10 "Survival Lies" You May Tell If You Have CPTSD

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my channel today I am making a video that is very Niche like I'm curious about who has found their way here and uh what your experiences have been because I imagine if you resonate with this title or have a even passing curiosity about this title we have a lot of stuff to talk about so I will get right into my motivation for making this video as well as some caveats about how I want to approach this topic those of you who've been following my channel for a while know that part of what has been helping me on my own attachment and cptsd healing Journey has been practicing a philosophy called radical honesty radical honesty is in some ways exactly what it sounds like in some ways not at all but essentially a lot of what it is is learning to notice when we're being dishonest both with ourselves and other people and learning skills for communicating more honestly in the moment one of the kind of core philosophies that's at the root of radical honesty is that the majority of the suffering we do in life is created by lying so when we are dishonest with ourselves and or other people we are creating a whole bunch of roadblocks for ourselves in a whole bunch of ways in which we are holding ourselves back creating intention internally and externally and overall just not allowing ourselves to experience the full breadth of what is available to us on this planet Earth while we are here so part of what's been really interesting for me as I go through the Journey of practicing radical honesty and integrating it in some ways into my real life outside of like workshops and radical honesty events and in other cases not at all integrating it into certain situations is that I'm noticing why I lie like I'm noticing which situations come up where it truly is slightly more adaptive for me to tell a lie than to tell the truth and which situations it is historically been more adaptive for me to either lie or omit certain pieces of information even from my own processing and those of you who have watched a lot of my attachment related videos know that a lot of what attachment theory is looking at is what information do we naturally omit from processing and secure attachment is all about having a healthy balance of processing both emotional and intellectual information but people who have complex PTSD which is a lot of people with insecure attachment Styles particularly those with fearful Styles I imagine are a lot more likely to have traits of cptsd the same with people who have been through family scapegoating so if you have been following my family role series and you relate to the scapegoat it is not unlikely that you ended up with cptsd symptoms and in this video I'm not going to go into what complex PTSD is the reason being is that that would be an entire video in and of itself but I do encourage you to check out the book complex PTSD from surviving to thriving by Pete Walker it is maybe my favorite psychology book I have ever read and that is saying a lot I read an average of two to three psych books a week complex PTSD does such an incredible job of looking at how early wounding impacts our adult functioning and today I want to talk specifically about how early wounding especially early wounding that that leaves us with complex PTSD patterning impacts our ability to be aware of and to tell the truth and the reason I want to do this is not because I'm trying to shame anybody for being dishonest and not because I'm trying to moralize in any capacity about this right what I want to do is just give you some tools and some things to think about and be aware of if you identify as having complex PTSD symptoms and you identify as someone who struggles to show up honestly and authentically in the world I think that a lot of the reason why a lot of us who have complex PTSD symptoms really struggle with close connections with maintaining intimate relationships with feeling confident and like we have high self-esteem is because it was highly adaptive for us on many levels when we were young to be dishonest or to Omit information from our own awareness so then we developed these patterns of not noticing the truth and not communicating stating the truth and those patterns led to a lot of maladaptive and dysfunctional traits as adults that a lot of us aren't even all that consciously aware of right so this video is largely just me sharing some patterns of lying that I've become aware of in myself as I've gone through this process of trying to become more and more honest in the world and in my relationships and if any of this is relatable to you I'm hoping that you can use it as a means of unpacking whether or not it might be safe to now tell the truth in some of these scenarios or to identify situations you could put yourself in where it's easier to be more authentic and more honest so again this is not about shaming or blaming anyone who has cptsd for lying it is about championing you for the ways in which you have survived and adapted in the world and reminding you that maybe now there is a way forward that is even more adaptive that feels a whole lot better and more intrinsically regulating and fulfilling so here we go without further Ado 10 reasons why people with complex PTSD might lie reason one you are having a fun response this is probably in my opinion one of the biggest reasons why people lie without knowing they're lying so Pete Walker's book he walks you through what a fun response is it is part of what he calls the 4f so when your sympathetic nervous