drglenndoyle

Nope: it wasn’t about you.

When I say “it’s not about you,” I’m not asking you to make an “excuse.” 

I’m not asking anyone to deny or disown their role in anything they genuinely had a role in. 

I’m not saying we’re powerless over every situation we find ourselves in. 

But when I say “it wasn’t about you” in reference to how you were treated by your parents or caretakers growing up, that’s literally what I mean: that wasn’t about you. 

We cannot “make” our parents or caretakers do their jobs. 

We cannot “make” someone abuse us. 

We cannot “make” someone neglect us. 

I don’t care if you were the most difficult kid in the world to parent: it was your parents’ responsibility to figure that sh*t out. 

It was emphatically NOT your responsibility to be an “easy” kid for them to raise. 

It was NOT your responsibility to be THEIR parent or caretaker. 

It was NOT your responsibility to figure out how to “make” them love or care or you. 

Some people read stuff like this and say, “Well, that’s OBVIOUS. Why are you saying OBVIOUS things that EVERYBODY knows?” 

Because, believe it or not, there are complex trauma survivors out there who really haven’t internalized this. 

They truly think it was their fault that they weren’t cared for. 

They truly think they were unloved because they were, or are, essentially “unlovable.” 

They truly think the problem was that they were a “difficult” kid to raise, and their parents, who were “just doing their best,” shouldn’t have to bear the blame for the sh*t show that was their childhood. 

If you follow my work, you know I’m not big on “blame.” 

I feel “blame” paradigms unduly center abusers and bullies, instead of the recovery work of survivors. 

But over and over again I encounter survivors blaming themselves, often harshly, for how they were treated growing up. 

I’m not saying kids need “perfect” childhoods. 

I’m not saying parents need to be “perfect.” 

I’m not saying that poor parenting is the only cause of CPTSD. (In fact, I think childhood bullying gets vastly UNDER-discussed in CPTSD spaces in contrast to bad parenting.) 

What I want everyone to understand, though, is that, no matter how you feel about your parents or caretakers, no matter what their situation or challenges were, no matter what they have or haven’t taken responsibility for or apologized for since, it was not on you to accommodate them growing up. 

It was not on you to be their therapist. 

It was certainly not on you to be any kind of “partner” to your parents in any kind of adult sense. 

I don’t care how smart you were. 

I don’t care if you were an “old soul.” 

That sh*t was not on you. Shouldn’t have been on you. 

Adults who turn to children to get needs met that should be meet by other adults, harm children. 

You are not the exception. 

And it wasn’t about you. 

But— letting that go can be a b*tch. 

Give it the time it needs. 

drglenndoyle

Self talk, mental focus, and physiology. Every day.

It is not my impression that trauma survivors are especially interested in “shortcuts.” 

Trauma survivors are many things, but “afraid of hard work” is typically not one of those things. 

For that matter, we survivors tend to be allergic to most shortcuts. We’d feel guilty if we allowed ourselves to take them. 

No, instead of taking shortcuts, most trauma survivors actually crate more work for ourselves with our standards and our insistence on “earning” every little inch of progress we ever make at anything (and even then, we often STILL don’t feel like we “deserve” it). 

All of which is just as well, because there is no shortcut to trauma recovery. 

The trauma recovery tools— self talk, mental focus, and physiology— ARE the “shortcut” to feeling and functioning better, insofar as they are the only tools that actually work. 

Any and every effective trauma recovery tool reduces down to self talk, mental focus, and physiology— which, by the way, is not to disparate any technique or system. 

Tools like EMDR and EFT and the entire alphabet soup of therapies, including CBT, DBT, and ACT, are all ways to leverage self talk, mental focus, and physiology— all helpful ways to leverage the basics, as far as I’m concerned. 

The reason I keep repeating that trauma recovery comes back to self talk, mental focus, and physiology, is to give survivors something concrete to grab on to when they’re not quite sure where to start. 

Yes, there are dozens of ways to leverage those three tools, but everything is going to keep coming back to whether we’re using those tools in recovery supportive or recovery destroying ways. 

