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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 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 have just had therapy, and I'm doing okay, actually. I was a little anxious today because we were going to talk about the in session episodes, which at the time were such a huge breakthrough for me. And it's fascinating to me really because those episodes were recorded almost exactly a year ago. And so part of it feels like more bookends, but also it feels like I'm starting to be able to see progress again. So this was a really big deal.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I need to tell you happened that feels like a really big deal also, Even though it's such a silly, thing, but for us, it's so huge, we had to run to the pharmacy. Okay? So let me tell you. We are old. We need reading glasses, and we have the what are they called?
Speaker 1:I don't remember what they called. Where it's in, like, in our glasses because that's our we're, like, we're losing our eyes. We are actively losing our eyes, and I know that. And so the eye issue is just a whole other frustration and sadness and grief, but it makes it really hard to see on the computer. And we work a lot on the computer.
Speaker 1:So instead of worrying about our regular glasses, even though they have the bifocals or the trifocals or whatever in them, we just use when we're working on the computer all day, we just use, like, reader glasses from the pharmacy like an old lady, except we have those cute teal ones, which are at least a happy thing unlike anything we've ever worn before, but we found them during the pandemic, and they're our favorites. And so we have those, and we brought them on a trip, of course, because we're still not home yet, but we brought them on the trip and broke them. And so it was a bit of a crisis and a little bit of a drama and a whole lot of grief, but everything is okay. And so we had to go to the pharmacy to pick up new readers. And while we were there, almost without thinking, just as casually as anything, as if we wouldn't notice ourselves doing it.
Speaker 1:We also picked up a notebook and the pens with the colors that we used to write in with it before. And I thought, okay. I'm just noticing this is happening, but I'm not gonna think about it. I'm not gonna comment on it. I'm just going to be aware.
Speaker 1:So that's a thing. And when we got home, I pulled out my readers that I needed for work on the computer, and I just sort of tossed the notebook aside and pulled the pin pins out of the bag and just put them on the notebook and just kinda left them there for a couple days. But then but yesterday, when we finished work and we're at a hotel right now. So when we finished work, and it was a beautiful day, so we went out to the pool to swim, and we were just feeling very okay, very relaxed. A lot of burdens are done.
Speaker 1:We had turned in our draft of the guidelines and introduction for the new ISSTD treatment guidelines. So that was done. Like, there was nothing on our plate. We have all the transcripts caught up. All the podcast episodes have been edited.
Speaker 1:Like, all these extra things that we do to ourselves to have more work to do, everything was strangely caught up. And so we were in a very calm and peaceful place. Plus, this is right after Denver, and so we are feeling very filled up and nourished and cared for after getting to spend the weekend laughing with our friends. And so all of this together just kind of unfolded. And after we had a swim and a nap and some reading of the wolf's book by the pool, we came back to the hotel room, and it was like and I took my shower, and I put on warm pajamas.
Speaker 1:So I was super, super cozy. Like, so in every area of my head, of my world, of my life, everything was just super, super relaxed. And so I thought, what if we just open it? Like, what if we just pull the notebook out, put it on the table, have a seat in the chair, and just open it. We don't have to do anything.
Speaker 1:Nothing scary has to happen. We just need to open it. What what I'm curious, like, what would happen? But then I thought, it's not like I wanna be writing about memories or what's coming to the surface. Like, I wanna keep everything that's happening right now super, super chill before we go home back to our life with all the children.
Speaker 1:So I'm just sort of holding space for this, but I'm actually don't feel any anxiety come up when I hold that thought, and I don't feel anything against it come up. So I'm thinking, okay. We we could do that. So let's just do that. So I get the notebook.
Speaker 1:I sit down at the table. I open the pens out of the package, and I just sort of lay them out. And then I wait. The blank pages in front of me were actually at a table with a notebook with the pens, zero pressure, and everything still feels okay. So I'm thinking, okay.
Speaker 1:This still feels alright, so I'll get ready for therapy by listening to the in session episodes. And in the notebook, I could just take a few notes for things for us to talk about in therapy, and it will be an easy introduction and easy easing into journaling again after having these two years of grief and not being able to do it, maybe it's time. Maybe it's a thing. Maybe it's possible. And the idea of taking notes while I listen to the podcast and taking it in the next morning to therapy seemed very low key key because I'm not, like, falling apart.
