Tag: cptsd

Spoiler: your trauma conditioning will find every possible way to label every halfway positive thought you ever have about yourself as bullsh*t. 

Trauma Brain, what I call the internalized voices of our bullies and abusers that we play on repeat for years and years, has absolutely no interest in what’s actually true. 

But it’s very good at telling us we suck. 

Trauma Brain is so skilled, so gifted, at telling us we suck, that it will find new and creative ways to inform us we suck, almost daily. 

There isn’t a positive or gentle thought about ourself we can think, without CPTSD stepping in and telling us how none of that “positive” stuff is true— but every negative thing we think about ourself is “obviously” the “real” truth. 

You need to know that has nothing to do with reality. 

You need to know that has everything to do with conditioning. 

I talk a lot about how trauma conditions us— what it conditions us to think, to believe, to feel, and to do. I do this because I believe conditioning is at the heart of our CPTSD wounds. 

I don’t believe CPTSD is entirely about what happened to us. I believe it’s about what the things that happened to us, did to our nervous system going forward. 

People think CPTSD is about “the past.” It’s not. It’s about what’s going on in our nervous system, inside our head and our heart, right here, right now. 

It’s about how all that conditioning makes it hard to live life. To hold down a job. To manage relationships. To manage money. To manage feelings. 

Nobody reading this is “stuck in the past.” Not the way people think we are, anyway. 

We are stuck in patterns of thinking, believing, feeling, and behaving that were powerfully shaped by the past— and that sh*t doesn’t change overnight. It doesn’t change with a one time decision. 

That’s what I wish people understood. 

That’s what I need you to understand. 

Trauma Brain is going to try to tell you you can’t do anything right— but that has nothing to do with whether you can or can’t do anything right. 

Trauma Brain is going to try to tell you you can’t make a relationship work— but that has nothing to do with whether you can or can’t make a relationship work. 

Trauma Brain is going to tell you there is no hope for you. But that has nothing— nothing— to do with whether there actually is hope for you. 

Trauma Brain is an unreliable narrator. 

Remember that. 

No matter how convincing or vivid or familiar CPTSD’s lies are, they are still lies. 

Lying to us about us is what trauma does best. 

Don’t take CPTSD’s lies at face value. 

A trauma recovery tool I get a lot of mileage out of is having conversations, almost every day, with my past self. 

That past version of myself that I still carry around in my head and my heart. 

For a long time I didn’t realize I was still carrying him around with me. 

I didn’t realize his pain was impacting how I feel and function every day. 

I thought I’d left him, the “me” whose main experience of existence was aloneness and defensiveness, behind. After all, I was no longer that age; I no longer lived there; I no longer had contact with many of the people who hurt me. 

But, as it turns out, we never quite leave the past versions of ourselves behind. 

They’re still here, with us, here and now. 

Our choice is not whether to leave the past version of us in the past. 

Our choice is how we interact with that version of ourselves, here and now. 

We can try to ignore that past version of ourselves, but if we do that, a huge chunk of our feelings and motivations are going to remain mysterious— and inaccessible— to us. 

The backbone of realistic CPTSD recovery is our relationship with ourselves. 

The damage CPTSD inflicts is on that relationship. 

CPTSD tricks and bullies us into relating to ourselves, especially our past self, with condescension and aggression. 

CPTSD tricks and bullies us into hating and blaming our past self for our own pain. 

The past version of ourselves is with us day in, day out— and we need to choose how, not if, we’re going to relate to them. How we’re going to talk to them. 

Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of things past-me did that I don’t love. There were plenty of cringey moments. Plenty of unkind moments. Plenty of not-courageous moments. Plenty of moments where past-me lacked integrity and purpose. 

Doesn’t matter. Not anymore. 

Relating to my past self with compassion, patience, and realism has been, is, a game changer. 

Doing so explicitly in my journal gives me an opportunity not only to shape my relationship with myself, but to review how my relationship with myself has evolved since I chose recovery. 

Not every tool is for everybody. 

But talking to myself, especially my wounded past self, in written form is a tool I almost always find effective. 

It doesn’t solve all my problems— because no one tool solves all our problems. Solving all our problems is not what trauma recovery tools and strategies are for. 

