation, right, as we were learning to be present with it. And the positive and healthy thing for us was to say, yeah, that really sucked. That was terrible.
Speaker 1:And look at this, I'm still okay.
Speaker 2:That's so cool because I think that's a key challenge. I think that therapy and healing have in some ways been cookie cutter that you're supposed to always be you know, things bad things happen, you get over them and you act like everything is fine. But for those of us who did not experience our emotions as children, and for me, my dissociation on a Bennett Brown's basketball model, I've converted that to the squad model because I think you left out will. And one of the significant impairments in growing up when you grew up in a household or a situation that is overwhelming is you don't get to make you don't learn how to make choices. And this is one of the things I think that results in in the over diagnosis of borderline personality adults, especially in women.
Speaker 2:It's not that we you know, why is it that experience something something traumatic means mental illness? It it only means you missed some skills and you didn't have the space to process some things. It doesn't have to be mental illness. It could be a lot of learning. And then once you look at things again with the new skills you have, it's they're not so overwhelming.
Speaker 2:You would know this in therapy as clinician in terms of the tendency to rush to health. People want to feel better and they're not comfortable sitting in the difficulty so that they try to heal too quickly so that the healing doesn't really work very well because it's been done on a kind of a I don't mean this ugly. I mean it as a as a descriptor, not a prescriptor, superficial level. None of us want to slow down long enough to build the sturdy self that can tolerate the difficulties that we need to be able to tolerate.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Absolutely. Last year was hell for us, but I'm really proud of us because we
Speaker 2:felt I do.
Speaker 1:We felt every ounce of it.
Speaker 2:I'm proud of you too for that because I think that's one of the things about ten years ago I went through an experience that may have been similar. That was a terrifying betrayal, put my company at risk, put me at risk, put all of us at risk. And by the way, I always refer to myself just as me. Sometimes I refer to myself as we and sometimes I don't. So if I need to clarify, let me know.
Speaker 2:And people were urging me to get over it, know, just get over it and get on with it. And I say, I'd love to, but, you know, I need to experience this. I need to feel it. And I'm gonna hold I'm gonna instead of doing the either or, I'm going to do the both and. And I think the beauty of multiplicity is it as the parts of us that are developmentally delayed because they were too busy trying to survive to develop the skills that needed to be developed.
Speaker 2:As we repair some of that, it becomes easier and easier to sit with both to have to feel multiple feelings at the same time. I feel sad and I can and I can go on. I feel hurt and I can remember that the chances are really high that in in these situations, nobody woke up deciding to make my life miserable. It was not that deliberate. They probably don't have skills either.
Speaker 2:And it makes it easier to sit in the discomfort and kind of paddle around in it and watch it dissolve.
Speaker 1:I think that's a beautiful example. Our experience changed even how we parent because people would say to us, I wanna choose the positive. I wanna focus on what's good. I wanna say, you know what's good right now is for us to acknowledge the trauma of this and to feel what's hard. That's what's good.
Speaker 1:So when my children fell off their bike, it wasn't this, well, shake it off, get back on. It was like, oh, yeah, that hurt. You fell off your bike and that hurt. And then when they were ready, they went back to their bike. It wasn't something I had to push them through as if trauma would somehow make them weak.
Speaker 1:And learning to honor their trauma changed how I treat myself and how I treat them. And that was good. That was beautiful and powerful and that was more positive and more authentic than just saying I'm just gonna choose the good as code word for I'm gonna pretend this isn't hurting which is not the same.
Speaker 2:No, that's kind of like working in an inpatient facility or working at a group home or anywhere where people say, oh, they're having behavior today. Who knows what kind of behavior that means? You can't use that kind of language with the child. You need to say that's that's that's okay, that's not okay, that's appropriate, that's inappropriate. And to help me understand how that helps you get where you wanted to go or didn't.
Speaker 2:But we have gotten so sloppy with language that we are calling things things that they are not and we're accidentally setting people up for failure. I was having a conversation this morning with a faith community here in in the area. And we were talking about how some congregants come to church or temple, excuse me, wherever people go. And the they introduce themselves with their trauma first. It's like they wear that as a badge of honor in front of them about everything.
