Recovering from Complex PTSD with Elizabeth Ferreira | Being Well Podcast

hey everyone welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back the most popular episode we have ever recorded for the podcast is our conversation with pete walker about complex post-traumatic stress disorder which is often abbreviated as cptsd as you might expect cptsd is a cousin of post-traumatic stress disorder but while ptsd can originate from a single painful highly traumatic event complex ptsd is the result of ongoing traumatic experiences typically but not always ones that have their roots in childhood these experiences include everything from physical or emotional abuse to inconsistent or neglectful parenting to resource scarcity to needing to manage the emotions of your parents as a child that's a big one and we think of many of these experiences as traumatic on their own but complex ptsd often arises from the slow accumulation of many many small injuries over time it can include traditional ptsd symptoms like intense traumatic flashbacks low self-esteem and self-regard hyperarousal the avoidance of stimuli related to the event and in addition to those lovely symptoms complex ptsd also often includes a lack of emotional regulation and the person who suffers from it intense feelings of guilt or shame is a big one and so is dissociation including selective amnesia around the events so today we're going to be putting a more personal touch on the complex ptsd conversation by talking with someone who's both dealing with her own history of complex trauma and helping other people to do the same my lovely partner elizabeth ferreira elizabeth is a recent graduate of the somatic psychology program at the california institute of integral studies and she's currently earning hours toward her license i'm really looking forward to sharing this with you i loved having this conversation with elizabeth it was really wonderful to talk with her so here it is so elizabeth how are you doing i'm really excited great yeah i've been kind of giddy about it and i get to come back and you know i for better or worse i really nerd out on this stuff so i'm really kind of excited to dive into it yeah well great well for people who want to relate this to their own experience because complex ptsd is a very complicated topic i think for a lot of people and it doesn't necessarily get tied to a specific experience that people have where there's one thing that you can point to and go oh that's the thing this is why i am the way that i am uh what was your life like when you were growing up speaking from my perspective being in it i felt like it was normal because that's all i knew yeah um my parents at the time were very religious they were seventh-day adventists so you know there were a lot of rules and restrictions i had a lot of limitations on who i could really hang out with i didn't go to public school i was home schooled my mom stayed home with me she was the one who also made sure i did my schoolwork and things like that and my dad worked all the time when i was younger he was an iron worker so he left the house before i woke up and often he didn't get home until sometimes late in the evening when i was really little he would have to go out of town for like the whole week to go work at a job somewhere so um extremely close to my mom and a bit distant from my dad yeah and very very normal a lot of people working families have a parent who isn't around until 8 9 pm and so there might be a little bit of an availability issue there for a kid growing up yeah um emotionally how do you feel like your emotions were held as a kid it depended on the emotions you know there was sort of a monopoly on the emotions that i could have and express in front of my parents and the emotions that i couldn't yeah so um if i cried or if i you know was moderately upset my mom was usually really good about comforting me you know coming and like giving me the attention that i needed um my dad kind of okay at it but if there was any like huge upwelling of emotionality uh i think it overwhelmed both of my parents and so i learned at a really young age uh oh i can't scream but i can cry and i remember being younger and having these moments where like i couldn't control what was happening i just was having this like upwelling of panic and fear and anxiety kind of exploding out of me and it would get to a point where my parents would just get mad at me and that was very disruptive for me and i would feel like oh i guess i'm bad or i did something wrong and so i kind of started to learn from a really young age oh i have to really control myself i can't do these things in front of my parents so in your relationship with your parents based on knowing them as you know potential future parents-in-law i know them fairly well i wouldn't describe either of them as bad people no i wouldn't describe either of them as ill-intentioned toward you in any way if anything they were quite protective of you or did the best that they could but the broader family environment had a lot of complexity associated with it and a lot of i think it's fair to say collective and generational trauma that went through that family line what were some of the ways that you think this showed up and how people behaved around each other acted toward you yeah so it it was very dysfunctional and my parents did try their best to kind of protect me from the broader family but um both my grandparents on both of my parents sides are extremely dysfunctional they have had their own horrific experience with trauma and i think what that does is that you don't really know how to function uh like a full adult and what i mean by that what do you mean by that yeah so what i mean by that is there's a piece of you that's always trapped in the child that was hurt and my grandmother my dad's mom lashes out a lot like a toddler there's always someone that she's mad at there's always someone that's on the outs gossiping saying horrible about the other person to get the other people to like you and my grandma's big thing was like do you love me more than your parents like you have to love me more than your mom because it's like she needed to be loved the most we talked a little bit a second ago about the emotions that you felt were allowed to you versus the ones that you didn't you were allowed to cry but you weren't allowed to scream as the line that i've heard you say in the past um how do you feel like you needed to interact with your parents emotions oh um like walking on eggshells yeah i had to really anticipate my parents you know like i often felt with my dad like i was a bother because he would just get home and be tired and looking back now i totally get it he was exhausted yeah and had a lot of pressure to provide for me and my mom but you know as a young kid that just like hits you in a place that you don't really know what to do with because all you can see is like oh daddy doesn't like me or daddy doesn't have time for me so with my dad i just learned how to give him a lot of space yeah i didn't ask for a whole lot it was like i had five minutes maybe out of the day of my dad's attention like literally just five minutes so i had to make those five minutes count yeah um and then with my mom my mom i'm almost certain that she also has complex ptsd um and i think she's been depressed for most of my life and when you have a depressed parent you know you kind of don't have someone who you can predict some days my mom wouldn't get out of bed other days you know she would be really fun and have a lot of energy and we could do stuff that like wow i really like this but then there was always this sort of game i would play where it's like okay how do i need to be to make my mom happier like how do i need to swallow the things that i'm feeling to attune to my mom so that we can get through the day yeah yeah so to pull this back a little bit because i think that the story is great to really ground the whole the whole system in also in the ways