Remember: you are on a different life path, a different mission, than “they” are.
Of course they’re going to misunderstand you.
Maybe mock you.
Certainly communicate to you in dozens of implicit and explicit ways that you’re “doing it wrong.”
You’re not, actually, doing it wrong.
But, in working your trauma recovery, you’re definitely doing life much differently than “they” are.
Hell, you are doing life much differently than they ever COULD.
You and I know the kind of focus and courage working our trauma recover takes.
Do you think “they” could actually do that?
I don’t.
Chances are, anyone who gives you sh*t about your recovery needs and habits is light years away from realistically being able to do what you do every day.
They don’t even know how much effort you’ve had to expend at various points in your journey just to stay ALIVE.
So, yes. You are on a very different path than they are.
Your mission statement is very different from theirs— not least because people who aren’t working a recovery often don’t even bother having a mission statement for their life.
Don’t let “them” get in your head.
Their judgments have exactly zero to do with what you’re actually doing in your life.
Don’t hold yourself to “their” standards. Don’t take “their” opinions any more seriously than they deserve to be taken.
You are on a different path, a different mission— and that’s the good news.
The path you’re on, the mission you’re on, is keeping you alive and creating a quality of life “they” could never.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how their behavior, is your fault.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how you’re “only” suffering because you are “weak.” Or “stupid.” Or, or, or.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how you don’t “deserve” better than you’re experiencing now.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how you’re The Exception to the fact that human brains and nervous systems can change with experience and guidance and support.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how because certain things happened to you, you “must” be “destined” for pain and misery for the rest of your life.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how none of the recovery tools that work for other survivors, will work for you.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how you “should” be further along in you recovery by now.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how you “should” be fairer or kinder or give another chance to people or institutions that hurt you.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how recovery is too complicated for you to wrap your head around.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how you don’t have the “willpower” or patience or focus to meaningfully recover from trauma.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how you “can’t” let on to anyone, under any circumstances, how much you’re struggling.
Notice when you’re telling ourself a story about how the “memory holes” in your past “must” mean that there’s nothing there.
Notice when you’re telling yourself a story about how what happened to you wasn’t “bad enough” to result in your current symptoms and struggles.
Just notice.
Notice, and remind yourself: this is BS. Belief Systems.
They’re Belief Systems so common to trauma survivors that I can list example after example just now, and know that it will resonate with most of the survivors reading my page.
None of those are true.
Some of them start out with kernels of truth, but Trauma Brain— what I call the internalized voices of our bullies and abusers, that play in our head on repeat for years— effortfully, very effectively, warps them into self-defeating assertions that we buy hook, line, and sinker.
Why do we swallow Trauma Brain BS? Not because we’re “stupid.”
Because we’ve been brainwashed. Conditioned. Programmed.
Realistic trauma recovery is about scratching the record. Waking up.
Seeing the stories for what they are.
And creating new stories for ourselves that are more reflective of reality and more relevant to who we are and what we’re all about.
One of the main things that makes safe people safe, is that they won’t lose their sh*t when we try to take care of ourselves.
When we set boundaries.
When we confront them about an aspect of their behavior.
Unsafe people tend to weaponize the fact that we trauma survivors can get triggered by anger and other reactivity.
They tend to use that fact to, literally, scare us into not standing up for ourselves, sometimes in the most basic ways.
Contrary to what you may have been conditioned to believe, every safe relationship involves boundaries. Including the most warm, loving, communicative relationships.
Contrary to what you may have been conditioned to believe, every safe relationship at some point involves confrontation— which, contrary to what you may have been conditioned to believe, doesn’t have to be aggressive or relationship damaging.
Safe people get all that.
A certain amount of anxiety when we’re standing up for ourselves is normal, especially if we’ve had experiences in the past when standing up for ourselves didn’t go so well.
But if someone is safe, really safe, they won’t weaponize that anxiety to get us to back down.
One of the staggering realizations many survivors make when we finally start seriously working our recovery is the fact that many of us haven’t experienced much safety, at all, in our relationships growing up.
That realization sucks.
And, as we get further into recovery, that realization is increasingly undeniable.
The fact that we had to make do with unsafe relationships is actually part of what makes complex trauma complex.
That’s where trauma bonds become a way of life.
That’s where we get into blaming ourselves for the fact that we never feel truly safe.
It’s not your fault if all you had growing up was unsafe relationships. It’s not your fault if most of your relationships now are unsafe.
(Another staggering realization many of us make in recovery is the fact that many of the “choices” we thought we were making along the way actually weren’t all that “free”— but that’s a topic for another time.)
Recovery asks us to be unflinchingly real about the safety, or lack thereof, of our relationships with others.
Recovery also asks us to reshape our relationship with ourselves to make it safer— and that means no trying to control our own behavior through shame or punishment.
Broadly, recovery asks us to give up lots of illusions that we thought were reality.
The quality of our trauma recovery is the quality of our relationship and communication with ourselves.
If we’re struggling with recovery, it’s almost always because that relationship and communication has broken down somehow.
We’ve lost touch with ourselves.