But it makes many of my challenges more handle-able.

CPTSD tends to be hell on our relationship with our body. 

Many CPTSD survivors even struggle to accurately imagine what their body looks like. 

Core to CPTSD is shame that seems to settle into every nook and cranny of every cell— and that can result in us feeling disconnected to or repulsed by our body, sometimes out of nowhere. 

There are lots of reasons why CPTSD scrambles our relationship with our physical body, bt one of the main reasons is, in order to survive complex trauma at all we had to psychologically distance ourselves from ourselves. 

CPTSD develops when traumatic stress is prolonged, functionally inescapable, and entwined in our relationships— meaning there is no actual, real world fleeing from the pain. 

So our nervous system has to invent ways we can escape, sort of— and consequently we end up floating out of or mentally rejecting our body. 

As with all CPTSD reactions, disconnection from or disgust with our body started out as a defense mechanism— a way for us to stay safe. Safer, anyway. 

But, as with all CPTSD reactions, the ultimate damage is in how our psychological defenses wormed their way into our belief systems and self-concept. 

For many CPTSD survivors, an added factor is chronic pain or complicated medical conditions. 

For some survivors it can feel as if their body, in addition to being something they hate or profoundly disidentify with, is literally trying to kill them. 

I’ve never met a CPTSD survivor who did not have at least a somewhat fraught relationship with their physical body. 

For many of us it ultimately leads back to blaming ourselves for what we endured— including subsequent trauma responses that are painful, confusing, and difficult to change. 

You need to know your body isn’t your enemy. 

You need to know that CPTSD is doing what CPTSD does— trying to turn you against yourself (and lying to you to get this to happen). 

You need to know there is nothing inherently shameful about your body— and there’s nothing that can happen or has happened to your body that YOU should be ashamed of. 

The backbone of realistic, sustainable trauma recovery is repairing our relationship with ourselves— and that includes our physical body. 

Your physical body, no matter what it looks like, no matter how it feels, does not deserve to be hated or punished. 

It deserves to be nurtured, soothed, and respected. 

Just like the rest of your person. 

I am never going to tell anyone their reason for living isn’t “good enough.” 

If it keeps you alive for even one more day, it’s “good enough” for today. 

We trauma survivors have a rough habit of judging, often harshly, our reasons for living (in fairness, we trauma survivors have a rough habit of judging, harshly, pretty much everything about ourselves)— but, truly, any reason for living is better than no reason for living. 

I very often work with survivors who tell me their reason for living today is someone else, usually a person or a pet— and that’s great. I have no problem with that. 

I do, however, encourage survivors to work on expanding their “reasons for living” list. 

Many people have many different reasons for living, but for the vast majority of the people in the world who continue to want to exist, their reasons include experiences that are meaningful and pleasurable to them— and their confidence that they can create or access those experiences on the regular. 

Trauma survivors, however, tend to struggle with this. 

Our painful experiences have convinced us that we cannot, or at the very least will not, create or access experiences that are pleasurable or meaningful. 

Oh, sure, sometimes we’ll have an experience that is okay, or even great— but those positive experiences often come at a complicated emotional cost for us. 

The moment we become aware we are experiencing something pleasurable or meaningful, we start to feel anxious. 

Part of us often gets activated that is thoroughly convinced that that this pleasurable or meaningful experience is about to be yanked away from us— and we’ll somehow be in trouble for daring to feel good for a minute. 

One of the bedrock beliefs that trauma cultivates in us is that good experiences don’t last. 

I hear variants of this every day. “Nothing gold can stay.” “Everybody leaves.” “Don’t get happy.” 

When we survivors happen to experience pleasure or meaning in our life, we tend to immediately anticipate losing it— while at the same time telling ourselves a story about how we never really “deserved” that moment of meaning or pleasure in the first place. 

There is a cognitive distortion called the “mental filter” that Trauma Brain is very good at leveraging against us, that will have us believing that any positive experience we have is basically an accident— that while we are responsible for every bad thing that happens to us, the “good” stuff comes and goes unreliably and completely independent of our own efforts. 

I know. What a bunch of BS (Belief Systems). But that’s what CPTSD does to us. 

