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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 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:My friend Laura Brown told me about her book, Not the Price of Admission, which somehow I had never heard of. And I said, how could you know I am wrestling with all these things and you not tell me about the book? And she said, how can you be my friend and not know about my books? I'm teasing. That's a funny joke.
Speaker 1:And also, the book has been powerful, and I wanna share some pieces from it. In the first chapter called Ready for the Thing Called Love, she says, If for you, good is too good to be true in a relationship, then you grew up in a family where there was, at the very best, no danger. There was merely insufficient love and care. At the worst, you grew up in a household where your physical, sexual, emotional and or spiritual safety were repeatedly put at risk by some or all of the adults around you. It is living in an emotional desert where connection and affection were mostly absent.
Speaker 1:Childhoods like yours are full of powerful emotional lessons that teach children, without any words, that emotionally meaningful relationships are perilous. Relationships always come with a large, painful and continuing price tag attached. Being emotionally close to other humans feels unsafe, even when emotional closeness is what you passionately desire. You have put up with abuse and exploitation, with low quality emotional contact with distance, and with all sorts of less than desirable situations. You've let yourself be made crazy at times in order to hold on to a connection you're terrified of losing.
Speaker 1:The best you could expect in a relationship was to be tolerated, not truly and fully loved. It feels as if the next encounter with someone who matters to you might be the last, and connections rarely feel solid. In trying to have some sense of control, in a world that has felt chronically lacking control, you have repeatedly, but rarely consciously or intentionally, done things to bring the other shoe down and get things over with. Your fears, your stumbles, your difficult relationships arise from powerfully biologically mediated patterns attachment that require hard work and intention to bypass. When you were very young, your brain learned to associate attachment with danger, pain, fear, and confusion.
Speaker 1:You have thought you were doing the right thing, whatever that was, and you were surprised by people responding in ways that seemed to tell you you had been doing it wrong. You felt defeated. You've believed without ever saying these words that paying the hard price of admission was the only way you could get anyone to relate to you in other than more superficial of manners. You've tap danced like crazy when you felt as if you were at risk of losing a relationship. You've kept trying, kept looking for cues that you're doing it right, kept giving and pleading, often to little avail.
Speaker 1:There were rules, you were sure of it. You didn't know what the rules were, and it seemed as if no one was willing to throw a rule book in your direction. This is the neurobiology of trauma, the ways in which childhood abuse and neglect, and disrupted attachment affect not simply your psyche, but the biology of response to other human beings when you get close to them. This calls for a different set of skills, including compassion for yourself, in order to get the relationship you want and deserve. Problematic childhood experiences with the adults who raised you have had lasting effects, many of them painful, on your conscious, nonconscious, and biological paradigms for how to engage in emotionally meaningful relationships.
Speaker 1:That's one of the things when we talk about staying in our adult selves, it's one of the examples of not having one. If we haven't had love and connection and safety modeled, we don't know how to do that as adults. And our efforts at trying come through child parts and middle parts and trauma, and deprivation. So sometimes we end up acting like perpetrators. Sometimes we end up begging for rescue, even though no one can undo the wounds that have already happened, and that is tragic.
Speaker 1:And also, relationships don't fix the past. She says, most often, you blame yourself and feel shame. That is, after all, what you've been taught to do by childhood experiences in which relationship problems were ascribed by the adults around you to do something wrong in you, not to failures in their own care for you. You had to find all kinds of ways to pay all kinds of prices to be in any kind of relationship. Kids blame themselves for the painful nature of their relationships with their caregivers from their childhood, and then proceed to blame themselves for all the difficulties.
Speaker 1:We come into the world hardwired to seek attachment and connection with the humans around us. Ironically, and dangerously, for those of you whose caregivers were the source of terror, infants and children are driven to seek connection with caregivers when frightened. This is the terrible paradox driving children into the arms of adults who hurt them. That's also how we get into relationships as adults with people who hurt us. Our understanding is informed by healthy self love and self compassion.
Speaker 1:So, in talking about the hard things, she also then compares that to people who grew up in secure attachment or in safe environments or with safe relationships. She said, When we have been well loved or simply loved well enough by the people who cared for us before we had language, we get sane and reasonable information about the complex and intricate world of emotionally meaningful relationships. Our understanding is informed by healthy self love and self compassion. There is a congruence between what the brain is wired to do and the actual experience of other human beings. Good enough care in childhood doesn't make relationships a walk in the park.