system is activated because you perceive yourself to be in danger we commonly think of going into either fight or flight mode he argues we go into either fight flight freeze or Fawn responses and when we are fawning what we are doing is essentially doing some version of what you might otherwise think of as people pleasing so temporarily shutting down your body and your mind to your own desires and needs and focusing on giving the person in front of you what they want because your body is in fear and your body assumes that if you can give the person what they want then they will not harm you now the fond response is a very complex psychological phenomenon that I'm actually going to film a whole other video unpacking so when that video comes out I will link it in the description of this video but essentially what you need to know about the Fawn response is that when you are doing this when you are going along with what someone else wants when you are people pleasing when you are deciding that the easiest way forward is to go with the flow and be easy going often you are not overtly lying in the way that we tend to think about people lying you are not sitting there with this Burning personal desire that you're refusing to disclose what you're actually doing is thinking okay I have like a list of 10 things at any given point in time that I want and right now the thing on the top of the list is harmony because I feel threatened and even that is often not the most conscious thought process what you might be feeling in that moment is I don't really have a preference what you might be feeling in that moment is I have a strong preference for not starting conflict and in in the moment that is your authentic want your authentic want is to give the other person what they want so that the problem or the potential conflict goes away however later on once you are safe again so you are no longer in that state of sympathetic nervous system activation where your primary goal is keeping yourself safe you might suddenly realize whoa I did have a want that I was at the time not conscious of what I actually wanted was X Y or Z but in that moment what I wanted was to give the other person what they wanted so that it wouldn't start a whole thing but now now that I'm safe and regulated my secondary wants or my more authentic wants are coming to the surface and the problem this tends to get us into is when we're harboring those secondary wants we don't say them in the moment often it builds resentment right we start resenting the other person for being so overt about what they want and in the moment we Fawn and we give them what they want and then we feel perpetually frustrated that our true wants which we might not realize until later go unacknowledged in the dynamic and this is a complex issue that's the thing about complex PTSD the problems it tends to give way to are complex and I'm not here to teach you how to solve every single one of these problems in the span of this video I'm just here to raise awareness about areas where you might be self-abandoning or lying without realizing it and I think this is one of the biggest ones for people with cptsd is when your survival system is activated which is much more often than the average person with less trauma than you you are likely to be in a fun response and to not be aware of what you want and then be unable to communicate it and I will give a small piece of advice it's probably helpful in your Intimate Relationships to make people aware of this to let your partner or your closest friends know hey sometimes I freeze up in the moment I don't know what I want and so I'll tell you I'm fine with something and later realize that I actually had another underlying want that I wasn't conscious of at the time is it okay with you if I come to you later on and just fill you in on what I wanted even if it's too late for me to get that just so you're aware of what my underlying wants and needs tend to be and the more comfortable you can get doing this the more likely you are to start actually deactivating your own Fawn response around that person right if you have a pattern of going to them and having the things you want and need to be accepted even if it's later on after the fact your body might start logging oh this person actually does listen to me when I bring up what I want or need and now maybe in the moment eventually after enough repetition my body can start calming down not having that fun response come online and I can learn to access my own emotional state in that instance and communicate it at the time but again this is a process right and you might find there are situations where you go to someone after the fact let them know what was happening and they're not receptive to that or they kind of like your fun response right and that in and of itself is information about that maybe not being the safest or most healthy relationship for you to be in doesn't mean you have to do anything about it it's just information another area where people with complex PTSD tend to start lying very young in my opinion like this is a pattern of lying that will start as soon as they go to school uh or are in other situations whether it's group sports or any type of social interaction where they're interacting with children from different backgrounds people with complex PTSD lie to seem normal so there is a book called adult children of Alcoholics and it is this kind of movement spurred in the 80s where they started noticing these patterns and traits that were consistent and for children who'd grown up with alcoholic parents