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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:We have Doctor. Laura Brown's book, Prize for Admission, which we are still crawling through. By the time you hear this, we would have been studying this book for a year, and it has literally changed almost everything in our life. Not the Price of Admission, chapter four. She says that when folks have healthy attachment growing up, everyone is in relationships by choice.
Speaker 1:So any kind of ships, work ships, relationships, friendships, peer ships, like all the ships, quote, all of them are making a series of continuing choices, sometimes consciously, usually not, to remain in association with the other person. Each of them has an internal sense of what is acceptable, what is marginal, and what violates their norms for safety, integrity, and comfort in their interactions with other people. Relationships of all kinds require attention, intention, and engagement. Relationships are full of moments of genuine connection, and also of hurt, misunderstanding, and confusion. In moments of difficult dialogues, the parties involved trust each other to be operating in good faith, possessed of a mutual desire to relate.
Speaker 1:And if things are chronically bad over time, then one or both parties will, after making efforts at repair, decide to create more distance or even end the connection. This goes back to what my therapist has been saying about how that is not avoidance. When we are creating distance for safety, when we are slowing things down for pacing, and when our boundaries are violated or we are unsafe or not allowed to pace things, then ending the connection is the appropriate response. Doctor. Tema talked about this in homecoming and in the interview.
Speaker 1:Laura Brown says, we are motivated to do a good job of repairing ruptures because we know the consequences of not making repairs, and we accept offers of repair because we value connection. Rupture repair is in fact one of the foundations of healthy, emotionally meaningful relationships. Humans accept the possibility of a bad fit emerging from a connection that once felt familiar and comfortable. Closeness waxes and wanes. It's not a fixed phenomenon.
Speaker 1:Well enough love folks don't interpret temporary changes in closeness as evidence of anything other than the tides and rhythms of life. Each person is free to inquire, what's happening when and if disruptions occur. Well enough love people believe that it's okay to be honest and speak their minds because they've learned that honesty brings greater closeness over time. Semi colon, however, comma, when we grew up with our safety and emotional well-being as secondary and at worst negligible altogether compared to the needs of the adults in our lives, Remember, children should not be having to care for parents. Then here's what we need to know about the truth of healthy relationships.
Speaker 1:You need to pay careful and close attention. Y'all, she puts this in bold, a whole paragraph in the middle of the book in bold. She says, you need to pay careful and close attention to what you feel, what you want, what you need, and what you know. You need to check carefully to ensure that an EP isn't filtering that information or trying to distract you or focus your attention entirely on the other person. You need to be as fully in the present as you are able to be.
Speaker 1:You need to know that paying attention to yourself first is the right thing, not the selfish thing. And then you need to build your emotionally meaningful relationships on the framework of that knowledge of your own feelings, needs, and desires. So again, neurobiologically, when we are being harmed by someone else, it doesn't matter why. It doesn't matter if it was malicious or not. It doesn't matter intent.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter if that's because their trauma and memory time. It doesn't matter. When we are being harmed either directly or because of deprivation, which includes lack of nurture, lack of care, lack of gentleness, lack of respect, lack of support, lack of empowerment, lack of protection, lack of showing up for you or choosing you or or even supporting you when you're in danger or being disempowered from other people or situations. Any time you are in harm's way, you are going to neurologically attune to your environment and those other people and situations instead of yourself. At that point, you have already lost capacity for consent, and you are already in active trauma response like fawning and compliance.
Speaker 1:When we are safe and healthy and the environment around us is safe and stable, we are attuning to our selves. That is where our attunement comes from. She says, this is probably shocking information for you. You were taught to pay the price for relationships and connections with humans by sacrificing yourself and by being loyal to people who are willing to use you or hurt you. You mitigated some of the pain of those experiences by not knowing what you felt, thought, or knew.
Speaker 1:This is the dissociation. You are trying so hard to stay safe that you sacrifice attunement with yourself to align with someone else to do for them what they should be doing for themselves, which is why we cannot win. She said it wasn't safe in those moments to know how scared or angry or sad you were. You taught yourself to be whoever they required you to be and change when their requirements changed. It's one thing when we were children and had no choices.