Speaker 2:And I was saying, well, let's take a look at how people learn to do that. I said, let's look at the process of going into therapy. You go in for an intake and you're expected to tell the person who's doing the intake everything that you know about yourself that's not working and you take tests to find out what's wrong with you. And then you go in to see your therapist and your first two sessions are spent doing the same thing again, talking about everything that goes on. Now this is supposed to be a relationship that's reparative and that helps you grow and it is a significant almost as significant as the one with your primary caregivers.
Speaker 2:So when you think about going to a faith community, a place of worship, if you're comfortable doing that, and you meet people for the first time and this relationship is supposed to be everything to you, Now why wouldn't you tell your story? Why wouldn't you lead with that every time? That's what you did the other place where things are so important. And I think a key piece that we're missing and many people many people without the diagnosis that we share is looking at what's called the Smith I think it's Matthew Kelly, Michael Kelly, seven levels of intimacy. How people typically step down through, hi.
Speaker 2:How are you? My name is. What do you do? Where do you live? The layers people go through to develop a relationship where you've put enough deposits in the relational bank that you can talk about your needs, the deepest things in your heart.
Speaker 2:And we often skip those. And that sets us up for tremendous isolation and terror because people get frightened of us. They don't want anything to do with us. And if they split with their story that way, we might feel the same. But among people who are survivors of trauma, it creates an immediate sense of the familiar.
Speaker 2:I want us to create an immediate sense of the familiar based on the healing first. Because if I'm going to get, quote, better, quote, then I need to be hanging around with people whose lives are the way I'd like my life to be. Universally, they don't introduce themselves with all of their history first in a general social setting. Universally, they they own the difficult things and they grieve when things are painful and they do a lot of of resilience and self care work unconsciously. They've learned how to do those things as part of their native language.
Speaker 2:And they lead with those factual layered pieces that that the seven levels talk about instead of starting from the bottom up. Because relationships start with the need first are very specific particular relationships in clinical settings or in skilled helper settings, but not in our social settings.
Speaker 1:I think that's a powerful thing for the plural community to hear because there are so many who go to online groups or online events or, like, healing together and there's a difference between some of those that become so toxic because they're focused on identifying or over identifying with what's hurting Mhmm. As opposed to acknowledging pain in a healthy way but also identifying with support and healing. And that's what makes something like Healing Together was so powerful because people are literally in the name Healing Together. There's the connection and the focus on healing. And I think it's a huge difference.
Speaker 2:I think so too. And I the challenge that all of us have to figure out somehow is how do we quit being so attached to the feelings of sympathy, pity, comfort, and attention that come from living in our pain? How do we shift that to being equally attached to the self respect and the self esteem and the access and responsibility that other people have, how do we how do we make that flip? Because as long as I'm stuck and and let me tell you, honey, I was showbug stuck in being angry and hateful and everybody owed me something and my life was awful and I was gonna make everybody else's life awful just like mine was. You know, but when you begin to realize, woah, why would I wanna do that?
Speaker 2:You know, I don't like it. Why should I think they would? And you begin to realize it's gonna feel it's gonna feel rough no matter which way I choose. But if I keep depending on pity, sympathy, comfort, and attention because it feels good and I didn't get much of that in my awareness when I was young, if that's what I focus on on getting, then I can count on staying in failure pretty much the rest of my life. But to make that shift from pity and sympathy and comfort and attention, the attention type shifts, you don't lose that when you develop self respect and self esteem and access and responsibility.
Speaker 2:Don't lose any of that, but you still have to go through the feeling that feels awkward when you're making the shift. And if I'm going to shift or switch every time something feels awkward, then it's going to be really hard and I have to have comfort every time I shift. It's going to be hard to break out of that loop, but it's critical to break out of that loop. You'll always have that loop. Nobody's gonna take it from you.
Speaker 2:It's critical to add another loop to it. This is like being an athlete. I swear I feel like an Olympian sometimes because filling up that bucket so that I had more choices about what I felt and what I did and how I expressed myself and how I took care of all of the different aspects of my own life. That has been hard, hard athletic work that's really been very powerful and important. Practice.
Speaker 2:I come at it from a learning perspective though because I'm I'm degrees an educator from from Peabody at Vanderbilt. And that whole perspective of, okay. And I did some work for the Justice Resource Institute a couple of years ago on the neurobiology of trauma for law enforcement advocates, mental health, and prosecutors. And the folks at the JRI used to help us grapple with how do we take the neurobiology of trauma and make it incredibly simple. When we sat down and they said, okay, so here's how it really goes.