If we’re going to consistently manage our suicidal ideation, we need to realistically chip away at Trauma Brain’s insistence that it is “pointless” to try to create or experience meaning and pleasure in our life. 

Yes, many pleasurable or meaningful experiences are, in fact transitory— but it doesn’t follow that the are not worth creating, pursuing, or enjoying. 

When we start to understand how CPTSD mangles our beliefs about ourselves, other people, the wold, and the future, we begin to see that we’ve been conned out of creating reasons to live that don’t depend entirely on other people or our pets. 

Again: I have zero problem with living for others or our pets. As I say: any reason to live is better than no reason to live. No shame and no shade. 

But as we continue to work our trauma recovery, we’re going to come up against our beliefs about the possibility of meaning and pleasure in our life again and again— and sooner or later we’re going to have to confront Trauma Brain’s lies about our ability to create a life worth living. 

You have as much ability to create and experience pleasure and meaning as anyone who has ever existed. No matter what has happened to you, and no matter what your life has been like until now. 

You might be new to developing the skillset that supports you in creating a life worth living— but the good news is, you’re right here, right now, reading this. 

That means it’s not too late. 

That means there is a life of pleasure and meaning out there for you. 

That means there are skills and tools that will work for you. 

Your reasons to live will not always be a short list. Just keep woking your recovery. 

CPTSD has this way of convincing us that our wounds are our identity. 

They’re not. 

Our symptoms often masquerade as who we “really” are, and sometimes we’re sufficiently confused or exhausted by them to buy in to it. 

Our symptoms are not the “real” us. 

They are our real wounds. 

They are the scars we bear from having survived situations and relationships humans are not built to survive. 

But we don’t “choose” our symptoms. 

Our symptoms have nothing to do with our preferences, values, or goals— so they cannot, by definition, be our identity. 

Our post traumatic wounds, up to and including dissociation, do not define our personality. They hijack it. 

Yes, they hijack our personality again and again, in relationship after relationship— but that still does not mean they somehow “become” our personality. 

Often we spent so much bandwidth managing our symptoms for so long, that we have trouble remembering who we really are and what we’re all about. 

We can’t remember a time when we made a choice simply because we liked something or something resonated with us beyond our trauma struggles. 

We can’t imagine what it might be like to live a day, let alone a life, centered around what we want, what we like, what gives us pleasure, what creates meaning for us. 

CPTSD doesn’t just hijack our personality at times— it often hijacks our life. 

And yet: we are not our CPTSD. Or DID. Or BPD. Or any other diagnosis that we happen to meet criteria for today. 

For my money, a huge, under-discussed focus of trauma recovery is rediscovering and rebuilding ourselves. 

For many survivors it’s not even about “rebuilding,” insofar as we don’t have a “before” the trauma to “rebuild” or even “remember.” 

For many survivors “rebuilding” ourselves actually means “building” our sense of self from scratch. Discovering who we are for the first time— without CPTSD calling the shots. 

That process often starts out with a fairly simple question: “Who would you be, if you didn’t have to spend all day managing trauma symptoms?” 

The truth is, many survivors have been convinced by CPTSD that they don’t get any meaningful say in who they are or what their life looks like. 

When we get into recovery, and realize that we do, actually, have more agency than we ever thought we did in choosing our personality and crafting our life experience, we often don’t have any idea wha the hell to do next— and we often feel unworthy of the opportunity. 

After all, who am I, to “choose” anything about my life? 

Won’t I just f*ck it up? 

Don’t I “have” to choose a life that everyone else will approve of, and that meets everybody else’s needs and priorities? 

No, you will not f*ck it up. 

You’re going to have all the struggles every human has in designing a life, and you’ll definitely have moments where you’re not your best self. Ask me how I know. 

But you won’t f*ck it up. 

And no, you don’t have to choose a life that suits ANYBODY but you. 

I know, I know. That goes against every scrap of programming that’s been pumped into your brain and seared into your nervous system for years. 

But maybe that’s the good news. 

After all, a life consistent with your old programming— you have that right now. How’s that working out for you? 

Your struggles are not your identity. You are not your symptoms. 

You are what you choose to do next. 

Easy dos it. Breathe; blink; focus.