Transcript: Episode 62
62. Making Progress
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
Okay, so after a series of not so good therapy experiences that at least helped us in different ways, and after trying different ways of therapy, and different people of therapy, and trying to find a safe therapist that we could actually work with and feel comfortable with and deal with this whole DID thing, we have officially been in therapy with our therapist for an entire year. So, in “Nerd Town” the question might be, how do we know we’re making progress? The answer is I don’t have a clue. [Laughing] I don’t have any idea. So, while I don’t really have any answers to that because I just don’t know, I do have some ideas in guesses in things from things we have learned that we want to share.
So, the first way that we know we have made progress so far in therapy is because we have words for things. So, not even talking about dealing with stuff, just having words. We know what it’s called. We know other people have it too. We know, technically we know, we are learning, trying to believe, that it is not entirely our fault, that it’s not our fault, something like that. I guess we don’t know it as well, but we’re starting to get the idea of it. And we know the different terms for things,like inner world or alters or parts or co-consciousness. We talked about that again this week in therapy when we know what’s going on externally, even if we’re not the one out, if we know what’s going on outside, that that’s co-consciousness. We know those words.
We also know a whole lot just about the system - being able to identify who is who and what they do and why they’re here or how we can help them or that we ought to be helping them even. All of that counts. Right?
[Background noise of dog barking]
So, I think that that is legit. All of those things about knowing the right words for things, like knowing that there are words for things, and words for us, and who is who. Which of course, just even by default leads to the next thing, which is knowing about how to talk to each other and when to talk to each other or why it even matters that we need to be talking to each other.
[Background noise of birds chirping]
And some of that is -- and we can do that with the notebook, or on the app on our phone, or through our therapist, or writing notes otherwise, or all kinds of different things, email even sometimes. Just learning anything we can about each other in ways that are respectful and let people be themselves and are accepting, which probably is a general rule for good living and life anyway. So, maybe we’ve accidentally learned some social skills. I don’t know. [Laughing] We’ll see.
We’ve also learned some really big things that have actually taken us more than a year to figure out and have words for and even believe. But I really think that we’re, at least at some layer, at a new place of being able to hold onto these things being true. And that goes back to what we’ve shared before in other episodes about things like now time is safe. Our therapist and The Husband are in now time, and the parents who are dead in now time, if we see them, or hear from them, that’s memory time, because they are not alive now. So, now time is safe, and talking about memory time does not change now time. So, we can stay safe in the present, even though there are things from memory time that we need to talk about.
[Background noise of birds chirping]
We’ve learned that there are ways that we can talk about things in good and healthy ways, like sharing some things on the podcast, and learning about DID on the podcast, or documenting our journey a little bit on the podcast, even though we don’t want to necessarily use it for therapy. It’s not therapy in and of itself. We don’t need to disclose a bunch of things here, but we can talk about the process of what we’re learning, and some of the things we experience along the way. It’s also okay to talk to The Husband or the therapist about most anything, and even maybe trying to make some friends along the way with those who understand and try to blend worlds a little bit. That has been scary of getting to know people and opening up and meeting some of them in real life or connecting our family or our real world to them in some ways has been scary, just because, not just of trauma in the past, but even more recent trauma of just wanting to be -- like what happened with family services or just wanting to be safe and wise in general about boundaries and not repeating things that have happened to us in the past.
So, that’s another reason to learn more about trauma and how it impacts us, because it -- this is -- I can’t.
[Break]
I’m really having trouble focusing. I thought I had things I wanted to talk about, but it’s a gorgeous day and there are birds and the children are not home from school - the outside children. And so I think I’m feeling this urge to play, which I promise that we can play, and even the Littles can play, but we need to wait until the kids get home from school, because I cannot record while the kids are home from school. So, we need to do this now and then we can play. I promise. See, negotiation. That’s part of what we learned in the last year. Right? Like I promise I will keep that promise. We will get to play after I need to do this.
