Do You Have Problems Making Decisions? - Childhood Trauma

so recently I did a short video on social media about indecision or having really a lot of difficulty making decisions it can be an extremely limiting problem for childhood trauma survivors and many of you asked for a full video on this very tricky issue and how to work on it so here it goes so to recap decision making the problem of it as childhood trauma survivors can manifest in big and small decisions like should you break up with somebody should you switch job should you take a class should you get back to somebody or even deciding on what you're going to have at the restaurant and the smaller decisions it's funny but they tell just as much of a childood trauma story as the bigger ones so in the struggling with making a decision you it's like a paralysis of endless debating with ourselves or avoiding deciding like perpetually tabling something or taking way too long to make a decision here are some examples you know staying with a partner for way too long in this debate with yourself and putting off a break break up or staying in a bad job for years due to the fear of like a new process not knowing what's going to be on the other side of a new job and that's going to be a lot of the focus of this video staying in ambiguity on getting back to someone about plans um changing your order several times and still not feeling good about it um in a similar way to like your online purchase cart and if any of you have gotten lost on an online review about buying a product for hours only to give up that's kind of what I mean by this stuff big and small stuff hopefully we know that we're being neurotic and the inability to make a decision isn't good for us for the following reasons first it it erodes our self-confidence in being able to handle the outcomes of our decisions we're spending way too much time in anxiety and unnecessary kind of suffering for most of this indecision stuff it affects others around us like our friends or our part Partners they they lose the connection with us cuz we're in this neurotic place or they get frustrated about plans or a meal or envis conversations about breaking up with somebody so most importantly our stuck place around decisions isn't good for you because it takes away from your flow in life and your security within yourself about being able to handle anything including a change or including a different outcome like leaving a crap job for a better one or taking a risk and kind of living your life in a better way it's really not good for us so for the rest of the video keep thinking about what is it on the other side of making a decision that really frightens you or limits you in the way that you can't make one so how might it come from childhood trauma um it's funny but I had the opposite problem about making decisions meaning where where I grew up in this very chaotic alcoholic home I kind of call it like an anything goes kind of childhood so decisions were kind of too loose and too easy for me for me like jobs or eventually going back to school or dating someone or or taking in like a sketchy roommate or even going to therapy my attitude as a younger guy was just like you know f it I'll give it a WHL I'll give anything a WHL in many ways that freedom to make an on the spot Choice worked for me and in many ways it really kind of got me into trouble so some of us need to reclaim letting go of what's going to be the out the other side of a decision and some of us need to be more thoughtful about our decisions there's kind of of a dis Spectrum to it so being impulsive or careless about decisions and being obsessive about decisions are actually kind of good strategies from our childhood trauma when we were kids because every kid comes up with their own strategy that keeps them safe you know being careless is a strategy about like not being real about how things could go wrong and defending against consequences defending against decisions like a little bit of bravado you know and ignoring the fear you know ignoring like a healthy fear which would keep us safe and being obsessive or indecisive or neurotic about decisions is a strategy to control the outcomes and control those consequences about our decisions you know not deciding keeps us safe and as a side note you know when I'm using the word neurotic it's not a judgmental tone or why I'm using that all neuroticism means to me is just evidence of childhood suffering oh and also I'm Patrick Tian I'm a licensed clinical therapist specializing in childhood trauma and the abusive family system if you like this video you can hit some buttons on the screen you can't miss with any of the buttons specifically the like button or the Subscribe button or the share button and if you're stuck in your recovery and you want to add a resource to maybe some therapy that you may be already doing um I host a monthly healing Community membership we meet twice a month for live q&as every other Wednesday and we go over questions about inner child work or childhood trauma with me I also send out weekly journaling prom s to keep members kind of on task and doing some inner child work and in addition to the monthly healing Community the membership also includes all my eour work all the stuff that I have available online including old webinars and access to upcoming webinars that I do so I'll put um if you click this ball up here it takes you right to the the healing Community membership and I'll also put video links that I mentioned in this video description as well that's related to this video and my patreon link and all my Social Media stuff so you can all find it in the description of the video so the problem that we have with decisions and being stuck in them or avoiding them can come from any of the following childhood trauma issues so I'm doing doing these in categories the first category is neglect which is like growing up without any Parental Guidance about how things work in the world from say doing a science