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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 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 2:Therapy today was amazing. Not because it was easy or fun, but because it's okay. It is safe enough. Even when she wants to talk about DID or journaling pages. We've been negotiating the last few weeks about what will make talking about these safe enough to actually do, and also why it matters that we do.
Speaker 2:And decide from everything else, it may simply be true that avoiding what is hard when I have someone who can help me with it does to me what has always been done to me. And that's not okay with me anymore. I show up for therapy because I matter to me. She asked me first about my week, and I told her a story. That I wrote about on Patreon.
Speaker 2:So for now, I'm just going to read that. This is what I wrote. You don't get to marry Jules, and you don't live with Nathan, and you have spent a year waiting on them while your life is already happening without you. What is living here right now going to look like? That's what my therapist asked me last week in therapy.
Speaker 2:Stupid therapy. It's so hard. But my therapist maybe is brilliant. I'm learning to balance my relationships. I'm learning to care for me.
Speaker 2:I'm learning to stay and not run away and still care for me. It seems easier than it sounds, but it's taking practice. My therapist has challenged me to go out into my community to find my community. The first thing I found even a year ago when I moved here was ballroom dance. But then Alex came, and then other kids came.
Speaker 2:And now I've broken my foot, which is finally out of the boot, but still in a small brace and definitely not yet ready for dancing again. There are also places to sing karaoke, which I thought of because my friend, Kim, you all know Kim, she goes to karaoke, but it brings up triggers I'm not ready for yet even if I have been brave on the podcast. So I'm proud of me for thinking of it and considering it and also respecting that I'm not ready yet. There were some family art activities that I took the kids to, and they loved it. We went to the LGBT community center for art projects and painting, and they loved it.
Speaker 2:And I love that they are learning to broaden their understanding of love. My therapist said that counts and also encouraged me to find something just for me. I've not left my house for a year, really, not on my own until then. So it still counts. It was a big deal that I went.
Speaker 2:And, also, it's been a long time since the pandemic. Decades of anxiety, and I've got to find my place in the world, even just this town. So that's how this last night, on a school night, I tucked my children into bed with books and flashlights after an extra big dinner and chocolate pudding for dessert, and I left on a school night. I know. I know.
Speaker 2:It's a big deal for us, a really big deal for us, but they're old enough. And I told them I was going and what time I would be home. And they all have access to phones if there really were an emergency and a sweet old lady neighbor just around the corner that they trust and I trust if they really needed help right away, and they have Jules' number or know where it is, and they have Nathan's number memorized. It's just time for me to let them grow up now that they're taller than me. So I left.
Speaker 2:I drove all the way downtown to a kava bar. I've never heard of a kava bar and had to Google it. I did not drink the kava or anything else. I did not eat the vegan food they had laid out. But I did go inside.
Speaker 2:It was full of older hippies, tiny young baby lesbians, people in native dress and barefoot, and everyone else had dreadlocks. There was a station for painting, like face painting for children, but they were painting rainbows and tribal tats. They called it the creation station. The people were amazing, so freely themselves without constraint. I think they all knew each other already, and I pretended I was looking for someone and then waiting for them.
Speaker 2:I was scared to be there, but I was there. I slipped in and avoided a panic attack while looking for a seat. I didn't want to sit at the actual bar since I wasn't drinking anything, but everything else was small sitting areas like a series of living rooms. I finally found a dark corner on a couch and piled cushions next to me to ensure a safe space. I was terrified, but I was there.
Speaker 2:And when they passed the clipboard around and it got to me, I wrote down my name, Emma. It was open mic night for poetry, and I did it. I was scared as the sun went down, and Christmas lights of summertime began to glow, and the spotlight was turned on. I was number 11 on the list, and I did it. And I stayed, well, partway.
Speaker 2:I stayed until intermission. It was amazing. I loved hearing the poems, and I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would. And then they said intermission. They said we will break for forty five minutes so that you can mingle.
Speaker 2:And when I heard mingle, I was out of there. I left and went back to my car and drove home early, full of adrenaline and also delight. I don't know what other word to use for it. It was amazing, and I'm so glad I went. I will find something else for my own.