We’re not checking in.
We’re not listening.
We’re not open to whatever our body and our parts are trying to tell us.
There can be lots of reasons why our relationship and communication with ourselves can get blocked, and many of them aren’t our fault. It’s almost never the case that we struggle with recovery because we’re “not trying hard enough.”
Usually, we’ve gotten scared or overwhelmed.
We’ve gotten distracted by all the noise. All the chaos— inside and out.
When we are overwhelmed, it’s hard to relate to ourselves with compassion and patience— and it’s especially hard when for years we’ve been conditioned by trauma to dislike and distrust ourselves.
During times of fear or overwhelm, we tend to regress.
We fall back into our default patterns of relating and communicating to ourselves.
That’s one of the main reasons why, when we’re badly triggered, we can feel like we’re back at Square One: we’re aware of having regressed.
It can FEEL like we’ve lost all our progress— but we haven’t.
It can FEEL like all the tools and skills we’ve ever developed have abandoned us— but they haven’t.
When we’re scared and overwhelmed, it can take a minute to remember that recovery is about how we relate and communicate to ourselves.
Sometimes it takes even longer to remember, because we feel embarrassed or ashamed that we’re struggling.
Fear, overwhelm, embarrassment, shame, dissociation— they all make it hard to get back on track with relating and communicating with ourselves in recovery supporting ways.
But we can get back on track.
We can plug back in to our experiences and our needs with compassion and patience.
We can start reaching out and listening to our parts again.
We can remember and remind ourselves who we are, and what we’re all about.
The trick is staying out of shame and self-blame.
Not assuming that because we’re struggling, we’ve lost the fight.
Not telling ourselves a story, over and over again, about how we suck, how we’re hopeless, how we can’t recover, how it’s not worth even trying.
Trauma robs us of many choices— but there are some choices we do have, even in moments of fear and overwhelm.
The most important of those choices is how we relate and communicate to ourselves.
The quality of our recovery is the quality of that relationship and that communication.
And it’s never too late— never the wrong moment— to pay attention to it with acceptance and love.
In working our trauma recovery, we have to make the deal with ourselves that ALL of our thoughts and feelings are acceptable.
We have to commit to not attacking, shaming, punishing or abandoning ourselves over ANYTHING we think or feel.
Our commitment to self-protection and self-love love has to be radical. Absolute.
Mind you: we are not always going to FEEL loving toward ourselves.
We are not always going to FEEL acceptable to ourselves.
I’m not saying we always need to FEEL accepting or loving toward ourselves. We won’t. We can’t force feelings.
But acceptance and love aren’t just feelings. They are behaviors— behaviors that comprise the backbone of sustainable trauma recovery.
What do we DO when we accept someone, wholly?
We create space for them in our life that is safe— and to which they have access without strings.
This is what we need to do for ourselves— no questions asked. No exceptions made.
What we DO when we love someone?
We nurture them. We are kind to them. We protect them. We give them the benefit of the doubt .
We have their back.
This is what we need to do for ourselves— no questions asked. No exceptions made.
The biggest threats to our self-love and self-acceptance tend to be things we think or feel.
Every single day we are going to think and feel things that we judge to be unacceptable, and which we believe make us unlovable.
If we only feel acceptable or lovable to ourselves when our thoughts and feelings are acceptable and lovable, we are going to develop deep anxiety— and deep shame.
It’s real hard to work a sustainable trauma recovery when we’re wrestling with deep anxiety and deep shame.
Why do we get so hard on ourselves about things we think and things we feel? There are many reasons, most of which have to do with our trauma conditioning. We’ve been programmed to echo and deepen our bullies’ and abusers’ attitudes and behaviors toward us.
We don’t choose our thoughts and feelings— we experience them. And the fact that we don’t choose them often triggers shame for trauma survivors, because we believe we “should” have complete “control” over what we think and feel.
The fact that we DON’T have complete “control”— or even all that much control, some days— over what we think and feel very often activates old, shame-bound conditioning.
We don’t have “control” over our thoughts and feelings. We can, over time, develop INFLUENCE over what we think and feel— but that starts with a recognition that we don’t “choose” our thoughts and feelings.
Our “choices” become relevant in our RESPONSES to what we think and feel— what we do next, AFTER we become aware of a thought or feeling.
So what does this mean for our daily Recovery Supporting Rituals (RSR’s)?
Make a ritual out of asking the Recovery Supporting Question (RSQ): what would self-acceptance look like, right here, right now? If I radically accepted myself, my thoughts, and my feelings, what would I DO about it? How would I talk to myself? What would would I mentally focus on right here, right now?
Likewise, an RSQ that can become a useful RSR is: if I loved myself, really loved myself, what would that look like, right here, right now? How would I talk to myself? What would would I do? What would I NOT do?
Recovery Supporting Questions and Rituals are how we operationalize otherwise abstract concepts like “self acceptance” and “self love.”
I’m all for feeling acceptance, love, and other warm and fuzzy feelings about ourselves.
But I’m more interested in how we create and support those experiences through our consistent behavior.
Use Your Damn Skills 