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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. 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.
Speaker 1:It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship. 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.
Speaker 1:We're all different, and all of our stories matter. As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
Speaker 2:And talking about FakeClaiming these last two weeks, this one is the one I've had to rewrite and rerecord the most times because there was a version of it that would be easy to write but worthless to publish. The version names a person that walks through a sequence of events, produces receipts, and asks you to agree with me. It would spread like wildfire, as they say, viral as soon as I clicked it into being, and I would have every right to do it. Nobody has to stay quiet about what happened to them. And, also, I would not be congruent with my values.
Speaker 2:This is not who I am, who I want to be, or what I want to become. It would also be the exact thing I just spent these essays and podcast episodes arguing against. It would ask you to reach a verdict about somebody using fragments I selected, which is the mechanism, not the cure. So I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is a pattern documented in the research literature that I've watched operate and that a great many of you have also lived through in your own configurations.
Speaker 2:I've heard from so many of you this year where this has also happened to you in different ways. So the thing that surprises people over and over that I've noticed is the timing of things. Escalation does not usually begin when someone is harmed. It begins when someone sets a limit, a boundary, a collaboration, an access point, a no that is delivered but received as an assault. I talked about this last week.
Speaker 2:But once you know to look for it, the sequence is almost boringly consistent. Contact was fine, sometimes warm, sometimes intense. Then something constrained it, and the response to that constraint arrived at a magnitude that made no sense next to the size of the limit, which is the first honest signal that the limit was never the real subject. What got threatened was access or control or a sense of standing, and the reaction scaled to that instead. I want to be careful because plenty of us react badly to boundaries and are simply hurt, and hurt people are not perpetrators.
Speaker 2:But there's a distinguishing feature in what happens next. Hurt tends to resolve or be voiced or to become distance. But the pattern I'm describing converts those limits into a campaign. Here's the part that almost nobody outside this situation understands and that the research talks about specifically. Miller and Smolter studied what happens after a person exits a controlling relationship, drawing on interviews with survivors, attorneys, and practitioners.
Speaker 2:What they documented was a barrage of frivolous filings, false reports, false allegations, gossip, system related manipulations, false complaints, all in efforts to continue to exert power, force contact, and financially burden the target. They call it paper abuse, and they describe it as procedural stalking. The research base comes from the intimate partner violence, and the mechanism travels well beyond it because it has nothing to do with who the people are. It has to do with what formal processes make available and how other people get exploited to do the dirty work. What they make available is contact the target cannot decline.
Speaker 2:It forces the target to stay engaged when they're trying to get away. It ends up harming other people that may become the face of the campaigns, and they are also exploited and harmed. And this is tragic. The system's own virtues are what get exploited. Courts are designed to accept filings and to remain neutral about the motives behind them because the alternative is a system that turns people away based on suspicion.
Speaker 2:That neutrality is correct and load bearing, and it also means the machinery of the process will keep a campaign with the same patients. It processes a legitimate claim. And also, there's nothing I can do but be myself and keep being myself. Jennifer Fried named a response pattern that anyone who has been through this will recognize immediately. The Darvo, the deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.
Speaker 2:The wrongdoing is denied or minimized. The person raising it is attacked usually at the level of credibility rather than substance. And then the roles invert so that the one who is harmed is recast as the aggressor, and the one who caused the harm occupies the injured position. For a long time, this was described clinically and anecdotally until it got tested in 2020. Harsey and Freid ran experimental studies presenting participants with an account of abuse, followed either by a DARVO response or a control response.
Speaker 2:Participants exposed to DARVO found the victim less believable, held them more responsible for the violence, and rated them as more abusive. The same exposure led participants to see the perpetrator as less abusive. Earlier work had already found that darvo is commonly used response when perpetrators are confronted. So the reversal is not merely infuriating. It is effective measurably on ordinary decent observers who have no stake in the outcome and no reason to want the wrong answer.
Speaker 2:In a survivor community, this works even better. We've spent years building a shared vocabulary for harm, for boundaries, for trauma responses, for what it sounds like when someone is being hurt. That vocabulary is one of the best things we have made all of us together. It is also fully available to anyone who wants to use it instrumentally, and it comes preloaded with our sympathy. A campaign narrated in the language of a survivor recruits the community's best instincts against its own members.
Speaker 2:Now the guardrail that matters more than anything else. Fried is explicit that Darvo is not proof of past behavior. She offers it as a way to anticipate and make sense of responses that are otherwise confusing, And she is careful to frame it as a hypothesis about likelihood rather than a test that returns a verdict. Someone falsely accused will also deny, will also defend, and will also feel like the injured party because they are. Pattern recognition tells you where to look.
Speaker 2:It does not tell you what you found. Anyone who uses it as a detection kit for identifying abusers in a comment section has turned insight into weapon. Third parties are not bystanders in this. They are the objective. Marwick in 2021 built a model of network harassment that we talked about last week, explains the recruitment step better than anything else I've read.
