Break Your Isolation And Escape Your Loneliness

childhood trauma carries with it a curse and the curse is loneliness the abuse and neglect you suffered as a kid didn't just affect you emotionally abuse and neglect caused an injury to your ability to connect with other people and if this happened to you you were robbed of what every person rightfully deserves to be treasured and to be lovingly guided into the realm of human connection that's all around you and on which the richness of your life and even your survival sometimes depend now all through your life the people who become your friends and co-workers and loved ones and your ability to connect with them will likely be the single biggest factor in how your life turns out and thankfully no matter where you begin or how old you are right now you are capable of increasing your capacity to love and connect with other people now you might say oh it's too hard and yes it's hard but healing is possible remember there is nothing wrong with you you have a common side effect of growing up with trauma and it's not your fault we now know that abuse and neglect early in life can literally change your brain and it can restrict the normal cognitive processes that enable you to seek out and connect with good appropriate people to bring into your life to know instinctively how to interact with people and to detect red flags so that you can avoid people who should not be led into your life now as I say this I know a lot of you are going to be welling up with emotion this loss of the ability to feel like you're part of everything that you're a full-fledged member of the human race losing that is a tragic part of childhood PTSD to be capable of love but not to be able to sustain a normal loving relationship is a devastating price to pay for what happened but you can absolutely make progress in this area if you are intentional about it if you just kind of leave it to chance and hope you'll figure out how to love people later in your life when you have more time or maybe when the right person comes along I'll be honest with you it's not very likely to get better now it turns out that having and growing our connections with other people is one of the most powerful ways that you can heal your trauma there's a large body of research emerging that shows that loving relationships actually help us heal not just our bodies and not just our emotions but even our telomeres and those are these little caps on strands of DNA in all your cells and they protect you from disease and they slow down aging so connection is actually quite vital to life and yes some feelings of loneliness and disconnection are Universal experiences for everyone at least a little bit but with cptsd it can kind of take over your life and it can drain you of anything good and this has everything to do with brain and emotional dysregulation something that's very common for people who grew up with trauma that can make connection really difficult but connection is related to re-regulation which makes change in this part of ourselves important and possible so I have a whole playlist about dysregulation if you want to learn more about that learning to recognize it and how to get re-regulated that's the foundation of everything I teach and of course there is my dysregulation boot camp if you want to you know take a deep dive into that there's a link to that with the other courses in the in the description section of this video and all my videos in fact but for now put really simply dysregulation is a tendency that's common and traumatized people and in everyone to some degree to experience nervous system bumpiness when they're under stress you might feel panicked or overreactive or discombobulated or numb being prone to slipping into a dysregulated state you know it can seriously challenge your ability to connect it's very common for people with childhood trauma it's hard to read non-verbal cues for example it's hard to express emotions in a way that doesn't push people away and it's hard to handle hurts when your brain and your emotions aren't quite aligned with what's happening right in front of you so dysregulation prevents connections it puts pressure on connections and it breaks connections re-regulation puts you in a place where you can learn to grow and maintain and repair connections if you've never learned to intentionally get re-regulated then getting the skills to do it it's going to be life-changing I also have a free course where you can get started on that too it's called The Daily practice it's really easy it's short and that's always linked under my videos on the free tools page there for me it's been a long process I was born to parents who loved me but whose alcoholism and addiction set the stage for abuse and neglect for my siblings and for me starting when we were really small and the violence in our house eventually stopped and there were definitely good things about my family but the neglect never ended and I grew up feeling a grinding sense of loneliness and shame and isolation and I used to think it was just me and maybe because we were poor or maybe because our house was so messy or maybe I used to think I was some kind of unlikable person and I mean trauma can make kids kind of edgy but I think I was a pretty okay kid I was really stressed all the time about all the arguing and tension in the house and by middle school I had to fend for myself to scrounge up lunch or clothes or money for the laundromat I spent a lot of energy hiding our home situation from other people and hiding all the creepy encounters with potential abusers outside the family the kind of person that tends to you know Shadow kids who aren't very supervised who don't have clear boundaries but despite all this I did okay in my young adulthood I was a good student I was creative I was responsible I made friends with interesting and exciting people and I had my first long-term relationship but I could not sustain the good things in my life and by the time I was 30 I had quit the job I left the boyfriend and not because I was moving forward but because I was falling apart that core loneliness was getting louder and louder and it made me selfish and it made me mean because I honestly thought the emptiness inside was caused by some failing in the people around me so of course people didn't want to deal with my anger and unreasonableness and blame and they left and I tried to change I was in therapy for years and eventually I was going multiple times every week but the more I talked about it the worse I got and the worse I got the more scared and desperate I became and I thought I was the only person in the world who struggled like that even in therapy now there was no name back then for what was going on but there is now it's complex PTSD from childhood trauma and this is the kind of post-traumatic stress that comes from chronic ongoing stress and this can happen at any age of life but cptsd develops most commonly in kids who are abused and neglected so you'll hear me say childhood PTSD and complex PTSD almost like they mean the same thing but they don't quite I always have to apologize it drives some people crazy and they're like Anna C is for complex not childhood and I actually I do know that and while complex PTSD is the technical term childhood PTSD is the one that makes instinctive sense to the most people so when I say childhood PTSD I can just trust you do know what I'm talking about even if you didn't have it you know the childhood PTSD even exists that was an aha moment for me it was like that it's even a thing it has a name it's not just me and the second crucial turning point for me was when I learned to heal the number one symptom caused by that and it's another thing there was no word for back then and it's dysregulation and I'm talking neurological dysregulation not just emotional but the whole body now if you've taken any of my other courses you've probably heard the story of how I learned the writing and meditation techniques that were shown to me that was like 1994 and to my surprise calmed my stressed and hurting mind like way way down I started to feel good in fact and it brought my thoughts and emotions into order and what a game changer I mean I was a mess before that it was getting worse so those are some of the things you can find in those links I'm sorry I keep referring to them I'm not trying to be hard sell I just want to make sure that you know that this state of healing I'm talking about I am telling you how to get there you