Stop Agreeing to Stay Vague, Undefined & Unfulfilled!

there's a habit a lot of us picked up when we were kids especially those of us who grew up with abuse and neglect and it's a pattern of behavior where when something makes no sense and you feel confused by it you pretend it's perfectly clear and it's understandable why anyone who's living in fear would do that so people don't won't get mad at you so they won't leave you so that you don't have to feel foolish for misreading someone's intentions but confusion is one of those side effects of early trauma that feeds on itself and ends up winding its way into your whole way of thinking and being and this can go on so long you can't remember anymore how you really feel versus what you pretend you feel and you get so used to feeling off balance and having to guess what people around you are feeling that you lose your ordinary powers of perception to read reality accurately now you might be in a relationship that you thought was serious but then you found out the other person thinks of you as a casual thing for example so you force yourself to be okay with it right you're like I'm fine um I'm cool or you might feel happy that you're having coffee with a new friend but then you gradually realize the friend is actually trying to sell you something maybe that was what the whole thing was about have you had that happen it's weird so you pretend that you were interested in the sales pitch or maybe you even buy something from them to avoid an awkward moment of saying something like like hey you're pitching me on something is that what this whole coffee date was about I thought we were making friends so we suppressed those thoughts uh we we lack the inner power to know how to say it or you might have this lack of clarity in a work situation and let's say you were promised a raise by some certain date and nothing happens and nothing is said about it and you pretend that this was never discussed or promised you go along with that and stay silent or worse you become self-critical for understanding the original promise wrong or you imagine that you must have done something wrong to change the boss's mind should you say anything and then you decide not to say anything and you stay for years and years in grudging silence that now becomes like this vague cloud of Shame that's all around everything in your life these are the kinds of dilemmas that rise up in your life when you're not confident in your own discernment when you have no Clarity and I'm going to talk about how that plays out and what to look for and then I'm going to tell you what to do about it so when you were a kid and you got mistreated one of your coping mechanisms might have been to just go into a fog of denial and let's say you witnessed a violent argument or a terrible fight in the house where you grew up and everyone pretended it didn't happen so you pretended too now this fog of denial may have helped you tolerate the horrible implications of what you actually saw and it helped you to carry on with your little kid life having friends going to school acting normal and your skill in blocking out what happened was incredibly valuable because chances are if there was violence one time there was probably violence a lot of times right and there would you couldn't afford to really let in the reality of that into your mind but now you're an adult and the fog of denial is still one of your reactions to stressful experiences let's say and if you're still responding to mistreatment and instability and anxiety or a sense of danger by blanking out and pretending it's not happening you've missed a lifetime of experience to learn how to speak up for yourself to detect danger and act in your own self-defense or to say something about things that hurt you to learn to set boundaries and ask questions hands down this behavior that passes as being nice or easygoing is not nice and it's not easy at all and being foggy is a vulnerable state where your childhood PTSD Behavior can start to kick into high gear clinging obsessing people pleasing crap fitting which is my word for when you fit yourself to crappy situations and people and all of this is made possible because every time you think of leaving it's like a switch flips in your mind and you lose your will to do it you lose your discernment about what actions would be best you stay paralyzed in a fog probably blaming yourself and really it's okay that you develop this survival strategy it helped you to get through painful experiences with your spirit intact so good job that's how traumatized kids survive but now as an adult if you still don't have a clear awareness of who you are what you want what it's fair to expect of other people and whether they should even be in your life you are on a path toward pain and emptiness without Clarity your life fills up with things that you never wanted and it's time to heal from the past and to find your way forward to happiness to love to fulfillment so I'm going to tell you what you can do to dissolve that fog and develop in its place Clarity and discernment so think for a minute about times in the past when you were not clear and one sign that you're not clear would be when you get broadsided by reality so let's say you find out someone you're dating is lying to you about who they are and how they spend their time and and once you find out you're like oh I knew it I knew it I thought something sounded wrong but I ignored the red flag that's you having good information but not being clear you didn't trust your judgment so you went into that nice cozy fog where you could have a little more time in that relationship the one that you hoped it would be till it was right in your face that it wasn't going to work it wasn't what you hoped and you couldn't go on with it any longer and then then not only do you find out that the red flags you saw and that you ignored were actually real you realize that this was probably obvious to everyone else in your life and they were probably telling you hey this person who you're crazy about they seem kind of off to me and what a person in a fog of denial is likely to do when somebody says stuff like that is not break up with the boyfriend or girlfriend it's to block out the friends who saw the reality and tried to help and that's what further isolates you and isolation is the perfect place for denial to spread and take over your life so that's how so many people with trauma find themselves stuck in intolerable situations and the good news is no matter how long this has gone on you can change it's Noble work to try to face your own problems it's not always easy to do and it feels sometimes like the shame is going to kill you like the loneliness is just too much and you need to go back you need to go back to the old situation and your mind will say that you'll be tempted to run from yourself and hide from the reality and blame the people who believe that you're doing something harmful to yourself because they want something better for you but what you'll hear is the criticism and that is the trauma brain thinking your trauma brain believes that if you see your own flaws it'll break you and that's a normal perception for a person with a history of abuse and neglect you rightly became terrified of criticism when you were a kid we all know people who simply cannot take responsibility for their mistakes but there's a loving way to view whatever it is that you chose or did or failed to do it was never your fault that you ended up with childhood PTSD it's not your fault you were abused and it's normal for traumatized people to struggle in just this way and now you get to have agency which means you get to begin your healing so where do you start maybe you have trouble recognizing Danger or feeling love or knowing when you've worn out