Having identified the basics of trauma recovery, we also have to acknowledge that leveraging self talk, mental focus, and physiology isn’t “easy”— specifically because those are the things that trauma conditioning hijacks, year after year, until we’re stuck in patterns that make us miserable and endanger our safety. 

CPTSD gets us using self-talk to kick the sh*t out of ourselves. 

CPTSD gets us using mental focus to visualize and mentally engage with things and people that make us feel like garbage. 

CPTSD gets us breathing shallow and physically “armoring up.” 

If we’re serious about trauma recovery, we truly need to address each leg of the “stool”— self talk, mental focus, and physiology. 

We also need to push back against Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of our bullies and abusers, telling us the effort we invest in trauma recovery isn’t “pointless.” 

Yes, all of this sucks. No, we shouldn’t “have” to do any of this. 

What we SHOULD have had was a life free of abuse, neglect, coercion, and other trauma. 

You and I shouldn’t “have” to think about trauma OR recovery, ever. 

But that’s not the life we had— and the work in front of us is the work in front of us, even if we didn’t ask for it. Even if we deserve something better and different in our life. 

The fact that we DO deserve something better and different in our life is why we do this, actually. 

Don’t overthink this and don’t lean into despair. Both of those will create more work than necessary on this trauma recovery journey— and neither you nor I need MORE work than is already on our plate. 

When in doubt, check the basics: what am I saying to myself? Where is my mental “spotlight?” How am I using my breathing and my body? 

If we can think to ask those Recovery Supporting Questions (RSQ’s), they’ll almost always yield useful, actionable answers— even if we’re new to recovery. 

drglenndoyle

Trauma identity and recovery identity.

To me, an unexpected challenge of trauma recovery is keeping our recovery identity top of mind. 

Most of us have been conditioned, sometimes for years, in what can be called our “trauma identity. 

We’ve been sold a bill of goods— about who we are, what we “deserve,” what we’re capable of. 

We’ve been conditioned in a whole set of beliefs about ourselves that aren’t grounded in reality— they’re based on what our bullies and abusers told us and made us feel about ourselves. 

We end up with this smorgasbord of beliefs and habits that aren’t really us— but which we are very attached to and entwined with. Our “trauma identity.” 

It’s one of the reasons so many survivors kind of confuse our symptoms with our “personality”— we’ve been basically brainwashed by our abusers and our experiences to believe that’s who and what we are. 

If we want to realistically recover, we’re going to need to give our nervous system an alternative, a recovery identity, to shoot for and flesh out.

Our recovery identity is everything about our life that we’re trying to create. 

It’s how we want to feel. 

It’s how we want to think. 

It’s the habits we want to cultivate. 

It’s even how we want to look. 

Think of our recovery identity as our roadmap— what we’re trying to make of our lives in trauma recovery. 

Defining a recovery identity, and keeping that “roadmap” handy, really matters, because otherwise we fall prey to the “pink elephant” problem. 

You know the “pink elephant” problem, right? Try this: DON’T think about a pink elephant. Come on, I said DON’T. Think about ANYTHING other than a pink elephant. 

Hard, right? That’s because our brains are not designed to NOT think about things. 

If we go around thinking about our “trauma identity” and telling ourselves DON’T think about those things, DON’T do those things, come on I said DON’T, no really DON’T…guess what our nervous system is going stay fixated on? 

That’s right: our “trauma identity.” 

It’s not enough to just define what we DON’T want. Most of us have been thinking non-stop about what we DON’T want for years. 

What we need is a template for what we DO want. What we value. What we’re trying to create. 

I’m a big believer in defining our recovery identity so specifically that we could crate a list of the characteristics we’re trying to cultivate in recovery— and I’m a big believer in checking that list often, to remind ourselves of what we’re doing here. 

It’s a big risk in trauma recovery, losing sight of what we’re doing here. 

The project can be so exhausting, so frustrating, so annoying, that if we don’t have a clear vision of why we’re doing this, we can lose momentum, develop the “f*ck it’s” real fast. 

So: define your recovery identity. Keep a running list of all of the the characteristics of the recovered version of “you.” 

Remember that your recovery identity isn’t a “perfect version of you— that doesn’t exist. 