know don't you don't have to walk away going ah you're describing me people say this all the time you're talking about me but you don't tell me what to do it's like I do tell you what to do it's down in the links I have all these courses the main one is free and if you take that one you get invited to group calls with me we do q a we use the techniques together it's a pretty cool community and you are invited and all you have to do is take the course and I'm always doing this huh pointing down that's what it is the description section it's where all the writing is below the video you have to click more or read more or something to get the whole thing to open up so I learned these techniques and very quickly I became calm and clear I wasn't expecting that I just wanted to feel like I could handle the night you know when all of a sudden my life just started coming into like Technicolor and finally I could see what was going wrong with my life and also what was really good about me underneath all the guilt and self-attack I used to direct it myself back then so maybe you feel anxious around people maybe past hurts have made it hard to trust maybe the shame and invalidation you're carrying from your childhood makes it impossible to just be yourself with other people and you're in fear all the time that you'll say the wrong thing or that you or you know that other people don't like you or that you don't belong and you think everyone else belongs but just not me I used to think that I totally know the feeling I spent so much time in my life feeling that way exactly just drowning in fear on fire with resentment talking about it trying to get other people to understand and like feel connected with them I wanted them to know how wronged I was how terrible were the things that happened to me how unjustly excluded and overlooked I had been and all these things were true and it felt like talking about it should deliver some kind of healing breakthrough that somehow people would care but that just it wasn't how it was worked it was true but talking about it and trying to get people to care about me it just wasn't a path out of that feeling there had to be another way it felt like there wasn't one we all have to talk about painful things sometimes but as you've probably found like I did it doesn't automatically heal that sense of disconnection of not being cared for that I've learned involves building something you might call connection muscles emotionally mentally neurologically and rather than trying to run away from people or change them or hate them or cling to them for dear life I learned to shift my focus onto noticing and calming my triggers and that's a lot of what I teach in the videos you're watching right now in the programs I offer if you don't get triggered all the other things that you do when you're triggered well now it becomes a choice you used to not have a choice you just got triggered into this like bad behavior now you get a pause and you go oh one triggered okay hold on let me do this differently this will change everything you'll be able to gracefully handle some of life's tricky people situations stuff most of us didn't learn from our parents right when you had to blunder along all that time with a combination of Faking It And fighting people and running away from them you don't have to do that you can learn to stay kind when you feel like lashing out you can care for yourself when you feel threatened or abandoned you can deal with conflicts with the courage and dignity that were drained out of you by the trauma in the first place now it's amazing how life opens up when you can be at ease with yourself and confident that whatever happens you will know how to deal with it you don't have to be all better before you start working on connecting you need connection to get better right now where you are even if that's at the very beginning of your recovery from early trauma you need it it's sad to say because all the other work that you're going to do to heal your brain healing learning your triggers how they cut you off from people none of that can be done in isolation and I'm laughing because I used to hope that it could be I just thought I'll get myself all fixed then I'll come out and meet people but it doesn't work like that you were born to be connected cptsd can block you from finding any connection and it can block you from experiencing the connections that are right in front of you but you can heal your healing gets a huge boost when you're making happy progress in your ability to connect with other people and whether it's with a spouse or your children or your friends your family or just strangers who you you know meet at the grocery store you can learn this in small Brave steps it's not always easy but as you take little steps forward it starts to feel good the change begins when you believe you can do it you can you can heal you can change your life you can change and the one that I want to talk about today that's a little hard to explain but very connected to loneliness and isolation is what I will call defendedness it's a weird word right but what I mean is a kind of fragility that we get sometimes we're fragile right where we think we can't handle being around something that bothers us so we try to control it like we control other people by telling them what they can and can't say around us like don't use that word or we make elaborate rules that we think we need other people to follow in our company like don't make jokes in front of my friends or don't eat I don't know ham in front of me because it reminds me of this thing that upsets me you know what I mean by fragile and controlling now what we're trying to do when we're defended is not get triggered right because for us it's really costly to get triggered we get all dysregulated and we might lose hours or days in terms of the ability to function and focus and that can seem like it makes sense because when we're triggered it's hard to function hard to be friendly hard to go to work so we get points for Good Intentions here and you know what some people will play along with our rules but trying to keep your PTSD brain regulated by controlling other people it just never quite works defendedness is not a boundary so don't confuse the two defendedness is an obstacle it's a wall we put up and we think we're blocking out triggers but what we block out is basically everything including surprises including things that will help us grow and especially we block out connection so this is a long background talk about how we use defendedness to try to maintain some safety But ultimately defendedness makes us lonely now here's why defendedness was never going to make you safe there's no safety because putting up walls only puts you in prison you're never going to be able to make the world be just how you want it to be so when are you ever going to be able to get out of that prison the future no what you can do is calm the trigger and this is what I teach in my healing childhood PTSD course you can save all that energy that you're spending trying to control your environment and instead enjoy your life by simply growing more neutral to the things that used to upset you now of course I'm not saying that you should be neutral in the face of abuse we don't tolerate abuse we still get to say no to things and we walk away from what we don't want but if we choose to stick around we can be more open-minded and accepting that people are different they're not all like us they don't fit what we want and that is absolutely okay when you know that and you're not so triggered by people having different opinions and wants and ways of expressing themselves you'll become more appreciative of the goodness in most people The Wonder of them and when you can start to shift into this less defended mode of interacting life unfolds for you and it reveals to you what you were looking for in the first place which is connection and meaning now I know these are the things that were taken from you when you were abused and neglected as a kid and back then staying safe meant defending yourself against people and life but now there is a way to be more open to it all to love and be loved defenselessly and still keep yourself intact and safe there's a way it has to be learned but there's a way and that is the strength that you're going to need to break through the walls you've put around yourself you probably weren't expecting me to say that but the strength is love you come inside with nice shiny boundaries