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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 longtime 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 really want to share more of this book, Trauma and Recovery, the Aftermath of Violence from Domestic abuse to political terror by Judith Herman. As I said, I found the book through a class I'm taking from the ISSTD. While I don't wanna talk about the class itself, I do wanna share some pieces from this book because it's new and different than anything I've read before, putting some of the pieces together that I have learned. And so there's some new things and also a different application of things, and it's really stirred things up for us as well as been very helpful in some really hard ways. I shared some from chapter one already in a previous episode that was primarily about the history of trauma treatment in the context of developing things as we know now, and I wanted to just pick up from there.
Speaker 1:The second chapter is about terror and really acknowledges how scary trauma is, but also how helpless you feel in the face of that terror. The combination really is what creates psychological trauma. The combination of that overwhelming terror that then also leaves you feeling helpless. Not just because it was scary, but also because you are overcome in other as well. The author kind of talks about the polyvagal theory not in those words, but kind of the process neurobiologically and physiologically of how terror goes through your body and how it mobilizes you for fight or flight.
Speaker 1:But then she says, traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail, when neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human system of self defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized. Each component of the ordinary response to danger, having lost its utility, tends to persist in an altered and exaggerated state long after the actual danger is over. Traumatic events produce profound and lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory. Traumatic events may sever these normally integrated functions from one another. The traumatized person may experience intense emotion but without clear memory of the event, or may remember everything in detail but without emotion.
Speaker 1:She may find herself in a constant state of vigilance and irritability without knowing why. Traumatic symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and take on a life of their own. So then she connects how the first chapter about hysteria really is dissociation and how it comes through this process of being overwhelmed and in a state of terror. Not overwhelmed by the terror, but both things happening, although the terror itself is also pretty overwhelming. But I think that sentence is really important because how often do we blame ourselves for what's happened or think we should have done things differently or it was our fault, and there's all kinds of reasons why, which the author actually talks about later.
Speaker 1:But she says, neither resistance nor escape is possible. And I just think that's really important to see in black and white on the page that it was not possible to resist, and it was not possible to escape. It was not possible to stop it. It was not possible to get away. What happened is not your fault.
Speaker 1:For us, at least, that's really, really hard to hang on to and really hard to remember. So seeing that in those words just simply and boldly stated and explaining why it's so overwhelming because we can't get away and we can't stop it helps give some context to what we experience and our response to what we experience. So when the result of trauma is PTSD or CPTSD, complex PTSD, The author gives three categories of symptoms. This is one of the things that was new to me that I did not know about before. So maybe you've already heard this, but for me, it was new.
Speaker 1:But she divided PTSD symptoms into three categories. One was hyperarousal, which is the persistent expectation of danger. So things like being hypervigilant, being anxious, and being like, the startle response, things like that fall under hyperarousal. Number two is intrusion, which reflects the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment. So things like flashbacks, for example.
Speaker 1:And then number three is constriction, which reflects the numbing response of surrender. So that's the amnesia, for example. So she says about hyperarousal, she says, the human system of self preservation seems to go onto permanent alert as if the danger might return at any moment. The traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. So this goes back to the sympathetic nervous system.
Speaker 1:And she says about survivors that they have the generalized anxiety symptoms, specific fears. They do not have a normal baseline level of alert but relaxed attention. Instead, they have an elevated baseline of arousal. Their bodies are always on alert for danger. They also have an extreme startle response to unexpected stimuli as well as an intense reaction to specific stimuli associated with the traumatic event.
Speaker 1:So part of the difficulty of sleeping is that we really can't even relax that much. Part of the difficulty with anxiety is that our nervous system is still on alert as if we are still in danger, which explains some of the incongruence when people around us can be enjoying themselves or relaxed or things are fine and nothing's actually wrong and yet our bodies are still so tense and we're still watching out for danger or feel like we're in danger though we're not. Then when she's talking about intrusion, she says, Traumatized people relive the event as though it were continually recurring in the present. It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma. The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciousness both as flashbacks during waking states and as nightmares during sleep.
Speaker 1:Even the normally safe environment may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma. And besides that, traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context. Rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and memories. So it's not just terrifying because it's like you're reliving the memory, but it's also terrifying because sometimes you only get pieces of it. You only get the pain of it, or you only see something.