It’s the version of you that prioritizes consistency, integrity, self-compassion, and personal responsibility. 

It’s the version of you that works every day to communicate with and take care of your “parts.” 

It’s the version of you that refuses to kick the sh*t out of yourself for setbacks or mistakes. 

Those are some starter examples— but you’re going to come up with a lot more. 

Make that list and keep it handy. Remember that the process of trauma recovery is about reconditioning our thoughts, beliefs, and habits, in patterns WE choose and that serve US. 

Think of your recovery identity not just as a goal, but a tool for shaping your self-talk, mental focus, and physiology. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

And remember who you’re becoming. 

drglenndoyle

Outer safety requires inner safety.

It would be awesome if we could somehow guarantee that others won’t try to attack us— that we’re truly safe from external threat. 

But, we can’t. 

We can’t guarantee our safety from anyone else, because we can’t control anyone else’s actions. 

If we could control anyone else’s actions, we wouldn’t have endured what we’ve endured. 

But, again, we can’t. 

Any assertion that we’re “safe” that depends on someone else doing something or not doing something, is not rock solid. We just never know for sure what is in someone else’s mind, or what they might do. 

All we can do when it comes to external safety is maximize the odds that we’ll be relatively safe, and minimize the odds we’ll be in a vulnerable position— while still living life, still having relationships, still going out in the world and living life. 

We can’t make a guarantee of “safety” our requirement for going out and engaging with the world— because there are no guarantees of external safety. 

We’ll be waiting for ever. Sequestering forever. 

(I know, there are some people reading this saying, “I don’t see the problem with sequestering forever?”)

We can’t guarantee external safety. Some survivors reading this are in positions where they can’t even influence their external safety all that much— who are in danger situations or abusive relationships that are not yet safe to leave. 

Realistic trauma recovery has to account for the potential lack of external safety out there. 

We can’t pretend “it’s safe now.” We don’t know. 

What can we do when it comes to safety, then? 

The most important thing we can do when it comes to safety is make sure that, if a threat is coming at us, it won’t be coming from us. 

We can make sure the threatening phone call is not coming from inside the house, so to speak. 

Many of us have been conditioned by our bullies and abusers to be mean to ourselves. 

More than that, even: many of us have been conditioned to respond to our painful situations by shaming, blaming, or harming ourselves. 

Many of us even have experience with responding to painful situations by threatening or trying to take our own lives. 

But if we’re serious about trauma recovery, we truly need to make our head and our heart safe territory, especially for our “parts” and our inner child— and that means we have to put a hard limit on the self-aggression. 

It doesn’t matter how we earned those patterns of self-aggression, or how long ago we learned them. We NEED our nervous system to be able to trust us. 

We need our “parts” to know they can feel what they feel and express what they need to express, without us freaking out and trying to harm or kill ourselves. 

We need to be truly safe with ourselves— even in a world that is not objectively “safe” otherwise. 

I want you to be safe from threats out there in the world. 

But the only true, relative safety from those threats comes from our commitment to handle them when they arise— and we can’t do that if we’re busy kicking the sh*t out of ourselves. 

The ability to protect ourselves from threats “out there” hinges on our self-trust. 

Can we trust ourselves to handle those threats, fight when we need to, flee when we need to?

Can we trust ourselves to stay present, size up the threat, and do what we need to do to keep our physical body, our “parts,” and our inner child safe? 

Remember that the primary impact of CPTSD is to damage our relationship with ourselves— and that has a direct impact on our overall safety. 

The world outside of us is not safe. We have to realistically manage that. 

And the only way we can is by making the world inside of us meaningfully safe— and that means no self-aggression, even if it is a long standing pattern. 

Even if self-harm or suicidal ideation is a comforting pattern. You know what I’m talking about. Even then. 

Realistic safety in trauma recovery is an inside out job— and a non-negotiable one. 

Sorry, that’s just how this “recovery’ thing works. I don’t make the rules. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

Here’s to my fellow imperfect survivors.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve been told what to do and who to be for years. Maybe decades. 

Chances are you’re still being told what to do and who to be, at least by someone. 

We get those messages all the time. 

