Use Your Damn Skills

Trauma often makes us hate ourselves. 

We often come through trauma disliking and distrusting ourselves. 

Trauma has a way of brainwashing us into believing we are at fault for what happened— and we deserve to be punished for what happened to us. 

Trauma often convinces us that there is nothing “normal” about our assorted trauma responses— that they are evidence of our “weakness” of mind, body, spirit, or character. 

In short, trauma CONDITIONS us in a lot of BS (Belief Systems— but the other kind of BS, too). 

(That is to say, bullsh*t.)

In my view, a significant part of the work of trauma recovery is repairing our damaged relationship with ourselves. 

Yes, it’s also about decreasing the intensity and frequency of our trauma responses, with the eventual goal of eliminating them altogether— but in my experience, our trauma repossess don’t begin to meaningfully decrease unless and until we start getting on better terms with ourselves. 

Repairing our relationship with ourselves is hard, when we’ve been taught, programmed, and conditioned to hate ourselves. 

Learning to like, trust, and eventually love ourselves takes time. We are undoing literal years of conditioning here. We’re physically rerouting neural pathways in our nervous system, and it doesn’t happen overnight. 

However, there’s a toxic positivity truism that get thrown around a lot that tells us we can’t love somebody else “until” we love ourselves— that if we don’t love ourselves first, we’re not able to love someone else in a non-toxic way. 

I understand what people mean when they say this— but it’s just not that straightforward. 

Can it be complicated to love and be loved by somebody when we have deeply negative feelings about ourselves? Of course. 

If we have deeply negative feelings about ourselves, and somebody comes along and says they love us, it can spike all kinds of doubts and insecurities and suspicions. 

Many of us were wounded by people who said they loved us. 

Some of us were even told that the wounds “they” inflicted were actually evidence of their love. 

Many of us believe, by default, that anything that comes FROM us— such as love, affection, or attraction— MUST be toxic, because, we believe, WE are “toxic.” 

So, yes: love can be complicated when we’re struggling with negative beliefs and feelings about ourselves.

But that does NOT mean our love IS toxic. 

It does NOT mean that we cannot express our love, not only in non-toxic ways, but in ways that are genuinely safe, healthy, and loving. 

It’s true that many of us do not have many healthy role models for what “love” actually looks like. 

But it does not follow that our love is inherently harmful. 

Do we have to be mindful and intentional with how we conduct relationships and allow ourselves to be vulnerable when we’re working a trauma recovery? Very much. 

Do we have to pay close attention to what in our relationships is actually in evidence, versus the fevered spinning of our trauma-driven internal prosecutor? Absolutely. 

But let me be clear, fellow trauma survivor: your love is not toxic. 

It s not harmful. 

It is not wrong. 

It is not shameful. 

Literally the best, most loving parents I know are trauma survivors working their recovery (and yes, I have specific people in mind when I say that). 

Literally he best, most loving pet owners I know are survivors working their recovery. 

The most faithful, loyal friends I have are survivors working their recovery. 

Are any of us fully healed, to the point of unconditionally “loving ourselves?” Definitely not all of us, no. 

But we’re all working our recovery, one day at a time. 

That’s all it takes. 

All meaningful trauma and/or addiction recovery is ultimately our personal project. 

It happens on our timeline. And we are ultimately responsible for it. 

Why is that important to say out loud? Er, in print? On the internet? 

Because there are people out there who really, really don’t want you to own you recovery.

These are usually people who are selling a product or service that they market as being necessary for you to recover. 

Sometimes psychotherapy is even marketed this way. 

(Scratch that. Psychotherapy is OFTEN marketed this way.)

There really are people, some of them therapists, who will try to tell you that you cannot recover without their product or service. 

What that tells me is, they don’t know how recovery happens in the real world. 

I hate to inform them, but people have been recovering from trauma and addiction since long before “psychotherapy” even existed as a field, let alone in the post-Freud form it does today. 

This matters because if we buy into their assertion that you can’t recover without their product or service, then access to that product or service becomes really important. 

And the truth is, many, many people don’t have access to the products or services that are being marketed as “essential” to trauma or addiction recovery. 

