Ways CPTSD Can Look Like Narcissism - How To Become More Self-Aware

complex ptsd and narcissism are closely intertwined they're not the same thing but in families narcissism in a parent can cause complex ptsd in the child the parent might be emotionally absent or controlling or completely self-centered and have no ability to see or recognize the child's unique and good little self and you hear all the time about how people struggle with the effects of that a narcissistic parent how they become wounded and vulnerable and self-attacking but what's interesting and what's never talked about i think is how often the parents narcissistic traits or behaviors are absorbed by the child to the point that people in the child's adult life might very much feel that they are being wounded by narcissistic behaviors now it's often said that if you have the self-reflection to ask yourself you know am i a narcissist then you're probably not a narcissist i'm not sure if that's totally true because you could just say those words right but if you're honest with yourself you'd have to admit that of course you have some narcissistic behaviors everyone does we all do we have some tendencies especially when cptsd is triggered and i bring this up because these narcissistic tendencies are pretty much the elephant in the living room around why people with cptsd struggle with relationships and none of the abuse was your fault you did not ask for this to happen to you but it's worth asking yourself if you're maybe sometimes driving people away with the very same narcissistic tendencies that hurt you in the first place they're just tendencies it's very unlikely that you actually have the personality disorder narcissistic personality disorder personality disorders are really hard to change but the wounds of childhood ptsd that that lead to these tendencies they can be changed you know it's not an overnight job but they can be changed this is flexible and i can tell you how but first let's talk about some of the behaviors that show up in traumatized people not every symptom of cptsd looks like narcissism but let's talk about the ones that do so first people with cptsd have a tendency to focus on how we feel all the time it becomes very dominant in our consciousness to a degree that it can make it difficult to be sensitive to other people have you ever had that when you're in a lot of emotional pain it can be very easy to overlook what's going on in your companions day you know what's going on in their life and i had a period in my life where like three close family members died in less than a year also i got attacked on the street during that time and i got dumped and some other bad things happened and i got so i was drowning in sorrow i was drowning in overwhelm and my ptsd symptoms were just like so just taking over my brain i was barely able to read or have a conversation i'd be on the phone talking and i couldn't even remember who i was talking to sometimes i was really struggling and i got the feedback from a friend at that time like that i was being very self-centered and it made me mad at the time because i couldn't really do better than that at the time i was very self-centered i was i was in deep shock and woundedness but for the record it was helpful to know that for other people it wasn't like having a two-way friendship right so if we get stuck in our trauma and we can't have a two-way friendship that's one reason why we could end up feeling kind of isolated from people because people very few people want to sign up for that for a relationship where you know we do all the talking where we are the designated person who needs to be cared for today most people want something a little more mutual or certainly in a healthy relationship they do okay second thing we can get very focused on how other people think about us and these are subtle signs right but and everybody tends to focus on what other people think about them but what i noticed about cptsd in myself and as i teach other people you know i teach this technique like the foundation of what i teach to help people heal their symptoms has to do with writing down fearful and resentful thoughts about other people and those thoughts sometimes i'm attacking myself but a lot of times i have fear what other people think about me i fear they think that i'm stupid old fat no good not lovable they're not including me and especially early early in my healing process you know i was really burdened with these ideas and in effect it's like i'm sort of thinking about myself but it's all about like what does do other people think of me why haven't they started treating me nicer yet why did they keep triggering me why can't they change their behavior so life would be easier for me and in a way that is a focus on how other people think of us and i bring that up because it's one of the hallmarks of a narcissist is that they are very focused on other people and whether other people make things good for them at the expense of thinking about what do other people need and what's the reciprocal arrangement there so this is sort of a subset of the first point i made okay third point when we're symptomatic with cptsd we have a belief that our problems are so unique that no one can possibly understand i hear this all the time when i coach people they go well you know i have problems you couldn't possibly understand now here's the thing about me i have problems they're not as bad as some people's they're worse than other people's the stuff that i went through in the past was pretty bad and i don't talk about 90 of it because part of my healing program is you know if you take my courses you'll get some highlights of the bad stuff that happened but for me to talk about it all the time would really be a bummer for you it'd be a bummer for me it would focus on the problem you know the problem you have the problem i focus on talking about the solution so when people come to me and think that i know somehow what ptsd is like and i know somehow how to calm the symptoms but i couldn't possibly understand the problem that's not always true there of course some people have had experiences that i have not had for better and worse in the case of certain abusive situations yes i'm very grateful i didn't go