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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.
Welcome to the System Speak podcast, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to longtime listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 1:We have a guest today from the community. Tabs is sharing with us the dress rehearsal from the upcoming presentation for healing together about dissociation in the professional workplace. Welcome, Tabs.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. Actually, I should be saying the same to you. Thank you for listening to me talk for seventy five minutes. So Well, it's good to be here, and it's I don't think I've met you before, so it's good to meet you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nice to meet you. I've, I used to go every Saturday, to the Saturday check-in group, and I made a lot of great friends that way. But I've been pretty much, like, busy with other things lately. So, I need to start going again, honestly, because, it's a it's a really good ritual to get into and stuff like that. Okay.
Speaker 2:Awesome. It is five zero five, so we are, gonna go ahead and get started. Thank you all so much for joining, this evening, and, welcome to my preview of my presentation. It is called Parts at Work and I am going to be presenting this at Healing Together twenty twenty four in just a few couple short weeks. I'm really really grateful to have the opportunity to present to this lovely community, and I really appreciate everyone being here.
Speaker 2:As a reminder, we are going to be recording for the podcast today. So please mute, and if you are not, please mute if you are not speaking, and if you do not wish for your voice to be recorded, feel free to ask questions in the chat instead. I will stop once halfway I will stop once about halfway through to answer questions, and there will also be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. So if I don't see it right away, I promise I will check the chat afterwards, and you'll also have the opportunity to ask me questions over microphone if you prefer. So, as you may have guessed, my name is Tab, and I have dissociative identity disorder.
Speaker 2:I am 32 years old, and I live in Michigan with my two dogs, Daisy and Bear. My career has always been a really big part of my life, and I currently work as a manager for a documentation team, at a Fortune 100 tech company. My team and I manage a knowledge base where we write how to articles to help our customers find answers to questions about our products. I am not a researcher or a clinician. I am not an authority on dissociative disorders in any way, but I did unfortunately discover that I had DID in 2022 during an incident that happened in the workplace.
Speaker 2:I have become something of an expert on how not to do things. So for the next approximately seventy five minutes, I'm gonna tell you about my career and how DID has impacted those experiences as well as the steps that I took after diagnosis to kind of get my life back on track. We have three core learning objectives that we're going to cover today. The first one being how to return to work following a leave of absence, strategies to manage dissociation in the workplace, and self care tips to find purpose beyond employment. Even if you can't relate to these specific circumstances, I hope that my story today kind of helps inspire you to speak your own truth and find your own resilience to bounce back from setbacks.
Speaker 2:So before we get into this a little housekeeping, as I said, I'm going to pause once during this talk about halfway through to take questions for about seven minutes, and there will also be time available at the end if you wish. I will try to answer any questions that we feel comfortable answering, but depending on what you ask, we may have to decline if it's a little bit too personal. Hope you understand, but, I'll be as open as I possibly can. I tried to keep this presentation as light as possible since we're all survivors, I didn't really wanna go in like trauma jumping on all of you, but there are a couple things mentioned in my talk today that some may find triggering. They are very brief mentions for most of it and, but just want to give you a heads up in advance.
Speaker 2:I do mention briefly gun violence, hospitalization, depression, psychosis, system denial, and swearing. I might swear a couple times depending on who is talking at the moment, but I will try to stick to my script. So that being said, your health and well-being comes first. If at any time during the course of this presentation that you need to step away from the room or from your device for any reason, please feel free to do so. I promise you won't hurt my feelings and I encourage you to take care of yourselves.
Speaker 2:So that's it. Let's get into it. So, as I mentioned with all of us as survivors, I didn't have a great childhood. I'm here speaking for a DID conference, these specific circumstances are still somewhat of a mystery to me, but even if I did know, I want to spare you the details. I really want to focus on the life events that came afterwards that kind of shaped like not only my career growth, but really kind of how I related to the world.
Speaker 2:So with a very unstable home environment, I really was somewhat raised by my teachers. I really internalized what they taught me and from them I learned how to approach the world in healthy ways. I wanted to be like them so I wanted to be a teacher. They were my models for what healthy adults look like. My whole career has always been oriented around education, whether it's onboarding new employees, creating training materials, or writing a knowledge base article.
Speaker 2:I always have been somewhat of a teacher. I actually initially wanted to teach high school French. I did do at some point some bilingual technical support, but I actually never got into the classroom. But you know whatever the format I love having the opportunity to teach someone something new, and I'm incredibly fortunate that I've had the opportunity to apply those skills in my industry. So, as a teenager, I wanted to stay at school for as long as possible.
Speaker 2:So I was heavily, heavily involved in extracurriculars, the two biggest being marching band and drama club. I regularly stayed at school until 10PM multiple times per week. This was probably my first experience of overburdening myself, but you know I gained a lot of great friends and life experience from all participating in these activities. Marching band, in particular was instrumental, get the pun, in developing my life skills and shaping my career. I actually played the tuba.
Speaker 2:This is hilarious. You can't tell because I'm on webcam right now, but I am five foot four. I was very much the littlest tuba player, but I had really buff arms from carrying around a tuba. So, thanks to my very extremely involved and passionate band director, it was here that I got my first experience with student leadership as a section leader for the low brass, our trombones, our baritones, and our tubas. As the section leader, I was responsible for coordinating and running rehearsals over the summer, teaching other students the music and how to march and helping anyone that was struggling and setting goals to give the best performance possible.
Speaker 2:My band director was particularly devoted to preparing us for careers so much that if you wanted to be section leader or drum major, that's the leader of the entire band, you needed to apply for it like it was a job. So, he had 14, 15 year olds filling out a job application. They needed references, letters of recommendation, a resume, a cover letter, all the works, and then you go through a job interview with him to be the section leader. I recognize as an adult how special but very unique of an experience that was, and it definitely prepared me for the world beyond high school. That meant that by the time that I graduated, I was very comfortable writing resumes and cover letters and interviewing.
Speaker 2:He wanted us to be successful and being in this position, you know, really helped me grow as a person. I became very comfortable in leadership roles from this experience, which also translated really well to the classroom. I had a French teacher who even let me design lessons and teach her beginner level classes. I actually got a future educator scholarship for doing that. I also became very comfortable with public speaking, which turned me into the kind of person that goes to conferences and rambles about themselves.
Speaker 2:I had these really important milestones all because of the teachers and volunteers who helped make these activities possible and keep in mind, I didn't even go to a good school. My school was not good. My teachers, my role models were just good humans and cared about my potential and my future, and I am endlessly grateful to them. So I had a lot of friends from all of these activities that I did, but I was also very fantasy prone, into very spiritual things and some would say chronically online. I knew that my brain worked differently from other people's and have had, differing explanation for it over the years.
Speaker 2:I frequented many niche Internet communities from a young age, but the most important to my story today is demonism based on the critically acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. So who knows what a demon is? They're not like a biblical demon. They are a spiritual being in this series that is an external physical, manifestation of a person's inner self that takes the form of an animal. Even though that they are animals, they can speak and represent the person's personality.
Speaker 2:Demons communicate back and forth with their human in a form of internal dialogue. When you become a teenager, demons settle or take on an animal form that is reflective of your personality, your whole essence. Now this is fictional obviously, but there is a multiverse in this series. In one universe, demons are external and visible in the world around you. So every person has a little animal following them around.
