Transcript: Episode 7
7. Standing My Ground
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 spent the week at the cabin by myself. I left the children with the husband after he quarantined and arrangements had been made temporarily for his parents. We finished our homeschool quarter—the first nine weeks of the school year—and I really needed a break. He left in February and then hasn't been able to visit since July. And for my own self-care, I needed to go away. I don't usually go away without the children but I really, really needed to take some time. I'm proud of me for doing so but the days flew by. They were not days of rest.
We are working on the workbook that's coming out this fall. It's ready now for final edits. And we worked as long as we could every day and also did our job because we can't afford to take off work. So our days were long and intense because we had to get done as much as we could, while we could, without the children. So that when we go home again, we're in a better place and more focused and more present and not resenting them for being children. It was a sensory break, though, without six little ones and the chickens pawing at us and needing from us and touching us and yelling at us. It was something we needed. Parenting our children is intense. But it is good and right, and I'm glad we do, and I love them. But I did not miss getting yelled at.
And I didn't wear my ears most of this week, enjoying the silence, watching the mist rise from the lake through the trees in the mountains. Little Ozark Mountains, not real mountain. And watching the colors change for fall. And when I did put on my ears it was to go for a walk and listen to the birds. I found different kinds of daisies and laurel and all the trees that have been my friend since I was a little girl. I cried there on my walk through the woods to the lake. I had memories and flashes of scenes of being siblings there, of laughing there, and singing there. Good memories. So blissfully unaware of everything else that was going on.
I understand that place differently now, too, as an adult in hindsight, looking back. I know it's where my mother went to run away from my father. Back in the days before therapy. When trauma was taboo, or unrecognized. Something has shifted in my relationship with her since I went to the cemetery last, to visit her. Not that everything she did was okay and not that I was never wounded by her, but I have a different context now as the gaps start to fill in, and I see what she was up against, what she was living with, what she was fighting every day. And I know we went there to the cabin to get away from him as often as we could.
We move so much that really the cabin is one of the few constants in my life. The only place of home that I've known my whole life. Because we still have the cabin, even when we moved in other places. When we live further away, we didn't go as often, but there was always a coming back. And I cried going back by myself this week. I don't even know why, and I didn't plan on it, but it washed over me, the tears of everything, the grief of everything. I thought about how hard the last three years were, how hard the pandemic was, how hard losing our therapist was, and how dark things got, and how scary that was. And I had already known that there was grief in the loss of the therapist and tracked it back to the lows. And so I know to take those pieces to therapy.
But on that walk in the woods while I was crying and singing a made up song, I realized there was also a loss of JohnMark as he was, of littles as they were. Not that they're gone forever, disappeared entirely, but things will never be the same because of what happened. And I know that just like the loss of our therapist really was about the loss of the lows, I know that the loss of them is really about the loss of my siblings. And the tears flowed.
I walked to the bridge where we threw some of my mother's ashes into the wind so long ago. Not long ago. And I know we buried most of them in the cemetery with her family, trying in some way to reunite her in a spot of feeling at home after death in a way she never was during her life. With our homemade marker because we could not afford a monument. With her name scratched into cement and decorated with pieces of china.
But a handful of her ashes we sprinkled over the stream at the cabin by the bridge. I don't know why that's what the siblings decided to do, because she never went down there that I recall. But it is where we played. It is where we went to get away from her, when she took us there to get away from him. I don't know why we sprinkled some ashes there. Maybe because you can't sprinkle them inside a cabin. And it seemed like the most sacred place. But now I wonder if we were sprinkling ashes not to say goodbye to her, but to say goodbye to a childhood we never had. A childhood we almost had. A childhood we pretended to have. Or the only bit of childhood we did have. There in the woods, on the trails by the stream.
I walked and cried and walked and cried and let those tears come. I felt those feelings as they came up. Because I know how now. I learned that over the last three years. Nothing has ever been so devastating to me as what's happened over the last three year with our previous therapist, except for the stark reality of what my childhood was and what it's done to me.
I can't go back to unknowing. That's what changes everything. I can still struggle with dissociation. My brain can default to dissociating as a trauma response, but the things I learned and the things I see and know and feel, I can't forget again. There's no way to push them back down. And they are heavy to carry with me.
And so I stood and cried and threw stones into the lake the way they do in Galilee. Forty years of stones at the bottom of that lake. Fish and mermaids must have built a city by now with 40 years of stones thrown. Thrown by me into that lake. But it helps somehow. it's better than carrying them around with the weight on me.
