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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:
Speaker 2: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 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:Okay. I know this is not everybody's favorite episode, and I know that it is also one of those strange recordings where you are hearing it all at once, but it is twenty four hours of my day. So just bear with me with the transitions, the pauses, all of the things. We went to bed so tired last night. And, again, just for context, we are all recovering from being ill because the kids went back to school and brought germs home.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. They're so generous and kind. But I woke up shook from this album and have so many questions. I don't even know where to start. So I'm just gonna start with trauma, because that's what we do on the podcast.
Speaker 1:And in shiny, happy context of purity culture, first of all, to have an album with that many explicit songs makes the album almost inaccessible culturally. So I'm having to work through those filters of why that is and what that is and what it means and how I feel about it, and it is a lot. So I am not in any way judging Taylor or talking badly about Taylor. I don't know Taylor. I am talking about my own internal experience and in a classic DID way being aware of complex trauma, practicing noticing partsiness, noticing thoughts and feelings, noticing responses, and seeing how I want to even respond to those things.
Speaker 1:So because this is happening in real time and because this is literally what I have questions about, that is where I wanna start with the questions. So you heard me in real time talk with the kids about what does the e mean? What does explicit mean? What does that warn us of or indicate? Well, on this morning, after some sleep, what I wanna say is this was a very overtly sexual album.
Speaker 1:Now in context, this makes sense for her. She is in a relationship she is enjoying. And in all the overnight interviews that she did in The UK in the morning there while we were sleeping, she's saying she still feels this way. She has said this is the first time she has released an album to the public where she still felt how she felt when it was recorded like a year ago. Now, I am in no way Taylor Swift, obviously.
Speaker 1:And also, I know that feeling. So often, we keep the podcast so far behind what is happening in real life, partly for our own processing and partly for privacy, and partly is just extra buffer of protection. And also, for things to come out in real time like this will is such a different experience of, like, is anyone else in the same moment as I am or wanna talk about these things? So while I understand not everyone wants to talk about Taylor Swift, what Taylor Swift is talking about through these songs that I think we already need to be talking about is sexuality and bodies. And how do we talk about that safely?
Speaker 1:Because when we have been traumatized, and on the podcast, you will be hearing the rest of the year about those sexualized parts and sexualized littles, and how we need to protect them and tend to them and care for them and acknowledge them. And we will continue to have reenactments until we do. This is what I have been working on in therapy, and this is what we've been talking about and healing from. And so it's absolutely at the top of my brain as part of my filtering this album. So again, I am not speaking for or even about Taylor Swift, actually.
Speaker 1:But my experience with interacting with this music is coming through these lens of healing from purity culture, and also how do we prevent reenactments, and how do we care for sexualized littles and parts. She, to be clear, on the album is not talking about sexualized littles. I am talking about that in the context of trauma and deprivation. So what does that look like with sexuality? The trauma, obviously, is sexual trauma and the hard things that happen because of that.
Speaker 1:The deprivation would be everything from how we don't talk about bodies, we don't talk about puberty, we don't talk about first periods. We don't talk about sex even in healthy ways that prepare us, many of us, we're not prepared for what is going on, much less things like gender or orientation, especially impurity culture. Right? That's so demonized and weaponized that it becomes not only deprivation, but also trauma, and that we will continue to have reenactments when we do. So what does it look like when it's done in healthy ways developmentally?
Speaker 1:I don't know, because I didn't get any of that. I didn't talk about bodies except for in the, like, science class kind of example, but we didn't talk about it at home. And I was certainly not prepared for my first period. Definitely did not have any context for how to navigate relationships or sex. It was purity culture, which was don't touch bodies, don't look at bodies, don't acknowledge bodies, and if boys do, it's your fault.
Speaker 1:That's what I got from purity culture, and that is all I got about sex. So how to, like, turn that light switch from off to on in a regulated, safe way, or how to know when people were being safe with my body, I did not know how to do that. How to have experiences that were about wanting or about desire, and also with consent, and also with boundaries, and also caring for myself, nobody taught me anything of that. The ways that I tried to do it differently with my own children so far, you actually heard some of that on the podcast this last week where we talked about intimacy a little bit. Right?
