drglenndoyle

Pain sucks.

You’re not wrong or crazy to try to escape pain. 

Trying to escape pain does not make you “weak” or “cowardly.” 

The vast majority of us try to escape pain whenever practical. Of course we do. 

You can let yourself off the hook for trying to escape pain. It’s okay. It’s normal. 

Why am I bothering to say this? Because you’re going to get a lot of sh*t for trying to escape pain from various sources.

You’re going to get Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of our bullies and abusers, calling us “weak.” 

You might even get therapists telling you that trying to avoid pain will only ever create more pain. 

It’s true that making avoidance our go-to reflex is going to create more problems than it solves in the long term— but the way these conversations are often framed can leave trauma survivors feeling shamed and child like for trying to escape pain. 

It’s not true that “trying to avoid pain only ever creates more pain.” 

There’s a huge difference between pain that can be productively faced, processed, integrated, and transformed— and pain that just sucks. 

CPTSD is full of the pain that just sucks. 

Not all pain is meaningful. Not all pain leads to growth. 

Some people in our culture absolutely fetishize pain as an “opportunity for growth.” 

Your milage may vary, but I’ve never “grown” as the result of having a headache. 

Trauma survivors often have a complicated relationship with pain. 

Some of us get conditioned to believe we “deserve” it. 

Some of us get convinced we’ll never be able to avoid or reduce our pain, so we stop trying. 

Some of us develop an oddly codependent relationship with pain, and come to believe we can’t function or exist without it. 

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to apologize or feel shame for wanting less pain in your life, or doing what you can to escape pain. 

Nobody is handing out medals for enduring pain without flinching. 

Nobody expects you to love pain or embrace all pain as a “growth opportunity.” 

CPTSD survivors have to approach pain with gentleness and compassion and patience— like we approach all our struggles and symptoms in recovery— but it’s real important we not get in our head about what pain does or doesn’t “mean.” 

In my experience, most pain doesn’t actually have an existential “meaning.” 

You’re not “weak” for experiencing pain. 

You’re not “childish” or “whiny” for wanting less pain in your life. 

You are not under no obligation to cheerfully endure pain just to prove you can take it. 

Nobody is questioning your resilience or toughness. Nobody who matters, anyway. 

Pain sucks. 

And it’s okay to to just stay that flat out. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

Teeny, tiny steps toward the future.

The irony of trauma recovery, and the thing a lot of people don’t understand, is that it doesn’t, actually, mean thinking about the past every day. 

It means thinking about the future— every day. 

That’s harder than it seems for trauma survivors. 

We’ve often been conditioned to explicitly NOT think about the future. 

Why would we, after all? We’ve had experience with that “hope” thing— and our experience is that the universe, or at least our bullies and abusers, happy wield that “hope” thing to hurt us. 

We know better than to get our hopes up. 

At least, that’s what our conditioning has us thinking, repeating to ourselves. 

The truth of the matter is, in trauma recovery we often have to learn new ways of thinking and talking to ourselves about the future. 

Because it’s true that blind, generalized “hope” isn’t much help to us in trauma recovery. 

What is helpful to us is thinking about our values and specific goals— and when it comes to goals, the shorter term and more realistically achievable, the better. 

Part of what trauma steals from us is our sense of self-efficacy— our feeling and belief that we can actually do things in the world. That we are up to what the world asks of us every day. 

How do we take our self efficacy back? 

By setting and achieving goals— notably teeny, tiny, steppingstone goals. 

Realistic, practical self-care goals. 

Realistic, practical personal development goals. 

And when I say “teeny tiny,” I very much mean it: I mean start out with your personal development goal being a page— MAYBE two— of a book today. 

THAT’S the kind of future thinking I’m talking about. Not climbing Everest. 

Maybe your self care goal today is washing your face or brushing your teeth. Maybe. 

Teeny, tiny. Baby steps. 

Remember: in sustainable trauma recovery, trajectory matters more than speed. I want you heading in a healing direction, even if the steps you are taking are teeny tiny. 

Teeny tiny steps, baby steps, add up. 

In your trauma recovery today, you may or may not think about your past, or your abuse, or your abusers. 

But you WILL think about the next baby step you need to take. 

I want you thinking about baby stepping to the end of today, to the end of this week. Not really any further than that. 

I want you thinking about self-care— not so much in the “spa day” sense, but in the sense of little gestures that communicate to your nervous system that you are in the business of valuing and protecting yourself today. 

Even if it is just in teeny, tiny gestures. 

Take it from a marathon runner: distance races are completed one step at a time. 

Focus on the future— but not the distant future or the ultimate future. Not the future that trauma has conditioned you to fear and doubt. 

Focus on the rest of this hour. Then the rest of this day. Then the rest of this week. 