I’m writing this because I want you to see all this for the marketing trick that it is. 

Trauma and addiction chew people up and spit them out every day. Post traumatic disorders and addictions are killers if they’re allowed to just do their thing. 

If therapists and others market their products and services as the “only” way you can recover— if recovery is not your personal project, but their product or service to SELL you— then they get to put a price on your recovery. 

That is to say, they get to put a price on your life. 

It’s just not true. 

There IS no product or service, including psychotherapy or rehab, that guarantees our recovery from trauma or addiction. 

In the real world, our recovery is usually cobbled together from LOTS of sources. Sometimes therapy plays a role, for some people. Sometimes it doesn’t. 

I find it really interesting that the people who seem to advocate most loudly and consistently for the “essential” role of psychotherapy— often long term therapy the effectiveness of which is not easily measured—  in recovery tend to be the people or organizations that have the most to gain from people believing it. 

This blog entry isn’t going to do well. It’ll likely stir up certain voices who will tell me I’m trivializing the role of psychotherapy, rehab, or other products and services in peoples’ recovery from trauma and addiction. 

You can make up your mind whether that’s what I’m actually doing. 

For some people, therapy with the right therapist can be a turning point. 

For some people, therapy can keep them alive or in the game. That’s no small thing. 

But let me be super clear with what I’m saying here: your recovery is not dependent upon working with a particular therapist, doing a particular type of therapy, for a particular length of time. 

Your recovery does not depend on you being able to afford or access ANY specific product or service. 

Your recovery does not depend on you adopting a specific philosophy or believing in a specific religion or spiritual or metaphysical system. 

There are multiple roads to recovery from trauma and addiction, and you’ll probably need different approaches at tools at various points in your recovery. 

But the bottom line is: recovery is up to us. 

All healing is ultimately self-healing. 

All help is ultimately self-help. 

The care we need to make it through this is ultimately, unavoidably self-care. 

Anyone who says differently is selling something. 

Do trauma survivors “take things personally?” You bet. 

You would, too, if you’d been conditioned to believe that EVERYTHING was your fault— and EVERYTHING was your responsibility. 

As survivors, we very often struggle to separate who we are from how we perform. 

We very often struggle to separate our worth from what others think of us or how they react to use. 

Very often, trauma survivors have been conditioned to believe that our value, such as it is, depends on our ability to produce; or entertain; or arouse. 

If and when our ability to produce, or entertain, or arouse deteriorates, we get worried that we will no longer be valuable to the people around us— and that we’ll be rejected and abandoned in short order. 

When you lay it out like that, it may not sound logical or sensical. 

But in our head, it is VERY real— because that scenario very often represents actual experiences we’ve had. 

Trauma survivors have often learned, the hard way, that our value to certain people is not absolute. 

We’ve often learned, the hard way, that there really are people who will cut us loose when our presence is no longer of immediate, demonstrable value to their goals. 

We’ve learned to feel expendable— because that was how we were treated in many of our most important relationships, often very early in our lives. 

Survivors of emotional neglect especially tend to struggle with this. 

Abuse often conditions victims to believe they were made to be used and discarded. 

Neglect conditions victims to believe they’re not worth paying either positive or negative attention to. 

So survivors of neglect often grow up believing they have to work extra hard to be even remotely visible. 

They grow up believing they have to work extra hard to be even sort of valuable. 

They often grow up believing it was something about them that made their caretakers ignore them— they must not have been “special” enough, or entertaining enough, or attractive enough…not “good” enough. 

So: yes. Survivors of abuse and neglect absolutely take things personally— usually because we never got the kind of assurance we needed to believe that not everything that happens to us is a referendum on our worth or “goodness.” 

We could have, should have, received assurance that we are worthy and valuable even on days when we’re not particularly attractive; not particularly entertaining; not particularly energetic; not particularly engaged. 

But we didn’t. 

We could have, should have, received assurance that nobody’s behavior TOWARD us could, by definition, take value AWAY from us. 

But we didn’t. 

We could have, should have, received received assurance that not everything is about us. NOT everything is our fault. NOT everything is our responsibility. 