Speaker 1:You think it's happening now, and it's not really, but you feel crazy or in that same state of terror again because it seems like it's happening right now even though it's not. Or maybe you only smell something or maybe you only hear something. And I don't just mean voices of the others inside, but sounds from what was happening, like an abuser's voice or a certain sound or all kinds of different things like that. Except there's no context to understand what's happening. So I can share an example of this that happened to us yesterday.
Speaker 1:It's now week seven of quarantine for us and so we have been home with the family all this time, and we are not very food secure, actually, and so that's been kind of scary. But there have been people from the school or from church who have dropped off food. That's wonderful. It's very kind of them. We are very grateful, and that has been a super, super good thing.
Speaker 1:But because of our daughter and because of COVID, we can't open the door. So people leave things in a cooler on our porch, and then we have to disinfect them and leave them out there for a while before we can bring them inside. But yesterday, someone rang the doorbell to let us know that food had been dropped off, and that's a good thing. And the normal response to people without trauma, when the doorbell rings, you go answer the doorbell. When someone knocks on your door, you go answer the door.
Speaker 1:That's how it's communicated that someone is at the house. And in real life for everybody else, that's a simple thing. It's not a difficult thing. But for us, it's actually really complicated. Every time the doorbell rings or someone knocks on the door, it causes a really big internal reaction that we've noticed for years and then there was enough of a pattern to it that after we've been in therapy for those three years with the therapist, we were able to recognize as a trigger.
Speaker 1:I don't know why it was a trigger. I didn't understand why it was such a big deal, but it was. And so the husband has just always known we don't answer the door. Okay. We are not Pavlov's dog.
Speaker 1:Just because the doorbell rings doesn't mean we have to answer the door. So usually, he's the one who answers the door, which sort of circumvents the process, but other times, we just don't answer the door. And I think this was even in a podcast episode, like, two years ago when Emma could not open the door and it was just medical supplies being delivered for our daughter. But yesterday, we actually had some intrusion symptoms happen when the doorbell rang. Usually, when people are dropping off food for us, they just text us.
Speaker 1:They don't even ring the doorbell because people know we're not gonna answer the door. So this falls under the category of the negative impact of trauma on our lives in the way that it affects social skills, for example, because people just don't come to our house because they know we're not gonna answer the door anyway. So they don't even try. People have to text us and let us know we're there, and we can open the door preemptively or we can go out to meet them, but someone just coming up to the house is a big, big trigger for us. But we couldn't figure out why.
Speaker 1:Right? And so yesterday, someone was dropping off food. They rang the doorbell. New person in our life. You can tell.
Speaker 1:Right? And for the first time, instead of just leaving it and letting the husband come answer the door or check on me and then answer the door or figure out how things are going, for the first time, one of our sons with autism opened the door. Okay, so that's never happened before and at some level it's kind of a safety thing anyway of just they don't know who's at the door and they don't have the discerning skills yet to know who to talk to or not to talk to. So that's kind of a safety thing at some level. But also, the older kids are plenty old enough to be able to answer the door.
Speaker 1:That's not an unusual thing. That's not wrong. It's not a moral mistake. It's not it's a normal and appropriate thing that a child who's 11 years old should be able to open the door when the doorbell rings. And so there was actually nothing he did wrong.
Speaker 1:There was nothing bad that happened because he did that, but we completely lost it. We flipped out. We freaked out. Whatever words you wanna use, we completely panicked. And it was huge.
Speaker 1:The intrusion that came immobilized us to the ground, like, in a fetal position in front of the children, which this has not happened before to this degree. And we could not manage it. We could not get out of it. It it was really terrible. It was really terrible.
Speaker 1:But the intrusion was kind of this flooding of memories of men coming to our house, of the mother being complicit in letting them in and knowing that bad things were gonna happen. So I don't need to go into what the whole memory was. I don't want the whole memory myself. I don't need it. But the awareness of connecting the pieces that it actually connects, that trigger actually connects to something that is a legitimate piece from the past was finally answers that we've not had even since marrying the husband.
Speaker 1:But now we know why that's a trigger and where that comes from and we were able to put those pieces together. But the intrusion in the moment felt like even though this is not what happened and even though he did nothing wrong and this was not his fault, which we processed with the children later very carefully and at great length, and I felt terrible about it. But but what we experienced in the moment, the intrusion in the moment felt like both things were happening at the same time. Like now time was happening and memory time was happening at the same time. So it felt like this is not what happened, but what it felt like happened was that the son opened the door to let those men in and put all of the children at danger.
