drglenndoyle

Did you say “the future,” Conan?

CPTSD does a real number on our ability to believe in a future that is anything but sh*tty. 

For that matter, CPTSD does a real number on our ability to think about the future at all. 

Part of is is depression— we just have zero motivation or focus to think about the future. 

Part of is is learned helplessness (which isn’t our fault, despite it being “learned”)— we’ve been conditioned by CPTSD do believe there’s nothing we can do to positively affect the future, so why bother? 

Yet another part of it is the cognitive distortion of “fortune telling”— that is, CPTSD has convinced us that we “know” what all is coming, and it’s all “obviously” sh*tty, so why think about any of it at all? 

Here’s the thing: when we’ve been kneecapped by CPTSD in our ability to think about the future, we’re also not that interested in doing anything right here, right now, to feel or function better. 

That is to say: we feel profoundly stuck. 

I don’t actually need you to believe that the future is going to be awesome. After all, how would I know? I don’t have any knowledge about the future that any other human lacks. 

I’ll tell you what I do know, though: CPTSD lies. 

CPTSD lies about fault and responsibility. 

CPTSD lies about how capable we are. 

And CPTSD lies about what we deserve. 

I don’t know what the future holds— but I do know that CPTSD’s insistence that it’s nothing but sh*t is probably not true, simply because of how full of sh*t CPTSD tends to be. 

Look, I’m not some raging, unrealistic optimist. I don’t believe in toxic positivity. 

But I also don’t believe in making sweeping judgments about what a situation will or won’t be based on the feelings and fears of this moment. 

I believe in planing. 

I believe in consistency and incremental change. 

I believe in trajectory over speed. 

I believe in habits. 

All of which is to say: I believe in creating the future, not waiting for it to happen or dreading it. 

Maybe we can or can’t impact the future— but if we can’t, we’ve lost nothing by choosing to believe we can. 

And if we can actually impact the future? Then approaching it decision by decision, with clarity and certainty about our goals and values, will realistically create a quality of life that CPTSD doesn’t want us to believe exists. 

I’m willing to make that bet. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

CPTSD hijacks our attention & dysregulates our emotions.

I think of CPSTD as a hijacker of attention. 

That’s mostly what CPTSD does. Yank our attention toward things and people that do not deserve it and that do not serve us. 

I think of CPTSD recovery as the process of relearning— or, in many cases, learning in the first place— how to retake effective control of our attention. 

Trauma yanks our attention toward memories, thoughts, and beliefs that make us feel like garbage. 

Trauma evokes self-talk that scares and demoralizes us. 

Trauma coerces our attention toward emotional regulation strategies, like substance use and self-harm, that create more problems than they solve. 

Effective trauma recovery is almost entirely about effective attention management. 

Being able to shift our attention away from things that scare and sabotage us, and toward things that support us in dealing with reality. 

Every effective trauma recovery strategy supports us in retaking control of our attention. 

One of the things that makes CPTSD recovery so hard in the fist place is the fact that most of us were not taught how to direct our attention growing up. 

Many of us assume we’re at the mercy of our attention and our emotions— that the only way we can get “over” trauma is by something magical happening, such that our attention is no long drawn toward things that make us feel like sh*t. 

Unfortunately, there is no magic in trauma recovery. 

What there is, is realistic attention management and emotional regulation— which almost always reduce down to making choices about our self-talk, mental focus, and physiology, especially our breathing. 

I wish it was more profound than that— but it’s not. 

Which is not to say any of this is easy. 

Effectively working our trauma recovery means wrangling our attention— which can be a massive pain in the ass. 

Most of us would rather not invest the effort in wrangling our attention or regulating our emotions that trauma recovery requires— and, to be clear, none of this is f*cking fair. 

Neither you nor I should have to even think about any of this sh*t. 

But— we don’t have the option of not having lived the life we lived. We don’t have the option of not having to wake up every morning and staring CPTSD in the face. 