Speaker 2:But in another universe, our universe, demons still exist, but live inside us internally. So fans of this concept have developed our own real world method of communicating with your own demon and long standing internet communities have grown around this concept. These communities address two primary components of, you know, what is known as demonism: form finding, which is devoted to analyzing different animals determining how their characteristics translated to human personality, and communicating with your demon, which includes meditation and visualization techniques. So after I had finished this series, I found a guide online of how to contact your demon, and it was essentially just ask inside yourself. Was very simple.
Speaker 2:So I I asked along the lines of something like hello and who's there and Stuart answered. I had other experiences of multiplicity at this time without really knowing what they were, but Stewart was really the first one that actively talked to me and he's really the one that's most important into our story here today. So I thought Stewart was my demon. He could turn into lots of different animals and he did so frequently, but his actual form was always human. He emphasized that he lived in my head, that he could really turn into whatever he wanted, but his actual form is a really eccentrically dressed black man who loves jazz music, the color purple, and smoking cigarettes.
Speaker 2:Despite the fact that he was very funny and helpful, he is actually a very cryptic and mysterious inner world part. He explained to me, when I first met him that I had unpleasant and frightening memories and that he was my gatekeeper keeping vigilance over them. He told me that he had always been here, that he had found me when I was alone and crying for help when I was four years old, and he was like my guardian. He never can took control of my body, but he never slept and was always helping me from the inside. You might be wondering if this is typical of a demon.
Speaker 2:It absolutely isn't. It was very rare for a demon to ever take human form in the community, at least at that time, and no one else really reported something like this. This didn't really concern me though, and by participating in this community, I had a lot of self discovery and analyzing my personality and learned really important visualization techniques. I also made a lot of great friends. So quick side note, does this mean that all of these people from this community have DID?
Speaker 2:No, absolutely not, but I am willing to bet that some of them probably do. There are plenty of inner experiences that have devoted online communities that are entirely separate from dissociative disorders. We have to remember that dissociation is on a spectrum of natural human behavior. This concept of everyone having multiple internal parts is still pretty new, So I think that there's a lot still that we have to learn about what these experiences mean. So in any case, I discovered Stewart using the processes that I learned in this community and it was a very formative experience for me.
Speaker 2:I told a lot of offline people about Stuart and I drew him all the time. There has been much speculation over to the years as to his origin. Some of the system do hold the belief that he has some sort of spiritual origin, while others believe this to be a potentially harmful substitute belief that should be reframed. My ex husband thought he was an alien. Some people thought he was a demon.
Speaker 2:Not like a demon like I just said, like an angel versus a demon. We did not attribute this to DID as the key point here. So you've really gotten an idea by now of the type of person that I was as a teenager. I want to tell you a little bit about my work history now and how it has affected and how it was affected by undiagnosed DID. As I've said back at the introduction, my career ambitions were always to teach French, so I went to college.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, I had to work full time while I was going to school, which placed a massive amount of stress on me. At one point, I was taking eighteen credit hours and working until 2AM every day. To this day, I have not completed my degree. I've tried to go back a couple times, and have just faced different mental health challenges, and just really haven't been able to get it together. My first professional job is when I was 19, and I worked at a freight company in the logistics industry.
Speaker 2:I was able to use those interview skills for marching band to land the job with my teaching skills, and I became the designated person to train new employees. After a couple of years, I was promoted to team leader for customer service, where I worked in a call center. Our job was to take calls from customers to book pickups and check the status of shipments. Now I'm not naming the company here, but it was really one of the worst trucking companies out there. It was such a shitty freight company that we regularly lost shipments, damaged shipments, and did late pickups and deliveries, which made customer service very difficult.
Speaker 2:To give you an idea of how bad this was, I'll tell you a quick story about how we messed up big time. So it's like 9PM at night, and I get a call from a man in the military in a logistics company that booked a shipment with us. They urgently needed to get their shipment back. They booked it with the wrong company. They knew our reputation, and they were going to send an expediting service in to pick it up at our terminal tonight.
Speaker 2:So I look up their shipment which is two pallets which should not be separated from each other. I can see in the system that one pallet is at a completely wrong terminal and the other pallet had been loaded onto a train by mistake and disappeared somewhere over North Dakota. It's literally impossible to pick this shipment up at the terminal. The two people on the phone were absolutely panicked, and the guy from the military tells me, I will personally give you $25,000 if you can find this freight tonight. Turns out they were airplane seats for Air Force One for a planned presidential flight.
Speaker 2:We didn't find the shipment. So I'm I'm very sorry, president Obama, who was president at the time. So customer service for a company like this was essentially being an emotional human shield for the company. These late shipments had severe consequences for their business operations and their livelihood. As a team leader, when someone called into customer service and they demanded to speak to a supervisor or got too belligerent over the phone, I had to take over the call.
Speaker 2:Multiple times people, people would threaten us with violence. And one person even told me he was going to come into the building and shoot us all. It was extremely stressful. I think my dissociation definitely helped me handle those calls. It was like I would step back while someone else inside took over to talk to the customers and I was just listening to this other person talk.
Speaker 2:I managed this for a few years and I did very well there, but between the high stress environment and the school schedule, I had my first nervous breakdown when I was 20 and needed to take time off to care for my mental health. I just had this overwhelming feeling of dread, and this idea of having to do this every day for the rest of my life was absolutely devastating. I felt helpless. I don't remember very much else about it other than crying in my boss's office. So well after that happened, I realized that I should probably make a career change because I just couldn't do it anymore.
Speaker 2:But I was making decent money there. Actually, it was more than I would have made as an entry level teacher. So it was around this time that I abandoned the idea of finishing my degree. Luckily, I was doing this customer service job, and it gave me experience talking on the phone to customers as well as helping customers with the website. So I was able to parlay that experience into technical support and I got my foot in the door in the IT world.
Speaker 2:I started doing technical support for a major tax preparation company where our lost my place. Where our job was to help employees with their IT issues, set up the offices during tax season, and troubleshoot technical bugs with our software. I learned so much at this job and it it gave me the opportunity to train people and create documentation for our knowledge base, something that I still do today. I'm extremely grateful for having had this experience because it was really the foundation of my knowledge in the tech industry. I liked it, but what I really struggled with in this job was that it was seasonal because tax season is only a few months in The U.
Speaker 2:S. We would work generally from October to April and be laid off each year until we are called back. During peak months, we were required to work extremely long hours of overtime to accommodate all of the TAPS offices. I enjoyed the work and I made some really great friends, but I basically worked myself to exhaustion just to keep up. I would go from being able to handle these really long shifts until 2AM feeling numb like a robot designed to just do technical support and crash to really deep lows again.
Speaker 2:There, I had my second breakdown in the workplace right at the end of tax season. I won't go into detail because it may be too triggering to discuss, but it was bad. So after that, I decided again that I should find a different job because, obviously, I couldn't handle this one anymore. I ended up finding a digital marketing company, who was interested in me for my French skills as well as my technical skills because they had clients in Quebec. This job was primarily creating and providing tech support for websites.
Speaker 2:It but it really looks incredible on a resume because even though this was a small unknown company, we worked with these huge big names across various industries. I became a team leader there, and I really enjoyed creating training presentations, educating our customers, making how to materials for our products, and all of the things that kept me close to education in a way. I didn't make enough money, though, so I had to work several jobs at this point to make ends meet. In addition to this office job, I was also working as a gas station attendant and delivering groceries for shift. On top of my usual emotional issues, this led me to developing horrible back pain.
