Come on in, everyone. Pull up a chair, grab your favorite beverage, and get comfortable. It’s story time! And who doesn’t love story time?
You know when your children ask you for some of the Halloween candy they got from trick-or-treating? Except the intensity seems more like begging than asking. “Please, please, please, can we have some?” And they make all these promises that you know they’ll never keep.
So you do what every responsible parent does. You tell them they can have some candy after they’ve finished their dinner. They’re disappointed, but the anticipation of that treat is high.
As you’re clearing the dinner dishes, you remember that you promised them some candy. You turn around to give them permission, only to discover candy wrappers strewn around the room.
You’re in shock because you missed the whole event!
They were as stealthy as ninjas because they didn’t want you to change your mind or influence their choices about which candy they could have.
And there it is, right in front of you. The evidence of their activity.
And all you can think is...
What just happened?
Before We Go Any Further, Let Us Introduce Ourselves
We’re Orchestrated Harmony, a system living with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). And as you’re about to discover, we don’t always approach things the same way, especially when it comes to our professional lives!
Some of you may already know us as Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. We spent 25 years in the corporate world, learning firsthand what it means to navigate workplace expectations, relationships, challenges, and opportunities while living with DID and the effects of childhood trauma.
Today, we draw on both our career coaching expertise and lived experience to help professionals living with CPTSD and complex trauma recognize how their childhood experiences can follow them into the workplace and influence their careers.
But talking about our work also means talking about what it’s like for us to do that work as a system living with DID.
It’s not only about how childhood trauma follows us into the workplace. It’s also about how we navigate our professional lives together. That includes what we want to work on, what takes priority, and when we’re ready to begin.
Which brings us to this story.
The question is…where do we even start?
We’d been working on preparations for our new podcast (The Resilient Career with Cyndi Bennett) for about a month when we received some exciting news. Our proposal to speak at the Healing Together Conference had been approved!
Our system was so excited. They wanted to get to work on the conference preparations immediately. And I understood the excitement. I was excited, too. But we already had a podcast to get out the door. So I told them that launching the podcast was our priority. The conference preparations would have to wait until after that.
Now, remember those children waiting for their Halloween candy? Yeah, that.
I woke up early on Tuesday morning. Launch day! And, of course, I immediately checked my phone. There they were. The podcast notifications telling me that our first episode had been published.
Then another notification caught my eye. This one was from our dear friend, Healing My Parts. One of her Substack members had sent her a message asking whether anyone was talking about DID and work. About navigating workplace triggers, how we’re treated, and the toxic situations we can find ourselves tolerating.
And she recommended Cyndi Bennett. Us. Wow!!! How kind of her to recommend us! It made us feel so seen.
The last thing I remember was the thought: What is the best way to help this person and others like them?
Apparently, our system did all the mental math in a split second. (IYKYK) They connected what would help this person with what would help the folks at the conference and worked out a workflow to make it happen. The podcast was out the door. The conference preparations no longer had to wait.
And by the time I realized what had happened, there it all was. A new Substack publication. A domain name. A connected website. A Stripe account. And a published announcement. All before 8 a.m.
And there they stood on the inside, facing me with chocolate all over their faces. The look on their faces was one of genuine pride and accomplishment. They were so proud of what they’d put together in such a short time.
And there I was, looking at the evidence and thinking, What just happened?
The first thing I asked them was, “Guys, how are we going to manage this extra work with our already stretched capacity?” Which is what I would’ve asked them to think about if they’d let me in on their little shenanigans.
“Sundays and Tuesdays.”
They didn’t even have to think about it. They’d already answered the question they knew I would have. And that made sense. Tuesday is therapy day. And Sunday is when we usually write our Orchestrated Harmony blogs, when we can. They hadn’t just figured out what they wanted to create. They’d figured out where it could fit.
A couple of hours later, we arrived at therapy. I was still coming to terms with what they’d done when we told our therapist what had happened. She asked how I felt about them doing all of that without me. About not being included.
And I told her I was proud of them. Proud of the initiative they’d taken. They’d gotten what would’ve been three weeks’ worth of work done in a really short time. And they’d done it well. I was so impressed. And they were grinning from ear to ear.
Then she asked why there had been such a sense of urgency. At first, we thought they’d been afraid I would change my mind or push the work down the priority list again. But as we talked, we realized it went deeper than that.
When we went to the Healing Together Conference for the first time last year, we were timid, shy, and unsure of what it would be like. Then we got there and discovered other systems just like us. We found a place where we could just be us.
We didn’t have to hide, mask, or pretend. We could just be. And we felt a sense of belonging we’d never experienced before. A belonging of our whole being.
That’s what they were telling me. These were their people. This was their part of the business.
Career coaching 4 systems, by a system.
And I think you can probably hear how much this work means to our system.
We know what it meant to find a place where our whole being belonged. What could become possible if we could create more opportunities to experience that with one another?
A place where we could talk about our careers as DID systems. Where we could share the challenges we’re trying to navigate, ask questions, learn from one another’s experiences, and celebrate our wins with people who understand why those wins matter.
Where we wouldn’t have to spend the first half of the conversation explaining that we’re a system before we could talk about what happened at work.
We each bring different experiences. Different ways of managing our professional lives, different challenges, and things we’ve figured out along the way that might help someone else. I keep thinking about what we could learn from one another if we had a place to share those things with safety, acceptance, and belonging.
That’s the kind of space we want to build here at Resilient Careers 4 DID.
Our system has made their feelings about that pretty clear.
And I’m with them.
Know another system who might benefit from this conversation? We’d love for you to invite them to join us. Share this with them so they can bring their experiences, questions, challenges, and wins, too. There’s room for them here.