where this is a very normal story yeah but it was housed in a broader ecosystem that you were describing that was dysfunctional yeah that was uh not emotionally available where you felt as a child you really needed to care for the emotional state of your parents where you need to be extremely sensitive to very slight movements in parental mood because there were heavy consequences for you that were associated with guessing wrong essentially you did not feel a lot of social support not a lot of relationships that were super deep with other kids because you had an environment where while you're being home schooled then you're in a church environment where there are a lot of restrictions being placed on you of various kinds again very very normal story but children are super vulnerable and the things that happen to us in childhood have cascades now through the rest of our life and we can see how some of those things that you're pointing to that hypersensitivity could be an example of that where now as an adult maybe you feel like you need to really be on the lookout for little movements in other people because those little movements might mean that a situation is no longer safe there's i'm kind of laughing a little bit because there's the trope of the wounded healer that sometimes i roll my eyes out a little bit but there's truth in cliche and there's truth in those things and i think in some level we can glamorize someone who's hypersensitive you know i'm a highly sensitive person um but you never attune to the person that's having the best time in the room you attune to the person that's having the shittiest time in the room yeah and because that's how your little nervous system developing had to you had to attune to the parent that was having the worst day so that you could monitor it and fix it and i think you know what we're also circling is the parentified child yeah you know you you have two distinct parents you never had to parent them yeah never i've had to be my parents you know uh parent parent i've had to be their therapist i've had to be their marriage counselor like i've worn a lot of hats in the family that a kid should not wear and there's something that's been kind of floating in my mind as we've been talking about this that i think is really important i think sometimes when we hear stories and like what you're saying oh this sounds like a very normal experience it can be easy to just think you're super sensitive or something's just wrong with me that i didn't fit in with my family or something and i really attuned to this definition of trauma where it's anything that you found overwhelming and you couldn't like process through it you couldn't reach a level of resolution it just kind of like the activation stayed in your body yeah and i say that because i was in denial for a really long time because both my parents have experienced physical abuse yeah um horrific emotional and you know neglect and so i always heard the story of like you have a great childhood because compared to ours yeah and even though it wasn't as horrific i think there is a huge toll that happens on a child when there is unseen neglect where there are parts of you that you know exist that you cannot show with your parents yeah and you cannot show with anyone around you and so you become really good at hiding i don't talk about feeling lonely very often yeah and you talk about feeling lonely pretty frequently it's a common emotional experience for you that feeling of internalized loneliness you're very sensitive to it in in a lovely way because i think that from again like wounded healer trope and all of that good stuff it really helps you relate to other people who are going through similar experiences like that and access the um the unseen parts of them we're using a lot of language here from ifs by the way if you're not familiar which is the internal family system it's great it's great you should look it up we've got some episodes on it um basically the idea is that people are constellations they are made up of all of these different aspects or parts inside of themselves and these parts have complicated relationships with each other and often people who go through diff we all do this but particularly for people who go through difficult experiences there are parts of them that get underfed inside and they get exiled and kind of cast out of the group and then part of the journey is to reclaim those parts in healthier ways yeah and so i think that feeling of loneliness could really be that speaking up and kind of coming forward in that way yeah and just you know hearing you say that like a key piece of me that has been emerging and i think that to an extent you've really kind of helped coax into um like out of the exiled under verse is um my sweetness yeah for sure and like you can kind of hear it if you're listening but like i'm kind of on the verge of crying which happens every time i come into contact with anything sweet and the reason for that is because my sweetness was viewed as something to be teased and taunted in my family you know it was like viewed as naive or um [Music] like too vulnerable and and i think i've learned that um sweetness can be very like fierce and kind of potent because everyone in my family has experienced childhood trauma yeah and so you have this little kid that's just like by nature extremely sweet and tender and what that does is then it brings up all the welling inside of yourself that you've had to like pack down and not allow yourself to feel that sweetness because i mean it can be crushing and that then ties in with the whole kind of like loneliness bit because i start to like attempt to be more sweet and it makes people uncomfortable and then i'm super sensitive when people are uncomfortable so then it reiterates the story of like i make people uncomfortable there's something wrong with me yeah which then further makes me feel lonely yeah yeah and so you see all these emotional cycles get created inside of stuff right where um for you the emotional experience that wasn't allowed and there were really two of them first anger or you mentioned you weren't allowed to be pissed no um even when things happened that would naturally make somebody particularly a child feel pretty angry and the second one is the sweetness aspect this very vulnerable underlying emotion and one of those emotions was too big and strong and one of them was too soft and squishy yep and so those were the ones that got repressed and okay now what are we dealing with these days those two repressed emotions so you can kind of think about this if you're listening from your own standpoint and looking back into childhood regardless of whether or not you would identify as somebody who has complex drama or not i would not obviously i think pretty clearly but i can look inside of my own history and go to okay what were the emotions that i was really comfy with when i was a kid and what were the emotions that i felt uncomfortable with what were the ones that i didn't feel comfortable expressing maybe because they were punished by other kids in some way maybe because my family wasn't comfortable with them maybe because my sibling wasn't comfortable with them or i had a weird experience with an aunt one time or whatever your story is like that's a great way to find a place to work these days if it if you're looking for a way in to unearthing some of the stuff it's a really really useful question for me another thing to just throw out there and i think i needed to have a concrete almost on paper proof that oh this is complex ptsd this is me this is me totally um and so i found a really great therapist and we were kind of orbiting some things and at this at this phase in my development um i was a mess i was real messy uh i was constantly being triggered by my graduate program which brought me to flashbacks of being a kid and having pretty difficult challenging experiences being in my room school school all of that and he gave me the what is it the