Steps To Take When You're SERIOUS About Healing Past Trauma

healing from trauma requires some persistence okay so here are the 10 things number one learn what complex PTSD is not just what you've heard on the internet not just what other people say about it and not focusing all your energy on what might be the diagnosis of other people who are in your story that's not the same thing as understanding what's going on with your brain and learning about your brain and about brain dysregulation and what that does to you and about emotional dysregulation and re-regulation and what a difference that can make how does that

impact your life we didn't know until very recently that cptsd is an injury to your brain and nervous system and a lot of therapists and clinical professionals still don't know this it's really important that you educate yourself so that you can choose professional help well based on people who get it and so that you can make decisions on your healing that's you know based on current knowledge and not old ideas number two when you look at yourself and how you're doing with your healing process be willing to notice some of the problems that maybe have

nothing to do with trauma now it's true cptsd can make it hard to focus it can make it hard to be consistent to be as kind and considerate as you want to be and it might make it hard to stay present cptsd might almost certainly is damage relationships in your life it might have damaged your health as well okay so all those things are trauma related but everybody has a couple of problems that are just kind of ordinary human problems so it could be something like you know maybe you're often late a lot of people

struggle with that you don't have to be traumatized to be somebody who's chronically late trauma could be implicated but sometimes that's one of the things that you just have you know it's just something you're doing at the right now and the reason I love the problems that are just normal person problems is because they're a little easier to solve you don't have to heal your brain necessarily to get that going it could be that you need to keep your kitchen cleaner that the whole kitchen smells like garbage all the time and when people come over

you're ashamed and I know how trauma can drive that kind of procrastination but it's a solvable problem and I love low-hanging fruit problems things that you can solve quickly and get another little win a little win you start feeling confident that you can take on another project for healing okay number three prepare to move your stories about the abuse and neglect that happened to you out of present time looping thoughts and into what I call the memory bucket if you can imagine there's a bucket there's your present time thinking and there is a memory bucket

so there's everything going on your mind now cptsd can trap your emotional and body reactions from old traumatic experiences and then keep them looping in your mind as if they're happening right now that's why it's so hard to have cptsd it's a different thing Than A Memory it's activating all your adrenaline your cortisol it speeds your heart rate it scatters your thoughts and puts your whole body in a state of stress so it makes it really hard to stop thinking about it or reacting to it that's what I call looping or I call it an

electric thought you know it's very charged what you want is to have access to your thoughts and memories but not to be controlled by them not to you know get physiologically changed every time they pop into your awareness an ordinary memory has the trauma element deactivated it's not electric it's unplugged you can remember it and if anybody asks you a question about it you can remember all the same details about it but it doesn't trigger this huge physiological and neurological response in you if you had trauma you probably have some looping electric thoughts that give

you very charged reactions and you probably have some memories that are not charged so when I say get ready one thing that will help you is to become open to the idea that you don't always have to be reactive toward the past I teach a method to calm reactions there are others out there my method is called The Daily practice and if you watch this channel you hear me talk about it like a lot and I point you toward the description section under every video that's where you can find it's free course it takes less

than an hour to learn it and try it and you can give it a try and see if like me it helps you take those looping thoughts and just kind of calm them down sometimes naming those stress thoughts and releasing them really does make a difference so good thing to try now I'm going to keep teaching you under the assumption that you've tried these techniques but if you haven't you know just try to hear the essence of what I'm saying here if you feel anxious at the thought of surrendering your fear and resentment through these

exercises and some people do because fear and resentment for a lot of us it's a primitive form of a boundary like being anxious and worried or angry can feel like the only protection we've got like no no way you're not getting in if that's you I would just say do it a tiny bit at a time do a little bit at a time and see what happens and just see when you do surrender fear about something do you end up incapacitated or does it make you a doormat or does it make you feel like a

little more lighter-hearted you know if you're feeling more light-hearted you're doing it right it's not been my experience that that facing what's bothering you and writing it down amplifies it or makes it worse in fact it makes me feel Freer of it and more empowered it makes me more clear about when something dangerous is in my presence and when I need to act on something so you can try that just try that you don't have to believe me you try number four is stop trying to make other people not trigger you all right so if

you get very triggered by people and pretty much everyone with complex PTSD gets triggered by people that's what makes connection hard for us in fact and that's what makes us have a tendency to want to isolate or keep people at arm's length because those interactions can be so triggering so there's a misunderstanding that if we could just get other people to stop behaving the way they do or saying what they say or making us feel the way we feel then we would be okay and sometimes occasionally that's true but it's usually not true because even

if they wanted with all their hearts to stop triggering you they probably wouldn't succeed the trigger is in here it's you know somewhere in here it's for you to work on and anyway most people are not willing to try to change everything for you you know that's just reality so you learning how to calm your triggers is going to be more effective easier and more empowering for you than trying to make the world around you change so that it doesn't trouble you now when you can learn to calm your triggers you become more perceptive and

you can begin to tell if someone in your presence is actually a difficult person or if you're just feeling triggered and having difficulty but they're not causing that difficulty that's hard to tell sometimes right surely you struggle sometimes I do is it just me is it them am I being crazy am I being a doormat and in most cases you're confused about that question because you have triggers so learning to know the difference is called discernment and discernment is one of the biggest things that we lose with cptsd the ability to tell the difference between

am I generating this drama or is something actually being done to me it's so difficult to go through life when you're not clear about that that is a consequence for some of us of how we were raised you know sort of you know feeling really scared and upset being like I'm scared there's all this fighting in the house and go no there's nothing going on shut up go to bed right so you start second guessing yourself and it turns into a maybe a developmental delay you know where it's just have a little trouble like making

sense of reality so using the writing technique I'm telling you in the daily practice can be a really good way to start strengthening your discernment you could also do that with a therapist you could do that with friends you could do that in a 12-step Fellowship it's really important though to have a way to face what's intense for you and to get some support while you figure out what is reality there's no substitute for other people for that and what a relief when you get a strong feeling that someone you meet doesn't belong in your

life or something they did was a deal breaker for you versus when someone is a person you want in your life and you can see your triggers for what they are you can work to make your relationship better you can become more trustworthy you can be a better friend to them by calming your triggers what you open up for yourself with those calm triggers is choice it's not going to make you like a perfectly nice person who puts up with anything it's not going to make you mean it just gives you choices about how you

want to respond because you can perceive things better so the other great thing about learning to calm your triggers is that you become flexible you become able to hang out with a variety of different people and you can be in all kinds of circumstances you don't have to be so particular and have you know so-called boundaries about you know I don't do this I don't let people say that you can start to be flexible and just let people be themselves and let life happen around you you are safe to relax around people when you know