and then they started realizing actually any sort of family dysfunction can lead a child to have these traits and one of the traits is you are constantly guessing at what normal is and I think that this applies to a lot of people with complex PTSD because their home environments their early environments were not necessarily normal or some of the situations they've been through in life were not normal or the way that they thought about themselves was an internalized belief that they are not normal right I think it's very very common if not a defining trait of having complex PTSD to think of yourself as not to normal and to think of yourself as othered or outcasted or unacceptable unlovable in some way which is not true at all by the way but if you have complex PTSD you probably think that so I think from the time that people with complex PTSD are young children they have learned to lie to socially blend in we all need social interaction we need it and to be fair everybody does this to an extent you do not have to have an extensive history of trauma to want to blend in and to sometimes fudge the truth to do that but I think that this is a particularly prevalent and obvious one for those who do have complex PTSD is because you don't really know what normal is but you have the sense that you'll get outcasted if you don't fit the normal mold you end up having to tell more lies than the average person who is closer to that normal mold than you are because they've had more common experiences in order to get the same social acceptance right so this is actually highly adaptive for a lot of kids and it's not something that I think anyone would blame or shame a child for but it is something that as we grow up we learn to blame and shame ourselves for rather than accepting yeah the reason why I don't always act like my true self the reason I don't always connect really deeply with people is because I learned from a young age that to get Social acceptance you have to lie about who you are and lie about what you've been through right so this is once again not about shaming or blaming you for this it's actually about giving yourself some self-compassion around it right you fought to survive and part of fighting for survival means fighting for social inclusion and that's what you've been doing for a lot of your life if you have complex PTSD chances are it led to some small or humongous lies along the way now number three is a big one because this is not just about lying to other people this is about a really deep self lie and this is that from the time they're very young many people with complex PTSD because they have this fragmented and disoriented sense of who they are because their true self was not mirrored back properly to them through their caregivers much of the time you actually might have a story about who you are that is not at all true to who you actually are so what that means is that let's say you were the scapegoat of the family and you came into the world as a person who wants to do good and make other people feel good and generally get along with people but you're chronically being told there's something wrong with you you're too angry you can't get along with other kids There's Something Wicked or evil inside of you and because as a child you really trust your parents view of you they're kind of your entire window to the outside world you might actually take on those Twisted points of view as your identity so you might truly believe I am a bad person I want bad things to happen to other people there's something wrong with me I'm defective I have anger issues I'm a monster whatever it is that you are told repeatedly as a child before you're old enough to have enough exposure to other points of view that would allow you to internalize different things you might latch on to these views of who you are that are inaccurate and that on some level you know to be inaccurate because you can feel in your body what you want and no child wants to be evil or bad or wrong or angry no child wants that there are no children who are just born like that okay but you might have been told you were and so growing up you might convey that to other people you might look for opportunities you can be in where a bad person would be in that situation or if you hurt someone instead of going oh that was an accident I didn't realize that that was going to be hurtful for someone you might automatically hear this voice in your head that goes you're a bad person you want other people to be unhappy and you're going to believe that about yourself so the child who's been scapegoated or the child who has gone through a lot of trauma related to other people telling them negative things about their character is likely to take on those things as who they believe they are right and this is the beginning of the lies that we tell ourselves and it's really hard to be honest and authentic about who you are if you don't actually know who you are right if you have all this language given to you by other people but it doesn't quite match up with the way you feel inside it's confusing and it leads to you giving people conflicting and confusing messages because you don't actually know what's true this is particularly potent when it comes to fearful avoidant attachment which is often again related to complex PTSD to family scapegoating to these adverse young experiences there is a disoriented sense of self so you don't really know who you are or what you want because it's hard to separate out what you've been told from what you feel and experienced to be true and so that can lead