Speaker 1:It's a specific thing I'm responding to. I can put it in list form so it feels very structured, and we're gonna talk about it in therapy for the next day. So it's not like the notebook is gonna be out all week. Right? It's just a very short, specific easing my way into things, and it felt okay.
Speaker 1:You guys, it was kind of amazing to have that back and to reclaim it in this gentle, gentle way. Now I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know what that's gonna look like for moving forward. But also I don't have to worry about that right now. I'm just taking notes.
Speaker 1:So that's the other thing. If you haven't heard, my therapist and I have spent the last eight, nine months, ten months going through the podcast from the very beginning. So I can now finally say, I know I have listened to my own podcast because I had to talk about it in therapy. So there were some episodes we just listened to and then came back and talked about, and there were other episodes like Iris, for example, that we listened to together and processed. Sometimes we could listen to several episodes during the week and just kind of touch base on them and keep going, and others, like Iris, took several weeks or months to kind of process and really work through, but it has been so helpful.
Speaker 1:And I'm starting to feel on the same page with my therapist, on the same page with myself, and kind of like having the book out there that I don't want to look at or process, but I'm aware it's sort of organized by themes and chapters, I'm starting to be able to do that inside myself using the podcast episodes so that while there may be some difficult things to talk about, I can, in a new way, unlike ever before, tolerate knowing they're just on the list. So in the past, it was like even knowing about it was too much. I could not hold space for knowing about the depths of pain in my own life. But now I feel like we have sort of categorized some of those things, and I know it's not really so cut and dry or so cleanly organized. Like, things overlap, and your brain attaches things to other things, and I've practiced that and learned that through EMDR.
Speaker 1:But the idea that I am in control of my own therapy, I can pace my own therapy. I give consent to my own therapy and withdraw consent. I can say no at any time. I can stop things at any time. We can work on containment, and we can work on resourcing.
Speaker 1:All of these things help make it tolerable. So while I have still not processed the content from memory time, I can hold space for saying, know what's there. And I can sometimes, sometimes, not always, sometimes I can even allude to it. I'm not ready to go there, and that's okay. And I can accept that as well.
Speaker 1:The other thing that has really shifted for us is that we are really lowering the bar or rate lowering the baseline. I'm not sure the right words in English, but about how I'm okay with my life being structured or not. So for example, one thing I learned three years ago is that even though I'm more introverted, healthy friendships, safe friendships are really important to me. And so when I lost friends, I grieved them, but I also learned what was good for me and not good for me from those experiences. And as we've started the community and started to make friends in the community, we have met all kinds of amazing people, and it's been an amazing thing to watch friendships develop there.
Speaker 1:But now as I start to address my own levels of stress that I am so used to tolerating, it is like my brain can handle all of this chaos and this danger. And so when there's not danger, it's like I seek it out, not on purpose. But, like, who has a war zone as their baseline? That's not healthy. I mean, wars happen, and it's tragic, and it's awful, and people in the middle of that.
Speaker 1:Like, peace is such a privilege. Right? And so I'm aware of that. I also have some survivor guilt for my own work, and all of that's for another podcast. But what I'm saying is, as humans who are designed to love and care for one another, war should not be our baseline.
Speaker 1:That is a trauma response. And so pulling myself out of that situation in the ways possible and soothing my neurological system as it learns to be not at war has been really hard work, actually. It's taken a lot of pretend yoga. I say pretend because, like, I just let my body do what it can do, and maybe that's very. But I don't want you to think like I'm a workout freak because that's not how it goes.
Speaker 1:I also need these walks outside to be able to regulate myself. I need nutrition. I'm not saying I can't eat fun things, but I need some level of nutrition so that my body can function in a neurologically safe way. I need breaks from intense work like parenting or my own self care to make sure that I'm able to parent well instead of only being stressed about parenting well. Like, when I'm with the children, I want to be all the way present and with the children for what they need and for their attunement and the things that they need in that way to develop properly their own neurological systems and to feel loved and to experience that care, and I want to provide that care.