through what some people went through but i've had people say stuff like well you know i have to move i have to move and i i'm sick right now and have to go to the doctor you couldn't possibly understand it's like oh my gosh you think i don't know what it's like i've had 14 surgeries and was in and out of the hospital see it's it's like a competition it's not a competition so when i get into trying to convince somebody i do understand that's also like a game i don't want to play and that's why i just want to call out that thing where you go my problems are so unique nobody could understand now i agree when you have cptsd a lot of people don't understand they don't understand the nature of it and they cannot understand why we don't just fix our problems it's like why do you keep getting together with the same kind of jerk you know why do you keep overreacting why don't you just not overreact it's so simple for them right but we understand each other more or less we understand and i'm calling it out as a narcissistic tendency to just think that your problems are so much worse than anybody else's i know you know objectively that there are many many people who have worse problems and who actually handled them okay and i will just point out to you that every individual is different you can put like x amount of trauma on this person and this person one of them will develop complex ptsd and one person will sail right through it you do it to a third person and they end up you know their whole life just collapses and they can't deal with it at all we're all different and so there's no point in making comparisons about your troubles and your grief and your solutions what helps is when you're talking to other people is to look for commonality look for what you can learn from other people's experience and what a relief it is when you meet somebody who has been through something similar and and who does understand i went through high school thinking i was the only kid who who lived in a chaotic home and i tried not to tell anybody a few of my close friends had been to my house and they kind of saw the outward signs of it and i went to a high school like a 30 something year high school reunion because when i left the town where i went to high school i graduated a year early and i left and i never came back i had a lot of shame was part of the reason i never came back but i finally went back i was healed enough and i went back and i connected with people and i was really surprised how much i liked my former friends and how much we felt connected to each other and when we really got to talking we found out that all of us in my group of girls that i was tight friends with in seventh eighth ninth grade all of us had a parent who had an addiction or alcoholism or had died so we all had been dealing with kind of a a major loss of a parent and a lot of the craziness of addiction and alcoholism at home and none of us were talking about it at the time and then we got together and we talked about it and it explained so much so it is good to be with people who understand it's also good to be comfortable with people who don't have your experience they may never understand your wounds but you can learn so much from people who were less traumatized so keep an open mind it's a narcissistic tendency to just think my problems are special you know people have to conform to my problems or they don't count that is a narcissistic thought and we don't want to go there we want to heal from from those tendencies all right the next narcissistic tendency that you sometimes see in cptsd is a strong victim identity and this comes up in narcissistic personality disorder for us you know there really was some victimization and for the record a lot of people who have narcissistic personality disorder were very traumatized as kids it may have played a role it's not the only cause but it can play a role in why people end up with that personality disorder so that doesn't mean that it excuses the behavior in them or in us so the strong victim identity you were abused you were neglected or you wouldn't be on this channel so you were a victim but i'm going to encourage you not to let it be your identity all discomfort and shame that you feel is no longer caused by other people or the past that's kind of my radical statement here if you're still having discomfort and shame around other people what's going on is some present time fear and resentment about that and that is coming from here and before you get all offended that i think that i'm saying like oh it's all your fault you create your reality i'm never saying that you were abused and neglected it caused problems you're having trouble moving on from being completely held down by the problems that that causes most people will be held down for life we're here i'm trying to teach you how to not be held down for life how to get free and i'm not saying you just you you deny that you were victimized in the past but i want you to get in touch with your new identity which is that you're no longer a victim or you're learning not to be one right because i mean a lot of us continue to get victimized because that pattern was laid down in us but we can learn we have a brain and we're adults and we're free and with a little bit of persistence in learning we can begin to change that pattern and then we're not a victim another victim format that you'll see in cptsd people and and narcissists is i'm the long-suffering victim i'm so nice all the time but everyone on the planet is just awful and they're mean to me for no reason and i'm kind of making fun of that because if you think that you're the only nice person on the planet you actually might have narcissistic personality disorder none of us is the only nice person on the planet we're like everybody we have a mix of good and bad traits and like everybody else we do better when we we work on healing the bad traits and the vulnerabilities and we play off the strengths we gotta love ourselves as we are [Laughter] but we're not the only good person in the world and there are many good people out there and just like there's people who suffer more than we do there's people who do good things on a scale that that any one of us can only like guess at like we don't