This is realistically how we recover. 

This is realistically how we win. 

drglenndoyle

Don’t hate on your sensitivity.

Highly sensitive humans are more vulnerable to trauma than less sensitive humans, it’s true. 

But that doesn’t mean our sensitivity “attracted” or “allowed” our abuse to happen. 

It’s true that sometimes sensitive people— not just kids— are targeted by those who would hurt us. 

But that doesn’t make our trauma or “fault.” 

That rather explicitly makes it “their” fault, actually— they’re the ones who did the targeting and the abusing. 

Don’t get it twisted. 

Trauma Brain is going to give you extensive lists of why some characteristic of yours drew traumatic experiences to you— but that’s not, actually, how that works. 

Abusers are responsible for abuse. Full stop. 

(Notice how Trauma Brain is right now in your ear, trying to argue with that statement— that “abusers are responsible for abuse. Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of our abusers and bullies, is heavily invested in you believing you “played a part” in your trauma— even if that “part” you supposedly “played” was just you being you.) 

Being highly sensitive can be a real pain in the ass. 

It can also be beautiful and useful and even profitable— but most of the time we’re mainly aware of how much it sucks to feel everything so overwhelmingly. 

It can get real easy to get down on ourselves for our sensitivity. 

Meeting our sensitivity with compassion and curiosity and grace can sound like a tall order some days, especially when our nervous system feels like it’s ready to physically jump out of our goddamn body. 

How we relate to our sensitivity matters in trauma recovery, because how we relate to everything about ourselves matters. 

CPTSD is going to try, hard, to get us to hate on ourselves— everything about ourselves. 

Our appearance. Our intelligence. Our choices. How sensitive we are or aren’t. 

You need to remember: the sh*t that CPTSD gives us about being highly sensitive— or anything else— is not about reality. 

It’s about making us feel a certain kind of way. Notably, like garbage. 

You don’t have to love being highly sensitive all the time. I don’t. 

But you and I do have to accept we are exactly as sensitive as we are— and that’s not evidence of anything “bad,” “weak,” or “immature.” 

We also have accept that there is nothing a victim can do that can “make” someone abuse them. 

No matter what Trauma Brain is whispering in your ear right now. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

What can’t be said will be felt– physically.

Our bodies often say what our words can’t. 

That’s one reason why CPTSD survivors often experience pain and other chronic health problems.

It’s not that physical problems are CAUSED by our mental distress— it’s that our mental distress makes us incredibly vulnerable to any and every source of pain and dysfunction out there. 

It’s hard for a body to fight things off when it’s been fighting off feelings and memories all day and night. 

But it’s also the case that the cells of our body have memories. 

They keep track. They “keep the score,” as the title of an obscure book put it. 

You may have heard the expression “what cannot be said will be wept?” 

It’s also true that what cannot be said, will be FELT— literally, physically. 

It’s one reason why developing the capacity to put words to our feelings and needs and memories and pain really, really matters in realistic trauma recovery. 

It’s hard to explain to others how “stuck” CPTSD survivors can feel in our body. 

Utterly stuck— and yet, somehow, not in our body at all. 

It’s hard to explain to others how CPTSD makes going to the doctor— even the dentist (especially the dentist, actually) about 10,000 times harder than it “should” be. 

Then many CPTSD survivors run into the reality that many of our physical problems don’t “behave” like “normal” medical problems do. 

They can be mysterious and difficult to diagnose— and they can often be less than responsive to modalities of care that seem to work for everyone else. 

There are survivors reading this more tired than they should be. 

There are survivors reading this physically sicker than they should be. 

There are survivors reading this experiencing pain— that they will never bring to the attention of a medical provider, because experience has taught them that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. 

If that’s you, you’re not alone. 

Realistic, sustainable trauma recovery has to account not only for our relationship with our “parts,” but our physical body as well. 

Trauma recovery that ignores the somatic component of CPTSD is incomplete. 

(And also, recovery that pretends CPTSD is ONLY about somatics is incomplete.)

Realistic recovery is holistic, in the sense that it accounts for how body, mind, and spirit interact and influence each other. 

But for now, realize: you’re not crazy. 

This really is taking a toll on your body. 

You’re not imagining it. 

And shame and self-blame is not the answer. Ever. 

drglenndoyle

None of this is “fun” or “easy.”

CPTSD is hard to get our arms around. Not everyone has heard of it.

If you asked five random strangers on the street what it is, four of them probably couldn’t tell you. 

Many CPTSD survivors themselves have misconceptions about what it is and how it develops. 

Because CPTSD isn’t as widely talked about in the culture as PTSD is, it’s easy to miss or misunderstand. (Just ask everyone who has been misdiagnosed with a “personality disorder” instead of CPTSD.)