that when you need a boundary and you need to step back from someone you can and when you know your boundaries and you're prepared to honor them you can be less afraid to connect with people and instead be more open to them so all the bad things that come with cptsd problems with relationships focusing balancing your emotions stress levels all that gets less activated if you Don don't get triggered so there's your superpower if you were to do one thing learn to notice when you're triggered and bring it down now learning to notice dysregulation and

a triggered state in yourself that's a huge piece of what I teach in my coaching programs and my courses dysregulation triggers disconnection from people and that in turn triggers self-defeating behavior and when Healing Begins in those areas good parts of you have room to come shining through your kindness your competence your talents your joy all of this has space to take root in your life and bear fruit the good things in you that's what gets suppressed by all the trauma and it gets locked down when your reaction to hurt and Trauma is to start to

control the environment some people go through life suppressed you know for years but only because they were too dysregulated to manage stepping out of their safe Zone in the safe Zone you can't afford to connect with people or face your mistakes right but when you learn to calm triggers and re-regulate your emotions and your brain you can take some risks and your life grows now remember this is not just to feel better you do have to feel better you do need that you deserve that and what it gives you is an opening for the real

healing to begin and that's you becoming yourself and delivering the love and the contribution that you have to bring to the world all right number five stop trash talking the people who you choose to have in your life it's very common for people who don't have cptsd to just throw labels on people you know this person's a narcissist they're toxic they're worthless but if you really want to heal if you want to double down on your healing I encourage you to stop using those labels on people and instead just start noticing what whatever you call

it the thing that other people do or have that is so troubling for you the thing to focus on is not the other person but the way that you get tense or you struggle around them the way that your emotions rise up or you get dysregulated that's the part that's the part where you actually have influence over what happens next you do have a right to make decisions about whether to let someone into your life or not so now when you're triggered by someone instead of just telling them hey you're a narcissist and therefore you

know you should read this book I found about narcissists because that always goes over well right no it doesn't well you can either accept them or you can step away from the relationship the more you recover the more you'll be at peace with the people you want in your life and the more quickly you'll be willing to withdraw from people who you don't want in your life focusing on yourself is always going to be your superpower when you can notice oh here we go this is where I get triggered now this doesn't mean that you

should just learn to put up with terrible behavior in other people you want to be aware you want to be grounded lucid clear-headed clear-eyed and perceptive so that you can make good decisions about how to proceed when somebody begins to to treat you badly and if somebody's treating you really well of course you want to be at your best so you want to be able to open your heart and enjoy that relationship when it's a good thing to do number six stop clinging to bad relationships that make you miserable now I have to bring this

in in any discussion of what it means to double down on your healing staying in bad relationships and hemorrhaging all your energy and your cognition to a situation where you're fighting all the time or you're being treated in an abusive manner or you're being Gravely disrespected or you're sad all the time this will halt your healing now I understand there are relationships where there's an obligation or a duty as there is with you know dependent children or with certain other people who rely on you for care and that may require extra effort and extra support

to remove yourself from those situations that are destroying your happiness and your chances of healing trauma but whether it's simple or complicated for you to get that distance it's important to keep moving forward all right number seven it's the same thing but for jobs don't stay in jobs that make you miserable unless your life depends on it there are times when we all have to do what we have to do to get a paycheck but not forever don't let that be forever and if the paycheck is not the problem right now I want you to

ask yourself is being miserable at work something you are unconsciously choosing so that you can avoid facing something else that's hard for you right now and I talk about this very directly because it's something that I've had to face in myself too there was a lot of time when I was still at the effect of cptsd where if I weren't miserable I would have to notice immediately that there was this giant hole in my life where close relationships were supposed to be and instead I had superficial relationships and I hated my job and I was

getting my self-esteem off the fact that I had this job but I wasn't happy and I didn't like the way I was being treated and I stayed 10 years working for an awful boss but because I I didn't have to stay in that job I know the problem was in here the problem was that I was accepting this unhappy lot in life in exchange for not having to make changes that felt impossible for me back then and this was when I was a single mom and I think I could have you know I was probably

scared to leave the security of that job except that one day when the recession of 2008 got rolling you know what I didn't have a job anymore anyway but honestly I'm so glad everything fell through because it was then that I started my first business really because you know nobody else would hire me I had to do something for money I got my business off the ground and that ended up being a really happy way to earn a living for many years until I transitioned to doing this to becoming crappy childhood fairy and for those

of you who have other extenuating circumstances that are keeping you stuck feel the truth of what I'm saying let it guide you don't let yourself give up on your healing trying doesn't always lead to success but success favors people who try all right number eight detach from the belief that you passively just magically attract bad people now I hear people say this all the time I attract narcissists well acknowledge that the issue is not really who is attracted to you the issue is who are you attracted to who do you tolerate who do you date

who do you sleep with that is the problem and that's a much better problem to have than some sort of magic occurrence that flies out of the sky oh look a narcissist has just landed and attached themselves to me it can't happen without your cooperation it may seem like they just occur they give those signs in the park it says ticks occur narcissists occur but you do not have to let them into your life occasionally exploitative people do look for vulnerable people and Target them but most of the people problems in your life are more

likely to be caused by a lack of boundaries on your part a lack of a red flag detector and being able to see like who should I let into my life it's your red flag detector that needs to be switched into the on position and that's part of trauma healing too if you're going to double down on your healing you're going to have to do that you're going to have to take responsibility that you are the gatekeeper and you may have heard me say you know I attract mosquitoes but you know I don't marry them

or sometimes I say I don't sleep with them I think that would be a good t-shirt but see yeah attracting them is not really the problem number nine if you have addictive behaviors make recovery your first priority alcohol drugs food pornography spending all that stuff your healing will get an enormous boost if you can take care of that when you allow yourself to experience life's ups and downs and show up for it and not Escape by some means and I think we should include limerence in that you know just checking out into fantasy right when

you can stay in your life then you can start to solve your problems I know how tempting it is to try to grab on and control things or run away from them or just get into some kind of Oblivion some comfort and it's almost Universal with people with cptsd the urge to fly away or crawl into a hole it's going to take one form or the other it's going to visit you sometimes but if you're using anything at all to sort of genuinely Escape like drugs it's going to delay your ability to cope with feelings

of disappointment and stress and emptiness and loneliness those are feelings that we actually need need to have sometimes because they guide us into action I totally know what it's like but if you're using something to escape it will make healing almost impossible and even when you're perfectly healed life is going to have its ups and downs so there's always something to face you're going to lose friends big disappointments will happen outside events will happen you're going to need a means to be able to handle what comes whatever approach to Healing that you choose for yourself

you're going to need an easy way to self-comfort and bring yourself back out of dysregulation and into re-regulation and if you want to learn how to do it I can teach you that's all in the links in the description section below this video and all my videos if that's something that interests you when you always have a way to calm your reactions and comfort yourself you'll find it's a lot easier to overcome addictions that is true Freedom when you feel like I don't know what's going to happen but whatever it is I'll be able to

