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Emma shares about complex trauma, deprivation, and dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID). Educational, supportive, and inspiring, System Speak documents the best and worst of life through insights, conversations, and collaborations. An archive curated for dignity for all.
Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about Complex Trauma and Dissociation.
Speaker 2:It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling. It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship.
Speaker 2:Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to. We're all different, and all of our stories matter.
Speaker 2:As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
Speaker 1:We have been talking since last week about the new fake claiming in the online world of complex trauma survivors, the latest trend of getting background checks on other people to weaponize against folks and how dangerous and damaging this is. In the last episode, I talked about how even the FTC has gotten involved because the data on these brokerage sites are known to be inaccurate and false information too often. And, also, today, there's another layer to talk about. There's a version of this that sounds harder to argue with than a junk data broker report, and that version deserves its own focus. Court records are real.
Speaker 1:They are produced by actual institutions, filed by actual clerks, and in most jurisdictions, they are available to anyone willing to submit a request and pay a copying fee. Nobody has to fabricate anything. The document is accurate as a record of the proceedings it describes, and it will still produce a false picture of a person for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the clerk typed the docket correctly. A court record documents a proceeding. It's not a document about a life, and it was never built to be one.
Speaker 1:Adversarial systems generate paperwork optimized for procedure, filings, motions, continuances, dispositions. What a docket almost never contains is the reason for anything. A dismissal does not explain itself. A withdrawn petition does not say the abuser threatened to take children if it went forward. A settlement records that the matter concluded and nothing at all about who was right.
Speaker 1:A charge that was never prosecuted looks on a printout identical to a charge that was prosecuted and lost. Then there is the part that matters most for our people and that almost nobody outside the work understands. An enormous proportion of what appears in a survivor's court history is the residue of victimization rather than any evidence of wrongdoing. Filing for a protection order creates a record. Being pursued through the courts by someone with more money creates a record.
Speaker 1:Custody litigation initiated by an abusive co parent creates a record, often years of it, and the volume of filings tends to track the abuser's resources rather than anyone's conduct. Eviction records track poverty. Guardianship and commitment records track a period of crisis, but say nothing about the decades on either side of it. Name changes appear as anomalies to an outside reader and as safety measures to the person who filed them. Look at a family's docket history, and the person with the thickest file is often the person who is being chased.
Speaker 1:There's a bitterness in this, and it hurts my heart. For many survivors, the court files the only institutional record that anything happened at all. The system that failed to protect them nonetheless generated a paper trail, and that paper trail is now the thing being handed around as proof of their bad character. The failure produced the document, and the document gets used to finish the job. Public access to court records is a presumption with a purpose.
Speaker 1:It exists so that citizens can observe how courts operate so that the public can monitor the exercise of judicial power. It is real, it is old, it matters. It has also never been absolute. And the limit the Supreme Court articulated is remarkably on point. Going all the way back to Nixon and Warner Communications, the court affirmed the general common law right to inspect and copy judicial records, and then said the right is not absolute.
Speaker 1:That court retains supervisory power over their own files, and access may be denied where records would be used to gratify private spy or promote public scandal. The court gave us this example of the kind of material this concern protects, the painful details of a divorce case. In 1978, do you hear that? The highest court in the country identified private spite and public scandal as the recognized abuse of court record access and named domestic proceedings as the Paradigm case. The practice now running through our communities is that exact abuse executed by people who believe they have discovered something clever.
Speaker 1:Here is the structural problem underneath it. A records request has no consent requirement because consent was never the mechanism. It is, in fact, evidence of the harm already happening. It also has no purpose test because purpose was assumed to be scrutiny of the court rather than assembly of a dossier on a private person with Excel spreadsheet links and a group of people tracking them. So the fact that a document can be obtained tells you precisely nothing about whether obtaining it was legitimate.
Speaker 1:Availability was never designed to function as permission, and treating it that way collapses a public accountability tool into a private weapon. So why is this a violation of voice? Disclosure has a shape. What gets told, when, to whom, in whose words, at what depth, with how much of the surrounding story attached. Every one of those is a decision, and every one of them belongs to the person whose experience it is.
Speaker 1:That is true for ordinary reasons of dignity, and it is true for clinical reasons I will get to in this series. And it is true because the entire long project of recovery is the project of a person regaining authorship over material that was originally imposed on them, using due process for the purpose of monitoring a court as a means of cyberstalking a person is evidence of the abuse already in play. And amplifying that is not about freedom of speech, but abuse of it. A records release makes all those decisions at once. It selects the material, it selects the timing, it picks the audience, it fixes the words and the words are a clerk's filtered through a poster who means a particular conclusion to land.
Speaker 1:The survivor appears in their own story as a defendant, a petitioner, a case number, a party. There is no narrator. There is nobody in the document who can say what any of it meant. That's what I mean by violation of voice. It is the rape of a survivor's story.
Speaker 1:The story gets told without the person who lived it in a language they did not choose about a period they may still be learning how to describe before they've ever even talked about it in therapy and then leaving them in therapy about this experience instead of why they were going to talk about that one. For the plural community, there's another layer that outsiders miss entirely. A legal record names a legal person. It does not name who was present, who holds the memory, who was carrying a file at the courthouse, and who has no access to that year at all. A post addressed to you about a proceeding from 2016 may be addressed to a part who was not there or to a part who was there and cannot be near it or to a body that will absorb the whole thing while the parts who remember stay very far away.
