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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 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:Which I've been asking since 2022, what is rage? Why would part of me feel rage? Why would I want to feel rage? Even in feminist circles that sometimes talk about rage, what is it? And I talked to Laura Brown about it in 2022.
Speaker 1:And she said there's no such thing as feminist rage because the injustice is the patriarchy. But I told my therapist even, I don't feel rage. I feel perfectly calm. Even with these relational ruptures and wounds and grief, I only feel compassion for them. And my therapist said, but it doesn't mean you don't have rage.
Speaker 1:So after therapy, I looked it up. Rage. It said anger is often viewed as a defense mechanism against deeper, more vulnerable emotions like fear, hurt, helplessness, all of which are the terror of annihilation anxiety. It says that it can surface when we clash with societal expectations, which sounds to me like things coming between me and my values. It says it can also be feelings focused inward so as to not notice the external abandonment.
Speaker 1:That made me nauseous. I had not thought before About how fawning indicates we have already been abandoned. If we had not been abandoned, we wouldn't need to fawn. Anxious strategies, avoidant strategies means we have already been abandoned. We wouldn't need to use those strategies if we were being cared for without harm.
Speaker 1:It says it indicates helplessness, which I know means that's a baby, a bug on its back, memory time. Because even a toddler can do some things. Even a toddler can move around. Even a toddler can put its pants on even if they're on his head. Only a baby is helpless, entirely helpless.
Speaker 1:So it says it is related to early relationships and unmet needs. And so because another part holds that terror, it means that in a dissociative way, in a process way. What I experience, is it showing up as depression and self criticism, which made me think of the critic because I've just done those episodes from 2022 from Pete Walker's book, which made me understand for the first time how Fawning and the critic are connected like mirrors of each other, both evidence of abandonment, both evidence of trying to survive. And then finally and it talked about how psychodynamically it gets used as a tool for differentiation. When it feels like we are blending too much with someone else and meshing too much with someone else, merging too much with someone else, we use rage to push ourselves away, push them away to create space between us so that we can see our distinctness.
Speaker 1:That stepped all over my toes. That landed in a way I was really uncomfortable with and also rang true. Because when we fawn, when we are fawners, when we are trying to be good, it means we do not say no. And when we struggle with boundaries, then people swallow us up, not on purpose, not even always maliciously, but we start to disappear because we're abandoning ourselves, which is an injustice, which is why I'm angry at myself, which is this self criticism, which is rage, trying to differentiate myself. It's scrambling to survive after the fact.
Speaker 1:If I'm defending against fear and hurt and helplessness, then where is that even showing up for me because I'm not aware of any of that, even if it's not part c, which somehow felt validating and also leaves me with the responsibility to ask the questions and find the answers, Listen for the answers. So I asked, what fear do I have? What am I afraid of? I mean, the first one's obvious. I am afraid of memory time.
Speaker 1:I didn't like how fast I went to memory time, so I tried to come back to now time. In now time, I'm afraid of falling apart. Pragmatically, I am afraid about providing for my family that I won't know the right thing or how to help them or be enough for them, that I'll respond to something difficult in the wrong way, not respond to a help request fast enough. All of those fears. I understand I'm a human and that I make mistakes and that I'm learning that it is developmental.
Speaker 1:I've only learned that in the last year, really, with recovery. But I'm still afraid that I am bad. I am afraid that my parents still don't love me even when they're dead. That was unpleasant and filled the whole page, so I moved to the next one. How do I feel hurt?
Speaker 1:I feel hurt when people think I am bad because it confirms my fears. I feel hurt when I am not seen or heard. Politically, I am hurt that the things that have unfolded in our country mean I had to move, that I lost my insurance, that my children were not safe at school, that my house now is so crowded, so many people in my house now. I am hurt, that I am physically exhausted trying to provide for us and that it never feels like enough, that we barely have caught up, That my job I worked for three years gave me enough retirement to cash out when I quit that job just to pay off moving. I feel helpless against the government even when I vote.