Speaker 2:You see a possum, I like possums. They work in this example so well. And the possum sees you and you both freeze because you're trying to figure out, you need to is it fight or flight time? And if you can't do either one of those things, maybe you're as as a human being, maybe your body doesn't work the way other people's does. Maybe you're in a situation where you can't fight or you can't take flight.
Speaker 2:I'm five feet tall. Fighting is not gonna be my forte. I've got really crummy joints neither is running. I couldn't take flight and I couldn't fight. So I was faced in with either one of two options.
Speaker 2:The only two fallback options your brain has after that freeze, fight, flight are immobility or dissociation. And for me, dissociation was easier. I was an infant, obviously, when a lot of challenges began. But that understanding that the possums are such good examples there because that possum will look at you and it'll hiss and it'll carry on. And because possums cannot run, they might trot, but that's about as good as it gets.
Speaker 2:They flop over and play dead. That's immobility and it works. If that's not a gift you've got, if that's not something you can do to keep yourself safe, dissociation is a fabulous gift. In every theological community that I'm aware of, there is some sense of multiplicity. In the Christian community, it's the trinity.
Speaker 2:In the Hindu community, it's the multiplicity of gods that one can work with. There's so many different places where instead of letting ourselves sink into shame about it, we can say, okay, there are places where this makes sense in the world and here are some of them and clearly I'm in that population too. So now what shall I do?
Speaker 1:I love that. The starting place for making those shifts can be so subtle like that. Sometimes just adjusting that framework. Sometimes like we did last year slowing down and saying, okay, regardless of what people we care about are saying around us, what we need to do is stop and feel what we're feeling. We've learned how to do this and this is the moment.
Speaker 1:This is our moment to practice in real life and feel these difficult feelings and how that changed us and empowered us and brought us together in new ways because we honored that. I think another example of us very slowly learning to do that is realizing that actually live inside this body that carries us around and that it means sometimes we need actual nutrients in our body or sometimes we need to just be outside or sometimes we need to move. Even if we decide for ourselves what those nutrients or that movement or what that outside time looks like, our body needs it and feels better when we do.
Speaker 2:That's correct and that is so critical. I have to tell you, I was terribly self abusive in terms of not caring for the physical shell and it was one of the primary areas where I was so dissociative. I had knee surgery like six times with nothing but Tylenol with Tylenol three. And that includes having my kneecaps taken out. Say back home, that ain't right.
Speaker 2:I didn't have any experience of what it meant to be inside my body. And I think you're absolutely right about slowing down this year with the pandemic. On the one hand, it is isolating and on the other hand, I'm comfortable being alone in my own home. And the whole notion of before this year, I traveled forty two weeks a year for the last ten years, teaching trauma informed care around the world from clearly an interesting perspective. And being able to be home the entire last year and learning to live in a still body and learning to listen to my body and see what it's saying to me at a different level has been one of the most holistically pleasant experiences I've had.
Speaker 2:Not the pandemic, not the deaths, not the losses, not the terror about income and work, but the the experience of living inside my body and my home, sleeping in my bed more than I slept in it in ten years because of all the travel. And I realized that what I had done is that while I may I be significantly more associated internally, when you look at the opposite of dissociation, it's association. While I may be significantly more associated internally, The getting up and going to the airport and going to a different city every week was another form of dissociation.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And have you seen the my the octopus my octopus teacher? Have you seen that?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Did you find that to be a perfect example of dissociation camouflage?
Speaker 1:I did. And actually actually even how you're putting it in the context of the traveling also made sense. We Our job before the pandemic was working in disaster sites and war zones and refugee camps and so we were always flying and leaving the family and going into these things. Turns out all of that was trauma reenactment and all of that was dissociative from being in the present with the family and the octopus picture is actually one of the moments that that made sense to me and I could see it clearly and sit with it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. And by the way, wanna talk about traumatic reenactment for a minute. That's a phrase that always used just get make me shudder inside because it can be used with such a sense of shaming people.
