Practical Steps That Make Life Better

you had a hundred reasons not to shine when you were younger and as a kid growing up with abuse or neglect you may not have had the support or even the permission to be extraordinary to be gifted to be your unique and quirky self but to fully become yourself now you can't let that traumatic past keep pressing you down so that you can conform and stay invisible and play small right now is the time when you get to decide whether you will rise up on the path of real healing and become your full and real self or whether you're going to take that so-called easy road which in the short run is easier it doesn't take a lot of courage or effort but it does require that you continue your self-suppression and tolerate the empty and depressed feeling that playing small always demands that's the price you pay and I'm here to tell you from my own experience recovering from abuse and neglect in childhood that healing is the easy Road it sounds scary and hard but the hardest Road of all is when you don't heal your past when you don't find a way of calming those intense triggers and you have to keep your life very tightly controlled and isolated and tiptoeing around your own reactions because why because you think that if you don't control it life is going to break you and I want to show you how you cannot break how you can open up a little at a time to experiences like friendship and romantic relationships and your work life and trying new things that used to be too triggering for you and I want to give you the real tools to make that possible for yourself to get out of small and get into the big beautiful life you really want okay so to stop instinctively protecting yourself let's look at what's really going on when you play small the first thing is if you're like just about everybody with complex PTSD people are triggering and when I say triggering I'm not just talking about a cultural phenomenon I'm talking about a physiological reaction that happens with PTSD when a certain stimulus happens it could be something like people yelling at you something that was terribly unfair being in danger suddenly a car almost runs into you things like that there could be positive triggers too like asking somebody out on a date or winning a prize things like that can set off a brain dysregulation that actually makes it difficult for you to function normally so sometimes with people people can be so triggering just connecting with them that you end up keeping them at arm's length or cutting them off and removing yourself from opportunities with people just because you're afraid of how you're going to feel when you put yourself out there a little bit that feeling that rises up that you don't trust yourself to handle when you're triggered there's a little sequence that happens in your body in your emotions when you're triggered you might not even be aware that it's there or you thought it was just you that you're just overreacting maybe you tell yourself you're childish and you should get over it and you've probably been told that by other people but when you say it to yourself that's a self-attack that can really make the effect of the trigger worse just so you remember that now let's say you're hanging out at work and somebody says something they praise somebody else where you should have gotten half the credit that happens that's a common trigger getting overlooked so let's just take the work example a trigger comes up adrenaline starts flowing you can you can feel it like running down your arms does that ever happen to you it's almost like you can feel it moving and you're oh no here it goes again your brain starts to just regulate in the pattern that is normal and common for people who went through abuse and neglect when they were kids reasoning goes down emotions go up next thing you know an emotional statement just comes flying out of your mouth you're completely unregulated for a moment and whatever you blurted out causes damage to your reputation to other people's feelings now this used to happen to me and I would be totally baffled in the moment why it was happening I didn't know what was causing it I thought it was just me and I couldn't understand why would I do something so self-sabotaging and later I learned but at the time it feels necessary to just say this thing it's just pressing you it feels like it must be said and then it comes out just too harshly and you can see people Flinch when you say it has that ever happened to you and then how do you feel shame remorse hiding fear and there were times when I would just sit I would say things and the way I sounded when I said them just made me afraid it made me afraid to speak up and I learned to keep my mouth shut I'd make small talk when I had a strong opinion or disagreed or needed to say something to defend myself or set a boundary I just wouldn't and I kept my ideas to myself I I'd let things that were unfair or untrue just go and not say anything and I didn't do things like ask for a raise or make a case to my boss to let me try new things that I wanted to learn and all of this was because I was in the habit of fearing how intense I would get when I expressed myself especially when the stakes were high or when there was some hurt feelings like buried in there and the reason that I was speaking up and I now know that this silence in crucial moments is normal for people with cptsd if you went through abuse and neglect as a kid it's a normal reaction when you're stressed to get a little dysregulated when you speak up courageously and if it comes out with a bit of an edge what you can do is learn to stay more regulated in those situations things come out better when you're regulated you'll have awkward moments in life you'll have awkward moments sometimes and sometimes you might have to apologize for your tone of voice but all of that is a tiny price to pay when you compare it to avoiding the problem altogether by withdrawing from your life not going for anything saying nothing so that's a form of playing small a second way you might be playing small is staying stuck in blame and first I just want to say the people who abused you are in fact to blame for what they did to you it's not your fault and it's good you're healing from any idea that you may have internalized that you deserved that the people who hurt you they are to blame for hurting you there's just no question there but right now they can't do anything about the past and it's rare that abusers even try but remember even if they admitted everything and did everything they could they couldn't do anything about the past the damage has been done and your brain has sustained that injury of abuse and neglect already and so now it's you who needs to start healing that now it's you who's been suffering from the dysregulated nervous system for a lot of your life and it's been affecting your behavior and your choices so now it's you who can heal that and start to change how this plays out when you believe that the problem that needs solving is in the past you give away all your power to change the problem the people who hurt you they can't change the past you can't change the past and that's why I encourage you to take your focus off the people who hurt you off the past even though they were to blame even though that really happened and step away from the blame game not because they didn't hurt you but because you need to get that power back into yourself so you can start using all your energy for changing your life right now for noticing where cptsd is affecting you and figuring out a strategy for how you can work around it and still succeed at the things you're trying to do all right a third thing that might be a factor in you playing small is that you've grown too foggy mentally and cognitively to take action on things even when you know the right thing to do this is also common for people who went through abuse and neglect as kids that brain fog is something that people so often blame themselves for you might be attacking yourself with the idea that you're stupid you're lazy you can't pay attention and all of that might not be true even if you were diagnosed with some problem in those areas some clinical experts I trust say that sometimes that ADHD diagnosis for example is a misdiagnosis of what's really a symptom of cptsd not always but that's worth noting you can ask a professional about that if you think it might apply to you so when you're making a plan to improve your life but then when you take action that brain fog comes and settles down on you it can feel like you're walking through honey or sand or mud like something thick and awful that slows you down and wears you out when you're feeling stuck like that it can be really hard to see clearly and move forward and sometimes just following through on a series of items on a list it'll just feel like too much and then you get one thing done and then off into the fog again we all know you know what that's like right it's a cptsd thing now in fact it's a dysregulation thing and if you think you might be struggling with this regulation you can take my quiz that's on the free tools page of my website that free tools page is linked right near the top of the description section under all my videos but luckily there are a lot of workarounds that you can use to start improving your mental acuity now one of them has to do with diet and there are many ways that you can eat in a healthy way but it usually involves eating lightly and not eating too much sugar and not eating too much High fast carbohydrate foods you should try it see if it makes a difference for you people love to talk about what to eat and they love to debate the best way and so whatever way is best for you try try this less sugar less fast carbs cut it out for a couple days and see what happens to your ability to pay attention there are other things you can do too I teach a technique for writing fears and resentments followed by meditation and that is the most powerful thing that I've done to get my focus and sense of calm inside back you know just bringing it back coming back to Earth before I had this technique I remember telling people I used to be really smart and I was I I had it when I was younger I was really good at crossword puzzles I got good grades in school but the worse my cptsd symptoms got the more I felt like my intelligence was just like wearing down and I asked the doctor if I could get checked for dementia once this was when I was like 30. I'd lost my ability to do math in my head or to write complicated ideas in a way that made sense to whoever was reading my work I was hopeless at keeping track of time or remembering what was on my calendar that's all really normal when your cptsd symptoms are getting worse but what happened is when I got my brain back and I learned to re-regulate my brain and my emotions and my nervous system by using these techniques that I teach it's called The Daily practice by the way this is these are the twin techniques of writing a meditation I'm always talking about them they're always linked below the videos but when I started using that technique within about two weeks it was like I felt like I had recovered about 30 IQ points and it was this tremendous boost in my mental ability back to how I used to be and every day it's my opportunity to keep honing that level of calm and alert awareness it's in that state that I have access to my natural intelligence I was born with it and you were born with it too and when your natural intelligence and awareness is suppressed it is one of the worst consequences that childhood trauma brings on people and makes it necessary for them to play small you can't focus you can't think you can't access your intelligence you lose your confidence in that but you can't suppress yourself forever just in case you'll be caught out for being out of it or too emotional or too angry you need that calm awareness you need your intelligence back it doesn't matter if you're in your 50s or your 60s or your 70s 80s 90s there's more mental acuity Available to You by learning to re-regulate from a triggered state of dysregulation to a regulated State this is something you can learn finally another reason you might be playing small is because you fear other people's disapproval when you stop playing small it sometimes means expressing yourself even when it might mean expressing ideas that not everybody agrees with now that was a process I had to go through in order to start crappy childhood fairy back in the day not so many years ago just a few and I was afraid people would say I had no right to tell other people what I was discovering about what worked and what didn't for trauma and they do say that sometimes you know they they say I have no right well I don't feel limited by that anymore when I first started out I did feel limited I tried to be safe I wrote a very safe and very boring blog that nobody could object to and nobody did mostly because nobody bothered to read it and gradually I learned that the only thing that really engaged people or made a difference in their lives is if I was real about what it was like to have what I have what we have I had no idea people would have such a strong reaction to it I told the truth I started talking about what it was like to be me how I felt when I was trying to talk about problems to a therapist and what it was like when I couldn't do it and what it was like when I had a breakthrough what caused that to happen what did I have to stop doing I told the truth about my experience which was messy and a little controversial and I was always is worried about getting canceled but the blog led to the videos and the videos ended up finding you and here we are and I stopped playing small I still get criticism and I get a little bit of hate mail now and then but I don't let it stop me the work I share here has a life of its own and it just it wants to come out and it carries me forward when I first started out I kind of had to push it I had to like try really hard but now I find it like it's it's just kind of like a natural thing that I create every week and it feels a little bit like getting carried along in a river actually making videos is hard sometimes I want to resist it but overall like what I'm doing here in this work it's I just feel like I'm being carried and I was made for this River and the river was made for me and I wake up each morning I'm just excited to get back in that River and keep going when you play small you don't say anything that offends people and when you begin to show up as your real self becoming open about who you are and telling the truth about what you know and what you believe you take a risk you take a risk what helps make that an okay risk to take is when you also cultivate a loving heart a commitment to be kind and thoughtful about when and how you express yourself and respect for other people and their right to disagree with you like when those two things come up together you're outspoken but you're also kind and respectful you can get away with a lot and growing a sensitivity to others feelings and their dignity will gain you a lot of leeway to say how you feel nobody likes a bully nobody likes a blowhard who just spouts opinions but doesn't know what they're talking about and doesn't listen you being kind and thoughtful and real is a powerful combination for opening other people's hearts and minds and this is where good things tend to start cropping up in your life if you're in an environment where nobody speaks up your self-expression it's going to attract attention so get ready there are risks but it's not as big a risk as shutting yourself down and ceasing to express Who You Are when you do express yourself you might even make it safe for other people to express themselves that's a good side of it everyone benefits When groups can trust and remain open in a robust conversation about a mixture of points of view that's a very powerful and good phenomenon and that is how it's meant to be when you take your place among the people working to make the world better and Kinder and more supportive for those who are still struggling especially you will begin to feel the unmistakable Stir of Happiness that's where it comes from not speaking up keeps you bottled up in yourself and this may block out trauma but it blocks out everything good too being yourself makes it possible to turn your focus outward to feel connection to other people to stop focusing so much on whether you feel bad or good or hot or cold and instead to have that purpose your real self might come running out like a little cult that hasn't found its legs yet or it might come out like a little kid who gets really excited and then cries it's it's it's a growth process and when you first begin to express yourself Let It Be clumsy your development may have been delayed in some areas but it's catching up now and so yes go ahead and get started remember to be kind practice will make it all smoother people may start relying on you and this can be scary for a person with cptsd maybe you're a people pleaser or maybe too much responsibility was part of what hurt you when you were a kid and you ended up with a big wall around saying yes to responsibility and that may be a great coping strategy for a 12 year old but it's not for a 30 or 40 or 50 year old it's time to say yes to your life with boundaries and to show up and start using your gifts and that feeling that life is passing you by that feeling of emptiness that's what it feels like when there's been too much avoidance and too much self-protection and not enough standing up to bring it to bring your gifts into the world where they're desperately needed if you're going to heal from the trauma of the past you're going to need to get your power back and what I mean by that is the life force that is generally drained and suppressed by trauma that gives you energy and focus each day to get up and take care of yourself now when I say power I don't necessarily mean power over other people I want to talk about power as the inner resource inside where you know your next right action and you have the strength and confidence to actually take that action because it takes power to get up in the morning it takes power to take a shower to brush your teeth to get to work on time right it takes power to get a job and it takes power to leave a job that no longer works for you it takes power to learn something new right to create something to to develop yourself to be ready for a new job maybe and it takes power to hold your ground and stay regulated around difficult people so this is really what empowerment is it's not something other people give you like I empowered these people it's not really something that can be given it's something that rises up within yourself through consistent positive actions in in the atmosphere of your basic good self but power is also something that you can make Stronger by steering clear of things that drain your power so the trouble with cptsd is it's really common for people to lose their power and a lot of trauma-driven behaviors do that they feel like a great idea but they drain you in the end so let's talk about cptsd behaviors that take away your power I'll tell you a bunch of them and then we'll go back through and I'll tell you how you get back your power from each of those tendencies that people with cptsd have some you'll have some of these not all of them so let's talk about the cptsd behaviors that take away your power and I'll tell you a whole list of possibilities and you can see if any of them ring true for you but after I go through them I'll go back and I'll talk about how to take your power back if that's your tendency okay so number one the way people with trauma sometimes lose their power is believing that someone is coming to save you and you know this doesn't just come from Disney movies it's just coded in there it is an old childhood memory and if you were not protected and people did not come to your Aid when you needed it when you were a kid you may have kind of gotten stuck with your Hope just kind of flying out of you all the time you know sooner or later somebody's going to show me the boundaries of what's Happening Here they're going to tell me how you're supposed to navigate this and one of the hardest things about growing up and then as you get older it's this hard realization that comes when you grow up sometimes gradually sometimes it takes a long time that nobody's coming that sometimes people can help you when you need help but mainly evolving your life and becoming who you really are is something you're gonna do all right number two this is a tendency that can drain your power is believing that someone who hasn't apologized to you must apologize and they got to do it right or you're never going to heal that's a really self-destructive belief and it drains your power it's basically taking all your power and giving putting it in the hands of somebody else you know with this idea like and I I totally believe you that they probably owe you an apology but it doesn't have to mean that you don't heal and to believe