Speaker 1:As adults with adult resources, we have choices. She says, that was then. This is now. Today, losing yourself is not an acceptable price to pay for love, connection, and attachment. Loyalty to yourself is essential.
Speaker 1:Loyalty to someone who hurt you, who has broken a relational contract, or who betrayed you while refusing to make repair or continuing the trauma and betrayal is a contradiction in terms. When someone who is chronically unkind or unfair expects you to live up to your commitments to them no matter what. They are insisting that you pay a price for relating to them, and that's not how humans do healthy relationships. It is what was done with your less than adequate caregiver, but it is not how humans make connection happen when we're all simply having to be good enough. I have to take a break so that I cannot cry.
Speaker 1:I have such big feelings about this. I have such big feelings. I have big feelings about previous situations and relationships. I have big feelings about previous therapists. I have big feelings about the betrayal of all of it.
Speaker 1:I have big feelings about what is happening in society. I have big feelings about things that have happened online. This is trauma. She says, as with most survivors, you are an expert at being for others, but you are a rank beginner at being for yourself. You don't know that healthy relationships grow and expand us rather than taking from and depleting us.
Speaker 1:Oh, this goes back to the previous chapter too, that anything that is isolating us from our sources of support is not healthy for us and not safe for us. She says it is ultimately more moral and caring to ensure that there is mutuality in your chosen relationships with others and clarity of motive on your own side of things. When you are loyal to yourself, you may stop offering others opportunities to engage in actions that harm you and are morally harmful to them. A decent person wants to repair ruptures that have occurred through her or his own carelessness or inattention, not rationalize them or brush the hurt aside. The relationships you want are the ones that nourish decency for all parties and dignity even for yourself.
Speaker 1:It is well past time for everyone to show up with decency, and anything less than decency is unsafe. Y'all, it is no wonder I thought I was a drowning whale. I can't even with this. And how do we get ourselves in these situations? She says loss of boundaries is one of the prices you've been raised to believe you must pay simply to have relationships.
Speaker 1:Absence of mutuality is another relational price often paid for by survivors. In a relationship where one person believes her or himself to be essentially unlovable and undesirable in either an emotional or sexual sense, mutuality is absent. The survivor believes it's necessary to pay for the presence of the other person literally or symbolically. But boundaries and mutuality, which seem like unicorns to many survivors, are hallmarks of healthy relationships. Okay.
Speaker 1:If someone believes that they are unlovable, then you cannot have a relationship with them because they are denying their existence and trying to use you to give evidence that they are alive and that they are lovable, and you cannot do that for them. We cannot. We are responsible for keeping ourselves alive and for tending to our own things in therapy, but it is not safe or healthy to be responsible for others' lives. Boundaries are the places where you and I begin and end both emotionally and physically. We learn through initial attachment relationships with caregivers whether we are allowed to have boundaries in relationships or whether the price of connection is the loss or violation of boundaries.
Speaker 1:Boundaries are a form of connection. You both know you're connected, and you both know you're separate. Separate, but not distance or disconnected. Why are boundaries important? Because our bottom lines are nonnegotiable.
Speaker 1:Our sense of what behaviors on the part of another person represent going too far to allow for continued connection. All of that resides in our boundaries. This has to do with what doctor Tema was talking about. This is what I have been wrestling with on the podcast for the last five years. Y'all, when you say like, oh, you went on this side quest or that side quest, it's true, I did, but it was to learn these pieces.
Speaker 1:What is okay with me for how I am treated and what is not okay. Having my website hijacked, not okay. Having differences of opinions about the things I learned, totally okay. Having different preferences of tools or techniques in therapy that work with you and for you? Totally okay.
Speaker 1:Exploiting survivors to colonize therapy by marketing fads and trends as a form of ableism, not okay. Being in different ships with other survivors who struggle with now time and memory time or their own therapy work, that is okay. But part of the boundaries is I'm not responsible for those ships, and it's not okay for me to be under attack by those ships. Drowning my ship is not going to save them. My therapist said, in fact, that lifeguards, like in large bodied water places, are taught that if someone is drowning to literally knock the person out, if they are fighting rescue because you cannot you cannot survive that.