Speaker 2:Someone accuses a target of violating the network's norm. The accusation generates moral outrage. The outrage propagates, and the harassment that follows functions as enforcement of the social order. The finding that reorganized my thinking is what participants believe about themselves. They understand their actions are morally justified and grounded in the target's conduct.
Speaker 2:But the people who forwarded the screenshots were not being cruel. They believed they were protecting someone. Many of them were survivors acting on the most honorable impulse they have, which is to believe the person who says they're being hurt. That is what makes it work and why arguing with participants almost never helps. You're not addressing a factual disagreement.
Speaker 2:You're asking someone to doubt an act of moral courage they just performed. Sometimes the moral courage was actually accurate and really important developmentally, but about memory time rather than the now time target. Asking questions, though, gets you absorbed. People who paused or requested specifics or said they didn't know enough to have an opinion were treated as taken aside. The cost of neutrality gets raised until neutrality stops being available, and the silence of reasonable people reads as consensus.
Speaker 2:But this is still binary, and binary thinking comes from our amygdala. There are trauma responses. Chronic legal contact produces a distinctive physiology. Hypervigilance organized around a mailbox. Sleep architecture built around a filing deadline.
Speaker 2:An anniversary effect because filings imposed tend to cluster cluster around dates that mean something to the person initiating them. So the nervous system learns a calendar. The startle response attaching to notification sounds. Months of therapy conscripted into damage control internally instead of the work you were actually doing. When this happens in an interpersonal violence, the care for the other person was real even before they betrayed you and even after when you can see who they could be if they believed in themselves.
Speaker 2:And a fact from the disclosure literature that people underestimate that we mentioned the other day, those negative social reactions to disclosure predict worse post traumatic outcomes, operating partly through reduced perceived control over recovery. And the damage done by hostile responses tends to outweigh the protection offered by supportive ones. The kind messages don't cancel the campaign. They matter enormously and may be lifesaving, but they do not balance the ledger. And if you're supporting someone through this, knowing that will keep you from wondering why your support does not seem to be landing.
Speaker 2:It is landing. The math just isn't mathing. An attack on someone's soul is an attack on their life. Smith and Fry gave us the term for the layer that people are least prepared for, institutional betrayal. Describing the wrongdoing perpetrated by an institution against people dependent on it, including the failure to prevent harm or to respond supportively when harm occurs.
Speaker 2:Their framework catalogs the form it takes. Negligence, cover ups, punishing those who report or ask for help, normalizing the abusive situation, responding inadequately. The injury from that layer is distinct from the original harm and in their research compounds it. Our communities function as institutions in exactly this sense. So do professional bodies, platforms, nonprofits, and the courts themselves when a survivor brings something to a body that exists to handle it and the body declines or delays past the point of usefulness or handles it in a way that exposes them further, the resulting injury is its own event.
Speaker 2:It is not a disappointing outcome to the first problem. It is a second problem, and it deserves to be named as one rather than absorbed as evidence that the person was never credible to begin with. Herman argues that what survivors most want from justice is acknowledgment from their community, and I think that's true. I also think you get it from a few people rather than from everyone, and that few is enough to live on. It's enough to alive ourselves.
Speaker 2:Telling your clinician what is happening so the frame can be adjusted deliberately instead of by ambush will help. Name that the pacing has been taken out of your hands and make a plan. It's a violating thing when things you've never talked about in therapy or aren't ready to face are promoted in public view without your consent. It's therapy rape. And staying alive means focusing on the basics, sleep, nutrients, and all the r's, rest, recovery, and rescheduling.
Speaker 2:And also, don't match the tactics. Don't become someone else's perpetrator, even if their own perpetrator is coming from memory time more than now time. The specific damage of this experience is that it invites you to become fluent in something you should not be fluent in, and fluency is difficult to give back. That kind of nastiness changes a person. Hold on to the real you.
Speaker 2:In the second experiment that Harsey and Fried reported, they tested whether the learning about Darvo changed how people responded to it. Participants who had been educated about the pattern rated the perpetrator as less believable than the participants who had not. The tactic's effectiveness dropped once observers could see it operating. Naming the mechanism degrades it. That's the entire argument for a series that keeps declining to name people.
Speaker 2:A piece about one person asks you to trust my account protects nobody who is not me and protects the moment the news cycle does. A piece about the pattern, though, hands you something you can use in any situation, even those I will never hear about involving people I will never meet, possibly on behalf of someone I would never have thought to defend. We've spent these essays and episodes on the same underlying claim, which is that the survivor communities keep being handed tools built to adjudicate people and that we would be better served by tools that help us think and feel. Junk data files, court records without narrators, parasocial standing mistaken for evidence, sincere moral outrage mistaken for proof. Be where the pattern stops.
Speaker 2:Let what you survived make you careful with what you know about other people, and let us all focus on ourselves and our own therapy.
Speaker 1: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,
Speaker 2:and healing brings hope.