Speaker 1:It does, however, provide helpful roadmaps as well as the neurobiological substrate associating connection with safety. Not having that is an example of deprivation. So again, not just the hard things that happen or terrible bad things that happen, but also the good that is missing, the emotional responsiveness that is missing, the attunement that is missing. People who grew up in healthy homes and healthy caregivers unconsciously expect others to treat them with love, respect, and care. They believe that love endures, even when someone is angry, sad, or temporarily unavailable.
Speaker 1:When they're treated disrespectfully or callously, these well enough loved folks rarely assume that they've done something to deserve ill treatment. They don't heap blame on themselves if a relationship goes through a tough time. One fight does not mean a breakup is looming. They know that love is solid, not fragile, persistent, and not contingent on perfection. When relationships end, well enough loved people are able to grieve.
Speaker 1:They're unlikely to unfairly blame themselves. They feel the pain of loss. Then they are able to move forward, choose differently, and find friendships, partners, and spouses who are able to love them as they are. They learn from their errors in part because they don't code errors as evidence of deep character flaws. So when we have had trauma and deprivation, not only are we looking for danger and hypervigilant about anything that could even be coded as danger, we're also expecting danger.
Speaker 1:So some things that are not actually dangerous will read as danger, and that's part of what leads to our isolation, which then ends up depriving us of connection even when we have it, which then becomes reenactment internally, if as well. She says, well enough loved people mostly love others that way too. They don't expect perfection. They're quite happy with unmythical beats. They're capable of offering humor and compassion to friends and lovers who are human and stumble and sometimes step on their emotional toes.
Speaker 1:They can get angry when someone does something that is not okay. But they are unlikely to hold on to the anger or upset as a protective distancing device or to use anger punitively or for the sake of revenge. She then also describes this in a way that feels to me very much like the wolves in Women Who Run with the Wolves. She says, These folks can sense betrayal and respond to it appropriately. They know it's okay to say that someone is doing them wrong.
Speaker 1:They've never been required to choose between attachment and safety, or between attachment and personal integrity. People who had good enough care before they had language know that they deserve to be treated with fairness and respect if they've behaved in a fair and respectful manner themselves. Isn't that wild? She says, Very few of these capacities and beliefs are available to you if you had a less than adequate experience with primary caregivers in your childhood. If you've experienced disruptions and wounds to attachment in early life and or abuse or neglect growing up, if one of your caregivers was more interested in you being a mirror on the wall reflecting back their wonderfulness than they were in your well-being, if you could never predict how that person would respond to you from moment to moment, or if any part of this was true for you, then you were handed a completely erroneous and confusing guide to attachment, love, and connection.
Speaker 1:Emotionally meaningful relationships are like a million piece puzzle and not a fun one. Then she says something that was like a sucker punch. She said adult caregivers control the brains of infants and small children. Adults, through their actions, regulate the brains of infants and children. Adults control the temperature and access to food, and they also control what happens in the brain's attachment system by how they relate to infants and children.
Speaker 1:Let me be clear, adults control the brains of infants and small children. Your struggles with emotionally meaningful relationships are not your fault or your flaw. They are the result of your newborn brain being controlled by adults who are dangerous, thoughtless, and disengaged, doing things that messed very badly with your circuitry. Love and connection have been equal parts longed for and terrifying, difficult and shaming. Love reveals old wounds that have never healed, even as you allow yourself to entertain the wish that this time love might heal you.
Speaker 1:Despair and hope battle it out for control of your relationship. Each new connection, each fresh friendship, each can be fraught with difficulty. Each new person who matters to you is an opportunity for you to reenact painful patterns that seem to show up despite your best efforts to behave differently. Each new relationship loss, each misstep in connection along the way, can turn on old themes of self criticism and shame. Each new apparent failure can be an opportunity to revisit narratives of inadequacy and self hatred, as well as inner beliefs that no one is to be trusted no matter how nice they may seem initially.
Speaker 1:Your inner sense that you're only there as long as the other person will put up with you creates a deep vein of anxiety under the surface of interactions, which then actually makes it more difficult for others to stay with you. Connection and danger are neurologically wired together for you instead of connection being the thing that soothes fear. Then she asked some really hard questions. Are you ready? Survivors of difficult childhood attachment experiences keep wondering what the price of admission is.
Speaker 1:To be in a relationship, do you have to give up your safety, boundaries, values, and identity? Do you need to walk on eggshells or constantly apologize for being human? Do you have to ignore signals inside yourself saying that something's wrong and never voice your discomfort? Must you never be angry? Never express disappointment?
Speaker 1:Be always the mirror on the wall saying, yes. You are the fairest. Yes. You are good. Yes.