face it all right number 10. sit down and ask yourself this is just a thought exercise and I really like this one ask yourself if I really had to solve this problem of having cptsd what are 10 things I could do and I love doing this you can apply it to any kind of problem but it's a really good one to do about how you would heal from your trauma because you actually have the answers you do you have the answers in there you just haven't tapped them yet or you may not have had the

energy to focus on you know taking action on them right now so make a list of them the 10 things that if you really had to solve this problem you know in a short period of time what would you do you don't have to act on all of them at once they can be Preposterous but may write it just bring them into the sunlight of your awareness the actions you could take if you really wanted to let them into your mind and heart and just see what happens childhood PTSD is in its Essence an injury

to our ability to connect with other people abuse and neglect early in our lives literally change our brains and neglect in particular can physically restrict the normal processes that enable us to identify good appropriate people to bring into our lives and to gradually open ourselves up to them and develop close and trusting relationships this to me is the most tragic part of childhood PTSD to be capable of love but not to be able to sustain a normal loving relationship is a devastating price to pay for what happened but the great news is we can totally

totally make progress in this area if we are intentional about it if we just kind of leave it to chance and hope we'll figure out love later in our lives or maybe when the right person comes along we're not likely to improve and in fact if you look around the people you know you'll see a lot of older people who have actually deteriorated from being able to be close to others if we don't work on this we risk getting more and more cranky and isolated and hard on other people and that's the tragedy to me

the goal of life is to learn to really learn to love other people and it turns out that having and growing our connections with others is one of the most powerful ways we can heal our own PTSD there's a large body of research emerging that shows that loving relationships actually help us heal our telomeres the little caps on the strands of DNA that protect us from disease and slow down our aging love and connection are important for everyone and especially for us who have so much catching up to do now most people with PTSD have

been hurt in this ability to connect and if that's you too then you're likely to struggle with relationships in proportion to the amount of time you spend in dysregulation this regulation breaks connections re-regulation puts us in a place where we can begin to repair connections as people whose ability to connect may be a bit wonky we can definitely take steps to gradually heal this and it doesn't always come naturally sometimes we have to be very intentional about it and work on it and take steps that are the opposite of the first impulse that comes to

mind when we find ourselves struggling now loneliness and feeling disconnection are Universal experiences for everyone at least a little bit but for us it can take kind of take over our lives and this has everything to do with this regulation which makes connection very difficult and re-regulation which makes change in this part of ourselves possible so we want to strike a balance a healthy balance between Solitude which is the ability to tolerate and even enjoy our alone time and connection with others because people with childhood PTSD tend to do a lot of things in Extreme

Ways and this is one of them we isolate or live in deathly fear that people will leave us we cling or we run away and we might go one way with friends and the other way with significant others but these extremes Rob us of much of the good we're meant to have through our relationships with the people in our lives obviously this is a huge topic and I may make a whole course on it later this year but for right now here are some important things to remember in order at the very least to grow

more regulated so first don't let yourself get too lonely every problem of your character will grow worse when you're in isolation people who have cut everyone out of their lives seldom realize how weird they've become their rationale for avoiding everyone sounds plausible to them but to the rest of us just sad it is a wish virtually everyone has when they know they're reaching the end of their lives they'll say they wish they had given even more of their time and attention to loving relationships so how can we grow closer to love in a realistic and

gradual way that can be sustained so not letting ourselves get too lonely is how we can grow closer to love in a realistic and gradual way that can be sustained loneliness taken to the extreme and by that I mean we've convinced ourselves that we like the loneliness and we found ways to numb out the nagging worry and sadness about it this kind of loneliness and pretending corrupts Us in the end and when we're lonely in life it should feel lonely the feeling of loneliness is a gift that nudges us to reach out and connect to

keep on trying to keep getting out of the house when it's tempting to hide out there so another suggestion is to make yourself connect with people face to face every day get out of the house leave your normal space and find a way to walk down the street and interact with the world also become a great listener when you're with someone you actually don't have to talk about yourself half the time or even at all if you can learn to give your full attention to the person who's with you and to really listen to them

without jumping in with your own story or debating the legitimacy of what they're saying or any digressions at all the connection between the two of you will get stronger I mean right in that moment you will begin to feel closer and real closeness will soften any impulses you have to cling to the other person or escape from them or try to control who they are now some people go to the opposite extreme and they pour their whole identity into another person as if this is an extension of themselves now not living in the center of

your being carries huge risks because your own strengths are not being revealed and your own problems are not being exposed which would cause you and your circumstances to evolve some people cling to relationships or they get obsessed or promiscuous and this is every bit as deadening for their souls as having no one in fact it's probably worse nothing can derail your life so dramatically as sexual relationships with people who don't care about you for women in particular sex bonds us to others whether we love them or even like them I know there are exceptions to

this rule but I would not really hold up sex with no strings as anything you would want to try in order to become happier or better regulated romantic and sexual drama can dysregulate you as surely as violence can other people may be able to have casual sex but for those struggling to regulate I don't recommend it trusting Intimate Relationships take time so if you're hooking up with people or getting together with them in a rush or impulsively in the name of having fun or just to fill your weekend nights until the right person comes along

you're in for a world of struggle this topic is going to be my next course and I have a lot to say about losing one's way along the path to love and finding it again but some quick tips for now while you're really working on your childhood PTSD include notice the relationship between dysregulation and relationship status are you more or less regulated when you're with someone generally speaking a conflict-filled relationship will create more dysregulation than being alone and a harmonious relationship will lead to less dysregulation an unstable relationship where you're in fear about getting left

all the time will lead to more dysregulation and a secure relationship will lead to less dysregulation so harmonious secure relationships are a positive path forward and something to strive for and the trick of that is being in a high drama abusive or unstable relationship does not work to bite our time until the right person comes these negative relationships actually take us way off that path the right person will never find us or if they do our manner our energy the way we engage with others will be ragged from the days or years of difficulty we've

had so sometimes the shortest path to true love is found by being single for a while so if you're single or whatever is going on in your love life and you experience a lot of loneliness a very good and re-regulating thing you can do is to participate participate in your neighborhood in your work life in 12-step groups in family get-togethers where you can be supportive of others practice Love by being loving to others in little ways if you're having trouble getting that started here's a first step each day find two people you can talk to

in the line at the store or out on the sidewalk or on the phone and contact them just to express something positive and supportive for them don't talk about yourself in this conversation just show up for the other person I guarantee you if you do this twice a day things will shift and you'll grow in Your Capacity to love which can't help but lead to more connection and in time you'll find that that love is shining right back at you after years of therapy a lot of people affected by early trauma are disappointed that they