Speaker 1:And it's the same in relationships or any kind of ships that if there is active trauma happening, you can't survive that. If I am isolated from the community or not allowed time to podcast or not able to create, you know what? This community can't survive that. The podcast won't keep existing. There are books that will never be written because I did not have the time and space to do so these last couple of years.
Speaker 1:Like, there's tragedy in that, and also it is my responsibility to say, oh, I am being isolated from myself, and that is disempowering. And so the boundary is I will not be disempowered anymore, and I am reclaiming my life. I am reclaiming my podcast. I am reclaiming my community. I am reclaiming the work I want to do personally and professionally because this is my life, and I'm the one who gets to live it.
Speaker 1:She says, to be able to say yes to someone, we need to be able to count on our ability to also tell them no without the fear that no will make life painful or dangerous or lead to permanent loss of connection if you can't safely tell someone no because they will do something to you that endangers your welfare. And my therapist would add, and does not empower your success or support your aliveness because trauma and deprivation, right? Then that person is probably not safe to have in your life. Saying no feels so emotionally unsafe for many of you that you assume it's never okay with other people, and so you just don't say it. Where your emotionally meaningful relationships are concerned, know simply isn't in your vocabulary.
Speaker 1:The best relationships occur when people have a clear sense of what they think, feel, want, and need in their interactions with others. Having clear personal boundaries is one effect of secure attachment. Something to say about this that my therapist talks about a lot is how when we have confusion about those things, things we think, feel, want, and need, when we have confusion about that, it means someone has come between us and our values, and we are having to dissociate from our values to maintain attachment with the person. And that is also harm. That is unsafe and unhealthy.
Speaker 1:Later this year, you will hear me interview Chuck Benenkasa, and he talks about this as well, that that there's only confusion when we are separated from our values. So this I don't know what I want or I don't know what I need is a dissociation tactic that we are having to use to keep ourselves safe, almost like a lie we're telling ourselves, but it's not about intentionally trying to lie to ourselves. It is about survival. So anytime we are confused about what we think, feel, want, and need in our interactions with others, it means it is time to pause, take that sacred pause, like Doctor. Tamas says, and go back to our homecoming with ourselves, regroup, listen to our bodies, listen to our systems, and what we need will actually become very clear.
Speaker 1:And people who love us and care about us will support those values, and it will be in alignment with our values if it's healthy for us and if we are having to sacrifice ourselves or our values to maintain attachment with someone else, then that is not actually attachment. That is trauma and deprivation. She says, as a child, you learned that connection, much less love, comes at a price. Love was contingent on silencing yourself, on becoming who and whatever your caregivers needed at that moment. Integrity, which is expressing what you feel, what you know, and what you want was being framed as oppositional, resistant, unloving, bad, avoidant, worthy of rejection, cutoff, or abuse.
Speaker 1:When you were a child, you learned to apologize profusely at the precise times when you were yourself owed an apology because your boundaries had been violated. I'm sorry I made you so angry that you had to hit me. And as adults, it sounds like the same song. Of course, I'll take you back. It was my fault.
Speaker 1:It is unsafe and unhealthy when relationships come at the price of being untrue to yourself. This is also where it shows up in confusion in relationships where, like, the things you're literally getting in trouble for are are like, why why why do you want to be with me if you don't like me so much? And if you think that this this is who I am, and then and then, like, with the false accusations, if you think this is who I am, you don't even know me. And if you don't know me and you don't like me, why do I wanna be with you? And it's precisely that confusion that leads us to understanding the truth that is under the confusion because there's no attunement in that.
Speaker 1:If you don't like me, you're not feeling attunement. If I feel like you don't even know me, I'm not experiencing attunement. And if there's no attunement, we cannot even get to attachment. Remember, attachment is not what I have with the world. Every relationship has attachment.
Speaker 1:It's not something I put on like clothes. That's why it's not attachment style. In this context, in this environment, what do I experience? So if I am feeling super anxious, it means I'm not getting care or memory time is getting in the way to and preventing care. Right?
Speaker 1:But is that happening in this ship? Is this happening because therapy is not helping me and I need a different therapist? Is it happening in my relationship? Where is it coming from? If I'm feeling avoidant, it is because I am actively being harmed.