Also, someone is -- they’re building more houses on our road, like down the street. So, all of the sudden there’s construction now when there wasn’t. So, I’m sorry about background noise, but it’s too pretty of a day to be inside. I just can’t. That’s another example of things we’ve learned in the last year, are like self care things, of things like how to get help with sleeping, how to make sure that someone is eating enough, make sure that we can drive to therapy and back safely, all of those things.
Okay, again, I’m totally distracted, because I’m sitting on the deck in the back of our house, and the grass is so green, you guys. It’s so green. I can’t get over it. First of all, it’s a gorgeous day. There are no clouds in the sky, and it’s warm, but not hot. In Oklahoma, the sun can come out and you can just cook by default, like a fried egg on the sidewalk. [Laughing] It’s so hot. And here it’s warm and it’s gorgeous, but it’s not too hot, and I’m just baffled. Because also in Oklahoma, the grass was brown. There’s always a drought or there’s always dust and dirt, because there’s not enough water and people need to feed their livestock and grow plants and vegetables and food and farming things, and you can’t because there’s a drought, and that’s a problem.
So, I’m looking out here after these months and months of snow and we went from brown in Oklahoma, to white in Kansas, and now the snow is gone and it’s just green as far as I can see. And I don’t know if I’ve in my life seen anything like it. And that feels like symbolic of the last year, of there is hope. There’s this book that is our favorite book in the whole world, and it is called Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and in the book she describes hope as green poking through the snow, and that’s totally what I’m feeling right now. It’s overwhelming me a little bit, in a good way. It’s just beautiful, and we’re at peace, and everything’s okay.
So, let’s just call a part of it what it is and just -- I thought I had a plan of what I wanted to share today, and I came out here and started recording because it was so nice, but there is an incongruence between what I was wanting to share and what was coming out, and how I’m feeling and the way I was presenting it. This is really overwhelming me. Part of it is what happened in therapy. I feel like if I were getting to describe what’s happened in therapy recently -- which first of all is not really my business, because it’s not my stuff, but I know, because we’re talking about it. I know what’s going on. Well, I don’t know details, but I mean I kind of know that for like we came back from spring break from therapy -- we came back ready to work on things in a new way. We are actively not just trusting our therapist, but being able to maintain that and hold onto that between sessions, which is new. And we still use lots of different props. I don’t think props is the right word. That’s what you say when you have a musical theatre husband. Like what’s the word? Grounding things? We have the watch, and we have our teddy bear, and we have our notebooks, and pens, things like that that we use to help keep us grounded and some things to smell or peppermints or whatever to taste. And so all of that is really helpful, and keeps us super grounded. And so we still need those props - like we rely on it, but they work and we’re able to do it, and that’s new. And when we can hold onto that, that she is real, and we are safe, it’s like a whole new level of therapy.
And I don’t mean that it’s always easy or that it’s as easy for everyone, as it is for others. Even internally, as a system, you have to respect where everyone’s at and their differences and their unique places on the healing journey. But it’s huge progress for us and maybe if we’re talking about how we know we’re making progress, this is an example, because we’re able to hold onto that and because we can hold onto that, it’s like all of the sudden for the first time, there’s enough safety to work on other things, like you know, actual trauma history stuff. I don’t know.
So we came back from break really ready to work on some things, but every time we went to therapy something happened that was different than what we thought of how it would go down. And I don’t know why we think or make plans, because it never happens like we think. And we’re not people who can be like, “Okay, on the first and third week, you go. And on the second and fourth week, I go.” Some people have these schedules, or they go lots of times a week, and one day is Little’s Day, and one day is this day, or whatever. No, we’re just not that high functioning.
[Background noise of construction]
We are not that high functioning, but what we can do and what does help is -- we’re just not that high functioning. Ugh, the sun itches me, because it’s been so long since my skin has felt it. Oh man. It’s a beautiful day, but I need an air mattress or a hammock and a swimsuit, and I’m just in regular clothes, because winter. Oh, spring time, you tease me.