I cried again before I left. I feel as if I know it is the last time I will be there. Maybe at least the last time I will be there alone. Quarantine is almost over. Vaccinations for the littles are coming. And the world will start again. The world has gone on without us, really, but our world will start again. I will have to go back to church. The children might go back to school. The husband will go back to his parents and continue caring for them. And I will go back to being a mom. Even though it seems like yesterday, I was a child. And yet also, after the last three years feel older and more ancient than I ever have before. It has aged me, these three years. And I don't just mean alters or therapy. I mean what we have endured, what we have felt, what we have carried. And I needed this ritual to close it, I think, to transition back to life again.
I want to move. I wish we didn't live where we live, except for its beauty. But it is not an easy place for my children or for me for coming out of quarantine. We live in a place where politics are cruel. And children are bullies. And their disabilities have already been mocked. And everyone is White. But the children don't want to move. They just don't want to go back to school. And the husband needs to be close for his parents, even though he doesn't live at home. And I am stuck in a season of 10 years at least, starting today, of learning how to stay. And it's hard for me.
I think that's part of why I cried when it was time to come home. Because I know what I'm committing to. I know the sacrifices that I'm making. I'm aware of what I'm giving up to do the right thing, to be there for these children in a way no one was for me. While I was at the cabin, I had dreams. Dreams that I was out playing with friends that I've met in the community. Dreams we had fun and we had chats and we were playing, enjoying our lives together, as if we were friends in the same place instead of all over the world. As if we weren't all dealing with Trauma Time every day, Memory Time invading every day. And I'm weary, I'm weary, but we need the workbook. And the children need a mother. And so I had to get the workbook done so that I can go back and be a mother. And when I walked back in the door I need to be solid and strong and not crying anymore. But I couldn't get it together in time. My time at the cabin is up. But I drove the long way home. Because I still not come back to the cemetery for my father. And so I did today. And as I got here, it began to rain. His parents are buried here as well, and I wondered if I should say hello, or if they want me here at all. I really don't know.
The faith tradition that my husband grew up in is one I joined voluntarily before I met him. And a sibling did as well, unrelated to me, as if there was this gathering. And in that faith tradition, there's a ritual a year after their death to honor someone, to offer them what we have here, to offer them peace and joy. My grandfather's buried here for five years now and we've not done it for him. We keep talking about it. We’re aware that it needs to be done. And we are quote, quote, obedient in every other way. But it's one piece keeps slipping through. Our faith tradition culture some might say he's not ready yet or it would be happening. And maybe that's true. But It's not my job to judge.
But this is part of the transition. Facing that there's not peace here. Like I could navigate at the cemetery for my mother. Facing that taking the extra 20 steps to where my father's body lies, was a distance that made me nauseous and dizzy. And that I had no words to say, no feelings to express, no profound weavings of what could be, or may be, just to bring healing to all of us. There was nothing. A curse word is finally what came. And then I walked away. Which maybe it's disrespectful, but at least someone around here is being honest. That's a start. And the more I become aware of what I need to do in therapy, the more I can't put it away anymore. There are things I know now that I didn't understand then, that day I hid behind a bulldozer to make sure his body went in the ground. Because I was not allowed to attend. Nor am I welcome now.
I know not everyone believes in life after death. But I wonder if they can see me now, if they think there's any good in me, if they think I have done any good in the world, if I have offered any healing that we have all needed this whole time, if I have done right by our name, despite it being hell. And I also wonder if I even care what they think.
I'm having big feelings, which is why I wanted to talk. But they are feelings I'm unfamiliar with and feelings that don't have words. They are voices I have not heard before, and stories I don't want read to me. Because when you have things divided up in your head, as if to contain this piece and contain this piece, then there's gaps in everything and nobody has the whole story. And how dare they put their war inside my head. Part of me is angry at how he treated me and the things that he did. Part of me has compassion, because I understand cognitively about trauma being passed down, which is why I want to stop it. No more. And part of me, this small part of me that is still waiting to be loved, that is still waiting to be accepted, that is still waiting to be chosen, knows that any taste we ever heard of that, it was called grooming. Even that wasn't real.