motivated by love for other people I'm telling you increase the love now codependence is not love trying to make people love you is not love love is the energy that you bring to people you encounter in this day no matter what's gone on for you in the past and you can increase the love in the world in this way and this is where your loneliness gets healed you walk the path of love childhood PTSD is in its Essence an injury to our ability to connect with other people abuse and neglect early in our lives literally change our brains and neglect in particular can physically restrict the normal processes that enable us to identify good appropriate people to bring into our lives and to gradually open ourselves up to them and develop close and trusting relationships this to me is the most tragic part of childhood PTSD to be capable of love but not to be able to sustain a normal loving relationship is a devastating price to pay for what happened but the great news is we can totally totally make progress in this area if we are intentional about it if we just kind of leave it to chance and hope we'll figure out love later in our lives or maybe when the right person comes along we're not likely to improve and in fact if you look around the people you know you'll see a lot of older people who have actually deteriorated from being able to be close to others if we don't work on this we risk getting more and more cranky and isolated and hard on other people and that's the tragedy to me the goal of life is to learn to really learn to love other people and it turns out that having and growing our connections with others is one of the most powerful ways we can heal our own PTSD there's a large body of research emerging that shows that loving relationships actually help us heal our telomeres the little caps on the strands of DNA that protect us from disease and slow down our aging love and connection are important for everyone and especially for us who have so much catching up to do now most people with PTSD have been hurt in this ability to connect and if that's you too then you're likely to struggle with relationships in proportion to the amount of time you spend in dysregulation this regulation breaks connections re-regulation puts us in a place where we can begin to repair connections as people whose ability to connect may be a bit wonky we can definitely take steps to gradually heal this and it doesn't always come naturally sometimes we have to be very intentional about it and work on it and take steps that are the opposite of the first impulse that comes to mind when we find ourselves struggling now loneliness and feeling disconnection are Universal experiences for everyone at least a little bit but for us it can take kind of take over our lives and this has everything to do with this regulation which makes connection very difficult and re-regulation which makes change in this part of ourselves possible so we want to strike a balance a healthy balance between Solitude which is the ability to tolerate and even enjoy our alone time and connection with others because people with childhood PTSD tend to do a lot of things in Extreme Ways and this is one of them we isolate or live in deathly fear that people will leave us we cling or we run away and we might go one way with friends and the other way with significant others but these extremes Rob us of much of the good we're meant to have through our relationships with the people in our lives obviously this is a huge topic and I may make a whole course on it later this year but for right now here are some important things to remember in order at the very least to grow more regulated so first don't let yourself get too lonely every problem of your character will grow worse when you're in isolation people who have cut everyone out of their lives seldom realize how weird they've become their rationale for avoiding everyone sounds plausible to them but to the rest of us just sad it is a wish virtually everyone has when they know they're reaching the end of their lives they'll say they wish they had given even more of their time and attention to loving relationships so how can we grow closer to love in a realistic and gradual way that can be sustained so not letting ourselves get too lonely is how we can grow closer to love in a realistic and gradual way that can be sustained loneliness taken to the extreme and by that I mean we've convinced ourselves that we like the loneliness and we found ways to numb out the nagging worry and sadness about it this kind of loneliness and pretending corrupts Us in the end and when we're lonely in life it should feel lonely the feeling of loneliness is a gift that nudges us to reach out and connect to keep on trying to keep getting out of the house when it's tempting to hide out there so another suggestion is to make yourself connect with people face to face every day get out of the house leave your normal space and find a way to walk down the street and interact with the world also become a great listener when you're with someone you actually don't have to talk about yourself half the time or even at all if you can learn to give your full attention to the person who's with you and to really listen to them without jumping in with your own story or debating the legitimacy of what they're saying or any digressions at all the connection between the two of you will get stronger I mean right in that moment you will begin to feel closer and real closeness will soften any impulses you have to cling to the other person or escape from them or try to control who they are now some people go to the opposite extreme and they pour their whole identity into another person as if this is an extension of themselves and a lot not living in the center of your being carries huge risks because your own strengths are not being revealed and your own problems are not being exposed which would cause you and your circumstances to evolve some people cling to relationships or they get obsessed or promiscuous and this is every bit as deadening for their souls as having no one in fact it's probably worse nothing can derail your life so dramatically as sexual relationships with people who don't care about you for women in particular sex bonds us to others whether we love them or even like them I know there are exceptions to this rule but I would not really hold up sex with no strings as anything you would want to try in order to become happier or better regulated romantic and sexual drama can dysregulate you as surely as violence can other people may be able to have casual sex but for those struggling to regulate I don't recommend it trusting Intimate Relationships take time so if you're hooking up with people or getting together with them in a rush or impulsively in the name of having fun or just to fill your weekend nights until the right person comes along you're in for a world of struggle this topic is going to be my next course and I have a lot to say about losing one's way along the path to love and finding it again but some quick tips for now while you're really working on your childhood PTSD include notice the relationship between dysregulation and relationship status are you more or less regulated when you're with someone generally speaking a conflict-filled relationship will create more dysregulation than being alone and a harmonious relationship will lead to less dysregulation an unstable relationship where you're in fear about getting left all the time will lead to more dysregulation and a secure relationship will lead to less dysregulation so harmonious secure relationships are a positive path forward and something to strive for and the trick of that is being in a high drama abusive or unstable relationship does not work to bite our time until the right person comes these negative relationships actually take us way off that path the right person will never find us or if they do our manner our energy the way we engage with others will be ragged from the days or years of difficulty we've had so sometimes the shortest path to true love is found by being single for a while so if you're single or whatever is going on in your love life and you experience a lot of loneliness a very good and re-regulating thing you can do is to participate participate in your neighborhood in your work life in 12-step groups in family get-togethers where you can be supportive of others practice Love by being loving to others in little ways if you're having trouble getting that started here's a first step each day find