Okay, see, having trouble focusing, but I’m trying. It’s because Emma is trying to be here, like all of the time. She’s kind of getting in my way of like trying to stay present and trying to be aware of what’s going on, and I don’t need her all up in my business. That’s part of what’s wrong. So much for functioning. Uh.
Okay, deep breath. Just kidding. So, what I’m trying to say is that we have this expectation of what we were going to do in therapy, and then the real life of what actually happens in therapy. And also, as it turns out -- oh, butterfly. As it turns out, there is -- okay, all the Littles, take a backseat. I promise we can play outside in a minute. Seriously. Just let me finish this.
[Background noise of birds chirping]
So there’s a gap between what we expect to happen in therapy and what actually happens in therapy, and then also we’re just really slow in therapy. Like what feels like a really hard, big two hours is like a sentence. [Laughing] It’s like a small little piece of something that for us feels really big, but it’s like turtles. I don’t know how the therapist can even sit there for two hours, because I would be jumping out of my skin, but we’re trying.
Okay, so since spring break we have been working on a specific thing. I don’t want to go into details of it, because I’m not trauma dumping on the podcast. We’re just not going to do that, but I will say a specific memory that is connected to specifically part of why it’s so hard to disclose things and there’s always a layer of that in any kind of abuse - absolutely. And there are lots of people who have lots of different specific aspects of that. But for therapy recently, we’ve been working on just one particular piece because Molly had the idea, because she knows so much now, that maybe if we work through that piece a little bit, it would lower the resistance so to speak of talking in therapy so that talking in therapy would be easier to talk about all the other stuff we need to talk about.
So, I don’t know if that actually works, but it was like the first time we sort of made a group decision in meetings as far as content we needed to talk about in therapy. So, in a way it was a huge breakthrough for us, and kind of a big deal. But also at the same time, there’s like 800,000 of us, not really, seriously, not really. I’m exaggerating. But when you have all of these different perspectives on the same thing, it’s still really hard to get all of those pieces out, much less put them together. And we’re not even doing any of the putting together. We are literally just practicing talking to our therapist, because if it’s safe to do so, then we need to do so.
And so it was like here’s a year of writing out all of these secrets in journals. So now, let’s pick the one that says why we can’t say these secrets out loud. And maybe if we can talk about that, then maybe we could talk about these other pieces, which some of them we already wrote down - not like everything and not in detail. But there’s enough pieces to know that if our therapist couldn’t handle it, we would have already changed therapists.
But she can handle it, and here’s how I know. Because she is strong enough, and she is smart enough, and she is present enough. And for us, that is what we needed. We need someone who was stronger than our scariest moments. We needed someone who was smart enough to understand us, and to keep things in context of knowing we are not completely crazy. And someone who was present enough to endure with us and to not give up on us when things are hard or quiet or slow. And she’s a rock star at all three of these things. And so we are not just keeping her, but maybe have finally started to actually participate. Like maybe a year, or two, or three in, we are actually doing therapy now. [Laughing] Five years in if you count all of the other experiences. Who has to go to therapy for five years just to learn how to do therapy? Oh my goodness.
So yes, after a year of working with her, we are finally starting to talk to her. That sounds so crazy, except I know you guys understand what I mean.
So, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. It has been a really hard couple of weeks while we work through this one specific thing, and not that we’ve even talked about it at all other than literally trying to get the story out. Emma doesn’t know about it. We haven’t put all those pieces together. It’s not like we’ve done anything with the memory. I just mean literally getting it out, like putting the pieces on the table so that we can play with the pieces. We’re not even to playing with the pieces. But at least there’s a picture on the box. Okay? There’s your puzzling for DID today. Does that make sense?
So, we’ve been working on that for weeks and weeks and weeks. But this week for like… .