We get told who we “have” to be, to be “worthy.” 

We get told what we “have” to feel, to be “acceptable.” 

The implicit message that comes with all those things is, if we DON’T happen to be that person or feel those things, that we’ll be rejected. 

Abandoned. Maybe punished. 

Sometimes the people who are laying those messages on us have good intentions, or at least they think they do. 

They truly think that they’re doing us a favor by “making” us be and feel things that will make us more “sympathetic.” 

Here’s the thing about many trauma survivors: we’re not uniformly, perfectly sympathetic. 

We’re human. We’re imperfect. 

We’re going to have our less than sympathetic moments and moods and verbalizations— not because we’re terrible, but because we’re real. 

Us being “worthy” of existence, of support, of understanding, of safety, shouldn’t depend on us being perfect, or even sympathetic. 

Have you ever heard the expression “the perfect survivor?” 

That refers to a trope of a trauma survivor who is “perfectly” sympathetic— vulnerable but not too vulnerable, wounded but not too wounded, wounded in ways that don’t get in the way of being polite or kind…and, often, physically attractive. 

That’s what the culture likes in its trauma surivors, or at least the trauma survivors its interested in acknowledging and supporting and making movies about. 

But that doesn’t perfectly describe all of us, does it? 

It certainly doesn’t describe me. 

The reality is, your resemblance to the “perfect” trauma survivor has f*ck all to do with your “worthiness.” 

It has f*ck all to do with whether you should be believed about your trauma. 

It has f*ck all to do with whether you “deserve” support, or resources, or safety, or kindness. 

Here’s to all my fellow “imperfect” trauma survivors. 

The survivors who, like me, can be a pain in the ass. 

The survivors who, like me, sometimes have a sh*tty attitude. 

The survivors who, like me, often play out our trauma wounds in our relationships. 

The survivors who, like me, don’t immediately get the benefit of the doubt because of the fortuitous placement of our cheekbones. 

(Understand, I don’t have anything against physically attractive people— I’m just acknowledging how our culture’s assumptions about and attitudes toward physical attractiveness impact how our needs get addressed.) 

We’ve been told for years who we need to be and what we need to feel to be “worthy.” 

And it’s been mostly bullsh*t. 

It’s BS that contributed to our BS (Belief Systems). 

And it’s BS that we need to unwind in recovery. 

That can start today. 

drglenndoyle

Validation, distortion, self-trust, & self-esteem.

Validation gets a bad rap. 

Some people seem to think validation means leaning into everything we think or feel. 

It’s not. 

We are going to think and feel plenty of distorted things, thanks to our trauma conditioning. 

Leaning into everything we think or feel would result in us not even trying to work our recovery some nights that are particularly hopeless. 

What validation IS is, when we think or feel something, we don’t immediately reject it. 

We lead off with how this thing we’re thinking or feeling makes sense. 

We give this thing we’re thinking or feeling permission to exist. We don’t demand it go away or be different immediately. 

Why does validation matter in CPTSD recovery? 

Because most of us survivors have, for years, been told that what we think and feel is by definition INVALID. 

We’ve been told we’re “crazy.” 

We’ve been told we’re “weak.” 

We’ve been told, in various ways, that we’re “bad” for thinking and feeling what we do. 

Leaning into THOSE reflexive judgments will mangle our self-esteem, and keep us from building the self-trust we need to climb out of this CPTSD Sarlacc pit. 

I’m a therapist. I listen to plenty of survivors confidently tell me things that I know aren’t true— things like how they don’t deserve to live, how they are unlikeable or unloveable, how they can’t do “anything” right. 

If I responded to all of those things by immediately saying “you’re wrong, crazy and/or bad for thinking or feeling that,” what impact do you think it would have? 

It would have the immediate impact, at least, of those survivors never telling me anything vulnerable again. 

We don’t tend to confide in people who lean into how invalid our thoughts and feelings are— whether they’re our therapist or ourselves. 

When we have thoughts and feelings, we can’t leap right to trying to invalidate them. Not if our goal is to build self trust and self-esteem. 