But we didn’t. 

So now, in trauma recovery, as adults, we have to kind of start over, with all that. 

We’re faced with the task of reconditioning our highly sensitive nervous system, which has been CONVINCED for years that we’re probably “the problem” in any given situation. 

It’s not a choice we’re making to believe that. It’s programming. Conditioning. 

The good news about conditioning, even trauma conditioning, is that it is reversible. Trauma recovery is the project of reconditioning our nervous system with beliefs and habits and feelings WE choose, that support the life WE’RE trying to create. 

Keep at it. Just keep chipping away. 

I remember the first time a therapist said the words “coping skills” to me— I hated it. 

I was a junior in high school. I had become the “identified patient” in m family after having a panic attack at school. 

(Do you know how f*ckng disorienting a panic attack is, when you have no idea “panic attacks” even exist? Very disorienting, is the answer.)

My parents had gotten me in to see a counselor, a family friend who would become one of my first role models in the psychotherapy field. 

(He would actually be present, along with my mother and me, at my dad’s death. But that’s a different story.)

Anyway. Yeah, I hated the words “coping skills.” 

To me, those words spoke of just getting by. 

The word “coping,” specifically, to me had some sort of…stench of desperation to it. 

I did not want to just “cope.” I wanted to succeed. I wanted to thrive. 

If this “therapy” thing was only going to equip me to “cope,” I can’t say I was very interested in it at all. 

Fast forward to now— I’m a therapist, and I spend a fair amount of my time supporting survivors in developing, you guessed it, coping skills. 

It took me years to realize that “coping” is not a bad word. 

The truth is, we have to cope BEFORE we can succeed. Before we can thrive. 

I know that now, with years of trauma and addiction recovery. But I empathize with the teenage-Glenn’s reaction. 

He couldn’t imagine a life of “just getting by” being anything he wanted to live. 

I’ve often discussed how my immersion in self-help books as a teenager helped me to not kill myself. Something I think about a lot is the fact that one of the main reasons why that worked was, self-help books usually don’t advertise themselves as “coping tools.” 

Rather, they present themselves as tools of success and thriving. 

Had those self-help books been focused on “coping,” I doubt they would have been effective, or at least as effective, for me. 

As a depressed, suicidal teenager, I didn’t yet have an appreciation for how miraculous it is to f*ckin’ cope. 

I eventually learned— but I still get why teenage-me wasn’t into “coping.” 

To be honest, while I’ve developed a powerful appreciation for the miracle of coping, I still don’t believe in trauma or addiction recovery the overarching goal of which is to just get by. To just cope. 

I don’t think you, or anyone, should be in recovery to “just get by” or “just cope.” 

To me, the promise of recovery isn’t coping. That’s just a starting point. 

To me, the promise of recovery is joy. 

It’s meaningful connection. 

It’s feeling f*cking awesome— consistently and predictably. 

Don’t get me wrong: coping is a necessary first step. But I have never, ever believed it to be the only step, or the ultimate step. 

I DO believe that if we’re serious about joy, we have to make our peace with going through the stage of just getting by. It’s kind of like how, in Twelve Step recovery, it’s not an option to jump right to Step Twelve— you have to experience and master the progressive increments of recovery, literally one step at a time. 

But don’t forget: while learning and using coping skills can be a pain in the ass, they are a necessary pain in the ass if our goal is to get PAST the “just getting by” stage. 

Recovery is not just about keeping our head above water— though it is assuredly about that. 

Recovery is about learning how to f*ckn’ waterski. 

One of the hardest things to give up in trauma recovery is that fantasy that “they” will finally be who we want or need them to be. 

That our parents will actually love us. 

That our church will actually be concerned for our spiritual well being. 

That our culture or community will accept us— even if we don’t conform to their expectations or preferences. 

We hold on to the hope that “they” will somehow, some way, become who we want them to be. Who we need them to be. Who we wanted and needed them to be when we were growing up. 

Don’t get me wrong— sometimes it happens. Not always, maybe not even often. But sure, of course it happens. 

People change, and organizations change. Sometimes institutions change dramatically when thire leadership changes. Communities and even cultures can change significantly over time. 

