drglenndoyle

Teeny, tiny steps toward the future.

The irony of trauma recovery, and the thing a lot of people don’t understand, is that it doesn’t, actually, mean thinking about the past every day. 

It means thinking about the future— every day. 

That’s harder than it seems for trauma survivors. 

We’ve often been conditioned to explicitly NOT think about the future. 

Why would we, after all? We’ve had experience with that “hope” thing— and our experience is that the universe, or at least our bullies and abusers, happy wield that “hope” thing to hurt us. 

We know better than to get our hopes up. 

At least, that’s what our conditioning has us thinking, repeating to ourselves. 

The truth of the matter is, in trauma recovery we often have to learn new ways of thinking and talking to ourselves about the future. 

Because it’s true that blind, generalized “hope” isn’t much help to us in trauma recovery. 

What is helpful to us is thinking about our values and specific goals— and when it comes to goals, the shorter term and more realistically achievable, the better. 

Part of what trauma steals from us is our sense of self-efficacy— our feeling and belief that we can actually do things in the world. That we are up to what the world asks of us every day. 

How do we take our self efficacy back? 

By setting and achieving goals— notably teeny, tiny, steppingstone goals. 

Realistic, practical self-care goals. 

Realistic, practical personal development goals. 

And when I say “teeny tiny,” I very much mean it: I mean start out with your personal development goal being a page— MAYBE two— of a book today. 

THAT’S the kind of future thinking I’m talking about. Not climbing Everest. 

Maybe your self care goal today is washing your face or brushing your teeth. Maybe. 

Teeny, tiny. Baby steps. 

Remember: in sustainable trauma recovery, trajectory matters more than speed. I want you heading in a healing direction, even if the steps you are taking are teeny tiny. 

Teeny tiny steps, baby steps, add up. 

In your trauma recovery today, you may or may not think about your past, or your abuse, or your abusers. 

But you WILL think about the next baby step you need to take. 

I want you thinking about baby stepping to the end of today, to the end of this week. Not really any further than that. 

I want you thinking about self-care— not so much in the “spa day” sense, but in the sense of little gestures that communicate to your nervous system that you are in the business of valuing and protecting yourself today. 

Even if it is just in teeny, tiny gestures. 

Take it from a marathon runner: distance races are completed one step at a time. 

Focus on the future— but not the distant future or the ultimate future. Not the future that trauma has conditioned you to fear and doubt. 

Focus on the rest of this hour. Then the rest of this day. Then the rest of this week. 

This is realistically how we recover. 

This is realistically how we win. 

drglenndoyle

You’re not a “failure.” You’re a work in progress.

You’re working on stuff. That’s all. 

You’re a work in progress. No more, no less. 

You’re not “terrible” at emotional regulation. You’re working on it. 

You don’t “fail” at making decisions. You’re working on it. 

You’re not “bad” at relationships. You’re working on it. 

Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of our abusers and bullies, tries to tell us, over and over again, that we’re terrible, we fail, we’re bad at all sorts of things. 

The truth is, we may not be great at those things— but in recovery, we’re working on them. 

Reminding ourselves of this matters. 

We’re not terribly motivated to try at things we think we just suck at.

Telling ourselves we just suck at certain things is a pretty reliable way to get us to avoid those things. 

Telling ourselves we just suck at certain things tends to reinforce the belief that we are stuck with how we feel and function right here, right now. 

The reality is, we are not stuck. 

If we continue working our recovery, almost every important aspect of our lives is going to look significantly different in a year. Let alone five years, let alone ten years. 

But all that supposes we don’t give up because we’re demoralized or exhausted. 

Trauma Brain wants us to believe that we “have” to get better at these things all at once. That we “do better.” 

Realistic trauma recovery is about doing better, sure— but more importantly, it’s about consistently GETTING better. 

We GET better in increments. 

We GET better in these teeny, tiny fits and starts that are sometimes so small or irregular that thy don’t FEEL like progress at all. 

We GET better by focusing on our trajectory— not our speed. 

(This is one of my core tools of trauma recovery: trajectory matters way more than speed.)

I understand you’re not where you want to be today. Neither am I. 

But we’re not screwed. We’re not hopeless. We’re nowhere near done with our journey, our process, our project. 

We’re working on it. 

Use the tool of self-talk to regularly remind yourself: you’re not a “failure.” You’re a work in progress. 