Speaker 1:So I'm sorry that the sound changed a little bit, but they started to do construction by where I was parked in my car, so I had to come back in my hotel room and it's not as quiet and I apologize. But anyway, not only do I wanna offer that to the children, I want to offer it to myself as well. I have resigned from all the work I was doing with ISSTD, not because ISSTD is bad, but because right now is my season to take care of me. And I have gotten off professional email lists, not because they are bad or I don't want to learn and grow, but because it is a season where I need to care for me. I have completed my tour and the rest I will finish virtually my deployment so that I have regular working hours.
Speaker 1:I have weekends off. I have evenings off. I need to care for me differently. I don't just mean like vacations where I come up for air. I mean, I should be having air all the time.
Speaker 1:That can include family and work and therapy if I'm taking care of myself and things are in balance. I just really want to make some of those changes. And when I do, like this week, I am at the hotel, my part of the work work on the new guidelines from ISSTD is finished and the draft is submitted and my work is finished for this week and the children are not here. So the rest of this week I have just for me and therapy and resting and playing and talking to friends, and it is such a relief to me after those hard years and then these intense months that we have had recovering from them, recovering from COVID, all the conferences, the tour, all of these things, it has just been so much and so to come here and to be still and to feel my neurological system like adjust, I thought, oh, this is what I'm supposed to be feeling every day. Maybe not to this degree because I do have six kids.
Speaker 1:And so that's just a lot. Not that they're bad. I just mean it's a lot of noise and it's a lot of interaction. So it's not the same level of stillness. But as far as lowering a baseline to where I am caring for myself differently than I ever have before.
Speaker 1:And my anxiety is really mostly gone. Like some things can be overstimulating, like the airport, for example, flying back from Denver was epic. That airport is the lines were long, people were upset. It was so, there was so far to walk. It was so overstimulating, but also I was okay.
Speaker 1:And when I needed to stop and take a break and just chill out for a minute, I did. And so I feel like one thing that is changing is simply how I regulate myself and how I regulate what my life looks like and recognizing differently as I've gotten to know myself, my cells, I get better at knowing what I need. And then when I meet those needs, not only is that a kind of attunement with myself or my other parts, right, but also they don't have to be so loud about it and they don't have to act out as much because those needs are getting met. And so it's been a fascinating cycle to where I finally feel like I'm on an upward spiral again instead of only a downward spiral. If that makes any sense at all.
Speaker 1:But as that happens, one of the other things that happens are the walls start to come down a little bit. So I wanna share something. I don't know that I have words to share it very well yet, but I don't wanna lose this piece. I want to say it out loud. In the past, I have experienced the others very real.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know we share a body. I know that other people who know me well can see evidence of them or that they pop up on a random podcast or that there's writing in the note book, for example, that is not mine. It is theirs, but I know that we're all in here. Like, I get how it works as much as one can understand that. But at the same time for me, it has not been I don't just mean I'm hallucinating people who aren't there.
Speaker 1:I don't mean that. I'm not seeing things that aren't there. But when I think of the others that like a therapist says, the others inside, other parts alters, when I think of them, I either think of them as, like, far, far away where it's not even my thing. I don't interact with them. Just like someone I might have to Zoom with in a meeting, but we're not friends, so I never hang out with them otherwise.
Speaker 1:Or I think of them as, like, over there. So for me in some ways, it feels very external, but all of that is part of me. So for example, I don't know how to explain this or describe this. Like in a hotel room, I know that we are contained in the hotel room. But when we are in a hotel room with no one else around, so it is there's a high degree of safety.
Speaker 1:Right? Because no one can see us or hear us or know what's going on. There is always more evidence of them because we don't have to like, the hotel room itself is the external boundary, like a skin of my body that is holding me together. It is the hotel room that is holding me together with my parts. And so because there's something holding us together, there's more evidence that they've been out and around.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? So I think of them very externally because when they say, oh, we share a body. Well, okay, that's weird, but I get what they mean. But I don't think about the others inside of me. I think of me and the others who all share the body.