Speaker 1:So I could look really avoidant in one place, but in another ship or with other ships, I have I could be profoundly connected and profoundly vulnerable. I think, like, you all know this because you know me from the podcast. You know my voice. You know the things I share. And you know even in the context of all the learning we've done together in the community, that is profound availability.
Speaker 1:My friends and therapists keep reminding me of this. I have offered profound availability. So it is not a true statement that I am avoidant as if that is my pronoun or as if that were my noun or as if that is an adjective of who I am. It could very well describe a particular ship, and in which case that tells me that with that ship, I am experiencing harm. So it is information about the specific ship.
Speaker 1:It is not information about me. Right? So the same thing if we're feeling more disorganized attachment, that come here, go away, it means that instead of come help me, please don't hurt me, what I am experiencing is that they are not coming to help me, and they are hurting me. But in another ship where I feel safer and I'm receiving care and not harm, that's not gonna look disorganized at all. Right?
Speaker 1:I remember I remember one time, out of all the therapists I've had, right, one time a therapist said, is this happening in any other relationship in your life? And I was like, no. I have never experienced this in any other relationship in my life. And she's like, See, it is specific to that ship. Like, you made off that ship.
Speaker 1:This was before I knew I had my own ship, right? And also, when we don't understand that, it's not that the learning saves us. People were talking about this in the community recently. It's not that the learning saved us. It's that learning is left brain and gives us context and balance, like on a teeter totter, to the right brain experience of the big feelings and affect and memory time and things like shame that without a left brain counterweight, I don't know how else to describe it, then it's too heavy, and it sort of crashes down.
Speaker 1:Like, the scales get tipped. So it's not that learning saves us, it's that engaging our left brain can help balance that. But if we do that instead of feeling or instead of expressing or instead of connection, then that just tips the scales in the other way. Right? We need both.
Speaker 1:We need left brain and right brain. It's what's so powerful about the symposium, and one of the reasons that while there are so many things we could do online in classes, the symposium is a specific relational experience that is left brain, right brain, and embodied, and that's why it has to be on and that's why it has to be in person. I don't know how else to explain that. Part of what we need to remember too is that shame is preverbal. So it is before the split between self and object.
Speaker 1:So when we are infants, I am cold is literally I am the coldness, or I am hungry. I am the hungri ness. As adults, we know that's just weird English where where the hunger or the cold is describing how I'm feeling, but I am not my feelings. Right? But as infants, we are the experience.
Speaker 1:So it literally starts out physiologically at the brainstem level where we are attuned to our environment via cortical connections, which is what I'm trying to say when we experience shame, it's not actually that we are bad. That's what we feel. That's how we interpret. That's what we experience. But it's not actually that we are bad.
Speaker 1:It's like our nervous system is dampening, slowing down whatever is going on that is behind that, like, rage at the injustice, panic because of the attachment response, or aggression to try and fight away the danger, or flighting from or to care that isn't there. And so it has to get dampened down because those things will endanger us. And so instead, we're feeling shame as a way of pacing. Even those parts of us that feel shame are trying to protect the system. Those parts of us that feel shame that are so vulnerable are in their own way keeping us safe and alive.
Speaker 1:But the more shame goes up, the smaller we'll feel, the younger we'll feel, and the more masking we do. Some of us may even have specific parts who have to continue functioning in whatever behaviors we may be ashamed of as part of compliance in staying alive. And sometimes, when we give too much access to ourselves and our systems away, that can be further exploited, where we even get abused by those parts being used to get access to our systems or our bodies in ways that we may not have consented to, or are not able to consent to or have said, this doesn't feel safe to me, or that part doesn't feel safe to me, or that dynamic doesn't feel safe to me. And all of that means we do not have capacity to consent. This is part of infanticidal attachment, which is a preverbal, sometimes even in utero experience that is shame oriented.
Speaker 1:An attached cry is our first response, where we have learned it is more dangerous to ask for help out of turn than it is to endure whatever is happening to us. So our body literally sacrifices what we actually need in order to maintain attachment with our caregivers, with partners, with whatever ships we need for herd acceptance. Even in shiny, happy context, this is why we give ourselves away for approval from the church or from the organization or from the whatever you wanna fill in the blank with society. Even when we feel in our gut, this is not right for us, this is not good for us, this is not safe for us, we do all the things because of that vestibular disorientation that is physiological in a way where we're not actually choosing. And because we can't actually choose, that is why we cannot actually consent.