adverse childhood experience scale yeah ace ace and i got an eight which is essentially all of them yeah yeah and it shocked me it legit shocked me yeah and um when i saw that number and then you know we were talking about it in therapy together i'm getting slightly emotional it was like um the part of me that had internalized what my parents had always told me of like you're not you're fine you're fine you're fine you're fine finally got to relax and then here's a person sitting across from me who's actually attuning to me instead of me attuning to someone else being like you're not okay you know and um and i really needed that i needed that mirroring to happen in order for me to accept the things that have happened to me yeah and something that runs underneath your history that we've talked about here is what you've alluded to which is your family's history your parents history your grandparents history and this is a way in to seeing the ways in which these things can be passed down through families yeah um where your parents which i've learned a little bit about you would know of course much more than i would went through their own extremely challenging experiences with physical abuse and completely emotionally unavailable families so on both sides of my lineage my mom came from um a past history where her parents divorced when she was a baby she lived with her dad who married a woman that had a ton of kids so she kind of got lost in the crowd um her biological siblings you know were already struggling so they kind of teased her and all that there was a real food scarcity her dad was not really emotionally available at all and then he died when she was about 14 i think around that age and then she had to go live with her mom and my mom's mother who has passed on also a lot of trauma i'm pretty sure she had undiagnosed bipolar um and so my mom went from being invisible to now having a mother that is just like abusive and um my mom left i think before she was 18 years old moved to california by herself and you know had a lot of strength to do that and um and then you know with my dad divorced family um my grandmother had him when she was very young um and then there was a famous murder that happened in my family that my you know my dad's brother was murdered in and the aunt that he often says was kind of like a second mom you know was murdered and taken away and um and then my dad also experienced a lot of abuse from his stepfather of physical emotional abuse so um my parents were had enough awareness to know the things that have happened to them and they were like we don't want to do this with our kid and so in many ways they tried to do the opposite so i was never like physically abused like they were i always had enough food i always had a home and things like that but you know what happened to my parents you move out another generation out of that and it gets even more horrific when you look at my genogram you know which is a way of kind of like tracking all the trauma that has occurred in a family in many ways my parents stopped a lot of that from touching me yeah but it wasn't enough to get me to like be unscathed by it totally um and so like i love my parents i really value that they stopped a lot of patterns but when a system is as toxic as mine was often um that insular is not enough yeah and you really need to like step away from it and find a really good therapist yeah and i think that that's a great way to talk about the ways in which generations can can hand the baton on yeah and the goal is not to a lot of the time it's not to repair everything that has happened to a person because these are generational things people hand the baton to the next generation and they try to put you in a better position than they were in and it's also what makes the conversation sometimes inside of families so complicated around this is my experience because your felt experience was one way but compared to their felt experience it seemed a very different way yeah and that's just hard translation that is a conversational challenge inside of a family for one generation to appreciate while yes things may be better but still there are these challenging experiences that need to be dealt with yeah and you know for me i think because i was protected in many ways by my parents at a pretty young age i was seeing um dysfunction that i didn't want to participate in yeah totally i bought a family system yeah you know and i kind of became the um there was a phase in my relationship with my broader family where i think i was viewed as the black sheep in some ways because i just started saying no i just started saying no i'm not i'm not going to have a relationship with you yeah and that was really challenging to be the only one in your family who's like consciously seeing these things and going this is kind of messed up i don't i don't want to do this anymore um and i think this is what makes my particular kind of soup of complex ptsd uh a little challenging because to this day i still get flashbacks like to this day i can still have moments where boom i am right back in a moment in time when something awful happened and i don't know if those will ever go away but over time the thing that i've noticed is that i'm i don't stay in it as long as i did before um and i think part of why those flashbacks aren't as um severe at this moment is because there was also a part of me that knew what was happening in the moment and i don't know if that quite makes sense outside of my system but um it was like there was always a part of me that was watching what was happening instead of being consumed by it you know you can call that healthy dissociation which i'm like a fan of it you know thank god for dissociation yeah i mean these are coping mechanisms yeah and our coping mechanisms as we've talked about a lot on the podcast are often very intelligent your your body your brain your system creates a way out of pain yeah and the the mechanism that might have been really useful to you back then can become a little bit of an issue in the here and now but that doesn't discount how useful it was and how helpful it was and how supportive of you it was and it can be helpful to see that too the ways in which um our behaviors aren't our fault but they can become our responsibility over time so a little healthy dissociation if that works for a person okay yeah create the space for that while also going all right i don't want to default to this constantly yeah yeah and i think what you're getting at is something that i really see uh as i've you know started to moonlight as a therapist yeah yeah we'll talk about that in a second but um with my family there's a lot of resistance to going to therapy yeah and i think because the terror of knowing is way worse than pretending like you don't know or um staying in the ways that you've coped because i think you've been privy to this as i've kind of gone down this journey of okay this stuff doesn't serve me anymore i really gotta kind of clean out the pipes here we go it's painful yeah you know it's and it's a grieving process and i think that's something that people don't really get when they first begin trauma work is that it's really grief work it's like it's a grief for all the false faces you've had to wear and it's a grief for the version of you that is you that had to hide for so long and then stepping forward in front of somebody because that's another bit with complex ptsd you don't trust people and so it can take a really long time to find someone even a therapist that just is the right type of whatever that you can kind of let go with and trust and then to finally just like cry for all the years you couldn't cry one of the things that i've noticed about myself when i show up like as a therapist particularly with people who have cptsd um is actually the power of just being very sweet if you were to google complex ptsd the normal thing that you see that everybody on google says is like dbt cbt and emdr you know and