project to say talking to adults another issue is overwhelmed due to that lack of Parental help when who out there remembers like having to figure out that school project on your own without any help and that overwhelm of that or say what to do about an abusive family member children need a lot of help and neglected kids don't get it another common one around neglect is overwhelm because you're being parentified at home like the decisions were all on you and you were making decisions for others in the family like you were having to be this little adult it's a lot of pressure another is not mattering to our parents about decisions such as signing up for something as adults um we can get triggered to great shame and disbelief that there would be an art class would welcome Us in or they would have a seat for us sometimes decision paralysis is related to how uncomfortable it is to be seen or to be welcomed or show up to something so again think neglect the other category that I have is criticism and contempt um growing up with that daily like why are you wearing that or don't you know the difference between pliers and a monkey wrench God like you're just like your mother you know like well you would have messed that up again like everything else you mess up like that that kind of tone that kind of like you know criticism or growing up in toxic comparison like well your sister's doing amazing I don't know what your problem is you know she's got a great guy she's becoming an accountant why can't you get it together um another is just like everything else you start you never finish anything there's contempt and criticism if you've heard any of these kind of things with that contempt and critical tone um there's kind of a really sad setup going on in that the child is criticized at home and then when they go attempt to get something done either in their teenage years or even later in life and they get triggered due to that earlier criticism it's a setup where again the family might say those things like just like everything else you f it up hopefully that makes sense another category that I have in this about why the decision- making might come from childood trauma is the dysfunctional parent modeling um having parents like mine who didn't budget or who weren't realistic about money and they made made really bad decisions that had long-term consequences on everyone having parents that were profoundly stuck themselves and never worked on it in their own sort of growth world or therapy world or having parents who modeled hyper rigidity around decisionmaking like a parent spending months researching a purchase and being rot with anger and anxiety about pulling the trigger on something like a lawn mower um and related to that having a parent who lived in the world who felt like the world was kind of out to get them in some way and any false step had big consequences to them real or imagined you know having parents that were impulsive or careless about decisions um and weren't in tune with how their decisions affected themselves or their family or their kids such as bringing an abusive stepparent after in after a divorce or having a just extremely negative parents like what's the point of changing jobs when you we never get ahead anyway you know so now let's look at how the factors from childhood trauma can lead to a childhood trauma Survivor avoiding decisions because of their it's like their inner child is stuck back in childhood and their inner adult needs a lot of help to kind of wake up and try to get themselves out of it so that's where like therapy comes in let's maybe do a hypothetical case example um just a a very common presentation of a childhood trauma Survivor who might come into my practice try to identify with the issues going on underneath not the specifics about what's going on with the person no two people have the same history nor the same problems in their adulthood let's just say our hypothetical client is Jill and Jill is 30 and she's worked as a certified public accountant for six years and she hates it she is wanting to do work that is more in line with her interests such as a masters in counseling like funny how I threw that in there um or something like wanting to start her own business in a creative art or sell stuff online stuff that's more in tune with like who she is and for 3 or 4 years there she's in this pattern she's applied to the counseling school she's taken business courses she's figured out all the Social Media stuff and does great with showing her creative stuff online she's looked both into a rental space for her creativity um like an art space and completed all the like the necessary testing for getting into a master's program um and always in the 11th Hour when it comes time for Jill to write a check on the rental space or submit her application for the Master's counseling program Jill gets overwhelmed and shuts it all down feeling highly anxious and terrible about herself that's more common than you actually might might think then she might kind of find comfort or perhaps worse kind of numbness in the boring accounting work and kind of forces herself to embrace it in her mind like well it's a steady benefits and long hours and and there's always work stability especially around April um who did I think I was for trying to do the stuff that I really wanted to do kind of like self flogging 6 months later as the accounting again wears her down she tries again with the same results she gets overwhelmed and shuts the whole thing down so there's this pattern let's say Jill books a therapy session with me in my practice knowing something is up from her childhood trauma about this pattern and this is not a commercial for my therapy practice you know I'm not accepting new clients it's just a hypothetical spelling out of a process about doing childhood trauma work and therapy with a therapist that gets it so in session we would do something called the genogram which is a family tree of dysfunction looking for the