Speaker 1:And why we need to be very, very careful in all of our shifts that we are tending to memory time in therapy, and that in now time, part of consent is including actively addressing power imbalances. We cover shame with anger or contempt, and the only remedy for that is kindness with healthy boundaries and letting no mean no. Shame is a protection from cognitively realizing what is happening to us. She says many survivors constantly fear being precipitously dumped and unpredictably and arbitrarily punished for sins they didn't even know they were committing until those alleged sins and the person committing them were labeled as unforgivable. Never mind that a genuinely loving and caring person would not act like that toward you in now time.
Speaker 1:So someone who loves you and cares about you is not going to treat you like that. Someone who loves you and cares about you is not going to put you on your blanket. It's hard for us to hold on to that because our EPs take us back in time where we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. We wouldn't say it this way, and we think that other people are barely tolerating our presence no matter what they say. We believe that other people will never be fully committed to you, to us.
Speaker 1:So we keep someone in our life where we keep paying the price of admission even when it has not been asked. So even when it's not malicious, even when someone's not trying to harm you, it doesn't mean we are not being harmed or deprived of care and nurture. You are unable yet to know that this person is relating to you because you are you, not because you are paying them a price for sticking around. So in healthy relationships, people want to like any kind of ship, people want to be with you because of who you are. You are already good enough.
Speaker 1:They have already chosen you. But we still think we have to pay the price. And in situations where it's not healthy or safe, we continue paying the price even at the sacrifice of ourself. She says, a pattern of frantic attempts to please placate and go along with whoever you are attempting to connect with helps obscure and destroy your own boundaries. You offer to sacrifice your integrity, your money, your safety, anything that the other person might potentially require of you just so they'll stay.
Speaker 1:Mind you, the person to whom you're making these offers may have no idea that you are doing this, nor any interest in you paying this price to relate to them. They might even have a genuine desire to relate to you simply because you're you, a being whose presence they cherish. This is like is like daydreams. Like, this is what I was talking about with daydreaming, where I am working so hard and trying so hard at a thing that the other person doesn't even want or even know exists or is even possible. Like, that's not okay.
Speaker 1:That only works when someone else is actually planning with you, actually doing with you, and you are creating together, then that can be a beautiful thing, but that's not a fairy tale because it's real. And then she talks to the people who feel like they're unloved and no one will want them, and then they act really nasty to other people because they're projecting or or because they're displacing the hate they have for themselves on their partners, she says, here's what's happened. The person in your life didn't want your everything. This person doesn't want to be or be seen as someone who would use you or exploit you. This person is not one of the adults who raised you to pay prices for relationships.
Speaker 1:This person wants you to have boundaries. They find your absence of boundaries unattractive and off putting, not a requirement for a relationship. This person wants you to have a self. It's that self that was attractive in the first place. That's the self who could peek through the layers of attachment wounds when the other person didn't matter enough to you to turn on your wounded attachment patterns.
Speaker 1:And that's the self you quickly put away as soon as the relationship started to mean something. Y'all, this is so hard because then you're trying to love a person who literally doesn't exist. Like, they're gone. They have so agreed with that infanticidal attachment contract that they are bad, they are unlovable, they are invisible, they don't exist, and so they will cease existing to do everything for the other person. You're like, woah.
Speaker 1:I don't need that. I was wanting to date the person, but now the person is gone. And so the relationship is impossible, not because you are bad, but because you stopped existing. Like, now I don't know you. I can't even find you.
Speaker 1:Like, where are you? And so then that person who was so afraid of being abandoned has now abandoned themselves and the relationship. Laura says, they're emphatically not the adults who raised you. Today's people want mutuality. In now time, they want you, your opinions, your feelings, your integrity.