i just want to say that emdr did not work for me at all it made my symptoms worse because it felt too intense it was like too direct it felt like someone was like a laser was being pointed at me and burning me or something it was just it was too much and one of the things that i've noticed because there's some people i work with that the power of just being really soft and sweet um and giving a lot of space and not being directive because if you have cptsd you can tell when people have an agenda you can feel when someone is uncomfortable with what you're saying you can tell and whether or not those projections are true or not it kind of doesn't matter in the scope of therapy yeah you know yeah that's a really key point i think yeah and so um i say that just to say that there are other ways and i think a way that i'm learning is really valuable with this stuff is the power of just being really attuned and calm and sweet and the growth that i've seen in a lot of clients when i've just kind of thrown technique out the window and going like okay i'm just i'm just gonna be here now you know yeah is that um all the moments where the little child was missed start to get repaired yeah and often i feel like i'm doing almost nothing i'm just being there well you've set me up really beautifully for a topic transition oh great thanks elizabeth professional podcasting over here um so the story i think is really important because it grounds everything we're talking about and also it's a way in for people who are listening to maybe go hey that's not me it sounds a little bit like me or there are these aspects of the story that i can relate to um as a contributor to that process you are describing of going oh there is actually something going on here that is increasing my sensitivity or is making it hard for me to have a certain kind of emotional relationship with another person that i would really like to have a really wonderful emotional relationship with or something that's just feels like there's something in the basement that needs to get unearthed or needs to be seen in a different way to lead to some emotional repair whatever it is for you so i'd like to talk for a second here just about symptomology in terms of what your actual experiences are these days yeah uh what are the consequences of this essentially and then we'll talk about what we can do about all of this stuff does that sound good love it so you've mentioned a couple of things so far you've mentioned emotional flashbacks so what does that look like practically for you for me i can it's a very visual and somatic experience a flashback that i have had often particularly with grad school is being like a little kid sitting on my bed and my mom is screaming at me because i didn't do something right as far as homework or something i can see exactly my childhood room i can tell exactly where she's sitting like everything it's very vivid and so there are other examples of that but for me it's it's it's like we time traveled and boom i'm right there i can hear her i can smell her like boom great so that's one symptom it's a very very common one associated with complex trauma another one that you've alluded to is hypersensitivity of various years um you also have some sensory stuff that probably contributes to this additionally what does that feel like to you like what does hypersensitivity mean um the best way i can describe it is it feels like you're just a raw exposed nerve going out through the world yeah um so it's very overwhelming uh i have a hard time just staying with myself i can kind of get lost in in like an overwhelming sea of sensation um it looks like all of a sudden uh i've reached overload and now i'm in a group of people and i'm dissociating real hard because i just can't take it anymore or it looks like certain people i just can't be around them because just how they are like puts me on such edge that i i feel sick like i feel physically ill around them and to no fault of their own they could be lovely people it's just something about how they move the tone that they have the quality of their voice you know the kind of topics that they bring up just something becomes grading yeah totally yeah so maybe particularly before you started doing some of the work that you've done in inside of this territory how do you think that the residues of this impacted your relationships with other people i was sort of the standard you know you got me maybe like three years and then i cycle through a totally another community and group of people i i would lean in really quick and hard and i could make like close friendships um but they would never really last i protected myself by also being quite uh angry and because i i would feel like overwhelmed or i'd start to feel uh anxious in like a group of people who were my friends and then it would make me angry like you know the brain tries to figure out well why do you feel alone in a group why are you feeling like you can't trust these people oh it must be them and so um i would do that as like a resource but then the resource uh ended up doing the exact opposite of what i wanted which was further alienate me make me feel far away um i would never trust people enough to tell them how i actually felt yeah repressed emotion for you for sure oh yeah and it would just i would repress to a point where i couldn't take it anymore and i literally couldn't be around them anymore yeah yeah um because the fear of telling them how i actually felt was way worse than if i just exited and it's like you never see me again i'm like a ghost starters there's an enormous amount of self-awareness there yeah which is fantastic yep we worked we worked hard on that and hey these things are developed over time you know and there's a there's a classic line that people use in the academic world which is research's research basically people tend to research the things that are closely related to their own experiences and i think a part of the reason that you ended up going to graduate school was to explore your own interior and to get better tools related to all of this stuff and also to work with people and to help people who also struggled with these experiences yeah because that that intimacy with the experience we've talked to so many people on the podcast uh pete walker terry real uh gabor mate we're gonna talk to you and um all of these people had their own deeply painful experiences coming up which is so interesting and massively informed of the work that they did with other people and gave them a unique expect perspective that allowed them to be uniquely helpful because of one of the things you were saying earlier when you're hypersensitive you are intimately attuned to whether or not you feel like you can trust somebody it's a trust issue yep and so being able to say hey i haven't walked in your shoes but i've walked in shoes that are a little bit like yours is just a huge resource for people this kind of ties into a couple of other symptoms which is uh it's really hard to trust people and then there's often an immense amount of guilt and shame yeah and i think i'm not the only one out there that has felt this but when someone is trying to comfort you but it's not comforting you but you're smart enough to know and you're sensitive enough to know oh this person is trying to comfort me but internally it's making it worse i just feel even more alone because this person is not attuning to the type of comfort that my body needs and then it builds shame and guilt because how could i ever tell to a person who cares about me you're not comforting me right now you're making it worse yeah like my impulse is to say f you you know because it's it hurts too much even though you're doing something that conventionally would be considered comforting yeah totally and so because i've experienced that my whole life i really try um with my clients to learn how they need to be comforted and i don't take it personal when i mess up if anything i own it and that's very