drglenndoyle

“Joy?” What the hell is that?

CPTSD survivors are often not great at the skill of feeling joy. 

No shame. Of COURSE we’re not good at it. 

Why would we be good at feeling joy, when for so long feeling anything remotely good felt like—or demonstrably was— a trap? 

We were conditioned to believe that feeling good left us vulnerable. 

We were conditioned to believe that feeling good was most likely “fake”— that to allow ourselves to feel good only made it harder when the good feeling went away. Or was ripped away, as it often was. 

We were conditioned to believe that we had no “right” to feel good— and we were “bad” if we “gave in” to the “temptation” of feeling good. 

Most of the time this conditioning operated outside of our awareness— that’s how conditioning works. 

But the end result was, our nervous system was not predisposed to feeling good. 

It wasn’t a skill we had a lot of practice with. 

Fast forward to today, to us working our trauma recovery: as we do things, day by day, to feel and function better, it’s very common to notice anxiety spiking alongside our progress. 

That anxiety is often an artifact of how we’ve been conditioned to respond to feeling good. 

The “it’s a trap!” energy can be strong. 

Sometimes that anxiety can get so intense that we actually sabotage ourselves, so we don’t actually have to “cope” with feeling good. 

Yes— all this might sound weird, even “crazy,” to a non-trauma survivor. 

They might read this and be like, “who DOESN’T want to feel good? Weirdos.” 

It’s one of the many paradoxes of CPTSD. 

It’s not that we don’t want to feel good. Of course we want to feel good. 

It’s that we’re not quite sure how to feel good without jumping out of our skin with anxiety.

Our relationship with pleasure is one of the many relationships we need to revisit and probably reshape as we work our trauma recovery. 

You, actually, have the right to feel good. 

You have the right to feel good without worrying intensely about someone coming along and stealing that feeling from you— or shaming you for feeling it in the first place. 

We get better at experiencing joy the more precise we get at it— and the more we meet our complicated relationship with pleasure with compassion, patience, and realism. 

You know— like we meet all our symptoms and struggles in trauma recovery. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

CPTSD anxiety is not “normal” anxiety.

CPTSD anxiety is not “normal” anxiety— and if we try to manage it like “normal” anxiety, we’re going to end up exhausted and demoralized. 

That said: lots of people in our life will assume CPTSD anxiety is “normal” anxiety. 

And those people will suggest all sorts of “normal” ideas for handling it. 

It’s not so much that the ideas for handling “normal” anxiety are bad, in and of themselves— it’s that people who assume our CPTSD anxiety “should” be more responsive to those ideas can get frustrated and judgmental when they don’t work. 

Everybody experiences anxiety at times. 

But it’s not the kind of crushing, consuming anxiety that accompanies CPTSD. 

CPTSD anxiety very often feels like we are going to literally die. 

It very often revolves around things we “know” we are avoiding or that we need to face— but we don’t at all feel equipped to face head on. 

Many CPTSD survivors describe their anxiety as being in an impossible bind: we cannot imagine continuing to exist this way, but we also cannot imagine NOT avoiding what every cell in our body is insisting we “have” to avoid. 

CPTSD anxiety feels like we’re simultaneously paralyzed and being pulled apart. 

That’s not “normal.” That’s not “pop a Xanax and think of Christmas” anxiety. 

CPTSD survivors are very often encouraged by the people around us to minimize or belittle our symptoms, including anxiety. 

“You’re making too big a deal of it.” 

“You’re only looking at the negative, of course you’re anxious.” 

“Everybody experiences anxiety, why are you making such a production out of it?” 

Of the things CPTSD survivors need when we’re trying to navigate post traumatic anxiety, judgment and shame are overwhelmingly unhelpful. 

Nobody is “choosing” CPTSD anxiety. 

Realistically managing CPTSD anxiety starts with meeting it with enormous validation and self-compassion. 

Use the tool of self-talk to affirm that this symptom is not “crazy”— it makes sense someway, somehow, to some part of us— and we are going to treat it with the attention and care it deserves. 

Get curious about the “part” of yourself that might be driving the anxiety— what does that “part” hold? What does it want? What does it need? 

We can manage CPTSD anxiety, but not from a place of judgment. 

CPTSD anxiety is no fun, and it is not a “choice”— and it can be exceedingly difficult when the people around us, often the people who should be on our side and have our back, lead off with invalidation. 

Easy does it. Breathe; blink; focus; and start off with validation and self-compassion. 

Just like with very CPTSD symptom we want to realistically manage and reduce. 

drglenndoyle

Feelings and trauma and our relationship with ourselves.

The problem with numbing out our negative feelings and experiences is, we also tend to numb out our positive ones, too. 

Not always, but often. Very often. 

Often enough that, when we’ve spent years, decades numbing out our pain, we often can’t remember what it’s like to feel even sort of good. 

We often settle for feeling some facsimile of good— that, honestly, doesn’t feel all that good. 