don't feel better they tried whatever the therapy was it didn't work very well for them and so they decide they must really really be broken have you ever felt hopeless like that so here's a different way to think about your healing try thinking of it not as something that a professional gives to you but something that you learn to kind of harness from within maybe with professional guidance or maybe on your own you work to develop your own natural tendency to balance out your mind and your body and to bring it back from a disregulated

or stressed State back to a calm and regulated State now there are dozens of ways that you can do this if you watch my channel you know I write my fears and resentments on paper and then follow it with a restful meditation twice a day I've taught thousands of people how to do this and if you want to learn it I've put a link to a free online course that I've made down in the description section so when people take that free class they're invited to these free Zoom calls with me and one thing that

comes up a lot a question that comes up is whether it's enough to just write and meditate whether that's going to actually change their mental state or help bring them back from dysregulation so yeah re-regulation is basically what my daily practice helps you do and if you want to know what that feels like and whether it's going to be a fit for you you could just try it so another thing I get asked a lot is shouldn't I also be making a gratitude list or shouldn't I also be figuring out the original cause of my

fears and resentments and I always say you can and should do whatever works for you but just consider trying these twin techniques all by themselves just to see what happens if you don't put effort into anything else at the same time not overthinking it too much not feeling like you have to improve on it just make a space for that natural healing tendency to just kind of well up from within so we all have a natural healing tendency and it might be kind of stressed and worn out right now but with writing and meditation you're

giving it a rest and allowing it to get stronger in you my observation from using the writing and meditation techniques all these years is that healing is natural if I skin my knee that wound will heal without me having to think about it or do it right I don't have to plan it I don't have to search for root causes to heal it I don't have to write a gratitude list to make it happen and if I get a cold my immune system also will organize a fight and pretty soon I'll recover now in the

same way there's a natural tendency in us to heal from childhood PTSD without a doubt this healing tendency can get blocked or disrupted by new trauma or exhaustion or drugs or drama or distraction but when we get dysregulated our brain wants to go back toward re-regulation and so with simple healing techniques we can kind of help that along we can get out of the way so that the natural process can help bring us back to equilibrium now everybody gets dysregulated sometimes and most of us eventually re-regulate childhood PTSD makes us extra dysregulated and can make

it harder to come back from that and so the art of healing is learning how to notice the dysregulation and start ticking steps to re-regulate just on the spot if you notice you're feeling triggered stop use your techniques if you're feeling numb or spaced out take care of yourself and use your techniques to get back in your body and feel your feet on the ground when you get good at noticing dysregulation and re-regulating quickly you'll start to be able to make that inner correction almost spontaneously 20 years ago I would get disregulated and I'd have

to go hide in the bathroom at work to write my fears and resentments on paper and today more of the time I can just make that inner shift and undo that kind of tightening reflex and relax into re-regulation now some people call this self-regulation or self-soothing and with practice whatever you call it it gets easier and if the day comes that you do have access to professional help and you want to do that you're going to have so much more of a base of strength to work with you and make that successful if you have

Mastery over your inner triggers you have a lot more freedom in the outer World whatever happens you can handle it and so confidence grows in you and it's as if your world just got a whole lot bigger and a whole lot safer now it pays to know the tools that work for you for some people it's exercise for some people it's sleep for some people it's martial arts or music or hanging out with their pets or reading spiritual literature for me it's writing and meditating now you don't have to wait necessarily for a doctor or

therapist to diagnose you and talk to you and figure things out you can start doing the things that help you re-regulate right now you can un-traumatize yourself there is no harm in doing that it still have trouble believing that you can ever heal I'll tell you the image that came to me in my own early recovery from childhood PTSD when I first learned this daily practice casually while I was meditating one day without meaning to daydream I imagined myself as a blade of grass in a field just covered with wild grass a grass is going

to grow exactly like grass if you don't mess with it if it's growing in a spot where there's some sunshine and a bit of water and some decent soil not too many Gophers tearing it up or cows walking all over it it's going to grow into luscious tall grass no we've all seen dead grass maybe it got walked on too much or it didn't get enough water or it was stuck under a tarp for the summer or the stalks are bent and dried out it looks dead and then it rains and for a few weeks

nobody walks there and what happens it grows back into grass it's the nature of grass to grow into tall green stalks of grass when conditions are good and this is what I realized was true for me for all of us it's our nature to be calm and perceptive to have equilibrium inside and to have a nice fresh balanced regulated nervous system that's how we get green and Luscious and while grass doesn't have choices we do we get to seek help and get help medical help psychological help spiritual help and help is good because it can

augment the natural healing you're already doing and again if you need some help I've shared things you can try in the description section below when we step away from the source of trauma a little and calm the triggers we can't help but become a little more ourselves and that's the feeling we were missing back when we felt empty inside now we have a way to feel just right so you were born into abuse with a raging alcoholic father didn't hurt you physically but did hurt your mom while holding you and I I can only imagine

what a trauma that would have been even if you can't remember it it would definitely have gone in there about your sense of safety in the world and how much love there was to go around so when you were two she ran away with you to the U.S which I guess was another country and I guess that would have been the end of your relationship with your dad for your mom I'm sure it was quite a trauma having to run away and go to a new country so she would have been stressed and then anytime

that you did stuff she didn't like if you were just acting up like a kid she would call you you are your father's daughter aren't you and that hurt yes that is a huge insult that's a projection of by her of things that your father has done onto an innocent child and anybody with a brain knows that of course the baby is not responsible for the father's Behavior so that is such a put down and I know that for a lot of us who got told that I also got told that a little bit at

times but it's like you become ashamed you become ashamed of who you are and you're not even sure I remember one person who wrote a letter to me some months ago said she would look in the mirror and look for her father's features and go there they are they're right about me it's not cool not a good thing to do it's emotional abuse you went through every kind of abuse that a person can go through every kind you emphasize and I guess I can read between the lines of what that is but the damage is

done you say and every time you think you've healed you enter into another relationship that models the one you had with both parents all right that's what we do sounds like you're normal I'm at the point where I'm just so exhausted um you've you either get neglected and abandoned or manipulated controlled and put down and just actively treated like [ __ ] okay so those are the two variations that you've observed before and you're about to tell me about a relationship that you feel is different although you can kind of see where I'm going here

okay here's the things you've tried you've tried therapy you've watched hours of videos on YouTube Journal meditate sit with the feelings um took a year off of dating to you've even taken a year off of dating to focus on yourself after ending a relationship um when you realized it was the same pattern of tolerating mistreatment and accepting crumbs had a few dates recently with people who seem secure but you didn't feel interested and they didn't seem interested and there was no second date all right so what I wanted to say about that about things you've