that anything can stop you from healing is to give away your power your power depends on you you know just having a basic mindset of like anything is possible I know healing is possible I'm going to get to work on it I'm going to do the best I can and if things don't work I'll change course a little bit and I'll keep finding what does work that is a positive attitude that's you know basically all any of us has all right number three for things that drain your power and it's trying to get approval from people who are mean to you or don't care about you and I know you have people like this in your life we all do if you have cptsd they're probably they probably starts with parents there's relatives there's you know people you knew all your life there's this weird way that when you're not treated like you're a real person like a real child who has real needs when you're a kid like the whole world conspires to treat you like that sometimes not the whole world but you're going to keep finding a pattern with that but if you dance around thinking that it's getting the approval that's going to solve the problem and you're abandoning yourself betraying yourself losing yourself trying to get somebody to like you it drains your power it drains your power at a certain point you need to approve of yourself and to do that is sometimes going to be a project because to approve of ourselves for real means you do things that are that you feel good about you've cleaned up messes that you don't feel good about so we'll talk about that when we come back through all right number four the thing that drains your power is avoiding conflict now I know I sometimes advise people avoid conflict don't go to a family holiday and get into it with people about politics or what happened in the past like that will ruin your day and everybody who's there including the innocent parties who were just hoping to have a holiday dinner with everybody there's kids in extended families who are in the same position you were in as a kid and if you could remember what it feels like when people are fighting so there are so many good reasons to avoid conflict but at a certain point you need to stand up and actually have the conflict and speak up for yourself or it begins to drain your power all right number five the opposite of avoiding conflict is fighting everyone just fighting everyone about everything and I don't know I've been that person before and it's exhausting it feels like a crusade it feels like it's just happening to you and you know you have no choice but you you do have a choice about who you fight with and if you're fighting with everyone you're probably going to drain all your power before you actually resolve anything you know I I totally understand the spirit of fighting everyone it's like standing up for yourself you know standing up for what's true not allowing abuse and yes you don't want to do those things but if it's just like across the board what ends up happening is you lose so much power you can't take sane action you can't see what's really happening so you neither want to avoid conflict or fight everyone there's this Middle Ground number six is using intoxicating drugs to cope with dysregulation now those might be prescribed we might be talking about alcohol which is you know it's not illegal it's just intoxicating and and so are street drugs obviously but a lot of people will say I'm self-medicating you know with alcohol or weed or what have you and self-medicating I just think that's a nice way of saying using it's just everybody's self-medicating when they use drugs and alcohol when there's not like an underlying addiction it's you know we call it recreational but it's always like on a Continuum right from the first part of the continuing it's like it starts fun and then it turns into you know self-medication and trying to deal with feelings so I just bring this up so that you can ask yourself you know are you using the term self-medication or are you using drugs out of some belief I hear this a lot people are like yeah you know they smoke weed every day quite a lot saying it helps with regulation and I would just say do whatever you have to do to keep yourself alive but in the long run if you're going to learn to re-regulate it's not going to work with intoxicants that's just not generally the pattern for people the ideal state for you is to be able to go oh I'm getting dysregulated and then to have tools to be able to pull it back in to be able to pull that back in if you have a tendency to get neurologically dysregulated you feel overwhelmed discombobulated clumsy can't get your words out spacing out you might be having dysregulation from from complex PTSD it's really normal for people who had a traumatic childhood and I teach people how to overcome that I'll put a link up above here where you can download I have a download called signs of dysregulation and emergency measures to re-regulate and you can get that by clicking that but stay with me here um if you're using drugs to re-regulate it's a temporary fix it's probably not re-regulating you that well and when you do learn to re-regulate even a little bit even if you haven't mastered it every day all day and nobody has right everybody gets dysregulated sometimes but with cptsd we just want to be better at re-regulating we want to notice it's happening we want to get re-regulated faster the seventh thing that can drain your power from complex PTSD is putting yourself down where you are having this negative self-talk that inner critic going oh I'm such an idiot you know oh I know this is or you know you're talking to people and you're like excuse me I know this is stupid but can I ask a question you're putting yourself down and it's just it's a natural instinct that comes with the fawning there's four trauma reactions fight flight freeze Fawn and fawning is when you're like excuse me I'm sorry and putting oneself down is sort of the equivalent of when a dog who's like nervous and jittery and you go to pet them and they go boom they roll over on their back you don't want to be like that you want to stay in your strength you want to stay in your power all right number eight is overspending uh credit cards uh going into debt that is a way that you lose your power a person who has a lot of debt has very few choices like you have to stay in some job that you have because to spend two months looking for a different one would throw you so far off financially that you can't even do it so overspending and debting are two things that take the power away that you could really do so much more with that power for healing all right nine under spending yes the opposite is not good either you drain your power and I always say if you want to know if you're under spending go look in your underwear drawer are they decent would you be okay if somebody had to go in your room and pack for you does your underwear drawer reflect your basic socioeconomic level or or is everything shabby and yucky and assuming no one's ever going to see it you might be under spending sometimes taking care of yourself means having appropriate things not lavish things but appropriate all right number 11 is avoiding your own intellectual growth avoiding learning learning is so important and you're going to need to learn to heal so when you're avoiding that when you're you know doing waste of time things like um you know drinking watching TV I love TV I love TV there's a place for it but when you're doing that instead of doing the learning that would help you heal it's a problem number 12 staying friends with people who drain your energy who diminish you who put you down who take a lot from you but don't give back I this is so common for us but it drains your power and it starts to affect how you see yourself who you see yourself as being what you think is possible for you all right number 13 getting into romantic relationships with people who cannot or will not go the distance with you so if you're taking all your love and all that sort of powerful potent life force of wanting to be in a relationship very precious energy that you have right possibly even having children this is like a very important power and energy that you have and if you're just taking it and just you know giving it to somebody who doesn't care about you you'll know if you're doing it right but if you're doing that your power is just draining away and you don't even have that to attract someone appropriate or to give to somebody who happens to show up you won't even recognize good people who show up when you're completely drained by you know obsessing on someone unavailable or staying in a relationship that's not good for you all right number 14 is neglecting yourself if you're not taking care of your health if you're not taking care of your hygiene this is really common right your appearance like is your hair brushed in the back you know in the back and after the I'm not talking about pandemic times here and I saw this once on a new girl where she goes I'm going to shave my legs even on the back back of the legs too and I laughed so hard because I was like yeah that's a level of self-care that I had to graduate to and so you know we don't just do this for appearances of having hygiene but we actually take care of ourselves so we'll talk about that in a minute all right number 15 draining your power is doing too much over functioning this is where you just feel like you know I do everything for everybody I you go to potlucks with way more than other people bring to the potluck you uh keep your life incredibly busy you're pursuing multiple degrees and jobs all at the same time and you know the signs because you're very stressed out and exhausted all the time um I think doing things an accomplishment and taking action is super wonderful but there is a line there's a line where it begins to drain your power all right 16 doing too little getting paralyzed from taking action avoiding action altogether just getting into deep procrastination oh it feels so bad to do that drains your power 17 is blaming blaming other people for your problems and uh they're you know you undoubtedly have problems that are caused by other people but there can be this way where that becomes a deep rumination it's a rumination that gets into your bones and you think about it all the time and you're like you know if only this thing hadn't happened in 1981 everything would be different for me and what that puts you into is somewhere other than right here other than right here looking at your problems and what can be done about them losing power number 18 is cutting people out of your life instead of healing relationships when healing is possible and desirable so we've all encountered people who sort of cut and run when the going feels a little bit tense they are flears they are avoidant and that might be you too a lot of us kind of Swing both ways on that like if somebody's fleeing from you maybe you cling if they're smothering you you flee you know it's all really common with cptsd but our power builds up when we can stay and deepen relationships and strengthen them so if you're sabotaging all of that I have no doubt you're losing opportunities and personal power okay my last two have to do with not dealing with the problems in your life and one way to do that is to stay too busy running around all the time overfilling your calendar you know oh I'm so stressed I'm so busy the other way you can do that is by being too involved too consumed with other people's problems such as if you're in a relationship with somebody who has an addiction or who's an alcoholic or who's doing something terrible with the money and you're just constantly consumed in this and you're tired and drained and walking around with circles under your eyes because of what you've been going through at home consumed with somebody else's problem there is a way to take your power back from that so let's talk about that let's go back through the list that I just gave you and talk about how you can retrieve your power and build it up instead as you heal your trauma with the belief that someone is going to come and save you I want you to just tell yourself right now that is a beautiful fantasy and I am hereby going to step up and save myself it's the best thing so one part of my life where I've had to do this is you know crappy childhood fairy it's a company and it's a company I love running but I don't know if I do it the best way all the time and I used to have this fantasy that if I could just find the right consultant they would come in and go I see exactly what you're doing right I see exactly what you're doing wrong do this change this change that and everything would get easy and better and um and it never worked and I tried and tried with some different things and different functions and what I had to learn is it's actually going to have to be me like it's my company and if something is wrong I'm going to need to do the research to understand why and I'm going to have to come up with the solution to fix it and I can hire team and I can have people help me but it's always going to be that the buck stops with me I'm going to have to see it I'm the person who cares the most about it and so it is with our lives so if you find yourself thinking if I could just find the right person if I just had you know fifty thousand dollars more all my problems would be solved no probably some very specific problems would be solved you know to do with money or to do with now you're with somebody and when you go to the wedding you have a date but it does not solve all your problems and in the end it's you who's always going to be facing get this a never-ending Fountain of problems like we're human problems come at us problems Bubble Up From Within and so the strongest safest route you can take is just to be very like ride the surfboard of life and just know you're gonna have to spot your own problems you're going to have to be responsive to them and try to embrace that it's actually the Great Adventure of life is what it is with cptsd it can feel like oh I'm broken there's no point or this is too overwhelming but that's a terrible attitude things problems will pile up if you can't come and save yourself and save yourself it's sort of an exaggerated term every once in a while actually you do need to save yourself out of a dangerous situation but saving yourself from a life of mediocrity a life of quiet desperation a life of isolation to cope with your triggers that's worth saving yourself and you can do that you can do that and it's going to come from you the second thing is instead of believing that someone has to apologize for you to heal just accept that they are never going to apologize if they do it'll be this incredible surprise but you'll find out then it doesn't fix you you don't need it to heal and the thing is most people never apologize or if they do it's a flimsy apology it doesn't really speak to the thing that hurt you so your post-traumatic growth has to do with how you sort of take that thing that happened to you and you're able to you know compartmentalize it a little bit be like yes this happened but it's not my whole identity I'm not sitting there like a like a like with a festering wound that only some other person like the person who hurt you oh my gosh you can't even like if they couldn't be kind to you in the first place are they really going to help you recover are they really going to say the words that you need I have such great news you don't need them and sometimes when you can sort of relax that Demand on people or that expectation it does create a little bit more gentleness in space where maybe they would give it a try sometime but I'm telling you you probably won't be satisfied because people who hurt others it takes a lot of denial to live with oneself that's what I'm just saying occasionally people do the work where they really get it and they can say they're sorry and they they've been thinking about how that must have affected you and how lovely that they do that and I think there's a really great connection that can grow with people as a result of that and it might prompt you to sort of go oh yeah that really wasn't my fault but often it does it doesn't bring the perfect like Island Landing of perfect ease that we were hoping for that comes from the healing that you can do whether anybody else takes responsibility for their actions or not the third one what to do to get your power back is instead of dancing around trying to get approval from people who were never going to give it to you anyway just stop dancing just kind of go about your business and just release them that little invisible rubber band that you have on them like come on approve of me let me know I'm okay that you love me you can finally just like you don't even have to let it snap just release it and you might just be surprised that there's a little more space for people to come towards you I'm not making any promises I mean the people who traumatized you here's if they traumatized you when you were a kid your beautiful child's imagination probably dressed them up a little bit and gave them a little bit more potential than they actually have to take responsibility for what they did and treat you right I'm sorry to say it but if you can just accept that that's often the case and go ahead and heal anyway then anything that they come towards you with any positive thing that they can contribute it's great you know that's just nice it's just like a cherry on top the fourth thing instead of avoiding conflict do your footwork so that you can have conversations about what's bothering you if someone's going to hurt you if you speak up step away from them never try to work things out with people who you think could physically hurt you or who are out to emotionally abuse you there is no point if you're worried that someone will abandon you if you speak up okay here's my radical advice let them if people are prepared to abandon you because you need to talk about what's bothering you it's going to be this incredible dance to hold on to them and make them stay it's a drain of your power if you have to use your life force to try to keep somebody attached to you if you're worried somebody will criticize you just prepare yourself to hear it if you haven't heard of my front porch concept all right think of yourself of your heart your feelings your mind it's this is your house and out here you have a front porch and so if people want to talk to you and you're not really sure if they're safe or what their motives are you can say oh fine come on just picture them talking to you on your front porch and so you bring your attention out to the porch and go sure what have you got to say and then they say it and you decide am I going to let this what they said or let this person like into the house do I let it into my heart or do I just consider it out here and go yeah and where I have the option to go yes I reject that you can say you reject it to them or you can just go all right well thank you for your feedback bye you don't have to get into it with anybody um because the next one the fifth thing if you've been fighting everyone there's avoiding conflict uh and there's coming to the porch for the conflict and then there's running off the porch and getting out there and fighting with everyone well that probably means you have confusion about boundaries what you can ask for from people what it means when you don't get what you ask for what what people's intentions are when things feel disappointing that is something that can get so messy when you're still like you got some unhealed trauma wounds there but fighting drains you so you speaking up is good fighting drains you just big messy conflicts some of it can't be avoided it's life it's part of having relationships but if you grew up in a household where there was violence or there was you know horrible animosity then sometimes there's this really bad well that opens up when you get into you know trying to State what you need or listen to somebody else's criticisms and it can get so tough and I really recommend that you learn some techniques for staying regulated when you are trying to communicate things that are a little bit fraud or triggering for you to stay regulated you can take that I'll put the link in here again to the signs of dysregulation and emergency measures to re-regulate and at the end of this I'll also tell you about my free course where you can learn the techniques that I use every day it's called The Daily practice all right uh fighting is a drain speaking up for yourself is empowering taking a bunch of random criticism is a drain being able to hear criticism on your front porch can be empowering and it can be enlightening you get to have a choice about what comes out and what comes in and I know how hard it is when you have all that neurological dysregulation and emotional dysregulation from cptsd but that's what we do at crappy childhood fairy we learn how to master that so everything becomes possible the sixth thing was instead of using intoxicating substances to cope with dysregulation you can learn