The thing is: we can’t hang our recovery on the idea or hope of them changing. 

We chan’t stake our recovery on our parents suddenly becoming the nurturers we wanted and needed them to be when we were growing up. 

We can’t stake our recovery on our church suddenly becoming invested in our individual spiritual or emotional well being, when for years it has prioritized its institutional survival over the well being of its individual members. 

We can’t put off our recovery hoping that the culture will come around to accepting our sexual orientation or gender identity— or even understanding it. 

All of those things would be awesome. Many of us are heavily involved in efforts to change organizations and the broader culture, with the goal of making them more caring and inclusive. 

But we can’t make our recovery contingent on anyone or anything “out there” changing or behaving in a particular way. 

If we do, we will be waiting forever. 

Many of us would absolutely find it enormously healing or gratifying if certain people or organizations DID change. 

If certain changes DID occur within individuals or institutions or within the culture at large, would that absolutely contribute to our healing and support our recovery? You bet. 

But our recovery is not continent on their epiphany. 

For a long time, many people reading this have lived their lives in reaction to other people. 

Other people have set the tone and the agenda for our lives. 

For a long time, many of us were little more than characters in other peoples’ stories. 

In recovery, we finally take charge of our own story. 

We finally become the main character in our own narrative. 

We finally embrace the fact that we get to make our story about what we want it to be about— not about the attitudes or beliefs or agenda of anybody else. 

In some ways, this is enormously empowering. 

In other ways, it can be bittersweet. 

It’s not fun giving up the fantasy that people or institutions or the culture at large will get better. Kinder. Safer. 

But we’ve spent enough time focused on and waiting for “them.” 

Now— it’s time for us. It’s time for you. 

This is your story. Your adventure. 

Whether or not “they” are ready for it or willing to play a positive role in it. 

Complex trauma is more than just “a bad thing happened.” 

It can involve catastrophic trauma or loss— but often doesn’t. 

Our culture is relatively better at recognizing catastrophic “flashbulb” trauma— the kind of trauma that is overt, observable, and changes everything— than complex trauma. 

Complex trauma is very often hidden. 

People enduring complex trauma are often effortfully trying to keep it a secret. 

Many people enduring complex trauma don’t even know that’s what is happening. 

One thing that makes complex trauma “complex” is that it is inescapable— or, at least, we experience it as inescapable. 

An example of this is the kid who is being abused at home. Very often, when we’re kids, we can’t opt out of our family— even if we’re being abused. 

Another example is if we’ve been sucked into a cult or high control community. While it may be technically, theoretically possible to escape, very often the group has social, economic, or spiritual leverage over us that makes leaving realistically impossible. 

Another characteristic of complex trauma is that it occurs over time. 

Catastrophic “flashbulb” trauma often occurs in an instant— there is an easily identifiable “before” and “after.” One minute the World Trade Center was standing; the next, it wasn’t. 

Complex trauma often doesn’t have such well defined beginnings and endings. More often it occurs over the long term. A common example is familial abuse— or spousal abuse that occurs or escalates over the course of years. 

It’s relatively easer to observe the changes in our nervous system before and after a catastrophic “flashbulb” event— but when the trauma is happening day after day, and we’re forced to adapt to it (and, often hide it) day after day, it’s harder to see how our nervous system is changing day after day, year after year. 

A third characteristic of complex trauma is that it often entwines with our most important relationships. 

One of the reasons why abuse or neglect by a parent or caretaker is particularly harmful— and complex— is because parents aren’t just anyone. They’re the people who are supposed to love and protect you, more than anyone else. 

Abuse by a spiritual guru, clergy member, therapist, or professional mentor is similarly harmful and complex, because they’re not strangers— they are people who are intimately involved with important domains in our life. 

A fourth characteristic of complex trauma— which I think is often overlooked in discussions of CPTSD— is that it almost always involves betrayal. 

The people who should have had our back, didn’t. 

The people who were supposed to give us the benefit of the doubt, didn’t. 

The people who were supposed to be on our side, weren’t. 