Understand: almost nobody reading this made a “choice” to numb out their feelings. 

Almost everybody reading this was conditioned to do it, to some extent or another. 

Blaming ourselves for it is a dead end. 

Realistically regulating our feelings often begins with finding ways to feel our feelings— good, bad, and otherwise— in ways that aren’t overwhelming. 

You have probably gotten all sorts of messages about your feelings over the years. 

You’ve probably been told you’re “too much.” 

You’ve probably been told you’re “too sensitive.” 

You’ve probably been told your feelings are, to one extent or another, just…wrong. 

So— you, like me, probably got in the habit of not feelings things. 

Well…that kind of oversimplifies it, doesn’t it. 

Because, after all, we do feel the things, don’t we. 

Just not…consciously. 

But we feel them. 

In our bodies. In our dreams. In our fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and/or flop reactions. 

Yeah. There’s no bypassing feelings, not really. And to the extent we try to bypass our feelings, we hand them power over us— notably, the power to interrupt our day, interrupt our relationships, interrupt our goals. 

My point is, trauma recovery often involves reevaluating our relationship with our feelings— and our conditioned strategy of trying to opt out of feeling them. 

Again: it’s not our fault. 

But our feelings have been waiting for us to return to them, to acknowledge them, to care for them. 

Trauma recovery broadly is about repairing and nurturing our relationship with ourselves. 

For my money, every decision we make in recovery comes back to: does this build or chip away at my relationship with myself? With my parts? With my inner child? 

Usually, if we can think to ask that Recovery Supporting Question, we can figure out the answer. 

Don’t fear your feelings. 

Hold them. Sit with them. Be with them. 

Even—especially— the rough ones. 

drglenndoyle

Don’t believe what they told you.

You are not stupid. And the most important people in your life shouldn’t have made you feel that way. 

How do I know that you’re not stupid? After all, I probably don’t know most of the people reading this.

Yeah, I may not know you personally. But let me tell you what I do know. 

I do know that many survivors of complex trauma come through our experiences believing we are “stupid”— very often because we were told this, fairly directly, by important people in our lives. 

What we need to understand is that, very often, those people didn’t tell or insinuate to us that we’re stupid because of anything having to do with our actual intelligence. 

They did it because making us feel stupid was an excellent way to make us feel unworthy, and to get us to distrust our judgment.

And making us feel unworthy and untrustworthy to ourselves came in very handy when trying to demoralize and control us. 

Most of what our abusers and bullies told us, about us, was designed to demoralize and control us. 

Many of us came through childhood believing things about ourselves and applying standards t ourselves we would’t dream of foisting on to anyone else. 

The fact, is, I don’t necessarily know you’re smarter than average— again, I don’t personally know most of the people reading this blog— but I do know that many complex trauma survivors arrive in adulthood erroneously believing they suck. 

It’s not just that being told we’re stupid is panful. 

It’s that being told and treated like we’re stupid by the people who should have had our back, who should have been in our corner, who, by rights, should have been our biggest cheerleaders, inflicts a very specific wound on survivors. 

Abuse and neglect are always harmful— but when we’re talking about long term consequences, who was inflicting the abuse or neglect upon us really matters. 

If just anybody calls us stupid, we may or may not be particularly reactive to it. 

But if the people who “should” have our back consistently treat us like we’re stupid, what are we supposed to conclude about our actual intelligence or capabilities? 

We don’t form a positive, realistic self-concept out of nowhere. 

We first develop self-esteem by modeling the “esteem” in which others in our life seem to hold us, most notably by their words and behavior. 

So many people don’t understand: complex trauma is not just about the impact of painful events— it’s also about the opportunities we missed to form a stable, positive sense of ourselves. 

Many people don’t get that it’s not necessarily trauma itself that makes us hate and doubt ourselves— it’s the fact that having to cope with trauma after trauma in our early years leaves precious little time or bandwidth to discover and develop who we are. 

A main reason complex trauma is so devastating is that it interrupts developmental tasks that are really, really important to us as we’re growing and learning about ourselves and the world. 

We’re not born feeling “worthy” (or “unworthy,” for that matter); we need to be taught whether we have worth, whether we “deserve” good things, whether we are capable of learning and growing and succeeding. 

When, growing up, we lack that assurance— or, worse, when we grow up around adults who communicate how “stupid” or “dramatic” or otherwise unworthy we are— that’s what we internalize. 

Then we struggle to connect how we’re feeling to any specific “trauma”— because it’s had to comprehend that the “trauma” that so harmed us was just our everyday lives and everyday relationships. 

You are not “stupid.” 

The fact that you were made to feel “stupid” says much more about the people and institutions you grew up in and around than it does about you. 

Part of your recovery work is accepting the fact that they were wrong about you. 

And, as odd as it may seem, the guy with the blog on the internet who may not even know you, is actually right about you.