Add to that the fact that dissociation is an incredibly common occurrence in CPTSD, but also an overwhelmingly misunderstood concept in our culture, and the “what is CPTSD” picture gets even hazier for the average person. 

All of this very often leaves CPTSD survivors feeling isolated. 

Alone. 

Kind of “crazy.” 

The thing about CPTSD is that it is an injury— not a “mental illness,” but an injury— that engenders lots of contradictions. 

Many CPTSD survivors are real good at convincingly pretending there’s nothing wrong. 

Hell, many CPTSD survivors achieve success in their academic or professional lives, leading others to assume that they couldn’t POSSIBLY have a serious psychological or behavioral wound. 

There are plenty of people who assume the collection of symptoms and struggles that define CPTSD simply don’t exist. Who believe that survivors can simply “let the past go” if they have enough “character.” 

It all makes recovering from CPTSD complicated. 

My own view is that CPTSD recovery is as involved and long term as recovery from addiction. 

It’s not so much a thing we do, as a lifestyle we live. 

Much like healing a broken bone takes time and care, recovery from CPTSD takes time and care— and we’re not going to think, talk, or “willpower” our way out of it. 

Realistic recovery from CPTSD almost always involves shifting how we relate to ourselves. 

It involves confronting what we were conditioned to believe about ourselves and our lives, and “scratching the record” of that conditioning— again, and again, and again. 

The truth is, you are not alone. Though, I get it— you feel alone. 

There are other CPTSD survivors out there, who are developing their own recovery routines and rituals and tools, just like you. 

No one is having a fun or easy time of this. 

This is not fun or easy. 

But this is doable. 

Yeah. You can do this “trauma recovery” thing. 

And, yeah: it’s going to take an open mind and a committed heart— and the willingness to meet each minute of your recovery on its own terms, one minute at a time. 

But you can do this. 

I swear to you, you can. 

drglenndoyle

Avoiding CPTSD overwhelm.

Remember: a day is just twenty four hours strung together. 

An hour is just sixty minutes strung together. 

A minute is just sixty teeny, tiny seconds strung together. 

All we need to do is figure out a way to be safe and focused for a second. This second. 

CPTSD, if you haven’t noticed, does its very best to overwhelm us. To make us truly believe we have to handle EVERY f*cking thing in our life, RIGHT NOW. 

CPTSD tries to make us believe we HAVE to solve EVERY problem we have, NOW. 

And what’s more: CPTSD make us believe that if we can’t solve every problem we have RIGHT NOW, then we can’t solve ANY of our problems. 

It makes us believe we are a failure for feeling overwhelmed. 

You are not “failure” for feeling overwhelmed. 


CPTSD is one of the most overwhelming experiences human beings can experience. 

Hell, the very reason CPTSD and, especially, dissociation exist is because we’ve experienced things that overwhelmed our nervous system. 

That’s not a knock on our nervous system, by the way. Every nervous system has its breaking point, just like every bone has its breaking point. 

We don’t shame bones for breaking when they’ve been subjected to the kind of pressure that breaks bones; and we shouldn’t shame our nervous system for dissociating or developing complex trauma responses when subjected to the kind of pressure that produces CPTSD. 

You are not “crazy” for developing these responses. 

Complex trauma is overwhelming, by definition— and that’s true whether or not you happen to remember, or remember clearly, what happened to you. 

Realistic trauma recovery is all about bringing it back to basics, every day. 

Twenty four hours in a day. 

Sixty minutes in an hour. 

Sixty seconds in a minute. 

And we’re back to using the tools of self talk, mental focus, and physiology, especially breathing, to find a way to make THIS sixty seconds safe. 

Don’t get rushed, bullied, or discouraged by Trauma Brain. 

Reel it in, and focus on this sixty seconds. 

Let the following sixty seconds take care of themselves. 

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

What “they” see is not the whole story of your CPTSD recovery.

What people see of our CPTSD recovery in public is only going to be a teeny, tiny percentage of the real story. 

The real story of trauma recovery happens in private. 

Private moments of doubt. 

Private moments of pain. 

Private moments of really, really wanting to hurt ourselves. 

Private moments of wanting to give up. 

Navigating those hard private moments, day after day and, especially, night after night— that’s what CPTSD recovery is really all about. 

The stuff other people see— us looking better, functioning better, showing up, engaging more— that stuff is all kind of gravy. 

For that matter, many of us survivors have lots of practice doing all that public stuff, even when we’re circling the drain. 

The truth is, nobody really knows how we’re leveraging our tools. 

How we’re talking to ourselves. 

How we’re using our mental focus. What we’re visualizing. The mental safe spaces we’ve created for ourselves, our “parts,” and our inner child. 

Nobody knows how we’re relating to our body and using our breathing to stay grounded and soothe ourselves. 

Only we know the full story. 

Only we know how hard we’re working. 

Only we know the real journey we’ve been on— and what point on that journey our current state represents. 

Don’t confuse what other people see with what’s really going on. 

They won’t see it all. 

They probably won’t see the most important aspects of our CPTSD recovery. 

But those milestones really, really f*cking matter. 

Whether or not I, personally, can see them,  I want you to know I understand how much work is happening beneath the surface. 

And I want you to know how overwhelmingly proud of you I am. 

That’s true whether or not I personally know you. 

Even if I don’t know you— I know you. 

We’re all in the same fight tonight. 

Keep on keeping on. 

Breathe; blink; focus— one minute at a time.  

drglenndoyle

Experiencing anger doesn’t make you an “angry person.” But denying and disowning it…

You’re going to hear it said that anger is just “sadness’s bodyguard”— but I don’t believe that. 

I believe that anger, while it frequently occurs alongside sadness, is its own thing— as real and valid and independent as any experience, emotional or otherwise. 

Remember that anger evolved for a reason. 

The cave-people who could get angry when other cave-people tried to encroach upon their territory and steal their mates and wooly mammoths and stuff, had a survival advantage over those cave-people who couldn’t. 

Anger, evolutionarily speaking, gives us a rush of focus and energy to defend our territory. 

Anger is important. Anger is valid. Anger matters. 

It it sometimes the case that our anger in a specific situation is actually about a different situation, maybe from the past? Sure— but that doesn’t make it invalid. 

The worst thing we can do for and with our anger is to dismiss it as nothing more than the “bodyguard” of another feeling. 

Anger, properly understood and responsibly managed, can be one of our most important trauma recovery tools. 

Of course, denied, disowned, misunderstood, and mismanaged, our anger can be as destructive to us as our abusers’ anger was back then. 

That’s why it’s so important that we take time to understand, validate, and manage our anger— precisely so we DON’T become our abusers in how we react (instead of respond) to our anger. 

Sometimes I get sh*t for being pro-anger— but I don’t know what to tell you. Anger is as important and valid as anything else we can experience. 

Meeting our anger with denial or shame is psychologically and even physically harmful to us. 

I recommend meeting anger just like we meet anything and everything else in trauma recovery: with compassion, patience, realism, and respect. 

Experiencing anger doesn’t make you an “angry person.” 

But denying and disowning your anger probably will. 

drglenndoyle

You deserved to be loved, not used.

When we’ve been used, over & over again, by the people or institutions that were SUPPOSED to love and protect us, it changes us. 

It changes how we think about ourselves. 

It changes how we engage with the world. 

It changes how we understand our worth and role in life. 

This is how CPTSD develops: exposure to abuse and/or neglect that was prolonged, inescapable, and entwined with our relationships. 

Being used instead of loved is exactly this kind of trauma. 

We’re uniquely vulnerable to complex trauma as children, but in truth humans can develop CPTSD throughout the lifespan when we’re used instead of loved. 

It happens in families, it happens in churches, it happens in communities, it happens in political movements, it happens in cults. 

It happens whenever and whenever a person or institution that claims to have the best interest of someone in mind actually just uses them— for their body, for their money, for their vote, or whatever. 

Many of us don’t like to admit we were or are vulnerable to complex trauma. 

We’ll do backflips to explain how what we experienced, ether in the distant or recent past, wasn’t “really” traumatic— how, yeah, maybe we were used, but it really wasn’t a “big deal.” 

Psychologically, it’s always a big deal when humans are used instead of loved, particularly by people or institutions that claim to love them. 

We often try to deny this— because we don’t like to feel we “need” anything that the people or institutions that abused us “should” have offered us. 

We want to seem “tough.” 

But neither you or I are “tough” enough to not need love— or be be unaffected when love is replaced by exploitation. 

It’s a specific kind of betrayal. 

And the reality is, most CPTSD involves betrayal. 

Parents betraying their roles. 

Clergy betraying their vows. 

Churches betraying their missions. 

Political parties betraying their supposed purpose. 

There can be many paths to developing CPTSD, but those paths often converge at the point of human beings being used instead of loved. 

CPTSD recovery involves us beginning to see ourselves as human again— that is to say, worthy of love, worthy of belief, worthy of care, and worthy of protection. 

Affirming our humanity— our essential deservingness and our essential agency, in particular— is core to realistic, sustainable CPTSD recovery. 

You shouldn’t have been used. 

You should have been loved.

We still need and deserve that.

No toxic positivity bullsh*t— you and I still need and deserve to be loved instead of used.