to a lot of mixed messages getting sent out a lot of contradictions that other people might think you are lying about when truly those contradictions exist within yourself and your own psyche and even you don't really know who you are or what your true identity is reason number four you might have learned to lie from a young age is you learn to lie to avoid loss so when you are a child the biggest possible threat to a child is getting taken away or separated from their caregiver it does not matter for 99 of children if their caregivers are abusive if they're unable to take care of them if they are neglectful there is something so Primal that attaches us to our caregivers because from the time we are young we learn based on the fact that they Keep Us Alive with their literal bodies if you are breastfeeding as an infant I will die if I'm separated from my caregiver that is what children believe on an instinctual level so it often does not matter how dangerous or unfit their caregivers are the thought of being separated from them of being let's say put into foster care or taken away by Social Services is threatening on a core basic survival level to most children so when that sense of survival is so strong theological thing to do is to act like everything is fine at home even if it's not to act like if you are being abused even by someone outside of the family if you believe that there is some sort of threat to your connections with other people with your family with the people you think are protecting you if you are to disclose what's actually happening you're probably going to lie about it that's a really strong incentive to lie when you are a child and I think what's important to note here is that that idea that you have to lie to avoid loss becomes encoded in the body like you might now make an unconscious association between keeping people's secrets and keeping them in your life right so when you meet someone who let's say abuses you as an adult physically or psychologically or sexually or whatever it is you might feel compelled to keep that secret because you have this response in your mind that's like telling the truth means dealing with incalculable loss so you are naturally incentivized inside of your own mind by your own conditioning to keep people's deep dark secrets and so you start lying on behalf of other people another adult child trait is being loyal to a fault and I think that this is kind of all wrapped up in that like we believe that telling the truth leads to loss so lie to keep other people's secrets and we lie really well in those cases most of the time now so far we've talked mostly about the lies that you will turn to in childhood if you have complex PTSD but I want to talk about how these Tendencies and these patterns of lying mature and develop over the course of your life and express themselves in adulthood so the adult version of lying for social inclusion is lying to secure resources so lying to get a certain job or to get money or to be able to sign a lease on an apartment when actually you have a really bad credit history by the time you have reached adulthood as a person with complex PTSD you probably have a couple of comorbid mental health issues you've been dealing with on and off for years you probably have patterns of unstable relationships that you've been struggling with because complex PTSD makes intimacy really difficult you might have struggled to hold down a steady job to keep your commitments in various areas because of all of these mental challenges and blocks that you have in the way of day-to-day functioning so you might learn to lie to do whatever it takes for you to get money to secure a place to live get ahead in life whether this means making up elaborate stories about why you don't have a reference to give in the workplace whether it means faking a reference for an apartment whether it means like forging documents or hiding the money you make or any long sequence of survival skills you you have picked up over the course of your life to cover up for all of the other ways in which you struggle to do things in the linear way that other people who do not have a lung trauma history seem to be able to easily do things this is again why we call complex trauma complex it has its tentacles in every area of your life for most people who struggle with complex trauma right and by the time you are 20 30 40 years old you are probably already covering up for years and years of circumnavigating the rules and getting around certain barriers and having to find creative ways to keep yourself resourced and alive and thriving in this world because chances are the linear Pathways did not work for you were not an option for you because you had different needs than the people who were on those linear Pathways even if the different needs was let's say you couldn't focus properly you have a really poor attention span because you frequently dissociate as a trauma response right that's going to make school a lot harder for you and if school is a lot harder for you getting a regular job might be a lot harder for you and if getting a regular job is a lot harder for you you might have to jump through a lot of Hoops to do a lot of different things for work that might now make it difficult to sign a lease on an apartment because your landlord wants proof of employment but you don't have stable employment and if you need a co-signer in the event that you don't have stable employment you might not have a co-signer because maybe you don't speak to your family or maybe you can't hold down a serious relationship with