Speaker 2:I walked with a walker for like several months and went from specialist to specialist trying to figure out what was wrong, but my muscles were just so tense from stress. Again, I worked myself to exhaustion, had a nervous breakdown, and then left. So, at this point, are you noticing a trend? So I found another job for a start up that made self checkout kiosks. I focused on training and documentation for their technical support team, as well as launch their knowledge base.
Speaker 2:Being a startup there is a work hard play hard culture, and I was going out like every weekend to bars with my co workers and drinking a lot. I heard about an opportunity at another startup that was in the logistics industry that was a massive pay raise for me and included a lot of traveling to their main office in California. I would be starting a training program and setting up a knowledge base for their customers. I was really excited and took the job, but the additional stress of traveling and drinking a lot, and I had problems pretty much immediately. In addition to the time zone challenges I was working a regular hours late into the night.
Speaker 2:It was while working at this shitty start up that I finally heard from Stewart again. He has never been involved in my career, really, and he goes radio silent for long stretches of time. He had been away for several years, but he popped up again when I was sleeping one night and talked to me right before I had my first pseudo seizure. For anyone not familiar with what that is, psychogenic nonepileptic seizures or PNES are seizure like episodes that are not caused by abnormal electrical impulses in the brain, and they're highly correlated with PTSD. Stewart tells me that my brain is going to start growing back together and that these episodes I was experiencing were just a result of these bad memories starting to cross over into the other part of my head.
Speaker 2:After making sure I really didn't have epilepsy and with a neurologist, I was diagnosed with PBNES. It was weird to think if I solved as someone with PTSD because even though I have general awareness that my childhood wasn't good, and, you know, know some know some general facts, I I really didn't know what happened to it caused this severe of a reaction. You know, to this day, bypass isn't really something that I think about. These pseudo seizures were exacerbated by the stress of traveling and general crappiness of the company, and after six months, I knew I needed to, again, find a different job, so I resigned. This was probably a good idea because the week after I left, the CEO resigned in disgrace after charging $75,000 in strip club expenses to the company credit card.
Speaker 2:After working all of these places and seeing the pros and cons of each, I really wanted to find a place that I could stay at for a while. I wanted to find some place that had a consistent nine to five schedule, good work life balance, and a good workplace culture. I saw a job posting, for a Fortune 100 cybersecurity company that was looking for someone to start their customer training program, and it was like it was meant to be. I interviewed with them, and I got the job, and this is where I work today. I met some really excellent people working in this role.
Speaker 2:I was part of a team that managed the knowledge base, the customer community, customer training, and technical videos for the company, all of the people that worked on preserving knowledge. Everyone I worked with was so kind and incredibly intelligent and just plain good at their jobs. They had all worked on this team for three to five years, so I knew this was going to be a place, that I could live for a while. And especially during the pandemic I got to know them very well and felt really close with them. I was still having pseudo seizures though at this point, but with less frequency.
Speaker 2:However, it was around this time that I started noticing I was having memory issues and I wasn't able to account for my time. I didn't really identify them as blackouts per se right away, but it was like I would have a general awareness of what I was working on, but I couldn't remember the details of what had gone on, even though I knew that I had been focusing on it intently. I literally described the process of making a training video to a coworker once as I kind of just black out and the video gets made. Even though this job was really great and was generally nine to five, I was still doing a lot of project based work that required very short turnaround times. I often had to work late into the evening to meet goals that I had set for myself.
Speaker 2:COVID lockdowns, also started in 2020, and working remotely only encouraged me to work increasingly bizarre hours. So we're almost caught up to my current role, so I want to stop and examine this trend of overworking. In all of the roles that I had, I was a powerhouse. I took on any and all projects, and I got that done, and I did a great job. However, I was constantly overburdening myself trying to be better than perfect, and this took a really serious toll on my mental health time and time again.
Speaker 2:I was good on the outside, but I was kind of a mess on the inside. There's a really interesting study called autopilot functionality and self destructive behavior in patients with complex dissociative disorders by Claudia Schnepp that interviewed 10 women with OSDD. They reported they reported they reported that the off, oh, they reported a behavior that the authors named autopilot functionality. I strongly related to the experiences described in the study. It says for many participants, work was a field in which they were very functional but often ignored physical needs in order to over fulfill the requirements of their workplace.
Speaker 2:The participants felt an enormous pressure to maintain a facade to the outside. This could be performing well in school or work or taking special care of their appearance so that nobody would realize that something was not okay. Participants of the study compared themselves to robots or machines that worked well but were unable to be in connection with themselves. The participants had so little compassion for themselves. It felt like it was normal to continue to function like this even though that they were feeling bad.
Speaker 2:This disconnection from the body made it difficult for the participants not to overburden themselves. They often only noticed that they had overset their boundaries through extreme physical signs, migraine and sleep disturbances. This is exactly which was what was happening to me with these very serious breakdowns with this PNES and the back pain and all that. I could take on all these projects and work these long irregular hours and I wouldn't really notice something was wrong until it was, you know, triggering seizures or severe depressive systems. It's symptoms.
Speaker 2:Systems. In some cases, I was even using overworking as a form of self harm. In addition to this autopilot feeling, I was experiencing intrusion from emotional parts. I would go from being this very self assured confident person who embodied my work identity to this very extremely fearful anxious person who is eager to please and thinking everyone was mad at me. I used to constantly think that I would be fired no matter how well I was doing at work, so I needed to be better than perfect.
Speaker 2:I know now that these extremely overwhelmed and anxious feelings were from traumatized young parts that I was then unaware of. To these emotional parts, no matter how big or small the project, everything always felt like too much. I worked on all these different jobs and different projects and would switch jobs when it got to be overwhelming. I thought it was just that the jobs were shitty, which in some cases they were, but after I finally got this job at the cybersecurity company, something I really liked, I realized that the common denominator in all these feelings of hopelessness was me. No matter what I did, no matter how easy, everything always felt insurmountable.
Speaker 2:So I was simultaneously someone who could take on the world and someone who felt profoundly exhausted and burned out. After years of overriding and ignoring these parts and feelings, these parts had a sense of desperation and were pleading to stop working. I felt like my body was collapsing from sheer exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. It felt like I was stuck in a never ending cycle. I was Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.
Speaker 2:No matter how much I rested, no matter how much I enjoyed the project, no matter what I did, these parts were so dysregulated and stuck in a world of chronic stress. But you need a job to survive, so I had no choice but to continue working. The autopilot study goes on to mention that the mechanism of maintaining a facade had disadvantages for the participants. Because they look so normal and continue to function, it was difficult for those around them to understand that they were not well. I was in therapy on and off as I came, and I come off extremely as well adjusted.
Speaker 2:I can hold a job. I'm independent. I'm self sufficient. I'm high achieving. None of my several long term therapist noticed association.
Speaker 2:Even when I was hospitalized, the staff joked that I was the sanest person there. Spoiler alert, I was not. The authors of the study suggested that clinicians can miss symptoms because they misinterpret this autopilot robot behavior or healthy behavior. So back to my work. We had a couple people leave the company in late twenty twenty one, and a management position opened up.
Speaker 2:Following my pattern, the ever overachiever who lives to be promoted, I jumped at the opportunity to be a manager again. It was around this time that things started to go south. In 2022, I started experiencing what I believe to have been dissociative psychosis. This is a psychotic episode that is unique in the way that psychotic and depressive symptoms interact, and it's strongly rooted in the past experience of trauma. There's not a lot of information on it, but there is a teeny tiny paragraph in the haunt itself and this other book that I forgot to notate the title of but will put on the community afterwards has a really good chapter on it with a couple of case studies.
