drglenndoyle

Trauma recovery is all about authenticity & autonomy.

I cannot overstate the importance of authenticity and autonomy to trauma recovery. 

So, so, so many trauma survivors get up in our head about whether or not what we’re being asked to do feels real or true— or whether we’re being coerced. 

We come by that anxiety honestly. 

Whether we developed CPTSD as a result of childhood abuse or neglect, or as the result of coercive control or exploitation or harm in adulthood, we know what it’s like to be controlled, manipulated, forced. 

We know what it’s like to have someone else trying to supplant what we want and need. 

We know what it’s like to have someone trying to download their template of who we are, or who we “should” be, into our brain, without our consent. 

Feeling controlled can really evoke that “freeze” trauma response in particular. 

Our nervous system senses that someone is trying to make us do something, and it just shuts the f*ck down. 

This happens especially when we feel we can’t realistically “fight” the influence of whomever is trying to control us, and the option to “flee” doesn’t seem to be available. ‘

So: we freeze up. Everything stops. We “resist” “their” control by resisting everything, even motion itself. 

Procrastination is a behavior often rooted in the “freeze” trauma response, that gets triggered ins response to feeing controlled. 

We can’t resist, we can’t run away— but our nervous system will be damned if it’s going to just go along with the coercion. 

So it seizes up— and time slips away, often to the point where we miss both deadlines and opportunities. All to avoid feeling controlled. 

If we don’t want our aversion to feeling controlled and our “freeze” response grinding our recovery to a halt, we have to, have to, HAVE to ground our recovery tools and goals in our authenticity. 

Our trauma recovery blueprint has to look and feel like it was specifically designed for us— not thought up by some “expert” in trauma who could cook up the same plan for any survivor, sight unseen. 

This is one reason why, for all the trauma focused content I write and post on the internet, I don’t write out super specific templates for individuals’ trauma recovery— because not only would those not work, but they would trigger many survivors’ fears of being controlled.

You have, and have had, enough people trying to control you your entire life. You don’t need some rando on the internet pretending he can design an authentic trauma recovery plan for you from afar. 

I know I sound like a broken record with this, but the quality of our trauma recovery truly is the quality of our relationship with ourselves. That’s what CPTSD breaks; that’s what we have to fix. 

The tools, skills, and philosophies that will fix my relationship with myself won’t necessarily work for you— and what resonates with your authentic self may not do anything for me. 

Realistic trauma recovery truly is not about you “having” to do anything that is not authentic to you (beyond challenging beliefs and habits that Trauma Brain has convinced you are “natural,” but which are really trauma programming trying to keep you miserable). 

Actual trauma recovery is about you feeling more like yourself than maybe you ever have— in a positive sense. 

“Recovery” that does not emphasize authenticity and autonomy is not real recovery. 

It’s a recipe for eventually feeling trapped, controlled, and “in trouble”— that is for getting triggered and setting yourself up for saying “f*ck it.” 

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.