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Emma shares about complex trauma, deprivation, and dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID). Educational, supportive, and inspiring, System Speak documents the best and worst of life through insights, conversations, and collaborations. An archive curated for dignity for all.
Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about complex trauma and dissociation.
Speaker 2:It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling. It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship.
Speaker 2:Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to. We're all different, and all of our stories matter.
Speaker 2:As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:I have a difficult thing to talk about this morning. But after the difficult year I've had, writing into the podcast that it's also happened to them, it's time to say something. In online dissociative identity disorder and plural spaces, most of us have learned the hard way that visibility is a double edged thing. The same Internet that lets survivors find each other, name what has never been named, and build language together also gives people a front row seat to our lives. Some of those people are kind.
Speaker 1:Some of those people are curious. And some decide that based on what they see through a screen, they
Speaker 2:have
Speaker 1:the right to declare who is real and who is not. That's where fake claiming comes in. In this context, fake claiming means deciding that you know someone else is faking DID, or not really plural, and then treating that judgment as a fact to be announced, shared, and weaponized. It isn't a private doubt or personal concerns, or a quiet question you take to your own therapist. It's a public verdict delivered by someone who only has access to fragments of what has been presented.
Speaker 1:Curated videos, partial stories, consolidated stories, compiled stories. Maybe a diagnosis label, maybe not. The core problem is simple and stubborn. Nobody outside a system has access to that system's internal experience, history, and assessment process. You can't see every conversation that happens in therapy.
Speaker 1:You don't know which memories came up off camera or off sound or never aired or never recorded or never written down. You don't know which parts refuse to participate in the process at all. You don't know what someone is going through. At the same time, plural spaces do have real concerns. People reenact abuse dynamics.
Speaker 1:People lie. People run scams. People use system language to excuse harmful behavior. People recruit others to help exploit some that are being targeted. Those things exist.
Speaker 1:But calling out behavior is very different from erasing a diagnosis or someone's identity. This thing you did that harmed me, or this thing you did I didn't like, or this thing you said I didn't agree with, isn't the same sentence as you don't actually have DID. There's a difference between accountability and existential erasure. FakeClaiming usually leans on stereotypes. You don't switch like I do.
Speaker 1:You're too stable. You're too messy. You're too functioning. You're not functioning enough. You talk about it the wrong way.
Speaker 1:You didn't do this the right way. No real system would do this or that. It sounds uncomfortably like the old disbelief from families, schools, and professionals. You can't be traumatized. You're too smart for that.
Speaker 1:You're making this up. Now it's just coming sideways from peers instead of authority figures. And because it's coming from inside the house from other survivors, it cuts deeper. One of the worst ripple effects is the pressure it creates to perform. When people are afraid of being FakeClaimed, they start shaping how they present symptoms to look real enough for the internet.
Speaker 1:They overexplain or over display switches. They narrate trauma in ways that will read as convincing. They stay in situations or relationships that are actually unsafe, because leaving might look like inconsistency, or because there are threats that if you leave, I will destroy you publicly online for the whole world to see. The more the community rewards that performance, pays attention to that abuse, gives credence to that kind of bullying, the further we drift from actual healing. Unfortunately, fake claiming has evolved a new costume, a new cover, a new justification.
Speaker 1:They're calling it documentation. And that's what I am getting emails about, that this hasn't just happened to me. And while I appreciate your support in private, I think it's important and finally time we say something publicly about this false documentation. Instead of someone just saying you're fake based on vibes, We're seeing people pull commercial online background checks and using glitchy reports as supposed proof that another survivor is lying about their identity or has false aliases. The move looks like this.
Speaker 1:Pay a website that aggregates public data, get back a PDF full of messy records, and then cherry pick anything confusing or inaccurate as evidence that the person has hidden names or a secret past. As if you're there for true kind documentaries instead of supporting each other in healing. Getting a document like this feels official because there's a document attached. It feels convincing because it uses paperwork instead of opinion. But when you zoom out on how these services actually work, it becomes clear that what's being wielded as truth is junk.
Speaker 1:Most commercial background checks or people search sites operate like giant data vacuums. They scrape public and semi public records in bulk. Old addresses, typo name spellings, former married names, records tied to relatives, partial court dockets, property records, maybe old phone numbers that used to belong to someone else. Their matching process is loose. If the name, approximate age, or city line up, they assume it's the same person and glue it all together.
Speaker 1:There's not actually any human being in that loop, carefully asking, does this actually belong to one individual? Or do we just collapse three different people with related data? That's how you get reports that list aliases that aren't aliases at all. A relative's name shows up as if it's yours. A middle initial you never use gets turned into a separate identity.
Speaker 1:Someone else's record with your last name and a similar birth year gets fused into your file. A misspelled version of your name becomes a whole new person the report thinks you also are. The machinery underneath is messy and automated, but the PDF layout at the end looks crisp and serious, like something an investigator or an employer might use. It's a verdict. That's where the escalation in our community lands, fake claiming with props.