someone who could co-sign so all of this turns into this web of scenarios where you are constantly triaging the next great emergency in your life and again I say this without judgment I say it with the utmost compassion because I understand life is not as easy for you as it's been for other people chances are and chances are you have learned to lie about your circumstances as a means of getting the resources you need to stay alive and I applaud you for doing that nobody on this planet is more resourceful than a complex PTSD Survivor nobody reason six you are likely to lie if you have complex PTSD as an adult is toxic shame so John Bradshaw who's a brilliant psychologist wrote a book called healing the shame that binds you that talks all about this concept of toxic shame Pete Walker also goes over it extensively in his complex PTSD book but essentially to have toxic shame means to have a shame bound identity so to think of yourself as inherently shameful at the core and when you think of yourself as inherently shameful at the core you start telling a lot of lies to try to avoid other people seeing that core and I don't think people like properly understand just how deep this runs because the problem is when you internalize the idea I am shameful at my core and then you let's say fail at something or struggle with something people who are not shame bound would go oh I failed oh I struggled at something I must need to learn some new skills I must just need some help people with toxic shame do not think those things they think I failed or I struggled because I am bad bad pathetic disgusting unworthy at my core and then it gets really hard to try again and this is the lifelong process of self gaslighting based on what other people told you when you were a child who did not know better and this is in my opinion the biggest thing that holds people with complex PTSD back and this is the thing that makes me angry every time I meet someone with complex PTSD and they talk about themselves this way I want to go back in time and I want to shake whoever first told them those things about themselves and I want to just overload them with the message that they are worthy of love and that they are worthy of trying and failing and that not meaning that there's something wrong with them that they are deserving of help that they are no different than anyone else out there who's trying and failing who is needing help deserving of support the only difference is that they don't think they can ask for it if you have complex PTSD you think that whatever happens to you that is bad was in some convoluted way caused by the fact that there is something deeply wrong with you and oh my God you are so wrong that is so not the case it's so not the case but it's also ridiculous like truly ridiculous how wide-reaching this is I think one of the clearest examples for myself is that I have had chronic pain since I was about 16 years old undiagnosed likely psychosomatic a trauma response stress response and every time I am experiencing a chronic pain flare-up I think that I'm faking it this is absolutely nonsensical because I am not faking these flare-ups when I have a chronic pain flare-up it is pain like I have never experienced in any other situation in my life like I can't get out of bed I can't stand up and every time I get one of these flare-ups without fail without fail I start berating myself for being a little baby and I start telling myself like anyone else would just suck this up and get through it no they would not anyone else feeling that level of pain I think would admit themselves to the hospital but because of this conditioning that there's something deeply shameful and wrong with me it has taken me so long to accept that when I'm in pain I deserve medical attention like I deserve to have a doctor who knows about this any other person would have a doctor who knows about this and would run tests on them but there's this belief when you have complex PTSD that anything bad that's happening to you is just because you are being over dramatic or because you should have known how to prevent it right so there is such a deep deep-seated sense of Shame when you have complex PTSD that it overtakes rationality it literally overtakes your ability to understand which resources are available to you you are so quick to assume that you are just being irrational and that your thought process is wrong because you've been told that on some level for a very long time that you will end up lying about things because you're gaslighting yourself toxic shame makes you think that this secret goopy inner Badness inside of you that you just magically have is the cause of everything that goes wrong in life it's not the truth but you think it is and so you end up telling lies because you think that the truth is that you're just not trying hard enough or that you're just shameful and it's your fault things went wrong right when in reality if you just told people the truth probably they'd be like oh my God I'm so sorry can I come help you with anything but like I said this stuff runs so deep it runs so deep that we don't even think to tell the truth much of the time like truly doesn't even occur to people with complex PTSD that there are situations where they can tell the truth because they have grown up with a pattern of lying about things that they don't even know they're lying about truly don't even know um and I imagine like if you have complex PTSD you know what I'm talking about and if you're listening to me talk about it and you don't have it um yeah it's hard to understand it