Speaker 1:So that's not what happened, and he didn't do anything wrong, and it was not his fault, And we clarified with him later that we got upset because we did not feel safe. And the reason we did not feel safe was from the past, not because of something he did. So we were very carefully able to talk about it in age appropriate ways and process and come full circle later. Later, we were able to to make sure that he was okay, and I felt terrible that the children were there when this happened. But the intrusion was not the intrusion of people coming into our house, but the intrusion of memory feeling like people were coming into our house in now time.
Speaker 1:But it was not happening in now time. This was memory time when it happened. Like, decades ago, decades and decades. I'm old enough for it to have been decades and decades and decades ago. But what it felt like was right now in the moment.
Speaker 1:So that's an intrusion example of kind of a flashback or how she said it's reliving in the moment, not just in our thoughts or in our dreams, but also as we do things and in our actual actions. A more neutral thing when you see this is children in their play. When children play, you see some of their stories of things they've experienced for better, for worse. They act out things they've heard from their parents, even in good ways, not just in trauma ways. So so part of that is natural development, but because of trauma, that gets divided up into memories of a different sort, and time now is irrelevant, and time gets blurry because memory time invades now time.
Speaker 1:What we know from therapy and what we can remember with help from the husband, for example, or friends or from the therapist, if we had one, because now we don't really have a therapist. Our therapist that we were set to work so hard with and then got started with, she has just kind of disappeared. COVID has taken her away. I don't know what happened. We were gonna do sessions online.
Speaker 1:We've messaged her, and there's just silence. There's been zero response at all. So now we are back to no therapist. And it's been six months since we had therapy except for, like, three different sessions thrown in there in the mix. And so the trigger there see, now that I talk about it, I can identify these things.
Speaker 1:The trigger there is that it feels like foster care. I'm like, that's great that you're a great therapist, but I don't get to keep you, so that's not really helpful to me. It feels the same as foster care trying to therapist shop. So even no wonder that's triggering. Right?
Speaker 1:Do you see so all of these things kind of invade now time. But the therapist in Oklahoma always told us that even though that happens, memory time does not actually have the power to change now time. So because memory time was invading now time, it felt like our son opened the door and let these guys in the house. But now time really is still safe and there really were no men coming into our house. In fact, no one came in the house at all.
Speaker 1:The woman was dropping off food and left it on our porch and then left and went to get in her car. So so nothing bad was actually happening. Memory time could not change now time. Now time is still safe, but that's not what it felt like. So there's a difference between memory time invading now time and memory time changing now time.
Speaker 1:Memory time can invade now time when there are triggers that give you clues to what happened in the past. Does that make sense? But memory time cannot actually make those things happen in now time. So it feels like it, and you get clues to why it's a problem and what went wrong and what happened to you, but it's not actually happening now. And that's a huge distinction and a huge difference to remember because it feels like it, but it's not actually happening.
Speaker 1:So that's why it's so important to remember things like using your senses to help you orient back to the present and now time where you are safe. What can you hear? What can you see? What can you smell? What can you taste?
Speaker 1:What can you touch? That helps you stay in now time because even though it tries to invade, it doesn't actually have any power in the present. So that brings up the question of why does that even happen if it doesn't have the power to change the present? The author says that the repetitive reliving of the traumatic experience represents a spontaneous unsuccessful attempt at healing. So going all the way back to Freud and Genet, Genet spoke of the person's need to assimilate and liquidate traumatic experiences, which when accomplished produces a feeling of triumph.
Speaker 1:Genet implicitly recognized that helplessness constitutes the essential insult of trauma, and that the restitution requires the restoration of a sense of efficacy and power. The traumatized person, he believed, remains confronted by a difficult situation, one in which he has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which his adaption has been imperfect, so that he continues to make efforts at adaption, end quote. So basically, guys, we're just trying too hard and need to chill out. That's basically basically what's going on. That's the Reader's Digest version of what's going on.
Speaker 1:But it's not actually happening consciously. We're not trying to make it happen. We don't seek it out. We don't welcome the experience of it or welcome the opportunity of it. We dread it and we fear it, as the author says, because it carries with it the emotional intensity of the original event.