There's so much darkness here, in this community, with billboards about how they serve God. And I want to ask, “which God is it that you serve, because what you represent is no God that I know.” And my faith is strong. But the idea of having to go back to church because quarantine is over makes me ill. And I know that we have to stay in therapy to untangle it all. And I know that it's time to do the work because I don’t want to end up like them. I want to reclaim who I am. I want to define for myself who I am apart from them. I know that I am healthier and better because I left. I know that I am healthier and better because I stayed away.
But that doesn't change not being wanted. That doesn't undo the harm that was done. And there's so much there, and so many things to talk about in therapy, and yet when her face shows up on the screen, my mouth is silent and my brain is empty. I could hear 100 voices at the same time—not really 100—but I can hear all this noise constantly when I tried to live my days, but I go to therapy and it is crickets. And I'm angry at the therapist for what she did and for betraying that space we had created where I could finally talk, where things were starting to come out. That was cruel and wrong, what she did. And I hate that now she is associated with the kinds of feelings that I have when I come here to stand on my dead father. That makes me ill.
And I shouldn't say things like that, because it makes me cruel. But it's also time to get over myself. I've got to go. I don't even know what the truth is in this place. But maybe that's what I needed today. To have a taste of that, to feel that as an adult and recognize if I cannot untangle it, or get the ooze off my skin, as an adult standing in the rain, literally being washed by the God of the sky, how would I ever have untangled it as a child? How would I have ever known what to do as a child? How can I have ever gotten away as a child? It stained me. And I wanted out of me. I want to reject the ugliness of what he did to me—of what they did to me—and get it out of me instead of rejecting parts of myself. Instead of pushing away the truth that I know. But that's hard, because the only way to do that is to say, “You did this and it was not okay. And I'm the one still standing here today cleaning up your mess. And you don't even care. And I don't even know if any of those few random good memories that I can come up with, I don't even know if they're real, or if I was being used even then too. Tricked and manipulated and as a pawn, groomed and bombed so that I would do what you want, or punished if I didn't? What kind of childhood is that? And how dare you how dare you make me the bad guy in this. I was a child.”
There is a bed of pine needles across the grass, as if my friends who are the trees don't want me even to touch the same ground where he lives. And I realized that the pine from the chicken coop that I said smells so good. Because that's where I used to hide back on the farm. And if I want to take responsibility for my own unconscious speaking to me, like the dream therapist said, then I have surrounded myself with the symbols of my childhood. From living in the country, to being abandoned by a therapist, to the smell and the chicken coop, to living on a hill where everyone can see and no one comes to help, to writing the memoir where the words are literally on the pages when I can't find them in my mouth. It's all there. There's no hiding anymore. And my time is up. And I have to go home and live and work and parent and care for children in a way that no one has shown me how to do, but that I have to stay present to do well.
And even that is a symbol. I have brought home the children that literally no one else in the state knew what to do with, wanted anything to do with. So I brought them home to have a family. I brought them home to give them what no one gave me. I brought them home to teach myself the truth. And it's heavy. And it smells like pine. And it feels like rain and wet grass and the cemetery. This cemetery four hours away from where my mother is buried. So no wonder there are parts in me divided into teams. They could not even be buried together. And as hard as it is to fill in the gaps, the more gaps I fill in, the more everything starts to make sense.
I don't know what my family thinks of me, wherever they are in the world of the dead this October. I'm not even entirely sure what I think of them. And I don't know how much time I have left to heal me. But I know who I want to be and who I don't want to be. And that seems like a starting place.
I don't know what my children think of me. I don't know that they are my children. But it's time to go home, and give my best, and stay in therapy so that my best is better. So that I have peace to offer. And so that I remember to smile so that they at least have that.
But when I lie down at night and have to close my eyes to sleep, it's not nightmares I have any more. It's your zoom faces that I see. And we laugh and talk and work things out. We listen to music and we go dancing. And it's a world of dreams I have giving me peace enough to sleep and strength enough to wake again for the next day. And I think that's part of why I cried so much this weekend. Because I know. I know I'm going into a season that is a one day at a time kind of season. And that the season will be 10 years long. And I had to brace for it. So that I can go in intentionally, wisely, boldly. I have to bring tenacity to my parenting. And that means having the courage to look at how I was parented. Offering my best self to them is the only way to offer healing to all of us.
And so I choose the good on the right not because I'm ignorant, not because it's what I want, and not because I'm fawning, but because it's the only way. The only way for us to heal.
[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.