So: wringing our attention and regulating our emotions it is. 

Step by step, day by day. 

You can do this. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

So what do we actually DO with these “feelings,” anyway?

So what do we do with all these feelings we’re experiencing with all this intensity? 

CPTSD does a real number on our emotional regulation— meaning if we feel anything at all, we feel it with, you know, the white hot intensity of a thousand suns. 

We get to the point where we’d really rather not feel anything. 

We get to hate and fear our emotions. After all, they don’t seem to do much of anything but f*ck us up. 

Then we get into trauma recovery, and we’re told that it’s not a solution to deny or disown or dissociate our emotions anymore— but that begs the question: what the hell are we supposed to DO with these “feeling” things, huh? 

Often, the very best thing we can do with those “feeling” things is to hang out with them. 

Sit with them. 

Let them exist. 

Most importantly: do not deny them, disown them, or demand that they not exist. 

CPTSD survivors have had our feelings invalidated, attacked, ignored, and disrespected for most of our lives. 

The key to CPTSD recovery is scrambling all those old patterns. 

That means we can’t treat our feelings like the people in our lives treated them— or us. 

Even if we don’t yet quite know how to regulate or understand our emotions, we can’t be in the business of abusing them. 

Abusing our emotions is abusing ourselves. 

Neglecting our emotions is neglecting ourselves. 

Sit with them. 

Be with them. 

Treat your emotions like the “parts” of yourself that they are— maybe difficult to understand, maybe difficult to contain, maybe difficult to cope with…but important. Valuable. 

In my experience, if we sit with our feelings long enough, without overreacting, without demanding anything of them, without insisting they not exist or go away, without judging them— our feelings will tell us what they’re all about. 

They’ll tell us what they need from us. 

But it all starts with the willingness to sit with them. To hang out with them. 

To validate them. 

What a concept, huh? 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

You get to decide.

You have the right to determine what your life looks and feels like. 

This is a revolutionary concept to many survivors of trauma. 

Many of us have been conditioned to believe that we don’t get any say in the shape or feel of our life. 

Many of us have only ever felt NOT in control of our life. 

Many of us have lost any kind of faith in our ability to affect the direction of our life. 

It’s a thing called “learned helplessness”— which doesn’t mean it’s our fault, even though it’s “learned.” What it means is that we’ve had the experience, again and again, of trying to affect or change things in our life, and we haven’t been able to. 

So of course we lose confidence in our ability to change things. 

That’s not our fault. 

Trauma recovery is going to ask us to believe in our ability to actually shape and choose our experience of life— and, no doubt, that can feel like a risk. 

Letting ourselves experience hope absolutely feels risky. 

It’s okay to be anxious about feeling hope. 

It’s okay to be reluctant to let ourselves feel hope. 

But we can be open to it. 

As you and I work our trauma recovery, we slowly start to believe in our ability to realistically, meaningfully change things in our life— bit by bit, choice by choice. Not all at once. 

Don’t think of this “recovery” thing as requiring huge leaps of faith or belief. 

Just focus on the .01%. 

Just focus on making one teeny, tiny choice today that can help your life feel better, more comfortable, more authentic, more livable. 

How your life looks and feels is truly up to you. 

It won’t transform overnight, and that’s okay. That’s better, actually. 

We want change to stick. 

We want your new life to be realistic and sustainable. 

You get to choose what it looks like. 

You get to choose what it feels like. 

You get to choose who does and doesn’t have access to your new life. 

You get to choose what your new life is all about. 

You have the right and you have the ability. 

Don’t let anyone tell you different. 

drglenndoyle

Slow down. You’re doin’ fine.

I want your CPTSD recovery to be realistic and sustainable. 

Not dramatic. Not cinematic. 

And not stupid fast. 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want any survivor to suffer for a second longer than they have to. 

But I have seen trauma recovery go up in smoke because survivors pressured themselves to do it fast. 