[Break]
I don’t even remember what I was talking about. Something about puzzle pieces, and that’s how puzzling it is, because as soon as I try to capture it, it totally just slips through my fingers, and the whole idea of what I was trying to say is completely gone. Uh. Dissociating. Foggy brain. Fantastic. Man, the sun feels good, you guys. I’m hungry for it. I’ve pulled up my sleeves and I can feel it on my arms and on my face and it feels so foreign, but so good. Like as good as the winter was hard. Like therapy.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what I was saying - like therapy. Because we've worked so hard these weeks to get those pieces out, and Sarah, who is friends with John Mark -- I don’t even know their whole story. I just know their names and that they hang out. But she has a lot of the words, like not even the experience or the memories -- like when you read in the workbook and it talks about memory holder or trauma holder. It’s not so much that, because it’s not her stuff, but it’s like she knows things and can talk about them as far as telling the words. I don’t know. I don’t even want to explain it all, and I don’t want to just tattle on her or tell her stuff. But she talked in therapy, like this week, and talked and talked and talked, like the whole time.
And not necessarily about one piece or one thing, but just holding that, of like being with our therapist and able to talk to her and being with her and able to say things, it was so good. It was so, so good. I can’t tell you -- well, I really can’t tell you, because I don’t know. But since then, like since we left there and drove home and today, the next day after, it has been amazing. We are so calm and so at peace and everyone’s so chill. The Littles are excited to go play outside on this beautiful day. They are not freaking out. They are not having memory drama. They are not all about triggers which is where we’ve been for two or three or four weeks, maybe six. I don’t even know, because that’s a time question.
[Break]
But it’s been really good. And I don’t know how to describe it other than as if we’ve been under this intense pressure, and therapy this week just turned the valve and let off some of that steam. And I feel like for the first time in a a year, two, five, 20, I don’t know how many years, we’re okay. And we’re at a new baseline that’s a normal baseline. I don’t mean things won’t be hard again and I don’t mean that there’s not more hard stuff to talk about or even the stuff we’ve been trying to talk about, but something has shifted where the safety level has settled through the layers of all of us in to something is brand new and being able to talk about things differently and in a new way. And now, when we’re struggling, it’s because things are good and everyone wants to experience that at the same time - like sunshine. Right? And so that’s an example of progress. That counts as progress. It’s annoying, but it counts as progress.
There are other things like not being stressed out about work, all of our bills being paid. What else? Making friends. Trying to connect with people from church where we used to be super involved, and now we still go to church, but since we’ve moved, it’s been harder to make friends. And we’re starting to make friends and church. And then two friends, who know about our DID, sharing more of our story with them and sending our books to them or connecting to them in new ways, and trying to reach out and learn what it means to have a friend and be a friend. And then other people who have been so kind and patient while we try and learn, not just how to do that, but the boundaries of it. Like what is us and what is not us and so what that looks like.
Any of our friends in the history of our whole entire life in however many thirty or forty years, we’re just not online people. We just are not messenger people. We never had messenger until we got on these online groups, and it’s not going to be a source of comfort or reaching out or a first thought to check it, and even the notifications are turned off. We just don’t do a lot of PMing, and we’ve done more in the last six months than probably we’re comfortable with. So, we’re probably backing off of that a little bit just to stay congruent with who we are rather than the external pressures of who that looks like or how we can practice that. And part of the intensity of first connecting in the groups and sorting out who is safe and who is not safe, but now kind of knowing who our friends are and who we can reach out to and ways to do that in different ways make it easier. So, I’m probably even just going to delete my messenger from my phone, because it’s just not a thing. It’s not a place where we hang out. And in fact, our church and our family actually has a lot of rules, even about screen time. We don’t even have a television in our house. We don’t have a television. Not that other people from our church don’t have a television. We just don’t have television. We’re just really strict about screen time in our family. So, it’s just not our place to hang out. Plus, we’re working on being more grounded and more present, and that includes in the physical world, and not the virtual world. So while I’m grateful for messenger or email or whatever to stay connected to people -- and sometimes it’s a part of friendships is staying connected or reaching out or making phone calls or something like that -- part of the work we’re doing in therapy right now has to do with being actually present and participating in the world.