really is like I I could not imagine being an outsider trying to make sense of why someone is lying like that and understand that they're lying to themselves first and that self lie comes from initial lies that someone else told them like when I started experiencing chronic pain I was constantly told that I was faking it and making it up and it wasn't actually happening so I literally thought it was true I thought that it was I thought it was like yeah it's bizarre it's truly bizarre what the human mind can do but anyways I'm going to move on to the next point so reason number seven is in my opinion probably the most common reason why people with complex PTSD tell overt lies so lies that you know are lies you know what the truth is but you stand in front of a different person and tell them something that you have consciously thought about that is not the truth and this is that having complex PTSD similar to what we talked about before with like getting an apartment or like securing work puts you in a lot of weird scenarios that other people would not be able to properly advise you on so you end up lying to them because it's easier to just not have the conversation because they would see what you're doing as a problem whereas you know the thing you're doing is actually the solution to a different problem maybe you're in an unhealthy relationship maybe you're in a relationship where if you told people about it they would be like oh that sounds unhealthy or abusive and you should get out but you know that you would not be financially secure if you were to leave that relationship you know that you don't have many other sources of emotional support if you were to leave that relationship and this is not me advocating for staying an unhealthy or abusive relationships I'll leave some resources in the description of this video for places you can go to like find support and find help if you find yourself in one of those situations but I do think it's very common for people with complex PTSD to end up in unhealthy relationships and feel like they can't tell other people the truth about what's going on in their relationships because other people don't understand that those relationships are well you the one in it might realize you're in a bad situation you also see the problems that that relationship is solving the same thing could be said for addiction people might look at your drinking or your drug use and go that's a problem of course it is and you know it is and still it's the only way that you are able to wake up in the mornings it is the only way that you are able to get your traumatic flashbacks to stop right and again I'm also not advocating for drinking or drug use but I'm saying to the Survivor using substances is often a solution or a way of managing your own symptoms of trauma if you don't have the help for dealing with the trauma itself and if you were to tell other people the full extent of how you're using substances they would be like whoa you need to stop and if you were to be forced to stop now one of your coping mechanisms is gone right and again I am not advocating for drug use for alcohol use for unhealthy relationships or staying in abusive situations all I'm doing here is saying that people with complex PTSD often find themselves in situations where they are choosing the lesser of all evils right where none of the options available to them were particularly good so they are choosing the one that allows them to function the best they possibly can within the situation that they're in and then they might lie to cover up some of the negative aspects of whatever it is that they have chosen because they know that for other people that thing would be a problem whereas for them it is more a solution than it is a problem and so that's where you start getting the overt lies right my partner is wonderful our relationship is great I didn't make it to the event last night because I got tired and fell asleep not because I was in the middle of an altercation sober I don't use I don't drink whatever it is all of these conscious lies that you learn to tell are often cover-ups for situations that you know other people will not understand or that they will will judge you harshly for and again complex trauma is complex there's not easy answers to any of these right the best possible solution is if you're able to get help and you're able to let's say find a counselor who deals with complex trauma and who knows the ins and outs of it that's likely to be someone who is understanding of why you're doing the things you're doing that other people might frown upon or might judge you for because they understand that you are fighting for your own Survival and you always have been reason number eight why people with complex PTSD might lie this is one that overlaps really neatly with anxious attachment but it can be slightly different between complex PTSD and anxious attachment or you can have both um but you might tell overt lies so again lies that you know you are telling in situations where you have gotten triggered or you've had a trauma response and you know that you have to come up with some reason that's acceptable for other people as to why you reacted the way you did but but you might not even know why you had that response right when we have trauma especially when we have trauma when we don't know we have trauma especially especially when we have complex trauma and we don't know we have complex trauma complex trauma involves something called emotional flashbacks emotional flashbacks are essentially too complex trauma what regular flashbacks