That’s not toxic positivity bullsh*t— it’s the f*ckin’ truth. 

drglenndoyle

You are not your trauma– you’ve been hijacked by your trauma.

We are not ourselves when we’re triggered— we become who we think we need to be to survive. 

Trauma responses are not “choices.” 

It really matters that we understand this— because Trauma Brain, the internalized voice of our bullies and abusers, will effortfully try to get us to believe that us triggered is the “real” us. 

That our behavior when we’re triggered represents “choice.” 

Here’s the thing about that: choices, in order to be true choices, need to be meaningfully free. 

That is: the alternative “choice” needs to be realistic and survivable. 

Does anybody reading this experience triggers and trauma responses as true “choices?”

When we’re tossed into a fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop response, we’re doing it— reflexively— because our nervous system truly doesn’t believe the alternative is survivable. 

Trauma responses represent survival instincts, not free “choices.” 

And for that matter: what we think, feel, and do when we’re triggered has virtually nothing to do with our goals and values— you know, those things that make us, us. 

Triggers and trauma responses do not “reveal” our true personality— they obscure it. 

When our nervous system flips parasympathetic to sympathetic dominance, all of our internal resources get shunted toward staying alive— not being our most authentic self. 

So many survivors get so down on ourselves for how we are when we’re triggered. 

The culture around us doesn’t exactly help, either— many of us have plenty of people in our lives who are only too happy to tell us that our trauma defenses actually represent our “real” personality. 

Something I strongly believe about trauma recovery is that it is about rediscovering our authentic self— that our authentic self has been hijacked and/or buried by our trauma patterns, and recovery is essentially a search and rescue operation.

In some cases, recovery is a rebuild-from-the-ground up operation, for that matter. 

But one thing I know for absolute certain is that our triggered “self” is in no way our real self. 

I don’t care how long it’s been: there IS a “you” in there, underneath it all. 

I know it may not feel like it right now, but humor me and start out from that assumption. 

That you are NOT your trauma responses— you’ve been hijacked by trauma responses. Maybe for years or decades. 

Trauma recovery is emotional archeology— and emotional alchemy. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

By the way: most “shoulds” are bullsh*t.

“Should” is a trap. 

It’s also one of Trauma Brain’s most reliable tools to make us feel like garbage— so Trauma Brain goes to it a lot. 

We think “should” should— ha!— be useful for us. 

We think “should” should help us live a good life. 

It seems simple enough, right? In order to live a life we like, we “should” do certain things, and we “should” avoid certain things. That’s reality. 

But that’s not really how Trauma Brain weilds the word “should.” 

Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of our bullies and abusers that we unwittingly play on a loop for decades, wields the word “should” like a weapon. 

Most trauma survivors’ self talk is absolutely RIDDLED with “shoulds”— and many of those shoulds are not demonstrably attached to a realistic, desired outcome. 

Many of us are so used to thinking in “shoulds” that we can’t even imagine the alternative— as in, how would we ever get stuff done if we reeled in the “shoulds?” 

It’s a fair question, but let me ask you: does thinking in “shoulds” tend to motivate you or discourage you? 

For most of us, “should” does far more to exhaust and discourage us than it does to motivate or focus us. 

A lot of this comes down to how trauma survivors have been conditioned to think about our goals, values, and the future. 

If you haven’t noticed, CPTSD does a serious number on our ability and willingness to even think about any of these. 


CPTSD tends to be VERY good at convincing us that it’s pointless to set goals; that we’re incapable of meaningfully living congruently with our values; and that the future is only going to be the same kind of sh*t show our past has been. 

Consequently, using “should” as a way to guide us toward goal directed, values congruent, or future oriented choices, goes out the window— because we’ve been conned by CPTSD to not think of or invest in those things. 

So we’re left with “shoulds” that just kick the sh*t out of us for no reason. 

“Shoulds” that just remind us that we’re falling short. 

Realistic trauma recovery requires us to use the tool of self-talk to really reel in the role “should” plays in our emotional life and decision making. 

That said, it’s real important we not turn “reeling in the shoulds” into another f*cking “should.” 

What I want you to do is just notice. Just notice the role “shoulds” are playing in your self talk. 

Then, inject what I call the “should buster” question: “Why?” 

If a “should” is legitimate, it will have a coherent answer to WHY you “should” do or not do something— an answer that is demonstrably linked to your goals, values, or future. 

If a “should” is Trauma Brain bullsh*t, it’ll probably try to shame you for even asking. 