Nor do we have to go all in and affirm that everything we think and feel is literally 100% accurate— and by the way, that would be true whether or not Trauma Brain was messing with our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves. 

NO human being has “100% accurate” thoughts and feelings all the time. 

What we’re trying to do in realistic trauma recovery is counteract the gaslighting and belittling of our past by validating what we think and feel— but also supporting our recovery by compassionately reality testing it. 

Many trauma survivors are sick to death of cognitive behavioral therapy responding to every one of their self-statements with condescending skepticism, and that’s completely legit. 

Validation is the key to reality testing our inner world without buying into the distorted, destructive thoughts and beliefs Trauma Brain is pumping into our head. 

Many people want to oversimplify validation. Validation is not, actually, a simplistic or black-and-white recovery tool. 

It’s a perspective shift that hooks into a larger recovery supporting mindset: our absolute refusal to shame or attack ourselves, no matter what we’ve been conditioned to do by our bullies and abusers. 

Validation is not a touchy-feely, pop psychology thing. 

It’s part of a practical, hard nosed commitment to relate to ourselves fairly and compassionately. 

Our thoughts and feelings are 100% valid. 

And, they can get distorted by our trauma conditioning, especially when it comes to how we feel and what we believe about ourselves and the future. 

Investigate and realist test your thoughts and feelings— even as you acknowledge that they make sense, that they’re important, and that they don’t mean anything toxic about you. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

Handling Wednesday.

Not all of our triggers are these huge, dramatic, obvious things. 

Sometimes we’re just getting the sh*t kicked out of us by, like, a Wednesday. 

Sometimes it really is just a day that’s hard for us— no special reason. 

Those days can be confusing. 

In trauma recovery sometimes we can extend ourselves some grace for getting triggered by something obviously related to our trauma, or something particularly stressful— but just, like a weekday? 

Those moments can be dangerous for our recovery. 

Those are the moments when we’re at risk of minimizing or belittling our triggers. 

The reality is, there are going to be lots of times when we’re not quite sure why we’re triggered. 

Something is obviously going on with us, but we can’t quite put our finger on it. 

In those moments our old programming can take over, and we can really sh*t on ourselves for supposedly being “weak” or “dramatic.” 

“What’s the matter with you, you can’t handle a normal WEDNESDAY?”, Trauma Brain will sneer at us. 

But the fact that we can’t identify quite why we’re struggling on a weekday isn’t all that weird— and it’s not a reason to ignore or belittle our struggle. 

So we’re struggling on what appears to be a pretty “normal” day. And? 

That doesn’t mean we’re “weak” or “dramatic.” 

It means something’s happening beneath the surface that we’re not quite consciously aware of— but our nervous system is responding. 

It’s real important we approach those moments with compassion, patience, and realism. 

Compassion matters because sustainable trauma recovery requires us to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt— to be on our own side when symptoms spike, whether or not we understand or like what’s going on. 

Patience matters because we’re not always going to immediately understand what’s going on— we’ll need to sit with it until we understand it a little better, until it tells us what we need to know about it. 

And realism matters because we can’t get swept up in our fantasies about how we “should” feel or respond to life— we have to deal with what we’re actually experiencing. 

Struggling with a “normal” day or night is one of the most common experiences of trauma survivors. 

It doesn’t mean we “can’t handle” life— it means that our trauma symptoms and struggles get their hooks into our everyday existence. 

That’s really kind of the essence of CPTSD (and DID, for that matter): it’s trauma that permeates into our minutes, our hours, our days, often in ways that aren’t “obviously” related to what happened. 

Struggling with Wednesday happens. Don’t overthink it and don’t over interpret it. 

Just keep coming back to the tools you have every day in trauma recovery, including on a hard Wednesday: self talk, mental focus, and physiology. 

We’re not going to shame ourselves into being able to handle Wednesdays better. 

After all, if shame worked to positively or permanently change before, it would have worked by now, don’t you think? 

Easy does it. Breathe; blink; focus. 

Wednesdays will get easier. 

drglenndoyle

Keep it in the day.

One of my own challenges in trauma and addiction recovery has been what they call “keeping it in the day” in the Twelve Step tradition. 

What that means is, manage today. 