are to PTSD so most people are Vaguely Familiar with PTSD they're familiar with the concept of having a flashback where you might have visual Recollections of something that happened to you where you might have extreme nightmares where you're let's say back in a war zone or back in a situation where your life was threatened with complex PTSD you have emotional flashbacks so when you're having an emotional flashback you feel as though your body is responding to a past traumatic situation but you don't have the visual component so you're still kind of seeing the room you're in you're still aware of where you are but your body kind of thinks it's in the past and starts emotionally responding as though you're in a traumatic past situation so this might look like sudden outbursts of anger or dissociation where you're totally not present and other people can kind of tell you're not responding appropriately this can look like total shutdown and panic and withdrawal and if you are experiencing an emotional flashback you have to find a way to explain to other people why you are having a reaction that doesn't fit the situation but often you don't even know why that's happening right very very few complex PTSD survivors can point to the direct correlation between their emotional flashback and the weird reaction they're having in the present our bodies store a lot of responses and those responses aren't always tied one to one to specific past memories it's more of an accumulation of feelings and fears and survival responses that live in our body right but if you've just blown up at someone and now you have to explain why that happened you're gonna try to find a reason to explain why it happened and if you are very unconscious of this and you don't don't even know for example what a trigger is which most of us until the last like three four years had no idea of you're just going to try to make up a reason that fit the situation and you might also be doing this for yourself like if you got into a fight with your partner and you exploded on them you might think to yourself they must have done something that was truly that bad for me to be that angry so you might be like I know you're cheating give me your phone I want to go through it right you might think that the intense reaction you're having has to be a true representative of the present situation that's when you have little to no awareness of the fact that you're even experiencing a trigger right but there might also be a level of awareness where you know you're triggered you know you're dissociated you know you're in an emotional flashback but you don't want to tell other people that because maybe you're at work and you don't want to talk about your complex PTSD with your boss right so instead you might say something like oh I got three hours of sleep last night I'm super exhausted sorry if I'm out of it but actually you're not out of it maybe you got eight hours of sleep last night right but you are dissociating because you got triggered by something right but you feel like you can't disclose that so instead you come up with another reason that kind of fits the reaction you're having but that isn't the truth and again this is also unfortunately kind of an Adaptive lie a lot of the time unfortunately a lot of people do have to not tell the full truth about their mental health in order to keep their employment and that sucks and that's a massive problem with Society not with you but again that's another reason why those with complex PTSD unless they have found a way to be completely self-sufficient so not need any sort of employer or not need to show up to any particular commitments um is likely to lie about what's happening is because they are having a 10 out of 10 reaction to a 3 out of 10 situation and they need to find a way to account for the discrepancy interpersonally reason number nine why people with complex PTSD might lie is almost kind of the inverse of this but could be related actually um you lie because you don't want to have to caretake the other person's feelings around if you were to tell them the truth and if I'm being totally honest here that's 90 of the reason why I for example lie about my chronic pain I don't want to stress people out by letting them know how bad it is for me I'm used to the level of Badness I'm used to dealing with extreme pain I'm used to dealing with a lot of scenarios that other people aren't used to and I imagine if I were to explain to them what I'm going through it would put stress onto them and I don't want to now have to deal with both my own pain my own stress and having to care take someone else's emotional experience around learning about my stress if that makes sense so people with complex PTSD because they often don't know that they can go to other people for care support and nurturing they assume my job is to be fine 100 of the time to not put my problems on other people and if I have a problem I not only have to learn how to completely and totally deal with that problem on my own I also have to learn how to make other people feel better about the fact that I have a problem and when you're actively experiencing that problem the last thing you want to do is also worry about other people's emotional reactions to it so what you're probably going to do is tell a lie that gets people to go away and not feel worried about you so that you don't have to explain the problem you're experiencing to those people because you're too busy experiencing it and if you had not grown up in a way that was extremely complex and caused all of these problems for