Speaker 2:And yet what it misses is the the the elegance of if I have learned what to do to keep my myself safe and I'm changing that, why in the world would I not face a similar dynamic again in some way to seek to test what I've learned? That's an it's it's it's again you know, and I remember I do some work with different athletic teams in the NFL from time to time. And one of the things that occurred to me is, you know, you look at the Super Bowl as strange as it was this year. How did how did those teams get there? Football and sports are nothing from that perspective, but traumatic reenactments over and over again with adjustments made based on watching the video on the tape and what you're trying to accomplish on the field and seeing where things didn't go the way you wanted them to go and then adjusting, adjusting and adjusting and adjusting.
Speaker 2:And traumatic reenactment when you view it from a learning lens is the kind of thing where clinicians instead of symbolically rolling their eyes and going, well, you know, when are you ever gonna learn? It's just what clients often hear. I think it should be positioned from the very beginning. This is a learning path. And you're going to learn and learn and learn new things.
Speaker 2:You're going to test them in environments where they're where it's fairly easy to see how they work and practice until they get comfortable. Chances are pretty good at some point in your life. So you're going to come upon a situation that feels similar to or that is very much like what happened in the past to see how those skills hold up there. And all it is is just a place to see what have I learned that was then, this is now, what's different, how did I do? And we've got to figure out a way to get the shame off of that so that people can experience those things like you and I have without ending up back down a dark rabbit hole of shame.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful. I think it's so true. It's one of those examples of learning to have attunement with ourselves and noticing those needs whether they're physical like learning to live in our bodies or emotional like giving yourself permission to sit with difficult feelings but also knowing you can get through that and knowing how to help yourself through that. There's so much about that that gives us our power back regardless of what kind of trauma we had.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's exactly right. And one of the chief tasks I think in all of this work is how do we develop the right use of power in ourselves? And that's an awkward process. If you watch a two year old, you can tell it's an awkward process because the two year old may tantrum or throw hissy fits or have a hard time trying to figure out simply how to get a need met.
Speaker 2:And we as adults aren't much better no matter what part of ourselves we're bringing to the forefront or who's popping up at the forefront, learning how to make choices because choices form the foundation of power. People who have no power have no choices. We have so many choices. Wow. We have so many different choices.
Speaker 2:And oftentimes, we're unaware of them because it's safer to not know. It means we don't have to take the risks. And I think for me, of the big challenges has been how do I identify the places that I don't know And how do I build in an awareness of choices about those places so that the next time I face them or something similar, I have the ability to to have a different experience of it. You know, one of the things this morning, I mentioned that I'd had a very difficult experience or maybe I didn't. I think I did.
Speaker 2:You were talking about feeling betrayed and I was reflecting in my own head on a betrayal that I experienced about ten years ago, which is usually takes me if it's a really big one, maybe five to seven years to to move around it and to be able to metabolize it enough so that I'm sort of comfortable with things. And I was in a situation in a congregational setting with someone that had betrayed me very profoundly a number of years ago. And I felt my anxiety start to rise and I just you know, if you're gonna talk to yourself, make it count. It's like I tell the clinicians I train, if you're gonna suggest, suggest for the healthy. Don't suggest for the awful, suggest for the healthy.
Speaker 2:But that's part of the clinical illusion, and and digress. So I I was aware that I was finding myself feeling extremely uncomfortable around this woman because of what had happened in the past. And I thought, wait a minute. Take a look at your choices. You've got the choice to stay put.
Speaker 2:You've got the choice to go. You've got the choice about how you feel on this. You know that her feelings were hurt and she was doing the best she could even though it was incredibly painful for you. You can either demonize her or you can let her sit in neutrality. And I thought, yeah, I think I'll let her sit in neutrality because that's gonna be where I'll have more power.
Speaker 2:But it's it's a thoughtful process. I think the cognition, the amount of thinking it takes sometimes is difficult. Yet I've discovered that over time as I continue practicing, these things become second nature just the same way shifting and switching did.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I'm thinking of my situation was also difficult where I was continued to continuing to have to be exposed to that pain because of mutual people, sort of like what you described. And I finally, after a year of feeling all of this and sorting out, coming to accept, okay. This is how it is.