We can get freaked out by thinking of trauma or addiction recovery as a lifelong process. 

Trauma survivors in particular are sensitive to feeling overwhelmed and inadequate— and the idea that recovery is this hard, complicated thing we have to “do” every day for the rest of our lives can really mess with us. 

“One day at a time” isn’t just a catchy recovery slogan. It’s a very practical mindset tool. 

It may seem obvious that all we can manage today IS today, but that can be easy to forget. 

We trauma survivors in particular tend to think in big, dramatic, overachieving chunks. 

We tend to go big or go home. 

So it can be hard for us to “keep it in the day”— to focus on this twenty four hours. 

A recovery tool that changed things for me was the morning exercise I learned while listening to a Nathaniel Branden audio program about self esteem: starting each day writing down not only what I wanted out of life, but identifying things I could do that day to nudge toward those goals. 

The rule with that exercise is, ONLY things we KNOW we can realistically do within these twenty four hours can go on that list. 

So, for example: while my “what do I want” goal may have been to “become a psychologist,” “earn a doctorate” couldn’t go on the “things I can do today” list, because that’s a multi-year project.

What COULD go on the “things I can do today” list? Maybe identifying a doctoral program; maybe starting an application; or, later, doing my daily studying or paper writing.

I didn’t actually make progress toward becoming a psychologist until I learned to “keep it in the day.” 

Every recovery goal or task is like this. 

We can look at the larger arc— in fact, it’s important to regularly check in with where we are with our big, little, and medium scale goals— but we have to, have to, have to keep returning to what we can do today. 

We also have to be realistic about what our specific trauma recovery challenges are, today. 

Yes, we can identify larger issues and challenges in our trauma recovery— and, again, it’s important to check in with our recovery arc on the regular— but we have to keep coming back, again and again, to what’s actually on our plate today. 

If we’re not managing today’s symptoms and triggers, we’re not managing our trauma recovery.

When in doubt, keep it in the day. 

Also when not in doubt. 

An always relevant Recovery Supporting Question (RSQ) is, “what are my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats today?”

(This is known as a “SWOT analysis, and it’s another powerful, practical recovery mindset tool.) 

“Keeping it in the day” doesn’t mean we lose sight of the overall arc. 

It means that our top priority is always our safety and stability today. 

Another recovery mindset tool I value is a perspective from the Rational Recovery tradition that is related to Addiction Voice Recognition Technique (AVRT), which reminds us that the rest of our life is always going to be a series of present moments. 

That is to say, if you can effectively manage the present moment, you can manage your recovery— indeed the ONLY way to manage your recovery IS to manage the present moment. 

All that said: I’m not, actually, one of those therapists who believes survivors should NEVER think about the past or the future. 

I think visualizing the past and the future can be incredibly useful mindset tools, especially when the present moment sucks. 

I think the key to utilizing memories of the past and fantasies of the future effectively is to be really conscious about how and why we’re doing it— rather than letting those memories and fantasies “hijack” our focus against our will. 

But even when we’re leveraging memories of the past or fantasies of the future to influence how we feel and function, we’re STILL managing the present moment and “keeping it in the day.” 

Using those mindset tools produces a result here and now— i.e., it’s part of our toolbox for managing these twenty four hours (specifically, this sixty seconds). 

Whatever recovery tools work for you, leverage them in the context of managing today. 

Don’t freak yourself out about the rest of your life. 

Focus and refocus on the day in front of you, the hour in front of you, the minute in front of you. 

Manage the present moment, and the rest of your life will take care of itself. 

Breathe, blink, focus. 

drglenndoyle

Gotta start somewhere to get somewhere.

For years, we were doing our best with what we had. 

There’s no shame in that. 

Many of us trauma survivors fall into this trap of shaming and blaming ourselves for struggling in the past. 

We tell ourselves we “could” have or “should” have done better, sooner. 

We tell ourselves we could have gotten out of situations. 

We tell ourselves we could have made better choices. 

We tell ourselves we could have just done better in life. 

The reality is, many of us were functioning remarkably well, given what we were dealing with. 