healthy ways to re-regulate this again is where my daily practice comes in handy it's very calming and soothing and you must have a way to calm yourself and to soothe yourself I'm not saying that like hey lady calm down nobody wants to hear that I certainly don't but everybody needs to find ease and comfort especially an emotional distress and if you've sought help for your complex PTSD symptoms even if you didn't have a name for you know what is wrong with me you've probably met with the thing where people are just like calm down you know think of this not that say this not that but it's all just such a jumble when it's going on so this technique the daily practice it's a way of putting in writing what you're fearful and resentful thoughts are and those are just like you know when you're dysregulated when you're in a conflict with somebody you get them on paper you ask for them to be removed or release them depending on you know how you see the nature of reality and then you go into you just rest in meditation for 20 minutes and let your brain recompose itself and I'm telling you you will be amazed what a difference it can make just to do this easy thing that takes nothing more than a pen and paper and some of 20 minutes 30 minutes you can't always do it in the middle of a conversation but the more you can teach yourself to step away when conversations get intense like that the better and you can take a minute and this when I had been doing these techniques for three years was when I was finally able to let go of my two pack a day smoking habit and I was definitely using cigarettes to stay regulated and to try to handle the intensity of things coming up I had to have as they say in a a sufficient substitute right if your thing is alcohol or drugs definitely learning how to have that ease and comfort and get those thoughts out of your head is such a great I know people who do just that to get clean and sober maybe you have another technique but you can use that together just to always have you know you have your pen you have your paper you always have a way to just calm down and a lot of people will be like take a deep breath I just want to tell you taking deep breaths has never been enough for me when when my cptsd symptoms are upon me I always felt like that was just like a little bit light it's a good thing but it's not enough when when the full thing's going on when you're in bull in a china shop State of Mind Right the seventh thing instead of putting yourself down to other people remember I talked about that putting yourself down and fawning just focus on letting go of what other people think when you're working on yourself you will have a much better sense of when you're doing something you don't feel good or dignified or proud of and when you actually are okay when you have confusion about whether you're being a good person and keeping it together you're going to find yourself paranoid that other people are judging you all the time and the fact of the matter is they are you know all those sayings like it doesn't matter what other people think but actually if you're like being very rude or cruel or something and other people are going wow she's really rude and cruel they would have a point we don't say that enough and there's so much like on Instagram it's like oh it's you know other people's criticism is always wrong it's like not so sometimes they're right and cptsd involves some difficult behaviors but putting yourself down is never productive so working on yourself which you can do you can do it with the daily practice people do it in my membership program they do it in 12-step programs they do it with therapists you can work on stuff where you're kind of undermining yourself or getting into self-defeating behavior and every time you resolve one of those problems you're it's like your head comes up you feel good and then you you don't have that urge to put yourself down to other people and the fawning Instinct the fawning Instinct you know comes from a childhood thing of like if I'm nice to you Mommy will you please not be mean to me will you please not leave and it comes from that right so you when you heal your trauma when you heal your fundamental security part of which is to feel good about your own ability to solve your problems your own ability to take responsibility for how you treat other people like that feels good it feels really good and less insecurity is there and more security that you know what if somebody's just like won't give me a break I'm I'm truly doing my best here and they're just endlessly criticizing me it's just like here's what you do just let them go you don't even have to push them away you can but you don't even have to just release that hope that they're going to come around and like you or approve of you you need to approve of yourself and if you think oh gosh this criticism is about to come let me preempt it I'll put myself down first it's not going to work anyway it doesn't make them see what's so great about you it tends to you know they get a little bit of agreement for if they were actually thinking something bad about you now I know sometimes we project that they're think that people are thinking something bad about us which is another reason not to just jump in there and go I know you're probably seeing what a liar I am or something and then they'd be like I hadn't really thought of it but maybe yeah so don't give them that just work on yourself work on yourself and do your best to be a person you feel good about all right in the first round we talked about overspending spending beyond your means going into debt using credit cards to death so instead of doing that here's what you can do you can begin keeping track of your spending and your bills what you owe what you spend and what you earn now I'm telling you this is something that when you're in the middle of kind of dysfunction around this stuff you are thinking oh I just can't look I don't want to face it it feels so good to face it it can be really fun to start making a plan to go over you know here's what happened here's what my goals are here's what I'm trying to save you are not alone if you have debt You Are Not Alone it is so common for people to end up in debt especially if you grew up with trauma because first of all the trauma causes poverty you may have grown grown up with sort of like poverty thinking and then it causes difficulty being in situations with other people and being able to you know be be good with other people is so much how we earn money very few people have figured out how to do that without actually interfacing with other people having cptsd can interfere with learning and because you know it's hard to pay attention so you might be working with a few deficits and you are not alone and it's okay and you don't have to be ashamed but it's just time to start putting it together here so one thing people I know um who have struggled around money and debt is they there's a 12-step program called Debtors Anonymous and they have this thing that people do called a pressure relief group I haven't done this myself but I had friends who did it and I always thought gosh that's brilliant like everything should have that where a few people get together every week and they are really open with each other about what they owe they bring their receipts they talk about it like bring it out of secrecy and out into the open you can do this with any kind of behavior like overeating or an addiction or anything that's starting to take you out of your you know operating in your own best interest is just bring it to the light of day with the support of other people so I think that I've heard nothing but good things about that 12-step Fellowship debtor is anonymous you can check it out you probably know exactly what to do you make a budget you pay down debts you could do a snowball pay down or an avalanche pay down and you can research all of that I really like Dave Ramsey's book I found that helpful when I got out of debt 10 years ago it's hard to do when you're only thinking about your money sometimes so it starts to become like a daily habit and it's crazy how much when you can sort of put your positive attention on a problem every day and just sort of set aside time to deal with it things just start to turn around like magic I remember I started to do things like um be careful about what gas station I went to I used to just go to whichever one was convenient but then I was like you know it probably doesn't break the bank if I spend three dollars more on a on gas this week petrol for those of you in Britain it probably doesn't make such a big difference but I'm going to do it I'm going to do the Thrifty thing I'm just going to keep doing the Thrifty thing and I got better about shopping and cooking at home and I even would stop and pick up pennies when I saw them on the ground pennies are really not going to change my budget but it was just the principle of the whole thing the mindset of me getting into I'm not going to let money just leak out of me because that's what I'm teaching you here do not let your power drain out of you and the money that you have in your possession that you are not leaking out all over the place is part of your power it's part of your ability to make choices in the world all right the ninth thing is if you're an understender if you're not taking care of yourself if your underwear drawer is shameful and you really hope nobody ever looks in there before you can get in there and throw out all those ripped awful old undies and replace them with something new that fits you that's appropriate that you like that you feel good in right and by the way yes it's possible to be both an overspender and an underspender to be you know hemorrhaging money out on vacations or trying to help somebody else and then in your own drawers having shabby things and things that are not suitable for a person you know in your place in life your age you're more or less socioeconomic level do you have a decent pair of shoes that aren't stained do you have something nice to wear if you were to go to a dinner party so many of us with cptsd don't have that and I think it got a lot worse during the pandemic when it just became possible to slump around and maybe because of not feeling great about your body you just don't have the right things to wear so just going to say if that's resonating for you you can get your power back by taking appropriate care of yourself remember I said nobody's coming to save you people aren't going to come and just buy you a new wardrobe or tell you what to wear like a little time and effort has to go into this and I'll be honest with you I am somebody who hates shopping I get very triggered in department stores it gets overwhelming within an hour I don't know what it is the sounds the smells the pressure the old be it growing up poor memory of having to find exactly the right one thing that would have to suffice for all purposes and getting like I can I can't find one thing and if I buy one thing and it doesn't work for this I won't have anything I just have this like old stuff that comes up so how I take care of myself around that is I always shop alone I drink a lot of water I pause I sit down I take a break and I get out of there I just don't try to do it all at once [Laughter] Tendencies sometimes to go here I'll just get two years of stuff at one store where I've just found a couple of things that fit and I'll get all the colors and get that yeah that's one way it's a one way but like doing it that way is not really taking care of myself and another part of your life to look at in terms of are you spending the right amount of money is betting is your bedding suitable is it clean and comfortable for you is it the right temperature for you so I've been very poor before and had to use you know just a dirty old sleeping bag for a long period of time and so I totally understand that sometimes that's how it is but if you're in a certain place where you could have those things but you don't bother to do it for yourself it's possible that you're under spending and it's a way that you're expressing low self-esteem and sort of telegraphing to the world if they ever you know either keeping them out of your personal space you don't invite people over right that's a that's unempowerment disempowerment to do that but yeah just shutting out parts of your life because you don't have the power to kind of meet life at a good place at a good level like wearing a nice I don't know this shirt I bought this shirt last year at a department store I remember and I remember I almost bought like four colors of it because I just like this shirt it's comfortable it looks okay but I only bought one and I thought to myself if I really love the shirt I can buy another one all right we talked about under earning and if you're under earning if you're not making enough money then I cannot say enough about how important it is to have money all right A lot of people and I think it's only people who have unlimited amounts of money they're just like hey money's not really the important things they have no idea what it's like not to have enough to eat I do have I do know and I know what it's like not to have dental care I know what it's like to have to stay in a bad relationship just to have somewhere to live and I never ever want to be in that place again I'm so grateful to be able to earn a fundamental amount of money that means I have choices about where I am and today I'm happily married and so of course we live together and it's a great situation I am all about those saving for my retirement I'm all about saving for us so that we have a suitable place to live throughout our lives and helping my kids through college and remember I'm somebody who only got out of debt 10 years ago so I'm very focused on that and that's a way I take care of myself and the signs that I'm not taking care of myself is a sense of dread and worry and so sometimes maybe things are okay but I haven't come to peace around it and so I'm worried and or I'm thinking about what other people have and I don't have that much you know I still don't have the material stuff that I had always thought I'd have in life I'm not there yet but with a little luck I think I might get there in my lifetime but I also because I've grown up poor and because I use my daily practice I have a lot of confidence that I can make a pretty good go of my circumstances wherever I end up I don't want to be homeless I don't want to ever be stuck somewhere where I don't want to be and so I take very good care of my earning for people with cptsd one way it's done is you're not going for the opportunities that you you know you're not working in a job that would pay enough so I see a lot of people who are working in low-pay jobs and then resentful all their lives that those jobs don't pay enough but they don't pay enough for anybody they don't pay the level that you would like to be earning and then staying in the job staying angry and like this is not fair and one example of this is Teachers right my mom was a teacher some of the great people in my life were teachers but as we know teachers don't get paid very much and we know that going in so what I sort of have to say to people is taking care of yourself means being very clear with yourself about how much you need to be earning and if it's more than a teacher makes then being a teacher may not be a good career for you you need to go into something that pays better now a lot of careers also require research if you're not earning what you think you should earn and the other way this can happen it's like you don't go for the type of job or career or you're in the career but you resentfully um you know just get made Invisible by people you don't get offered raises or anything as you may have heard this is very common for women asking for arrays it feels too confrontational for many people it was something I had a hard time doing but you know what I gotta raise I haven't had a job with an employer for a long time but I did I did Consulting and in many situations I had to raise my rates over time and the hardest part of that was the inner job of just deciding that I was worth it and that I would work hard enough to continue to be worth it that I would deliver work with that it was easier for my clients to accept pay Rises you know an increase of rates from me than it was for me to prepare that self so it's an inner job and you do that by doing the research by dressing the part by doing learning the skills that are needed um I can't tell you I know a lot of people who are software Engineers I live in I live in you know the northern part of Silicon Valley a lot of people are software engineers and in some environments where software Engineers work there's a huge culture of learning and people are always learning new things and they're being Cutting Edge and you know that tends to be a workplace culture that's really going to go somewhere and innovate but other places end up with a workplace culture and I'm just picking on tech people here but this happens in all professions and people don't learn new things they're just very protected and defended and like you know we've already he's always done it this way we don't do that oh that's just somebody's opinion about some new thing and they want to keep everything the same well in technology that doesn't tend to do very well in all careers it pays to read about your industry it pays to learn about what interests you and it pays to learn about things that are completely different than the work you do because sometimes getting outside of the work you do and learning about something stimulates your imagination so that you can contribute positively and if you're going to increase your income then contributing positively to the workplace to the teamwork to whatever is going on there is the number one thing that you're going to be able to do you're going to need to be able to do that it doesn't automatically get you arrays you have to be good and then you have to ask for the money that that it warrants and if then if that can't happen there you need to have the guts to move on and find a new job which also takes research and preparation and all that stuff but Power this is just I just wanted to talk a little bit more deeply about earning money um so often people who are in an abusive relationship and especially if they have children feel like they cannot leave because they neglected their ability to make money and neglect is a hard word a lot of people stayed home to care for kids but now now they must get out there needs to be a way out I see nothing wrong with living in a shelter getting welfare whatever you have to do to get out of an abusive situation but ideally of course no one wants to stay stuck there for long it's an act of personal growth to learn things and take action in a direction towards where you're trying to go which ideally is doing work that is Meaningful to you and making enough money to live decently very important to be able to live decently studies show that Beyond living decently like more money doesn't necessarily increase happiness enough money that you have choices and you you have sovereignty over your own life you live where you would like to live I don't live in a mansion I might like to live in a bigger house but I live in a safe place that's what I mean another reason I want to give you for learning more you know I talked about learning and neglecting your learning if you've been neglecting your learning one reason to really get into it is not only does it help it put you in a more powerful position to do the kind of work at a level of pay that's more suitable for you but it makes you more alive and it makes you a more interesting person it activates something in your brain when you're learning either reading a book that's challenging or taking a course if it's online if it's not I do I'll admit and I know some people have bought my course and they're like I'm sorry I never actually took it and I'm like I understand I've done that too but but to actually engage in learning to actually engage in learning it makes you more powerful more interesting it costs some of your free time it might cost some of the time that you would otherwise spend socializing and socializing is important too but I promise you when you when you increase your learning it will dial up the quality of how you spend your time it will dial up the quality of how you spend your time and it will increase the wonderfulness of the people who are drawn to you and want to hang out with you we're up to like the 12th thing here if you've been staying friends with people who drain you and making you feel bad it's time to talk to those friends about how you feel um or if you're ready to let them go you don't even have to tell them how you feel you can just let them go when you feel better about yourself your relationships will tend to evolve the people who were never going to sort of come along and be respectful and kind and supportive of you they will fade away they often will fade away angrily they don't like something oh you