two people you can talk to in the line at the store or out on the sidewalk or on the phone and contact them just to express something positive and supportive for them don't talk about yourself in this conversation just show up for the other person I guarantee you if you do this twice a day things will shift and you'll grow in Your Capacity to love which can't help but lead to more connection and in time you'll find that that love is shining right back at you do you feel loneliness or does it go away completely once one has found a healthy relationship and a satisfying vocation Richmond that is such a good question I think loneliness is part of the human condition I think cptsd is a disorder of loneliness it's by its nature it cuts us off from people so you're right you tuned into when things are my loneliness goes up and down somewhat in proportion to what's happening in my life but fundamentally I mean I went through lockdown just like everybody it was so lonely and I was one of the lucky ones who had some people in my house to hang out with and that helped but I I you know like many people I didn't realize what a beautiful thing it is in life to go have your cup of coffee at a table amongst many tables with people at them even though you're not going to talk to them I mean when that returned it was such a sweet experience again and uh it's the lockdown coincided with the growth of this Channel and what's interesting is how much I learned that connecting with people is what's broken with cptsd and it's what we have to begin to learn to do to heal cptsd and having healed CP well it's never done right okay let's just get that clear this is like it's like taking insulin or something you you might reduce the need for it but you're always going to have an underlying condition called cptsd and so we treat it day by day we live our lives with a routine and with a set of principles and techniques that help keep us strong every day and over time yes there is growth but I'll tell you I experimented once with not doing all of this for two years and not only did I go back to my old miserable depressed dysfunctional having relationships from Hell state but I was worse like it was Progressive so like it was a thing that got worse in me so I am just so down with this people are like I don't think I have time for the daily practice and I'm like well then things are going better for you than they were for me I gotta have time for it because it works for me because it it makes me happy it makes me happy but I wouldn't say that loneliness goes all the way away but what learning to um overcome some of the core destructive symptoms of cptsd like not being able to deal with people it's too triggering well now I still find people kind of triggering but I can deal with it learning to listen with empathy learning to not push people away so quickly I take more time to discern if that's what's needed I used to kind of have a hair trigger you know that's it I blow up this relationship and then half an hour later I'd be I'm sorry I didn't mean that and then it would be too late so I you know that kind of thing goes away um another thing that really really made me lonely and I'm working on a video about this is I was fundamentally ashamed of myself and so I was uncomfortable getting very close to people who had their heads together and I would tend to favor people who were um you know in a in a very dysfunctional State more so than me and I think that was an unconscious way of trying to escape criticism and judgment I was so afraid of that all the time so I have less to feel ashamed of now um like 95 percent less I'm human so I still like oh why did I do that why did I say that but it's so much better and because of that I can be a little more open-hearted to people and more capable of listening and not being so defensive and you know so that growth happens I will say that getting married to somebody who loves me is both the most healing thing that another person has you know I think a lot of healing does not come from other people we look to them for it but it's it's in here but it it is wonderful to have somebody who loves me no matter what it's also very challenging for my cptsd and now that we've been together 14 years I feel like we're getting I'm getting so much better at this um but I have weird rhythms because of my cptsd like I wake up in the morning and I'm like don't talk to me don't you talk to me I can't really have a conversation first thing before I've done my daily practice and I'm still figuring out how to say that in a way that's not rude or you know um dismissive or inconsiderate towards my husband and then also I guess a lot of people have this but I'm so used to having to take care of everything myself having been basically feral as a child that having to make decisions as a team is hard for me sometimes and I'm just like oh I just like I can't believe I'm expected to compromise on something because this is just what I want and that's what it involves so feel really good though I um have gotten it wrong so many times before but I picked a good guy and I just like so much of my material is to help you pick a good person too because when you when you choose well then you can bend and accommodate and know that you're working towards something good and you're not just turning into a doormat or a codependent or any of those tendencies that you know that so many of us have so loneliness is always there a little bit but it gets better so and the satisfying vocation yes definitely now this is a funny thing in my real life hardly anybody knows what I do for a living and um when it comes up and I start to tell them they get very bored fast and I at least you know it's this funny phenomenon because I feel like for me and I know you guys who are here you you can appreciate this it's like this is like the biggest thing that ever happened I found a way to use my gifts I'm connected I found my tribe like this is huge and most of the real life people in my life are just like you know they're like what do you do you have some kind of little self-help thing and I'm like um yeah so then sometimes this is kind of funny I every once in a while I get an email from somebody I worked with 10 years ago and they were like I was watching YouTube and oh my gosh I saw you and I'm like yeah that was me so that's a funny thing in a weird way doing having my connections online it still leaves real life as lonely as anybody's life like no that's it doesn't necessarily connect me to people in real life but you know who I feel the most connected with is people who are part of this Mission with me the people who are in this community who work on my team like like what we're doing here together to me it's like where my heart is and um so my whole family does work on crappy childhood fairy and Ashley who's who's on the call and other members of our team Cara Ramon kalista Jack Gabe you know we have this amazing team and these are the people who I talk to every day and who I love having tacos with and and some salad right Nash why pushing everyone away it feels so freeing and peaceful at first let's just get that out on the table all right first isolating yourself is an instant solution to the stress you feel when your cptsd symptoms are triggered by something an argument a mistake something embarrassing you feel rejected or judged or ugly or you gained weight or you feel frazzled it's a way that you can shut the door on all those unpleasant feelings for a while second once you get triggered and that really kicks in your emotions rise up your mind starts distorting things you feel overwhelmed and honestly when you get that dysregulated it can take days to bounce back and feel like yourself there's a huge temptation to just avoid the triggers all together or to use what I call covert avoidance and those are strategies that you can keep looking good like you're connecting with everybody but they're really you're just keeping your relationships as Hollow as possible you're not showing up for people you might not be conscious but you're like avoiding commitments canceling plans not really being present with them when you're hanging out with them this is really common for people with cptsd putting yourself out there when you're a covert avoider it just feels like it's going to be exhausting right it feels like it's going to be just like a marathon that never ends so you avoid it's very tempting and by the way if you feel that childhood trauma has affected your ability to connect and