And so I have to be sure that making friends who also have DID and so they’re online by default, because they don’t just all live in Kansas City, where we do -- everyone lives all over. Right? So by default, part of the relationship is online, but that’s different than me hiding online or avoiding being online. And so it’s a tricky balance and all of that is progress. We are having to negotiate internal and external rules - rules being like using very broadly. I don’t have a better word to use for it right now, but for having friends and for functioning and not just hiding in the house. These are new things and things like being out on the trails instead of just on my computer all morning, or making friends instead of just hiding in the closet. Those are different experiences and it makes our days look different. And we’re participating more with our children differently, and being more present with them also takes away from screen time and things like that.
And so it’s just a lot of pieces to learn, but all of it counts as progress. Being able to share our art is a new thing. I, myself, am not any good at art, but to see Katie’s paintings or some of the things some of the Littles do or ideas they have, that’s pretty special for getting to know them, but also just the progress of being able to express ourselves. Trying to take pictures with our children is an assignment we have from therapy so that they have memories of us with us in pictures, is something we’re working on that is really hard for us just because of some of the things that we endured as a child that was related to having our picture taken or videos and things. And so being sensitive about that, not just protecting ourselves and DID, but just in general, trying to heal more and share more pictures and participate in those ways. There’s just a higher dose of normal in our life somehow. And again, not because everything is easy or because we have it all figured out. We’re just making progress. We’re starting and it maybe has taken us a year to get started, but we are starting, and I think it counts.
And so I wanted to talk about that because it can be so hard.
Okay, all of that to say that guess what our chapter is this week in our group homework - it’s about overcoming the phobia of inner experience. [Laughing] Okay, so I can talk about it, but Emma’s just going to have to read this chapter and do the homework, because me doing it for her kind of defeats the purpose, right? She’s going to have to figure out how to be present and stay and do this. Except she is and it’s crazy, because it’s changing things and stirring things up in a way. And she is more aware of what is going on and she’s out longer and longer.
I haven’t seen Cassi in weeks and weeks and weeks. How can our life be so good we don’t even need Cassi around? What is that about?
But it says, “Our inner experience is what we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan, and predict.” All of that is already above my head. But it says, “She has to become aware of, learn to tolerate, regulate, and even change how she responds to those inner experiences.” So like when stuff is happening in life or stuff is happening in the inner world, all of us, not just Emma, but all of us have to become more aware of what is going on internally and externally. I think. I think that’s it. Is that it?
It does say that it’s actually impossible to change our inner experiences if we’re avoiding them. Well, we’re really good at avoiding, that’s why we have DID. [Laughing] It says, “You might avoid them if you’re afraid, ashamed, or disgusted.” Well, I don’t disgust you. You disgust me. No, really.
So, let me think about that - afraid of? Yeah. Check. Ashamed? Uh, yeah. Check. Disgusted? I am not disgusting. Let’s just put that out there. You might be disgusting, but I’m not disgusting. So that is when you avoid, but serious avoidance of your inner experiences is called experiential avoidance. I can’t even say that, but I’m not going to repeat it, because I do not want hot mail. I do not want hot mail? I meant hate mail. [Laughing] No offense to anyone using hotmail. That is not at all what I meant to say. [Laughing] I don’t want hate mail. So, I’m not going to repeat it, but it was hard for me to say.
It’s also called the phobia of inner experience. So, a phobia is fear and avoidance. You feel fear and so then you do behaviors that avoid what triggers that fear. That’s what it says. And then it talks about panic attacks and nightmares and flashbacks - all of which they call intrusions. And so we do things like dissociating to avoid that stuff. So you might even be ashamed, not just of like what happened to you, but feelings you have about it.