tried Luna is you don't say how old you are but I'm guessing you're fairly young maybe in your 20s because the things you've tried they don't sound like you've gone very deep yet and that's really hopeful because that means that everything you listed could have been gone a little deeper like you've tried therapy I don't know how much you did I'm somebody who didn't benefit from therapy but many people do but I I wouldn't expect the depth of trauma that you've been through um I that's just something it's it's got so many layers so I

would really say if if a person goes to therapy or tries journaling or meditation or anything yes you should expect to feel better somewhat better but then you know changing the patterns and really kind of healing the Deep rooted stuff especially when it happened before you can remember that stuff it just it's a process of healing that so what I'm saying is it's totally okay that you're not all the way healed yet the pattern is going to keep showing up until the wound is healed and people say that as if like you know oh you

bad person you needed to go in there and heal the wound why haven't you yet it's because it's mysterious it's elusive we many of us actually do get that healing but it takes a lot of persistence sometimes it takes practice one part of your life will get a lot better and then you'll go oh this other part of my life I'm still struggling that's the Journey Don't despair because no matter what you're going through with healing and still suffering all of it is leading to the sort of deepening and strengthening of you as a person

the whole process is good now that you're on the other side you're out of the bad relationship you are on the other side now and everything here can be better everything can be better so don't despair that things you've tried haven't worked and sometimes it's the specific kind of therapy or technique that you use I know it was for me like you know I tried everything I thought nothing worked then I learned the techniques that I teach that are called The Daily practice and boom you know within like two weeks I had a huge transformation

I had a transformation that changed my my ability to stay regulated and sort of gave me the capacity to feel happy to be alive which was huge but it didn't immediately solve my problems with relationships that took practice and you know what you get here on my channel is you know Decades of experience learning the hard way how how not to do things and what does work and I distill it down into videos and courses and coaching programs hoping that someone like you can kind of cut through the Clutter and through the like rabbit holes

that I went down that didn't work and go right to what does work and what does work always includes an element of like facing what is really happening just facing what's really happening you're doing a very good job of noticing okay the pattern is repeating step one right why is it repeating how does that pattern get back into your life and that is usually getting in the the portal for that that bad thing to get back in and sort of twist your thinking and get you stuck in another bad situation it comes when you're feeling

magical thinking when you're going into a fog of denial I'm listing a number of things that you know people with cptsd do or we've had it so bad before that like the littlest bit of niceness seems like a step up and that might be the category that I put you in I wanted to ask a question about an emotionally unavailable man I have an interest in it's more like an obsession so right there I'm going to say yes it's more like an obsession and this diagnosis of him as emotionally unavailable I think that might be

a misapplication of that now he might be he might not be what he is is I'm just going to tell you right up front he's shown no sign of being interested in you you got one contact from him on social media and it sounds like that's the only time he ever indicated an interest in talking to you all right so an emotionally unavailable person usually that would be somebody who you're in a relationship with and they try to be in the relationship but they can't love you or they can't be present for you but this

is somebody who's just flat out unavailable it's not just emotional he's he's not there he's not even in your life you haven't had contact in four years so this is a big clue that this is a limerent relationship okay and then you say he has a Public Image because he's wealthy well so people who are wealthy probably get a lot more than the normal share of people who are interested in them and that's something to ask yourself and sometimes the reason you know if he's artistic and Wealthy you know you're not giving information about him

and I appreciate that we don't really know but if he is well known and Wealthy for his artistic abilities and he's very visible and known then sometimes that is a super attractive quality and sometimes could set off limerence and and when people have that highly visible profile it's easy to feel like we know them even when they don't really know us but I get that you were acquainted so you knew each other through common friends but never really got to know each other there was no friendship so big clue there there is not even a

friendship you don't actually know each other when you wanted to pursue a relationship with him and you say yeah I know it's unhealthy to chase a guy um well chasing a guy trying to you know trying to get a friend to set you up with somebody that's not inherently unhealthy I think it might not be strategic but it's you know that's not that's not the part that's limerent um you were hoping your friend would fix you up the thing is here he did not he didn't bite he didn't respond to that so whether your friend

did anything he had his chance to be interested in you and he he wasn't and I know that might be painful to hear Elizabeth but I just see no evidence that he is interested in you at all or was when he had the chance to meet you this happened some years ago and and I think you're saying it started like 12 years ago it went on until five years ago and you say you were very unhealthy back then you had a string of toxic relationships you had crippling anxiety and self-esteem issues so yeah sounds like

you have cptsd it showed up in your relationships and when we're in that state when you're having horrible relationships that are making you miserable and you're having crippling anxiety and your self-esteem is bad limerent relationships are just delicious you know they look so good because you can kind of Escape all of this you can escape the plane where everything's a struggle and imagine this happy relationship where you get your emotional needs met and I know you you're going to be talking about your parents here and I think that's a huge clue too that your mom

was totally self-centered couldn't be there for you your dad was unavailable so I see this again and again I'm learning so much and it's not it's not like it was unknown to the world or to the people who are Professionals in this field but what happens when you're a kid I just keep seeing this this this this pattern of cptsd where somebody wasn't even real to their parents and they become very vulnerable to relationships that aren't real and if you know what I mean by real like for parents to see the reality of their kid

they know who you are they know how you feel they care about it they're down there on the floor with you working out problems and helping you understand yourself and loving you and helping you form self-esteem at the same time as having self-awareness to know when you're not sharing your toys so it sounds like if your parents couldn't do that for you there's a way that a person doesn't doesn't feel real and I just keep seeing this over and over again so we're going to talk about how you can become more real so you were

chasing him then and he didn't seem interested and I'm just going to say since it didn't result in any kind of dating or anything this is the tough love Elizabeth he wasn't interested if a guy is interested in you he will show up he will let you know he'll be present he'll ask you out so he wasn't interested it wasn't just seem but that's the limerence going well you know there's no evidence that he's interested but I'm looking for signs I'm feeling something we have so much in common some people go into magical thinking they

think about like you know in reality he doesn't realize it yet but we're you know soul mates or he doesn't realize it yet but we had a past life together there's a lot of ways that we that we trick ourselves into so that we can keep obsessing on somebody because it's giving us comfort in a horrible emptiness and just like a drug it can kind of like get you off the hook in the moment but it ends up leading to Greater emptiness down the line and that's what's Happening Here you still haven't had the kind

of relationship that made you happy so let's assume that's the goal here and keep looking at what happened with this guy Max in light of that of how we can help you move towards it so then you said he coped with his issues using alcohol and then he got sober and your friend said so but you're not sure that he did well so that's interesting you're obsessing on somebody who has alcoholism and many of us have done that but it's just you know it's just a fact somebody who's an alcoholic is very unlikely to be