Notice that. 

And start seeing Trauma Brain BS (Belief Systems) for what they are— propaganda tools. Not instruments of reality or recovery. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

Don’t hate on your sensitivity.

Highly sensitive humans are more vulnerable to trauma than less sensitive humans, it’s true. 

But that doesn’t mean our sensitivity “attracted” or “allowed” our abuse to happen. 

It’s true that sometimes sensitive people— not just kids— are targeted by those who would hurt us. 

But that doesn’t make our trauma or “fault.” 

That rather explicitly makes it “their” fault, actually— they’re the ones who did the targeting and the abusing. 

Don’t get it twisted. 

Trauma Brain is going to give you extensive lists of why some characteristic of yours drew traumatic experiences to you— but that’s not, actually, how that works. 

Abusers are responsible for abuse. Full stop. 

(Notice how Trauma Brain is right now in your ear, trying to argue with that statement— that “abusers are responsible for abuse. Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of our abusers and bullies, is heavily invested in you believing you “played a part” in your trauma— even if that “part” you supposedly “played” was just you being you.) 

Being highly sensitive can be a real pain in the ass. 

It can also be beautiful and useful and even profitable— but most of the time we’re mainly aware of how much it sucks to feel everything so overwhelmingly. 

It can get real easy to get down on ourselves for our sensitivity. 

Meeting our sensitivity with compassion and curiosity and grace can sound like a tall order some days, especially when our nervous system feels like it’s ready to physically jump out of our goddamn body. 

How we relate to our sensitivity matters in trauma recovery, because how we relate to everything about ourselves matters. 

CPTSD is going to try, hard, to get us to hate on ourselves— everything about ourselves. 

Our appearance. Our intelligence. Our choices. How sensitive we are or aren’t. 

You need to remember: the sh*t that CPTSD gives us about being highly sensitive— or anything else— is not about reality. 

It’s about making us feel a certain kind of way. Notably, like garbage. 

You don’t have to love being highly sensitive all the time. I don’t. 

But you and I do have to accept we are exactly as sensitive as we are— and that’s not evidence of anything “bad,” “weak,” or “immature.” 

We also have accept that there is nothing a victim can do that can “make” someone abuse them. 

No matter what Trauma Brain is whispering in your ear right now. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

What can’t be said will be felt– physically.

Our bodies often say what our words can’t. 

That’s one reason why CPTSD survivors often experience pain and other chronic health problems.

It’s not that physical problems are CAUSED by our mental distress— it’s that our mental distress makes us incredibly vulnerable to any and every source of pain and dysfunction out there. 

It’s hard for a body to fight things off when it’s been fighting off feelings and memories all day and night. 

But it’s also the case that the cells of our body have memories. 

They keep track. They “keep the score,” as the title of an obscure book put it. 

You may have heard the expression “what cannot be said will be wept?” 

It’s also true that what cannot be said, will be FELT— literally, physically. 

It’s one reason why developing the capacity to put words to our feelings and needs and memories and pain really, really matters in realistic trauma recovery. 

It’s hard to explain to others how “stuck” CPTSD survivors can feel in our body. 

Utterly stuck— and yet, somehow, not in our body at all. 

It’s hard to explain to others how CPTSD makes going to the doctor— even the dentist (especially the dentist, actually) about 10,000 times harder than it “should” be. 

Then many CPTSD survivors run into the reality that many of our physical problems don’t “behave” like “normal” medical problems do. 

They can be mysterious and difficult to diagnose— and they can often be less than responsive to modalities of care that seem to work for everyone else. 

There are survivors reading this more tired than they should be. 

There are survivors reading this physically sicker than they should be. 

There are survivors reading this experiencing pain— that they will never bring to the attention of a medical provider, because experience has taught them that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. 

If that’s you, you’re not alone. 

Realistic, sustainable trauma recovery has to account not only for our relationship with our “parts,” but our physical body as well. 

Trauma recovery that ignores the somatic component of CPTSD is incomplete. 

(And also, recovery that pretends CPTSD is ONLY about somatics is incomplete.)

Realistic recovery is holistic, in the sense that it accounts for how body, mind, and spirit interact and influence each other. 

But for now, realize: you’re not crazy. 

This really is taking a toll on your body. 

You’re not imagining it. 

And shame and self-blame is not the answer. Ever. 

drglenndoyle

None of this is “fun” or “easy.”