feel comfortable with people I have a quiz that you can take to check if you have the common symptoms of that there's a link to that download right down in the description section below this video it's called The Connection quiz and you might want to check that out all right the third reason why isolating is so tempting is that social situations stress you out and it's just so easy to cancel if you're a little bit avoidant I'll bet that you've told every story in the book to get out of plan plans just tell them you're sick tell them you have to work and they say okay and it's just such a relief right now you don't have to deal with all those people and it feels really good at first it feels empowering to have that control over your time even though you kind of got it dishonestly it feels good to give yourself that space probably you were very hungry to have a little space and a little control over your time but it's come to this where you're isolating in order to get it so the fourth way that isolating can be so tempting is what's happening when you're avoiding everything is you're telling yourself that this is only temporary you just need a rest you just don't like this one person you just need a little bit of self-care time and in fact it feels like self-care doesn't it it's like a little spa for one with Netflix and doordash feels like you're doing something good for yourself but really how does it feel how does it feel after you've done it a couple days in a row or a couple weeks or a couple years if you do it enough times there's a dread feeling that is really hard to push down I know I've done it it tends to come up and haunt me about three in the morning and I can't sleep I just feel like that life is passing you by and it'll start to get more stressful not having real relationships in your life than it is having them so when you're promising yourself that soon you'll get back out there just remember you know the longer you are out there the harder that gets and sometimes the isolation will cause you to go deeper into behaviors that trigger the urge to isolate so it can be kind of a downward spiral it can begin to feel like an addiction where you even feel drawn to like experiences of overwhelm or exhaustion because then you can give yourself permission to keep isolating that's when you know you're in a bad spot okay so let's talk about why it's so important to fight that urge to isolate to come out of loneliness even when it's hard and the first reason is you need people in your life I know you know that but I'm just going to say it out loud you need people in your life even if you didn't have emotional needs for people your immune system needs to be around people your mental health needs to experience people your physical health needs to be around people and when you're actually connecting with people it has this really healthy effect of just kind of soaking up self-absorption self-absorption is what fills up all that space where your friends belong right it ends up being this big Focus like how do I feel what's going on what's about to happen and you get out there with people and your attention comes off of that and you start to have a more balanced view all right being with people helps to keep your thinking grounded and I would just like to point out some people have felt a little hurt when I say this but if you've ever known people who aren't into people and they're like hiding out and they're avoiding people maybe when you were younger you saw people who had been doing it for years and they were older being a Hermit actually makes people start to act weird and I know you know it's true and what it comes from is there's just a total lack of socialization there our fears can get the better of us our sort of biased thinking can sort of just keep escalating and escalating when there's nobody there to push back on you or give you a reality check and so yeah we get weird we also need to be around people not just so that we can act like not weird but so that we can be useful to people I believe strongly that our happiness it's not just a feeling it's something that is really really developed as we grow into being our real selves and becoming useful to other people being of service to them helping them out a little bit not like being codependent not doing too much but being connected enough that you can show up for people you can attend Community meetings you can check on a neighbor you can run an errand for somebody you can take a phone call from somebody who's sad those are facets of showing up that are actually really good not just for the other person but for you you need to be playing this role for your continued development or it traps you it's like a developmental barrier you can't mature if you're not having those interactions with people also speaking of maturing so important to have people who are caring for you if you're sick if you have an injury you need to be cared for and in this past couple of years 2020 2021 we've seen the example of people who ended up isolated and didn't have those relationships in place and there was nobody to care for them and it's one of the saddest things there is this is a good time to make a commitment just say you know I'm going to do my best to be connected to people so that when the time comes that I have to be isolated or I'm in the hospital that I have people to support me and one way you can do that is you can be that person for others a most important reason that you need to be connected to others is that you have gifts to bring to the world and the gifts are not the same as talents talents are things you're good at gifts are things that you have that you that have been bestowed on you for the benefit of others and if you don't have others in your life you can't use your gifts I spent years not using my gifts I felt empty and Hollow and had this constant feeling that I was missing out on life and when I began to get busy and get into action when I started doing crappy childhood fairy it started as a Blog I started writing blog posts and I shared it and I think two people saw it and I sent emails to everybody I knew a couple people saw it but it began to engage me in the process of doing something for the benefit of others and it lifted me up so much that I had I had the focus and the energy to write a second blog article and another one another one and then here we are five years later here we are together it's I've it's the greatest joy of my life we need other people so that we can flourish and so that we can become ourselves now it might not feel possible to you right now to step out of your comfort zone whether that is deep isolation or something that you're doing that's a little more covert where you're out there with people but just avoiding real Connection in your life but that feeling of difficulty is exactly why now is a good time to fight the urge to isolate what you can do instead of isolating in order to protect your triggers is you can learn to calm those triggers and then you won't need to isolate if you can start to get Mastery over those triggers and the dysregulation that results which is totally normal for people who grew up with with abuse and neglect if you're new to this channel we talk a lot about that here dysregulation it's a neurological state where we we get overreactive and anxious and discombobulated it's not a good way to live your life when you learn to calm your triggers dysregulation doesn't kick off neither does that disconnection from people neither does the self-defeating behavior that that has been dogging you all your life whether that's an addiction or an attraction to people who treat you badly or an inability to care for yourself there are a number of ways that we fall into self-defeating behavior and that's what happens there's the original trauma not your fault then there's the triggers the dysregulation the disconnection and the self-defeating behavior and when you're healing once you can heal those triggers and dysregulation you you are now on a Level Playing Field where you can start to deal with the self-defeating behaviors everybody has some we're all works in progress right now it feels good to start facing one of them that's been giving you trouble and you can get going on that so learning to calm your triggers that's the skill that will set you free childhood PTSD is in its Essence an injury to our ability to connect with other people and if this happened to you you were robbed of your Birthright to be well enough loved and properly