Speaker 2:Both of these materials are intended for clinicians, but I really wanted to understand what happened to me because I had no answers. Both my therapist at the time and the ER I admitted myself to while it was occurring thought nothing was wrong with me. I don't really have enough time to get into the entire thing of this episode, but the way I understand it, for the first time I was experiencing very strong parts communication and some of the content of these memories was starting to come through. Stewart was involved in this and based on his role in the system and his comment about my brain growing back together from years ago, this makes sense. During the episode, I remembered or was given knowledge that the system existed and other parts could now talk to me.
Speaker 2:During the time leading up to this, I remember actually feeling very safe and content with life with great relationships with friends, and I think the psychological safety that I felt made it okay for those dissociative barriers to be lowered for the first time. The part the parts the individual parts, perceptions of reality are all dependent on who they are and what they've experienced. Some of them have substitute beliefs that constitute elaborate backstories and some of them are really young emotional parts that believe in age appropriate magical thinking that they were exposed to in childhood. The introduction, of this traumatic information combined with the sudden unexpected stressor of my sister being hospitalized, hospitalized, made us unstable. And, we started experiencing frequent switching and blackout amnesia, and this time full blackout amnesia.
Speaker 2:I think my brain was trying to make sense of this new information in the best way that it knew how, and it put the information back together in the completely wrong order. So, I saw this connection that didn't exist between all of the facets of my life at the time, which linked trauma to work, for the very first time. I was communicating with my family and my friends while this was happening and they were able to tell that someone something was wrong though. Even though I attribute this to parts activity, my actions are still ultimately my responsibility and I said and did a lot of things that I'm very ashamed and embarrassed about. This in itself was a traumatic event and I'm still having a hard time processing it to this day, so it's kind of hard to talk about.
Speaker 2:The worst of this and the point of my story today was when Stewart who had no involvement or knowledge about anything related to work prior to this event, decided to send an email to the people that I worked with. I had no idea that he had the ability to take executive control of my body in any way And as an inner world part who does not interact with daily life or objective reality, only constrained by the limits of my imagination, I don't think he knew how to process it either. So he emailed about 700 people that I work with and two support teams from other companies for software vendors that I worked with. The email was very long and strange, but he basically introduced himself as a ghost and explained that he was writing through Tab, me, and he could experience this because Tab, again, me, had the internal experiences of hearing voices. He explained the psychotic belief, which was the connection between unrelated events, which was that the events of a video game predicted the events that happened today.
Speaker 2:And through cryptography, he was able to predict events. He explained that he was concerned that a security breach was going to occur. Again, I work in cybersecurity. He concluded by making a passionate statement that society should not stigmatize mentally ill and queer people. He then signed the email in his own name, and I discovered it the next morning.
Speaker 2:What's hard to deal with about this, is that we still don't know for 100% certainty why this happened. Different parts have different feelings and explanations about what happened. I've rationalized it and believe that I understand it to an extent, but part of me still wonders if I have additional comor com comorbidities and worries that this could happen again. I self admitted to the ER, and they diagnosed me with anxiety. So I really didn't get the support that I needed.
Speaker 2:Which makes this hard to understand for me is that I actually found out later that Stewart knew that sending this email was wrong. This could just be my attempt to explain something that has no explanation, but there is a strong possibility that this was in some part an intentional self sabotage of my career in an attempt to get me to either quit my job or be fired to collect unemployment. This sort of scheme and manipulation is actually reflective of something that my past abusers would do. Stewart wrote to me in advance of this event saying that he was sorry for what's about to happen to you and that he'll explain later and that I can remember a very hazy internal dialogue afterwards that was talking, between some parts of the system who were happy this happened because I would have time off. Upon reflection, I now know the helplessness that the emotional parts felt about having to go to work every day.
Speaker 2:So this very well could have been a act of desperation. With everything that happened, it was likely a combination of several factors. Unfortunately, as the person who controls amnesia barriers in my system, Stuart's job is to lie to me and withhold information. So it may take some time before we truly understand what happened, if ever. So after all this happened, I took a three month long leave of absence.
Speaker 2:We went back and forth as to whether we wanted to truly quit or not, but we decided that we were going to need insurance and it would we were just in too delicate of an emotional state to go about finding another job. So we decided to stick it out and take some time off to recover. I went back after about three months when I was able to start therapy, but actually feeling better after all this took a really long time and I don't think I'm 100% over it to this day. Part of the motivation for me to do this presentation was to conceptualize these events into a narrative so I can move on. I lost a lot of my friends around this time and I felt very vulnerable and alone.
Speaker 2:Before we get into our first learning objective talking about how to return to work after a mental health episode and talking about how I personally addressed the events in this situation, I wanted to pause for a couple minutes and see if anybody had any questions. If you'd like to unmute and ask a question, feel free, or feel free to drop your questions in the chat. Okay, so moving on. The course of action that I took is absolutely not recommended, but I was able to get through it in the end. The way that this happened made my situation unique because I had written documented evidence witnessed by so many people that my childhood imaginary friend had taken executive control of my body.
Speaker 2:He even signed his own name. We do not know at what point that we discovered this was DID. I think that we knew that there was a system like structure intuitively, but it's also entirely possible that I found the diagnosis years ago and thanks to Amnesia forgot that information until it was safe to process it. Either way, somehow after this event, we realized that we had DID and that we needed to take steps to address it. So we split a new part.
Speaker 2:Vowel was created the day after the incident happened, and his goal was to get us as far away from tab as possible. He is not extremely different from, you know, our tab parts, but he's a little bit more introverted and task oriented and he speaks in a slightly different pitch. Only my therapist and my sister can really tell the difference. It was not safe for it to be tagged right now, and Val's goal was to take over running the day to day life to correct the situation. He immediately moved out, sold our house, cut our hair, and legally changed our name to Val.
Speaker 2:He also had little personal idiosyncrasies, like he wanted to switch us to iPhone, which I always hated, and he got our first he got our first tattoo, which I had never had before. He even wanted to get my ears pierced because he didn't have any connection to the time when I was eight and had an earring get stuck in my earlobe. Most importantly, it was Val who actually took us to therapy. I even called it my therapy altar. Val, with the help from others in the system, documented all of our dissociative symptoms and showed up at my therapist's office asking for EMDR.
Speaker 2:If you'd asked my therapist what my name was, she would have told you Val. Right from the get go, she was talking to someone other than what would have been considered the host part, so I was able to start getting help pretty much right away. Being in the therapist's office was really hard, and he stood in for the top parts when it was too painful to do so. He also was the one who returned to work after all this happened. Our top parts were too damaged to come back, and it wasn't Val who had been embarrassed by this incident.
Speaker 2:When we first got back in touch with our manager, we told her that we would be changing our name to Val and planned to do a complete post switch. Unfortunately, in addition to all of this, I was very well known for the project that I worked on. Everyone at work knew my name and the project that I was responsible for. So we weighed our options and decided it was going to draw more unwanted attention to change, to announce a name change, so we ultimately did not go through with changing it and stuck with tab. Getting back to work after all this happened was very difficult and I had to do I had to do a lot of this on my own, but a large part of the reason that I was able to do this successfully was due to the community, the culture, and the procedures in place to support me.