The reality is, many of us were doing more than anyone could have reasonably expected of us, given the lack of safety and support we endured. 

The reality is, many of us STILL overachieved relative to our peers— even while telling ourselves we “should” be doing “better.” 

You and I only had to work with what we had to work with. 

Our coping patterns represented our attempts to make chicken salad out of chicken sh*t. 

How on earth were we supposed to develop emotional regulation, when the adults around us were anything but regulated? 

How were we supposed to escape defensive, self-defeating relationship patterns, when we never saw healthy relationships modeled?

How were we supposed to set goals and work toward them in realistic increments, when the expectations of us were arbitrary and constantly changing? 

None of this is an “excuse.” 

It’s just the reality that many of us had to work with. 

There was, and is, no shame in doing what we can with what we have. 

The only difference between a survivor who is further along in our trauma recovery and a survivor who is struggling in early recovery is that the more experienced survivor has tools and perspectives that early recovery survivor doesn’t yet have. 

It’s not shameful to lack tools you were never given. 

It’s not shameful to not be good at things you never had the opportunity to practice. 

Here, now, you and I are learning and practicing trauma recovery tools grounded in realistic, recovery supporting self-talk, mental focus, and physiology. 

We’re giving ourselves the grace to be as inexperienced with them as we are, and the room to grow as we practice and develop them. 

That’s what trauma recovery truly is: an ongoing process of realistic, sustainable learning. 

As it turns out, learning doesn’t happen if we’re busy shaming ourselves for not knowing what we didn’t know, or not being able to do what we couldn’t do. 

I know, it’s not always fun to be a learner. Believe me, I know. 

Being a work in progress sometimes sucks. We want to be the master, who whips out skills and tools effortlessly and intuitively. 

We’ll get there. 

But the first step to being good at something, is sucking at it. 

Gotta start somewhere to get somewhere. 

Dare to suck today. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

drglenndoyle

Trauma Brain is neither “objective” nor “reliable.”

Don’t mistake Trauma Brain for a reliable source of information. 

Trauma Brain is the internalized voices of our abusers and bullies. 

It’d be like if our abusers and bullies bought a cable news network, the subject of which was us and our lives. 

All day, every day, their reporters would produce stories about us— but do you think those stories would be accurate, coming from our abusers and bullies? 

Not hardly. 

They’d probably focus disproportionately on how we suck. 

They’d focus on how our problems were our fault— and definitely not the fault of our abusers and bullies, who just happen to own the network. 

Those stories would focus on how we’re probably doing life entirely wrong— especially if we’re working a trauma recovery and trying to break free of our bullies’ and abusers’ influence. 

If our bullies and abusers had a cable news network, that’s what we’d expect. 

What we need to understand is that the cable news network that our bullies and abusers do have, and which is broadcasting 24/7/365, is Trauma Brain. 

Trauma Brain is particularly tricky, too, because it is the result of conditioning over time— meaning we often don’t realize that what we’re “hearing” from it is anything other than our own, spontaneous, “natural” thoughts. 

We readily acknowledge when a cable news network run by people with whom we disagree, runs news stories with a particular “slant.” 

We understand that cable news networks that have an agenda are going to omit certain facts and spin others, such that their point of view is strengthened.

I’m telling you, Trauma Brain is doing that right now, inside the head of every survivor. 

Trauma Brain omits facts. 

Trauma Brain spins other facts. 

Trauma Brain is NOT an objective source of information, any more than the cable news network run by your least favorite political actors is. 

Yet, we know that the biases and agendas of cable news networks don’t keep some people from watching them, and believing everything they broadcast. 

Any smart, objective person understands that the real truth is probably not what is being broadcast by those networks. 

And survivors who succeed at trauma recovery understand that Trauma Brain is not so much a truth-seeker or truth-teller, as it it is a spin doctor or an advertising executive. 

Trauma Brain is in the business of persuasion and coercion— not information. 

Yes, Trauma Brain can be convincing. So can cable news networks. 

But remember who is pulling the strings. 

Remember what the real agenda is. 

Remember that in order to see what we see and know what we know, we have to step back from the “news” ticker. 

Breathe; blink; focus. 

And look closer.