even know and honestly if we've spent a lot of our lives kind of held down by trauma we didn't have a chance to shine we didn't have a chance to bring our gifts to bear and that is why it's so important now to heal because if your gifts which are in there you were given gifts if trauma came in and stopped you from fulfilling those from becoming your real self and bringing to the world all the good that you have in you if that got thwarted by trauma that's terrible that is the tragedy that is i think that the deepest most burning source of depression and sort of discouragement is just knowing that you're capable of so much more but you can't do it you get so tripped up on things so you're here you're watching this video now and together that's what we do we learn to not get tripped up over those things we learn to sail through them we learn to handle them so that we continue to be ourselves so that we can be real and honest about who we are the next narcissistic trait people with cptsd we can be arrogant sometimes we think we know how other people should live or how they should think or what they need to change about themselves it pushes people away to say the least when we do that and so you want to check that it's it's a very natural thing and especially if you grew up with trauma your life may be heavily populated by people with serious problems when we think we know what somebody else ought to do and we start saying you know honey i've been through this before here's what you do you got to read this book you got to eat this you got to not drink that we're putting ourselves above other people and sometimes they might want that help they might be turning to somebody who has that experience but if they're not what it feels like is control and arrogance and it causes them to want to push us away at its very worst that kind of control can go to the extreme of being you know misguided pressure and it can be cruel it comes off as criticism so if you feel like you're just trying to be helpful to people and you're finding that they're not receptive that's something you could ask yourself is do i do that am i giving them advice in a way that makes them feel a little bit criticized or a little bit you know like i'm trying to control them and it can come as a surprise how little you need to do that to influence other people the best thing you can do if you want to influence other people is to just do really well yourself to solve your own problems and to show up happy and free in front of them and then they might ask you one day how did you do that but i'll tell you you know of all the healing i've ever had people have rarely spontaneously asked me for advice or changed their life because i sort of rushed in with a solution for them more what happened was i sort of you know used my solution and changed my life and people began to ask and i suppose when you come find me on youtube that's a form of asking you can watch the video or you can turn it off but i'm not pushing you to do anything i say in fact i tell people all the time when i give advice about how to deal with this thing called say ptsd put it on the front porch of how you listen to things don't bring it right into your house just listen to what it is see if you agree with it see if you think you can use it and don't take it with a grain of salt because it's my experience and the best thing you can do is use your experience another narcissistic tendency that we sometimes have in cptsd is we have a hard time seeing our own role in our problems not just in that we you know think that we're innocent victims and blame other people but also we have trouble realizing that we have agency we we do have the capacity to discover what's going on in our lives and to change it it's not easy and some things are very difficult to change but we have agency so that tendency to think oh you know everybody else just controls everything and they make everything bad for me and i can't do anything that is like a narcissistic tendency so when we think that other people control things and we can't what we're basically doing is we're taking our standard allotment of power which is about like everybody else's everybody has some power over themselves we're taking that and we're giving it to somebody else and in fact when we give it to people who abused us and say well i was abused so i can never change we're taking that power and we're giving it to these people who hurt us in the first place and further we sometimes tend to believe that they did it because they targeted us and that is occasionally what somebody does a very bad person might target another person for abuse most abuse happens by people who are overwhelmed and too messed up inside their own head maybe they're narcissists maybe they have cptsd but they're getting overwhelmed and this bad behavior is coming out so it's not always a product of targeting and i think believing that all abuse was targeted at you is a form of giving your power away because it's a way of not seeing that even though you had cptsd and even though you might not have been able to see it coming given the information and the strength that you had at the time you couldn't have done anything about it you can learn from it and maybe handle such a situation differently next time i think that people over assign targeting as the cause of somebody's abuse targeting is something that you don't have much control over do you you have less control whatever you do however you interpret what happened to you try to see if given what you know now about cptsd and about yourself and other people is there a way that you could protect yourself from that happening again without having to cut everybody out of your life without having to make everybody on the planet bad to try to keep your heart open your heart is going to play a big role in you becoming your real self so you shutting your heart down you cutting people off it's not a good solution to the problem of cptsd it's a temporary solution it's a temporary solution and it saved you and that's great but now we're going to help you open your heart again there's a similarity here in that a person feels too fragile to hear criticism and i think in the case of narcissism a person cannot be messed within this belief