strange for them i think to experience when i go oh i missed you there and it's like wait what like oh no and it's because we're so used to going through like a cognitive bypass of like well i really understood and attuning to the other person and it is a strange and alien experience when you have cptsd to be attuned to without you trying to meet the other person in the middle at all it's like you're in your house and then all of a sudden someone's sitting on the couch with you and you're like i didn't know this was possible yeah um and i think that's why it's such a tricky thing to also work with because what works for one person what works for the standard that is like comforting and attunement can totally not be it yeah and so it's this sort of practice of and why i think everyone with cptsd should go to therapy because nothing is a safer container than being able to sit with someone who in many ways is yes being paid to try to attune to you but it's a safe container for you to also say you missed me yeah and owning this is not my problem anymore like this is not comforting me yeah and that in of itself can be immensely reparative so i would love to talk a little bit about what you've done and also what you're doing with people great um because as part of your graduate school experience you started working at a clinic saying that correctly you particularly specialize in somatic interventions yes in somatic psychology more broadly which is based on the body the soma and so i would love to hear a little bit about what you have found really essential to start with when somebody walks into the room or walks into the zoom meeting these days is maybe a better way to put it but walks onto zoom and is like hey here's my story and you go oh you just start to smell complex ptsd in the air what do you do with them to help them regulate their system or help them feel safe to start with um yeah great question the first thing that i do is i try to achieve safety as quickly as possible yeah um so i'm very non-directive i'm not that person that's going to ask you in the first question what are your goals you know because i've been on that end and sometimes i've blanked out because it's too direct so i'm i'm very spacious i am paying way more attention to the person's body than what they're actually saying to me and that doesn't mean that like i don't care about your story or what happened to you but often with cptsd or people who have experienced any type of trauma in their life there is sort of a part that you go to to be able to tell your story that is immediately disconnected awareness from your body yeah you have to dissociate a little bit yep yeah and painful experience yeah and i will entertain that part i will give it a place to land over here but i'm really attuning to the nervous system that's happening in the moment and so i kind of take a moment and i describe it as like i'm kind of like putting my somatic feelers out into the ether where i think okay and i practice a little bit and i'm like okay how does my voice literally need to be in tone pitch and volume for the nervous system to start to settle a bit how close to the camera how far from the camera do i need to sit for this person maybe to start looking at me more like what level of eye contact is too much like maybe i need to kind of like have a soft gaze right and often a big contributor of safety is that when i see activation happening i pause i will stop the person and we go right into a form of resourcing and i describe it as like i'm just noticing a little activation or sometimes that's a little too intense for people and i say energy and i just like why don't we just try to take it down a little bit i've never had someone say no let's not do that because often even just being seen in that little amount starts to create relief for yourself so let's say that you're in an environment that has some of the features of what you've described maybe it's a social environment where you feel like you're starting to lose track of the conversation are there too many people talking or somebody's kind of rubbing you the wrong way they're in the normal range of behavior they're not behaving quote unquote inappropriately but it's not doing it for you or you have to engage with a difficult experience maybe one that activates some old material maybe you're having to engage with some bureaucratic systems that you feel really uncomfortable with or some other kind of thing that just generally activates you emotionally yeah what do you do to resource yourself to calm your system to feel safe and comfortable again so you can keep on meeting that challenge well tools that i have in the moment is uh become aware of your feet like if you immediately go for us can you feel your feet yeah yeah you immediately start to ground and so you start to notice there's a little more weight to the body now when you start to notice your feet you know and and grounding uh really helps to start the process of settling the nervous system um so so i do that i will either literally push into my body i will really pay attention to my feet i will kind of really feel the weight of my body pooling in my sitz bones another tool that i use is i shift my awareness and if something's really overwhelming i just go okay the body has weight and the body breathes and i don't have to work at it it's just gonna do it anyway and it's a way of like pulling out of maybe a flashback that's about to happen or critical negative thoughts that are like kind of funneling in in a social environment and now i'm boom i'm right in the present moment another tool that i use if i need like a total settle is um i hug people i have my safe people sometimes in groups i have a couple friends that if i just need to like touch you or get that physical co-regulation happening yeah um i will go there um and another tool that i do is i've kind of taken it on that time doesn't exist it's not real it's a myth and when i take that in uh there's no need to rush yeah there's no because time does time's not real cool and you could call that a healthy dose of dissociation from the pressures of time but um it brings like a humor to it yeah totally and it totally settles my nervous system especially when i'm like oh there's a ti and i'm like wait a minute time's not real and i use that with my clients typically the last 10 minutes of a session is when gets real spicy and juicy and sometimes you get those clients that are very mindful of time and they start to panic about it and i'll just be a little i don't believe in time and then they're like wait what and i go yeah time doesn't exist not here that's my that's my job keep going yeah you know and it becomes a little pattern break for them also yes and we always have enough time like the irony is that there's never enough time but in the moment there's always enough time that's almost like a zen coan there well you know i'm real out there sometimes yeah but but that's like um you know i take a very um chameleon kind of role as a therapist because i know the power of meeting someone where they're at and i think that's a huge resource in somatics is you become so knowledgeable about the nervous system and states of activation and being able to really attune and feel and maybe i have a bit more capacity there because i'm also a traumatized person who has hypersensitivity and you know the alphabet soup of being neurodivergent so there's there's a lot going for me um but like there's a language and there's tools that i can really put language to what i'm feeling so those are great tools when you're facing a moment of challenge you were talking about whether you gotta hug a friend or gotta touch your own body ground yourself comb your system take some deep breaths move out of time whatever the practice is then alongside those um those those emergency practices there's been a much longer and slower process for you of changing patterns and breaking down patterns of different kinds uh which largely get to you