Speaker 1:The exposure is aimed at a self that does not correspond to anyone hosting, fronting, or present on the surface. This is the part clinicians see that the Internet does not. Phase oriented treatment exists because pacing is the treatment. Stabilization and skill building come before trauma processing, and the processing is dosed deliberately in amounts calibrated to what a person can metabolize while remaining functional. The sequencing is the central organizing principle of treatment for complex dissociative presentations, and it exists because the alternative reliably destabilizes people.
Speaker 1:We spend months, sometimes years, building the capacity to approach materials safely. That pacing, that titration, that pendulation is not caution. It is the intervention. A public posting of someone's history overrides every element of it in an afternoon. Maximum intensity, zero titration, no containment, no preparation, no aftercare, and a public audience.
Speaker 1:That's exploitation. That's abuse. And we know something about what audiences do. Ulman and Peter Hagging found the negative social reactions to disclosure predicted greater PTSD symptoms, both directly and through maladaptive coping and reduced perceived control over recovery. Set with that, perceived control over recovery.
Speaker 1:The survivor's sense that their healing is theirs to steer is one of the paths through which hostile responses do their damage. An involuntary publication of other people's stuff is the removal of exactly that sense precisely and completely. It is dangerous and abusive. The same literature carries a finding which people should know before they hit share and amplify abusive voices. Negative reactions weigh more than positive ones.
Speaker 1:All of it is bait. All of it is a trap. The harm of hostile responses tends to be stronger than the protection offered by supportive ones. 40 kind replies underneath a thread. Do not cancel the thread.
Speaker 1:That arithmetic does not work. The math is not mathing, and everyone has been through this already knows what I'm talking about. Uhlman's later systematic review adds one more thing that should stop us cold. Across studies, survivors with more extensive trauma histories receive more negative social reactions to their disclosures. The people with the most in their file get the worst reception when the file comes out.
Speaker 1:The mechanism selects for the most injured person in the room. And the consequence of that is that therapy gets conscripted. Whatever the person was working on has to stop, and the sessions that were therapy become crisis management. Containment, damage assessment, deciding whether to respond, how to respond, capacity to respond, managing the parts who want to explain and the parts who have gone silent, and the ones who are certain this proves that they were always going to be abused anyway. Material that was being approached slowly and on purpose gets detonated instead, on a schedule set by somebody who wishes them harm.
Speaker 1:I have watched people lose half a year or even a whole year or more of clinical progress to a thread that took someone nine minutes to write. And underneath all of it sits the trap, which I think is the actual design. The survivor cannot correct the record without disclosing more. The only way to explain the protection order is to describe the abuse. The only way to explain the custody case is to narrate the custody case.
Speaker 1:The only way to explain the hospitalization is to explain what what led to it. So the choice on offer is between leaving a false picture standing and performing a deeper involuntary disclosure in front of an audience that is already assembled to watch, that is doing to each other what the clinical field already did to us in history. Demonstrations are exploitive and abusive, and silence about them reads as confirmation in the same way that amplification does. Our own explanations cost another layer of privacy, and every layer given invites the next question. This is the double bind.
Speaker 1:There is no move on that chessboard that does not cost you something. That is not an accident. That is part of the abuse. Our communities already understand this. We have norms against outing people's diagnoses, their systems, their legal names.
Speaker 1:We don't docs locations or histories. We don't out other people's sexualities. Those norms did not arise because the information was hard to discover. They arose because we recognize that some information belongs to the person it is about, and that another person's ability to obtain it does not create an entitlement to publish it. A court record sits in exactly that category with the filing fee attached.
Speaker 1:We ought not pull records on other survivors. That's the whole first rule and doesn't have an exception for people you have decided are dangerous because everyone doing this has decided the target is dangerous. It's confirmation bias, and it's damaging. If someone is dangerous, stay away. If you don't like their work, don't listen to it or don't read it.
Speaker 1:You're not obligated to continue to engage. And if someone hands you a file or tells you whispers about someone else, what you have received is information about the person who is gossiping. And your response can simply be, I don't talk about people who are not in the room. That's a developmental lesson, and most of it... Most of us learn it the hard way.
Speaker 1:If you are the one whose file is circulating, you don't owe the Internet an explanation. The pressure you feel to correct it is the trap operating exactly as it was designed. Take the pacing question to your therapist before you take anything to the comment section. Document what is being posted with dates and don't argue with it in public. Jurisdictions have sealing or redaction procedures, and most states run confidentiality programs for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
Speaker 1:Those are questions you can ask your local attorneys or free clinics. Refuse the frame that treats a person's unwillingness to publicly relitigate the worst years of their life as evidence of something. That refusal is the whole ask. It costs you nothing and removes the fuel. Recovery in every model I have so far learned is the process of a person regaining authorship over their own material that was originally imposed on them without their consent.
Speaker 1:Taking a survivor's file and narrating it for them at a time of someone else's choosing to an audience of their assembling for a conclusion you've already selected before you filed the request is the same imposition performed again with paperwork. It's abuse. Instead of becoming the perpetrator, become the place that the pattern stops. Instead of being an abuser, let what you survived make you careful with what you know about other people. Instead of being complicit in harm, be the one who asked the questions before passing it on.
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. Connection brings healing, and healing brings hope.