dysfunction of the family system looking at the modeling we would look at the family Dynamics and we would look at sort of using a tool called the family Rules and do I would work with Jill on doing some education on what a healthy family system does to get their kids thriving um and we're doing all that to kind of get started on tracing the problem back to Childhood and kind of nailing it and Jill shares about her parents with me and her father was say very ragy very violent hated his work hated himself and gave off the belief that doing what you love in life is selfish and you have to be selfless and suffer in a job because of his own trauma beliefs or whatever and it's also supported by a religion that the parents are wrapped up in you know the father made himself like a violent martyr and the mother supported all that sacrific and codependency and didn't protect their kids from all that energy and all that rigidity and all that you know like kind of Hardcore belief system um and the main message about the about that Jill got about work is you should be lucky to gravel for whatever work that life gives you but you do get to abuse others for your sacrifice as a provider Jill didn't do that so Jill's parents were also extremely cheap um and rigid and which is really like being highly risk averse yet there wasn't like poverty going on like they were let's just say they were like a middle they weren't growing up in poverty but there was just such like hypervigilance that things can go drastically wrong and kind of a side note probably this is important is you know Jill talking about her parents probably the best side quote that I know of um that I've heard of comes from Carl Yung who said that the most depressing thing that that can affect a person's life is the unfulfilled life of their parents you know that the father's marrish burdeny Vibes will greatly affect any child cuz any child just wants their parents to be happy so they can therefore be a more happy and kind of functioning family Jill grew up in misery and as little kids we just want our parents to be happy so they can be more engaged and be happy with us you know so Jill and I do some inner child work um using a tool called dialoguing and Jill's inner child when asked believes that if they get if they get the art studio or they go back to school go to the Masters that others will suffer and in this case jills and her child believes that she will abandon her accounting clients and her co-workers and is selfish for doing what she wants this is a tool that we're trying to make the unconscious conscious what's really going on there so remember when I said earlier about thinking on what's on the other side of a decision what's the fear around a new job or a breakup or ordering something inner children will project onto our jobs or to our co-workers even if we're not really that close to them and if Jill say had a partner that projection would also go on that partner like the partner is going to be super judgmental and CR and criticize her for leaving when the partner's just like I think you should you I think you should leave um so that narrative that came from her parents was so strong that if you're going to do something for yourself that others will suffer greatly that's her unconscious that's driving this stuff so also the parental abuse around rigidity around money was also tricky and say Jill is really Frugal and can afford the risk and of starting a business but the inner child has huge beliefs that they inherited growing up about spending money and the whole world's going to end if you spend money on something so Jill and I reframe her childhood trauma that you know reframing is really like rewriting what the parental message was and the thing that we're reframing is that the father's like sacrifice was really just a license for him to get attention to be a victim and gave himself a license to be abusive to his family this is what it means when I say in my videos to hold a toxic parent accountable in therapy is really spell it out what was really going on there healthy parents don't make their children indebted for welcoming them into into their home into their life healthy parents also don't weaponize their miserable choices such as the father weaponizing his choice of employment is like look what I have to do for you kind of stuff also most importantly healthy parents want their children to be fulfilled and happy and true to themselves so what I would be teaching Jill is for her to be reparenting her inner child and part of that parenting is to be consistently helping that inner child see that they're not bad for making decisions for themselves reframe things that's what inner child work is over time we're not hopefully we're not doing that forever but for a good chunk of time we need to rewire what we experience so and I probably reframe it that um she might actually inspire the co-workers that she mentions in in sessions who also hate being an accountant she might really Inspire them as opposed to them being feeling abandoned by her so in this hypothetical I'm giving a nice summarized neat portrayal of therapy and I'm oversimplifying Jill would probably need a really good childhood trauma group and a good amount of time and therapy to heal many things like the decision it's not just one thing I mean people come at therapy with like focusing on one problem but it means other things since the conditioning is so deep um it's not just an easy hard like quick shift out of that stuff and the general childhood trauma beliefs that causes Jill to become overwhelmed and shut down um like shut down the Master's application or the rental Art Space is these are like core beliefs like I'm bad doing things for yourself is selfish I don't deserve good things um what I do greatly affects others and I'm not allowed to hate what doesn't work for me so now let's take those core beliefs and we're going to categorize them into sort of three categories shame control and security these