think you're so great they will but they will sort of take themselves out the good people in your life they might be there now they might be people you're soon to meet but they will come to you they will be drawn to you because they match you they are also at a level of growth and growing that is similar to yours they won't resent your growth they will like it they will want what you're doing in your life to be a good influence on them and likewise they will be a good influence on you the 13th thing if you've been spending good years of your life in romantic relationships with people who chronically disappoint you who hurt you they can't grow with you they can't commit to you or they can't commit to themselves even well think of them as a room with a sticky floor it's hard to leave you can't get your feet up right but having a happy relationship begins when you get yourself out it never it always feels like you're shutting the door on love like you're giving up the only chance of love but if that love is not making you loved then the shortest path to being loved is out the door of that bad relationship so if you're going to be in a relationship aim for one that makes you feel good about yourself that will be your sign like sometimes sometimes you'll be not sure like we have these differences we have these qualities I like but the number one sign is just like check in with yourself how do you feel about yourself does this person bring out the best in you do they make you want to be a better person do they make you want to be more and do more right that's a sign that's what they're talking about when they say that someone completes you right they're they're very presence in your life sort of draws you forward into a better version of yourself all right the 14th thing if you've been neglecting yourself your health your hygiene your appearance sit down get a piece of paper and pen and make a list of 10 things you can do to take better care of yourself and this is going to be you know what they are you know what they are but I want you to write them down go take a walk find a recipe to make a healthy meal make an appointment to get your teeth cleaned you know what you need to do but you need to sit down and be bring it into your conscious Consciousness into it into the top of mind so make a list of 10 things if you can't if if you make a list of 10 things and you tape it to the wall where you see it every day begin to take at least one action a day towards doing that make the appointment for the dental cleaning okay go take the walk make a date with your neighbor to take a walk arrange to walk somebody's dog for them just take the action and put it on your calendar to take at least one action on your list of things that need to happen for you every day if you want to do more than one great but I'm always with cptsd sometimes if you're going to be making positive changes like let it be slow let it be gentle so that you don't have to quit and freak out and dive under the covers and hide from everything just a little at a time titration a little at a time adjust a little at a time adjust that's how you can make some changes all right so if you've been doing too much if you've been over functioning you've been giving your your power away to other people trying to show them how helpful you are how totally on top of everything you are trying to make sure that they value your friendship because you know you're gonna step in you hear they're getting married and that's it you'll take care of everything for them you've all tier that's what over functioning is and people who over function will almost always tend to crash they'll do a whole bunch of stuff and people start to count on them I've done this and I've had people do it to me and then boom all of a sudden they do this like flip on you there's just like they're so angry they're so angry because in their mind they've been working on this complicated equation where they will not say anything but they'll be so busy and helpful that something they want from you is going to come their way and then you have no idea they're even doing this and so you can't deliver you don't even know what it is and they're just like boom and then they cut you out of their life have you had that happen or have you done it to people so we don't want to do that we don't want to do that it's very good to be able to be active to function but not do too much don't do so much that you're putting yourself in Jeopardy of having to flip out and run and if you're connected with somebody either through your work or your personal life with somebody who is like doing way more than their share of things like see if you can talk about that with them if you can get things out in the open about what they're doing what they feel good about what they were hoping would be reciprocal you might be able to save the relationship from their flip out later you know when they have to when their only way to set a boundary is to end the relationship it's so sad right but it happens all the time if you've been under functioning if you've been procrastinating all right uh you will think to yourself there must be a magic pill for this but there isn't there's actually what happens is you break the ice you have to break the spell procrastination can become a spell by getting up and doing one thing do one thing that gets you moving and that brings you pleasure make it something that you actually like sometimes procrastination it's like such a Negative state that if you say oh I'm gonna go you know Harvest all the broccoli and eat it for dinner so if you go um I'm gonna I'm gonna make brownies and have fun it's easier to break the ice I'm trying not to eat brownies myself ha but that's that's the idea of breaking procrastination you do one thing and when you're getting started make it something that gives you pleasure so like all other changes we're talking about releasing old coping mechanisms is going to create a little temporary moment where you feel empty did you have you have you had that happen so when you finally stop over watching TV or overeating brownies or whatever it is it'll be like oh I don't know I feel anxious I feel like something's missing in my life I just I need something I need a brownie I need Netflix I need that it feels like that all right when you start to feel that emptiness here's what I want you to remember it's good that's really good the empty pocket is where it's the thing you're trying to fill and you're going to be able to bring your attention to it and it's where you can sit and do the footwork to face what is in here and in your heart what is scaring you what's keeping you angry what's keeping you stuck this again is where where I recommend using my daily practice that's where we get the fearful and resentful thoughts on paper out of our heads on paper like you know it's you're gonna surprise yourself how effective it is for reducing that hamster wheel thinking when you can get it on paper it's a very specific technique and I strongly invite you to come learn the specific technique don't just like rant on paper it's not a journal it's not a journal a journal is for remembering and recording this is for you just take out the trash you're like I have fear this and fear that and I'm resentful it so and so because I very well you get it on paper you don't even have to write nicely and then there's a thing that you write at the end that I call the sign off where you ask for this to be removed if you're inclined toward a higher power if you are more working like with your higher self if you prefer to do that you can release it and then you rest your mind in meditation all right so that's free you can sign up for it in the description section the link is uh underneath every video I make down there so you can always find it there or on my website the 17th thing instead of blaming other people for your problems which causes you to lose your power you can forget the role that other people have played in your past yes I know that's sacrilege right you're supposed to talk about and acknowledge it and grieve it but I'm going to wager probably you've already done all of that you've probably spent a lot of time talking about it analyzing it reading books about it hoping that if you would just understand what happened to you enough if you just were to talk about it enough that you would begin to feel better now that could happen it's it's certainly part of healing certainly in the beginning but if you've been doing that if you've been paying for a lot of therapy you're talking you're talking and you're not finding relief yet then something else might be needed to move you forward out of that and that's again where the daily practice is that's what it is it helps you deal with what has to be dealt with and then you can let go of the rest it's a big release your healing doesn't always depend on talking confronting analyzing sometimes it's about naming releasing and then moving on with paying attention to your life today and trying to make it the best life you can so it's a good exercise to look at your problems even if someone has really pushed that problem on you and just ask yourself what can I do to stop having this problem because usually even if a problem was sort of dumped on You by somebody else's bad behavior like they're not gonna fix it for you it's you you're you're the one it's not fair but here it is you know somebody's got to fix it and it might as well be you so ask yourself is there anything I can do to solve this problem right now and it I you know try do what you can to detach it from the person who perpetrated the problem there's very few problems that other people can solve some of the ones like that are like lawsuits and things and that's one reason I have really tried to stay out of those in my life because because you can really get tied up for years trying to make other people a judge a jury the other person the lawyers or whatever to see it your way and sometimes the most freeing thing the most happy outcome is to be able to just wash it out of your hair what happened and move on sometimes all right the 18th thing if you've been cutting people out of your life as a way to avoid difficult conversations well I want you to be able to have a choice in those moments you can cut people out of your life but it it is something that you could exercise only when everything else that you could try has failed so sometimes problems with other people can be worked out and sometimes problems with other people sacrilege again sometimes they can be ignored not everybody in my life has my approval or agreement about everything they think and do but that it doesn't really have to be an issue because of the nature of my relationship with them I don't have to worry about that I don't have to tailor my life around it or make them change to be friends with them now I know there are relationships that do need to end and that will become clearer especially when you're using tools to get those fearful and resentful thoughts out of your mind those can actually trap you in kind of a strange way of like blaming other people for stuff that's not their fault blaming yourself that's for stuff that's not your fault blaming yourself and thinking they're so great when is there you know it's just like our perception gets very warped so you need a way to process your thoughts especially the negative feelings to process them and sometimes processing them just means naming them releasing them and releasing them doesn't mean you're not going to deal with them or you're not willing to look at them it just means that while you meditate for 20 minutes and take a rest you're just like there you know come out of my mind let my mind come together and you'll usually find that only some of the things that were bothering you come back only some of them come back and a lot of what's been bothering you the fearful and resentful thoughts they're just oh they just drift away they're just forgotten and so I when I do my techniques of the daily practice I write my fears and resentments I meditate and I keep a pad of paper just in case I go ah you know what I really do have to send that rent check right now I forgot and I can write it down because even that that start that'll start to be something I must think about I can't just like relax right now I'm afraid I'll forget so you take care of business and that's how you get your power back laughs and and that's very empowering when you can like know when you can keep track of what you feel responsible for doing and let go of the stuff that doesn't need your attention you just took all these power drains out of your life and you could take all your power back and focus them on the things that you do need to do that are fruitful that you choose that is power I would like you to have the power to save relationships that matter to you that's a very important skill to have so you you can talk to people you can talk when there's a problem and when you trust yourself a little better to be able to handle the emotions that come up when you're honest about your feelings you can be more confident about going and trying to patch things up with people when you heal you will become better at having healing conversations that help relationships and don't hurt them when you heal you'll become better at having healing conversations and you can practice that when you have a little small Rift sometimes and work your way up to bigger problems all right the 19th thing if you've been staying too busy to ever focus on what needs healing in your life oh this is great this is your chance you get to do less now being over busy starts as a way to help someone out or make extra money but if it's a coping mechanism you're using all this activity to avoid something in your life it's time for you to have that quiet time and just let the awareness of the problem show you what it is you don't have to solve it yet just allow it to enter into your mind and your mind will begin to work it out as you have less PTSD symptoms your mind can do these projects for you just when you're while you're sleeping all right if you've been consumed with somebody else's problems and it's been driving your life it is time for you to bring the focus back to yourself it's one thing if this other person is a child and you're obliged to keep taking care of them that's a hard situation and help is available for that but if it's a partner or friend and you can you can't be that effective in solving problems for them and there's a high probability that you're avoiding your own life by you know trying to be the hero in their life a lot of people are afraid that if they focus on themselves they'll be lonely or bored or useless or just too consumed with themselves but when you avoid yourself like this you lose all your power and guess what you become lonely and bored and unable to be useful to anyone now if you grew up with trauma a lot of what I'm saying Probably sounds good but you don't know how to actually start the place to start is with the daily practice course I teach it's two techniques that help you get clear in your mind and calm in your emotions and empowered to take good Common Sense actions to build your power back up I have this great tool that I use whenever I'm frustrated and confused about a problem in my life that I thought I was working on but then I realized I'm not getting anywhere I'm stuck and this is a really simple tool you can use it right now to break through and create a map that shows you the way out of the problem and you're going to create a set of instructions for yourself to put right in front of you that you can begin to take action on this is something you write down I'll show it to you in this video as I do it for myself all right now whether or not you get the power to do everything you write or just one thing that you write the act of writing it down has tremendous power in it sometimes just naming the changes that you need to make is enough to get that movement started that step-by-step movement so this is a thought exercise that I use in lots of areas of my life when I feel like I'm not making progress fast enough or I've lost my focus it's a great question to ask yourself if I had to solve this problem inside of a year what would I do so it could be something like if I had to earn x amount of money in a year how would I do that or if I had to be able to run an eight minute mile three months from now what would I need to do and then I list at least 10 things okay so the money example is real when my first marriage fell apart and I had two little kids I had to figure out really fast how to go from earning about 25 what I need to survive as a single parent to a hundred percent of what I'd need to survive as a single parent and later I used this tool to plan my next step up how I'd get past survival and create a business and a life that would let me pay off my debts start saving and be a good mom and eventually meet somebody new so people with childhood PTSD you know we get fuzzy a lot of the time on seeing uh I'm having a problem and if this problem is going to be solved I'm going to have to solve it like that's kind of the obvious thing but it can be very hard to see with trauma you may have ended up feeling like you were waiting for something or somebody outside yourself to change and then you could change that's that's the heart of the problem so I'm giving you a homework assignment that you can do yourself and I'll put the link it will be down below in the description section you can download it you can print it you can follow along with me or just listen to how I do it and then download it and you can do it for yourself so it's called if I just had one year to heal my childhood PTSD what would I do right all right so I know one year is like a tight deadline to heal something as huge as childhood trauma and healing never follows a planned timeline anyway but don't worry about that this is a thought exercise it's there to open up and stimulate your thinking so today I'm going to tell you my list and I've got the benefit of knowing all the things that I did do to heal from childhood PTSD but I did them over a period of more than 25 years with lots of downtime and being off track during whole chunks of time so I thought I'd share with you the benefit of my hard-won wisdom if I could do it all over again this is how I would do it if I had to heal my childhood PTSD inside of a year the first thing I would do is I would learn the science of complex PTSD in childhood PTSD and childhood PTSD is a casual term that I use for the kind of complex PTSD that comes from Child childhood trauma complex PTSD is any kind of intense stress that happens over time but in most cases people with cptsd got it in childhood but not necessarily so the books about the science we're not out when I first started healing but if I started right now I would take the ace survey which is a set of questions to kind of measure how bad was the trauma I'd get my score I'd read the body keeps the score by Bessel Van Der kolk I'd read complex PTSD by Pete Walker they weren't written yet when I started healing but they're there now so that's what I would do like right away and there are lots and lots of other books out there but that's where I'd start those two books now if I had had access to these books it would have saved me Decades of thinking I was a broken person and hopeless and for some mysterious reason just always struggling it turns out my symptoms are totally normal for somebody who had experiences like mine I'm not broken I'm normal I'm having normal responses to abnormal circumstances second I learned to notice the neurological dysregulation that is such a foundational symptom of childhood PTSD and I'd worked to master re-regulation the first thing I'd start doing is the daily practice techniques that I now teach to everybody to hundreds of thousands of people and this is the twice daily writing of fears and resentments in a very specific format and you can learn and try that in less than an hour if you care to there's a link to that free daily practice course in the description section below all my videos after the writing the second part of the daily practice is meditation it's a very simple restful meditation yes twice a day so that's what happens twice a day in the daily practice write and meditate first thing in the morning and then later in the afternoon sometime before dinner is the ideal time write and meditate so the writing and meditation together have a powerful effect if you want to know what it's like use the specific technique that I teach and just try it just try it everybody can try it and if you take that course you can join me in free Zoom calls that I lead twice a month for anybody who's learned the techniques and wants to come practice them with me and ask questions so as it happens I did learn the daily practice 28 years ago but back then I had no idea what was wrong with me or why using these techniques made me feel better I just knew that I felt better but I also went into resistance and I stopped doing it regularly and I now know this was