Speaker 1:And if I have a choice, then I can continue to be wounded by this or I can recognize that what this dynamic is for them is never what it's going to be for me. And accepting that and just letting myself be who I am and this is me, these are my circumstances and I can't change those things and that's who this person is and what their circumstances are, I can't navigate that. So just be okay with it and let it go. And so my acceptance had to do with giving myself permission to be who I am instead of trying to be someone else, giving myself permission to stop trying instead of finding ways to try to build bridges that were not actually going to happen and
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:To let that person choose for themselves their own role and then let it go. And when that doesn't match, then it's no longer in my plate of responsibility. And it was such a huge breakthrough for us.
Speaker 2:That's so cool. That's just so cool.
Speaker 1:It was hard. Like, it hurt because I could see how, oh, it would be so pretty and so healing and so wonderful if this and this and this and this. But those ifs, I can't do it. It's the same as the trauma from the past, which is where I finally connected that it was a reenactment because I can't change those pieces. That's done.
Speaker 2:No. No. It's it's I can't change those pieces. It's done. About the only choice I really have is what will I do with what has come to me now?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:What will I do with this situation? And I remember thinking to myself as I was I I I had to make a report about something that was happening that was very difficult thinking, okay. People are not gonna some people aren't gonna like me. Some people are gonna like me. How am I gonna stand in the middle of this?
Speaker 2:Leadership is probably gonna vilify me. Okay. I can I'll probably cry a lot, but I can cope with that, you know. And I remember the feelings of desolation and that clear moment of yes. This probably although I didn't I couldn't yeah.
Speaker 2:This is probably what I felt like as an as a young child, birth to three when so many things were just going away around me. And, you know, bless my mother, she did not have the support to be who she wanted to be either. You know, it's it's a it's it was a hard thing, but realizing that, okay, here I am again. Now now I have power. I'm an adult.
Speaker 2:I've got a lot of choices I can make. What's and I was so I'm such a geek. I'm going, what is the most difficult choice I can make to see how long I can hold this choice? And I decided that the choice I wanted to hold in that situation without the expectation of things getting better, but that I still wanted to hold was that everybody was doing the best they can. Even the people by whom I felt so hurt, who also felt hurt by me.
Speaker 2:That if I wanted people to believe that I was doing the best I could, given the situation I faced, I needed to be willing to extend them that same grace. And I don't mean grace in a big woo hoo, you know, spiritual kind of way. I mean, in terms of openness, access, ease, opportunity that that the decisions I made about others would really reflect the decisions I was making about myself in the moment. And I have to say it took me probably seven to ten years just to work my way through that. And I still periodically bite me a little bit, but it should.
Speaker 2:The reminder is good. You know, when I realized that one of the reasons that that our brains bring up so much of the negative stuff is to try and keep us safe. It got a whole lot easier to listen to those nudgings for terror and say, oh, okay. Okay. I understand.
Speaker 2:This is scary. Now let's see. How scary is it? Let's do some evaluation here and see how how terrifying it really is. But slowing down enough to do that, dear Lord, it took a long time to learn that.
Speaker 2:To uncouple some of those connections that were so instant and so fast to be able to recognize. I can feel two things at once here and I'm going to choose to do that. If I can have such a multiplicity of state, Frank Putnam does the best job ever talking about this. If you haven't read his new book, you should. You should.
Speaker 2:He is he is so reasonable about state dependent learning and expressions of self and state dependent learning. It just makes a lot of sense. But it's like if I if all of me could learn to feel so terrified and survive that, surely we can learn to feel upset and content at the same time. My work can be going really great, but that particular situation is incredibly painful. Must I sacrifice one for the other or can I tend to the injury while I continue to do the work?
Speaker 1:I love that so much. And I love that piece about recognizing that it's so hard in the moment and realizing how much harder or how difficult it was when you were a child. When I went through my betrayal and my experience last year and recognized, oh my goodness, when this happened last time, I was all alone. I didn't have the chosen family for support that I have now. I can't imagine how I must have gotten through that without anyone all on my own and then realizing
Speaker 2:Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Oh, reenactments. It did happen before because it happened in college that time. And then I was homeless, and I didn't have anyone in the world because I had run away from home to try to get an education. And how on earth did I ever survive that? And then realizing, okay.
Speaker 1:Also, this is the environment I grew up in as a child and I was betrayed like this all the time. How did I do this? And looking at my own children and seeing their age, how did I feel these big feelings that I'm feeling right now when I was three or four or five or
Speaker 2:six. Right.
Speaker 1:Right. It was so powerfully healing and gave me for the first time not just self respect, but a newfound loyalty, I guess for lack of a different word, to myself.