a good partner somebody who has you know you go on to say he has toxic he drink he has alcoholism he has toxic relationships he has issues so it sounds like even if he were interested in you the chances of having a great relationship with him or you know he's not in that place but there's the main problem and that is that he's not interested enough to even stay in touch with you okay that's the main thing so whether he drinks or not is not even your your concern anymore he's not in your life so

after a while you stop being interested in him and you found someone nice but broke up soon after yeah that's what we do after the breakup Max contacted you on social media and asked to talk over the phone okay so there's the big moment you were waiting for but you were not in a good mental space you had had a breakup there was a family death you are feeling terrible and you said I can't talk to you right now but will you talk to me later and you thought he would but he didn't you haven't

heard from him since then that was 2017. so I would say when if you've been kind of pursuing a guy for what was that seven years and he never took an interest and then one day he calls you he reaches out and says oh give me a call but when you say you can't talk right then or you need a little time and he doesn't call back I would just say I don't know what that call was but it wasn't any big thing where he realized that you were the one for him if he did

feel that way he would have called you back because again if a person is interested in you and I'm saying this to everybody a man or a woman they will let you know if they're interested they'll let you know especially if it's safe to be interested so the one case where people sometimes keep these things secret is if they don't think you like them but if you've been pursuing them for years they know and they will let you know if they feel the same way and he didn't okay it's sad but there it is and

this is good it's really good you know sometimes just a clear fact is so helpful to set us free so that we can move on and actually have real love right so this is a good thing this is how sometimes the news you fear is the happy news because you go yay you're free you're free you can stop obsessing on a ghost right all right so then you said a couple years after that you moved out of the country he lives in you sent a goodbye message he didn't reply so there's your 100 confirmation right

he's not in your life he's he's not in communication with you he could be but he chooses not to be all right so now you're back in your native country and you came back to live with your mom because you wanted to give her a chance and it's been a huge disappointment you know so you're in your late 30s and so a couple years ago you were still in your late 30s so it's interesting to me that you would make a move for the sake of your mom at that time but I don't know that's

probably another story but it I I get the sense of you kind of traveling around the globe trying to find the love that's going to help you get your needs met I mean your dad wasn't there at all and she was narcissistic so yeah you probably hoped I get it yeah you wanted love you wanted love and that's always what it is everything bad I've ever done everything dysfunctional I've ever did I I I did because I needed love and I was lonely so I think I think a lot of people can relate to that

so it's okay it's not your fault it's not your fault you're showing a common pattern that people get from trauma so you say sometimes I think of Max and what could have been between us and I'm not sure if this is healthy I think that sometimes thinking of people from the past there's no problem with that but when you keep thinking what could have been I think you have your answer about that and that's the fantasy it's it's it's just a temptation to go visit this fantasy where you are loved and everything's wonderful with this

you know and artistically free and you say you're artistic but and maybe you're just not telling me stuff here but I'm not hearing anything in your life where that Artistry is expressed and I think that happens too around trauma is that I believe you that you have artistic ability but it's kind of hooked on to this other person like if we could just be together I could set free this gift I have for art and that's really common but it's not true there is a such thing as people who create um a life or an

environment for you that allow you to set your gifts free but they're never the ones who treat you like crap they're never the ones who just like don't even return your calls that would not be it so then you say you remind me that he's 45 not married and with no kids you're 39. so yes those are marriageable ages that would be ideal except let's go back to the main fact he chooses not to have any contact with you and doesn't know you okay so you so yes you said goodbye he didn't reply you don't

know him well but from experience you've had about men in general he's not toxic or unsafe so Elizabeth I'm just going to say I think you should handle that with tender hands because I mean to say hold it lightly that in your past experience you haven't had good judgment about who's toxic or unsafe you've had a string of terrible relationships and so if you're like the rest of us with cptsd that isn't healed yet it's just not something you're very good at detecting in advance it's really common you didn't do anything wrong the way that

you were raised inevitably almost results in that kind of broken red flag detector but when you say I don't know it from what you're saying there's no evidence that he's not toxic or not or unsafe and the drinking in particular I mean somebody with a problem with alcohol is inherently toxic and unsafe now they might recover but but again if somebody who you had had a relationship with had with had alcoholism and you were hoping that they would get sober if they got sober that would just be like the beginning of a very long road

on the question of are they a suitable person for you when alcoholism is active the answer is no the answer is never yes with an active alcoholic it's a you know it's just a huge barrier to a real happy relationship or having your emotional needs met that's why alcoholism is such a bummer for the person who has it and the person who tries to love the alcoholics so um it's a challenge sometimes people are already married to an alcoholic and they have children and they're invested and there's all kinds of reasons to then you know

go to Al-Anon and learn how to live with the alcoholism and find peace whether the alcoholic stops drinking or not right but if you're not if this person is not even your friend I'm just saying honey you know no don't pursue out relationships with alcoholics um now that we live in different countries and don't have any contact with each other on social media I'm not sure if something's ever going to happen no I there's no evidence that anything's going to happen and even if it did um it would be random out of the blue from

somebody you don't really know so I'm going to strongly encourage you to set yourself free from any hope in this relationship so that you can have hope in real relationships so then you say my question is this is what I feel for him limerence which is obsession with the idea of a person or healthy mature love I'm just going to say by definition this is limerence because what you're into is the idea of him you don't even have a friendship with him it's not possible to have healthy mature love for somebody you don't know that

that could be admiration that could be attraction that could be Obsession but it can't be healthy mature love healthy mature love is by definition a mutual thing between people who know each other who care about each other who are invested in the best for each other who are present for each other that's healthy mature love so let's go with limerence you diagnosed it yourself then you say is it worth saving myself up for him or should I just bite the bullet and admit to myself that this was a fantasy that I indulged in and I

only got crumbs from it there again you see it Elizabeth I know you see it it is the latter it's a fantasy you indulged in and you only got crumbs from it you barely even got crumbs I mean one contact ah and then when you asked is it worth saving myself for him so there's this Noble idea of saving yourself for someone and saving yourself for someone who's actually committed to you um is one thing but saving yourself for for a person you don't even really know or have a friendship with I would say that's

more in the category of avoidance you're protecting yourself you find it safer to be in the fantasy of Future Love versus all the difficulty and the slog of actual people love and I can see why you feel that way but if you want real love the path to it is to come back down from the fantasy back down to earth back to the real men of the world who you meet who right now you're judging is boring but believe me there are all kinds of men in the world there are men who have everything that

you listed about yourself in common they have that in common with you too and they're available for a relationship and you have the opportunity you're you're at an age where it's entirely easy to date men and learn if there is some kind of mutual feeling there that could grow into real mature love real mature Love Takes Time to develop and it's pretty hard to accomplish when you're still in so much pain and self-esteem difficulty and you know just the crazy making phenomenon of cptsd when you're in that it's pretty hard to have healthy mature love