CPTSD is hard to get our arms around. Not everyone has heard of it.

If you asked five random strangers on the street what it is, four of them probably couldn’t tell you. 

Many CPTSD survivors themselves have misconceptions about what it is and how it develops. 

Because CPTSD isn’t as widely talked about in the culture as PTSD is, it’s easy to miss or misunderstand. (Just ask everyone who has been misdiagnosed with a “personality disorder” instead of CPTSD.)

Add to that the fact that dissociation is an incredibly common occurrence in CPTSD, but also an overwhelmingly misunderstood concept in our culture, and the “what is CPTSD” picture gets even hazier for the average person. 

All of this very often leaves CPTSD survivors feeling isolated. 

Alone. 

Kind of “crazy.” 

The thing about CPTSD is that it is an injury— not a “mental illness,” but an injury— that engenders lots of contradictions. 

Many CPTSD survivors are real good at convincingly pretending there’s nothing wrong. 

Hell, many CPTSD survivors achieve success in their academic or professional lives, leading others to assume that they couldn’t POSSIBLY have a serious psychological or behavioral wound. 

There are plenty of people who assume the collection of symptoms and struggles that define CPTSD simply don’t exist. Who believe that survivors can simply “let the past go” if they have enough “character.” 

It all makes recovering from CPTSD complicated. 

My own view is that CPTSD recovery is as involved and long term as recovery from addiction. 

It’s not so much a thing we do, as a lifestyle we live. 

Much like healing a broken bone takes time and care, recovery from CPTSD takes time and care— and we’re not going to think, talk, or “willpower” our way out of it. 

Realistic recovery from CPTSD almost always involves shifting how we relate to ourselves. 

It involves confronting what we were conditioned to believe about ourselves and our lives, and “scratching the record” of that conditioning— again, and again, and again. 

The truth is, you are not alone. Though, I get it— you feel alone. 

There are other CPTSD survivors out there, who are developing their own recovery routines and rituals and tools, just like you. 

No one is having a fun or easy time of this. 

This is not fun or easy. 

But this is doable. 

Yeah. You can do this “trauma recovery” thing. 

And, yeah: it’s going to take an open mind and a committed heart— and the willingness to meet each minute of your recovery on its own terms, one minute at a time. 

But you can do this. 

I swear to you, you can. 

drglenndoyle

Regret, amends, and trauma recovery.

You don’t have to love who you were or what you did, in order to forgive yourself. 

I say this as someone who has struggled with enormous regret for years. 

Regret is literally the biggest challenge in my own trauma and addiction recovery. 

I don’t love who I was or patterns of behavior that defined my life for…decades, actually. 

I look back and I cringe. Maybe you can relate. 

In my trauma recovery, I’ve come to understand that some, maybe many, of the situations that I hate thinking about now, weren’t actually my fault or my “choice.” 

But that doesn’t always help, does it? 

I still don’t love who I was or how I responded to those situations. 

I wish I’d have been cooler. 

Smarter. 

More skilled. 

I wish I’d had more integrity, been truer to myself. 

What many people don’t understand about trauma recovery is, it’s not just about what happened to us. 

It’s also about how we responded at the time— and how we respond now to memories and feelings associated with what happened. 

There were times when I was not a nice person. Not a reliable person. Not a person of integrity. 

Yes, I can have some compassion for and extend some grace to who I was then— he was, after all, working with the tools he had at the time. 

But I still don’t love it. 

I get asked a lot about the relationship between self compassion, self forgiveness, and those times when we weren’t our best selves. 

“What if I actually DID hurt someone, even if I was down the rabbit hole of a trauma response that I didn’t choose?” 

Well, what if? 

I actually agree that our trauma wounds don’t, actually, give us a “free pass” to hurt people. 

If we weren’t our best selves, if we behaved destructively, we should own up to that. 

The problem that many of us trauma survivors have with “owing up” to our past behavior, tough, is that we have a tendency, because of our trauma programming, to blow right past “accepting responsibility” and lock right in on “kicking the sh*t out of ourselves.” 

Kicking the sh*t out of ourselves is not useful, necessary, or deserved. 

“Personal responsibility” and “making amends” in the context of trauma recovery is not about self-punishment. 

It IS about accountability— and realistic accountability is about changed behavior. 

We don’t change behavior long term out of shame or punishment. 

As counterintuitive as it might be, self-forgiveness puts us in a much better  position to sustainably change how we think, feel, and behave going forward. 