Speaker 1:The survivor is continually buffeted by terror and rage. These emotions are qualitatively different from ordinary fear and anger. Reliving a traumatic experience provokes such intense emotional distress. Traumatized people go to great lengths to avoid it. And how do we avoid it?
Speaker 1:That's the third thing, constriction. And that is the freeze response. The author says, quote, sometimes situations of inescapable danger may evoke not only terror and rage, but also paradoxically a state of detached calm in which terror, rage, and pain dissolve. Events continue to register an awareness, but it is as though these events have been disconnected from their ordinary meanings. Perceptions may be numbed or distorted with partial anesthesia or the loss of particular sensations.
Speaker 1:Time sense may be altered, often with a sense of slow motion, and the experience may lose its quality of ordinary reality. The person may feel as though the event is not happening to her, as though she is observing from outside her body or as though the whole experience is a bad dream for which she will shortly awaken. These perceptual changes combined with a feeling of indifference, emotional detachment, and profound passivity in which the person relinquishes all initiative and struggle, end quote. I feel like I'm especially seeing some constriction even in dealing with COVID and while we're in quarantine still because other people are super stressed out and we are actually fine. I'm aware of perception changes.
Speaker 1:I'm aware of structural changes internally. I'm aware of walls going up. I'm aware of those kinds of changes. But with the family, as I've said on the podcast already, with the family, we're actually fine, except for yesterday when we freaked out about the door. But but we are just going through every day with the family as if nothing's happening, and it sometimes almost feels like I'm watching myself doing homework like normal or cooking like normal or trying to feed them like normal or helping them with chores like normal as if nothing is actually wrong or as if we're not stuck here and can't leave and can't take them outside.
Speaker 1:And there are days that that space between us and reality happening around us gets to be so big that I can't connect anymore to where it's like I'm watching the children, but only watching me participate with them, not actually participating with them, except I am, but it's not me, except it must be. And I can't connect with my friends. I can't, like, physically cannot reach out even through my phone, even through technology. I can't participate in the things that I know help me, like connection with others, for example. It's like something is frozen inside and something else is happening on the outside.
Speaker 1:And I don't know how else to explain it except that it leaves me feeling cold inside. It leaves me feeling far away from myself. It leaves me feeling like I'm outside of what's happening so that I'm watching it happen rather than experiencing it happening. I don't know how else to better explain what's going on. And the longer that this quarantine goes on and the longer that I don't have a therapist and the longer that I'm separated from all these things that made such a difference in my life and helped me so much in my own progress and in treatment and in getting better, the more that separation grows and the greater gap that becomes, it's like those become brick walls instead of just gaps.
Speaker 1:And the less I can remember those things and the more blurry those details become, and I can feel myself separating from it. And it gets harder and harder to remain connected to those parts of myself so that now it just feels like there's an awareness that that is part of my life, but it does not feel like it's mine. And the details are super fuzzy. Like, for example, for work yesterday, I was trying to write down calendar dates of things that are coming up and trainings are coming up and when I'm supposed to be aware or what I need to be doing. And there was a note about conference on my calendar that's coming up.
Speaker 1:And I'm aware that I went to that conference last year, last summer, but I can't remember it at all. Like, there's some kind of discrepancy between what I know is true and what I can remember or hold on to or recall or retain or pull up in my mind. Like, it's just not there. It's just blank. And so those are examples of constriction that happen because of trauma, whether it's ongoing or whether it's new trauma after you've been used to it.
Speaker 1:And like Doctor. Barrish said when we talked to him on the podcast earlier this week, those habits of dissociation are how we have always dealt with things. So even though we've made lots of progress and even though we know things to do to help, when things really get hard, that's still the default to where our brain goes, and that's still how our brain processes things. And that's just not fixed or undone easily. So I also have some feelings of shame that it's happening and I can't stop it.
Speaker 1:I have some feelings of helplessness, like the book talked about, because I can't make it better and I can't I'm out of skills. I'm out of what I can do all by myself. And I have some feelings of something that is a mixture of guilt and shame for wanting to reach out for help, but also feeling like, who who am I supposed to get help from? I I don't even know the answer anymore. Like, all the options are gone.