Speaker 1:We, of course, do much more of that off the recording. In that context, there was a little bit that we could share, but also not wanting to exploit them either. So it's really, really a fine line, and we have to be really careful about it. Most of those conversations are not only private, as in off the podcast, but also private, meaning individually with the children where they are developmentally as a person themselves, not just like the whole group together. So talking about some of this developmentally with the kids looked very different.
Speaker 1:My oldest three children, all three have developmental and learning disabilities, which means not only do we have to be super explicit, we also have to be super specific. Right? So one has cerebral palsy and spina bifida. One has autism, and one is deaf and has no incidental learning at all. And so learning these things has looked differently for those three than the younger three.
Speaker 1:These three, we did lots of books. We did lots of talking. We did lots of pictures. We did lots of YouTube videos, all that were safe and developmentally appropriate and instructional, but also lots of repetition. So probably every four to six months from the time that they were in third or fourth grade all the way up through now, going through these over and over and over again, and then even modeling, like, meeting privately with them, with me and Nathan together as co parents when we were having visits in person, even modeling things like contraception and condoms and things like that.
Speaker 1:Not modeling on ourself, of course, but in developmentally appropriate ways. How do we talk about these things? And how do you know what to do? How do you make choices? And then even talking through different, what they call social stories of narratives where you're confronted with different examples of social stories and how do you want to respond, and what are your choices, and how do you think through that.
Speaker 1:So all the kids need that at some level, but these three really needed it in a very specific way, and that is what it has looked like. But it can also be really tender and fun in ways that, again, are developmentally appropriate. So for example, one thing that we could do with all of our children when they sort of got into middle school and once they started talking about their first crushes and things like that, we would save, a particular movie for the Valentine's Day that was their first Valentine's Day in middle school. So our family has, because Nathan is a musical theater writer, there are lots of traditions that we have that are about media. So whether musicals or movies or music or art, we have different traditions and have worked that into our own calendar, which is so cool because it's a calendar that is outside the religious trauma setting.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? And so one thing that we've done with all of the kids, their first Valentine's in middle school is watched with them the movie called Little Manhattan, which is a sweet movie where there's a scene. Like, there are lots of coming of age pieces of it, but there's specifically a scene that is about the first time they hold hands. And all of them needed this emotionally and mentally, but especially those who don't have incidental learning and really needed to literally see it modeled for them. It was a precious way to have entirely age appropriate, developmentally appropriate.
Speaker 1:Right? Because my kids, it's not just about ages. It's about where they actually developmentally. So developmentally appropriate context and showing and movie, but also sweet and fun and not just awkward and weird. And y'all, they love this every time.
Speaker 1:And while we don't, like, make them do it on their own, they've always come back to it. Every Valentine's Day, they want to watch Little Manhattan. And so that's become a sweet tradition. And next year, our youngest will be old enough to see it, and we'll do it with her privately. And then it will be the first time that all the kids can kind of watch it together and kind of be in this new era, this tiny season where the oldest kids are in their last year of high school next year, and our youngest is in their first year of middle school.
Speaker 1:And so to have everyone together that last season before the teenagers become adults, it is going to be really tender. Not in a putting that expectation on them, but just already feeling it in the air as they're growing up and really leaving childhood behind in lots of ways. And I really wanna emphasize that about developmentally appropriate because our oldest children may be older in age, but developmentally they're a little bit younger. Whereas our youngest is actually very bright and developmentally right on target, but physically smaller because of the medical issues and the oxygen issues, and so gets mistaken and infantilized sometimes because she's so tiny. And because she's a cleft palate child, that means that her speech has this higher, raspier sound that also gets infantilized.
Speaker 1:But she's in fifth grade, and that's not middle school yet, but it's not a baby. And so she's in a very tender tween season, but absolutely is learning about bodies and learning about all the things that we learn about that age. And I am not, like, revealing her privacy. I mean, even at school and in health class and all the things, right? That's when we do that in fifth and sixth grade.
Speaker 1:And so it's entirely age appropriate, developmentally appropriate. And sometimes, there have been seasons where even though there's such a wide range of age, that they were kind of all on the same developmental season in the same kind of way. So that has been one thing that we did with all the kids, and we'll do with this last one soon. The thing we've been able to add in just the with the younger three that the older three didn't have access to, which I think in this case was okay. It was fine.