because instead what there is is what um some people call attachment hunger right you just like I I really want to be attached can't deal with real men but there's this guy I don't really know and I just remember my idea of him and it's so beautiful and I want to be in that idea but it's an idea so back to Earth back to the back to all of us boring earthlings here we're not boring we're actually quite a wonderful colorful different interesting and the reason people seem boring is because right now you're kind of

high on a fantasy and just as somebody let's say they were addicted to heroin okay if they were addicted to hair heroin and they were hanging around a bunch of people who were spending the holiday together and they weren't high on anything and they didn't drink they would think that was boring too in fact alcoholics think people who aren't drunk or boring so effectively some people would call this a form of love addiction and I'm just sort of going to put a question mark like is it an addiction I don't know it's an attachment wound

it's an attachment wound it's certainly you know it quacks like a duck it acts like an addiction this limerent idea it's like an addiction and when you're in your Addictive Behavior everything that's not that is going to feel boring nothing can seem to get in there and that's part of what com that's part of what makes it so hard to be in a limerent state is like you can't taste anything you can't smell anything metaphorically speaking you can't feel anything no one's getting through you're not getting through a huge part of yourself is kind of

up in this fog here you know where you're Imagining the relationship that you might have and you're not experiencing the person who's right in front of you and so it can be painful it can be like withdrawal to come back down out of that cloud and just be on earth and start paying attention to people and usually if the difficulty for you has been with men then women friends are going to be good if your mom has been difficult for you you know a lot of people with difficult moms don't feel a lot of trust

with women or they don't feel affinity and they find it easier to be friends with men and so one thing you're always going to hear me recommend is to find groups such as 12-step programs because you know often if you've been in an obsessive relationship there's often Financial catastrophe following that if you can't be present on Earth well earning a living is a is an earth thing so unless you're independently wealthy I'm guessing this this is an area that's hard for you so you can you can go to 12-step fellowships they're free there's group therapy

there's ways that you can be together with just women or men and women but something where there's no possibility of romance where you can just begin to practice connecting with other people and practice being real because that's what I wanted to address the little bit you told me about your childhood the narcissistic mom the unavailable dad what how I see you as somebody you're having trouble feeling the reality of yourself you are a real Flesh and Blood woman you crave love like all human beings you want to be loved by a real person who can

actually love you not an idea and you're just having trouble like connecting that the reality of yourself to a real person so you practice real relationships with people and there's a way back you practice telling the truth you practice saying how you really feel because part of being in a limerent relationship is always kind of pretending you're not as obsessed as you actually are in there and so there's this there's this way you're always sort of translating how you really feel into something you think is socially acceptable one of the signs of limerence is that

when you talk to your friends about this person you're so excited about they're always like you know they're acting like oh gosh we're sick of hearing about this guy or hmm you know they're worried about you when you talk about them they don't they're not quite on board with it that's a sign and obviously there would be exceptions like some friends just can't get behind some some love interest but in this case seven years of pursuing a guy and he wasn't interested at all I'm guessing your friends were sort of like getting a little tired

of your quest right so so pay attention to what people think and become yourself start telling the truth those friends in that other country they're not around where you are right now there are people in groups who you can get together with and you can just talk about this you can say you know I feel like I want to go on a date what I'm worried about is this or you can say I'm having memories about this guy I would try to avoid social situations or groups where continuing to talk about or think about this

guy Max is encouraged or tolerated that's that sometimes is my unique perspective and some people don't like it but I'm telling you if you want to get over anybody whether they were actually in your life or that it's a limerent thing stop talking about them number one stop talking about them number two make yourself stop thinking about them when you catch yourself thinking about them say I gotta oh I gotta stop thinking about that and give yourself a few go-to things that you can put your mind on you know a nice piece of music a

cold drink of water run up and down the stairs or some happy memory some something that comforts you where you can just push your mind instead it's kind of hard to 100 control your mind but go in this direction just take them off your mind when they say that phrase watch that man out of your hair that's how you do it you watch them out of your thinking you wash them out of your thoughts thinking about him is you leaving your life it's you going off because you know it's not just a fantasy is it

it's kind of like the world of the dead it's a world where there is no love and there is no interaction and there is no contact it's like the world of the dead so come back Elizabeth come back to the world of the living where we can love you and we can hear you okay so one thing you said that was that I thought was important here you said I feel if I don't cut ties with him I'll wait for that social media message from him for the rest of my life and will stay single

forever you don't even have ties with him to cut but the ties that you have with him are mental with the idea of him and that is I would totally encourage you to cut those ties it'll be sad at first but you'll be surprised how quickly it feels better it feels like um clean it feels peaceful to cut ties with an idea that's been torturing you and that's what I'm hearing you had said that it's safer to stay in the past because you know what to expect from it I know how it will go uh-huh

I just don't see anything safe about being alone for the rest of your life that doesn't sound very safe at all change is unpredictable and it does give you anxiety and I totally understand it the future the future is Bumpy and bright it's both wonderful and scary and that's a fact we're all going to get hurt again here and there but as you continue to recover and you keep yourself out of fantasy and here on Earth you can start to grow your open-hearted capacity to be solid with two feet on the ground and showing love

and that's the kind of person a healthy person can love and I want you to have a healthy person to love Elizabeth and who will love you right back in the same measure I used to think self-care was just hot baths and chocolate for people whose problems were so small that they would actually solve them with chocolate but 25 years of continuous healing and strength building has taught me that while it's true that self-care by itself probably won't heal childhood PTSD it makes healing more possible and it definitely makes it more sustainable how many times

have you had some healing breakthrough from a book or Retreat or a new healing technique or a new boyfriend and then within like three days you're feeling more dysregulated and dysfunctional than ever for me so many times because I made the mistake of thinking that the new thing du jour was going to be the whole fix for all time now wouldn't that be nice if everything would just be okay forever right but that's not how healing Works recovery from childhood PTSD doesn't happen because of one-time treatments it happens because of multiple things that you use

consistently over time it's not a pill you take it's more like a stack of pancakes and here's what I mean you probably know how important it is that you get adequate sleep for example and this would be true even if you'd never had any trauma at all a lack of sleep not only wears us down physically but degrades our cognition weakens our ability to self-regulate emotionally and amplifies virtually all the problems associated with early trauma like depression addiction anxiety and even heart disease and cancer so if you get only a little sleep one night and

that's the only thing that's going wrong for you you're probably going to be fine but if you had a day where you had no exercise size and you ate a bunch of bread and ice cream and no protein and you watched five hours of TV and had four glasses of wine and had an argument with your partner and then you lost a couple hours of sleep then the lack of sleep could be the last pancake on your stack and that's the thing on top of everything else that pushes you over the edge into being a