your welcome and it's time to get up from your friend's table and say good night and when you begin gently to come back to your life and take stock of it you'll begin to learn ways to handle those situations your awareness will wake up or you might have a tendency now to you know block out painful truth with something that you think explains it away like maybe someone you've been dating says they feel like the relationship needs to end but instead of feeling the pain pain of rejection you get busy researching mental health conditions that could explain why they want to leave and you start pushing books on them and trying to get them to go to therapy right so people with cptsd often go that route going into helper mode when their security feels threatened and that instinct to stay unclear and to try to get control over reality while staying unclear is a survival strategy it started when you were small you learned to play along with mistreatment or the Shady behavior of the grown-ups in your life from a very early age you instinctively knew if you spoke up you'd be hurt and you knew that if you told anyone what was really going on they would ostracize you or there was even a risk they'd take you away from your family so for a child that's an existential threat that's why denial has such a tight grip it holds on it takes strength and courage to overcome that and to come out of that fog and to face all the years that you've suffered all the opportunities you lost because you couldn't see very clearly what was really going on the longer you put off facing what's real the more your precious time on Earth is just kind of dribbling away from you not being in reality reality is where you can be happy where you can create things where you can love and be loved and when you don't become who you really are in this way we all are deprived of the gifts that you were meant to bring to the world everyone is ready and waiting for the good real person you are to heal and come forward and take your place in the world so here's where you can begin you can begin with the relationships in your life right now the job is to learn which people are good for you to associate with and which ones have red flags flying all around them and to list and understand the times in your life where you made choices either positive or destructive that got you where you are right now now I know from my own healing process how hard it feels like it will be to look at yourself honestly in those moments where you realize that you somehow played a role in the problems that you previously thought were just you know being done to you like we play a role sometimes and the Temptation is to slip back into the fog and not look at that but everything depends on being here in Clarity Clarity feels good it feels clean it feels peaceful and a lot of stress Falls away even when the truth that you're facing is that you need to leave a relationship or two or you need to change so some of what you'll face is how you were mistreated but you'll also see how sometimes you played a role in this by convincing yourself oh well it's probably just me it's my fault so I'll stick around and you know what sometimes maybe it was you sometimes that is right sometimes we're unreasonable sometimes we're the ones who are neglecting ful or hurtful or even abusive and the thing is not being clear what your role is is going to hurt you whether you face it or not but when you face it you can heal it and when the denial is gone what's left is this wonderful power of discernment discernment means good judgment it means being able to tell good from bad and right from wrong when is it just me and when should I get the heck away from someone and there are two skills that will accelerate your powers of discernment and they are very simple but probably Rusty if you've been living in a fog one is the skill is to tell the truth you've got to be honest with yourself and with other people and the second thing is to ask questions when you're confused by something another person says or does you can wait for it ask for clarification so for example have you ever been invited to a restaurant but you were nervous the whole time because you didn't know if it was a date or you didn't know if the other person who invited you meant to pay for you or not or were you flirting with somebody who you knew was unavailable you knew it and you knew it was inappropriate but you were afraid if you said something it would ruin the moment has this kind of ambiguous situation shown up for you over and over in your life here's what you can do you can just say out loud what's going on you can say you know what this this is weird it feels like things are getting a bit flirty here or you can ask hey when you invited me out were you planning to treat or should I plan to pay for myself or you can say I'd love to go to dinner but before I say yes I hope you won't mind my asking is this a date it's not so bad to ask questions and tell the truth is it it feels so embarrassing to ask those questions in the moment or state the obvious but you know what so great about it there's no more confusion so whatever the situation is can be made clear to you and you can proceed accordingly how many times did you hide your feelings not ask the question or put up with crappy treatment and assume it was just you and I just want you to think about this if you were ever in a relationship where things turned out not to be what you thought would it have changed things if you blurted out the truth of what you were noticing or wondering when you first noticed noticed it yes saying the truth really kills the romance sometimes and that's what you want if the truth ruins everything something was already seriously not right speaking up early is also how you can clear up limerent or one-sided relationships where you're pining away for someone who's very happy to keep things ambiguous and enjoy that adoring energy from you without ever being clear about the relationship now it's embarrassing to get rejected but so much better to have it happen early and get it over with than to build your life around some unavailable person who just basks in that warm sunshine of your devotion year after year and this is what I mean when I say you have to be honest now if you're going to heal your perception and take on this project of courageous honesty it helps to have at least one person to whom you can pour out your heart and who you can trust to be both kind and real with you about what they see from the outside and supportive of you taking steps toward doing things in a better way and this isn't always something you can get from friends because they're either too hard on you or too easy on you and either way it's not helpful and it's not uncommon for traumatized people to have no friends that they could ask for this kind of support So healing goes faster when you're willing and able to create a support system of friends if that's been difficult for you maybe a 12 step group where other people are changing their lives in similar ways that you are you could take online courses or get coaching you could come into my membership program for these things you can always find links to my stuff down in the description section below every video or on my website at crappy childhood fairy find what resonates for you and then give it a try and if one thing doesn't work try another thing be persistent because healing is amazing if you want to know what it's like when your trauma is healing I've got a PDF I particularly love this one I created it that you can download for free right there and I will see you very soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 14,580

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Id: QLkt9ErgdW8

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024