Speaker 1:Instead of saying you're fake straight out, people go hunting for something that looks official enough to back up a story they already wanted to tell. That's confirmation bias. And when confirmation bias intersects with trauma responses, underlying fears, hurt feelings, or abusive behavior that becomes dangerous. A cheap background report becomes the costume that lets them say, see, it's not just me saying it, the data proves it. That's still triangulating.
Speaker 1:And the data they're holding up is often a pile of loose matches and bad assumptions, not a careful investigation. Law enforcement level background checks are built on a different model. They typically rely on specific identifiers, including fingerprints that they run through regulated databases. When two records look similar but don't quite fit, there are protocols and actual humans who dig in, figure out which John Smith is which, and clear false positives. People who work in that world know how often records get tangled, and they have tools to untangle them.
Speaker 1:They expect errors. They plan for it. Commercial sites don't. They collapse noise into narrative. Everything that looks like it might belong to you gets stacked into one file, and the file is then sold, actually exploiting the person who is scared and maybe has legitimate concerns and sells it to them as a portrait of who you really are.
Speaker 1:There's no built in pause where someone says, hold on, this might be two different people, or that's obviously a typo, or this looks like a relative, not an alias. And when we are locked into trauma responses, we're not using critical thinking, and these things never get filtered, and it becomes really harmful and hurtful. When we do this to people, we become the abusers we're afraid of. If you've never had that data misfire on you, it's jarring. You can open a report about yourself and not recognize the person it describes.
Speaker 1:The addresses don't all belong to you. The also known as list includes someone else's name. There's a criminal record or a lawsuit you had nothing to do with, attached only because your names are similar and you once lived in the same place. You're scrolling through a stranger's life that has been glued to your own like a bad collage. And yet, if someone else pulls that file, they're encouraged to treat it as fact.
Speaker 1:Now imagine handing that kind of flawed document to people who are already invested in disbelieving you, already invested in harming you, already working with your abusers. That's where it intersects so dangerously with fake claiming in plural communities. When someone wants to discredit a survivor, especially a visible one, they're not starting with a neutral question. They're starting with a conclusion. They go mining for anything that can be framed as proof.
Speaker 1:A messy background report that shows aliases becomes the perfect prop. It doesn't matter that those aliases are really a misspelled last name, a relative's married name, or data entry error from court clerk ten years ago. On screen, in a screenshot, the nuance disappears. What's left is a caption. Look.
Speaker 1:They lied. They're not real. They're a fraud. They're a fake. They're dangerous.
Speaker 1:When in truth, what happened to them in the past was dangerous. I've lived this personally. People angry at how I exist, the boundaries I set, and wanting to destroy the work we've done for over the last decade, pulled one of these commercial reports on me and gave it to someone who gave it to someone. It came back with so called aliases and odd records, things that didn't match my actual history or identity. Instead of reading this as what it was, sloppy data attached by algorithms alongside actual trauma stories with nuance.
Speaker 1:Things I had already shared publicly, even within the first 10 episodes. They treated every mismatch as a smoking gun. They posted about it. They narrated a story where each piece became evidence that I wasn't who I said I was. That my professional identity and my survivor identity were somehow fabricated.
Speaker 1:What complicated it even more was that other people had tried the same background check move on other survivors. I know of at least seven others who had false aliases come back on their reports and then got posted about on social media. The pattern is the same. A jumbled file, a pile of mismatched records, and then someone holding that pile up as if it were a mirror. When my child asked about this at Police Academy, they were told these sites aren't treated as reliable or real.
Speaker 1:It's the same as ChatGBT. It has access to some information, but some of it is placeholders or just false altogether. There are errors, and it's not accurate. What artificial intelligence can do is gather information quickly. Present it in a form according to a template.
Speaker 1:It cannot discern, sort, or actually correct its errors unless you ask it to. And these sites don't bother with that. They just are taking your money quickly. They said, we know these sites are full of garbage, official checks, and more use more identifiers and actual human review. He said, these online background checks are screen trashed dressed up in report format.
Speaker 1:This matters. That difference matters. It matters because in our spaces, with DID, plural, and survivor spaces, people already live under a microscope of doubt. Our histories are complicated. Our paperwork is complicated.
Speaker 1:Our timelines don't always line up in neat rows. Many of us have name changes, have moved across states, have estranged relatives, sealed court records, court records we couldn't afford to seal, or patches of our past that we don't publicly disclose because doing so would put our children at risk or ourselves at risk. Into that already complex picture, the fake claiming dynamic throws one more accusation. If we can't make your entire life line up with this commercial PDF, you must be fake. The harm isn't just reputational.