There are many examples of trauma of varying complexity out there, and there might be examples of complex trauma that don’t check the boxes I’ve outlined here— but for my money, these four are the most common, most important characteristics of complex trauma. 

Our culture hasn’t caught up to the differences between “classic” (catastrophic, “flashbulb”) trauma and complex trauma. 

Very often complex traumatic stressors are brushed off as consequences of “choices” made by victims. 

Our culture very much doesn’t like the idea of trauma that is not as easily identifiable or treatable as “flashbulb” trauma. 

But once you learn what complex trauma is, and you realize how embedded in the culture it is, how prevalent it is out in the world— and potentially in your own life— you can’t un-see it. 

I know. But breathe; blink; and focus. 

I often say trauma survivors live on the tail ends of the bell curve. 

What I mean by that is, trauma survivors are often afflicted with medical and other conditions that are considered “rare.” 

It’s very often the case that trauma survivors struggle with medical conditions that are difficult to diagnose, and which many medical doctors don’t have much experience working with. 

Survivors with complicated medical conditions often have to travel, often at great expense and inconvenience, to get their medical needs met. 

This often mirrors the situation many survivors face with their mental health: they often have to search far and wide, and often travel, to get appropriate mental health care. 

Trauma survivors are more likely to struggle with conditions like CPTSD and/or Dissociative Identity Disorder, which many mental health professionals don’t have a lot of experience or expertise with. 

On top of complicated medical and mental health issues, trauma survivors are often up against medical and/or mental health systems that are skeptical of the validity or prevalence of those complex conditions. 

I wish this weren’t the case, but there are absolutely medial professionals who more or less dismiss certain complicated conditions because of their supposed rarity. 

Similarly, there are absolutely mental health professionals who more or less dismiss certain psychiatric diagnoses because they understand them to be extremely rare and improbable. 

Complex trauma survivors, however, know that certain conditions aren’t as “rare” as the world supposes them to be— and even if they are comparatively rare, there are still people afflicted with them, who need competent treatment. 

In my role as a trauma specialist, I’m often confronted by people who maintains that serious trauma-based conditions like DID are far rarer than social media, for example, would indicate. 

My response is always, I can’t tell you how rare DID is or isn’t— all I can tell you is, almost everybody who comes into my office suspecting they have DID, does suffer from a dissociative disorder or another serious trauma-based condition. 

Many complex trauma survivors who also struggle with complex medical conditions develop what we call “medical PTSD” as a result of their encounters with the medical system. 

Many survivors have the experience of not being believed or taken seriously when it comes to either or both their medical or mental health struggles. 

This is so common that I work with multiple people who have had similar experiences literally eery day in my practice. 

You are definitely not alone in struggling with complex medical and/or mental health issues— or in the very complexity and “rarity” of those issues being yet ANOTHER traumatic stressor you’re obliged to cope with. 

It can be overwhelming. It can be discouraging. 

Enduring the long, complex, expensive, and often painful medical treatments that many survivors are subject to in their treatment is no joke. It is a traumatic stressor. 

You are not alone if medical professionals have related to you with skepticism and invalidation. 

(This has happened to literally the smartest survivors I’ve worked with.) 

Continuing on with medical treatments in the face of such skepticism and invalidation can be a tough ask. 

Continuing on with mental health treatment when you’ve been met with skepticism or invalidation over conditions such as DID or CPTSD can be a tough ask, too. 

I will never deny or minimize how tough it is. And it’s all common enough that I’m writing this blog about it. 

I admire the hell out of you for sticking with it. 

I know how big an ask it is for you to stick with it. 

I wouldn’t ask if if I didn’t genuinely, realistically think your quality of life could measurably improve.

Yeah. Yours.

Breathe; blink; focus.

When I relapsed, I felt unlovable. 

When I relapsed, I felt like a failure. 

When I relapsed, I felt like I would never, ever get this “recovery” thing right. Not really. 

I’d heard old timers, people with years in recovery, say that relapse wasn’t the end of recovery— it was part of recovery. 

I understood what they were saying— but i didn’t believe it. Not really. 