Speaker 2:Good for you. That's just juicy. That is just the juiciest stuff I've heard all day. And because it's and I think it's because it is so very true. You know, when you stink when you think about that, not from the pathology or the or the damage, but from the strengths, you had a deep sense of your inner needs.
Speaker 2:You had an awareness of boundaries. You had an awareness of what was okay and what wasn't okay. You had an awareness of how much you learned to support yourself. If you think about the strengths that your own that just what you've just shared about running away to get an education, and we can put the years before and years after. When I look back at at my own history and look at even the parts that are gritty, being homeless, not being able to keep a job, thinking I wasn't smart enough to do anything except prepare shoes for a long time.
Speaker 2:Those were safety mechanisms. And I tend to look at everything because I'm so pickled in being trauma responsive. I tend to come at things from a present focused strength based collaborative point of view, which has really shifted a lot of what I think about my own history. Instead of putting myself down for not being able to tolerate, cope, figure it out, and do something else. It's like, man, look at the strength I had.
Speaker 2:I remember when I did the Montreal Williams show when I was diagnosed as a multiple back in '92, I guess it was. And that being the era of my diagnosis, I'm not real. I don't use DID very much because as someone said to me very dryly once, well, we're did because we got done to and when we get done, we'll be done did. Yeah. That's about how I feel about it.
Speaker 2:But looking at this whole what are the strengths? And this is something I think it's hard for clinicians to do is to look at how the strengths are there. We know if you go back and look at that, Cohut's one of my favorite dudes. Cohut self capacities mean so much to me. And they've been brought forward.
Speaker 2:John Breyer brought them forward and Laura Perlman and Casey Bittney brought them forward. But those self capacities of managing feelings and interconnections and feeling worthy of life, We've got all of those mechanisms in us even with the rotten stuff that happened. And even in and if you look at the rotten stuff with a different pair of glasses on, you can see the kind of strengths it gave you to become the person you are. They're helpful strengths. I know people who would who would I I would I would give almost anything if I were able to see in them that they had some awareness of who they really are.
Speaker 1:Well, and and recognizing that that's exactly the piece that gives you the power to choose who you are. So like in my example, once I had done that work and even felt like the others inside, right, their response to being heard of yes it did feel that bad and yes it was that scary and yes it was that hard and this internal agreement for the first time like never before Also deciding and recognizing the other people involved in their pain and their struggle and everyone trying their best and the pandemic in the way of all of it and all of these things, recognizing, okay, so everyone's hurting and that's unfortunate, but who do I want to be and how do I want to respond? So that there was not drama, there was not bad behavior in quotes, air quotes, bad behavior, acting out, whatever. It was just like, okay. So this is how things are.
Speaker 1:This is how much it hurts, and I wish you well, and here's the actual positive note that really is good and healthy because I felt the depths of the badness of it and the hurt of it, not just a fake or false well wishing.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. And sometimes the fake and the fake or or slightly shallow well wishing might be the best we can do in the moment. Don't worry, we'll get a chance to revisit it again later. I'm sure it'll pop back up if it's an important thing.
Speaker 2:That is just so wonderful when we get to that point and can see that. And I think for me that going back to cohort a little bit, so much of this, this is one of the pieces of work I did last year was to do what's called the crosswalk between social emotional learning, emotional intelligence and trauma recovery. I surveyed 4,000 clinicians online and asked if your people came to you with higher levels of self awareness, self regulation, social awareness, relationship skills, empathy, and decision making, how would what how would that affect your work with them? And to a person, the responses were it would make the work a lot easier for all of us. And if there's one thing that I'm keen on, it is reducing the time and the trauma and the costs of healing for everybody involved.
Speaker 2:The people who have the history, which does include the clinicians, the people paying money and the people spending money in the in the therapeutic setting. We all want we all need to do this healing with the most grace and the most efficiency we can unless we just like feeling tortured by our own histories. And to me when that when I realized that and I didn't have the the pieces of social emotional learning and emotional intelligence, intelligence. But I did have the other piece about how can we reduce the time and trauma and cost of healing without it being a rush to healing? How can we titrate?