Speaker 2:My job is a very good job that I worked hard for, but I have to point out that I am white and I am male. There are systemic reasons that I was able to get this good job in the first place. I was fortunate in, in the fact that I was able to keep my job without being fired. My job also had leave of absence, with a with short term disability. I was able to go out on medical leave for an extended period of time and my work had benefits in place where I received a percentage of my paycheck for the duration of my medical leave.
Speaker 2:There was even an HR employee relations person to help me with the paperwork. Also, ever since the pandemic, my role was remote. Not only was this in in itself a huge benefit to my mental health, I didn't have to go in and physically face any of these people in the office. Also, my management was extremely understanding. The people, as I mentioned, were, were all really great human beings.
Speaker 2:My industry in general is known for being very progressive, and one of our core values at the company I work at is being kinder than necessary and my managers and teammates really did exemplify that with their actions. My direct manager in particular at the time was immensely helpful. She stayed in touch with me for the duration of time that I was on leave and welcomed me back and kind of helped readjust me to working. Most importantly, my job pays a living wage. I have disposable income to spend on therapy.
Speaker 2:I would be extremely ignorant to not acknowledge that I was lucky. I don't want to be one of those types of speakers that attributes their success to something that they got all of all all on their own when that is absolutely not the case. I know that not everyone has a job where they have these kinds of benefits. So when you're looking for job opportunities, just pay attention to their policies and culture among the people that you work with. One of the reasons that I had all of this support was because I work for a large company.
Speaker 2:There are like over 90,000 employees and we have been around for long enough to have these, employee programs in place. Startups that I worked at, they can be fun if you like that kind of culture, but I wouldn't have had the same experience of the other jobs that I had worked at. So after this happened, you might be wondering what exactly that I told people. As I mentioned, this was absolutely not the recommended way to go about disclosing your DID. A few days after everything happened, Val sent a short apology to everyone.
Speaker 2:I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was very brief. Everyone knew that something had happened to me, but they didn't know exactly what it was unless maybe they had an understanding of DID. I did not return and tell everyone that I had been diagnosed. I had really already disclosed enough information for a lifetime. I did have many people who reached out to me while I had been on leave, many of them people that I hadn't worked with before and did not recognize.
Speaker 2:I was fortunate in the fact that our Slack message retention was only for two months. So by the time that I returned to the office, the messages were already gone. I didn't have to be confronted by people's reactions about what happened. I was especially concerned with how to approach my teammates, many of whom different parts had talked to very radically before I had gone on leave. They had every reason to be wary of me and doubt my abilities as a manager, and I frankly had frightened them.
Speaker 2:I needed to apologize. Luckily, my manager was very supportive, and I really only needed to disclose my diagnosis to leadership. She was not only really into mindfulness and meditation, her specialty was actually communications. So she was able to help me kind of plan and practice those conversations. Her advice was not to include anything about the specific diagnosis or dive back into what happened in great detail and instead encourage me to say something along the lines of, I was experiencing some medical problems and was not at my best and make a short but sincere commitment to do better in the future.
Speaker 2:This went over well with everyone that I spoke with, and if they were upset with me still, they didn't show it. Our system is split on being open about DID in the workplace. Some of us lead towards activism, living your truth, and being open about your experiences. Others view that as anxiety inducing, oversharing, and unnecessary. It was a very complex and personal topic, and we kind of split the difference between these two approaches.
Speaker 2:As a leader, it is my job to create structure and help people feel safe. One of the most important things I do is manage my connection with others, and I have to be very mindful of every interaction to avoid unnecessarily triggering a stress response in my team. I need to be stable and predictable, so I don't want everyone knowing if someone else is fronting. I would never expect them nor want them to call me by different names. I avoid going into detail about exactly what is going on because I don't think that it would reassure them to know that sometimes when I talk I am mentally six years old.
Speaker 2:However, I do recognize the power of personal narrative for people in positions of leadership. So I tried to build a conscious culture by being open about mental health and neurodivergence and diversity and inclusion in general ways. I want them to know that if they were to come to me and struggling with disability, that I would be there to support them. Disclosing your diagnosis could realistically have a negative impact on your career. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that seventy six percent of employees with disability with disabilities who are surveyed report not feeling not seventy six percent of employees with disabilities, report not fully disclosing their disabilities at work.
Speaker 2:This is who we're serving. I need to fix that sentence. Their research found employees with disabilities worry that disclosing will lead to retaliation, slower career progression, and less meaningful roles. Talking about your experience with DID can be very difficult and it's a personal decision even in supportive environments. It's also very possible that sharing too much becoming too personal with people can make them uncomfortable and have a negative impact on your working relationship.
Speaker 2:This disorder is extremely stigmatized in our society and it's not really your job to correct correct every single person's negative perceptions. Let people be wrong about you. Disclosing a disability can also be unnecessary if your dissociation does not impair your ability to perform your job. If DID does not significantly impact your job performance, you might not have any reason to disclose your DID at all. On the other hand, you may decide to disclose your diagnosis to your employer if you need resources or flexibility to do your best work or if for some reason you think you're in an environment where disclosing DID would be beneficial.
Speaker 2:When you can do it safely, the ability to be open and bring your whole self to work to help foster a sense of belonging and psychological safety among your team. This is especially powerful if you're in a position of power or authority. According again to the Harvard Business Review, when employees with disabilities have role models at the leadership level who have disclosed their own disabilities, they found that the employees with disabilities have an incredible 48% higher likelihood of self disclosure. Anecdotes from high level people about the struggle to fit in or be their authentic selves at work sense of belonging. It normalizes and brings awareness to such a stigmatized disorder.
Speaker 2:This is why clinicians in particular who are open about their personal experiences of multiplicity like Emma Sunshine, shout out, Jamie Marich, and many others who attend this conference are so effective at changing perspectives about DID. These bold role models who are not only successful in their own practices, but thought leaders in the community make it okay for others to be open about their own experiences. One resource I know of that talks about disclosing DID and accommodations at work for DID is the plurality playbook, which is a resource that was created to help employees and managers understand dissociative disorders as well as plurality as a whole. It was created by Freya Spirit, Lucia Bateman, and Irene's Irene Knapp. And it's really the first of its kind guide for employees and managers to navigate multiplicity in the workplace and was designed at Google.
Speaker 2:It is a great foundation, and I think there's lots of potential to expand upon it in the future. If you do use this resource however note that it does intentionally present disordered and non disordered systems together so there are information and links within it to things like topamancy. While I'm not here to engage in any debate about endogenic systems, I think it could potentially make for a confusing introduction to DID for employers. If I were using the document with a leader who's completely new to dissociative disorders, I would personally want to focus, then keep the conversation on DID and OSDB. If you're disclosing your disability to your manager, you're likely asking for some form of accommodation that would help you be successful and do your best work, so you don't want to gloss over the specific challenges you experience as someone who has a disability, but that's just my personal experience.
Speaker 2:Experience as someone who has a disability. But that's just my personal experience. Everyone's different, and, that resource is available for you. So, now I'm gonna talk about some of the strategies that I use to manage dissociation at work. As I mentioned before, I usually don't have full blackouts, but I do have switches between at least two or three parts on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:Unless the person switching in has a general sense of what it's going on, even if they don't know the exact details, So there is the potential to lose time, knowledge, or skills between switches. In addition to practicing the grounding skills I was learning in therapy, there are a few tips and tools that have really helped me continue to be successful. Before I dive into that, I do wanna give the disclaimer that not everyone can work with this disorder. It absolutely has the potential to be completely disabling, and just because I personally have enough internal communication to be successful in my role, that is not the case for everyone, especially if you're dealing with more overt switches, disruptive alters, and more time loss in blackouts. If that is you, you are absolutely valid and that must be incredibly hard to manage.