you again complex PTSD is complex you might have a support system who's familiar with the problems that you go through and who shows up to help you and who you don't have to explain or caretake their emotions around when you're struggling with something but because complex PTSD is complex chances are you didn't really know that was an option you just learned to hide every time you were struggling or in pain and then you also learn to not communicate it so you didn't have to make other people feel better about it because you didn't know it was an option to communicate it and receive support and Care in return and that sucks and it's something that you could learn to do differently as your life goes on and now you're aware of that that's just another really common way in which people with complex PTSD tend to lie is because they don't want to have to manage their own situation and other people's feelings about their own situation which is what they assume they are going to have to do reason number 10 why people with complex PTSD might lie it feels freaking nice to feel normal sometimes when you have a history of complex trauma and you have a life of jumping through weird Hoops to have the things that other people consider Bearer Necessities into normal part of life like I don't know a few friends a partner a place to live it feels nice to just sometimes pretend that those things come easy for you too I used to have this habit of like inventing jobs the worst of my like lying if I were going to some event where I knew that the average person would have a very like normal run-of-the-mill life I would just like invent a profession and pretend that I had like a very normal nine to five job and that I had like normal things and a normal way of living when in reality I spent I spent my entire 20s like traveling and working odd high pressure jobs that uh would like make me a bunch of money and then I would have no work for a while and then I would have these like chaotic relationships and but but if you met me at a barbecue you would meet Heidi the freelance writer who mostly works for small companies helping them with their personal branding and on my off time I spend time with my partner who I've been with for two years I read quite a bit but I mostly like fiction books like Murder Mysteries and I don't really know much about psychology or mental health but I do have a friend who's going to graduate school for it it just feels nice to feel normal so sometimes and I think that most people with complex PTSD have at some point or another in bigger or smaller ways whether it's inventing a mostly fake life at a barbecue or just telling small white lies to fit into a social situation where you know you don't really belong have that experience of just wanting to lay down all of the chaos that is the rest of your life for like a hot second and feel normal and the cool part is that I talk about this in other videos but the more you can work towards gaining your own security gaining a secure attachment style which is no small feat I don't say that simply the more you will find ways to share yourself authentically without overwhelming other people the more you will find ways to seek support and Care from people who can understand you because you will know where to look you will find communities like recovery circles whatever it is where you'll find all of a sudden my story Isn't So abnormal right my background is not different from these people's backgrounds and I will put a ton of links and resources in the description of this video on where you can start seeking out communities like that and getting yourself surrounded by more people who you feel like you don't have to lie to but I just wanted to make this video as kind of a I don't know compassion commiseration session with those who have histories of complex trauma and who might beat themselves up a lot for telling lies or for not knowing what the truth is in the first place right it is almost definitely not your fault that you are lying frequently I don't think anyone really really likes to lie I think all of us at our core really crave authentic relationships where we're sharing who we really are and actually letting people get to know and love the real us but there's so much so much in the way of that for most survivors of complex PTSD or their types of trauma right so I'm inviting you to give yourself some compassion in this regard go easy on yourself start to unpack all of this slowly and look for the safe places and look for the different Pathways forward one at a time you don't need to stop lying about everything overnight you just need to become more aware of which situations you may not have noticed it's now actually safe for you to tell the truth in and I personally really hope you start finding those because that is where the hardcore healing work actually happens all right that is all I have to say for today on this topic as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and I will see you back here again really soon foreign [Music]

Channel: Heidi Priebe

Views: 227,379

Keywords:

Id: 5b0AT5wOrG0

Length: 44min 46sec (2686 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/lucid-heart]

I thought this was really informative for us on the psychological journey. Discusses "fawning" (people-pleasing) and the complexities behind it, being "shame-bound," and how we lie to even ourselves for survival.

I know for myself I refused to acknowledge how stressed out WT made me, even to a therapist. We have been trained to lie to ourselves, and it seeps into every part of our lives.