Speaker 2:How can we dilute the impact, the effect so that we can keep functioning, keep growing, keep learning, and still and still do the work we need to do. And I think Steve Gold does a great job with this in his work down in at in Fort Lauderdale in terms of and and Anita Jones who was once the treasurer for the ISSTD and Steve is a past president. To take a perspective on this that that is that is helpful and healing rather than focused on the pathology so powerful. You know, it's it's just it's just so critical because if you look at social emotional learning skills, which are the same as the one those three are all the same set. In families where life is good enough, not perfect, but good enough, children do develop social those five things.
Speaker 2:And they take those with them to work. And if those the development of those five things gets interrupted and you show up at work without much social awareness or without much self regulation, you're going to have a hard time working. I was consulting with a company earlier in the week that's got a lot of folks who are very young, who have as the person I was talking to said, the social skills of leftover corn cobs. And I said, okay. So how are you seeing that show up at work?
Speaker 2:She says, well, they don't follow instructions. They are short and rude and snippy. They start something and then go to something about finishing what they started first. They are unable to pay attention in meetings. They're very comfortable giving eye rolls and sarcastic size in social settings.
Speaker 2:And I said, to what do you attribute that? And she said, and this is such a classic answer, poor home training. I thought, okay. What she was saying was that their parents didn't teach them right when they were growing up. Sometimes parents can't.
Speaker 2:If parents don't know how to or didn't learn those things, they can't teach the kids. Sometimes families are so overwhelmed by illness or injury or homelessness or unemployment. The benevolent things. The benevolent things are the ones that we leave out. We know the malevolent things down, up and down.
Speaker 2:But these benevolent things need to be considered as just as impairing. Because if they can't teach you or help you learn what you need to learn to be able to be more useful to yourself in in in your life. You know, you you get to work and you end up like the group of very young people that this employer was talking about. I said, have you asked them what they all watch what they watch on TV or on in on you know, what's the media what what are the kind of shows they watch? And she came back and I said, ask them how ask you might want to do an informal fund survey.
Speaker 2:See how many people love the Simpsons, but the media that we watch these days doesn't teach us much about the very things that we need to know in terms of emotional intelligence. And that has become our substitute relationship now is is video, film, video, media, TV, games, rather than than than developing those skills with people. That that dopamine, that reward player, the pleasure circuit's way too powerful for that.
Speaker 1:It's it's a difficult thing. It's a difficult thing. We we have children all our children are adopted from foster care and so there's so much trauma in our house. We don't even turn on the TV and people will tease us about goody two shoes or this or that. It's not even about that.
Speaker 1:It's that our children's brains literally can't function if we have the TV on. Just can't. So we have like a weekly or every other week, Friday night, family movie night, but other than that, we just we can't. They cannot function with that and it's it's such a big deal and trying to teach them, I get as a therapist, I get parents call for appointments right and they're like, we want you to fix our kid and that's not how it works actually. Let's talk about you and and so many times of teaching parents like your children aren't doing what you guys are doing to each other.
Speaker 1:So if you will start treating yourselves and each other differently, the children will follow that. And saying that in a very non shame context but in an answering and giving hope of how are you treating your children and that is how they will treat you. And seeing that is just, I think, I mean we're talking about people at work like in your example or kids in my example, but the same thing happens with systems internally when you have, oh this part is such and such this way, You give it one of those labels and they're so difficult and it's impossible to work with them because da da da da da. Well, I would not work with you well either if that's how you talked about me.
Speaker 2:Right. Exactly. I mean, I'll tell you, this whole piece of neighboring and building community. The first book I ever wrote was called Managing Ourselves, Building a Community of Caring. And by the way, it's a workbook for people who are like us based on organization development and common sense.
Speaker 2:It's non pathologizing. When I was working on that, it was like one of my colleagues said, but this is what everybody needs. I said, I know, it's just framed through a different lens for people who are dissociative. And and we have to have that we you know, we we've got to do some of that learning about how do we neighbor ourselves. You know, and I think if you go at this from a union perspective, how do we love the other in ourselves?
Speaker 2:What do we do with our shadow? How do we, you know, what do we do with all the different aspects of self? You can look at at at folks who are not diagnosed as multiplistic. And you'll see that in the morning, they go through being, you know, daddy daredevil driver, Aetna executive, a friend, firefighter. You know, we we have all the different roles that we play during the day, but they're not as exaggerated as the roles that and I say roles without judgment here.