Speaker 2:This is a disability at the end of the day, so just keep that in mind as we approach this topic of managing association at work. One of the first pieces of advice for managing DID was to start tracking switches. I just first want to say that this wasn't very successful and added unnecessary stress to my day. I tried to do this virtually with tools like Simply Plural and using a physical schedule. I don't know who I am at every given moment, and I sometimes don't know when I've switched until hours after.
Speaker 2:Trying to think back to did I switch at 03:26 or 04:15 was not helpful because it was such universal advice. At first, I felt like I was a bad patient and wasn't doing enough to progress in therapy, but I feel so much better after dropping this expectation to track everything. If tracking works for you and helps you, fine, but if it isn't working, it's not the end of the world to not do it. So, I read a lot about DID when I discovered I had it, and one of the most common pieces of advice about work was to designate a specific part who would handle your job. We tried to designate Val as our work part, but anytime someone would ask for tab, it would mentally summon him to respond to the question.
Speaker 2:Val, as I'll discuss later, also had some skill in knowledge gaps and wasn't really able to be successful on his own. As much as we wanted to give our tab parts a break, they were still needed to do work. I was aware that switches were happening, but I wasn't really able to identify who I was in any given moment. I found a really interesting case about this in Janina Fisher's book, Healing the Fragmented Cells of Trauma Survivors that really resonated a lot with my past experience. She describes several high functioning professional clients in work that she worked with who had dissociative parts, and their careers frequently came up in therapy, especially in scenarios where younger parts are taking on adult responsibilities.
Speaker 2:She says in work settings, difficulty functioning can be traced back in retrospect to trauma related triggers inherent in normal life. Authority figures, work demands, whether reasonable or unreasonable, challenge and change, success or failure, visibility or invisibility, pressure working in groups, lack of social support, feeling too little for the responsibilities being given to us. Parts hijack or blend with the normal life self, impairing its ability to function. This seemed like exactly what I felt with those emotional parts who were experiencing black not blackout, burnout. In one of her case studies, a client with a scared little child part who was anxious about, speaking at an upcoming public speaking engagement.
Speaker 2:He explains to the little boy that grown ups like to do scary things and speak in public, but he told him that it would be his adult self that would be doing the speaking. He tells him that he's just a kid. He shouldn't have to handle these adult responsibilities that were scaring him so badly. So the guy asked the child part if it would be okay if he did the speaking event while the little boy stayed home. This worked, and, Janina Fisher says that this client's career blossomed because every time he had to do scary grown up stuff, he would have the same conversation with the little boy.
Speaker 2:The adult self would do the grown up stuff, and the little boy would stay home. So I started asking questions internally throughout the day, and sure enough, there were young parts who were involved in the work that I was doing. I did the same thing. I told them they didn't have to go to work and take out all these responsibilities. I could do them instead.
Speaker 2:Some of our little parts are actually very competent and have been helping with work for a very long time. So we do notice that, that they do sometimes contribute, particularly if we're doing something fun with our team or connecting with people on an interpersonal level. I still don't have great communication with these parks, but since I started doing this, the amount of overwhelming situations that I found myself in have drastically reduced. I started paying attention and getting curious when I felt too small and started being able to at least identify when child parts were close to the surface. Some of the child parts genuinely like helping or watching me work, so I give them a choice.
Speaker 2:You can help if you want, but if you don't want to, you can go play. If a dysregulated emotional part is fronting or coconscious and we absolutely cannot calm down, we've actually started to take a day or a half day off. I used to feel guilty about calling off for mental health days, but after everything that happened, I don't wanna chance these little parts getting overwhelmed. I save all of my time off for illness instead of actually taking vacations. Amnesia and PID can present in many different ways, including loss of information regarding behavior, emotions, skills, or knowledge.
Speaker 2:There's actually a section in the Google Plurality Playbook that I mentioned before, that asks, what do I do if I forget how to code and I'm a programmer? We rely on our skills and knowledge and experience to be successful, so this can be a real challenge for someone with a dissociative disorder. As I mentioned, Val didn't have all of the skills and experience to be successful without help from other parts of the system. Val's memory started the day after the incident happened. He had a general awareness of autobiographical events that had happened to us collectively, but he didn't have a connection to them.
Speaker 2:For example, he knew intellectually that we had spent a great deal of our life working in leadership positions in various capacities. But because of the loss of connection to those memories, it felt like he'd never done it before, and he felt like he didn't know what to do. This is a problem when your whole job is to be a manager. We needed to start at square one and go about relearning leadership and getting more comfortable giving feedback and direction to the folks on my team. It was very bizarre.
Speaker 2:You've heard of imposter syndrome. I, as Val, felt like I was literally an imposter. Things have gotten better with that, but I do still encounter it to this day. Recently, I was developing training materials, which I've done many times before. It was my passion for so long, but I didn't even know where to start.
Speaker 2:It feels like I've never done this before, and I'm literally googling things trying to draw up my memory desperately hoping that the right part shows up. To make progress when I like this, I do a technique that I call picking at it, which means that I open the document and try working on any parts of the project I do know how to do. I usually can research issues and look things up pretty consistently, so I typically start there. I do sometimes find myself procrastinating because I've been waiting on the right part to come back, but I've learned that sometimes I just need to move forward on something even though it's not the best that it could be. Don't let perfect to get in the way of good.
Speaker 2:One of the most fortunate aspects of my role is that I can work remotely. Prior to the pandemic, I used to work forty, forty five minutes to an hour and a half away. I would commute to the office every day because I really wanted the job, but it was brutal. It really affected my mental health. Even if I'm having an absolutely terrible dissociation day, because I'm working remotely, I can keep working from wherever is comfortable for me.
Speaker 2:It's not for everyone, but if you're able to manage your time independently, this is something that I would recommend requesting as an accommodation. Keeping track of what I'm working on and prioritizing tasks is hugely important and I personally found that a lot of the strategies that work for someone with ADHD can also be applied to someone that experiences switching but doesn't regularly experience full blackout amnesia. As I said, I usually have a general idea of what I've been working on in the passage of time and sometimes I don't even really notice it until I start questioning myself on the specifics of what I've been doing. I need to be really proactive in tracking and organizing the things that I worked on that I'm working on, and I use several different tools to stay on track. One thing that I did find really helpful is Trello, which is a project management tool.
Speaker 2:You can also do this in Jira, monday.com, or others available to you. I used to track my daily tasks in a notebook and, with sticky notes next to my laptop, but, I did like it, but it wasn't ideal for a long period of time. As a manager, I not only have to track my own tasks, but I need to check-in on what other people are working on. So I need a private private Trello board and Kanban style with different swim lanes for on hold, in progress, and completed. One thing that I especially like about these tools is that you can leave comments on the board.
Speaker 2:So it's great for multiple parts checking in. My Trello board is my source of truth for the workday, and we've all gotten into the habit of leaving comments every time that we do something. I talked to so and so. I started a document. Here's the link.