like opening a terrible portal for all my cptsd symptoms to come back so if I had my healing to do over again I'd quit messing around and I'd just be religious about my daily practice and I really do it thoroughly twice a day without fail and I would not quit because somebody in my life found it inconvenient and I would not quit because things didn't always go my way what I know now is that when things don't go my way a lot of times that is progress that's what it looks like is something that's not working Falls away also it's just Safe and Smart to keep up your healing practice through good times and bad so that leads me to the third thing I do to heal in a year I'd quickly get out of all the unhealthy dead end one-sided relationships with significant others and would be significant others where one of us had feelings but not both sometimes it was me sometimes it was them but basically one person who didn't have feelings was kind of using the person who did have feelings because I don't know it's kind of fun to have somebody adore you I guess but unfortunately it cost both people their emotional availability and and neither person will tend to find true love when they're entangled in this kind of you know friendship so I'd end all of that right off the bat and then the fourth thing I do is become really good at happily spending time alone this is the difference between Solitude which is happy time alone and isolation which is sort of involuntary time alone I used to have so much anxiety about Solitude and so I'd fill up all my free time doing social things that I didn't really want to do and hanging on to friends I didn't really like just so I didn't have to be alone now I know a lot of people with childhood PTSD have the opposite problem and I've been in that camp too isolating and avoiding social interactions so if I had one year to recover I'd cut down my relationships to just the ones that involved no pining on either person's part no one using the other person to fill up the seat next to them at the movie and only people where we both truly cared to know and support each other that's what a friend is it's somebody who really wants the best for you and shows an interest in that for me it would have meant more alone time and in my years of recovery I've discovered there's actually so much joy in in having constructive time alone not too much but some and to be good at it gives you Freedom so that you don't have to like cling and hold on to relationships just because you can't deal with the thought of a weekend alone a weekend alone can can be wonderful you can take trips alone visit museums alone go hiking alone you can work alone you can go to the movies alone and after the pandemic actually going to the movies at all is right up there with my great joys so today I have a family and I love being with them too but learning to enjoy my time alone has set me up to be free to make choices about being with people or having some joyful Solitude and it makes me happy so the fifth thing I do is stop spending my money on two things that I was using out of desperation to feel better therapy and cigarettes I know saying therapy is a shocking thing let me explain so first of all quitting smoking is obvious right and I was able to do that after about three years of healing very expensive habit quitting therapy was counter-intuitive and that happened about the same time so I realized that therapy is really helpful and often even life-saving to people on this channel if you've watched my videos you've heard my own story about how for me personally talking about my trauma in therapy was dysregulating and emotionally and neurologically destructive and after trying out 11 different kinds of therapy over the years it was the daily practice where I can write my fearful and resentful thoughts that Set Me Free from the life I was living stuck in my narrative you know with looping and looping on the bad things that had happened to me and waiting and waiting for some kind of better mental state to just kick in in therapy that better feeling never came in the daily practice which happens to cost nothing it was like the sky opened and the daily practice you know I just had to do it over again that's all all I had to do was repeat repeat but it was always in my hands to do that so when I started having that way to kind of release all the intense emotion of having cptsd all the losses all the struggles everything started to calm down so that allowed me to stop smoking and about the same time I was able to transition easily out of therapy and then I saved thousands and thousands of dollars so if I had it all to do over again I would have magically found the daily practice much earlier in my life I would have gotten rid of the cigarettes much earlier I would have completed my therapy much earlier and I would take all that money I spent and I put it in tech stocks and now I'd be a jillionaire oh well the sixth thing I would have done if I had it all to do over again and no one ever told me this back then but it's strong exercise it is so good for re-regulating it's good for calming emotions and who'd have guessed it's good for your heart your lungs your muscles and pretty much everything in life so now that I exercise I have so much more confidence in the world I feel prettier I feel healthier I feel younger even though I'm way older than I was back in those days when I did not exercise okay the seventh thing I do if I had it all to do over again I'd stop all the negative stuff in my life starting with my own trash talking of other people and their opinions their religion their politics their taste in food their music their choice of Partners pretty much everything and I would instantly challenge myself on all my negative beliefs that require black and white thinking and you know that you know these people are good those people are bad this person's perfect this person's evil and I'd completely embrace the understanding I have now that everything is complicated and we're all working out a way to do the best we can and I'd quit being so judgmental quit telling people how they should change I'd stop putting myself down I delete all the music I used to listen to that was about death and heartache and revenge and being crazy and getting betrayed and self-pity or I delete most of that music anyway I mean some of it's kind of good right but I know that it affected me in a bad way I know that it can be trauma triggering just listening to music about despair the eighth thing that I do is I'd be a better friend I'd go to people's weddings when they invited me I'd call them back when they called I'd accept them and not abandon them just because I was triggered or busy and the ninth thing is I'd be a good worker it took me so long to learn this when you take a job your job is to make the boss and the organization successful period and I used to make everything so much about my feelings and how I was treated which sometimes was awful and the jobs where it felt like that where that's what I was experiencing those are the jobs that I was supposed to leave but I didn't I hung on to those jobs and just kept waiting for other people to change and I complained and I talked behind people's backs about it but I stayed and stayed and I regret that so that's something I would do differently I would move on to a job more aligned with my own values my own abilities and my goals and then I would enjoy like doing my very best I love doing my best that's a very happy thing actually the tent thing I do and I'm happily married now so this one is moot now but I it would have changed my whole life if I'd have learned this earlier if I were single and I had one year to heal I would learn to date I never knew how to date I thought that dating was just finding yourself all in an emotional bond with somebody because you already had sex with them and there was a mutual attraction that drove you to that and then retroactively you would try to change them into the person that you were hoping they were in the first place no it turns out dating is supposed to be a getting to know you process with people to see if they might be someone with whom you'd later want to become committed to and in my case I knew that I wanted marriage I always knew this was what I wanted but you wouldn't know it by who I dated or how I handled myself in those relationships I know my confusion around this was from my childhood hurts but the trauma that bad relationships brought into my life was probably even worse than the trauma from childhood and worse even than that I caused other people to suffer so I'd completely change that if I had to heal in a year is it you know done goodbye so that's my 10 things and if you're in my courses you've done this type of exercise before because I'm all about how good it feels to face the truth even when you thought it would be terrible and then to take really practical steps to make changes so you deserve those changes you deserve a good life if you want to write your 10 things down I made the worksheet and I put the link below where you can download it I'm not checking your homework this is just so you can try this exercise and see if it inspires you and helps you make a map of and dream big about your next steps it's not a crazy goal to change your life in a year some parts of your healing are going to take longer of course but if you're ready and you're willing to do what it takes jump in there's so much that can start feeling better quickly you probably already know what to do and if sticking with your resolutions or your intentions to change is hard for you one thing you can do is get support one way you can do that is to become a member of crappy childhood fairy membership is the inner circle and you get access to all my courses my monthly webinars the group coaching calls I lead twice a week that are just for members and an incredible group of fellow Travelers people men and women who take part in our secret Facebook group supporting each other organizing daily practice calls at different times throughout the day just enjoying friendship with people who understand what it's like to have cptsd and who are walking the same positive path of healing that you are so you don't have to accomplish everything you write on your list of 10 things that you would do if you had only a year to heal but doing the exercise might energize you to stay on the good path and open your mind to what's really possible for you everything is possible for you childhood trauma is a thief of your mental focus your confidence your energy Your Love but you deserve to recover those things they're yours recover what is yours be bold and become your full and real self at last you're beautiful you are real don't let anybody tell you that it has to take forever for you to become fully real and fully beautiful as you were meant to be you were born for this you're made to heal this is your Birthright and you've already come this far so be proud of yourself I love you and I'm so proud of all you have done to recover and bring your love and your light to this world we need you and we're on this path together so many things that we've been told about healing our lives and recovering from old traumas is wrong have you noticed this the wisdom a person needs to live a good life to grow past the bad things that happened I know people knew this at one time but it's like it got broken up into pieces and tossed up with a lot of other ideas and I started figuring this out years ago when I used to go to a lot of 12-step meetings and I went to thousands of them over the years and sometimes the same meeting every week for years I just go I would see the same people over and over again and I had the opportunity not only to work on myself but to observe other people who were making incredible progress they were totally changing their lives like before my eyes when they were shedding old problems and it was really attractive and these people were you know a really positive influence on me but I also had the chance to observe people who didn't make any progress and this really shaped me too and in fact formed my whole philosophy about how to heal and change your life and how you maybe don't want to approach it because you'll notice not a lot of people succeed at healing their trauma you know it's not like an automatic given and a lot of people reach out for help but it's rare that anybody really breaks through like really blossoms it's a huge deal when someone does and back when I was really struggling with what I now know were childhood PTSD symptoms I was scared that I'd end up Stuck like so many people in the meetings I went to but I was determined to find a way to do it to be one of the people who heals and changes and so I was paying attention and taking notes and I sought mentorship not just in 12-step but in like a few different disciplines and so when you come to my channel you'll notice that how I approach healing is something different than what's out there I'm very direct I teach people to be honest with themselves self-directed Sovereign have sovereignty over their healing and I bring in a lot of Common Sense wisdom but I'm also very counter-cultural when you hold up my philosophy and it is a distinct philosophy along with a set of techniques but when you hold up my Approach against the mainstream mental health world and their approach and their beliefs about what trauma is and how to heal it well there's there's differences and I want to talk about those differences now I have an open mind to the fact that different people respond to different things but I think there are some really negative and limiting and even destructive ideas out there and just in case those ideas are all you ever got and you're feeling hopeless or stuck like healing can't happen for you I want to present an alternative that might help you get a breakthrough now I love doing this work because all day I'm witnessing and communicating with people who are getting that breakthrough and I feel strongly that everyone deserves this chance to heal from their trauma and I'm very driven by this Mission and I've always been interested in how people who are struggling with depression and Trauma can heal and make positive changes it was so hard to get real information about that for me when I needed it but I had that breakthrough and you know the healing work is it's a lifelong project it's a happy project but I'm never done I don't think anyone ever is it's something we're always working on we're always you know it's kind of like a condition that you maintain and I'm unfolding as a person just like you are just like everybody is so I have complex PTSD and now that I know what it is I can see that I've always had it I had a rough childhood I've talked about it in my courses and on my videos it was mostly because my mother had severe alcoholism and that brought in all the problems that go with alcoholism and I'd say the cptsd symptoms I first remember them when my mom moved us to a new state when I was nine away from my father and I lost him and my I lost my support system so I was isolated and it got worse in my teens when I started having sex and it's common for kids who were abused to sort of fall apart at that point in their lives and then I got my heart broken then I got my heart broken a whole bunch and then I really got my heart broken in my late 20s and at about the same time I was a victim of a violent crime and also in the same couple of weeks my mother died so I was effed up I was not just sad I was scared I was freaked out and that's when it became obvious that something was really wrong with me and there was no name for it and I also it also became obvious that doing normal mainstream therapy not only wasn't helping me but it it had never helped and in fact I think it was kind of making it worse so I thought I was some kind of really extra screwed up person I was convinced that my therapist was judging me like for you know being so unresponsive to things that were helpful to people in normal cases and they definitely didn't know what was wrong with me or what to do but they thought they knew what to do and they didn't really address the self-defeating behaviors that were all over my life and creating an extra load of trauma and drama like 80 of my trauma at that point was self-created stuff there was the childhood that led me to the self-defeating Behavior but those behaviors were then really bugging me down so yeah my therapist had me talking talking talking about my feelings about my memories and it was literally making my symptoms worse and worse now to be fair therapists back then didn't know what was wrong because there was no name for it and the name we now know it's complex PTSD and that's the kind that comes from chronic exposure to intense stress usually in childhood doesn't have to be it could be at other times in a person's life and it seems obvious now if you know what it is and you've had a chance to check that knowledge with your experience of struggles and healing from what happened to you but even now most mental health professionals don't have a working knowledge of complex PTSD a lot of people you know doctors therapists mental health programs they say that they're trauma informed but that's really a subjective term and you know what do they mean by that you have to ask and what do they propose that a person does if they have cptsd or trauma so you'll notice there's a lot more talk about the problem of trauma than the solution to it how do you actually heal and that's what my life's work has become so I hit the end of the road and I was hopeless about all avenues of help available to me this was back 29 years ago now and then something happened and I healed not overnight of course but you know in bursts and I had a big burst of healing when I first found the techniques that I still use every day uh you know I've been using them ever since I was first shown that's the daily practice that is a set of techniques I teach them for free it's a free course it's always down in the description section below every video I make so you can always access that and I'd love it if you did if you if you take the course you can come join me on free Zoom calls that I lead every couple weeks so I'd love to meet you there I answer questions we use the techniques together and you can see if they help you as much as they help me to calm your cptsd symptoms but back then there was a core like hole in my spirit that got healed all at once in a short amount of time and I had a lot to work out after that big problems in my life and I'm still not like perfect or perfectly healed but I don't get into trauma-driven problems like I used to and when I hit trouble I know what to do and that's what I teach here and in my courses and workshops and coaching and alternative self-led path to Healing that can help whether you have access to professional help or not now in some ways it's a radical approach now that I'm writing a book about it and I am I I realize how much all the videos here are like well they're like a sea urchin they're they're like little spikes of information I'm putting out like one video is a spike and here and here and I talk about this and this and so now writing the book demands that I be linear and that I weave my lessons around a coherent philosophy which I've known for years I know My Philosophy but I don't think I've ever articulated it all at once My Philosophy informs every video I make and so I want to have it all laid out in one place and in one video and this is it are you ready okay I have eight principles and the first one is trauma is an injury not an identity so we used to think of symptoms of trauma as primarily psychological right we now know that there are largely neurological and by extension they're physiological because neurological means nervous system and your nervous system not only governs you know your nerves your brain it governs your whole body and it affects your emotions it affects your hormones your immune system your Sensations when you feel like it's time to go to sleep like it's it governs your physical life and so when you have a neurological injury which is what trauma is it can affect everything in your body and that explains what we now know that a history of early trauma can really increase your risk not your certainty but your risk of serious health problems not just the things that we've always kind of known like depression anxiety um bad relationships we've known that but it can also give you heart attacks Strokes diabetes obesity reproductive disorders endocrine disorders immune disorders learning disabilities problems with memory and increased risk of dementia oh that one scares me so there's almost like no bad thing on earth in people that isn't made worse by trauma so we have every incentive to heal okay so also part of this like injury is that adult symptoms of childhood abuse and neglect ruin lives they ruin careers like so many careers they ruin relationships and they ruin families the effects of trauma like we kind of knew this instinctively but when you really measure it out if you look at like