guided into the web of human connection that's all around you and on which the richness of your life and even your survival sometimes depend I know from personal experience that life with complex PTSD doesn't always let us have the love and belonging that are essential to happiness what's simple for other people like just being in a group having a friend feeling a sense of belonging or recovering from a conflict with a co-worker these can be so fraught for us even in adulthood the people who become your friends and co-workers and loved ones and your ability to connect with them will likely be the single biggest factor in how your life turns out now thankfully no matter where we begin we're all capable of increasing our capacity to love and connect with others even later in life but yes it takes work we now know that abuse and neglect early in life can literally change your brain and restrict the normal cognitive processes that enable you to seek out and connect with good appropriate people to bring into your life to intuitively know how to interact with them successfully and to detect red flags so you can avoid people who should not be led into your life the loss of connectivity is the most tragic part of childhood PTSD to be capable of love but not to be able to sustain a normal loving relationship is a devastating price to pay for what happened but the great news is you can absolutely make progress in this area if you are intentional about it if you just kind of leave it to chance and hope you'll figure out love later in your life or maybe when the right person comes along I'll be honest with you it's not likely to get better it turns out that having and growing our connections with other people is one of the most powerful ways that we can heal our trauma there's a large body of research emerging that shows that loving relationships actually help us heal not just our bodies and not just our emotions but even our telomeres those are the little caps on the strands of DNA in all of our cells and they protect us from disease and slow down aging so connection is vital to life and yes some feelings of loneliness and disconnection are Universal experiences for everyone at least a little but for us it can kind of take over our lives and drain us of anything good this has everything to do with brain and emotional dysregulation something very common for people who grew up with trauma that can make connection very difficult and it has also to do with re-regulation which makes change in this part of ourselves possible but for now put really simply dysregulation is a tendency that's common in traumatized people and in everyone to some degree to experience nervous system bumpiness when they're under stress so you might feel panicked or overreactive or discombobulated or numb now being prone to slipping into a dysregulated state can seriously challenge your ability to connect it's very common for people with childhood trauma it's hard to read nonverbal cues for example it's hard to express emotions in a way that doesn't push people away and it's hard to handle hurts when your brain and emotions aren't quite aligned with what's happening right in front of you so dysregulation prevents connections it puts pressure on connections and it breaks connections re-regulation and I'll teach you how to do that puts you in a place where you can learn to grow and maintain and repair connections so if you've never learned to intentionally get re-regulated then getting the skills to do it is going to be life-changing for me it's been a long process I was born to loving parents whose alcoholism and addiction set the stage for abuse and neglect for my siblings and me starting when we were pretty small the violence in our house eventually stopped and there were definitely good things about my family but the neglect never ended and I grew up feeling a grinding sense of loneliness and shame and isolation and I used to think it was me maybe because we were poor maybe because our house was so messy or maybe I was some kind of unlikable kid and I mean trauma can make kids kind of edgy but I think I was a pretty good kid I was really stressed out all the time though about a lot of arguing and tension in the house and by middle school I had to kind of fend for myself to scrounge up lunch or clothes or even money for the laundromat I spent a lot of energy hiding our home situation from other people and hiding all the creepy encounters with potential abusers outside the family the kind of person that tends to sort of Shadow kids who aren't supervised and who don't have clear boundaries but despite all this I did okay in my young adulthood I was fairly accomplished as a student and I was creative I was responsible and I made friends with interesting and exciting people I had my first long-term relationship but I couldn't sustain the good things in my life and by the time I was 30 I'd quit the job and I left the boyfriend not because I was moving forward but because I was falling apart and that core loneliness was getting louder and louder it made me selfish it made me mean because I honestly I thought the emptiness inside was caused by some failing in the people around me so of course people didn't want to deal with that they didn't want to deal with anger and unreasonableness and blame and they left and I tried to change I was in therapy for years and eventually I was in therapy multiple times every week but the more I talked about it the worse I got and then more scared and then more desperate now there was no name back then for what was going on but there is now it's complex PTSD from childhood trauma this is the kind of post-traumatic stress that comes from chronic ongoing stress and this can happen at any stage of life but cptsd develops most commonly in kids who are abused and neglected so you'll you'll hear me say childhood PTSD and complex PTSD almost interchangeably and I always have to apologize it drives some people crazy The crucial turning point was when I learned to heal the number one symptom caused by my trauma and it's another thing there was no word for back then and that's dysregulation if you've taken any of my other courses you've probably heard the story of how I learned the writing and meditation techniques that were shown to me in 1994 and that to my incredible surprise calmed my stressed and hurting mind way way down and brought my thoughts and emotions into order now what a game changer I became calm and clear and I could finally see what was going wrong in my life and what was really good about me underneath all the guilt and self-attack that I used to direct it myself back then now maybe you feel anxious around people maybe past hurts have made it hard to trust maybe the shame and invalidation you're carrying from your childhood make it impossible to just be yourself with other people and you're in fear all the time that you'll say the wrong thing or that they don't like you or that you simply don't belong you think everyone else belongs but not me I know that feeling I spent so much of my life feeling that way drowning in fear and consumed with resentment talking about it trying to get other people to understand how wronged I was how terrible were the things that happened to me how unjustly excluded and overlooked I was and all these things were true at one time and it felt like talking about it should deliver some kind of healing breakthrough we all have to talk about painful things sometime but as you probably found too it doesn't heal the disconnection that I've learned involves building something you might call connection muscles emotionally mentally and neurologically now rather than trying to run away from people or change them or hate them or cling to them for dear life I learned to shift my focus onto noticing and calming my triggers if you don't get triggered all the other things you do when you're triggered become optional you can choose to do something different it's amazing how life opens up to us when we can be at ease with ourselves and confident that whatever happens will know how to deal with it you don't have to be all better before you start working on connecting in fact you need connection to get better right where you are if that's at the very beginning of your recovery from early trauma you need it because all the other work that you're going to do to heal the brain healing learning your triggers how they cut you off from people none of this can be accomplished in isolation so you were born to be connected and cptsd can block you from finding any connection and it can block you from experiencing the connections that are right in front of you but you can heal your healing gets a huge boost when you're making happy progress in your ability to connect with other people whether it's with a spouse or children or friends or family or just strangers you meet on the street you can learn this in small Brave steps it's not always easy but as you work at it you get better at it it gets easier to enjoy people and be at ease with them you get better at choosing who you want in your life and who you don't so there are a lot of forms of help out there that focus on the cause of trauma what happened to you the people who hurt you and how that affected you and those aspects of your story they're important but this course is mostly focused on present time what symptoms you're having now what is happening when you start connecting with other people and how you can do that better now the change begins when you believe that you can do it you can heal you can change your life you can change I've received hundreds and hundreds of comments and emails where people with complex PTSD and childhood PTSD share with me how much they're suffering with loneliness isolation feeling cut off from people in their lives and it's not just people with trauma lots of people are isolated but for those of us with a rough childhood it can be extra strong extra limiting and very hard to get out of so I want to talk about why that happens and how to start healing it now part of the urge to isolate is learned it was a protective measure back when you were being traumatized maybe you became a black belt at cutting off connection from dangerous people even while you kept a smile on your face and interacted just enough to show the world that you were okay you're isolating tendency could also be partly neurological a brain thing that might have developed in your very early years because you didn't get the connection and attention that babies and toddlers need in order to grow the neurons that support connection with other people it's a developmental delay for us and something we may have to work harder at than people with a normal ability to connect now just to be clear isolation is a different thing than Solitude Solitude is the choice we make at times to be by ourselves to like focus and recharge and collect ourselves before we return to our normal level of connection with other people and some of us with past trauma we actually have kind of a hard time taking Solitude when we need it it's a good thing to know how to do and it's good to be comfortable with it but isolation is a different thing it's a state of living with very little connection to other people and without meaningful relationships we all do it a little bit at times but if it gets so bad that it's blocking you from being happy or functional it's time to shift it and that can be hard because when life gets stressful which it often does PTSD symptoms can make it very tempting to go isolate further now research shows that loneliness itself is a factor in the development of complex PTSD and it's a factor causing loneliness to last longer than it otherwise would so no wonder it's hard to heal loneliness increases the chance that traumatic events will cause cptsd and loneliness makes the symptoms of cptsd last longer so what this tells us is that your best chance to overcome the harmful effects of cptsd and childhood PTSD the depression the dysregulation increased risk of serious health problems and yes the isolation the best chance to recover from it is to strengthen your ability to safely connect with other people and just in case you don't know what makes this kind of PTSD complex it refers to trauma that happened on an ongoing basis usually early in life so you'll hear me say childhood PTSD and complex PTSD almost interchangeably because childhood PTSD is a large subset of cptsd and the symptoms are similar so apologies in advance if this drives you crazy so loneliness it turns out is not just painful emotionally for your body it's poison for your recovery process it's like chaining yourself to a wall you'll you'll have just a little space to move around in if you're operating within loneliness and yet connecting with people is risky it's triggering and we screw it up all the time and we get in deeper sometimes than we can manage and that's really common and I'll be taking on each of those obstacles to Connection in the next few videos over the coming weeks some of you have written to tell me that you're resigned to loneliness and this is not uncommon in people who have been severely abused especially as time goes by so okay it's everyone's right to pull back from people if that's what they need to do but if you have a desire in your heart at all to reconnect with people and enjoy more friendship and love in your life please stick around for these videos you may have gotten a little used to a high set point of isolation the level you tend to hover at because it's just so costly to your state of mind to even try to connect I totally understand that but I want to make a strong case that learning to connect with other people is something that's worth the struggle I'm a big champion of titrating taking changes a little at a time in Little Bites so to speak where you try a little something and check if you can tolerate it then you try a little more and you check again and you don't have to go running out and do everything at once with cptsd one step at a time is usually the best long-term strategy now as much as we may lean on the idea that we're totally independent and therefore we're strong living without the love and care of other people does not lead to strength I've been there and you probably have too so your assignment should you choose to accept it for this video is to just let yourself be aware of the loneliness and isolation you feel right now in your life and if you feel sad and scared about it just know that a it's normal B it's common especially for people with early trauma and C you can walk forward out of isolation step by step no matter how far in your cocoon that you've been hanging out and no matter how hard on yourself you may have been until today don't beat yourself up for having what's basically a normal reaction to abnormal conditions in your past you can do this how do you feel when you try to take part in a group it's super common for those of us who grew up with abuse and neglect to feel as adults that were somehow not quite part of things we feel like we're on the outside of groups kind of part in part out but never really in it or we start as a full participant but then pull away over time we uninclude ourselves have you ever done this now maybe you resigned to the fact that groups are just not for you but you might be still trying and trying joining groups and getting uncomfortable or feeling excluded and then dropping out again and you probably think I used to that in each case the problem is the other people and sometimes of course that is true but the Telltale sign that this could be something inside yourself even when it doesn't feel like it is that you're almost always at the same distance from the center and by that I mean like every group has a center in that Center there's maybe a leader or two people who are like kind of guiding the whole thing and then right around them are a bunch of people who are super involved and influential in the group but they're not quite as influential as the center and then there's people who less so and less so and then like in my case I'd be out here always out at about 80 percent from from the center and it's kind of a spot where you get invited to the party you get to comment on things sometimes but you're never really responsible for making the Party happen or solving problems so a lot of times I'd start out motivated and thinking ah this group is great you know I finally found my people and I want to be involved in this and then maybe take on a more active role or maybe even a leadership role and sooner or later usually sooner I'd find some reason to pull back I might go out to about maybe like 40 percent from the center yeah but eventually I Just Bounce out of the group altogether that's usually what happens being part of something was and in some areas of my life still is really uncomfortable for me so why is that do you relate to what I'm talking about so I used to think my trouble with groups was just like bad luck one episode of bad luck after another after