Trauma Brain’s favorite trick.

Trauma Brain is going to try to trick you into wasting your focus and bandwidth on the past. 

Don’t take that bait. 

When we’ve struggled with a trauma response or made a recovery inconsistent decision, the temptation is going to be to judge ourselves harshly— to replicate the behavior of our bullies and abusers by kicking ourselves. Repeatedly. 

Trauma Brain is going to try to get us to keep kicking ourselves by telling us that if we stop kicking ourselves, we’re “letting ourselves off the hook” and “not taking responsibility” for our struggles or poor decisions. 

We definitely know we don’t want to do that— so we keep kicking ourselves. 

Every moment we spend judging and kicking ourselves is a moment not dedicated to strengthening our recovery tools or making a better decision. 

Most everything Trauma Brain does to us is an attempt to distract us from asking Recovery Supporting Questions (RSQ’s) or following through with Recovery Supporting Rituals (RSR’s). 

Trauma Brain knows that if we constantly as RSQ’s and perform RSR’s, then we recover— but it knows if it can distract us from our RSQ’s and RSR’s, we’ll eventually burn out and revert back to our autopilot. 

Our autopilot, of course, was programmed by our trauma experiences. Trauma Brain IS our autopilot. 

Think of Trauma Brain as an autopilot enabled with artificial intelligence— that will work overtime to get us to quit trying to take the wheel ourselves. 

I’m a firm believer in accountability. Accountability is super important in both addiction and trauma recovery. Without accountability, recovery is impossible. 

But kicking ourselves for the last recovery inconsistent decision we made is not accountability. 

Refusing to stay focused on our last bad decision is not “letting ourselves off the hook.” No one is asking us to like or approve of the last recovery inconsistent decision we made. 

We need to be realistic about the fact that recovery is largely about allocating resources. 

All of us have a limited amount of energy and time and bandwidth. Most of us survivors actually have less of these resources than many people, because we’re exhausted from having been in survival mode for months and years at a time. 

Kicking ourselves over our last bad decision is simply not a wise investment of those scarce resources. 

Kicking ourselves will never result in us being able to un-make that recovery inconsistent decision. 

What kicking ourselves will do is make us feel like garbage— which doesn’t exactly help us make the NEXT decision any better.

Behavioral psychologists know that punishment simply isn’t a particularly effective at lasting behavior change. 

Most animals, when they are punished for making a decision, only learn to avoid similar choices in the short term— but they come to hate whoever is doling out the punishment in the long term. 

When we punish ourselves for recovery inconsistent decisions, we are not making it any more likely that the next decision will be recovery consistent— but we are teaching ourselves to hate and distrust ourselves. 

That’s not how we build self-esteem, and it’s not how we make better choices. 

Trauma Brain knows all that. Which is why Trauma rain wants us kicking ourselves whenever we make a recovery inconsistent decision. 

We do not have to love every decision we make. We do not have to approve of every decision we make. I know I neither love nor approve of every decision I’ve made, even in the last twenty four hours. 

But if we’re working a realistic, sustainable recovery, we do have to manage our self-talk and mental focus in such a way that we are facing forward, not backward. 

Neither trauma nor addiction recovery can be navigated looking backward. 

Don’t take the bait. Refocus. Again, and again, and again. And again.