Speaker 2:You know, the characters, the states that that they live across are not as distal as ours, and they know what each other are doing when when I'm being I had my PTS got a little dish the other day. I got out of the house for the first time in a week after our big snowstorm, and a guy pulled out in front of me and nearly hit me. And, I mean, I was I was ready to run him over, just absolutely ready to run him over. I thought, oh, yeah. You ought to pay attention to that.
Speaker 2:But the the whole way in which and I thought, okay. Where is it that that in myself internally, where is it that we are not paying attention to the emotions that are going on in there? And I was able to stop and look around and figure it out real quickly, which was nice. We don't help people understand that whole sense of everyone is made up of all the experiences they have had, whether they are associated or dissociated internally, those experiences and the states that we adopt because of them are our heritage and our legacy. And how we metabolize those begins to be a reflection of how are we living outside.
Speaker 2:If you look at society and culture right now, the degree to which we have so much hatred and so much violence and so much general meanness. And I look at the concomitant rise in adrenaline based sports and extreme sports And people who are doing things that are that just to prove they can. And I think there's a lot of value in some of that. But when we begin to move to the level of the extremes that we're seeing on the external at the external level these days, I wonder what's going on with us collectively internally. Internally.
Speaker 2:That we're so disconnected from how we are also common and so similar in so many ways.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful. What can you tell us your website where people can find your books?
Speaker 2:Well, sure. They can go to Amazon. You know, the the book Managing Ourselves, Building a Community of Caring is currently only in print in my office. So people can reach out to me, epower@elizabethpower.com, and I'll send a copy. I hope to have it back up on Amazon in the next month, but they can go out to elizabethpower.com and find out a lot about me, and they can look my books up on Amazon.
Speaker 2:The newest one is called Healer Reducing Crises, and it's just a really fun book. It's again, I I think that we have to have a different kind of response to where we are in the world. If you look just at the prescriptions given for written for Sertraline in 2018, there were 24,000,000 prescriptions written in The US for what we call Zoloft. And as a clinician and educator, you know that a lot of people might be able to do make do without medication if they had deliberate relationship and moderate exercise. So let's say that twelve million people need therapy and counseling so that maybe they won't be on medication, which while it can be extremely helpful is also a colonizing force.
Speaker 2:We may not have the money to buy it. It may not be manufactured. There may be long term effects we don't like. There are all kinds of reasons that other things might ought to be tried first, but we live in an industrialized medical system and that makes it hard to do this. But I wanted to look at if you have to have 12,000,000 people in therapy seen twice a month for a regular session, how many clinicians would you need?
Speaker 2:I can't even figure that out. 20 it's 24,000,000 sessions a month. And if you can do the math and figure out how many how long does it take to become a clinician, how long do clinicians stay in the field, it doesn't take long if you can even you have to be able to do the math to figure out we're never going to have enough skilled helpers to do the work that that people may need to have may need to do. So I went back to the social emotional learning and the emotional intelligence stuff, and I framed it through a trauma informed lens to look at how can we help to reduce the inner crises that we experience and how can people begin to do that without having to have a diagnosis. If it's learning, what do people need to learn to jack up their emotional intelligence so that even if they do need therapy, it may be a little less intense and it may be a little easier for everybody.
Speaker 2:But they can get to me on my website at it's ElizabethPower.com. They can email me at epower@ElizabethPower.com.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:You're so welcome.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else that you wanted to share that we didn't get to cover today?
Speaker 2:Only that the world is really and truly a gorgeous place in spite of what happens in it. Cherish every beautiful thing you see. Store it up in a box for when you need a little bit of something to help you tolerate the difficult.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, truly.
Speaker 2:You're very, very welcome. Thank you for having me on. I'm I'm deeply honored to be your guest.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's so kind.
Speaker 2:And thank you for what you do. Thank you for being a foster mom. Thank you for being a kick butt rocking clinician and a person of great integrity who's got good skills and good chops.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening.
Speaker 2:You're welcome. You're welcome. You know how to find me.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. I will talk to you another time.
Speaker 2:Okay. Thanks. Bye bye. Bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us for System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. This podcast is available on any podcast player and on systemspeak.org. If you would like to know more of our story, our memoir, If Tears Were Prayers, is now available at systemspeakbooks.com. Thank you for listening.