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Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Over: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast,
Speaker 2:a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to long time listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 1:I know that on the podcast, we've been talking about hard things. It's mostly because that's what I've been learning in therapy. I've spent a whole year now getting myself and my children to safety. In some ways, that seems silly to say. When I have lighter skin, no one has dragged me out of my home.
Speaker 1:And being single and introverted means that I haven't even been in public very much. So it's not like I've been in danger. But I have been grieving all year. And just because it's not happening to me doesn't mean it's not happening. And I spent this weekend working on old episodes, getting them back up all the way through August 2022, which is right before I left Oklahoma.
Speaker 1:And I can feel myself waking up so slowly, and it's brought up so many questions in so many tender places. I'm also learning to see my dissociation in a different way. We so often talk about mapping as learning who is here, who is where, how old they are, what their names are, what roles they play. But I have learned it's much more than that. Much more subtle than that.
Speaker 1:It's a process, not just people inside. When I am in this situation, can I remember the other parts of me? And I don't mean people. I mean experiences, thoughts, opinions, needs, and wants, preferences. I've never liked the metaphor about the bus and who is driving the bus.
Speaker 1:I don't know why it bothers me, but something about it bothers me, and also they're not wrong. And sometimes it's easier to see in hindsight who is driving the bus. Listening to myself come out of quarantine after the pandemic, which stretched so long for us, and finally grieving the loss of my first therapist. And having had the quarantine stretch of time where we did not attend church services in person and then to return to the world and see who was still there in my life after we had wrestled and struggled to save my daughter's life those two years and what still felt like me on the other side and returning to services only to realize I could not return to services because the time away had left me with time with me, which made it easier to see what was congruent and not. I had, by that time, recognized that I was my own ship.
Speaker 1:And I felt brave and silly naming an episode, oh, ship, as if it were so clever and sneaky. Who was that? What developmental phase is that? The adolescent experience of rebelling in language, pushing limits in expression, and, also, how sheltered was I that that was so wild. I had by then learned about fawning and talked about unfawning before I ever left Oklahoma.
Speaker 1:I had recognized the codependency that was happening at home and had questions and crisis but had not yet found recovery. And I recognized that whatever was happening was the end of me, that I was in a place where I could no longer stay with things as they were and also survive. I did not yet have words to understand or express how fawning means giving away pieces of myself and that I was running out of pieces to give. But I could feel intuitively that it was no longer acceptable to sacrifice me. Now all these years later, it feels like decades.
Speaker 1:But when I left Oklahoma in 2022, and I've spent a year here, and so the year and a half, two years in between, all of this when my therapist and I, when my friends and I talk about we can no longer sacrifice ourselves, We remind each other, survivors of religious trauma, that we were not born to be the baby Jesus. In no way disrespecting any actual savioring, just acknowledging that was not me. Maybe that's the difference between a faith that may include some aspect of redemption in some way and religious trauma where we are commanded to be the sacrifice. I remember the years of study where we even talked about other ancient cultures that sacrificed women or children, literally. But no one talked about how we did it metaphorically or figuratively in religion.
Speaker 1:And I had given so much of myself, there was nothing else to give. There was a part of me, whether that is alter or process is irrelevant, really, in my own healing, but a part of me who did daydream, that I could be wife enough to save Nathan from depression, that I could be mother enough to save the children from trauma they experienced before they ever even came to me. But no one was teaching me how to be me enough to save myself, and I think that's why I ran out of air. And, also, as a child, it was my job to save my family, to rescue my mother, to rescue my father, To save my mother from her depression. To save my father from his lack of functioning.
Speaker 1:To save my parents' marriage. When my mother had babies and was no longer tiny and beautiful in the way she was before motherhood, in the way that oppressive cultures talk about women's bodies. And when being the only provider for the family, which caused her meant that not only was she too exhausted to parent, a depleted caregiver, Laura Brown calls them in her book. And certainly not feeling desirable to a spouse who wasn't supporting her and also who was shamed for the betrayal of her family for working outside the home, for getting too educated, for daring to be a librarian instead of a teacher, for working with veterans and doctors instead of only having contact with her husband. And my father, who failed schools, and my father who never could complete his education or hold a job and struggled with whatever masculinity was wounded when my mother could.
Speaker 1:And reasserted his power in ways that harmed her and her children until she was done and left. And he was a thousand miles away from his family and had to learn. I'm acutely aware of how much this reenacted in my own life, how this intergenerational trauma repeated itself, and also the little girl in me. Who thought she could be good enough to make her mother happy, who could be strong enough to make her father better. I have learned only over the last year that that's the part of me that still daydreams.
Speaker 1:If I am gentle enough, maybe my children will be too. If I am present enough, maybe they will be safe for always. If I offer enough, maybe Nathan will be okay. If I buy enough plane tickets, maybe I can hold our family together from far away. If I keep myself in jobs that are high risk and require me to travel, maybe I won't pass on the bad things.