Speaker 1:You treat them like they want to silence, exploit, or punish you, and that's not who they want to be. The mirror you hold up to them by your continuing insistence on paying unasked prices reflects someone they have no desire to be with you or anyone else. That's what I was saying about feeling not known or seen or understood. Like, there's so much misattunement. Like, I am not one of your abusers from childhood.
Speaker 1:I'm not. So stop treating me like I am. That's not a relationship. That's a flashback. She says, they want you to be you, not to spend all your energy trying to ferret out what they want and give it to them no matter the cost to you.
Speaker 1:You feel so confused by this new scenario. You've worked so hard to give them what they ask for when what they're asking for is that you not give them everything they ask for. What does it mean that they're thinking about leaving because what they want is a genuine relationship with you, not with the version of you that's trying to please them all the time? And then she talks about when that's not working or the other person won't get the therapy or recovery support to be able to show up for themselves, how you like, there's nothing you can do more. It doesn't matter how much you can give or do or want it.
Speaker 1:Doctor. Tema talked about that too, that it doesn't matter how much you want it or how much you love someone or how beautiful your daydreams are. If they are not showing up for themselves, it's not going to work. She says, you also then don't have to keep trying endlessly. There are some connections that turn out to be too toxic destructive to be given another chance.
Speaker 1:But if we insist that people be perfect in order to relate to us, then they are paying a price of admission in relationship. Doctor Tema talks about that a lot, both in the homecoming book we read on the podcast and her new book about relationships, by the way, that we haven't even gotten to yet. She says, sometimes you just can't. And walking away from what you cannot do, what is not healthy what is not healthy for you is actually a very healthy thing and has nothing to do with the other person being good or bad. It's not shaming them.
Speaker 1:It's not abandoning them. It is staying within your own lines. Laura talks about it as boundaries that are like, here are the outlines in which I can color. This is where I'm comfortable coloring, this is what I want to color inside of, this is where I'm safe and healthy, and I cannot go outside those lines. That's different than other kinds of boundaries that you can be flexible with or take turns, like being accommodating, like taking turns picking what you want for dinner, for example.
Speaker 1:But when we are talking about safety issues, safety has to be addressed first. Laura says, because you were taught to believe that connections were fragile and that you were expendable, it can feel almost intolerable to be in conflict with someone you care about. Standing up for what you want, feel, or know feels threatening to connection. You would rather have no boundaries than no relationship. Boundaries can be a place where conflicts happen, though.
Speaker 1:Many survivors will either be highly compliant and engage in emotional cutoffs when they can't tolerate it anymore, or keep the peace at any price and avoid conflict no matter what. Either way, it is because of the terror evoked by anything resembling the violence of your childhood. And usually, the biggest role in conflict avoidance is shame because you have a belief that you are the one who is always and only responsible for fixing those problems, no matter any evidence to the contrary, or your partner feels this and displaces that onto you, and then you cannot win. She says, we get ourselves into these situations where we can't win and the double binds that are a part of interpersonal violence because many survivors unconsciously and repeatedly find relationships in adulthood that mirror the problematic attachment dynamics existing in your life and in difficult families of origin. This phenomena of playing the painful relationship card one more time is known as trauma reenactment.
Speaker 1:So remember, enactment is when we're doing instead of talking about what we could talk about. Reenactments. It is when we feel miserable, frightened, and despairing as a part of normal life. What we need is compassion for ourselves that helps us observe ourselves to have insight rather than shame, because insight helps us learn, and it stops shame in its tracks. So then she talks about these different rules as part of a reenactment.
Speaker 1:She goes back to the drama triangle or what's sometimes called Cartman's triangle, where there are the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer, and Laura Brown adds complicit bystander. She says, in the role of rescuer, in this reenactment scenario, the survivor portrays whoever they're relating to as the victim of the survivor's horribleness. So I'm hard to live with. I'm high maintenance. I ask for too much.
Speaker 1:I'm too needy. Then you have to rescue the other person so the survivor becomes the rescuer by sacrificing boundaries, self desires, and then we become martyred. So do you see how that cycles through? So for example, for me, this is a reenactment because when my grandfather died, my mother believed that no one else would ever love her, and so it became my role in the family to prove that she was loved enough and good enough, which meant sacrificing my own existence to defend her existence. So when I repeat that in a relationship, that is unhealthy for me, but I get swept into it really easily, which means I have to be very vigilant that I am not rescuing in relationships.
