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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.
Speaker 3: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. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Hello. Can you hear me okay?
Speaker 1:There we go. Hi.
Speaker 2:Just wanted to make sure you could see me. I will turn off my camera for the interview just to make sure we have the best sound.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But I wanted you to see me so you know. Hello. Hello. And is there anything you have questions about or anything I can do for you before we start?
Speaker 1:I don't know when when is this gonna air?
Speaker 2:Probably not before March or April. It's pretty well recorded in advance. And right now, it's already, everything is already scheduled through March. It may not air until then or April or later, but I can let you know when I know for sure.
Speaker 1:Okay. Perfect. And, when you do this, podcast, do you frequently meet with other systems? I haven't had a chance to view to review your podcast yet, so I was just, like, wondering what do you usually do? Do you talk to other people who have DID?
Speaker 2:On the podcast? Mhmm. The whole podcast is about DID.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's what I thought. Yeah. So that's what I was wondering.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good question. Good question. I'm sorry I didn't understand. Yes.
Speaker 2:Sometimes other systems are on, and sometimes I talk to clinicians. Sometimes it's just me. Okay.
Speaker 1:That's what I was wondering. Right. Take a
Speaker 2:big breath. I'm sorry. You're so brave to be here.
Speaker 1:No, it's okay. I've done podcasts before, but I usually go on to talk about my writing. So it's a little different, a little a little more vulnerable to, like, share more information about my system.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Also, entirely okay to pass on anything, really.
Speaker 1:Okay. I I have pretty good boundaries. So so if I'm uncomfortable, then I will just I'll just tell you that, you know, whatever. But
Speaker 2:Also, just to make it explicit, you don't even have to explain. You can just say pass.
Speaker 1:Okay. Perfect.
Speaker 2:Okay. I wanted you to see my face, but I'm gonna turn it off so that you can I mean, so that we get the best sound?
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. The first thing I even want to acknowledge just for listeners is that you and I are doing this absolutely as strangers. I found you sort of by accident. Like, I wasn't even looking, and it was like, oh, there's this new book out about this, and you and I have not gotten to meet. You have not gotten to listen to the podcast.
Speaker 2:I have not gotten to read your book, but it was so important. We had to schedule this. So we are starting from scratch right away.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:How how do you want to introduce yourself just so listeners can get to know who you are and sort of get acquainted with the sound of your voice?
Speaker 1:Oh, great. My name is Nicole Wilden, and I am a survivor of abuse and trauma. And I'm also a writer, and writing was part of how I began my process of healing, my kind of journey of healing. And so I've written a lot of fiction. And then this year, I also put out a memoir about my kind of like experiences as a child in a cult.
Speaker 1:And then it also deals with me finding out that I have Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Speaker 2:What can you share with us within your boundaries? What can you share with us just that piece for starting? What it was like for you to learn about DID?
Speaker 1:Oh, it was a wild ride. I went to therapy because I was feeling a lot of just depression. And I was always aware that I wasn't entirely one person, kind of. I believed I was crazy. I believed I had an imaginary friend who never went away.
Speaker 1:And I was able to talk to him and he would like respond to me and I didn't hear those responses with my ears. So I just sort of believed that I was just not well, but I was afraid of anyone ever finding that out. So when I started therapy, I actually went just for depression, and I never intended to tell my therapist that I thought I was crazy. And now I don't even believe in the concept of crazy. So, yeah, so when I was diagnosed, it was actually because another part came forward in therapy, and introduced herself to my therapist.
Speaker 1:And essentially said, I'm not Nicole. And the therapist was not at all surprised, had been expecting it to happen, had already decided that this was probably what was happening in my life that I had Dissociative Identity Disorder and that I was a system of parts. So she wasn't surprised. But once she told me, I was very surprised, and it certainly transformed my life.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing that with us. I agree that getting a diagnosis for a dissociative disorder is absolutely an experience where everything is shocking and also everything makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yes. There were a lot of things that came into my understanding at that point that I had just always ignored. There were there were always things, there were always signs throughout my entire life that I just chose to ignore because that was my role. My role was to not know, and so I just didn't. I didn't know.
