Transcript: Episode 1
1. Restart
Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, fighting stigma about Dissociative Identity Disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma and dissociation, please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, where there is a button for donations and you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. You can also support us on Patreon for early access to updates and what’s unfolding for us. Simply search for Emma Sunshaw on Patreon. We appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others. We are also super excited to announce the release of our new online community - a safe place for listeners to connect about the podcast. It feels like any other social media platform where you can share, respond, join groups, and even attend events with us, including the new monthly meetups that start this month. Go to our web page at www.systemspeak.org to join the community. We're excited to see you there.
[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
I have a favorite book. Women Who Run With the Wolves. It's by a Jungean psychoanalyst. And each chapter is a story, fairy tales, but not the Christianized watered-down versions, the original gory versions. She tells the story and then spends the rest of the chapter telling how we play all the parts. It's a brutal book if you read it for real, meant to take over a year. I read it every summer. Every summer that I can remember. It's like my holy book. It's sacred to me. And the pages are worn and weathered, with pens, underlining, and colors of notes in the margins, highlighters of different shades, and watermarks from bathtubs and rivers and oceans. I take it everywhere with me, and I refer to it often. But every 10 years I buy a new copy. I'm on my third copy now. This summer I started again.
It's a kind of restart when you really need a fresh look at what's going on, to see new insights rather than just visiting old friends of words and phrases. It's a daunting task starting again, wondering where I'll find myself in the pages. Wondering if I'll want to see the truth bombs there are how my life will be different by the time I reach the end. But it is that restart, a refreshing look at trying again, a new beginning. Even when it's continuing the same as before. Even when it's the same stories as before.
I think it's good for us really at different seasons in our lives to have a restart, to get a fresh look at things, to feel the earth beneath our feet once more, before we tackle what's next. In the book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, she would say it's a returning to the sealskin, our souls, the part of us that we're truly made from, the part of us that we're becoming.
In psychology and writings about dissociation, they call it the emerging self. That's where I got the name for this podcast.
But I've had a podcast before—System Speak, a podcast about dissociative identity disorder. We recorded there and shared for five years almost. It was kind of a big deal and a lot has happened. I think it was good and right, and I'm proud of how far we've come, even though it's not always been easy and rarely been pleasant. It's close to my heart. And since we've started a community, getting to meet the listeners and real people who are also in the struggle with us has meant the world to us. It's everything. It changes everything. It needs a restart, a fresh reading of the same book.
We wrote a book too, our memoir, If Tears Were Prayers, because that's how much progress we've made to have an outline of our pieces. Even if I'm not sure yet what order they go in, or how to find them when I need them. It's progress that counts. It's progress that needs a restart. A trying again, a buckling down, a coming up for air, and then going back down under. It’s time.
The pandemic was epic. No matter what side of politics you're on, or whether you know anyone who got sick or not. It's been epic for all of us, the protests and the politics and the pandemic. Our family, my husband and our six children, and now a new foster child, so seven children, have been in quarantine for almost two years. Soon, the youngest of the children will finally get to be vaccinated. It's not a political thing for us, it's about her complex airway and medically mandated for her. So to protect her and to keep her alive, we've been careful during the pandemic. And I don't know when the pandemic will officially be over, but numbers here are finally going down for the first time. It will soon be safe for us to come out of quarantine carefully, cautiously, with masks still on once she's vaccinated. For the first time, there's hope. I feel like I have been cocooned here in this house we found in the country, to be safe, to breathe fresh air, to rest from what has been so hard for so long. It's been good for us, healing for us, all of us, everyone in the family. But it's a hard thing to sit with only yourself—yourselves—and have nothing to do but heal. It's been ugly work, hard work, lonely work.
We've had a series of therapist for different reasons in different circumstances. Not because we are shopping or want to change therapists all the time. But because of things beyond our control that were difficult to resolve, like a therapist that died from COVID, a therapist from our childhood we needed to let go of and move on because our worlds overlap too much, a therapist who was really good and helpful and brought us through our grieving of the previous therapists whom we call Kellys. All of them, our past therapists, all of the therapists we have before, when we referenced them, we call them Kelly. And this last Kelly helped us grieve the previous Kellys. But now she's had pregnancy complications. And so we're letting go of her too, with new skills for radical acceptance, of being grateful for how she brought us through a very dark season, but also knowing we have to keep moving forward. And so we've interviewed therapists and narrowed it down to two, and visited with both of them to see who could help us. And one of them was obviously not a choice once we met them. And so it's settled on our new Kelly. And we'll just call her Kelly from now on.
The five years on System Speak, the podcast we had before, was also epic. It was a big deal. We went from not being able to speak at all to telling the world our truth. It became overwhelming though as the world found us and listeners grew to over a million, 86 countries, and I'm so grateful that it has been helpful in some way. But also, there became so much overlap it began to feel like a crowded room where we couldn't share what we needed to share. A friend asked us if it was getting in the way of therapy, if there were things that we didn't want to share in therapy because we didn't want to share them on the podcast. It was a valid question, and we thought about it for a long time. But I don't think that was the case.
