Cultivating Joy, Peace, and Prosperity After Abuse with Calion Smith

Today I'm talking with Calion Smith about cultivating joy, peace, and prosperity after abuse. He's founder of Uncover Your Joy, a peer support network founded by and for abuse survivors. The survivor of sex trafficking and abuse, Calion has lived with PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and a few other disorders. Today he's telling his story of survival, finding joy in the pain, merging his alters into a single identity, and how he has taken his experiences and used what he's learned to help others who have survived traumatic life events.

What to Listen For: 

Surviving sex trafficking and abuse from a young age
Having the sense of wanting more than the typical ways to heal and cope with PTSD
How a little pink flower led to a turning point
How being groomed for sex trafficking resulted in his identity forming in a different way

"My brain had to separate that into compartments because one whole brain that remembered all of the trauma I was going through was just too much to handle. So my brain created these sort of units in a way. And each of those developed just like a normal child would have their own personality."

Reconciling all of his identities to form a brand new person that didn't exist before 2020
The critical role remembering played in this reconciliation
The power of inner dialogue in dealing with our emotions
Getting help starting with his PTSD about six months after escaping his victimizer

"I know that I went through trauma, and I obviously needed support for that. So I started getting help for PTSD."

A bunch of factors stacking up to create a lot of exhaustion and trauma
Dissociating, losing track of time, not remembering tasks like cleaning or eating
Noticing different handwriting in his journal
Exploring dissociative disorders with his therapist
Getting an official diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder when an alternate personality showed up to therapy
Reorienting in small instances

"We'd go through periods of trauma memories and reorienting to those and gathering more information, but it was really only when the full narrative became clear that reorientation really happened because, you know, DID was something that I had lived with since I knew myself as a person."

Learning new lessons in pain through the process
Building to a moment where he knew he was ready to go through final fusion

"It was very sudden, actually. There were four adult alters—those of us that felt like we were adults—and there was one child alter, which is a very common experience. He was five years old, is how he identified.

So the four adults in the system, which is what a group of alters is called, the four adults of us, we basically just had this moment of like, I feel like final fusion is right. It just hit one night where it was just like, that suddenly feels right. And it never had before. So, reorienting to that in like coming to terms with that and accepting, it was a very emotional process and very grief-focused, because it also meant letting go of who we all individually were."

The emotions and grief processing that came with this moment
What the process taught him about trauma reorientation and reorienting to life events
The sense of being all the people he was before, but also totally new as well
The key roles that radical acceptance and validation play in recovery
The uncertainty that followed his fusion
The challenge of presenting himself to the world in one body with five alters

"It was very difficult before thinking if I go to this cafe looking this way, then I show up to that same cafe looking this way are they going to be really confused or are they going to be questioning? Are they going to be looking at me weird and things like that? 

It was this constant dividing up of life. And that's a huge thing that I've been able to just let go of is like, I can go where I want. However,