Speaker 1:I feel helpless about paying bills and being well. I feel helpless trying to find love to share with someone who wants it from me, the real me, the actual me, all of me, not just what they get from me or parts of me. I feel helpless when it is so hard to find time alone when that is what fuels me and how I create and what I most want to give to the world. She says rage is a tool for differentiation. I looked up differentiation.
Speaker 1:I know it means the difference between you and me that we cannot be the same people and be healthy. That even in relationships, we have differences, and that is not danger. That is health. I looked up differentiation again. My friend says that therapists always forget their basic counseling skills classes.
Speaker 1:So instead of assuming I knew what it meant, I looked it up and it says, a process of maintaining a sense of individuality and emotional autonomy while also being able to form close and intimate relationships. So being able to be intimately close to someone, and I don't mean sex, but to be truly intimate with someone, we have to be able to say no without being punished for it. And we need our emotional autonomy to be able to consent to it, which means we cannot be fawning in it. And saying no or setting limits is about our own boundaries, not about the other person taking it personally. Or Laura Brown talks about how in lesbian relationships specifically, I don't know about gay men because I am not a gay man.
Speaker 1:But in lesbian relationships specifically, when it gets taken personally, then you become both responsible for your own emotional response and the other person's emotional response, and then it cycles, and that is the firestorm where then you're also responsible for your emotional response to their emotional response and their emotional response to your emotional response to your their emotional response to your original emotional response. And that is not intimacy. That is merging. So there is rage when I cannot avoid intimacy and yet also need autonomy and using it as a tool to create space for me and my dissociation relationally. So we talked in therapy about how healthy differentiation involves clearly distinguishing my own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs from those of others, which makes sense that it was hard for me and has been a struggle because I literally, just in these episodes in 2022, I am just now seeing religious trauma.
Speaker 1:But I'm seeing it in the context of Shiny Happy a year before the documentary came out when I was talking about what happened in college and not yet seeing what I was still experiencing. So it makes sense that even as I moved from Oklahoma, that all the way until now, I was still even learning how to have my own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Part of me was daydreaming, thinking I could find someone, not to rescue me from what I was leaving because I did that on my own. But having left that and having found myself that there would be someone who would want me that I had found. But I skipped this step of me wanting me.
Speaker 1:So I could not balance the need for togetherness with the need for independence. And when not given independence or that balance or that space for myself, I could not have personhood. That is where the oppression comes in. Intentional or not, malicious or not, and I am the one responsible for doing that to myself, for leaving myself in that. I can't control what other people do or don't do, which is part of what I was realizing in Oklahoma but didn't have words for yet.
Speaker 1:But it is my job to create space for my own rage, to see clearly the injustice, and to create space for myself. I have said for years even on the podcast that I feel like it is this like a dream I had that time about pushing the walls of the tornado out, creating more space for myself, which is amazing. And also, I don't have to live in the eye of the storm. I don't have to have my safe place be inside a tornado. That is a pushing away the trauma, but leaving me in deprivation that is still abandonment.
Speaker 1:With healthy differentiation, there is a balance that allows me to be my authentic self in a relationship and to tolerate differences in our partner. I have seen that and experienced that as well where when someone cannot tolerate the differences in a partner, then it feels like abandonment if we cannot be enmeshed, if that's what our family was like. And, also, for me, having grown up so alone, Nathan's family was like that very, very tight as a family. And so everybody knowing everybody's things, emotional enmeshment, I don't mean that in a shaming way. I mean dynamically different than my experience where I was so on my own.
Speaker 1:And so for me to be so on my own and so abandoned emotionally and so alone in my experience growing up, enmeshment was not just overwhelming. Enmeshment was drowning. So the only way to manage that was not rage I didn't have, but also was not just rage I didn't know I had, but also fawning as a way to control, which meant when I felt controlled, I had to abandon my own needs just to prevent more danger. And when my differences and my relationships of the boundaries of this is me over here, we're separate people, which I think the parasocial piece with the podcast and other things make it difficult or more challenging. Because even when we keep talking about it explicitly, when you listen to the podcast, you are having an experience of it without me even though you hear me.