Part of that is an artifact of how many of us were raised. 

Many of us were conditioned to believe that fast is good and slow is bad. That if we’re “good” at something, we can do it fast, and ideally more or less perfectly the first time. 

Many trauma survivors (and many humans!) very much HATE feeling like we’re not good at a thing we’re trying to do. 

We feel embarrassed. We feel humiliated. 

We feel like we want to quit this thing we’re trying, because we believe we’re “failing” at it— and we want to not try at it anymore, because who needs to feel like a “failure,” am I right? 

The truth about trauma recovery is, we tend to be better at it the slower we take it. 

And the real truth about trauma recovery that many survivors don’t want to hear is, we only ever get REALLY good at it by embracing the fact that we are, every day, beginners at it. 

That might sound weird. Isn’t the goal of this whole thing to achieve mastery? 

You bet it is— but we only ever achieve anything approaching mastery at trauma recovery by approaching it every day as a beginner. 

Whenever a survivor starts making noises about how “good” they are at trauma recovery, that sends up a flag for me— a flag that there’s something off about their recovery. 

Trauma recovery is too delicately balanced for us to get a big head about any of it. 

True masters, of recovery or anything else, approach EVERYTHING as a learning opportunity. 

I approach every day in my own trauma and addiction recovery as a student. A beginner, who has things to learn from this day. 

Not only does that take off some of the pressure of having to “perform” recovery, it reminds me that I am never, ever, so strong or so skilled that I have nothing to learn from this day. 

Part of being an eternal beginner, an eternal student, is going slow. 

After all, if we go too fast, we can’t really learn things— we’re too busy keeping up and plowing ahead. 

Mind you: I’m a big believer in self-improvement and goal setting. 

Yes, I want to improve constantly. A core principle of my life is CANI— Constant And Never-ending Improvement. 

But to realistically achieve CANI, I have to slow down. 

To really look and really see. 

To really take in what this day in recovery has to teach me. 

To really internalize and reinforce the skills, tools, and philosophies that will keep me safe and stable today. 

Wanna go fast in trauma recovery? Me too. 

So go slow. 

Slow is steady. 

Steady is fast.

And beginner mind is mastery. 

drglenndoyle

Today is a point on your recovery arc– not the whole thing.

Remember that today is not the end all, be all of your CPTSD recovery. 

CPTSD recovery does not happen in a day.

The damage CPTSD did happened over time. Years, usually. 

We’re not going to repair that in a day. We couldn’t if we tried— and that’s okay. 

CPTSD recovery is a project. I like to think of it as a lifestyle. 

CPTSD recovery is about our long term patterns of how we talk to ourselves, how we focus, and how we leverage our physiology. 

Today those patterns might not be great. 

Today might be a sh*t show, even. 

That’s okay. 

Today is just one point on our recovery arc, not the whole arc. 

If you’re reading this, there’s a 99% chance you’re being too hard on yourself today. 

There’s a very good chance you’re thinking of this “recovery” project in very black and white terms. 

If today’s a sh*t show, remember: one sh*t show day does not a recovery define. 

You’re okay. 

Surf the sh*t show. 

So there’s anxiety today. 

F*ck it. 

So there’s depression today. 

F*ck it. 

So there are emotional flashbacks today. 

Two tears in a bucket, motherf*ck it. 

Today is what it is— but the most important thing today is, is temporary. 

Surf it. Ride it out. 

Let the sh*t show stink exactly as bad as it stinks. 

And remind yourself that CPTSD recovery is an arc. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

So no one told us life was gonna be this way.

Trauma and addiction recovery bring us face to face with the fact that our life did not go as planned. 

Maybe nobody’s life does. But our life really, really didn’t. 

And, we’re going to have feelings about that fact. 

There’s going to be anger about that fact. 

There’s going to be sadness about that fact. 

And if you’re like me, there’s going to be plenty of just…f*cking…amazement at how spectacularly off the rails life has gone. 

