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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, 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:In therapy today, we talked about other people's big feelings. Sometimes it's my kids. Sometimes it's in the community. Sometimes it's at work. This weekend, it was at Pride.
Speaker 1:Well, not at Pride. People saying mean things outside of Pride, driving by Pride, people spending part of their day harassing us as they drove by, even though they were literally on the way to other places that didn't have to do anything with pride. That's okay. It's so activating from childhood. Loud voices, conflict, feeling in danger by big feelings from other people like I'm going to drown.
Speaker 1:My therapist said that when other people feel out of control, they have fallen out of their ship in now time and into memory time waters. And sometimes when people are in the water, they try to pull other people in with them so they aren't alone when they drown. I try to apply that to myself, right, because Al Anon teaches me that I can't change other people, and everybody has a right to feelings. So how do I learn the lessons to focus on myself instead of other people's choices or behaviors? So if I felt like a drowning whale, how did I try to pull other people in with me so that I wouldn't be alone?
Speaker 1:I don't think it's about being bad or malicious. I think it's about being human. So we talked about some really hard examples, like the moral injury of working so hard to raise my kids in the church and now finding out not all of it was good for them like I thought. And I can shame Spyro with that pretty easily. But my therapist says that's the point.
Speaker 1:No one has to be in the water. We all have our own ships, and I have a right to say no. Thank you to drowning. Sometimes I drown by myself instead of pulling people in with me because that's part of the contract, part of the punishment that I deserve to be alone. So I don't even know that pulling other people in is option.
Speaker 1:And also, when other people try to pull me in, I can just say, no. Thank you. It's up to others to build their own safety. It never was my job. We talked about the ways that my father taught me it was my job or my mother taught me it was my job, but it wasn't true.
Speaker 1:Whether they knew it or not, whether it was malicious or not, those were lies that got communicated. It was a lie that it was ever my job to save the world. I didn't know that as a child, but I can know it now as an adult. And I can know it's my own job to build my own safety. That goes back to why I get to keep in TIS.
Speaker 1:Now time is safe not because of what is happening or what other people are doing or the circumstances in which I live. Now time is safe enough because I get to choose my response, and I have the right to say, no. Thank you. No one asks for trauma, but it is our responsibility to heal it. My therapist says that over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:We do not have the right to drown others, and I do not have to consent to being drowned. And it was never my job to save the world. We talked about what that looks like, trying to keep my parents together, trying to protect my parents from things they had done, being the parent of my parents, thinking if I could be good enough or get it right enough or get educated enough that it would save our family. My therapist said, maybe in the context of shiny, happy culture, it was easier for you to identify with being born to save than seeing so clearly the danger you were in and the horrors of what you were experiencing. We talked about how that played out with Nathan and the kids, the traumas of DHS, and how much I love my kids, and the time I have got to spend raising them, And also, those kids deserve better.
Speaker 1:I don't mean better than me in a disparaging me kind of way. I mean it's a system that fails foster kids almost always. Even when they get good enough families like we tried to be, they still were separated from them, their first families. And the moral injury of that, I can't undo and could not stop. And even now, our family not living together, I still think it's my fault because I left or because I should have stayed or because I should have done more or I should have done differently, but I could not.
Speaker 1:The kids themselves had different needs. Our youngest had to be by a hospital, and we moved and moved to keep her alive. Our oldest needed deaf schools and attachment, which means we couldn't just ship her off. They do that still, you know, the residential schools. Except it's not viewed as a disruption attachment.
Speaker 1:It's viewed as culture. And also, trauma over time looks like personality, and trauma in the society looks like culture. So where is that truth? The nuances and complexities of the lace of that. We had others that need autism services and others that needed this or that.
Speaker 1:So while we could approach something some ways when they were little, and then the pandemic happened and isolated them for the first time from their families, where we could not even do visits. And then as adolescents, their needs have been different, and what they needed from where was different. What they needed from each other was different. They could not have been safely together as they were when they were little, even as their past traumas from before they ever came to us played out for their own healing and coming to the surface in new developmental periods in adolescence as it will again in adulthood for each of them. The same is with all of us.
Speaker 1:There was nothing I could have done. But, I said, as if I could get away with a joke. I'm really good at guilt. Except my therapist didn't laugh and didn't think it was funny. She went back to the ships like she always does and about how when people have big feelings like they're in the water, that no one has to be in the water Because we all build our own safety, and how your safety may not look like my safety, or my safety today may not look like my safety five years ago.
Speaker 1:In now time, I have different capacity for safety, for building my own safety in a way I could not as a child. And my therapist said that's the key is looking at my coulds. She said every time we say should, it's about someone else's expectation. If I'm thinking I should have this or that, I need to change my should to could. Could I have done this or that?
Speaker 1:Because when the answer is yes, it's a learning opportunity, even a mapping opportunity, a development opportunity, an integrating, like an invitation to integration. Not in a parts y way, but in a what do I have access to, an awareness of, mapping kind of way. But when the answer is no, I could not. I could not have done that any differently than I did. I could not have done that any better than I did.
Speaker 1:I could not have tried harder than I did. That tells me, she said, that it's not my stuff, not my ship, not even my waters. And if I trace my shoulds all the way back to childhood with my family, I wasn't even in charge of the world. I was only a child. The world was not my responsibility.
Speaker 1:I was the world's responsibility, the responsibility of my parents. I was supposed to be their world. I could not save it or them because I was just a child. So she said that's moral injury again, parts that feel punished by the shoulds. Because especially in Chinese happy culture and mind control and with trauma and deprivation, Control gets infused into us and internalized as guilt, false guilt.
Speaker 1:But that guilt gets presented as shoulds, and that is moral harm. And if we have parts of us that that feels true, it means we have gone through pain. And that counts as mapping, to be able to track all of that, to be able to follow that, to be able to see that. Mapping is more than just names and ages and who is there and where they are. The map leads us to ourselves, And to get there, we have to see what actually happened, not just remembering who said what or who yelled at us or who did what to us, but the meaning they made of it that we internalize, the meaning we made of it, what we learned because of it, and whether those conclusions are accurate or not.
Speaker 1:She went back to pride and used that as an example. She said being any kind of queer isn't bad. It just is. The same as having hazel eyes and brown hair that's turning gray. But we are convinced through religious trauma that it is bad.
Speaker 1:And when conversion therapy helps us internalize that it's bad, That is moral injury to ourselves, and it's why Pride weekend matters so much. So that we can share space with others who understand that pain, others who know the truth that it's not wrong to be ourselves. And sometimes the colors needing to be bright, and the costumes needing to be bold, and the hair needing to be big, the heels needing to be high. All these different pieces of drag culture or pride weekend or dressing up in rainbows that are so loud because they're bright is because it's attunement, and the loudness of pride has to match the loudness of the harm that has silenced us. There are vulnerable parts of us that need to go to pride and be at pride, to see that it's not wrong to be us.
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. One of the ways we practice this is in community together. The link for the community is in the show notes.
Speaker 1: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. That's what peer support is all about.
Speaker 1:Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.