Speaker 1:Just like if my whole family were inside this hotel room, my outside kids aren't inside me, right? We're in the hotel room. So to me, it feels the same in that I understand why people say we share a body. I understand that it's a thing that we share the body, but us sharing the body is not the same thing as them being a part of me. They're not a part of me.
Speaker 1:They're somebody else. I'm not arguing clinical semantics. I am talking experientially, and I'm trying to make sense of it. I know we share a body. I know what switching looks like externally when I see it with my friends.
Speaker 1:What I'm saying is that the others that we call alters or parts or whatever are not a part of me or alters of me. I am one of the alters or one of them just like they are one of us also. Does that make sense? I'm not sure if I'm communicating what I'm trying to say, but I've always experienced that very distinctly. Now sometimes when we talk about co consciousness, that starts people are implying things like capacity to communicate, capacity to share awareness, capacity to share knowledge.
Speaker 1:Like, don't know what that looks like the way other people mean it. But over the last year, what I have experienced is I feel like the others who are not in me, but I know are with me, maybe that's how I could say it. They are with me sharing this body. Right? I know that.
Speaker 1:But I feel like they are closer than before. So even at the height of the pandemic, when all of that therapy grief and friend grief was going on, it felt like they had been banished to an island, right? We use that metaphor. Now, I know there's not an actual island with the actual 12 year old body of John Mark in a real place where someone else outside this body could, like, go pick them up and bring them home. I know that.
Speaker 1:But that's how far away and how banished it felt, like how separated we felt, that there was like an ocean between us. I don't see them. I don't hear them. I don't have access to them. They are where they need to be.
Speaker 1:They're fine. They are safe. I am here in this body right now doing this thing. I understand they are also in this body, but an island away. Like, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:It sounds crazy to try to say out loud. Like, no wonder people interpret that as crazy or don't understand, but that's the best I can describe it. But it feels like unbanished. Maybe that's it. Like they are close again in ways we haven't been in a long time, but still not yet the same as before.
Speaker 1:But when they are this close, there are those things where you feel things, maybe passive influence, sometimes it's called that, where you think things or feel things or do things that are influenced by one of the others, but because you're sharing the body, then through co consciousness or however all of this works, like you experience that as part of yourself, even though it's not, except also it is. Does that make sense? And so as we have developed friendships, as we have started to heal after processing previous therapy traumas, starting to re engage in therapy doesn't just mean finally talking to our therapist. It also means re engaging with others in a way we haven't for a long time. And the reason I'm sharing that is number one, because I can feel this shift happening and it's enough of a difference that I'm noticing it.
Speaker 1:And number two, because this notebook was opened and I took notes about session in it, by the time we took it to therapy this morning so like I just opened it last night and started writing notes to in session. Yeah? And then by this morning when it was time to go to therapy, there were other things also written by others in the notebook. And so in a way, it felt like we are back to work again. So it was interesting because I had this like double response.
Speaker 1:Like on the one hand, it was a full on panic of, oh my goodness. They're back. I'm gonna lose control. What does this mean? How much are we gonna fall apart?
Speaker 1:What if it gets really messy? What if somebody talks on the podcast? Like, all these things where I felt like I've had things under wraps really well, consistent presentation as much as possible. Don't change your voice as much as possible. Like, how can we have this frame?
Speaker 1:If we all share the body and the skin is what holds me together, then how can I use my very covert fronting to manage all of these things until we are ready to deal with it? Because I don't need other people telling me what I'm not ready to receive or what I'm not capable of understanding or tolerating right now. Right? So those walls have been very high both internally and externally. And all of this is metaphor, so it's really hard to talk about, and it's really hard to make sense.
Speaker 1:But those of you who have experienced it, I think you understand a little bit of what I mean. But having other people writing in the notebook, like, not just that we got a notebook out, but having other people writing in the notebook, that is huge. It's huge. And so I had this big reaction to that of what does this mean and what is that gonna look like, all of those. But also on the other hand, there was this nostalgia of, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:Our therapist was right. They're still here. They're okay. And almost like a relief. I mean, I don't wanna say I was excited to see anybody because why would we admit that?
Speaker 1:But I am telling you there was something good about it. Nothing was too overwhelming. Nothing was too scary, but conversations are happening. And that feels like a big deal.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:Connection brings healing.