Speaker 1:We did read through the book, but now there's also the movie of that classic work of Judy Blumes with, are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. So with this, it was really tender to go through all six kids individually even though the older three were older by the time the movie came out. But having both religious trauma displayed and also coming of age and puberty and all the things, and an explicit conversation about first periods and things like that so that we had not only instructional things to share with them, but also relational things to share with them. It's so, so powerful and has been so, so good to just sort of add into the conversation very naturally.
Speaker 1:So it's something we've done intentionally as a family in a way that was never done with me or for me. So now while the children are at school today, I am thinking about this album we listened to last night and questions about the album for myself and to talk about with my kids. So one thing that I already talked with my oldest about this morning when when he brought up questions for me and talked about it before school was that this is in no way in our conversation is any of this about being shiny, happy with Taylor. It's not that Taylor did something wrong. It's not that Taylor's songs were bad or the explicit lyrics were bad.
Speaker 1:It's not about that. Taylor created art and put it out for us to appreciate. So it's much like when we lived in Kansas City and took our tweens and our teens to the art museums there, and they saw nudity for the first time, and they saw paintings that is classic art, statues that are classic art. And talking with them about the difference between that and pornography, for example. When they're 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and trying to learn the difference between that of, like, what does pornography mean and what does what does art mean and what is the difference?
Speaker 1:Those are big conversations. So talking with my oldest this morning about Taylor's explicit lyrics and Taylor herself being in a place where she's publicly saying, this is about my experience of the last year and the whole entire era of all of these albums that she's done and everything she's been through. And also this is where I still feel in this relationship and her being an adult in an adult relationship, that means she is speaking from the context of a safe and consensual relationship where what she is sharing is coming from a place of strength and safety and secure attachment in a way that is very healing and empowering and liberating about her own body, about sexuality in general, and expressing these developmentally appropriate concepts. Now what I would say to podcast listeners, to you all specifically as opposed to my child, I mean, is that that's really contrasted, I think, with the context of my questions the last couple of years about sexuality and orientation and all these things and how do we reclaim that? How do we talk about that?
Speaker 1:And my friend Kim saying, oh, don't go there. Don't go there. I think I I give Kim a hard time about that because Kim was giving me a hard time about it in the context of the fun and play of our friendship. Right? And also wanting me to be safe.
Speaker 1:And I think what Kim could see that I could not see is that I was not coming from a place of strength and safety and secure attachment. And so I was overly vulnerable and sharing explicit things that were not healed yet. And what other people what y'all wrote in about in emails is, I hear you being little. I hear you being young. Even though you're talking about these adult content things, your voice is higher.
Speaker 1:You're this and this. And you guys could observe things that I could not even respond to because I did not I wasn't safe yet. And so because I was not yet in a safe and healthy place, I could not navigate that in a safe and healthy way. So to hear the difference between what my experience was even over the last year, I'm thinking about, like, the if you know, you know episode or when we played the lunch song on the piano and the teasing about that kind of thing where in some ways it is developmentally appropriate. We have, inner teens just like we have inner children.
Speaker 1:Right? And so those teens or young adults coming to a place of this is safe enough for me to try or to play or to learn or to express, and also recognizing in hindsight that I cannot tend to inner littles, much less any sexualized littles, until I am in safe environments and safe relationships where it is a doing with and not a doing to or doing for, that I cannot adequately protect myself, protect you as listeners, much less protect those younger parts, because I don't have access to it yet. So this is what's fascinating. And there's lots of external stuff. Even though we don't know Taylor at all, there's lots of external stuff to notice, like her parents being so involved.
Speaker 1:She depicts this all the time. I don't know if she likes that or doesn't like it or if it depends on the day or if it's too much or if it's just right, but it's certainly not deprivation as long as she's also getting privacy and those kinds of things. And that's not for me to judge. I'm just saying she has parents showing up in ways I didn't have parents showing up, and she's had parents who have stayed in ways I didn't have parents who stayed. Right?
Speaker 1:So she's got access to support and attachment and context of health and safety and security in ways many of us have never had. And so I think that's part of the conversation too. She's also from the South. So even if she herself is not shiny happy, she and her original listener fan base, if those are the right words to use, are shiny happy adjacent, which means they are all having to do the same kind of liberation work I am having to do even if that looks different for them. And I think it's one reason that she has had this audience that has grown up with her, which is maybe part of what intrigues me because I am adjacent to that, even though I didn't find out about her later because deafness.
Speaker 1:And not just because of purity culture, but also because of in the South, we are expected to be polite and not say the things. And we're supposed to take care of the men. And she is not taking care of the men instead of herself. She is taking care of herself so that she is healthy and can show up where she wants to show up, and she is not being polite. She is saying the things we are not supposed to say.
Speaker 1:So Clarissa in the wolves book, Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves, she talks about it as the sacred profane, talking about, enjoying, singing about, telling stories about, using humor about, saying all the things about the private hidden things that we as women are not supposed to say, experience, or even know about in some cases. So there's something very sacred profane about this album. There's something very sacred, feminine, divine about this. Like, she's in goddess mode. My friend pointed that out, and I would agree with it because of this whole wolf woman vibe of I have worked so hard to survive what y'all put me through.
Speaker 1:And I know there's references to traumas she has been through and getting her albums back. Like, I I saw this wonderful video this morning where it was talking about she is the father figure, and she had to say I protect my family six times because that's how many albums she had to get back from Scooter Braun. And so, like, what does that even mean? Talk about anima and animus. To be able to be so whole that not only in reparenting am I tending to myself and all the self care and all these things of what we're really talking about in a gendering way of mothering.
Speaker 1:But what is it like to father myself, to protect myself, to provide for myself? These are big questions, and not just gender specific, but to become my own parent, to become my own person, to use that hidden space not for violation, but for birthing, to bring myself into the world, what does that look like? This is so powerful. It is so powerful. She's also known to be a poet.
Speaker 1:And so to say the things that she says in the lyrics and to express the things that she does, and some of it be storytelling, some of it being calling out, some of it being just expressive to what she's appreciating or experiencing in the world or not appreciating. She's really good about boundaries and singing about boundaries, and I love this. And, also, she knows what it means to experience misattunement. The things that have been published this morning already, either in favor of her or against her or these assumptions and theories about what her lyrics mean or who she's talking about, we don't know. We're not her.
Speaker 1:We don't get to speak for her, and that's just disrespectful. I understand that. I've experienced that in my own life where episodes have been weaponized against me, where you're talking about this and you're mean this and this is what everybody's gonna think. And it's like, that's that's not what I was talking about. And, really, I've talked about this in therapy where it kind of intersects with Al Anon in that I can share something with the world, but I cannot control how people receive it.
Speaker 1:I cannot control whether they like it or not. I cannot control what they think it's about. I cannot control what they do with it or how they apply it or not. Like, none of that is up to me. That is the listener experience and really none of my business unless someone chooses to share it with me, which is why we have the emails episodes.
Speaker 1:Right? And then it becomes a relational in a new way instead of only parasocial because I get to respond. I read this email. I don't know when you'll hear it, but I read this email last week from the Foxes, from Todd and the community, and it was so powerful. And I was just weeping through it.
Speaker 1:And it was life changing for me to be received in that way, to be understood in that way, but also respected in that way. And it was just, it was literally life changing just for an email. And that's someone in the community that's newer and someone I never even got to meet in person yet. So it makes sense when we have in person experiences that that becomes really powerful, especially through the symposiums. And what we have seen through the symposiums, not just because it's such because it's so much more than just a meetup, what we have experienced through the symposiums is that we have a degree of experience that is, I feel like, directly correlated to the work people are doing in their own lives.
Speaker 1:When people come prepared for the boundaries that the symposium is, which includes, I am not there as the therapist, there is no therapist there. You have your therapist on call. You're responsible for your safety and your connection with your therapist and your work in preparation for and in follow-up from the symposium. And us being in the trenches together just to look at the things and to tolerate the things, but regulating ourselves, not rescuing each other, no one being a therapist there, not peer support. Like, that is not what this symposium is about.
Speaker 1:And when people are within that context and they bring it, the degree of relationship and healing and connection we share in those moments are beyond profound. When people have not come prepared to do that or tried to step into the Cartman's triangles of either rescuing people or victimizing themselves and not seeking out the support or not doing the emotional work it takes to really soak in that content or to do the work that we're there to do, it's been a mess. So we have found that the experience of the symposiums continue to deepen because we are getting more and more practice together at how to do this. Because what we are not doing, going back to Taylor Swift for a minute, what we are not doing in this explicit album, my friend pointed out, is that we are not seeing Taylor and Travis together. She's reflecting on the relationship, and it's like, oh my.
Speaker 1:She just said that. And and I saw I saw one video where one of the ladies doing her listening party and, like, live streaming this had on her Taylor Swift sweater and all the things. But she was like, oh, I need to take the sweater off. She had to take the sweater off because it is a spicy album. I get that.
Speaker 1:And, also, we're not seeing their actual relationship. This is still parasocial. This is still set apart. This is still reflection on the universal experience of loving someone and being safe with them and setting boundaries in places we're being harmed and rescuing our own babies. In this case, her babies were her albums.
Speaker 1:Right? Her younger self, her inner child self, her younger teen self, these albums that were stolen from her, these ways she was violated, absolutely mental rape, absolutely emotional rape. And she got those pieces of herself back. She did that work, and she did not do it alone. She did that because we supported that because it is world changing.
Speaker 1:It is life changing. It alives all of us when we don't allow abuse to happen. And so we as an audience refuse to be complicit by going to the Heiress tour, by buying the merch, by supporting Taylor, by collectively raising the money to set her free. That is what is so powerful. That is how we collectively participated in liberation in that example, and that is what she is singing about even in father figure.
Speaker 1:So that is how we change the fate of Ophelia's life. Do you remember that I was talking about that double bind where I felt like my choices were that I could not say no or the other person would die, like in the story of my mother, but I could not ask for help or I would die, like in the story with my grandfather. That is the fate of Ophelia. That is Hamlet. Hamlet is Lion King.
Speaker 1:That, I mean, that is the story. There is death. It is a mortal story. We do not survive that story. But when we connect together, when we empower each other, when we agree, you are worth being alive, how do we support you?
Speaker 1:What do you need to liberate yourself, and how do we help collectively liberate ourselves in parallel journeys with healthy boundaries rather than drowning in our trauma where we do not survive it? When we change that story where we are aliving ourselves together, that is what changes the fate of Ophelia. And when we change that fate, life gets better, and we have opalite skies instead of dark and stormy firestorm skies. This is my album. This is the album I needed.
Speaker 1:Yes. I'm having to work through these layers of what did I just hear? What is even happening here? Taylor, girl, what did you just say? And also, this is fire.
Speaker 1:This is everything. And I also want to be a little political for a minute, not about politics or Democrats or Republicans, but about patriarchy, in that if a man said these things, he would be glorified and monetized. He would get sponsors. He would not be canceled. He would wow.
Speaker 1:I just had the whole so many people inside just said things about even what is happening political and the missing files and all of this. If someone if a man said these things, his bad behavior, if we're judging it as bad behavior, would not be immoral. It would just be, oh, boys are being boys. It would be excused. It would be covered up.
Speaker 1:Witnesses would be silenced and dismissed. But when a woman speaks it from her own experience rather than it being done to her or about her, we cannot silence that. We cannot shame that. We cannot say there is something wrong with that. She is not talking about harming other people in unconsensual in a way that is violating consent.
Speaker 1:She is not talking about exploitive anything. She is talking about her own lived experience even with sexuality, which I think is so powerful and empowering to see modeled, even if also for those of us as parents looking at how do we talk about these in developmentally appropriate ways. How do we talk about it with ourselves in developmentally appropriate ways? I have so many things I wanna say, so much I want to share about all of this, but this strange episode of twenty four hours is continuing because next, I go to preview the movie before I see it with the children after school. So hold on to your hats.
Speaker 3: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. The link for the community is in the show notes.
Speaker 3: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. So, sometimes we'll see you there.