people who are incarcerated there's such a high rate of traumatized people in there if you look at people with addictions if you look at people with grave mental health disorders all of it is made so much worse by trauma so that's starting to be finally dealt with you know as a person with cptsd I can sort of say like we're the most expensive people in the Health Care system and so there's an incentive not just for us but for the whole system to find a better way to help us I don't think they've done it yet they talk about it they're not there yet but that's what we're doing here is practical ways to start bringing those symptoms down and I can definitely say my health improved dramatically 29 years ago I feel healthier more energetic more alert than I did at that age and it's thanks to being able to re-regulate my thinking my nervous system to bring my Vital Signs kind of back into alignment through using my tools I use my tools and I that's again my daily practice you can learn that too the effects of early trauma are more serious than they realized and they're more wide-ranging and they you know it's not just the obvious stuff and cptsd it can't be cured but the symptoms can be healed and I do think of it something like diabetes where you may have it but you can reverse your symptoms by changing how you do your day what you eat you know what medicine you take for us there also is a way of living that can help turn those system those symptoms back around and if you do that you can have like continued good health and keep going and then if you fall apart the symptoms come back so that's that's how I experience cptsd and if it were to get worse especially as we get older if it if it were to get worse the symptoms could become more grave so I just want to like emphasize it's so important it's so important to address your symptoms you may not know what caused your symptoms you may never know and that will be okay if you can learn to calm your symptoms all right the second principle dysregulation is an almost Universal symptom among traumatized people people don't talk about this you may have never been told but neurological dysregulation it's a nervous system phenomenon it can be measured in the brain it can be measured in your Vital Signs and easily observable signs that you might notice are things like difficulty focusing your heartbeat being irregular going up randomly or two just too high feeling clumsy feeling emotionally overwhelmed or once you've gotten emotionally overwhelmed and maybe you know expressed anger that was kind of over the top then going emotionally flat like you feel nothing and even your thinking will be like I don't care and there's this weird like silence after intense outbursts well that could be neurological dysregulation if you relate to that now everyone is sometimes dysregulated and most people will eventually re-regulate but dysregulation seems to be exacerbated by traumatic experiences and the Brain changes that as a result and so people with cptsd will get dysregulated more often more intensely and they'll have a harder time coming back out of dysregulation so luckily that can be healed but dysregulation is responsible for you know a wide range of the symptoms that we associate with trauma like why does trauma cause people to have a higher probability of getting lupus or Ms why does having a history of trauma make it so hard to heal tissue like I got stuck in the hospital once for over a month I could not heal and it was at an extremely traumatic time in my life and I had surgery after surgery after surgery and they kept saying we don't know why but you're you know like just everything keeps breaking down after we operate and then I got back I had left my daily practice techniques and then I came back to them like I just came back and started really working on calming I didn't know I didn't know what dysregulation was at the time I didn't know what cptsd was I just knew that I was really freaked out again and I pulled it way back using my techniques and then I healed then my body healed and so I've had Physicians tell me Physicians who know what trauma is yeah probably I was somaticizing my trauma which means sort of expressing it physically like the trauma plays out um by with limited blood flow or you know poor immune response to infection I was having a lot of infections I kept hemorrhaging you know I was having all these problems and then my body kind of pulled it together and it pulled it together when I was addressing my trauma symptoms so again I did not know what that that was trauma but later I looked back and it's like that's what it was my daily practice that I was using the whole time it was calming my symptoms and the effect when I'm using my tools consistently is always like an improvement in my physical well-being and my mental focus so dysregulation also has cognitive elements there's emotional disruption and I think I would say emotional like developmental delays and so there's like this damage or delay to our ability to connect with other people our ability to kind of read the room and sense what other people are feeling how to face up when things are awkward and how to apologize or how to how to ask someone out all that stuff it can get delayed because trauma is just it's doing something with the neurological injury that's a little hard to connect that's that's what it feels like to me and it's consistent with some of the research that I've seen now self-defeating behaviors that result directly from dysregulation and from the injury of trauma self-defeating Behavior I feel like does not get addressed adequately and I I don't know I saw something like 11 therapists and they were always like very ready to talk about what my mom had done what what the suffering was in my life but in terms of the mistakes that I was actively making that were making my life terrible and driving people away I had a harder time getting help and I guess I don't know if they didn't understand or relate or if they were trying to go easy on me they thought it would be too distressing for me to be confronted or criticized about stuff that I was doing to mess up my life and I ended up you know what I ended up learning my daily practice as well as you know getting some like a big truth bomb in my face was from a woman who was a peer who showed me the daily practice and she was just like yeah you know you have to stop hurting people you have to stop being selfish and I was like what nobody had ever told me that like there was a lot of talk about how other people had been bad but just it never came back to me and I was so ready because the beautiful thing when you realized like it was you who was making a lot of the mistakes it was you who was being rude selfish using people socially yeah I had a lot of stuff going on but when you know it's you it's like guess what it's something you can change now what my mom did I couldn't change my mom died before all of us you know that she died at the beginning of my healing process not a coincidence like I started healing as a result of all the pain that was in my life at that time and that's when I could begin to get honest with myself about the role myself defeating behaviors played some of the attitudes I had were social or cultural and some of it I learned from my mom you know I grew up part of the time my childhood was in a commune it was very crazy druggy people having sex on the floor that kind of thing and you know it wasn't exactly a great moral education for me it's not like I didn't learn anything about like a good way of life or what was a way to be a good person there's a lot of ways to pick that up a little bit from my parents from some good teachers friends parents TV good old TV you know where would we be without it like how should I act what is a good person so I learned all of that but a lot of my suffering and a lot of the ways I was doing self-defeating with behavior was from cultural messages like hey I have to be authentic I have to be myself I have needs you know I was just kind of like taking those things a little too far I didn't know any better so these three which is dysregulation disconnection and self-defeating Behavior they flow into each other and they make each other worse they can also make each other better but when your trauma symptoms are getting the better of you it's usually like a ping pong between those three points dysregulation disconnection and self-defeating Behavior now all three of those things there's one thing that activates them and it's triggers so learning to calm triggers and this is the fourth principle learning to calm your triggers is the starting place to break the cycle if you can calm your triggers an ordinary natural healing process can follow if you've been trying to heal and try to heal and trying to heal and you keep like you get two steps forward and then ten steps back it's probably that your triggers haven't been addressed and these days you know people say triggered it it can refer to anything really like something you don't like or you disagree with but when we're talking about triggers in the context of trauma we mean something that sets off the neurological dysregulation a stimulus happens and for reasons you can't totally understand or control a nervous system reaction kicks in your heart's pounding your thinking gets distorted really if you do a brain scan left front cortex is going down you know less activity right front cortex is your emotional center it's going up what's going down over here is reasoning so less reasoning more emotion that's what it feels like to be triggered the way people talk about triggers it's as if like it's other people's problem that they do it but what the problem is is that we react to stimulus that way that's the problem you can learn to comment and it's a lot more productive to learn to calm your reaction to things that trigger your neurological dysregulation way more productive than trying to get other people to stop being themselves you know people are going to people right this stuff is going to happen people are going to overlook you they're going to criticize you they're going to reject you like this is always going to be part of life they're gonna not get you they're gonna team up with each other and leave you out like all that stuff like that's hard for a person with cptsd but when you learn to calm your triggers it can't set off that like big dysregulation disconnection self-defeating Behavior so you can practice this and you can strengthen yourself practice and strengthened against triggers now common can largely be accomplished through simple techniques that you manage yourself you don't necessarily need to see a professional for this these are things that many generations for thousands of years have known about how to start calming down the nervous system and if you ask me it should be the first line of treatment and it includes things like intense exercise doing something that involves the left side of the body and the right side of the body like marching and actually when you do one of these exercises with other people it magnifies the beneficial effect and so that's interesting right for thousands of years soldiers have marched and then they also will sing or chant together you know and doing that together with other people The Voice the body it's how people re-regulate nobody maybe knew that's exactly what was going on but people have figured this out and I think that if people are like fighting in a battle you bet they're triggered they're you know their trauma is activated there it's going on right now and so it's only practical that they learned how to sort of bring their nervous system back into lion so that they could manage their bodies and their body systems and pay attention and and sleep at night all of those things are critical for anything intense like battle right and so we can learn from that how people did that singing together is re-regulating and then sometimes like a little shock to your senses it could be like a cold shower or warm hand washing something that reminds you of your senses you plunk down in a chair I have a sheet and I'll remember to put this down in the description section below it's a sheet about the 10 ways 10 emergency measures you can use to re-regulate yourself very good to keep handy like carry it with you so those are the emergency measures and then the ongoing measure for re-regulation that I teach is the daily practice and I'll be that's always down below too so I recommend that for everybody whether or not you have access to professional help this lack of awareness or Focus or solutions for treating dysregulation is is why conventional methods have been so minimally successful to treat complex PTSD there is there is poor evidence of good efficacy it's marginal and you you know a little bit you might even question it because especially where drugs are involved there's this incentive to hand select the studies that are included in you know the measurement of is it effective and there's ways that you can really the research to to make it look like something's more effective than it is but it's you know Placebo therapy medication they're all kind of close and physical exercise intense physical exercise has recently been shown to be at least as effective as therapy or meds or both and I just remember when I had acute PTSD nobody told me that they were ready to just slap me on some medication and I didn't want to do that because I had had this powerful experience when I first got my daily practice of having my depression go away but then something really bad happened and I got into this I got into like adult onset PTSD symptoms which had me looping and looping on the memory of the bad thing and going into sort of like adrenal overdrive my heart would pound and I was getting worn down it was going on for a year and a half and I finally mentioned it to a doctor and I had been in therapy for months at that time they were like oh you got to get on medication but I didn't want to and I said hold on and I got online and I researched and there were a few things that I could do that I thought I just wanted to try first and it was intense exercise so for 45 minutes I would run or I would like walk up a hill something to get my heart going and get sweat going I drank a lot of water I stopped eating sugar or consuming alcohol and guess what my PTSD symptoms went way down like most of the way and sometimes if you can go from here to here with those symptoms from here you've kind of got it you can you can insert you know there it's no longer getting the better of you and you can start to manage better and that's what happened for me I did those simple interventions and didn't have to go on the medication so talk therapy is largely focused on noticing feelings and recounting memories and while this is counterintuitive talking about your trauma can be a trigger for dysregulation and when you're dysregulated you can't really process emotions or memories even if you had some sort of breakthrough you would have a hard time remembering what happened during your therapy session and that's what happened to me I would just like I remember thinking oh this is kind of good but there would be like between sessions I would just like regress I would just go right back but it became very clear to me that talking about trauma was dysregulating to the point that it was counterproductive and now I recognize like everybody needs at some point to talk about what happened especially you know maybe right after it happened or as you're trying to figure out or before you ever gotten validation that yeah that's a trauma that's really hard you deserve care about that you should have had something better so we all need that there's a brain pathway when you talk about trauma that can like set off the whole like neurological dysregulation James penabaker University of Texas at Austin has written about this he's done a lot of research on it writing about um you know harsh things that happen in trauma is a way that you can get it out without having to re-trigger The Language Center of your brain which is where for whatever reason it goes off it's a calmer way to get it out and when I've written something like that I can then read it to somebody and that's what my friend showed me she was like write your fears and resentments this is a specific technique so don't just go off what I'm saying in this video take the free course if you want to try it but you write the distressing thoughts and then you meditate and then you read to somebody what they were what they are and that is a way that I can share with another person and get support if I want it about what happened without talking about it but that really changes the game and this is where my principles kick in if you become a member and you join our secret Facebook group we have like one of our guidelines is like Go Lightly with talking about what happened to you like we understand but a lot of people's first instinct when they get into a healing Community is I just want to tell you what happened to me and I understand that instinct and it's what we were conditioned to do it's what we were told would make us feel better and if it does make you feel better by all means go do that but not in our community we're doing something we you know we can touch on it you can say well I was abused as a kid there was physical abuse there was sexual abuse you need not go into detail with us because most of us understand and that way you're communicating what happened and then what what everybody's helping each other with is and so today what I'm struggling with is you know trust or expressing myself or setting boundaries normal problems that people with a traumatic past have and in that we can talk and support each other and use tools together and having a community of people to help you is very powerful now I'm still talking about the problem with conventional treatment and I just want to say medication medication can interfere with the natural inclination that people have to re-regulate when they get dysregulated everybody gets dysregulated sometimes most people eventually re-regulate and what we do in my programs is we keep practicing that muscle of learning okay oh there's my dysregulation symptoms the cue you know the thing I notice it's happening and then we use tools we come back into re-regulation as quickly as possible so the goal is like to be regulated as much as possible more you know most of the time totally changes what happens in your life if you're regulated most of the time a lot of things that you couldn't previously do you know whatever it is for you be at a party and act like yourself have a relationship you know try for a new job you know everybody has different thresholds of what they can do before they get dysregulated well if you can stay regulated more of the time the world is your oyster you can do so many things because it's like oh yeah I'm kind of you know I'm on a date I'm getting really anxious you can just go into the bathroom use your tools come back out nobody's the wiser that you're in their writing and you know washing your hands in warm water to get your nervous system back online and grounded again and go back out there and be yourself again like like there's this huge flexibility you could also work with a professional or a therapist you know on something if you know how to regulate and there are therapists who know about that I think a lot of the tools that people teach for re-regulation when they're tools that are espoused or created by people who don't have CPT SD they're not powerful enough that's all I'm saying you know and so I I pay particular attention to people who themselves have cptsd to learn from medication though it's very imprecise for treating trauma it has its applications for different mental health situations but for complex PTSD there's very low evidence that it helps like you know anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants you know there's a reason why they give those things but for cptsd it just doesn't do that much we haven't found something that really hits that spot the problem is that your natural ability to re-regulate and to work on that I can just tell like a lot of times when I'm working with coaching clients and they keep using the tools and they keep using the tools and they just can't they just can't get back and I'm like are you Medicated by chance and sometimes it's like weed or alcohol even it could be that but also prescribed drugs and you know psychotropic drugs that are given can they can make it more difficult to re-regulate now some people they really can't stop taking and I I would not recommend that anybody just kind of make their own decision to get off it has to be done with a doctor if that's your choice to do and whether you do or don't take them you can still use these tools but if you're having trouble getting that breakthrough and getting back into a state of Regulation which you'll know when you feel it it has a very pleasant feeling to it of like alert calm you know attentive but if you can't get there it could be that medication