It is not your fault that you were conditioned to stay in certain situations.
If we’re going to truly recover from trauma, we very much need to understand and accept what conditioning means.
It means many things that may have looked like “choices,” weren’t.
That’s true even if there was no physical coercion involved.
If you’re reading this, chances are someone has given you sh*t— or you’ve given yourself sh*t— for staying in a situation longer than you wanted to, or longer than it was healthy, or longer than was safe.
What we come to understand in working our trauma recovery is, many of those situations where we thought we were “free” to leave, were more complicated than we knew.
If our brain simply doesn’t register something as an option, it’s not a realistic option for us.
If our nervous system believes we will be harshly punished— or worse— for certain things, those things aren’t realistic options.
We can’t just “power through” those internal obstacles.
If we try, our nervous system will cheerfully engage the defenses of dissociation and “freeze,” leaving us literally, physically unable to “just leave.”
It has nothing to do with intelligence.
It has nothing to do with courage.
It has nothing to do with strength or “toughness.”
It is not an option for us to simply ignore our conditioning— especially conditioning that was burned into us by pain over time.
Complex trauma is trauma that unfolded over time; that was functionally inescapable, and that entwined our most important relationships.
That is to say: the perfect recipe for conditioning. Brainwashing, really.
We didn’t wake up one morning and just decide to be vulnerable to triggers. We were conditioned to be vulnerable to them.
We didn’t wake up one morning and just decide to believe awful things about ourselves. We were conditioned to believe those things.
We didn’t wake up one morning and just decide to struggle with our eating and body image. We were conditioned to feel and focus on those things.
And we definitely didn’t wake up one morning and just decide to fixate on hurting or killing ourselves. We were conditioned to think about and feel those things.
Our conditioning is not our fault. No one asks to be brainwashed. No one wants it. Most of the time we don’t even understand it’s happening at the time— how could we?
My model of trauma recovery is all about reconditioning our nervous and endocrine systems. No other piece of recovery work will matter if we’re not fundamentally rewiring what we reflexively think, feel, and do.
Realistically reconditioning ourselves means understanding and accepting that we were conditioned, brainwashed, programmed with trauma BS (Belief Systems— also bullsh*t).
That is to say: we are not suffering because we suck, or we suck at making choices.
We are suffering because we were “taught” and we “learned” distorted things about ourselves and reality— often by the very people and institutions that were supposed to teach us how to live and thrive in the world.
Don’t get me wrong: trauma recovery goes way beyond “it’s not your fault.”
But it definitely starts there.
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
And see your conditioned patterns for what they truly are.