are the things that are greatly going to affect our decision-making so shame top tier thing if you're confused about your triggers it's most likely going to be be around shame um it's a such a tricky thing from childhood trauma and like 90% of childhood trauma survivors Jill was trying to not be like her father by not acting like a martyr but she was emulating that she had to be selfless which is something that she kind of had to absorb from her father and that if you you know if you're not selfless others will suffer um it's like toxic parental shame is kind of a contagious thing so that's the shame part in this I'm bad um the next categories control inner children have immature beliefs and it's important to develop our inner adult a strong inner adult over time that can help that child and catch those beliefs and kind of know that they're you know make the make the unconscious conscious for example when Jill tries to embrace the counting job after being overwhelmed and shutting down her dream inner children have magical thinking about that it's going to work from now on um and believe that the crappy job doesn't shouldn't matter anymore and they're just not going to feel that anymore that's a decision we often kind of do which isn't good and it actually really never works and what's the control in that the control is repressing the feeling of not liking accounting or hating it and this can often really manifest in our dating life when you're not happy with someone and the inner child says being happy doesn't matter I'm just going to force myself to like this person that's what I mean about that immature magical thinking controlling the RIS risk of say spending money or on the art rental space or controlling the ambiguity or Risk by shutting the whole thing down that's the control the control is also a great strategy from childhood to put ourselves away and make ourselves small and deny our needs which is another component to decision-making problem and then this third category security the more I work as a therapist and in doing what I do the more I see that we're all ruled by a lack of security as childhood trauma survivors um and we should be getting that in a healthy family system during development Jill didn't grow up in Security in general but especially around developing a healthy sense of self um my mentor has this beautiful phrase that every child needs a safe home base um playing loudly made dad violent and Mom would either advise to never do that again or scold Jill about that kind of stuff so from toddlerhood to adulthood what kept her secure was not making others upset with her showing up for them constantly by and not upsetting anyone so the other side of taking a risk is insecurity you know what's going to happen um if I if she depletes her savings or in a master's program what's going to happen if her art doesn't sell or the economy crashes what's going to happen if we go through a breakup with so and so and then we were wrong the whole time about it and we're now we're lonely what happens if you order the fish at the wedding but the chicken was actually amazing you know and you ordered the wrong thing um the shame and control that I mentioned earlier fuel the insecurity um true security which I think is kind of a a goal in good Psychotherapy is to be the ability to be okay no matter what comes up in our lives through good times and bad times and true security also means to be able to roll with decisions instead of seeing life as just like one false move and that's finite that's forever as childhood trauma survivors we're kind of conditioned ourselves to avoid pain and suffering which was a great move but now we're hyper Vigilant about not again being kind of this in this screwed place so that's why we don't maybe go for the new job because it's just we we we never want to go back to that place where we're really up the creek so chicken or fish could lead to suffering and you only get one shot at chicken or fish is kind of like what the inner child believes being wrong about someone that we're dating and breaking up could leave us again getting everything wrong and being abandoned because we were wrong choosing to rent the art space or getting a master's um and leave the accounting job is to be in a risky no man's land where the wheels are now off the bus and that's too scary um from a survival standpoint indecision can be looked at as simply as the fight or the freeze response cuz it's really kind of a shutting down and overly thinking and it's like an inaction kind of response coming back to what we experience in the households that we grew up in um flight as an escape is fleeing the decision like Jill did to return to accounting and fleeing the anxiety created by the lack of security on what would be on the other side of that decision and the freeze is simply shutting down is a good strategy and maybe it'll go away that's like the perpetually tabling something and as a way to play it safe so here is how to do some work around this problem around decisions upfront the best thing to do about the decision-making problem is to start sessions with a good child to trauma therapist those are hard to get they're hard to afford they're hard to find I get all that but I feel like it's my ethical duty to say like that's where we should all start if you can't get all that I totally understand here's somewhat of a of some writing prompts some things to explore on your own to work on it a little bit and the first one is to figure out what is your typical decision-making process even if you don't make a decision that's still a process meaning is it like Jill's where she had that cycle of wishing and researching wanting to make it happen only to get overwhelmed and go back to where she started or do you put yourself through this anxious guilt ridden ringer of big emotions and then when you actually do make the decision it wasn't that bad write down times that that happened um or do you eventually make decisions out of reactive