Speaker 1:So your relationship with me is different than our relationship together and is different than my experience of myself. And when my differences of who I really am in the present moment and my own experience of myself, when those differences are not tolerated, my rage creates distance in ways I didn't even know was happening, and that gets labeled or even weaponized as avoidance. And then other people have to work harder to connect or to get through to me. We talked about this in the community as skittish cat. Right?
Speaker 1:It's more than that. It's that I feel so overly attached. I need space to bring myself to the relationship, and I cannot if I feel hunted down. So it becomes that double bind again where I either have to abandon them or me, which goes back to that story with my mom where I realized that if I say no to them, they will die. But if I ask for help for myself, I will die.
Speaker 1:That's the double bind that was in my story. Your double binds will be different. You have your own story. That is a good example of differentiation. Right?
Speaker 1:So there's five things that I looked and looked and looked. Five pieces of healthy differentiation. One, balancing autonomy and attachment, letting people be individuals within relationships, that there are you can have a very intimate relationship, but there is still a line around what is you and what is me. That could even just be my own skin. This is my skin.
Speaker 1:But we say we do this with our clothes on. We're keeping our clothes on. That is the boundary of this is my experience, and that is your experience. Two, we manage emotions and remain thoughtful. I can only pick up my own babies.
Speaker 1:There is no one else coming to rescue me. There is no one else coming to help me. I may develop friendships in which I can offer some support or they can offer some support. I may have a relationship where we can support each other, but the rescuing happens within myself. Three, intimacy with independence.
Speaker 1:That's what we were just talking about, which creates number four, authentic self expression. I am able to say no. I am able to say not right now. I am able to say, no. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Without having to defend myself or justify it. No is an answer. I can also say, when this happens, I feel this. When I hear this, I experience this. And five, the setting of boundaries, which is my own responsibility, so I have to learn how to do that to be in any healthy relationships.
Speaker 1:Laura Brown and I were talking about with lesbian relationships specifically because we are socially conditioned as women. We are good at talking. We are good at reading each other. We are tuned in. We are craving emotional safety.
Speaker 1:We connect emotionally. We connect deeply. That builds attachment very quickly because we are good at intimacy. But if emotional closeness moves faster than the relationship itself, we skip steps. We need to know how to handle stress and how the other person handles stress.
Speaker 1:We need to know how they talk to and about others, knowing that's how they're gonna talk to and about us. We need to know how they repair after rupture, what conflict looks like with them, and if the needs and values we each have even align within those contexts. When attachment moves faster than relationship, our sense of stability depends on how the other person is feeling that day. So then when conflict hits, it feels like the whole relationship is falling apart. So we are scrambling to prevent it, which can look like control or avoidance.
Speaker 1:My friend John O'Neill talks about this when he teaches the PTP classes, that control then turns into conspiracy because we're telling ourselves stories about it. We're telling other people. If we are gossiping, we tell other people. If people join us in that trance, that conspiracy spreads, and that's when it turns into gossip. But it also happens internally.
Speaker 1:And then there becomes a coup where parts of us that would not be driving the bus are driving the relational bus, and we are not behaving in ways we would actually wanna show up in relationship. For me, this is part of why recovery matters so much. I go to Al Anon and to ACA meetings still. It's been a whole year now, and it has been lifesaving for me because I have found nothing else that fills in the good. Good therapy and psychoeducation helps me deal with the trauma, but nothing else has helped me fill in the good that was missing all along because I have to do that for myself.
Speaker 1:Even my therapist can't do it. My therapist can model. My therapist can be present with me in it. That's a good start. But I have to give myself the good that has been missing all along, and I'm not going to miss out on relationships just because they're not doing what I want.
Speaker 1:I have to rescue my own babies, and I have to show up in relationships like an adult. That means slowing down so that relationship building is part of the process, not just attachment. And it means data over drama. I have a clinician friend who says this, the data over the drama, getting the information, receiving that rather than falling into the emotional loops and roller coasters and chaos of being attuned to other people instead of myself. And it is slow love and slow friendship and slow relationship.
Speaker 1:Any ships slowly are the ones that last. This is so healing to me. And, also, my therapist said to understand that, I have to learn the difference between love and limerence and the difference between relational and coercive. So that's what we will talk about next. 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.
Speaker 1:It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing.