Therapy Debrief - While Driving in My Car
Including a Kentucky Fried Chicken Drive Though encounter.
She has a mission, for that part to feel a connection, without a flight, fight, freeze, or flop response.
Okay. This is a therapy debrief while I’m driving in my car.
I have worked with my therapist since sometime in 2018. My therapist is a somatic clinician and works with my nervous system and where things feel somatically in the body. She says she has been teaching me how to feel things in my body for the last couple of years, teaching internal communication, she works with DID clients and trauma survivors.
Only recently, I think since the Healing Together conference in fact, we have been doing attachment work.
We haven’t done a lot of memory work because it was all about safety. Everybody in my System feeling safe, working together as a System, System consent, System communication, and we’re now at a place where we have begun to work on some attachment.
I started working full-time, and this is my fourth week, doing teaching. Last week was fairly hard, I was working in the Learning Support Unit (students with disabilities) a fair bit and also in a couple of other classes, where the teacher needs release, it’s where they go and plan and do things like that. Where I live, teachers get a certain number of hours of release time each week to do planning, and some of these classes are really tricky classes, like really really tricky classes, behaviour-wise.
I think because we’re a system and everybody is working together, we are able to manage these classes fairly well. Last week, I thought we were stretched to our capacity with managing some of the behaviours, we did okay but there was overwhelm.
Everybody has a capacity whether they’re a system or not, what I need to do is work out well what my capacity, my ability, and how much can I work and not feel overwhelmed, because I’ve also got everything else that goes on in the life of a family with small children who have additional needs. In a relationship with MultiMes who is coming in less than two weeks, this is wonderful – 10 days, this is exciting!
That’s not overwhelm, that’s like a breath out! My relationship with Multimes is so wonderful, you know there are challenges, always are in relationships, especially long distance.
So, in today’s therapy, she (our therapist) wanted to work on, where in my body does it feel with overwhelm, and it was about personal boundary.
Okay so, some people can have someone right up there in their face and feel fine, other people need somebody about a meter back and feel fine.
My therapist started halfway across the room, and the room is quite long, let's say about 20 feet long, and she started halfway across the room. So, we were feeling where we could feel it in my body, now this was the hard part for my System. Hold on, I’m going to pause while I order some KFC.
At the KFC drive-through, order box:
KFC Guy: Well, what can I get for you?
Us: Hi, can I get a large zinger burger combo with Solo, please?
KFC guy: With a Solo sorry?
Us: Yes.
KFC Guy: Yep. Anything else?
Us: No thanks.
KFC Guy: Drive on through.
We drive to the next window, where the same KFC guy takes our payment.
KFC Guy: $14.95
Us: Thank you very much.
KFC Guy: No worries, there’s that one.
He hands us our bottle of Solo.
Us: Thank you.
KFC Guy: Have a good one.
Us: You too.
Us talking to our recording: Uh sorry, I just got to fix this up so I can put my drink there. They give you your drink and you drive around (to the next window) where you pick up your food.
KFC Lady hands us our food: Enjoy the rest of your night.
Us: Thank you, you too.
Where was I? I was talking about boundaries, just like a personal space boundary, okay.
It all depends, let’s say you’re having a fantastic day and your six-year-old starts whinging and whining, and she’s in your face, well you’re not overwhelmed so you can deal with that whinging and whining and you don’t need that space, it’s okay, you don’t need to have a space in between you (an emotional space), because you're able to…, well you know, I’ve been calling it, “You’re on your game”.
Or let's say you’ve worked all day, your brain has had it, and your 6-year-old starts whinging and whining and it's like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t deal with this,” it’s like, you do, you need space.
The way she described it before we did some exercises and stuff… I could have gone then, I can go, they’re all turning…
The way she described it is turning your defence response on at the same time, turning your attachment system on, okay?
It’s different from a flight response, where I would go into my room and shut the world out; or a fight response, where I might start to argue, I might be critical and not have as much patience as I want to; or a freeze response, where I would be stuck thinking about something over and over again, have I done something wrong, catastrophising something; or a flop response, where I can’t get out of my bed, I’m just stuck there, I just can’t move.
Turning your defensive system on is a good thing I've heard, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be defensive, but it means you have boundaries in a good way.
She started halfway across the room, and I started to feel where it was in my body (how my body felt), and it was like a glitch, it was like a glitch in my stomach, the left and the right-hand side of the front of my stomach, kind of where the diaphragm sort of muscle is. Then we worked on that, she went further back and somebody on my inside said,
“Tell her to turn around and face the wall.” We worked out what feels safe. Where does the glitchiness feel safe? She (our therapist) was telling me at the time,
“We’re not going to deal with anything except for how it feels.” So, I was focused on how it feels and I’m quite in tune with my body, in an exercise like that. I’m not in tune with my body if I’m out and about, like even now I wouldn’t be feeling. If I focus on it, I feel like a little bit tight in my chest, because I’m trying to explain this and there’s somebody on my inside who doesn’t want me to explain it incorrectly, that whole people-pleasing thing, which comes from the abuse and the rejection. She (my therapist) told me that too.
So, we’re looking at my nervous system’s capacity, okay? And we were looking at responding to how my body and seeing how everyone (inside) reacts. Sometimes, as we were doing this, she ended up facing the other way.
We started with putting a chair between her and me, oh no, first of all, we started with me pushing my hands…, and she’s 20 feet away, so having my hands out in a pushing sort of motion. Then we put a chair (in front of us). My System felt so, much better having a chair in front of her, and I remembered when my father would come and visit a couple of years ago, he doesn’t come anymore. We’ve created that boundary. But we were working on how to make my System feel safe with my father in the house and we learned that by putting a bench in between my father and even if he was on the other side of the room, that helped. So, putting a chair there (in therapy), really-really helped. We put two chairs there, one in front of the other. She was able to turn halfway around to face me after a period of time. We experimented with a quarter, a half, and three-quarters, we even got her to face all the way around (facing us) but with her eyes closed.
It was really extraordinary to work out, my brain could not understand what was going on. I couldn’t work out what was going on, but my body knew exactly what was going on, okay? I don’t know how long we did it for but then there was this teenager feeling, a teenagery sort of part. I don’t if it was just an emotional person as opposed to somebody who has not named themselves, or something like that. They were saying,
“Alright, that’s enough. We’ve had enough of this; we want to stop.” So, she’s (therapist) is really good, she respected that, and she was thinking about,
“We can’t just abandon this exercise; we need to sort of come out of this exercise gradually.” Because, what she said she was doing, was that she was helping somebody who has never ever ever felt listened to or heard, she was helping them know that they could be safe, and she wasn’t going to abandon that. And it’s like,
“What are you talking about? I’ve got somebody who has never ever ever felt safe?”
It was like, far out! The teenager’s going,
“Look just tell her to jump out of the window.”
Not that, you know, the teenager’s quite cognitive, she knew she wouldn’t actually do that. And, that kind of made the situation a little bit funny, because both our therapist and I imagined how that would look. As the therapist was explaining what she was doing and how she was helping to create this sense of safety, she said, she had a mission, for that part to feel a connection, without a flight, fight, freeze, or flop response.
It was like…, Wow! That is massive! My brain still couldn’t comprehend it back then, but my body could. My body and everybody within it, or whoever was working on this exercise, felt, this is what we want. We want to be able to feel a connection with anybody in this world. The teenagery person was saying,
“Nah, man! Look at how small… (the situation is), you have to be 20 feet away, you can’t even turn to face us with your eyes open, how is this gunna happen in real life!?”
They were going, “Nup not possible.” They were getting really frustrated about it. So, when she said, that was her mission, some people on our inside. Wow that’s brilliant! We want that, we want to feel connection to anybody without having a fight, flight, you know all those.
Interestingly enough, for the most part, I think we have that with MultiMes, occasionally we might get triggered by something that’s in our world, and if we’re triggered, that sort of connection, however it goes. The relationship that Multimes and I have had, being long-distance, has been slow and steady, we’ve had ruptures and repairs. And I think being so far apart and coming together at times and all that, has built such a foundation of relationship, of communication, of safety and I can’t tell you enough about how it feels for our System. We have complete System consent and System response with her, it’s just really lovely.
But interestingly enough, we’ve got that with them, but that has taken years. We met them, probably first in July 2021, online and we were friends for a very long time before we started developing an extra relationship on top of friendship. And you can’t do that with everybody else, you’ve got your work colleagues, you’ve got the students that we work with. It’s straight in there, that sort of thing. There are also authority figures, there’s navigating crossing the hemisphere, learning about different cultures, the North American culture to the south sort of Australian culture. There’s a different culture within each state I suppose, you know both America and Australia.
There’s so much, there’s so much that a human being has to respond to in the everyday world, what our therapist was saying is that the research and the therapy with DID seem to be really successful…, and I don’t know but that was what she was saying. I seem to be going alright at the moment but who knows…, is teaching that safety, that communication, that system communication.
She was saying that with abuse and rejection, for the abuse we need the defensive response online, remembering it's not any of the fight, flight, fear… I can’t even think at the moment, and the attachment response is online.
I always had this theory, I don’t know if I’ve been taught this by some other something-or-rathers, but I always thought you can’t heal your attachment system, but we’ve been doing a lot of attachment system work with people in my System, well not a lot, two sessions and this one was about overwhelm. I don’t know, don’t ask me, I don’t know how much we’ve done because sometimes I don’t get to know everything that goes on in therapy because I still lose a little bit of time, not much.
Anyway, my body…, I think I might have reset my nervous system today or something, my body is feeling reset.
My brain is empty, I have nothing left in my brain, I must have something because I’ve been able to debrief this therapy session, but my body, it feels online, you know. It’s great, I’m hoping (wondering) over the next couple of days how that’s going to feel.
Anyway, so I just wanted to debrief that. Thank you very much, it’s just so cool to learn stuff like that, it really is. It’s been a journey.
Thank you for coming to our Substack. Please like, comment, share, and subscribe to keep encouraging us.
Unpretending Spontaneous is the name used by a Multiple System from Australia, the technical term is currently called DID - Dissociative Identity Disorder. This blogcast is our journey as we attempt to function well in society as a multiple while healing from our traumatic past.
To find out more go to Unpretending’s Substack at unpretending.substack.com or email us at unpretendingspontaneous@gmail.com
Disclaimer: All views expressed by anyone on Unpretending’s Substack reflect the perspectives of the person speaking at the time of publishing. These perspectives may change without notice.
Share
Keep doing that System exploring...listen and learn from all those within/part of you. Proud of your growth no matter where or how it takes you.