Speaker 1:And I've tried everything, I've tried so hard for so long. And there's been so much that's built up that now it's just, like, solidified, like stale bread that's just hard as a rock, and it's all bricked up. And I just I I I I can't. I don't know how to access it anymore, much less try to keep things moving or progressing. And I don't know when that settles back down.
Speaker 1:I don't know how you come back from that or if now we just have this as a new normal, like this is our life now, except this time we know why it's our life. Because I know about DID now, and I know about dissociation now. So that's different than only feeling crazy, and it's different than not knowing why. But it's the same process, and I still don't know how to make it stop. I don't know how to turn it off.
Speaker 1:So what happens, like the author talks about, is that this becomes a process of the experience where you sort of float between the intrusions, like the flashback we had yesterday, and the constriction of blocking it out and not remembering to where you can't remember the things you want to remember and you are remembering the things you don't want to remember. And it's like this back and forth causing the reinforcement of the hypervigilance. And that's basically what it's like to live with PTSD. And that's basically what it's like to live with complex trauma. The author says, quote, in the aftermath of the experience of overwhelming danger, the two contradictory responses of intrusion and constriction establish an oscillating rhythm.
Speaker 1:This dialectic of opposing psychological states is perhaps the most characteristic feature of post traumatic syndromes. Since neither the intrusive nor the numbing symptoms allow for integration of the traumatic event, the alternation between these two extreme states might be understood as an attempt to find satisfactory balance between the two. But balance is precisely what the traumatized person lacks. She finds herself caught between the extremes of amnesia or of reliving the trauma. Between floods of intense overwhelming feeling and arid states of no feeling at all, between irritable impulsive action and complete inhibition of action.
Speaker 1:The instability produced by these periodic alternations further exacerbates the traumatized person's sense of unpredictability and helplessness, which then perpetuates it, she says. So part of this struggle with healing from complex trauma is that the one thing that helps the other thing reinforces the first thing, and it's just this back and forth and back and forth. And and so I don't know if that's part of what therapy helps with is sort of slowly bringing that in a little bit at a time so things get a little less extreme or a little more balanced until it's kind of a more smooth process. But, basically, because of these symptoms, because of the intrusions and because of the constrictions and because of the hyperarousal for safety and feeling like you're in danger whether you are or not is basically what leads to disconnection. Both disconnection from others inside and disconnection from others on the outside.
Speaker 1:And that's what she talks about in chapter three. Quote, traumatic events call into question basic human relationships. They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community. Traumatic events have primary effects effects not only on psychological structures of the self, but also on the systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community. Traumatic events destroy the victim's fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation.
Speaker 1:In situations of terror, people spontaneously seek their first source of comfort protection. When this cry is not answered, the sense of basic trust is shattered. Traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. I can't tell you what an accurate description that is. On days when we are really, really struggling, that is exactly what we feel.
Speaker 1:We feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, and completely cast out. I don't know if that is an emotional flashback that's not attached to a specific memory or if that's just the process of the trauma like what she's writing about how you feel disconnected. But that is absolutely what we feel in the moment when we are struggling regardless of how many times the therapist has told us that she is there, regardless of what we have to connect us to her, or regardless of how long we've known the husband, regardless of how close we are with our friends, we cannot feel any of that or hold on to any of that in those moments when we are really struggling. It's like those things completely disappear. So, again, I don't know if that's because the symptoms are up or something is happening physiologically or if that's a flashback to a specific thing that someday we can work through and then go away, but it is a loop that we go through over and over and over again, and it is maybe one of the most terrifying and distressing things, almost more scary than intrusions like the example with the door, Because those flashbacks are terrible and terrifying and we can work through them.
Speaker 1:But when we do work through them or when they pass, we can be back in now time. But this disconnection is almost harder because it disconnects you from people. And in now time, it's like now time can stretch somehow. And if you're that alone in it or that abandoned in it, then something like a flashback is a thousand times worse because there's no help coming, and there's no rescue coming, and there's no one who understands or cares or loves and it's a whole different thing that complicates everything else. So this chapter was really meaningful to me that it was even included because I feel like it's a huge piece that we maybe don't talk about enough and maybe that most frustrates support people who are like, I'm here for you.
Speaker 1:I'm here for you. I'm here for you. And then don't understand why we don't believe them. Because it's not about not believing them. It's not about not knowing that.