“Grace over guilt” is not just a catchy slogan. 

It’s a summary of how we practically, realistically approach our role in the train wreck of our past.

Neither you nor I require “forgiveness” for things that happened TO us. 

And both you and I can realistically, self-compassionately take responsibly for how we’ve responded to the things that have happened to us without kicking the sh*t out of ourselves.

With practice, we can do that, anyway.

drglenndoyle

Avoiding CPTSD overwhelm.

Remember: a day is just twenty four hours strung together. 

An hour is just sixty minutes strung together. 

A minute is just sixty teeny, tiny seconds strung together. 

All we need to do is figure out a way to be safe and focused for a second. This second. 

CPTSD, if you haven’t noticed, does its very best to overwhelm us. To make us truly believe we have to handle EVERY f*cking thing in our life, RIGHT NOW. 

CPTSD tries to make us believe we HAVE to solve EVERY problem we have, NOW. 

And what’s more: CPTSD make us believe that if we can’t solve every problem we have RIGHT NOW, then we can’t solve ANY of our problems. 

It makes us believe we are a failure for feeling overwhelmed. 

You are not “failure” for feeling overwhelmed. 


CPTSD is one of the most overwhelming experiences human beings can experience. 

Hell, the very reason CPTSD and, especially, dissociation exist is because we’ve experienced things that overwhelmed our nervous system. 

That’s not a knock on our nervous system, by the way. Every nervous system has its breaking point, just like every bone has its breaking point. 

We don’t shame bones for breaking when they’ve been subjected to the kind of pressure that breaks bones; and we shouldn’t shame our nervous system for dissociating or developing complex trauma responses when subjected to the kind of pressure that produces CPTSD. 

You are not “crazy” for developing these responses. 

Complex trauma is overwhelming, by definition— and that’s true whether or not you happen to remember, or remember clearly, what happened to you. 

Realistic trauma recovery is all about bringing it back to basics, every day. 

Twenty four hours in a day. 

Sixty minutes in an hour. 

Sixty seconds in a minute. 

And we’re back to using the tools of self talk, mental focus, and physiology, especially breathing, to find a way to make THIS sixty seconds safe. 

Don’t get rushed, bullied, or discouraged by Trauma Brain. 

Reel it in, and focus on this sixty seconds. 

Let the following sixty seconds take care of themselves. 

drglenndoyle

“Joy?” What the hell is that?

CPTSD survivors are often not great at the skill of feeling joy. 

No shame. Of COURSE we’re not good at it. 

Why would we be good at feeling joy, when for so long feeling anything remotely good felt like—or demonstrably was— a trap? 

We were conditioned to believe that feeling good left us vulnerable. 

We were conditioned to believe that feeling good was most likely “fake”— that to allow ourselves to feel good only made it harder when the good feeling went away. Or was ripped away, as it often was. 

We were conditioned to believe that we had no “right” to feel good— and we were “bad” if we “gave in” to the “temptation” of feeling good. 

Most of the time this conditioning operated outside of our awareness— that’s how conditioning works. 

But the end result was, our nervous system was not predisposed to feeling good. 

It wasn’t a skill we had a lot of practice with. 

Fast forward to today, to us working our trauma recovery: as we do things, day by day, to feel and function better, it’s very common to notice anxiety spiking alongside our progress. 

That anxiety is often an artifact of how we’ve been conditioned to respond to feeling good. 

The “it’s a trap!” energy can be strong. 

Sometimes that anxiety can get so intense that we actually sabotage ourselves, so we don’t actually have to “cope” with feeling good. 

Yes— all this might sound weird, even “crazy,” to a non-trauma survivor. 

They might read this and be like, “who DOESN’T want to feel good? Weirdos.” 

It’s one of the many paradoxes of CPTSD. 

It’s not that we don’t want to feel good. Of course we want to feel good. 

It’s that we’re not quite sure how to feel good without jumping out of our skin with anxiety.

Our relationship with pleasure is one of the many relationships we need to revisit and probably reshape as we work our trauma recovery. 

You, actually, have the right to feel good. 

You have the right to feel good without worrying intensely about someone coming along and stealing that feeling from you— or shaming you for feeling it in the first place. 

We get better at experiencing joy the more precise we get at it— and the more we meet our complicated relationship with pleasure with compassion, patience, and realism. 

You know— like we meet all our symptoms and struggles in trauma recovery. 

Breathe; blink; focus.