in in my feeling and i would love your take on this working with fear yeah um because if you think about the nature of ptsd in general complex or otherwise uh it's it's about if your fear response you were afraid in a situation or something scary was happening and your body reacted to it yeah and those imprints are then left on you what are some of the things that you've done through this long process to work with some of those underlying patterns or to release some of those old experiences um it's a big question it's a it's a big question yeah yeah one chunk at a time yeah a piece of the pie at a time um i mean i'm probably a broken record at this point but uh finding a therapist that you can actually trust a therapist that you don't feel like you have to take care of either someone who can just hold that space for you to totally break down to say all the things that you've dared never say to another person and kind of just getting it out you have to experience it out and you got to be witnessed in it because i have spent here's a little you know a little spicy time i've spent so many freaking years crying and screaming in my bed by myself doing the stuff i do with my therapist by myself but it's not therapeutic because i'm in it alone and it just further like intensifies the old patterns yeah so just being watched without judgment from someone was massive for me and being able to be as like loud and cry and you know i mean there are several times you've seen it where i come out and i'm just wet just covered in the tv and you're like oh are you okay it was great you know i had a great session um so so so the foundation truly is like therapy sure um but then outside of that has really been about uh knowing my own needs and knowing the things that i need in order to fully show up in relationship with other people you know and for me that often looks like i need alone time i i need to sometimes be like babe i love you dearly can you please get the frac out of the house because i just can't it has happened because i just can't be around another nervous system yeah because my body is so autonomic on attuning to somebody else it doesn't even matter when you're in the next room fun fact complex ptsd mostly comes from not having your needs met in childhood yeah you think about it right your needs were not met in childhood and so then so what does this lead to for a lot of kids well they have a choice right they can either be punished by their caregiver or they can get exiled from the system or they can not have as many needs and so classic feature of complex ptsd is the suspect the suppression of normal needs yep not complicated ones not hard ones really normal ones and so a major part of the healing journey for a lot of people is about accepting the presence of your needs and facing the terror of actually saying what you're doing yeah expressing them totally oh boy and i think that's been and to this day is still like the practice because you know i feel very safe with you yeah you know surprise surprise um but still you know mostly in context of like people outside of just like our little system we have together where i am petrified of telling people how i actually feel yeah or like this doesn't work for me i need you to interact with me this way i still can't do that yeah you know because there's something so threatening about it and so terrifying that um i'm still processing through just thinking about it like i'm i'm not ready to act on it yet i'm i'm already trying to metabolize the nervous system activation that just happens with me even saying that into this microphone right now yeah yeah and one of the challenges of this is that you can have people who can be your safe resourcing person in these ways whether it's a partner it's a good friend or it's a if it's appropriate if it's a family member if it's somebody out in the world whoever if it's your therapist whoever it is um and we have a relationship where i basically go okay great if you have a specific need or if you need me to be a little bit of a different way about something particularly if it's not stepping on my toes in some kind of massive way yeah but it never is and it's always fine and so it's very easy for me to say yes with people out in the world sometimes they're going to say no and i would love your take on this sometimes it can be a restorative practice actually to have somebody essentially say no and then to not have yourself explode as a result of it where yeah they said no and everyone went on going on and like that is like a oh the dreaded experience happened and it didn't destroy me and that can probably be a little useful too i think this is really interesting territory because in this moment even just hearing you say that right i'm having a reaction okay i'm having a mild trauma response and this is i'm actually glad this is happening because now i get to kind of be very like transparent in the moment you saying that to me directly in that way of like this is reparative and blah blah blah it's like it's too direct okay so and this is kind of the thing i've noticed as i've worked with more folks who have cptsd where the defense gets triggered yeah totally and it's like oh hell no you know like hell like yeah and here's the thing i understand exactly what you're saying yeah and i have enough awareness to know there have been moments where that has occurred yes particularly around my email email used to freak me out and then i cried into the floor one day and i've been checking my email ever since and there have been moments when oh my god that email is terrifying but i get through it i need to do it yeah so yes you're right but my nervous system even in this moment because it's like the delivery was the way it was yeah there's a part of me that's very strong very laid out yeah and excuse me for using some you know choice words here but that just wants to say you yeah you know like and immediately tries to create distance and and that's a defensive response it's a defense against pain because you know i'm already on fire why am i going to like make like why are you going to make me touch it yeah you're you're telling me it's going to make me better to be more on fire yeah what are you talking about yeah crazy talk absolutely totally and you know i'm also self-aware enough to know like i'm not on fire yeah but that's what the body starts to say and i think it's because a lot of cptsd comes from childhood trauma and you're too young to reason with yourself out of it oh for sure yeah to highlight a part of this this comes from a guy named bruce perry who we've had on the podcast a bunch in the past i'm a big fan yeah if you're listening to this i'm such a big i'll send the episode i'm sure you'll love it he is the most wonderful guy also as an aside um but uh yeah so his work really focuses on development yeah and particularly the the largely sequential development of the brain where younger parts of the brain are kind of more down toward the bottom and then the older parts of it get layered on top and people can get essentially trapped at a level of development where the the house of the brain the more complex floors were built by these lower floors that were themselves dysregulated yes which leads to a dysregulated structure as the whole because you essentially have a drunk contractor building your house yep and that's like not a great vibe for anybody um and so i think that it speaks to a little bit of what you were talking about there in terms of that like younger more vulnerable part that is feeling very threatened by this experience and doesn't have the language to talk about it and hey maybe it's a good piece of advice also for people who are listening who are maybe in a relationship with somebody who's gone through some challenging experiences in the past or they want to know how to be more supportive of people who have those same kinds of experiences and particularly for me i'm a pretty cognitive person yeah um and so i love writing about