Speaker 1:It was my job to not know. And there were a lot of things that I overlooked, like purchases that I knew I hadn't made, but then they would show up at my house and I was like, oh I guess I guess I did buy that thing that I thought about buying, you know, and there were a lot of there were a lot of excuses that I made to myself for time that I was missing, because it wasn't my experience wasn't gigantic blocks of time. They were a lot smaller pieces of time. And so I was just able to be like, oh, I must have just been daydreaming or whatever. And I would just miss out on chunks of time.
Speaker 1:And and once she diagnosed me, I was like, oh, everything in my life is finally making sense. So in that way, it was really rewarding. In other ways, it was really overwhelming. And in in some ways, even devastating because I just I I believed that my my life was over and that no one would ever love me. And none of that turned out to be true.
Speaker 1:So I'm I'm a happy ending story.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I will share some information to recap my own story just a little bit since you don't know that and have conversation from there. I was diagnosed with DID after both of my parents died really close to each other, and sort of I went into chaos from that and needed what I thought just grief therapy, and got diagnosed in that process. But also other background that listeners know because they've listened to the process as it's happened is that last year, the documentary on Amazon about shiny, happy people
Speaker 1:came
Speaker 2:out and talked about sort of evangelicalness, which is what I grew part of what I grew up in, in my experience. And so I really wrestled with the shiny, happy concept and all of that. And then realizing as part of that, that my vulnerability from having survived that, like all the way through college, was also that vulnerability and that trauma was really appropriated by the church, which I joined later, trying to reclaim some version of a family that was promised me. And so then having to spend two years since then of realizing, oh, wow, this has just taken a different shape. And me being okay with this piece of my faith or this piece of my faith is not the same as consenting to everything that's happened since and trying to get out of that, including some conversion therapy and being in a mixed orientation marriage that I had to leave because we were both gay and I just need to live congruently to myself.
Speaker 2:So it has been a whole process of all of these things. And so listeners already know this background and this story and have sort of witnessed it with me, but it is in sort of my faith transition group, my support group. I got referred to a group online where I saw the post for your book, and that's how we got connected. Yes. So where do you even want to start with the pieces of your story that you want to share from your book?
Speaker 2:Or how do we even talk about the church? Again, I wanna be really clear. I'm not because I've gotten emails about this before. I am not talking about people's faith. I am not talking about, like, hating on any faith tradition.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about a really specific experience and a really specific church group. And, like, you even already used the word cult, and it's so hard for me. I'm there. I've done the work. I've taken the assessments.
Speaker 2:Listeners will be hearing some of that coming up. But deconstructing all of that is so hard because it's pervasive. And then when you have a system on top of that, getting the information, like, all the way through, or when you have a family that you're trying to raise and getting everybody untangled and resettled, but it's such a big deal, and it's hard to even find words to explain that. And that's part of why I was so excited to talk to you today because you have put all of this into words.
Speaker 1:Yes, I did. So what I can what I can say right away just to kind of like help with this whole, I'm not here to like, you know, kind of step on anyone's faith by any means. I am a highly like faith filled spiritual person. And so I in no way want to to I want to explain the use of the word cult because I was in a high demand religion, and that is not actually the cult that I was talking about. So I was in a high demand religion.
Speaker 1:I was raised in a high demand religion. And that's the group where you and I connected was that's the high demand religion that I came from. But there was a subsect of this religion that is not endorsed by the church itself that existed in the 80s, where I grew up in a neighborhood where I grew up, there was a child trafficking ring that claimed to be a high priesthood of this high demand religion that I was in. And it was really just a trafficking ring. But they used they used what they used words and scripture from the church that I was in, and and it all was churched me.
Speaker 1:Going to church on Sunday and sitting with my family and then going to different classes at church, I didn't know the difference between that and going to this this basement that they call the temple, and going through these rites and procedures that were eventually what broke me into pieces, if you will, was that experience of being bought and purchased over and over and over again and used. So it's a little different. I was part of a high demand religion as well and I have plenty of trauma related to that high demand religion. But the abuse that caused my mind to splinter, or really, probably more correctly, to never coalesce into one singular identity was this cult that I was in, this underground subsect of my church.