So like maybe you’re ashamed of getting mad, because only bad people get mad when that’s not true. Anger is a legitimate feeling that has its own place and you can feel anger without being abusive to someone. But if you don’t know that, you might just be ashamed of anger and try really hard not to feel it.
And then it also talks about being afraid of inner voices from other Parts. No. Other Parts are just annoying, because I’m trying to do a podcast. Emma is totally afraid of inner voices, and I think Em is too, because I’ve seen it in the journal. So we talked about that. They’ve got some homework to do, yo.
It may also be validated by actual experiences. So like if you’re afraid of being crazy, but then you’ve also had a really bad inpatient experience or went to the ER for help and they dismissed you, or something like that - those are retraumatizing in a way, because they reinforce what you’re actually afraid of happening. Does that make sense? So that’s another reason it makes it harder to get help or to talk about things.
So then it says, “The avoidance can look like lots of things like working too much.” Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Ow. “Not paying attention to yourself.” Like hygiene or taking showers or brushing your teeth - those may also have other triggers besides that. But those kinds of things can also be like trying to outrun memories. So if you stay busy enough then maybe I won’t have to think about memories that are surfacing. I am down with that plan. No, I’m just kidding. I just want to lay in the sunshine. Please. Just lay in the sunshine.
“Drugs and alcohol can also be ways to avoid.” We are past that. Meaning that every day we don’t drink. I used to drink. I do not drink now. In fact, this fall will be my 10 year sobriety anniversary. So, boom-chick-a-bah.
Then it says, “You can also avoid not just your inner experiences, but try to avoid other Parts.” Which I think is where Emma’s been for like 20 years. Are you listening to me, Emma? “It can be conscious or unconscious, but trying to be aware of it and that it’s going on and that the Others are there, all of those things help you pay attention and be more present.” They say in this book -- what I’m reading from is chapter five from Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation. I’m not actually reading from the book. I’m reading from Emma’s notes from the book, because I’m a little spy and I want to know what’s going on in the notebook. It says, “This phobia of inner experiences can develop for three reasons.” One, you didn’t get help learning how to cope and you didn’t get reassurance or help or support. And two, what we said earlier about thinking your feelings or your responses are bad so then you’re ashamed of them. And three, acknowledging inner experiences is a signal to your brain that something bad is going to happen.
So this goes back to what Dr. E talked about on the Polyvagal, because it doesn’t matter if it’s happening now or if it’s happening in the past, and it doesn't matter if it actually is dangerous or you just perceive it as dangerous, because your brain can’t tell the difference. So until you have safety like I was talking about with our therapist, then you can’t really talk about hard things, because number one, you have to be able to differentiate between now time and memory time. And number two, you have to know how to tell your brain that you’re safe through grounding or breathing or whatever, even when it thinks you’re in danger, because of memory time.
So, those are important things and that’s part of why it takes so long to start really talking in therapy. And it’s okay that you take a long time feeling comfortable with and safe in therapy before you start dishing out stuff, because that’s true anyway. Like even just with friends down the street or whatever -- I’m making that up. But you know what I mean - just friends. You don’t just tell them everything right away. It comes out of your relationship that you build over time and it’s the same with a therapist.
So, here’s why I’m sharing this, because we felt everything was all calm and stable and good and the best and strongest we have felt in years and years and years and years. I’m not kidding about that part since therapy. Right? Except guess what? The homework for this week is to write every day, answer these whole questions about what’s happening inside, like in the internal experiences, and what your phobias are and what your fears are and what you’re feeling and being present with that. So, what? Because now, she’s getting up in everybody’s business trying to learn and pay attention to what’s going on and to notice and feel things and be aware of things. And what does that even mean? What’s going to happen? So now my Polyvagal is tripping out, because she's getting better, except not, except yes, except that’s progress. So, uh, therapy.
[Background noise of pages turning]
So, here’s my point, is that sometimes it gets harder before it gets better, and sometimes it’s really hard work just for things to be easy. But even that counts as progress… allegedly. We’ll see. [Laughing]
[Break]
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