Speaker 2:I told my therapist that since Christmas last year, I've been taking the children on one on one dates. I mean, we always have. But when it was just me and I've been single parenting, I had to be extra intentional about it. But this week, I told the kids I'm gonna start taking me on dates too. This open mic night thing, it's once a month, and I really, really had fun.
Speaker 2:And it's okay for teens to go, so I think I'll take Mary because I think she would like it too. She loves to write, and it might be good for her. So that's something we can do together, and I will keep trying new things for myself. That was the story I shared on Patreon. But today, I told my therapist about it, and she was so excited for me that I got a whole point in therapy.
Speaker 2:We are keeping points now. We might both of us be a little competitive, and it's working, so we're just rolling with it. I got a point. But she got a point too, asking hard questions, bringing things back to DID. It's hard to talk about, not because I don't know, but because we're talking real life, not just theory.
Speaker 2:I got another point in therapy for finding a small example of dissociation to share. Today, when I thought I was driving to therapy, I woke up downtown with a police officer knocking on my window, startling me. My car was parked at a stoplight, and people were waiting on me. I was embarrassed. I didn't know what to say.
Speaker 2:I was not in trouble, but I was scared I might be. I just said I had trouble with my car, and I started it again. And he gave a thumbs up, and I drove away. I was so embarrassed. I was mortified, and, also, that could have been dangerous.
Speaker 2:It's really frustrating when dissociation gets the best of me, except also that's not good. It's not even safe. What happened? I don't know. I don't even have a story to explain what happened.
Speaker 2:I have no idea. Then when I turned around to come back to my therapist's office, I missed the turn and had to come back around through the neighborhood again. So I know I was anxious for my appointment, and I told her about that. And she always asked how I felt in my body, what I noticed. It's hard to answer because I keep forgetting that I have a body.
Speaker 2:It's so weird to be talking about all these things again after so long waiting for therapy, trying to find a therapist, and now staying with a therapist again. She says that's the goal, to stay in therapy together and actually work through some things. I'm nervous. She's nervous, but we're both being brave together, and there's something safe about that. I like that she's not a therapist who already thinks she knows everything.
Speaker 2:I like that she tells me what she's learning and what we're going to do. It feels safe to me when we make plans together so that we know what's going to happen. Her plans are for us to talk about DID and my journaling. My plans are to avoid it altogether. That's funny.
Speaker 2:Not really. And I talked about that because she asked if I was working hard in therapy because I wanted to work hard in therapy or if I was working hard in therapy for fawning. But I don't think I'm fawning because she lets me pass, and she lets me say no. And I've tried it out, and we've practiced, and I've seen the evidence of that. And, also, I've worked really hard to find a therapist, so I don't wanna let go of that now.
Speaker 2:And to be honest, even with a discount, therapy is killing me financially. Not really. But when you look at how much we spend on therapy every year and how many years we've been in therapy, that's a lot. It's a lot, and I don't take that for granted. I work hard for that.
Speaker 2:I can't waste my time, so that helps hold myself accountable. So I am I am trying in therapy, and I did share that example of dissociation when it came up. She wants us maybe to talk about the others that feels uncomfortable talking about DID more directly, especially after all this time of making things more and more covert, it feels like going backwards to be overt. It's so hard because I know there's therapists who are wanting to be out about their lived experience. And I know there are places like healing together where everyone comes and is super overt and just lets themselves spill out everywhere.
Speaker 2:And as amazing as those experiences are, it still scares me even after all this time, especially after the last few years. So we talked about that too, what happened with my previous therapist and how I felt abandoned and how it almost cost me my life. And, also, there's evidence that this therapist isn't doing those things and that she's different in lots of ways from that therapist and from what I've been through before. So I don't know what makes it so scary to let those walls come down, to let them spill back out. She even offered snacks, and I had to say no.
Speaker 2:No snacks because that will be losing time to John Mark, which I didn't mean to say out loud, but I did. I would be too embarrassed, I told her. I don't know if I would even be able to come back ever. She talked then about our session a couple weeks ago that was really hard when all the pages overwhelmed me, and scary things were there. I think maybe it was more specific than I knew.