I kind of figured you’re either in recovery or you’re not in recovery— and if you’re relapsing, you’re demonstrably not in recovery. 

I really thought I would be the first survivor, the first addict, to figure out how to do recovery without ever relapsing. That I would be The Exception. 

But I wasn’t. 

Whether it’s with a substance or a behavior that we’ve realized we just can’t have in our life, relapsing when you’ve effortfully tried to give it up can be an enormously demoralizing experience. 

It can make you question whether any of the work you’d done to get to that place, meant anything. 

After all— so the dialogue in my head went— if the “recovery” work I’d been doing was so great, I would’t have ended up in a place of relapse, would I? 

Thing is: it doesn’t work like that. 

Relapses typically happen when the perfect storm of enabling thoughts collide with the perfect real-world opportunity to relapse. 

Relapse thoughts include “I can handle just a little of (whatever).” “No one would have to know.” “Maybe I should just experiment with (whatever), maybe I can handle it now.” 

For me, those thoughts entwine with feelings of resentment that I “can’t” do whatever I want to do. After all, I’m a grown up; who’s to say what I can and can’t put in or do with my body? 

And then they collide with the opportunity to relapse— having the time, having whatever you need to do your thing right at your fingertips. 

(It’s even more difficult when the stuff you need to do your thing happens to be legal and readily available. Ask me how I know.) 

Relapse is a bummer. Give our choice, no, of course we wouldn’t relapse. 

But the old-timers are right: relapse isn’t the end of recovery. It is very often part of recovery. 

It has no bearing on how lovable you are. And it is a “failure” only if you very narrowly define “success.” 

Sometimes relapse has warning signs, and sometimes it doesn’t— but if you’re at risk of relapse, chances are good you’re so far down the rabbit hole those warning signs might be super easy to miss. 

Relapse is less important than how we think of and respond to relapse. 

This is recovery, and recovery is a long haul. We’re gonna backslide sometimes. 

We’re gonna have sh*tty days and sh*tty nights. And yes, we’re vulnerable to relapse. All of us. No matter how “smart” or how “strong.” 

What do we do? We start over. 

How many times do we start over? As many times as it takes. 

We commit to not abandoning ourselves, even if we’re disappointed we relapsed. 

Commitment to recovery is commitment to being on our own side, having our own back, no matter what. 

It was, and is, really hard to not abandon and shame myself when I relapsed.

I had to remind myself of my commitment to myself. 

“You are safe, and I am here.” 

No matter what. 

A lot of people reading this grew up believing that they “had” to be tough on themselves. 

They “had” to be harder on themselves, in fact, than anyone ever COULD be on them. 

They grew up believing that if they WEREN’T hard on themselves, something bad would happen. They’d lose their edge. They’d get “soft.” They wouldn’t succeed. 

This idea— that self-cruelty is essential to success— is often reinforced in abusive families and institutions. 

Organized religion, including the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised, tends to glorify pain and sacrifice, linking it not only to success, but to eternal salvation. 

Over and over again we are told the key to success is self-discipline— and we seem unable to detach our understanding of “discipline” from cruelty. 

When survivors get into trauma therapy and/or recovery, we’re often told that a key to our successful recovery is to develop compassion for and patience with ourselves. 

I’ve often written that a non-negotiable in realistic, sustainable trauma recovery is to create safe space on the inside of our head and heart. I’m sure I sound like a broken record on this point. 

But these ideas— self-compassion, internal safety— often conflict with our old conditioning, which holds that we MUST be cruel to ourselves in order to succeed. 

We really, really think that if we’re NOT cruel to ourselves, we’ll be surpassed or outworked by someone who IS being cruel to themselves. 

That idea— that self-cruelty is essential to success— is BS: a Belief System. 

(But the OTHER kind of BS, too. You know what I’m talking about.)

The truth is, high level athletes don’t perform for sadistic coaches. Not for very long, anyway. 

Employees and managers that add value don’t stay in the employ of sadistic bosses. Not for very long, anyway. 

And if we get into a relationship with ourselves that is sadistic, that relationship will deteriorate beyond any capacity to utilize it to recover from trauma. 

