Relationships that will support our trauma recovery will not feel like mind games.
There is, of course, the reality that Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of our bullies and abusers, is going to try effortfully to make any and every relationship feel like a mind game.
But I’m talking about the energy purposefully created by a person.
In my experience, bullies and abusers intentionally play mind games.
The enjoy a good non-consensual power imbalance.
They depend on their targets feeling off-balance in their interactions.
That’s what gaslighting is all about: putting someone in a vulnerable position by making them question their reality.
After we’ve been in coercive or manipulative relationships, we’re going to be vulnerable to power imbalances or mind games triggering us, even if a person isn’t necessarily malevolent.
We’re going to really struggle in relationships that are heavy on those lopsided dynamics— relationships that make us really vulnerable to emotional flashbacks.
Relationships with people who make us constantly question or justify ourselves just don’t support our trauma recovery.
They hijack our bandwidth to managing the weirdness or lopsidedness of the relationship, instead of managing our own self-talk, mental focus, and physiology— that is, managing our trauma recovery.
Relationships that make us question our intelligence or our worth do not support our trauma recovery.
That’s not to say we can only ever have relationships that build our ego or kiss our ass— those don’t especially support our trauma recovery, either— but CPTSD survivors are very often used to relationships just making us feel like garbage.
Life is too short and recovery is too important to try to make those relationships the backbone of our social support.
I’m talking about relationships that weaponize “humor” to belly-punch our self-esteem.
I’m talking abut relationships that expect us to swallow our values or standards to excuse the behavior of someone else.
I’m talking about relationships where we’re constantly “chasing.”
I’m talking about relationships that do nothing except trigger anxiety and cause us to second guess every interaction.
A relationship doesn’t necessarily have to be abusive to be non-recovery-supporting.
And we don’t necessarily have to cut off relationships that don’t support our recovery.
We absolutely do need to be mindful and judicious about our exposure to those people, however, and realistic about our limits and boundaries with them.
I wish none of us ever had to think about any of this.
But I’ve seen plenty of trauma recoveries compromised by “friendships” that were more or less excuses for someone to relationally punch down on survivors stuck in “fawn” mode.
Notice if a relationship of any kind consistently feels like mind games.
And ask the Recovery Supporting Question (RSQ) if you have time for that.