that they're perfect and above everything a person with cptsd is fragile just worrying that they're worthy enough to deserve to be part of the human race right there's a real low self-esteem there criticism takes on a power that it really doesn't have it takes on a power in the ears of a person with cptsd to be very destructive and that mirrors a narcissistic tendency and it's not a good one to have we need a coping mechanism to deal with criticism sometimes so that it doesn't get in so that we can keep it on the front porch of our listening and not let it into the house and consider is it good criticism is it something we need to hear and can learn from or is it just junk that somebody's throwing at us that's the case sometimes another narcissistic tendency we are drawn to troubled people who are less functional than we are sometimes and who see us as bigger better smarter more successful the leader or even the savior people who have narcissism want to be surrounded by people who look up to them i've noticed that people with cptsd tend to sort of split it and have difficulty with equal relationships sometimes so there's always one person is up or down i've certainly noticed that before i was healing that my relationships were all either i was kind of the the person who had more power or the other person was and either i was getting resented or i was doing the resenting so unequal relationships have a place in the world and that would be normal with a parent and a child or an employer and a worker you know somebody's in charge there so there's a place for that but of course for our closest relationships we want to have the capacity for equal relationships part of healing is to develop comfort to have that and equal relationships equal relationships have a whole lot of level of communication that can be tricky with cptsd and i think that's why there's an attraction to unequal relationships because you don't even have that community you don't really have to work out certain fine nuanced problems it's just like well the boss says you know this is how we're going to solve this problem so it's a way of skipping over the part that's complicated as you heal that's going to get easier for you so that's something you might want to look at in your life another narcissistic tendency we sometimes make big sweeping accusations at people we say stuff like you know education is just brainwashing for the masses or religion is all about social control these things are not true those are resentful big sweeping statements another one you hear all the time is everyone i know is a narcissist but of course i'm not i'm exempt from this and that sort of sweeping declaration is a narcissistic tendency if you pay attention to reality of course not everyone is a narcissist and i see this particularly in youtube comments people who just say it's a terrible world out there nobody cares about other people anymore and we know when we read those comments they're talking about their experience they're having a terrible experience and it feels like it's everybody but that's what happens with cptsd is that kind of thinking can calcify and ultimately that's a very self-centered and narcissistic style thought you know i'm the only good person everybody out there is bad it puts us above everybody and you know of course nobody likes it it pushes people away and usually it's said by people who have already resigned themselves to that by declaring everybody's bad i'm gonna isolate myself it's the only way and i think some people's ptsd is so bad that that is that is for now the best solution there is but i'm here for anybody who's ready to take that next step and try to reconnect with people you know to help look at to help look at the behaviors that get in the way including these narcissist style behaviors that you may have inherited now here's one i i don't think this is as common as some of the other ones but it's a narcissistic tendency and it's a sense of entitlement where we believe that other people are sort of like the grown-ups and they're responsible to make our lives better make the world better and even pay for everything like housing food therapy and this reflects an unhealthy belief that we have a special status as people who are just damaged and have to be taken care of but who don't have any obligation to other people and so we very easily see the obligation of some people towards people like ourselves we don't see our obligation right back and i totally understand and i've been the person who could not fulfill certain obligations because because what was happening in my life was too great but there have been other times when i had the joy of sort of stepping up a little bit and becoming one of those people and i really want to put it out there that whether you can do it in a big way or a small way when you rise up to start bringing that goodness that you're holding latent in you under the cptsd when you start to bring it into the world you're going to feel a joy you're going to feel the freedom you're going to feel a power that you never could have had when you were waiting for other people to solve your problems for you we all need help sometimes but in every little way that you can see what you can do to become that person even if it's in a tiny way helping somebody who lives on your street all right now if you think that you have cptsd i don't think you'd be here if you didn't but if you're wondering you can take this quiz where i list the common symptoms and that's linked below i put it on the very top line of the description section right under the video there's also a link there where you can read you can click it and it will open up it says more you can open up and see all the links i put there now if you're resonating with this video and you want to look at more ways that that you might be having better relationships with people the next video i picked out that i think goes really nicely from this one is right here and i encourage you to watch it and i will see you next time 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Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 245,259

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Id: Q_0poJWcggY

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021