Speaker 1:And when someone else is in reenactment, then they are going to feel abandoned by my lack of rescue because that is the role they are in in their part of the triangle. With complicit bystander, the role in reenactment is a position of helplessness or passivity. If one of your caregivers stood by and failed to protect you or intervene when other people harmed you, then this role is familiar to you. I experienced this in different settings in the last year where things were impacting me professionally, and those that I expected to stand up for me, to intervene on my behalf, to advocate for me, did not. It is an example of a way that I received harm because not because they were doing the things, like, didn't hijack my website, but because they were a complicit bystander and did not empower or help, which is not the same as rescue, but because they did not use privilege and power and accessibility that they had in ways I did not, did not use that in my behalf, it left me more vulnerable, and the deprivation of lack of protection, lack of care, lack of attunement, not understanding what my experience of was that, and in fact, not even asking what my experience of that was.
Speaker 1:In contrast, other people who saw, who said, who talked to me, who found ways to support and empower me, even though they didn't have anything to do with that and that wasn't their fault, and they weren't rescuing me from the hard situation. They were empowering my safety and stability. That's what community is. That is the opposite of deprivation. She says, for example, the survivor as bystander feels terrible about how they're being treated and says nothing for a long time.
Speaker 1:They don't stand up for themselves. So then I did that to myself, like using it as a mapping opportunity. I do that for myself when it takes me years to get out of a situation where I keep saying, oh, this doesn't feel good. This doesn't feel good. And my response to myself is, well, try harder.
Speaker 1:Try harder. Try harder. That's me being a persecutor, telling myself to try harder, but also a complicit bystander by not getting myself out of the situation. Like, if it doesn't feel good, stop. Just stop.
Speaker 1:And if it can't get better or can't be repaired or isn't safe, walk away. Run away. Get away. Move away. Do what you have to do to get safe and stable.
Speaker 1:She says, and then here she calls me out. She says, the child of a depressed parent, that's me, marries people who are themselves depressed, then trauma reenactments occur without conscious knowledge or intention on your part. Right? So remember, reenactments are not like, people aren't trying to do this to each other generally, but it's part of that script of how to be in relationships that were written by the less than adequate caregivers of our childhood. And she says, you do not have to keep paying the price by staying in those relationships.
Speaker 1:Reenactments can be ended or transformed. You may feel that you have to sacrifice yourself to stop the truck or just let it roll over you and accept the inevitable, but you have a better choice as an adult. You can simply get out of the way of the truck. You can even jump in and start to drive it in a different direction, or have it take it where or have it take you where you would like to go, or just walk away and don't even be on the road. Go live somewhere else where you're not going to get run over.
Speaker 1:Preach. Your job today is different. It's not to learn to live with being run over. It's learn to step out of the way of the truck. Today, you get to be safe enough, and you are allowed to move, to walk away, to step away, to not pay the price.
Speaker 1:You do not have to pay the price of being run over in order to be in relationship with someone. Your integrity, your boundaries, and your physical, emotional, and spiritual safety are neither necessary nor acceptable costs for you to pay to have connection and love in your life. In fact, if it costs you those things, that is not love. It is not care. Then she talks about this fascinating piece where those of us, especially with dissociative disorders, where we have systems inside, because we are not integrated inside, and I don't mean parts have to go away because, I mean, not having access to ourselves or being able to have awareness of all of ourselves, then we also project that externally and lose awareness of how we are the same or different with others externally.
Speaker 1:So rather than distancing ourselves from someone who is treating you badly, you fuse with them. How this looks is that you stay as close as possible, making yourself meet as many of the caregivers' needs as you can, soothing the other person like crazy, being compliant. I spent hours as a child trying to tend to my mother, trying to cheer up my mother, trying to be present with my mother, trying to distract my mother, pouring my soul into validating my mother's existence. When I do a reenactment in a relationship and have to do the same thing and pay that price for admission, It is like staying as close as I can to my mother so she will survive so that I can survive. It also looks like in memory time or in now time, if I stay close enough to you, maybe you can't reach me to hit me or to harm me or to hurt me.