Many survivors in recovery really struggle with accepting that we’re this far from where we thought, where we assumed, we’d end up. 

We weren’t supposed to be HERE by now. 

We were supposed to be…who knows where, but not HERE. 

We can get real up in our head about where we ended up at this point in our life. 

It’s real easy to get into a spiral about the fact. 

Reeling ourselves in when we get all freaked out by how f*cking far we feel from the path we “should” be on, is a recovery skill. 

We get to feel whatever we feel about it. Sad, angry, incredulous, whatever. 

And, we get to not let whatever we feel about it drag us away from working our recovery today. 

The truth is, there’s no guarantee we were EVER “supposed” to life ANY specific life. 

Hell, I did not even imagine I’d be alive today, let alone on a particular life path. 

Whatever “path” we thought was for us, just wasn’t in the cards. 

So be it. 

Apparently that life was never supposed to be a thing. 

This is the life we have. This life, right here, right now. 

Not our life as a victim of trauma or an addict in active suffering— but our life in recovery. 

The teeny, tiny recovery supporting rituals we do today are more important than anything that “could have been” or “should have been.” 

What we do next is infinitely more important than what we did or didn’t do at any moment in the past. 

So life didn’t go as planned. So what. 

We have today. 

We are alive today. 

We have a chance to influence today, with our self talk, our mental focus, and our physiology. 

We’re here. 

That’s all that matters now. 

drglenndoyle

Let ’em moo.

As we work our trauma recovery, we’re going to get sh*t from people. 

Not “maybe.’ We will. 

Some of those people may be well intentioned, some of them won’t be— but all of it is going to be annoying. 

Here we are, just trying to make micro choices that support our safety and stability, and here they are, well intentioned or not, giving us sh*t. 

Let me assure you that no trauma survivor or addict in recovery is struggling because they haven’t gotten enough sh*t. 

Giving them more sh*t probably isn’t the move that will finally nudge them into a better place. 

But also, here’s the thing about many of the “helpful” people who are so willing and eager to give us sh*t as we work our recovery: their values, goals, or worldview may not have anything to do with ours. 

When people give us input or feedback, they make this huge assumption that we want what they want. That we value what they value. That we can do what they can do. 

But it’s very often not true. 

You need to know that the vast majority of sh*t you’re going to get in your recovery journey will be from people you don’t want to approve of you, anyway. 

Everybody’s going to have an opinion about how everybody else “should” be living their life— but that opinion may or may not be valid when it comes to you. 

But we may not always have a lot of perspective on that, thanks to the “fawn” trauma response at work. 

“Fawn” will try, hard, to convince us we “have” to take the sh*t other people give us. 

We don’t. 

It actually doesn’t matter if they approve of you. I don’t even care who “they” are, in this context. 

Anyone giving you sh*t for how you’re working your recovery is kvetching from the cheap seats. 

You’re the one in the arena. 

I’ve said it before: their opinions are a moo point. 

You know, it’s like a cow’s opinion. It just doesn’t matter. 

It’s “moo.” 

So they’ll give you sh*t. So they may not approve of how you’re working your recovery. So they’ll judge and they’ll b*tch and they’ll find all sorts of ways to try to make you feel like you’re doing it wrong. 

So? 

Let ‘em moo. 

You stay focused on YOUR recovery micro goals today, this hour. 

drglenndoyle

“Control” is a bogus concept.

Trauma survivors very often feel “out of control.” 

We know we’re not in control of many of the events of our lives. The events of our lives have demonstrated that to us, again and again. 

But also we very often feel like we have next to zero control over our reactions and feelings. 

It’s true that having endured certain things in our life mean we are particularly vulnerable to overwhelming feelings and behavioral reflexes that are often confusing or even self destructive. 

But thinking in terms of “controlling” those “problems” is only going to make the situation worse. 

“Control” is kind of a bogus concept. 