Here’s the thing about our relationship with ourselves: we can’t opt out of it. 

We are with ourselves 24 hours a day. Even at night, when we’re sleeping, we’re with ourselves in our dreams. 

Unlike the high level athlete or the value added manager, we can’t leave a sadistic coaching or employment situation. Not when the situation is our relationship with ourselves. 

If we want our trauma recovery to stick, if we actually want to get better, if we want that recovery to be sustainable over the course of our lifetime, we have to give up this fantasy that we’re gong to manage our performance by bullying ourselves. 

It’s just not going to happen. 

We will shut down. 

We will turn on ourselves. 

We will dissociate. 

If we are habitually cruel to ourselves, we will do the exact opposite of “perform” over time: we will lose all incentive to perform. 

What they don’t tell you about those high-level coaches who “motivate” with “tough love” is: they are only out for a short term result. They do not care about their athletes’ long term quality of life. 

Trauma recovery is about quality of life. 

And we don’t build quality of life through self-cruelty. 

I don’t care if, because of our old training and conditioning, self-cruelty feels familiar or “right.” It s a losing strategy. 

It is actually the GREATER act of self-discipline to be kind, patient, and compassionate to ourselves. 

THAT takes guts. THAT takes courage. THAT takes practice and skill. 

You’re up to it. I believe in you. 

We’re not ourselves when we’re triggered. 

That’s not an excuse; that’s a fact. 

When we are triggered, by definition, our awareness is restricted. We hyper focus on certain things, and are incapable in that moment of focusing on other things. 

When we are triggered, our frontal lobe— where we make considered, value-driven decisions— temporarily shuts down. 

Our limbic system— where all our fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, and “f*ck it” trauma responses are generated— fires up, and temporarily takes over. 

Sometimes when we’re triggered, dissociative self-states, or “parts” take the wheel. 

Whoever said that pressure “reveals” who we “really are,” didn’t know how trauma responses work. 

We are literally LEAST ourselves when we’re triggered. 

One of the reasons we work so hard to manage and reduce our reactivity to triggers is specifically BECAUSE we want to return to our “real” self, as quickly and totally as possible. 

The thing is, many, many people are resistant to the fact that triggers change who we are, at least temporarily. 

Some people seem to think acknowledging the impact of triggers on our personality and decision making is somehow trying to “avoid responsibility.” 

No one reading this is trying to “avoid responsibility” by acknowledging the impact of triggers specifically, or trauma generally. 

(In fact, the far more common pattern with trauma survivors is for us to OVER assume responsibility— to assume that EVERYTHING, past and present, is both our fault and our responsibility.) 

What we are trying to do here is UNDERSTAND how trauma and triggers change who we are, how we think, and what we do. 

We can’t understand something we are hell bent on denying and disowning. 

It is not a “failure” to admit when a trigger or trauma reaction is impacting our judgment. 

It is not “avoiding responsibility” to realistically consider how we are essentially a different person when we’re triggered. 

What we’re doing here is taking REALISTIC responsibility. 

We don’t have a choice about how trauma impacts us. 

We DO have choices when it comes to how to respond to that fact, once we’re grounded and able to. 

We don’t get to choose our triggers or our reactions to them. 

We do get to choose what skills, tools, and training we’re gong to invest in to reduce our reactivity to our triggers. 

All of this realistically begins with accepting that we are not ourselves when we’re triggered. 

We need to stop denying that, and get curious about who we become. 

We need to understand that person— what motivates them, what they’re reacting to, what they need to step back so we can once again drive the car. 

In my experience, the biggest roadblocks experienced by survivors in trauma recovery are denial and shame. 

The very LAST thing we want is for anybody to think we’re trying to weasel out of taking responsibility for our feelings or behavior. 

If we’re going to take realistic, meaningful responsibly for our feelings and behavior— for our recovery— we need to start by acknowledging when we’re NOT in control, and what we’re NOT in control of. 

We’re not ourselves when we’re triggered, and we can’t help that. 

No amount of blame or shame will make it possible to “control” it. 

Is it scary? You bet. 

Recovery is very often about doing and accepting scary things— until they’re NOT scary anymore.