Speaker 2:Something in those pages that I know I need to talk about, but I'm not quite ready. So I kinda freaked out. She apologized too because we're still learning each other. And so how to tell when I'm okay and when I'm not okay, when I'm learning how to say it, when I'm good at covering it up. And so that feels safe.
Speaker 2:Having a therapist who will talk about that when things go wrong, what makes them go right, what feels good and what doesn't. There's safety in that. There's consent in that. And that's maybe what makes it okay to talk about the pages. And so we did finally, for the first time ever in therapy, talk directly about the pages.
Speaker 2:I've never ever done that in my whole life. I maybe still haven't because today was more like a practice run. It was an email about the pages where I responded to something she asked and then also said what I needed because she said that's what healthy relationships do. So last week, we tried this thing, not on purpose. Well, it was for her, but she told me about it later.
Speaker 2:We call it pivoting. She can pivot like nobody's business, where we're talking about one thing, and then all of a sudden we're talking about something else. Sometimes I have done that in therapy to change a subject when something gets too hard, but she's as good at it as I am. And sometimes things are okay, and then all of a sudden, we're talking about a hard thing. And then just when it gets to be too hard, we're talking about something else again.
Speaker 2:It's like a zero entry pool. I learned that from orchids. I couldn't remember the word for it. You know the swimming pools where you just walk in, not with steps, but, like, for kids or toddlers or sunbathing, and it's just a slope when you go in? They said it's zero entry.
Speaker 2:I think I think that's what they said. That's what it feels like for therapy. I'm not having to pry open a painted shut window of tolerance. I don't feel like someone is throwing a rock at it and shattering my window of tolerance. It's just zero entry, like leaning out a window and feeling the wind on your face and then coming back outside and still seeing the curtains blow.
Speaker 2:She's good at that, and it's helping, and it makes it tolerable. And, also, I wrote in it that I appreciate that and, also, that we have to be careful because one thing with DID is sometimes if you change it too much, too fast, if the pivot if the pivot is too far off topic or too quick or too sudden, sometimes there's a switch. So then it looks more regulated, but the one who was distressed still is. So to practice unfawning, I was honest about that and told her. So we talked about that too.
Speaker 2:And then and then for what I needed, I told her two things. After thinking about it for several weeks, it felt brave to say what I needed and also a bit silly and spoiled, but she never made fun of me at all. I said, for one thing, if I embraced before I come to session to talk about a really specific thing, then I really need to be able to talk about it because that takes a lot of energy and spoons to get ready. So if we don't get back to it or we don't stay on topic, then that can be too much of a letdown, and it's hard to get the focus back again. And then, also, I asked her if she has a little tray table where I could paint sometimes for really hard things.
Speaker 2:Because for me, sometimes that helps. Not always, but sometimes. Not only was she agreeable to both things when we talked about them today, she also brought a shredder. I am telling you, it was the cutest little shredder I've ever seen in my life. It was tiny like a gerbil cage.
Speaker 2:And in fact, at first, I thought she had gerbils on her desk, but they weren't gerbils. It was this little shredder, a tiny hand shredder with a crank. It wasn't electric. You don't plug it in. And so we practice with my first page just to see how it was going to go.
Speaker 2:She read my pages. I talked about them. She read what I wrote. I talked about it. She asked me more questions, and then I answered some and passed on one.
Speaker 2:And then when we were done, I folded it and put it in the shredder, held it together tight, and then turned the crank. And all of that hard stuff went right through the shredder. It was the most cathartic thing I've ever experienced in my life therapeutically. I'm not even kidding. It was amazing.
Speaker 2:And it feels like maybe not only do we have a therapist, but maybe we have a way forward. A structure that's working for her, which means she won't give up on me, and a structure that works for me, which means I have the capacity to do these hard things, to talk about these hard things, to tolerate these hard things, to process them, and let them go. And do you know what it did? It literally turned my nightmares into confetti. How transformative is that?
Speaker 2:It was amazing. That's what was amazing about this session. That's what I wanted to share. That maybe again, for the first time in five or six years, I have hope.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org. If there's anything we've learned, it's that connection brings healing.
Speaker 1:We look forward to connecting with you.