Speaker 1:I love you enough. What fear of emotional magic or trickery do you have to perform to get this one not to leave, not to be mean to you, not to show you disgust or contempt, not to get tired of you? How can you sneak some of your needs through the back door where they won't be visible enough for this new person to see them and reject you for having them? The perceived price of admission has been too high, paid too often, and has felt too inevitable. So you exit the stage.
Speaker 1:You make your life smaller. You tell yourself you can be content with this until, without warning, the possibility of love or intimacy or friendship and connection shows up again, and you find it nearly impossible to resist hope. You get back on the ride once more, vowing to make it different this time, yet not really knowing how. You don't have to spend your life paying a price for what happened to you when you were little. You need help to develop capacities that will actually get you what you want.
Speaker 1:You can change your covert agreements about what emotional prices you are willing to charge or to pay. You don't have to live on crumbs or learn to live hungry. You're starving, so you gobble up anything you can get, even if it makes you ill. Your caregivers betrayed you and lied to you. Your small child self struggled to stay connected to them, no matter what, because you were human.
Speaker 1:Your troubled caregivers frequently gave you very specific directions, sometimes unspoken but no less clear, as to the price of admission for connection with them. Connection you were absolutely required. Connection you could not choose to go without. You were required to tolerate violations to your body. You learned not to protest when they called you vile names.
Speaker 1:Not to flinch when they beat you, not to ask questions when they left you alone and cold and hungry while they were on a binge, not to scream when they took you for a careening, drunken drive in the car without a seat belt, not to complain when they failed to respond to your normal childhood needs. You had to soothe them when they were anxious, to listen while they ranted manically. You cheered them up when they were depressed. You flattered them and told them what wonderful people they were. They taught you that the only way to have connection was to give up important aspects of yourself and your safety.
Speaker 1:They taught you that there was a price that you had to keep paying and paying. Love was for rent, and the rent could be raised any time, collected at any moment. You learned to expect the unexpected. You knew that the sky was falling. Oh my goodness, this is so painful, this whole chapter.
Speaker 1:She says, When not caught in a reenactment of childhood experiences, survivors frequently have no idea how to behave or what to expect, like you don't even have a part to deal with things. You may unconsciously start to search for small clues that tell you this new person is indeed just like all the rest. You pull out familiar ways of paying for connection, even as the other person wonders why you don't believe that they do truly want to connect with you. Simply connect with no hidden painful prices. Like many survivors of less than adequate attachment experiences, you hire a therapist because you find yourself somehow blowing up every relationship you're in.
Speaker 1:Or you go to therapy because you've been left behind and betrayed and sometimes abused or endangered by every emotional meaningful relationship that you've had, friends and lovers alike. Or you find yourself being used and abused and exploited everywhere you turn. You're the one at work who finishes other people's projects. You're the one left to clean up the dishes after dinner, the one nominated for the crappy jobs. You don't understand why this happens.
Speaker 1:You wonder if there's a target on your back saying, kick me. You end up feeling if you're doomed to repeat the pain of your childhood. Maybe your caregivers were right that people are cruel and you'd better get used to it. There is hope, though. We don't have to stay in that place of memory time, of attachment wounds, of childhood trauma drama, and we don't have to act them out as adults in our relationships.
Speaker 1:She says, You can have love and connection without paying the prices. Attachments between humans, intimate relationships, friendships, and all the permutations of how we connect are never perfect and sometimes obnoxiously difficult. Negative encounters with others don't have to be seen as lessons to remind people of their place in the world. They are simply what they are. One bad time with one person who perhaps turned out to not have been a very good choice.
Speaker 1:They are not evidence that one must pay a higher price simply to have someone in your life at all. They are just bad times. A fight with your spouse is only what it seems to be. A fight about that pile of clothing that's been left out once again, not the first sign that you're about to be abandoned because you were either the one failing to put your pile away or the one opening your mouth to indicate unhappiness with the pile. A friend or partner having a bad month isn't cause for the despairing assumption that feels truer than true, that things are about to go badly from now on, so putting yourself entirely aside to bring that person to feeling good.
Speaker 1:A loss is a cause for sadness, not self blame. The reasonable cost of attachment is, or should be, that sometimes we feel distressed because we differ and are in conflict with one another. A reasonable cost of attachment is that sometimes we're angry with someone close to us who has behaved in a way that is not okay, and that we want that person to stop acting that way. A reasonable cost when a relationship is lost or someone dies, is that we feel grief. Grief is, in fact, one of the most powerful indicators of the presence of love.