Speaker 1:It looks like if I give up all of my power, maybe you will stop accusing me of misusing it. If I have no wants, needs, or feelings that are not what you want, you won't accuse me of being bad or wrong or in trouble. Maybe you will stop punishing me. She says, your caregivers taught you that the relationships depend on you being the best possible servant to others. You attempt to anticipate people's needs, to breathe at their rate, to adopt their values, their style of dressing, or even their use of language.
Speaker 1:You are a chameleon who, like the lizard of that name, changes color in order to blend in and feel safe. You check-in as frequently as possible to ensure you haven't missed something, and you will be punished if you don't. She says many cultures tell women that a real woman should have no wants or needs of her own. They are expected to privilege the wants and needs of others over their own, no matter how unfair those demands might be. Know this, If someone attempts to coerce you into paying relational prices by telling you that you are failing as a woman or a member of your group or a partner, this is a red flag about being in reenactment where your boundaries are being disrespected and violated under the guise of encouraging conformity with the world around you or someone else's social contract from memory time.
Speaker 1:When someone pleads that you're not a good blank card, partner, any kind of ship, that's the time to get into the present and remind yourself you are not required to pay the price. A good enough human of any shape, size, background, or color is full of imperfections. All you have to do is be adequate, show up, and be compassionate. Adequate is just fine. Having boundaries isn't a luxury or something only other people's groups or peoples do.
Speaker 1:It is not about paying the price of a relationship. If someone is telling you that you are doing it wrong or that you are bad because you are not the partner that they want you to be, then that is coercive control. It is okay for someone to say, this is not the kind of dating relationship I am wanting or needing, but someone being wrong for you is not the same as being wrong. Someone being not what you need is not the same as them being bad. A mismatch is not a moral failure.
Speaker 1:Dating is a trying on, and if it doesn't fit or doesn't work, that's okay. But if they are forcing you to make it work or forcing you to stay or trapping you or isolating you or suffocating you, that is coercive control. Your internal working model for relationships doesn't include the idea that there is a basic human right to say, no, not that, or no, that's enough, or ouch, that hurts, stop, Or, no. Not now. No.
Speaker 1:Don't do that. If you have this internal paradigm for connection, you've been told that to say no is to not love. And it may also feel like boundaries when they did make appearances were imposed on you as controls and used as a means of punishment. If someone is checking your phone or your location or your computer or hacking your website, that is not boundaries. That is control.
Speaker 1:That is abuse. Your caregiver's emotions and impulses had to be indulged immediately unless you wanted to risk being labeled as unloving, selfish, or bad. Then she adds this fascinating piece. She says, you will know that EPs are in charge and that someone is in memory time instead of now time when they expect you to drop everything and pay attention to them. When you have feelings, but they want you to be available for them.
Speaker 1:When you are expected to soothe them, but they are not soothing for you. Not only will you know you are not allowed to have boundaries, but it is information that that is unsafe. Learning that you can feel loved and cared for in the presence of someone's clear boundaries is challenging. It can be terrifying if your attachment figures were disorganizing, problems of self soothing and containment of your own emotions, which is not the same as being shut off or dissociated from them because that's still dysregulated. Right?
Speaker 1:Problems of self soothing and containment of your own emotions often go hand in hand with disorganizing attachment experiences. It may even mean that obviously a violation of boundaries were involved in your original abusive experiences as a child. That said, you can learn how to identify identify people and qualities that are connections, that are safe enough and good enough, and don't exact a toll of a price of admission. You do not have to give up the right to your feelings, your preferences, or your opinions to be in an emotionally meaningful relationship. In fact, you must have your feelings, preferences, and opinions to be in a healthy relationship that you hope for and deserve.
Speaker 1:It's literally a prerequisite. 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. One of the ways we practice this is in community together.
Speaker 1:The link for the community is in the show notes. We look forward to seeing you there while we practice caring for ourselves, caring for our family, and participating with those who also care for community. And remember, I'm just a human, not a therapist for the community, and not there for dating, and not there to be shiny happy. Less shiny, actually. I'm there to heal too.
Speaker 1:That's what peer support is all about. Being human together. So yeah, sometimes we'll see you there.