Speaker 1:If I try hard enough, maybe someone will love me. It was Laura's book and doctor Tema's book on recovery that helped me learn that that's not true, that daydreams aren't real. And, also, with therapy, I learned that they weren't bad. The part of me that daydreams so intensely, that wants so much for people to be happy and safe, to love and feel loved, to care and be cared for. To give pieces of myself away and hope someone will put me back together again.
Speaker 1:That part of me was just a little girl trying to stay alive. That is the dissociation of trying to maintain attachments because I need someone as a mammal child. I need someone for me to survive. And maybe that's part of why losing that first therapist was so devastating. Because I thought she was a someone.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's why religious trauma was so devastating. Because I wanted God to be my someone. Maybe that's why dating is so emotionally exhausting because I've been looking for a someone. But if you marry them and they just can't or you date them and they just don't want you back, it doesn't make anybody bad. Their stuff just isn't matching my stuff.
Speaker 1:Not because anyone has failed, but because we all have stuff and because there is no someone when you didn't have anyone in the first place. And the death of hope, that grief, that things can never be different than they were, also feels devastating. Why drowning? That's why I thought I was a drowning whale. Because I was daydreaming so much, I forgot I was the ship, which I figured out all the way back in the 2022.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting because when we've talked about things like maladaptive daydreaming, I never thought it applied to me because I don't play video games. I don't do Sims. I don't dissociate on purpose to develop my inner world or my parts. Not that any of those things are bad. It just wasn't a part of my life mostly because I was never exposed to it.
Speaker 1:So I just mean my experience, not judging others who that was a part of their experience. But I think this is where it does apply. Where there's someone very young in me that sees people in pain and says, I am here to save you, and then you can save me. Nobody consents to that. That wasn't what Nathan signed up for.
Speaker 1:Nobody invited me to Idaho. I just invaded. And the whirlwind of moving here over the mountains in the winter, one U Haul at a time, was exhausting, not just for me and the children, also for my neighbors and friends. Not that Nathan or anybody else regretted or resented it. They just didn't ask for the mess that is me.
Speaker 1:And the truth is I'm not anybody else's mess. I am my own mess, which goes back to the same thing of I'm the only one who can pick up my own babies. I'm the only one who can go to that little girl daydreamer and say, none of this should have been your responsibility. None of this was your fault, and I'm so sorry you were alone in it. And, also, I'm here now to be your someone, my own someone.
Speaker 1:When we talk about annihilation anxiety and the terror that we, as children, without any words or understanding for it, Feel when we are so alone with caregivers that cannot care for whatever reason. That terror is life threatening. My father has to function, or I will not survive. My mother has to be happy, or I will not survive. I remember at a visceral level in my body the conversations about where are we going to live if my father can't keep a job.
Speaker 1:I remember the visceral feeling of terror in my body as a child when my mother couldn't get out of bed. We aren't even talking about the terror of trauma, Just the terror of deprivation to be without care or protection or nurture or provision or softness, gentleness, that is life threatening. That is danger. That is itself trauma. We, as little children, needed safe, soft spaces to be tended to and seen and heard and loved.
Speaker 1:Emotionally, not just physically, to be held. Our first someone should be our parents, our caregivers. And when we don't have that or a whole series of substitutes, or only when it's conditional with strings, with prices of admission. We are left devastated and in terror for our lives. And as children, we cannot escape that terror, that annihilation anxiety.
Speaker 1:We cannot escape it because we are in it and because we are children. So part of me holds the terror. Because it's too much to feel all at once and because part of me has to save my parents. And I can't save my parents if I'm feeling terror. So one of me for my father, one of me for my mother, and one of me for terror.
Speaker 1:That's when I realized that fawning, that being good to be good, the being good at being good to be safe. The other side of the coin, the other side of fawning is terror. And realizing that that's how it ties into attachment styles, attachment strategies, with the fawning being an approach strategy, trying to do the things to get you to be okay enough to care for me. While also trying to contain the terror, trying to avoid harm, the very real threats that the terror represents. And that is an injustice to childhood.
Speaker 1:And if we remember that happiness tells us something is right and sadness tells us something is wrong. And I grieve with sadness that things were not right in my childhood and that it has so impacted so many things, even daydreams, of what could be perfectly lovely without the invasion of trauma and deprivation, then it is anger that tells us something is wrong, that there has been an injustice. So if part of me is for the mother and part of me is for the father and part of me is for the terror. There is also a part of me that knows there has been injustice. And feels anger I didn't even know I had.
Speaker 1:My therapist said, This is rage. Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community. It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing. One of the ways we practice this is in Community Together.
Speaker 1:The link for the community is in the show notes. We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too, being human together.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.