Speaker 2:I'm leaving comments for future me, whoever that may be, so I know exactly where I left off on a future task. In combination with project management tools, I keep a running list of updates specifically for weekly conversations with my manager or questions that I need to bring up to him during our meeting. I used to have a really hard time with these sorts of meetings because I couldn't recall what I'd worked on. I could never go into a meeting like this and just wing it. So I keep a weekly list in Google Docs or Word that I refer to when I'm having a chat with my manager during our weekly one on ones, and I can refer back to my trouble board if I need to refresh my memory, on where anything is.
Speaker 2:One other general time management strategy that works out well for jobs like buying is blocking your Outlook calendar. I find this to be particularly, useful for activities I need to do at the same time every week, every month, or quarterly. Don't go overboard. I I don't schedule every minute of my week, but I do like, I do like that regardless of who's around, I get a reminder to do something at the same time. Also, if you have a lot of meetings, blocking time when you're unavailable to meet is a great strategy as well.
Speaker 2:So you can have time to work on your own things. I actually front load my week so that I take most of my meetings Monday through Thursday, and I have Fridays two to 5PM blocked for focused work and professional development. After all this happened with realizing, I had DID, Val and the other parts of the system knew that we needed to reprioritize and focus on therapy. Val didn't really consider work something that encompassed his identity because he didn't have an attachment to the events that happened before he was created. Work became something that we did during the day that was important, but therapy really was my full time job.
Speaker 2:I was very isolated and I spent most of my free time reading books about DID and working on therapy. Now that our tab parts have been showing up a little more a couple years after this happened, we're finding that we do have some that still really identify with our career and are types to sign up for an hour and a half talk about their work experience, but others aren't. We have many parts that answer to tab and when they're hunting, they think I am the main tab And they feel less distinct from each other. But by getting curious about these parts and hearing them share their experience, we actually found that they differ in how they emotionally feel about different situations and in skills. For example, we have at least one who self identifies as a good writer, but when we've gone back and seen what they've worked on, it's often really hard to understand and a sentence structure is much more simplistic than I'm normally used to, and it absolutely looks like someone completely different wrote it.
Speaker 2:As I was learning about different roles in the system, I assumed that work parts were doing so because they found it fulfilling in some way. The literature, especially when it's designed for a clinical audience, has this very objective and distanced approach to parts which makes sense because they're seeking to understand how systems work systemically and through research and logic oftentimes without the direct personal experience of what it feels like to have this inner experience. I was internalizing this tendency to just categorize them. Oh, that's just a work part. They're an apparently normal part.
Speaker 2:They handle day to day work tasks. But when I started paying attention to what these parts were expressing, there was a lot more to them than just I'm here to do work, particularly for those who didn't have this eagerness to dive back into my career after all this happened. They might look very similar to another part and, yes, they do show up sometimes to do work tasks, but when you give them the freedom and space to get curious about who they are as an individual, they might surprise you. Some of these parts are holding on to past career aspirations like one wants to be an artist. Some have very low energy and would prefer to just stay home and play video games.
Speaker 2:I'm sure I'll learn more as I continue to work with them and learn more about why you're here. There is just more to them than just work part. With these inner reflections becoming a priority for me, I made several changes in my life that I continue to working on. For these parts that do strongly identify with our career, I've given them the space to continue to develop that. They read books, they attend classes, and they continue to do well at work.
Speaker 2:We have changed some of our bad habits like overworking and actively drew more boundaries between our work and home selves, sticking to a consistent night of five schedule, not having Slack or work email on my phone. This also meant recognizing when I was taking on too much and learning to say no to requests that interfere with my life. This was actually pretty easy to do after what happened because I realized that to keep my job, I needed to do well in therapy and work towards integration, not final fusion, integration, or this could happen again. For these work identifying parts, we still struggle with flashbacks to 2022, and I realized that this was a trauma. If I'm still dealing with 2022, there's no way that I can actually work on anything that caused my DID.
Speaker 2:Having this awareness of how trauma impacts people has encouraged me to bridge what I am learning in therapy with what I'm learning about being a good manager. I, I read Evolve, the path to trauma informed leadership by Carolyn Swara because I was searching different keywords trying to find out if there was actually a management philosophy that bridged these two worlds. She didn't coin the phrase trauma informed leadership, but the book is pretty good. The first part has a little bit of pseudo science y personality typing, but the main idea really stuck with me. Everyone experiences some form of trauma.
Speaker 2:If you work with humans, you are working with trauma. As a manager, people will confide in you their divorces and deaths of loved ones and car accidents and just really challenging and heartbreaking stuff, and that's really going to affect their ability to be successful at work. It's not your job to diagnose it unless you are a clinician or treat it. You know, that's for a professional, but understanding how it motivates people's behavior helps you make decisions to make the workplace a safer space. I mentioned that I am very aware now of the things that I say and do.
Speaker 2:This is because people are looking to you as a person in a position of authority for social cues, and it's almost like you're co regulating with them. That's why it's especially important to have your own internal awareness because the things that you do and the decisions that you make will affect their relationship with you and how they experience work. I realized that my commitment to healing from DID and my passion for my career shared a common goal, and it has helped bring meaning to a perspective of what I do for a living. But as I mentioned, some of my parts that were showing up for work do not have a passion for this. In the past, my identity defaulted to whatever I happen to be working on.
Speaker 2:I was on autopilot and disconnected from feelings. I didn't really know who I was without work, and I had this whole new perspective of my experiences as a person with DID. So I am working with these parts to understand who they are, what they're about, and giving them space to just be. My work identifying parts loved reading and everything they could about trauma and going to work every day and learning about management. But for these other parts, I needed to slow down.
Speaker 2:Some of these non non work emotional parts are children, and some of them are jaded adults that resent the idea of living in a capitalistic society and being a cog in the machine of a massive company and consider managing a team to be a bullshit job. I am working on communication to reduce the amount of time these parts are exposed to work, and I understand that these parts were hurting and unhappy, and I needed to find out what self care meant for them. I do not work past 5PM, so our evenings are for leisure. They need time to rest, so we take PTO mental health days when we need to. And in our free time, we're exploring different hobbies that they're interested in.
Speaker 2:So, that's where we are today. I've spent the last couple years very isolated, so I needed to actually actively choose to have human contact. It has taken two years, but my tab parts that reflect more of my social and intro and the tab parts that reflect my more social and extroverted tendencies have started to come back around and are adjusting and trying to make new friends outside of work. For example, we do yoga classes at this cool little studio by my house, we work from cafes sometimes now, we attend a book club at a cool small bookstore and, French conversation groups. We have been lucky to have also very understanding family members, and we have a close relationship, and I see them every week for dinner and to go grocery shopping.
Speaker 2:During the past two years, finding connections with other people who have systems has really helped me overcome some of the personal feelings of shame. I read all of the books I could find, but they can't compare to hearing from the experiences of other people with DID. Systems are created in the imaginations of traumatized children, and our experiences are subjective and unique to us. I really struggle with doubt and denial, and I regularly go, I'm faking this. I made this up.
Speaker 2:I'm going to call my therapist and cancel all of my appointments. But hearing from someone else and going, hey. I do that too, gives me pause and really helps me feel less alone. One community that I can't wreck enough recommend enough is System Speak, run by Emma Sunshaw. It started as a podcast and developed into a really great little community of people, including weekly check-in groups that really helped me connect with other people who had systems.