When we took a break at the end of 2021 from System Speak we published all the final episodes that we had scheduled through 2022, all at once, with just a click of a button. It was kind of a rush I had not expected. It confused people, though, and I'm sorry for that. But we needed a break. We needed to take care of ourselves. We needed to find our soulskin. And during that break, it just became harder and harder to talk in therapy. I don't think in our case the podcast was getting in the way of therapy. I think it's what made therapy possible, which is why we've decided to keep going. But at the same time, the safety measures we had put in place for sharing such a personal thing had become a bit convoluted or blurry, with boundaries shifting. And for the first time, it started to feel intrusive. That's what made it hard to talk on the podcast or in therapy. So while we took a break, we considered our options. And if it grew that much in five years, it means there's a real need for it. But I think that System Speak can speak for itself, actually. And we can just leave it there and let it help people as long as it's both safe and helpful. And yet, we still want to continue our sharing, because it's what worked for us for a variety of reasons we can share later, but I'm learning more and more about why that is. In part, because the biggest key to our healing is sharing our story in our own words. That's what matters when your stories have been stolen from you in the past. And so here we are, for a restart.
People will find it eventually. And that's okay. Maybe you have found it now. But for now, we're not going to link to it on the website. And for now, we're not going to be public about it. Not because we're ashamed or because it's a secret, but because we need time. Time to adjust, time to orient to our new therapist, time to start sharing again. The walls have been up for too long.
It's not a restart as in starting over because we get to keep the progress we made. I understand now about DID, at least a little. And even though there are always days, even like today, that feel like maybe it was a mistake, or maybe it's not real, or maybe I'm not real. I understand that's dissociation and how it works. I'm also not ashamed of my brain doing what it does because I understand now why it does that and how it does that. And that's been very powerful for me in addressing some of my shame issues about my diagnosis. So whether you want to refer to it as DID or just complex trauma, or even just dissociation in general, this is where we're at, having made progress, understanding now what is wrong, and why it's happened. And even having an outline of what has happened.
I don't think that Phase Two is more difficult than Phase One. With Phase One being about learning about DID and grounding and coping skills and things like that—safety and stabilization. I think that Phase Two is just different hard because it means learning the truth. It means seeing what there is to see and knowing what there is to know And that hurts. It means putting memories back together. It means grieving what never was. It means being horrified at what really was. This is a daunting thing, and I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it.
But also I want to get better. And I want to heal. And we're making progress.
So maybe with a little more privacy, and at least some time for a fresh start before everyone finds this, maybe we can keep going and keep sharing at the same time. It's a hard thing. It's a vulnerable thing. It's not something I wish on anyone. But for us, I think it matters because of the kinds of things we went through. I think it's a choice that if there's any way to make good or find meaning in what we have endured, it's by helping others. I don't mean that your story is the same as mine. I don't mean that your experiences are the same as mine either. But there are some things that we share, and there are some things that it's better when we're in it together. That's what I've been learning.
So for now I'm not telling the world that I'm here. When they find it, that's okay. It just is. That's the whole point. But the break that we took, and then just getting started here, and getting back into our own healing journey after the disruptions of the pandemic and everything that came with it, I think it will give us a time and space where we can be authentic and vulnerable and still have our voice. That really matters to me.
I don't know that this podcast will be the same as the other. System Speak was magical in all the right ways, in all the good ways. Right now, to be honest, we're still in the end of the pandemic, or the middle of it, I don't even know. And we're homeschooling all the children because they can't be in school because of our youngest daughter. And so I do not have the spoons or the energy or the time to be able to do interviews like I did before. And to be honest, we also don't have the internet and bandwidth. Our data is so limited here in the country on satellite. It's really difficult. And it's made interviews frustrating and painful, rather than a learning experience or a collaboration. Sometimes when we're able, or if we get out of quarantine and I'm traveling again so that I sometimes have space away from the children, and good conversations come up, I'm absolutely open to that. We've learned so much through the interviews. But I also have different boundaries, better boundaries, stronger boundaries. So that if I don't want to do an interview, I don't have to do an interview. And if I do an interview, I don't have to air it if I'm not comfortable with it. And I want my interviews to be real authentic conversations between people, not just clients and clinicians or just about DID. I want it to be about people. Because that's where I'm at. I want to be a people, a person, an emerging self.
In that way, this podcast won't be the same. Even if people find it, they might not like it the same. That's okay. I'm doing this for me. I'm doing this for us. I'm not trying to repeat the other podcast. I'm not trying to recreate something that was already wonderful. System Speak was wonderful, and it stands alone. But I don't have to recreate it to honor it. This is new. I am new. I am becoming something that never was. And that's what I want to talk about. This is entirely different than anything else. And to capture it, I need a restart, a new copy of the book, a fresh look at me. And so here we are, back at the beginning, but so much further than we've ever been.
[Break]
Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon. And join us for free in our new online community by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org. If there's anything we've learned in the last four years of this podcast, it's that connection brings healing. We look forward to connecting with you.