is interfering and that's a longer term process but I'm just saying there's a better way okay so the standard therapeutic modes of you know when you go like go talk about what happened talk about your traumatic stories feel your feelings if it's more likely to produce dysregulation than healing we have a problem most insurance plans they'll say okay you can go talk to a therapist 10 times and it's like you talk about your trauma you talk about your trauma you're crying you're crying you're crying and it would appear that you're not getting anywhere then they go well you better take medication now you just may have been cut off from the ability to get back your ability to re-regulate to start working on that so I feel that the system is broken the system is misguided it's not everybody in the system but it is like the Baseline of the system and so as you're trying to get help for yourself I just really encourage you to ask questions do research read be willing to try things experiment with them but also listen to yourself and if it's not if it doesn't give you a feeling like you're doing better you know there should be a feeling of relief like very quickly don't let anybody tell you oh this is going to take a long time and you're like I don't know I'm just really going down yes don't listen to that it has to feel better maybe you can do deeper work that feels terrible to look at when you can stay regulated but I would prioritize being able to stay regulated now standard professional help cannot be relied upon to be the answer it's cost prohibitive it's wildly you know not standardized and it's also unproven and people don't really talk about this but studies show that when it comes to like how people are diagnosed there's a lot of variation depending on who the practitioner is when it comes to how people are treated there's so much variation that researchers have concluded it's almost meaningless so what I encourage you to look at is what are your symptoms people are always saying well I don't know my childhood wasn't that bad but I have all the symptoms can I come to your channel can I take your course and I'm like yes we are about symptoms here this like direct cause and effect like my mom did this therefore I have this it's not true for everybody look at your siblings right different kids in the same family have really different outcomes everybody's different if you have these symptoms of dysregulation then yes use my techniques if you're trying to get your life together because self-defeating Behavior has gotten the better of you and you need to empower yourself to make a change yes these programs are for you so okay next principle conventional beliefs about trauma have disempowered survivors the power to heal exists in present time I insist the power to heal is in present time and the only aspect of trauma that can be controlled is our own symptoms and what we do about them now if you're actively in a in a situation that's traumatizing you okay yes other people are involved but this old therapeutic model urges us to give all the power away about that change by relying well focusing on the past on talking about things and relying on professionals to solve everything and you know what you get one hour a week with a professional and really you know have you ever felt like that was enough and I just think professionals are perfect for advising helping guiding you between days where you've got your own tools you're working on your own process and I do think that that is so important I get told from time to time like there's thousands of therapists and doctors who refer their clients to crappy childhood fairy and to take my courses and they come themselves and they get coached like this is for everybody but there's a few professionals who find it very threatening that what we're doing is like self-empowering we're teaching each other as peers we're helping each other we're serving as a community to each other we're defining what it's like to have cptsd and we're helping each other understand what it is and we're reading all the books that some of them are not reading frankly you know who nobody can read everything and so we belong at the table talking about this and we need to be focusing not only on the hurtful actions of others and but we need to be focusing on ourselves and assessing ourselves for the choices that we make that are perpetuating the harm of childhood trauma both our own symptoms and then the way we treat other people you know that saying hurt people hurt people and usually you know people say mean different things when they say that but it's something we have to take very seriously if we're not healing our trauma we run the risk of hurting and traumatizing other people certainly children but also Partners co-workers you know everybody everybody in our path healing is so important it's helping our health it's helping the way we relate to other people it's help it's bringing about a Sweetness in our lives it's helping us earn the money we need to adequately support ourselves which is really important but because of this focus on the past the past what happened what happened it's left generations of trauma survivors unhealed and locked into this identity as victims and I understand I you know as a trauma Survivor myself yes we are victims in fact what happened to us victimized us trauma is an injury not an identity and so it's just really proliferated in this generation this identity it's like I'm Vic I'm a victim that's all I am you have to change so that I cannot be a victim well it just never works so even if that were Fair which sometimes it is is not going to happen so if you're going to heal if you're going to be an empowered person who makes a difference in the world and the way that you want to make a difference in the world it's so important to heal your trauma to learn to calm your triggers to reduce the effective triggers to make you dysregulated disconnected and in your self-defeating Behavior so the seventh principle is the healing complex PTSD requires taking your power back that's your agency do you know that word agency it's your ability to lead your own life to make changes to affect the world now once you own your healing you no longer have to depend on fallible people and the Health Care System wherever you may live and the methods available to you they may not be enough for you you are less inclined when you're empowered like that to settle for stock answers that don't fit like the one that I'm always complaining about is how I got told gosh you know you keep making these you know destructive choices my self-defeating Behavior you must want to recreate your childhood and I just always knew like no I don't I I want desperately to have a better life and I don't understand how I keep getting into this rut you know and and it's now I know it's neurological dysregulation my brain was down my feelings were up I was making impulsive choices and I couldn't understand how I got there I was having trouble reading the situation I was I had an attachment wound that was pushing me into relationships quickly and making it hard to leave because of the abandonment trauma that would come up in there so like so many people with trauma I was stuck with this idea like this isn't helping me it must be me it just must be that I'm a defective person you're not defective the trauma symptoms I'm describing here are totally normal for people who are abused and neglected in childhood now we know and you are the best judge of what helps you so it's very important to stay at the you know in the driver's seat of what you're doing in your healing confidence in yourself happens it grows it develops through courageous experimentation and a focus on identifying and healing the symptoms that you notice in yourself and then changing your approach to life or the behaviors that are sabotaging you and you can do this and it feels great like your self-esteem just goes when you make these changes and discover that you actually can but it takes a shift of focus from the traditional way that people are viewing trauma it's like oh it happened to you talk about it and then one day you'll feel better that day just never came not through that Avenue so though other people can support us there's nobody else who can actually make the healing happen for us not therapists not Partners not parents so don't even wait for them to apologize parents almost never apologize but even when they do which is nice it's not going to change that you now have a neurological injury if you have cptsd the damage is there it's in here now and so the you know to repair the relationship when that's possible is a lovely thing but you still will have your symptoms until you learn to calm them so that brings me to the eighth principle and this is that character development is essential to healing and in particular character development is important for developing the ability to connect with other people you know if you have difficulty with boundaries if you tend to lash out these are totally common symptoms right but they push people away and so they harm your ability to connect I just I've never met a person who has complex PTSD who didn't struggle on in some of these ways to connect with other people and the thing is not only do you need some healing to have healthy connections with people but you need some kind of connection with people to heal and I always say this is like I was so sad when I realized this because I would like to believe that everything in life I can do by myself but I can't heal trauma by myself it's a relational wound and much of it is healed by practicing connecting with other people so even if your ability to connect with other people is kind of like rickety and has ouchies in it you know you just have to keep trying in a titrated way I have this course called connection boot camp you can take if you want to learn a system a 30-day program to start practicing that and then overall I have a class called healing childhood PTSD which is a great place to start so most complex PTSD symptoms that we're experiencing today are caused not by the original trauma and this is you know I keep saying this original trauma did it we can't change that part but that original trauma has led to some self-defeating behaviors and those are causing us to re-traumatize ourselves now it's still not your fault especially when it's first happening but I'm here sort of like ruining that innocence in you where you can say I didn't know because now you know your self-defeating behaviors are reactivating your trauma are are pushing people away that you know the loss of someone you love who rejects you who breaks up with you or stops being friends with you or you lose a job like that's devastating to a person with cptsd it's hard for anybody but that's why it's so important to learn these things and why making a little change here and a little change there it really starts to build so that you can maintain good relationships all around or you know start to improve them it's a process right but you start to improve them and then those good relationships give you more strength for the next move you're making in your healing character development is not taught in most dysfunctional homes it's barely taught in schools and most therapist offices don't teach it you know I I have a friend who was getting a PhD as a therapist and they learn ethics and ethics I said well what you know what do you learn and it was mainly like don't sleep with your clients and there was very very limited you know you can't give advice to people and you can't just tell them hey stop sleeping with married men that's what's great like crappy childhood fairy I can say hey stop doing it it's going to make you miserable it's morally wrong it's going to make your life unhappy it's going to gut your ability to have a good relationship I'll just be in your face but that's character development you know knowing Discerning what's right what's wrong that's so important to your healing and that's a lot of what we got robbed of growing up you know if your parents were drunk High you know fighting all the time mentally ill absent you didn't get that moral education on like how do you be a fine upstanding person but you're not going to be happy until you are like everybody's coded with that desire and Trauma can kind of drive it out of you and make you kind of find try to find other ways to get your needs met but it will never work you need to be a good person and you need to be yourself those are the two ingredients of being really fulfilled and really happy and being fully yourself includes bringing your gifts to bear in the world so there's a fear around addressing self-defeating behaviors because people confuse that with blaming the victim and every time I talk about self-defeating Behavior someone in the comments will go you're just blaming the victim you're just shaming people but I'm not uh you know believe me everybody's walking around feeling the shame anyway of of what maybe they did wrong and a whole bunch of other stuff that they didn't do now the 12-step model is one example of the centrality of moral Reckoning and healing the point of healing isn't just to feel better but to become the person that you were that you can be and that is all about clearing up the mistakes that you've made the way you've harmed others complex PTSD suppresses and oppresses your true nature and you risk losing forever the opportunity to express who you are if you don't heal so on a large scale complex PTSD robs the entire world of the loving and talented and creative person you are of the participation of so many people who are right now you know repressed under their trauma they cannot bring it right now and we are all suffering as a result you know when you look out at the world and you're like something's missing it should be better than this we've got to make it a better world well who's missing like about seven percent of the population who is suppressed under trauma right now okay trauma is part of who we are it's not going anywhere it's going to be part of our story forever but healing the symptoms allows us to simultaneously accept what happened and then to transcend it to become who we are always meant to be which now includes your greatness as well as your history your trauma so many many great men and women have had traumatic pasts trauma hurt them but it didn't Define them in fact it informed them it deepened them and it empowered them to have compassion and to be motivated to make a difference in the world now true happiness requires that we develop and use our gifts to bring to the world what we're capable of bringing and then having done that to create conditions where everybody has the opportunity to develop their gifts that is a full and happy and meaningful life and I hope you'll take it to heart I've learned a lot about healing past trauma by observing people who are trying to change their lives and watching who moves forward and transforms their personalities and their relationships and their materials success in the world and then watching who does not and I got to meet a lot of people who are working on themselves because I was in 12 step rooms for decades and I had periods where I was willing to go to any lengths I was doing all the work and then I had these other times where I really didn't do it I couldn't do it I didn't have it in me I would shrink from it and I would just sort of go along and talk the right talk but you know just do the least amount of work in my case it was usually because I was into some relationship that wasn't really compatible with my healing as dragging me down or because I just wanted people to think I had it all together so I made excuses for the problems I was having all the conflicts with people all the financial problems all the relationship chaos so if you're not moving forward I know what that's like but then I did move forward and that's what I teach here for anyone who's ready to face the problems honestly and see where they might be resisting what's right what's in their best interest to make their lives better so I want to share with you a list of six excuses that I hear all the time that I've made myself and excuses they're like cement shoes Okay so if you recognize them you know there's a big opportunity for you to get free and heal and change your life you don't want these cement shoes anymore right number one the first one is what I call kicking the can down the road I first needed to do X then I'll do y and it's an artificial sequence right often people will put giant projects between where they are now and where they want their life to be like I'll start eating healthy once things stop being so stressful I'll do it then it'll get better then I'll leave this terrible relationship once I get my sanity back I hear that a lot that's a really dangerous fallacy you're actually not going to get more sane in a terrible relationship you're going to get ground down so it's going to be much more difficult for you to leave the longer you stay you'll often see people sabotaging their goals with some foolish action something that really sets them back like they want to go back to school but then they go into debt and then they can't afford to go to school or they want to get into a relationship but then they hook up with some crappy X and get all emotionally like wrecked about it or spend six months kind of you know emotionally latched onto this thing that's not going anywhere the they're not going to get into that great relationship they were hoping for not in that year the second one is what I call getting on a high horse you know where where you're thinking you know what I'm not like all those shallow normies like I have to suffer and you get this like with I'm an artist or I can't be expected to work full-time or I can't really care for my responsibilities because I'm just so you know hurt or so creative it's a superiority over other things High horses nobody likes them and they don't help you solve your trauma the Third is the straw man do you know what a straw man is it's like this artificial entity where you can put all the blame and you go well I can't change because they you know this situation is completely holding me back but it's kind of a fake thing right or it's something where you're sort of constructing it as this big obstacle but the obstacle may not be as big as you think so this would be something like you know the problem is with the system it's rigged against people like me it's capitalism it's patriarchy it's the diet culture people are idiots and they have this religion or this political view and so on but staying stuck and blaming it entirely on outside entities and people is it's an excuse it's an excuse to not change and it'd be so great if you could honestly say that change was impossible because of this issue or that the group of people make it impossible for you because then they all you have to do is get them to change and you'd be fine but that's not how it is hey they're not going to change and B even if they did you would still have your sort of trauma symptoms you'd still have the things inside that are limiting you so you might not ever be rich you might not ever have a career of your dreams but I guarantee you if you can face and work on what is holding you back in here and in here you can change people can make positive Transformations under all kinds of circumstances they do that when they're poor they do it when they're incarcerated they do it when they have to live in hiding yes there are huge obstacles and disadvantages and life is not fair but every person including you do is capable of great things based on where you are right now for each of us the job is finding how in the environment in which we find ourselves with the strengths and the weaknesses that we have with the cards we've been dealt what can we strive for can we move forward because we can we can blossom despite everything all right the fourth one I call collapsing this I give up I can't do things like this job or this conversation or this obligation or this relationship where I promise someone I'd help them but now I'm tired tiredness is a huge form of collapse and as you know tiredness has a lot to do with choices that you make and yes I know some people have health conditions chronic fatigue or cancer or long covid or even worse things and that's another story right that's not what I'm talking about even when you have illnesses like that it still requires taking care of yourself and maximizing your energy to the best of your ability so there's no scenario where people with cptsd really can get away with trashing their bodies and sacrificing their energy and their motivation it hits us harder than people who didn't have huge trauma we can prevent a lot of the health risks that are correlated with trauma but it means really really taking care of ourselves sleep healthy food and exercise those are the basic building blocks if you're doing those things you don't have to be perfect but if you can do them at 80 percent wow then you can get to work on the emotional reasons