Speaker 2:I also attended healing together last year and it was really helpful for me to see so many people who live fulfilling lives with DID while also maintaining a professional career. It helped me feel like it wasn't the end of the world. We did discussion groups last year at the conference, when we were sharing about our experiences, and I casually said, yeah. I found out I had DID after one of my alters took over my work email and tried to get me fired. And seeing other people's reactions and empathy to that helps me realize, okay.
Speaker 2:Maybe this was really as bad as I thought it was, and I'm not being ridiculous to still think about it. I'm not the first person to make a mistake at work. You know, I could have been the forklift driver who loaded the wrong pallet for the Air Force one seats for the wrong truck. I could have been the CEO who charged $75,000 in strip clubs to his company credit card. We're all human.
Speaker 2:Nobody makes it through life mistake free. As challenging as this was for me, I realized that it served as a stepping stone with valuable life experiences that I'll take with me, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to grow that it has afforded me. Humans make sense of their experiences by turning them into stories, so I'm very grateful to be have to have this welcoming space with others who understand. So that's it. I wanna thank you you for listening today.
Speaker 2:You have my gratitude for listening to my experience, and I'll take, any final questions that you have now.
Speaker 1:I had no idea I was gonna cry this much. You you got me in the fields right where I have been needing and working
Speaker 2:on the past few weeks. Thank you so much, Tabs. Oh, that's so sweet, Emma. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Someone in the chat says, your share is so incredibly educational and extremely relatable. Thank you for sharing.
Speaker 2:Oh, you are most welcome, my friend. Oh, yeah. I was I was gonna say the same thing here. Feel free to type it. So, yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you have any feedback on things that could be improved about it I'm open to that as well. If you don't want to say it here you know feel free to DM me on the community or reply in the thread about the chat. I will also I know I didn't prepare a PowerPoint for you guys, but, once it is prepared, I'll post it, and post the links to the different resources that I was talking about, so you can check them out if you're interested.
Speaker 1:What someone said, we can relate so much. Thank you for sharing. Someone else said awesome. Someone said, what an impressive story. Thanks for sharing.
Speaker 1:Someone said, thank you for being so vulnerable. I have not returned to work,
Speaker 2:but your story gives me hope. Best of luck to the person returning to work. I know it's really hard.
Speaker 1:Someone said, how proud are you of all of you? Oh, my heart.
Speaker 2:We we have mixed opinions. There is very much a large part of me that's like, why did you even do this? This was a mistake to do this. I don't wanna present at the conference. So we, we have very complicated feelings about our own experiences.
Speaker 2:Luckily, we were able to, we were able to reflect the more positive aspects of our system, you know in the presentation and kind of really focus on the things that were positive about this experience, and I think that those parts feel, I think that those parts feel very, good about what has happened. But I think that the because that this situation was so complicated, I don't necessarily feel proud, but I feel good that I was able to write everything out. I feel good that I was able to find and at least come to somewhat of a consensus about what and why this happened and feel empowered that I'm making choices to prevent it from happening in the future. So I wouldn't say proud, but that's just me personally talking. So, I think others in the system have other opinions.
Speaker 1:You really gave such compassion for the humanity of all of us as people and all of us as insiders of a system people, for making mistakes, for growing through that, for improving care of ourselves and others by tending to each other inside, and that is so, so challenging. Someone said in the chat, so many of the things you've shared with us were things I've never heard spoken aloud before. The world is bigger. My heart is open earth. Thank you.
Speaker 1:My mind is not able to hold all of the thoughts and feelings on your presentation all in one place.
Speaker 2:Aw, that's so sweet.
Speaker 1:That's such a compliment. Thank you. Someone asked, any thoughts on what employers need to know or consider or might not know on how to support employees when the employers might not know their employees' experiences? I know you referenced that book. Would you is
Speaker 2:there anything you wanna add? Yeah. I actually had a section on this, but because of the time constraints, I had to cut it out. But, essentially, your employer doesn't need to know all of the ins and outs of dissociation to be to support you. I think that, that that one of the main things that is, that I would change if I was personally writing the Google document is that I would actually simplify it and focus more on, like, how it presents in the workplace, as opposed to trying to introduce every single aspect of plurality, which is why I disagreed with including, the examples of, like, topamancy, which if you're if you're starting with someone that is completely blank slate, I think that that's a lot to take in.
Speaker 2:So, I would say if I would say focus on what specific to you is, is challenging and just reflect on that. And I think that's gonna be different for every single person, because it there's different levels of amnesia. Some people have really overt switches and some people don't. So I think that question is really gonna vary on the individual employee that they're helping. But, at the end of the day, a lot of these strategies that your manager is going to be able to help with is about reprioritizing your workload and, and, making your flexibility in your scheduling and making those accommodations.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the things that you'd be asking for are very similar to other issues that will be encountered like ADHD for example. I have experience working with, folks that have ADHD and helping them get organized and stay prioritized. So for me personally, a lot of those strategies were, you know, were very similar and, you know, you didn't need to be an expert in DID, with that. And, my current employers though they're very supportive they they don't know the ins and outs of my diagnosis either, but they do know that I need flexibility in my schedule and I call off sick a lot. I don't they they don't expect me to give them a whole, you know, life story every time I call off sick, but, I do, but I do have a a good relationship where I'm able to be like, hey.
Speaker 2:I really can't do this today. And I use that as sparingly as I can, but I know that this is an accommodation that I need, especially if there's, like, a a little that is fronting. Like, I can't, like, I can't run a meeting with a little that is, like, overwhelmed and, you know, very close to the surface. So they do know, they do know general things about, like, TAB needs accommodations in their schedule and TAB works remotely and, you know, just thinking about how it relates directly to the job that you do is, really the most important things to convey to the employer. So I apologize I don't have a very direct answer for you, but, don't feel the need to explain every single detail about the ID.
Speaker 2:We don't need to do that. Just really focus on, how it affects you and the things that your manager is actually going to be able to do. Come to them with ideas and say, like, I'm having this problem. I think it could be helped by working remotely. Or I have this problem.
Speaker 2:I think it could be helped by gaining access to project management software so I can get organized better. So, stuff like that. I I hope that's helpful.
Speaker 1:I will answer the other part of that question about if you're the employer and think someone is dissociative but the employee has not said. There's just laws about that. You can't get intrusive into people's medical or mental health diagnoses or needs. You can if, generally, you're noticing someone is needing support. You could use those same strategies and supports like what Tabs is sharing about.
Speaker 1:Those, ideas you could offer to anyone who's an employee accommodations that might be supportive. The same as if someone had ADHD but didn't know it or wasn't recognizing it or owning it. You could still use those same things in that way. So you could offer support generally, but I think that it really requires you could check the laws where you live, but at least here, you it really requires the person to initiate that, which is part of why we talk about advocating for your needs in the professional workplace.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I knew absolutely nothing about that, so I'm glad you're here, Emma. Thank you. Any other questions? That was so good.
Speaker 2:We're so grateful. Well, thank you all so so much. I can't thank you enough. I know that was a lot to sit through, and, if you have any questions or thoughts and wanna reach out to me, feel free to do so on the community. And, like I said, I will post those links for you.
Speaker 2:And I just wanna thank you again for your your compassion and your patience, and, I have so much gratitude for this community. So thank you for being so welcoming and giving me a space. Well done, Tabs. We're so proud of you. We're so excited for you, and we will absolutely be cheering you on.
Speaker 2:Thank you, everybody. Bye, everyone.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemspeakcommunity.com. We'll see you there.