Speaker 2:So let's break this down because all of those three things from high demand religion to trafficking to actually using the word cult, we have talked about all three different pieces broadly on the podcast. Clinicians who have come on the podcast have talked about all three different pieces. And so just for listener safety, let's just kind of break it down a piece at a time and structure it that way. Is that okay?
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So how would you define high demand religion? If we just look at that piece first, which again, we're not disrespecting or referencing people's faith or faith expression, this is a really specific experience, How would you explain pieces or aspects of that?
Speaker 1:I would say that for me, high demand religion has always been something that incorporates every part of your life. So it's not just something that you do on Sunday, or just, you know, one one or two times a week, you just go and you like, you know, feel your feelings and you like experience this unity with a deity of any kind. That that's not what a high demand religion is. A high demand religion to me is something that's pervasive. It's in every piece of your life.
Speaker 1:In my high demand religion, I I was instructed on on what to wear, on words to use, and and lots of words not to use. So my speech was regulated. My clothing was regulated. My behavior was was highly regulated. So it was always about things that you can do, things that you can't do.
Speaker 1:And I would say the the biggest piece of what made it a high demand religion is is what it does to my mind. What it does to people's minds is you're constantly watching and second guessing yourself, and I feel like in a in a high demand religion, you often end up suspending your personal critical thinking and doubting your own self in favor of the religion that you're in. So for me, that's what my high demand religion was. It just it regulated every piece of my life. And I was always anything that came up in my life, I was always questioning it against what does the church want?
Speaker 1:What does the church think? Or what does the priesthood want? What does the priesthood think? Or what does God want? What does God think?
Speaker 1:And all of those things sort of were one thing and separate things in my mind because of my experiences.
Speaker 2:I think part of me really needs to say out loud and add that also what we ate and what we drank was regulated. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. I forgot about that.
Speaker 2:Right? Not just bad things of don't eat or drink these things, but also this, you need to, like vegetables in season, fruit in season, like these kinds of things as well. And some of that got very cultural, very like, it's a slippery slide between doctrine and culture, absolutely. But even the structure of our days, from what was expected of us as part of the church when we woke up in the mornings to, again, our dress being regulated, what our family activities were even before anyone went to school or work for the day.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And then even specific structures with evenings and during the week, even outside of the church building itself.
Speaker 1:Yes. And then when you throw in things with the church building, so we also I mean, as a child and and as a teen, I attended church twice a week. I would go on Sunday, and I would go another day of the week for other other kinds of things. So they're on top of every single day, all day long, churches happening in my mind, then I would also go twice a week, at least twice a week. And as and I also took classes in school that were more church classes that I was allowed to take in school.
Speaker 1:And when I lived, like, in an in another location, I would still take these classes even though they weren't part of school. I really early in the morning and take an hour of church class. So it was just it was pervasive. It was in everything, and it was all I ever all I could ever let myself think about was the church, and it it really it did a lot of quieting my own thoughts and quieting my own concerns was a big part of my daily practice.
Speaker 2:There's there's something hypnotic about that where to be good, to be worthy, we have to do all of these things, not do the other things or not say the other things and earn sort of this access to presence, which outside of it, I can look at it and be like, that is relational trauma that I have to earn presence. That's not okay. But that sort of I know in our group, they call it the mental gymnastics of how we talk ourselves through doing what we're doing every day that that it gets so swept up into every moment and every expression and every every aspect of our lives.
Speaker 1:Yes. I I noticed one of the things that I had to start doing as I started deconstructing was I had to really face worth head on because worthiness was something granted to me in my religion. It was not something that I just had internally. I had to do things to be worthy. And once I started deconstructing, I had to figure out what worthiness meant to me.
Speaker 1:And it really did a I mean, it it transformed my life in many beautiful ways to realize that I just innately am worth time, attention, you know, all the things that I thought I had to earn. I no longer feel like I have to earn those things. And that has come through the process of healing.
Speaker 3:This conversation will be continued in the next episode.
Speaker 2: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.