fear and it's not good for you come up with experiences where that happen we have these built-in forgetter and we don't catch these patterns like not breaking up with an unavailable person out of fear and we dig ourselves deeper into unhappiness that's the first one the second one is just to write down what's the fear figure out the thing that you're having an issue with deciding on and write out and walk yourself through the the thing that you're afraid of like the Doomsday scenario the consequences of what you're afraid of and really write that out and examine it like Jill had this narrative that she a terrible person if she lived her life to the fullest and she'd be selfish and she'd abandon people and she would just become this awful human being um wasn't true so the next one is how might the fear that you're the Doomsday stuff that you just outlined in number two how might that come from your childhood trauma story neglect criticism poor parental modeling could it come from like a family tragedy where your father opened up a business with someone who was shady and that ruined the family financially that kind of stuff so related to that third one and to share a little bit decisions to better myself like go to college they were kind of Tainted by my mother's mopy attitude she had this morose belief that things never worked out for us so taking a wrist my inner child felt like there was this huge scary futile experience because in my family things never worked out for us I had to reframe that as parental alcoholist and moroseness not reality um that things weren't going to work out in the long run like success was for other people that's just one way decisions were hard but my point is we all have to dig a little bit and figure this stuff out and where it comes from so the fourth Journal prompt is regarding security what would you need to feel more emotionally secure about the decision in therapy Jill needed to reframe that it's okay to make decisions uh to better her life and she needed um and she actually needed her parents to model that try not to think of something physical like tangible like money money is really nice and it's going to help you make a decision but um but what would make you more secure as a person in order to be able to handle the risk emotionally if it's about say leaving a bad partner often inner children are terrified to be alone or not have a partner like your peers do so the emotional security that is needed for the inner adult to take on different discomfort such as being single on purpose as opposed to the bigger discomfort of being in a relationship that is really like quiet desperation and doesn't work it's not what we want you know but the inner child would need that inner adult to take care of them and to be more invested in the inner childood they would be able to tolerate that other discomfort the other side of a decision same with the new job the inner adult would need to provide emotional security and comfort and Care in order for both of them to be able to tolerate whether the new job is going to work out or not lastly here are some more emotional security ideas to kind of get your your brain kind of like thinking about this stuff is you know my favorite thing is you always have the right to change your mind decisions are often about trading discomfort for a new experience which is also going to be uncomfortable like trading discomforts but being stuck as I'm in my mind is kind of the worst discomfort because it's really we go to a hopeless place when we get that stuck and I learned this another piece I actually learned this from a marine um you can make a decision and then when things get complicated you could modify your decision inner children really get cut up in this black and white place and perfect from now kind of stuff um and I think that that Marine strategy is just like you know don't get bogged down and paralysis when you're in the middle of a firefight like that kind of a thing and lastly is that you're an adult now and you you can handle the other side of decisions but that wasn't true growing up and your body is conditioned to be terrified around decisions and not having security or any help around them a new job is going to come with new stress you know an online purchase might not work out for what you want and you might be a pain in the ass that you have to return it a breakup will come with pain and loneliness and the chicken might be awful and the fish could have been amazing and why I say all that is the usual culprit to the decision-making problem for childhood trauma survivors is the inner child usually thinks they can research and they want to know exactly what making a decision is going to look like on the other side but we can't know that that's where security comes in that's why we need the security to be able to handle anything so we won't leave the relationship because we don't know exactly how it's all going to go you know the inner adult really needs to step in and tolerate what's on the other side of decisions which usually comes with more flow and joy in our lives eventually so I'd love to hear if this was helpful to you like what your personal stuck place is and I'd really love to hear about those of you who who put off something and then you maybe you took the risk made the decision might have been hard but your life got better I would love to hear about that stuff too and as always may you be filled with loving kindness may you be well may you be peaceful and at ease and may you be joyous and I will see you next [Music] time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Patrick Teahan

Views: 756,606

Keywords: psychology, health and wellness, childhood, family, ptsd, childhood trauma, emotional abuse, abusive parents, childhood ptsd, narcissistic mother, narcissistic father, narcissistic parents, repressed memories, emotionally abusive parents, abuse

Id: WMXseugY23w

Length: 29min 57sec (1797 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2022