Speaker 1:It's about feeling it. We cannot feel it. We don't experience it. So I can know it cognitively, but when my cognition goes offline, I lose that peace because it's not something I know how to feel. So it's not that you're not doing enough, and it's not that you haven't tried hard enough, and it's not that I'm ungrateful or dismissive or giving up or not remembering or seeking out drama or trying to sabotage what's good for me.
Speaker 1:It's that I only know this cognitively because we've worked so hard on it cognitively. It's not something I know how to feel and it's not something I can hold onto when the cognitive piece is missing. Does that make sense? That's the closest I've ever been able to find words to explain that. And this author says, it's because a secure sense of connection with caring people is the foundation of personality development.
Speaker 1:When this connection is shattered, the traumatized person loses her basic sense of self. When a parent who is so much more powerful than a child, nevertheless shows some regard for that child's individuality and dignity, the child feels valued and respected. She develops self esteem. She also develops autonomy, that is a sense of her own separateness within the relationship. She learns to control and regulate her own bodily functions and to form and express her own point of view.
Speaker 1:Traumatic events violate the autonomy of the person at the level of basic bodily integrity. The body is invaded, injured, defiled. Control over bodily functions is often lost. The individual's point of view counts for nothing. Unsatisfactory resolution of the normal developmental conflicts over autonomy leaves the person prone to shame and doubt.
Speaker 1:Shame is a response to helplessness, the violation of bodily integrity, and the indignity suffered in the eyes of another person. This blew me away that she talked about dignity because I just for the first time wrote that to the therapist. So the therapist has we do not still write in notebooks, but we continue to send letters sometimes. But finally, I was like, I have to stop because this process in itself is triggering me because it just goes out there, but I don't see her. I don't hear from her.
Speaker 1:I don't know what she thinks or feels or been so long without therapy that it's slipping through my fingers, all of it. And I am so disconnected from my own self at this point that continuing to try, I'm at the point where I don't have it in me to continue to try anymore. And there's nothing left to hang on to or nothing left to hang on with. And I literally spilt out. And there's some level of a shame reaction to that, of how humiliating it is to keep begging and trying and pleading, which is not about her.
Speaker 1:This is about the past. That's memory time. But I said in the present, in now time, like, have to stop doing this because just for the dignity of not being abandoned in this. And so when she talked about dignity in this chapter, it really blew me away because I had just connected that piece myself through writing, which I guess means it's still being helpful, which is super annoying. But it goes back to that being utterly alone piece.
Speaker 1:The author says, and this is one of my favorite things she says in the whole book, not because it's so exciting, but because it's so true, it's so real and raw. This is exactly what it feels like. She says traumatic events, by definition, thwart initiative and overwhelm individual competence. No matter how brave and resourceful the victim may have been, her actions were insufficient to ward off disaster. That's exactly what we were trying to talk about in the podcast when we talked about the shame of not even being able to do DID right.
Speaker 1:Because if we had been creative enough or smart enough to create the right altar or to do the right altars the right way, we wouldn't have had to keep making more. Right? That was my initial finally understanding that piece. But now with this book, what I understand is it's not really about creating new alters. It's about if I had been good enough, they wouldn't have hurt me.
Speaker 1:It's about if I would have been valuable enough or meant enough to someone, I would have been loved. She says to imagine that one could have done better may be more tolerable than to face the reality of utter helplessness. And then she quotes Gardner who says, the patient was horrified at the realization that he was expendable to his own people. And this layer is so raw and hurts so much I don't think I can even talk about it more and still function. So going back to what the author says, quote, trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately.
Speaker 1:The profound disruption in basic trust, the common feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, and the need to avoid reminders of trauma that might be found in social life, all foster withdrawal from close relationships. But the terror of the traumatic event intensifies the need for protective attachments. The traumatized person therefore frequently alternates between isolation and anxious clinging to others. And that's humiliating. It feels humiliating to me.
Speaker 1:It's why we get misdiagnosed as borderline and then borderline gets stereotyped. That whole come here, go away thing, it's not about the drama as of that. It's about I'm aware at some level that I desperately need people to stay alive and to be healthy and to be well. But I'm also aware that because I don't feel real, those relationships don't feel real. And because I feel like I'm in danger, those relationships feel like danger.