that you sometimes collapse when you have that together you can start to look at the outside reasons you sometimes collapse but it's got to start in here people who are quite ground down inside are not in a good position to change the world or change other people or make things better it starts here so maybe you were trying to put yourself out there and it brought up a lot of fear or maybe you're really vulnerable to criticism and you don't have the kind of friends who help you keep criticism in perspective you know it's cool it's just one person it's okay I get that maybe you let problems pile up and pile up and it's too hard to face the mountain of problems but there's a way forward and it's it's not through escaping into substances or the internet or anger or isolation it's a day by day process of showing up doing the good things that keep you feeling okay doing the work to keep a community of supportive people around you I know it's easier said than done but it's doable and using the tools that help you do all that one day at a time 12-step groups you can use my daily practice it's a free technique set of techniques saved my life I teach it to everybody it's a free course it's down in the description section under every video I make it's in the on the free tools page of my website please go find it check it out you can come to free calls with me once you've signed up we do the techniques together I answer questions it's a great way we can meet each other you can also join my membership if you want but if you're trying to change these behaviors where you're making excuses for changing your life life these are the areas where you might be getting bogged down okay the next one is magical thinking this is where you decide to believe that some bad situation you've created in your life it's just happening to you bad things do just happen sometimes but I'm talking about the things you actually chose which becomes especially clear if the same bad thing happens again and again have you been there I have the abusive work environment the emotionally avoidant partner for example your trauma may be driving you to these patterns but the pattern isn't going to change until you change it so try to notice if you're making excuses for your patterns what you hear people saying is I'm just unlucky or I'm cursed I used to say that I really thought it too I'm like I'm cursed you know everything I touch just turns to crap I saw later it was me or you believe that the problem is that you attract people who hurt you you know narcissists manipulative people the problem isn't actually who is attracted to you it's who you are attracted to it's who you let into your life who you get into a relationship with when you can't detect who somebody is or you get in so fast that you don't realize till too late what they're like that was you that was you okay and you take your power back when you admit I keep being attracted to narcissists versus they just find me I don't know why all right the next one is what I call fatalism fatalism is when you believe that something has to be that way it's inevitable and then traumatized people it shows up as my parents abandoned me so I always end up with people who abandon me and yes it's absolutely true that the pattern of childhood tends to show up as your pattern in adult relationships tends to but you can change that it's not inevitable it's it's actually when you have perspective on it you've been working on it you can see every time where you ignored the red flag and you walked right in anyway there is there's this little moment where you can change how you do that you actually have the power to do that so watch out when you explain your problems this way as if there's a direct cause and effect that you play no role in my parents made me like this I'm like this I'm a highly sensitive person I'm an empath and even calling yourself an adult child of an alcoholic all of that the labeling of yourself it's just a way of sort of giving up on all your potential to be different to be not so affected by what happened to you as you are right now you have that potential foreign you're a fully feeling fully capable human being you're working to heal the effects of the past and become yourself what happened to you is not your identity when you keep focusing on that identity those abusive events or the neglect it's a distraction you know believing that is distracting you it's a coping mechanism that's making it so you don't have to focus on the problems right in front of you the way you might be isolating and avoiding your own life the way you might not be taking responsibility or you're pushing people away with emotions you haven't yet learned to regulate or you're living as if somebody is somehow coming to save you that's really common you need to save you I know it's sad but it's true you need to save you and you can do that by facing the problems and looking for the parts of those problems where your own trauma-driven thinking or dysfunctional choices have played a part you can focus on those not because you're bad but because this is the only part of life where you really do have power in yourself in present time okay the last big excuse it's really a whole category of excuses and it's what's known as spiritual bypass and the people who do this are sometimes religious they're sometimes spiritual sometimes they're against religion and spirituality or their ideology is a religion you know it could be like a political belief but they get so locked in that they cannot see reality and this is stuff like I'm exactly where I need to be right now it's or it's all good or if it's meant to be it'll happen or God doesn't give you more than you can handle I particularly hate that one because I've lost people to Suicide so it's just patently true well I don't think God gives you those circumstances but people frequently end up with things they can't handle that happens so I consider that a spiritual bypass a lot of spiritual bypass what it really is is encouraging words that are meant to lift you up and keep you going when things are tough but they can be used to pretend that you have no agency they can be used to just make an excuse I just can't do anything about this any belief system can be used by you or people who want to exploit you to put up with crap so doctors who tell you your trauma symptoms are all imagined that's a belief system of theirs therapists who tell you that the fact you're still miserable after two years is because you just need to feel your feelings or grieve or whatever and you're like I don't know I've been crying every day for years that's a spiritual bypass that's not dealing with the reality of the situation you need and deserve to feel happier to feel more ease and comfort right now so don't BS around with other people's excuses and don't make your own healing is possible when you can recognize your own symptoms and then work on ways to soften them when you can recognize your own self-defeating behaviors and work on ways to change them you don't have to do it all at once sometimes you just pick the one that's causing the most problems for you and start there a lot of what you've been told about how to heal and what works for changing your life just isn't true too many people get stuck in their trauma because they think something outside of themselves you know Society parents ex-partners events that happen in the past that those are the sole cause of problems today and the truth is you've got to hope that's not true because there's very rarely anything you can do about the past or about the way other people have behaved so if you're waiting for those things to change and outrage is building and you're falling into despair I have great news your healing doesn't come from those things it comes from things you can change and if there's anything you're destined to change about Society or if a confrontation with the people who hurt you is in the cards then you healed is how that power within you is going to get strong enough that you can take those problems on but you in the middle of your trauma reactions I'm going to be honest with you active cptsd is such a vulnerable state there's distorted perception undermining you there's emotional dysregulation undermining you there's almost always a lack of reliable emotional support from people around you that's part of why you have cptsd but it's also a symptom of cptsd it drives away people you can trust so my trauma healing began with a huge Paradigm Shift the old broken way that I saw the nature of the problem and the nature of the solution totally shattered in a period of a few weeks and a series of traumatic events threw me into a deep trauma reaction and me doing everything you're supposed to do about trauma threw me even deeper into a trauma reaction I don't blame anyone but I was trying to operate and navigate solutions from a set of beliefs that weren't true and when your beliefs are true how you know is they work when nothing is working it just might be pointing to you know there's no nicer way to say this it might be pointing to lies there are lies in your belief system things that lots of people believe but that aren't true so things that you might even have been told to believe by experts or you were bullied into conforming your beliefs to what you're supposed to believe that might be what's operating when things aren't working for you but if it doesn't work it doesn't work so I had a belief system meltdown like that by luck when I was at the lowest point in my life an acquaintance who saw I was going down showed me a way to soften the hold of my old beliefs and to let in some sunshine some truth and I woke up and about half my trauma healing happened in a day just like that it was such a marked and Sudden Change that the therapist I used to see at the time was sure something was seriously wrong with me I was Serene I felt okay about things I felt confident and excited about the possibilities in my life that was really out of character for me back then and here I am almost 29 years later to say they're very clearly with something right about me at last and I broke out of the lies that governed my life and I'll tell you what I did instead so people say I'm tough love but I'm telling you nothing changed in my life until I learned and accepted these 10 truths one when it comes to your past trauma no one is coming to save you from the effects you'll have to seek that out so don't just suffer through your life saving up your problems for weekly appointments with someone who's supposed to know what to do even if you have access to a therapist and even if they know how to help you and you actually feel better you are going to still need tools and awareness that you are in charge of it it's you who will be recognizing your trauma reactions and devising how you'll change the pattern and then working every day to fine-tune and integrate those changes you are sovereign over your healing second thing second truth therapy isn't the only way to heal from trauma and for some people with cptsd from childhood talking about trauma only makes it worse our culture says that talk therapy is the way to deal with this kind of problem but many people's experience feeling like it does more harm than good is backed up by Recent research there's a time and a place to tell your story and get validation and have that blessed experience of of understanding what happened but if talk therapy feels bad and doesn't seem to go anywhere or if you're like the millions of people who can't afford talk therapy I want you to know there are simple tools you can learn and use that just might make all the difference they did for me and I'll talk about that in a few minutes but having a therapist isn't the only way that you can have emotional support things like 12-step groups offer support every day of the week with people who are likely to understand what you're going through and have experience they do have walking the path all the way to Healing this can be a huge benefit whether or not you have professional help because peers who have healed and whose help you ask for can help you by teaching you the Practical day-to-day tips that they develop through real life experience and they can help you get the focus off other people who may have hurt you and get the focus back onto your own self-destructive behaviors some might call this calling you out and maybe you see this as the opposite of support but sometimes the most loving supportive thing someone can do is be straight with you and this is something not all therapists can or will do for you it can be a bit of a taboo for them to give direct advice or make moral judgments about what you're doing what you plan to do but getting called out by a 12-step sponsor after years of getting unconditionally supported by a therapist it was exactly what helped me to stop my trauma-driven behaviors and move forward in my healing very quickly so you might see in your own experience that you've needed both and that may be true but for someone traumatized as a kid when you're an adult so much of the problem in present time is the way that you might be re-traumatizing yourself so that leads me to a third truth that has to be faced which is that focusing on other people and society and the past drain your power it's a helpless place because you're helpless to change the past and you can't change other people present time is where all your power to heal your own life resides so healing the thinking healing the reactions healing the behaviors that traumatize and re-traumatize you and in many cases that harm other people yes people hurt you and yes there is value in telling your story and getting help to make sense of it but now what for many people it helps them to know they're not alone and there's a reason for their struggles healing the thinking healing the reactions healing the behaviors that traumatize and re-traumatize you and in many cases harm other people yes people hurt you and yes there is value in telling your story and getting help to make sense of it for many people it helps them to know they're not alone and there's a reason for their struggles but all that trauma wreaks havoc in your life and all the understanding in the world isn't enough to straighten out your trauma-driven reactions and your self-destructive behaviors right it's now and not in the past and it's with yourself not with the people who abused and neglected you that that's what holds the potential for changing your life it's you now and once you make this shift you can start to recognize your symptoms when they're happening and taking actions to create a trauma-free life that's what works okay fourth truth neurological dysregulation is the symptom underneath the vast majority of other trauma symptoms you probably never got taught this and you probably never got help with it and this could explain why you've tried so many things that never worked the truth is until you learn to re-regulate your healing efforts are likely to just kind of limp along when you learn to spot dysregulation and quickly re-regulate everything gets easier all right fifth truth research doesn't show a clear pattern of efficacy when medication is prescribed for cptsd symptoms not only don't they help but they can actually make it harder for you to re-regulate antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs might be necessary for you for other reasons at least in your experience or in your doctor's opinion but because our insurance system tends to push people suffering with trauma symptoms first to talk therapy usually limited to 10 sessions then when that doesn't work refer them to prescriptions a lot of people are getting disregulated by the talking approach and then thwarted in their efforts to re-regulate because they're taking medication so this is something you'll need to talk to your doctor about it's a bad idea to change medication without medical supervision but in my experience staying sensitive to the feeling of dysregulation and then mastering re-regulation is super important maybe the most important thing that you can do to heal trauma symptoms so if medication you're taking or any mind-altering substance is blocking you that's going to defeat the purpose of learning to re-regulate and healing your trauma number six let's talk about the phrase self-medicating this is a euphemism for the use of drugs and alcohol by people with emotional pain now not everybody gets emotional relief from drugs and alcohol but those who do don't usually get that beneficial effect for very long so a word for trying to feel better might be self-anesthetizing or maybe self-sedation because medicine self-medicating medicine implies it heals you and sedated people are seldom able to make the positive changes needed to actually heal their trauma you know it is part it is part neurological and then it's a lot of changes in your life and that takes being present when you numb your pain I get it it's what you need to do sometimes but it's delaying the part where you feel the pain and pain has information in it that you need to know you know what's going wrong where does this suddenly go south for me what's my trauma reaction what's versus what's a feeling that I actually need to act on what is triggering dysregulation for that matter and what is the moment before that happens when I can maybe learn to put a little pause in and re-regulate before deciding what to say or how I'm going to respond to something so if alcohol and drugs are part of how you're coping there's a reason that your healing has been so hard and there's an easier way when you're ready for it all right seventh truth there's no point in arguing with people that they haven't met your needs you are the one who meets your needs when you do a good job of that you're better able to choose caring people and to have in your life people who you're going to have as friends or as a partner and then it's not going to be such a question of whether your needs are met you meet your needs and then from there you can attract those caring people operating on the belief that other people are supposed to do that meet your needs just because you've become attached to them it's an echo from childhood when your needs were supposed to be met by someone but they weren't in adulthood caring and commitment happen rarely and they build slowly so being angry at someone you've been dating a short time for not meeting your needs as one of our members said recently it's it's like driving around wildly expecting the other cars to keep you safe and then being mad that you crashed so meeting your own needs is the strongest protection that you have also against romantic Obsession that is something that rises up when your needs aren't met and it starts with you all right the eighth truth when you've ended up in bad relationships the truth is most times the red flags were there on day one but maybe you rushed in anyway what caused that an attachment wound um extreme loneliness that made it Unthinkable to turn back no matter how glaring the problem was that you saw until you can heal that that need to go forward anyway the pain is going to keep happening and this is normal for people neglected in childhood healing happens when you can slow down and stay connected and honest with people who are supportive of your healing process then you can develop the awareness and the guard rails that you need to stop making the same relationship decisions that have worn you down in your life so far all right the ninth truth is about how you slow things down and though a lot of people don't want to hear this the way to do that is by avoiding casual sex to borrow from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous which I read a long time ago I'm gonna change a little phrase here and say that casual sex is the dubious luxury of untraumatized people now maybe it's fine for them but for people with attachment wounds it opens the door to trauma-driven thinking and behaviors that can ruin the relationship and it can wreck your happiness it can be very destabilizing traumatized people can have good relationships but there's a lot of learning that you maybe didn't get from your family and you can make space to learn A Better Way by going slowly all right number 10 as painful as it is to realize that a lot of your trauma now is from you making trauma-driven choices facing the truth is nothing to fear it feels good to seek the truth of your situation to see your part in it and no matter how small to heal that facing reality it feels good it's empowering it brings peace and sometimes you'll cry but good cleansing tears bring relief and if you need help with this process that's what we do at crappy childhood fairy truth feels good and you need to feel good you do you need it not years from now but today so if you need help for that check out the links in the description section below [Music] thank you

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 142,568

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Id: NLjJAkvI7-8

Length: 170min 55sec (10255 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023