you oh well thank you babe um so i'm pretty directive i'm pretty top down i'm pretty thinky yeah and this leads to a way of talking about things that is often accurate yes but it's not necessarily sensitive yep and and i've worked on this a lot to become almost as accurate while being way more sensitive or to maintain my accuracy while also increasing my sensitivity because i value accuracy yeah um and so it's a good little moment there as a as a way of talking about this territory where you go yes forrest you're accurate but maybe you're not being super sensitive there or maybe there's a way to frame this that somebody might be more receptive to and to speak in the moment this little part inside of me right now that felt that just a minute ago if it could actually like say something it would say why are you getting rid of me i'm the one that keeps her together yeah and so yeah you're accurate you're saying all these true things but like this part is not working on an accurate level totally this part is is dysfunctional but this part is like kept me safe for a really long time and like this is the work that i do often with clients is it's like it's not helpful to always be accurate but it's always helpful to be sensitive yeah well that's really sweet for starters and very touching and also i think again can be helpful to people often but not always men often often men um who can have this again very like accuracy driven orientation yeah and there's often a phrase that you'll hear people say some version of well i was right yeah or like well why are they mad everything i said was true and it's like well you're missing the point dude most of the time you're missing the point um because there's that level of sensitivity or couching things in a way that somebody can actually receive mm-hmm i just i just feel very overwhelmed by how much i love you in this moment you know nothing new wow um but something something came forward uh also as you were saying that which is i need someone to be accurate like it's important it's important but sometimes my window of capacity for accuracy i don't have any more i don't have any more to give i'm full and this is also what makes complex ptsd complex to work with because some days i'm i'm here for the spockian you know let's be really logical space but like i i often struggle to articulate this um at any point in my life and maybe maybe because we're just in this particular kind of therapeutic space even in this moment um that's creating some space for this to come forward but um my whole life i've had to hide parts of me that are desperate to be seen and desperate for just someone to be there with them and so there can be moments and i think this can happen with many people even folks that don't have cptsd where you're you're starting your work you're doing the journey and this tender part of you this younger part is now coming forward and it's terrifying you know and and you reach out from that part so like i'm not reaching out to you as a 30 year old graduate student totally i'm reaching to you out as a three-year-old yeah you know and so when i met with like a lot of reason a lot of like well we should do this and you just gotta blah blah blah it's like i'm too you don't speak that and i think that can be a really vulnerable thing for a lot of people and i see this too men who have see ptsd i think it can even be more challenging because there's this cultural push to not be sensitive to not be vulnerable to be logical and reasonable but then you inevitably leave the part of you that's holding the hurt behind and that's where the work is is you got to let someone hold the part of you that's holding the hurt and give it to somebody else for a time so then you can really play and be with this younger part unencumbered and there's a term for it it's called indwelling when the baby's nervous system can attach to the primary caregiver's nervous system and it's almost like there's a moment of enmeshment where the baby can't tell the difference between itself but through that indwelling they then realize they're an individual they find their soul i think so much of what i'm trying to say in this moment is that the work that i have done has been figuring out who i was always meant to be like literally finding my soul um oh god the sweetness is coming oh god here it comes here it comes but i i think like a part of that is that like i've had people that i can indwell with that the little baby that didn't get it when i was younger like there's parts of me that can attach to parts of you and you can see it like i think you've seen it the times when you've really leaned in when i'm real messed up crying like overwhelming and you just hold me yeah totally and then all this space gets created then i can actually tell you how i feel but if you immediately go into like tell me what you feel yeah i can't yeah there's nothing there no totally start by joining is probably the single most useful phrase that i have ever learned in my life start by joining start by joining yeah yeah and if you are trying to figure out how to support other people if you got a partner who's on the sensitive side for whatever reason if you just want to be a better relator single most useful phrase i can think of start by joining start with emotional relationship i see you i hear you i feel you okay spend some time there don't just do it to check the box gotta hang out for a minute and then you can go into problem solving but if you start with problem solving as i have painfully learned in my life you are doomed to failure [Music] that's not just with you yeah yeah everybody maybe particularly with you but you know with everybody well we all do it yeah because when things get uncomfortable we want to fix it we want to fix the problem we want to take the pain away yep yeah and i've definitely fallen into this with some of my clients where i could too quickly have moved into trying to fix it or trying to all right yeah let's let's do the work you know and i'm very grateful that i learned this lessons in the beginning of my practicum because now when i have that impulse it's like oh i'm resisting hanging out joining comfort oh yeah i'm resisting joining where this person is at because i don't want to feel this hurt and in many ways as i have processed a lot of the hurt inside myself it gives me more capacity to sit with other people in their hurt because it's like okay i know how to do this i've gone through it and this is kind of linking back to what you said right totally i've done it yeah you know i faced the dragon i can do it again it's it's not going to kill me yeah and i guarantee it's not going to kill you well elizabeth this was really lovely i always have so much fun i feel like you're such a rock star and sometimes i get nervous like oh wow i really gotta say stuff profound and then i say you know derp derp well i think you say a lot of very perfect stuff oh and i really like doing this with you it's so great and uh the tone of these when we've done we did a previous one on pmdd and i'm sure that will do other things in the future the tone is often a little bit different when we're doing this together as opposed to when i'm doing it with my dad or doing it with a guest for obvious reasons including that we're just sitting in the same room together which is often not the case but i really like it and i hope that the people listening like it too even though it's a little bit different than some of our normal episodes and i just had a really great time uh today talking with you um well thank you i had you know it's kind of odd to say but i had such a blast talking about my trauma oh man there's so much there's so much to unpack there too right but but if we can just before we leave this is kind of the joy that can happen yeah you know like even now just by like what we shared today like i feel more relaxed i'm more settled i feel like you really get me and it's not like you know i know you get me but like i'm feeling that you