We don’t, actually, “control” our feelings, even under the best or circumstances. 

We don’t even “control” our behavioral reflexes, even under the best or circumstances. 

If someone important to us is cruel or dismissive toward us, we’re going to feel bad. There’s no “controlling” that.

If we touch a hot stove, we’re going to recoil— and thereafter, we’ll probably recoil from anything that our nervous system suspects MIGHT be a “hot stove.” There’s no “controlling” that. 

CPTSD survivors tend to get way up in our had about all the things we can’t “control”— which, it turns out, is a hell of a lot. Almost everything, in fact. 

Sustainable trauma recovery asks us to surrender our focus on “control”— and instead shift to developing realistic INFLUENCE over what we can. 

The “Serenity Prayer” in the Twelve Step recovery tradition frames it in terms of having the “serenity” to accept the things we can’t change, the “courage” to change the things we can— and the “wisdom” to know the difference. 

There is SO MUCH we can’t control out there, we will drive ourselves absolutely crazy if we persevere on it. 

Trying desperately to have “control” over things we cannot control is an absolute recipe for depression and burnout. And nobody reading this needs to set themselves up for MORE depression and burnout than they’ve already experienced. 

I recommend making the shift in your self talk from a focus on “control,” to a focus on realistic INFLUENCE. 

Don’t ask, “how can I CONTROL my mood;” ask “how can I INFLUENCE my mood 1% today?” 

Instead of asking “how can I CONTROL my trauma responses,” ask, “how can I INFLUENCE my VULNERABILITY to trauma responses by 1% today?” 

Thinking and talking to ourselves in terms of influence, rather than “control,” and adding realistic frames around our self talk (1% today), shift how our nervous system processes and responds to our self talk and expectations. 

It’s the difference between a coach who only says broad, abstract things like “DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO WIN!” versus the coach who instructs you to “work on improving this specific skill by this specific amount, right now.” 

Our self talk around “control” is often one of our biggest vulnerabilities in trauma recovery, and we often don’t even realize it, simply because it’s so “natural” to think and talk in terms of “control.” 

Realistic trauma recovery is not about “control.” It never was. 

“Control” is really kind of a myth. 

I will bet on the survivor who gets serous about realistically INFLUENCING their patterns every time. 

drglenndoyle

CPTSD and systems of meaning.

At the core of CPTSD suffering is what psychologists call “systems of meaning.” 

It’s not just what happened to us. Though what happened to us may have been painful enough. 

It’s what we believe those things mean. 

We were abused. We were neglected. Those are facts. 

But Trauma Brain is absolutely going to try sell us on what those facts mean. 

It will try to convince us the fact of our abuse means, we “deserved” it. Or “asked” for it. Or maybe even “liked” it on some level. 

It will try to convince us the fact of our abuse means, we will always walk though this world damaged and dangerous. 

It will try to convince us the fact of our abuse means, we “have to” do self harmful things to regulate our emotions. 

None of those things are true. But Trauma Brain is going to try effortfully to make those narratives the backbone of our systems of meaning. 

The truth is, we get to decide what things do and don’t mean to us. 

We cannot change the fact of our trauma— but we can absolutely shape our understanding of what those facts mean. 

We do not have to accept anyone else’s systems of meaning. 

If someone else thinks we’re “broken” or “damaged goods” because we’ve been abused, that’s a drag— but we do not have to decide that’s what having been abused means to us. 

If someone else thinks abuse survivors “ask” for it, that’s a serious drag— but we do not have to buy into that system of meaning, either. 

Trauma Brain wants us to believe that the systems of meaning attached to certain facts are or should be “obvious”— but that’s just our trauma conditioning trying to get us to not question it’s bullsh*t. 

Our systems of meaning are ours. We get to choose them. 

We don’t have to just download and operate on someone else’s systems of meaning— including the systems of meaning embraced by our family or faith. 

Facts are facts. 

But meanings can be molded to support our recovery.