Speaker 1:But, the cost of attachment is not and should not be the requirement to get rid of yourself, to make yourself small, or to make the relationship all about pleasing and soothing the other person all the time, of your own welfare or expense. The price of connection isn't that you have to be in danger. You don't have to bargain away your safety to have connection. The price isn't about feeling out of control behaviors that seem to chase other people away. Those are unfair prices.
Speaker 1:But then we have more hope. She keeps going back to the hard pieces, so it feels very cyclical and reading it, and it reminds me of that staircase of healing again. But she says, having the relationships you deserve also requires learning to tolerate certain kinds of distress as aspects of normal life. These are feelings that in your childhood were usually the harbingers of something very bad about to happen. You will have to learn to be around other people when they're unhappy and know that this is not evidence of coming doom.
Speaker 1:To stop paying unreasonable prices, you have to be willing to learn to soothe your own insides while someone close to you is unhappy or even angry. You'll have to acquire the capacity to trust that relationship will not be damaged if you do not leap into the breach and immediately make things good for everyone else. You will have to learn to embrace ambiguity to be able to get through not knowing what's happening and not being in constant contact with the other person. Then she talks about how these attachment wounds often are what bring people to recovery. Because even if a parent was not an alcoholic, grandparents may have been, or there may have been addiction or dysfunction cycles earlier.
Speaker 1:And so she talks about how 12 recovery or recovery groups like AA or Al Anon or ACA, those kinds of groups can be really helpful in adding some of the resources and tools that got missed from deprivation, as well as helping to tend to some of the things from trauma. I remember Larry Rule talking about this on the podcast. He's gonna come back and talk to us more about recovery specifically later this summer and or later this year. And then also, we will take some side quests with some of that literature because we've been exploring it, and some things have been really helpful. So we'll share about that a little bit in, future episodes.
Speaker 1:She says, I practice, teach, and write about feminist therapy, which is an approach that looks at people's experiences of power and powerlessness in the context of sex, gender, social class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other components of identity in which disempowerment and maltreatment frequently occur. The systems pit people against one another. We are empowered when we are able to become one another's allies, working toward greater equality of opportunity and resources. And then she talks about how people who are native, people who have disabilities, people of color, and people with fewer economic resources have additional disempowering experiences that make it even harder for them to connect safely in relationships, because often they're in relationships with people who already have more power than them. So within when that Venn diagram of hell happens, these people are extra disempowered, and there's already a power imbalance, which can make unhealthy or toxic interactions actually even more controlling or abusive simply because one person has fewer choices than the other.
Speaker 1:She says, if you were taught that people like you can't gain access to power, happiness, or safety in life, it's even harder for you to know that you can have those things and not be a traitor to your group. It can be hard to see that there are people in your group who, despite oppression, have loved and parented their children well and created as much safety as possible. Poor people are at greater risk of trauma from outside of their immediate relationships, more risk of police violence, environmental injustice, inadequate health care, and substandard education. All of these affect the capacity to parent and partner well in someone who is vulnerable emotionally. You deserve as much as any other human to have fair living and working conditions in which you are not the target of exploitation, harassment, or verbal abuse.
Speaker 1:You deserve as much as anyone else a safe enough world in which to live, safe enough water and air to drink and breathe, and good enough care for your body and soul. No one gets justice by denying it to someone else. This is part of what we learn from codependency and healing from it, that we cannot be afraid that seeking justice for our self is going to deprive someone else. And don't think that revenge equates to justice. Justice expands from the presence of justice, and the more of it there is, the more it grows for everyone.
Speaker 1:This view of the world as having enough good for all of us flies in the face of what many of you learned in the families where there is chronic scarcity of the good stuff. In closing this chapter, she says, you decide that you're incompetent in the domain of relationships because you can't easily follow advice and prescriptions that are helpful for folks who were well enough loved. Sometimes an excellent book about relationships can feel shaming. Let's start where you are. You're a survivor, paying high prices to be in relationships and not knowing how to apply all the great advice.
Speaker 1:Let's look at how you got here so that you can find your way out of the tunnel of not love. Giving up paying the unfair price of admission to connection and love means you have to learn to live radically in the present. This is a challenge for survivors because you already live relationally in the past. Your adult relationships are actually relationships with littles and memory time, and it takes adulting to bring them back to now time. Let's explore how to get back into the time machine and be here in the present right now.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness. This book is gonna hurt. I can already tell. But we're gonna pause and look at some of the 12 step recovery stuff she referenced and then circle back to this book later because it is a lot, and I'm gonna have to pace myself. And, also, because it's relational, I'm glad we're doing it together.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. 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.