get me yeah yeah yeah and i just think that there's something that's so reparative and the the fancy term for this is creating a coherent narrative of childhood but the simple way to put it is just telling your story to people yep and relating to that story as a whole person everything that went into the creation of who you are up to this point and then big question what's the next act like what do you want to do from here and i understand that that is a little to do attached to it but i think it's actually a big emotional process for most people and it gets to the emotional relationship that they want to have with themselves and with everything that's happened to this point yep yeah so maybe on that note it was great to do this with you today thanks so much for doing it yeah thank you today's conversation on complex ptsd with elizabeth began with a description of her family environment these were the circumstances that she was growing up under that led her to develop complex ptsd and one way to simplify and think about complex ptsd is that it occurs when your needs are not consistently met over an extended period of time often in childhood it's generally a developmental diagnosis but that can certainly happen later in life as well and there are a couple of reasons that complex ptsd is usually developed in childhood the first one is that kids are essentially trapped much of the time so if they're in an environment that is not meeting their needs they can't just leave and find a different environment the second is that children are very vulnerable they are balls of clay being molded by their circumstances much of the time and the developing brain is very easily changed by the things that happen to it one way to think about complex ptsd is that it arises when somebody's needs are not met over a long period of time and those could be the need for safety and maybe there's a direct threat to somebody's safety based on physical or emotional abuse it could be your need for emotional nurturance particularly kids really need to feel like they are prized by their parents maybe you didn't get that maybe it could be the need that kids have to be enough all on their own without needing to fulfill a role inside of the family and that was one of the things that really came up in elizabeth's story elizabeth essentially needed to manage up and you see this a lot in complex ptsd cases where the child becomes parentified they become the parent to their parent and one of the things that we highlighted in elizabeth's story was how there were aspects of it that were really very normal parents who were going through their own struggles who needed to overcome their own challenges who did the best they could to shield her in many ways from the environment that surrounded her but just because a story is normal doesn't mean that it's good enough and you often hear some version of you have a great childhood compared to ours and that might well be the case but again that doesn't prevent somebody from developing long-term issues based on the experiences that they had and we talked for a while about what some of those issues are the issues that elizabeth experiences individually and then the issues that people with complex ptsd tend to experience more generally and these include things like intense emotional flashbacks where elizabeth talked about flashing back to experiences of her parents yelling and screaming at her when she was a kid it can include emotional and sensory sensitivity where you feel hyper vigilant toward the world around you it can also often include a lot of repressed emotions where you feel unsafe expressing yourself and things get really bottled up until they reach a breaking point where they all spill out in some way that is often a little problematic people who struggle with complex ptsd often experience also intense feelings of guilt and shame and it can also be really challenging and i say this as the partner of somebody who who is dealing with this it can be challenging sometimes to comfort them because normal range ways of comforting another person can come across as problematic controlling or just not quite the right way that that person wants to be related to and part of this comes from the ways in which complex ptsd traps a person in their earlier experience it can trap them in the period of time that these painful experiences are happening so the hurt child emerges in adulthood one of the things that elizabeth said that's really going to stick with me is this idea of trauma work is grief work where you're going back and you are grieving for the experiences that you went through and that can be a really painful process for people so understandably what can support them in going through and doing that work is a huge foundation of feeling safe in the moment and that safety is really the the essential basis for any kind of long-term positive change here elizabeth specializes in somatic work with people and feeling into the body is a major part of what she does with them uh one of the things that she mentioned to me in the moment was can you feel your feet can you ground yourself when you're going through a painful experience or you're having an emotional flashback she also really highlighted the ways in which the healing process for her but then also more broadly occurs in relationship and this is one of the ways where therapy can be really helpful where it's just not enough to go through it in your room screaming into the pillow was the example that elizabeth gave you really have to be witnessed by other people because the injury that you experienced was relational so your body has to relearn that relationships themselves can be sources of safety sources of joy rather than sources of suffering earlier i mentioned how complex ptsd often arises from not having our needs met in childhood and so a big part of the healing process a lot of the time is accepting and expressing a person's needs in healthy ways this includes reclaiming the normal needs that somebody has needs to be witnessed needs to be related to needs to feel safe and secure inside of their relationships then at the end we talked about the importance of starting by joining and that really came through i think in our own relationship where i had a comment that i thought was pretty accurate about how uh for people they can learn that facing the dreaded experience whatever that dreaded experience is won't cause won't cause them to dissolve and uh they'll learn that they can overcome those challenges when they emerge for them in the world and then elizabeth really allowed a part of her to step forward where she went okay forest that's that's accurate but there's something about the way that you're saying that that feels a little too directive and it's coming across as harsh for me and we were able to talk through that and workshop it together by joining with each other seeing the alternate perspective and then coming to a soft landing that felt really good for the two of us i hope you enjoyed today's conversation with elizabeth of course i always loved talking with her and it was great to have her on the podcast if you've been enjoying the show we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to leave a rating and a positive review really helps us out also subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already wherever you're listening or watching it right now and then if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwellpodcast for just a few dollars a month you can support the show and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 114,755

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Understanding CPTSD with Elizabeth Ferreira, CPTSD, PTSD, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Elizabeth Ferreira, trauma, loneliness, grief, Recovering from Complex PTSD with Elizabeth Ferreira, PMDD, Somatic Psychology, Somatic Trauma

Id: FHRgPA_jagE

Length: 74min 1sec (4441 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022