another you know oh dear I guess I joined the wrong group and I never saw that it was a consistent pattern until I had a lot of healing from dysregulation and started to have some clarity and it makes sense I mean being in a group when you have the sensitivities of childhood PTSD it can feel like too much dealing with a lot of people can feel like an assault on your senses and it can get really emotional really vulnerable it's kind of like a high school experience that never ends that's how I felt it and childhood PTSD is not the same thing as introversion but I suspect there are similarities in that being social with people can take more energy than it gives that's a characteristic of introversion and that's what it feels like having PTSD sometimes because we're just working so hard to act normal to deal to fit in and it's draining right but we're human and we need people and like everyone else we need a sense of belonging so it's natural that we gravitate to groups but toward the outer edges and that right out there it's a little more manageable we can be around people be social a little bit but just keep one foot outside the door in case we need to get the heck out of there and it's okay to do that healthy groups have roles and spaces for many kinds of people and it's okay not to participate fully for a while now life would be great if you could keep going like that forever just soaking up the group belonging feeling feeling like the door is open if you want to go in deeper but never risking too much of yourself and just staying peripheral to the group and having all your relationships be peripheral and shallow and that's the problem it can just make it really hard to develop closeness with anybody to grow meaning in your life when you're just kind of hanging around the edges growth requires some friction friction is like when things get difficult it's hard it challenges you you need some contact with people to develop social skills sometimes things have to feel a little bit awkward to practice what to do in awkward situations and make it graceful everyone practices this and if they were raised you know in a normal environment their parents taught them this if you didn't get that or for other reasons of trauma it's just hard for you then you can learn it now being on the periphery of the outside keeps your contacts shallow and that's what we want at first when we're healing that's how we can sort of keep ourselves safe from setting off triggers but shallow connections take a toll and that connection that We crave it you got to watch out because you could end up sort of making it a fantasy about the future but something that you're avoiding in the present in the present we're still isolating and then what starts as a kind of delay in our development can become a full-on deficiency and next thing you know you're getting more isolated than ever and you probably know people in your life who have been isolating for a long time and as people get older this can it can happen and what you'll notice some characteristics you'll notice is that people are either tending to get angrier or more spaced out it's more dysregulated there's something about other people that is very healing for us as hard as it is that helps us stay stay connected to reality so you need to be taking some risks to grow your comfort zone a little wider they don't have to be enormous every day they can be small every day but consistent there are normal ups and downs of being part of friendships and groups and if you're not participating in those this is where that non-participation starts to get slippery and before you know it you can't really do the Downs anymore it's it feels like too much and you're not getting included anymore that's what happens you start avoiding everybody you say no to all the invitations and you're not included anymore and when that goes on for a while you can start to get hard to include and what it is and this will sound harsh but we get very self-centered not sharing ourselves with other people is an emergency protection measure but not a way to live our whole lives so the possibility of sharing ourselves is all around us we can agree to bring something to a potluck dinner or we can join a choir or take a watercolor class or invite friends out for a hike when we show up for people in our lives we grow less fragile and more flexible less eccentric and more grounded more connected more included and yes it's demanding to be included and isolation sounds so peaceful as an option sometimes but if we allow isolation to take root long term it will take over and our very worst traits will have a field day we grow crabbier more self-centered more bitter more paranoid and then it gets harder to turn the ship back toward connection again because we've gotten too weird that's the only word for it I've said the word weird on YouTube before and several people complained that it was being unfair but I think it's fair weird isolation makes us all a weirder version of our ourselves and I don't mean good weird have you ever felt this beginning to happen to you just after you had a long stretch inside maybe during lockdown have you seen this in other people so take your alone time and then keep chipping away at Your Capacity to stay connected I know many of you watching this video are there right now just like wondering if any change is ever going to be possible for you will it be worth it and I just want to tell you yes it is worth it yes you can you can start with one small action you just show up take a shower put on your coat and go say hello to some people you can go back to a group that you used to like you can pay a visit to a friend you've been neglecting you can sign up for a litter cleanup day or a blood drive or whatever your community offers as an opportunity to just show up just participate go to a farmer's market and if you do one of these activities a small thing every day after a few weeks you're going to find yourself included again that's how it works so the need to be included it's not just a weakness it's Primal we're born into community and as much as we want to escape it sometimes and be independent we can never really do that and evolutionary biologists will tell you it's a survival strategy so that you have warmth and food and protection from predators and enemies but it's not just physical inclusion is just as important for the growth and development of your being your intellect your spirit because without inclusion in human relationships the blossoming of your whole real self it gets arrested it can't fully happen fulfillment can't come to you you can't become yourself and being included and connected is also crucial for your physical health it's for your brain health it Wards off dementia it creates a support system of people who care about you and who can come to your Aid if you're broke or lonely or feeling like your life is falling apart you're not meant to go through all that alone you've probably done it before but I don't want you to ever have to do that again one-on-one relationships that's one thing if you have childhood PTSD those can be just as hard as being part of a group you need both one-on-one groups I know it feels hard and that's because it is hard and that's why we use titration that's a word borrowed from medicine where it means to like give a little bit of a dose and see how you tolerate it wait then give a little more of the dose see how you tolerate it it's slowly testing your tolerance of things and if you've been isolated for a long time you get triggered easily and I think all the lockdowns don't help you might have to titrate a little so don't you don't rush out and like throw a giant party you go out and talk to a couple people and then come home and rest a little bit use the tools that I teach the writing and the meditation techniques in the daily practice that's a that's a free course that's linked down below that's how I calm my cptsd triggers I've taught it to thousands and thousands of people it's great you can join me in Zoom calls if you take the course that's a way to calm your triggers so that you can keep titrating a little more you know a little more a little more each day the reward for that is that you get to be included and included is secretly where we all want to be foreign [Music]

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 127,959

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Id: rPDmPZ1wSY8

Length: 70min 35sec (4235 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022