Speaker 1:It's relational and internal. Relationally, people who might have stayed at the edges of a conflict get pulled into the drama via screenshots and threads. They're shown snippets, a highlighted alias here, a mismatched address there, a breathless explanation underneath. If they don't know how bad these reports are or how easily data gets mismatched, if they're not doing well enough in life at the moment to use critical thinking skills. They're primed to believe the worst because trauma.
Speaker 1:So strangers exploit and violate other people's trauma, people in our community, and their hurt feelings, which may be valid, but then also weaponized. A stranger's collage of your supposed life starts to feel more objective than your own account of yourself. That can ripple into lost opportunities, freed friendships, and a chilling effect on participation in community spaces, which is helpful for those who want to make money off of you, even if you never were making money. Internally, it taps right into old wounds. Times when our realities were denied.
Speaker 1:When abusers insisted their version of events was the only truth. When institutions treated paperwork as more trustworthy than our bodies and memories. Having someone wave around a flawed report and say, this proves you aren't real, doesn't just hurt in the present. It echoes every earlier moment where you were told we don't believe you. It's the same pattern now wrapped in the aesthetics of data.
Speaker 1:All of that could be true, and it would still be a private grief if it only affected me. But for me, the bigger concern is what this pattern does to our whole ecosystem of survivors. When we start treating junk data as a weapon, we quietly shift the terms of belonging. It's no longer enough to show up honestly in our bodies and in our stories. Now we're expected to be able to prove every details of every domain of our life to the satisfaction of people who already decided they don't like us, who already tried to hurt us.
Speaker 1:That's not community care. That's surveillance. That's coercive control. There's also a power issue baked into who gets targeted. The people most likely to be put under this kind of microscope are the ones who are visible, hold any kind of responsibility, or who refuse to play along with the dynamics that feel exploitive.
Speaker 1:Clinicians who are also survivors. Advocates who say no to unsafe collaborations. Systems who set boundaries around their time, labor, or trauma disclosures. And far too often, people from already marginalized groups, queer and trans folks, people of color, deaf and disabled people, those whose histories already don't fit the default template of how a respectable person is supposed to look on paper. When those are the people who get background checked by angry peers, it's not natural curiosity.
Speaker 1:It's gatekeeping with extra steps. There's a real tension here. Communities absolutely need ways to respond when someone is harmful. Survivors deserve safety from scammers, abusers, and people who manipulate trauma narratives for personal gain. But we do not have to collapse harm response into identity erasure.
Speaker 1:We can say, this person's behavior is unsafe in these ways, without saying, therefore they never had DID to begin with. We can document patterns of abuse without posting their half true data dossiers as if we're doing an expose. We can refuse to platform someone and still refuse to take a swing at their diagnosis. That line between naming behavior we disagree with and erasing identity is where I want us to stand as a community. This looks like having a conflict that erupts, and somebody rolls out a commercial background check as their main evidence.
Speaker 1:We pause. We ask basic questions. What exactly are they claiming this shows? Is that actually what this means? Would a trained investigator treat this as proof or something to verify?
Speaker 1:Have you considered that false matches are common, especially for people with complex lives, name changes, or relatives with similar names? And most importantly, even if every single detail in this document were accurate, would that actually tell you anything about whether this person is plural or how their system functions? It might look like steering conversations back toward what we can responsibly speak to. I wasn't in the room. I wasn't there when that happened.
Speaker 1:It doesn't change who I know them to be. I would like to talk to them directly. I don't gossip about people who aren't in the room. Or this background report is messy and outside my scope to interpret. What I do know is that using it to publicly question someone's reality feels too close to the disbelief many of us have survived.
Speaker 1:It might also look like each of us making a quiet agreement with ourselves. I don't get to be the judge of someone else's system. I can decide who I trust, who I work with, whose work I share, whose spaces I enter. I can hold my own boundaries, but I will not participate in fake claiming, whether it's based on vibes, PDFs from a website, or about someone else's history. For me, telling this story, including my own brush with weaponized background checks, isn't about asking the Internet to like me or relitigate old trauma drama.
Speaker 1:It's about naming a pattern I've seen more than once now and how easily it lines up with the oldest harm. We know you better than you know yourself. We're gonna tell you what reality is. That sentence has been used against survivors for generations. I don't want us to be the ones repeating it to each other, now dressed up in new technology.
Speaker 1:This kind of drama and additional harm is also why for so long they said survivors should be kept separate. Why they didn't want us to congregate. Why they didn't let us contact each other after treatment. I don't think that's healthy, and I don't think that's fair. And I don't think it's for them to decide.
Speaker 1:But when we behave this way, we give those old theories credence. We destroy our own freedom. We become the enemy. We can do better. We can be critical of tools that were never designed with safety safety in mind.
Speaker 1:We can protect one another from real harm without becoming investigators of each other's existence. We can build communities where the bar for belonging is not can you pass a stranger's Google test, but can we be in this space together with respect, accountability, and care? That's the invitation I'm making to myself as much as to anyone else. 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.
Speaker 1:Connection brings healing, and healing brings hope.