Speaker 1:And because I feel abandoned, I know it's a matter of time until those relationships abandon me. And because I feel alone and being connected to them brings up the feelings of relief and healing and goodness and closeness that we have been hungry for our entire life, that sometimes it's too painful to stay in those relationships because you can't feel that and also not be aware of how hungry you have been for it or how long it's been for it. And so at the same time that it brings relief, it also brings pain. And the intensity of both is so overwhelming that I can neither draw closer to it nor get away from it. And so I collapse, I constrict, I avoid, I withdraw.
Speaker 1:I curl up into a ball and watch my phone light up with text that I physically cannot respond to. I don't know how to invite others into my life, and I don't know how to respond to offers of connection. And I don't know because none of that feels safe or feels real or feels like it's permanent enough or strong enough or real enough or long enough to handle the mess that is me. I don't know how to turn toward others, even though cognitively I understand healing comes through connection. I don't know how to turn towards others when that also means turning towards myself, which means recognizing what it is I'm healing from.
Speaker 1:It's too much, and it's too hard. And the experience is that I'm utterly alone, utterly abandoned, and completely cast out or forgotten. Not because I'm acting out, not because I want more attention, not because of some behavioral problem, but because that's what it has always been. That has always been my experience, and I don't know anything differently or how to fix that. The only thing that heals it is connection, and the only thing that helps us connect is being chosen.
Speaker 1:Except that being chosen was always dangerous. That's how hard this is, and that's how real this is. And I can't believe I got through that without crying. The author says, because traumatic life events invariably cause damage to relationships, people in the survivor's social world have the power to influence the eventual outcome of the trauma. A supportive response from other people may mitigate the impact of the event, while a hostile or negative response may compound the damage and aggravate the traumatic syndrome.
Speaker 1:Their sense of self has been shattered, and that sense of self can only be rebuilt as it was built initially in connection with others. You guys, that exhaust me. In some ways, I feel like we've made so much progress, and in some ways, I feel like the walls have just gotten thicker, and that it's the struggle and the vulnerability of it has just become more secret. And the great the closer you get to the need, the greater the shame is for having the need. The author says, In the aftermath of trauma, rebuilding some minimal form of trust is the primary task.
Speaker 1:Assurances of safety and protection are of the greatest importance. She needs clear and explicit assurances that she will not be abandoned once again. I don't even know what to say to that because I can't get to that point. I can't hold onto that by myself yet. Or maybe I can't at all, and that's why we need connection.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. The author says, once a sense of basic safety has been reestablished, the survivor needs the help of others in rebuilding a positive view of the self, the regulation of intimacy and aggression disrupted by the trauma must be restored. This requires that others show some tolerance for the survivor's fluctuating need for closeness and distance, and some respect for her attempts to reestablish autonomy and self control.
Speaker 1:But beyond the issues of shame and doubt, traumatized people struggle to arrive at a fair and reasonable assessment of their conduct, finding a balance between unrealistic guilt and denial of all moral responsibility. The survivor needs the help of others who are willing to recognize that a traumatic event has occurred, to suspend their preconceived judgments, and simply to bear witness to her tale. The survivor needs help from others to mourn her losses. Unresolved or incomplete mourning results in a stasis and entrapment in the traumatic process. Sharing the traumatic experience with others is a precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world.
Speaker 1:Restoration of the breach between the traumatized person and the community depends first upon the public acknowledgment of the traumatic event, and second upon some form of community action. And that can take all kinds of shapes. Like, I think that's why it was so powerful when my friends came for my birthday. That was an action. I think it was so powerful when we were able to connect for a Zoom meeting with my friends that I've not seen in two can't.
Speaker 1:I can't hold on to it by myself, and so I'm losing that and regressing in other ways despite my efforts every day just to hold on. These two responses, recognition and restitution, are necessary to rebuild the survivor's sense of order and justice. So I feel like these last pieces are pieces I'm not to yet. So I know they're significant. I underlined them.
Speaker 1:I mentioned them on the podcast, but I don't know how to process them yet because I'm not there yet. But it's part of where I need to go and part of the work I need to do because I know cognitively that connection matters and that that's where healing is to be found. But at the same time as knowing that cognitively, my feelings are that that's maybe the most terrifying thing anyone has ever asked of me. I don't know how to do it, and I don't know if I can. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1:Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemsspeak.com. We'll see you there. Hi.