mess with yelling and dissociation and tears and then two full days of brain fog and the clumsiness that goes with that and all of that before you feel like yourself again and it's hard to know what sets you off because whichever is the last pancake on the stack is different every time the trigger is actually the full stack of pancakes and that's what you want to pay attention to because health problems can be a huge obstacle to Healing you know that vigorous exercise is one of the most powerful healing strategies available for PTSD but you

can't do it when you feel terrible from bad food and bad sleep or when you're sick and I know this better than you might think it becomes a vicious circle because if you're trying to do your life day after day under the burden of a fairly large bunch of Health stressors which I'm calling pancakes the dysregulation you're feeling is probably also happening at the level of your nervous system and you can't feel that necessarily but it's making you sick The increased rates of disease from childhood PTSD is well known and it's measurable and the more

trauma you had as a kid the higher the probability that you'll bump into serious health problems as an adult not just the problems you'd expect to be risks for traumatized people like depression addiction anxiety and behavioral things but diabetes obesity heart disease autoimmune disease cancer chronic pain migraines Strokes and please don't internalize this as your inevitable fate it's not your fate your risk is higher but not everyone is affected and what you can do to lower your risk right now is heal from childhood PTSD and this means mastering re-regulation changing the things in your life

that are beating you down and taking beautiful imperfect but substantial care of yourself now I get this in comments a lot people say oh it's so easy for you to heal because you have no idea how bad it is for me what I go through well to those people I say yes I know and if you think I haven't been at the bottom of the totem pole and stuck in hospitals and broke and sick and sad and hopeless you just haven't heard enough of my story every person is different but where you see me today

is not where I always was and where you are now doesn't have to be where you always stay everybody knows that crappy experiences in our childhood can end up causing a whole slew of symptoms in our adult life stuff like depression anxiety relationship problems health problems difficulties with learning and paying attention and memory one name for these symptoms is childhood PTSD and if you think you have it you've probably tried all kinds of treatments from therapy and books and counseling and support groups and even medication but if you're like most people I talk to these

normal people Solutions are only kind of effective they work for a while so long as you're going to the class or until the insurance runs out but after that you're kind of on your own worried scared you're going to slip back into all the symptoms of PTSD that's what used to happen to me I was trying to get my life together and I was willing to follow all that good smart advice from the people in my life but it wasn't helping me I would go to therapy three times a week and when I came out

I would feel worse than when the hour started I was worried about how I was going to get even the like two or three days to the next appointment but now I know that those Solutions have this one big piece missing for people with childhood PTSD there are things that you can do right now that totally work but you have to understand what the real underlying problem is until recently the effects on us as adults were thought to be almost entirely psychological they thought we had developed negative self-esteem negative beliefs about ourselves maybe thought that

we deserve to be in bad relationships that kind of thing now this may be partially true in some people but it's not the whole story not at all so sure childhood trauma can cause psychological problems but the really important thing for us is that it can cause brain changes so the effects are not just psychological but neurological and neurological problems can manifest in every part of our Lives it can result in physical health problems like diabetes and heart disease but it can also manifest as emotional problems like depression or uncontrollable anger or it can manifest

in behaviors that in theory we can control stuff like drug and alcohol abuse risky sex getting into abusive relationships or the opposite avoiding everyone so these things start as neurological changes and then become psychological issues that then become self-destructive behaviors so you can talk to a therapist about the behaviors or about the psychological issues but if your brain is just sending compromised signals to other parts of your brain or to your organs you have a problem that's really hard to talk your way out of and that's not really how we were trained to think about

it right you're supposed to talk about your problems but when you have PTSD talking about it can sometimes make it worse than if you weren't to talk about it so if you're relating to this so far then you're probably all too familiar with that feeling that you're kind of going down this path in life and you're getting really freaked out and you don't know how you got there and you don't know how you can dig your way out so here's the missing piece the underlying problem in childhood PTSD is dysregulation first we get dysregulated in

the brain now you probably know the feeling really well maybe your emotions go up through the roof and then they go really flat and you say things you don't mean or you get very spaced out and you do things like getting lost driving through your own neighborhood or you walk into a room and you don't know why you came in there or you lose your train of thought in the middle of trying to speak a sentence or you get clumsy and you trip and you drop things these are the telltale signs that you're normally well-regulated

brain has gone dysregulated it's a little bit out of whack if they did an MRI on you they might see whole sections that have gone dark there's no activity there or they'd see areas that are unusually lit up and not communicating well with the other parts of the brain that they're supposed to communicate smoothly with after a while our brains will gradually come back to a regulated state but when you're suffering with childhood PTSD you're spending way too much time in that dysregulated state and it's really limiting disregulated people can't think straight they can't make

good decisions their judgment is wrong research has shown that people who had a really rough childhood can sometimes have a lot of difficulty being aware when danger is at hand or a loss is about to happen and they can't adjust their behavior accordingly do you ever feel like you just keep walking into the same problem over and over again and you didn't see it coming it's really easy to spot in other people but when you have childhood PTSD it's sort of like you wake up and you go how did I get here again now psychological

problems respond to talking and reason but neurological problems have to be addressed a little differently when I learned how to re-regulate my brain whenever I needed to then I could start to rehabilitate every part of my life that had been damaged before I started to feel the best parts of myself coming back online my intelligence my compassion my ability to connect with people and to form lovely nourishing safe relationships I could follow through on plans I made I could be responsible I could be healthy I could be safe I could be happy if dysregulation is

the underlying problem then a purely psychological approach is only going to be able to get us a little temporary relief which is not entirely a bad thing but it's not going to get us a permanent change out of the suckiness of having PTSD for lasting change we need to get our brains working again to re-regulate them and with that done then we can begin to re-regulate our emotions taking them back from extremes of numbness and hyperintensity back to Center and from there we can begin to re-regulate our decisions and our behaviors and take them back

from the extremes that we're prone to with childhood PTSD of too much and too little why do so few people make real progress recovering from the long-term effects of childhood trauma if you ask me it's because of the misguided belief that telling the story of what happened in the past if we just probe the memories enough or generate enough emotions around those memories that it'll somehow make everything better this like cultural belief in the story dominates the kind of help that any of us can get when we ask for help and it dominates decisions about

what health insurance will cover and that dictates what you can get yet the evidence suggests that this hard focus on memories and feelings just doesn't heal trauma I'm Anna Runkle also known as the crappy childhood fairy and I want to show you a different way to approach healing from the long-term effects of abuse and neglect in childhood one that is based more closely on science and Recent research about the real nature of trauma now compared to the memories and emotions approach you know where you would get asked tell me what happened in your childhood and

What feelings come up for you around that these are not irrelevant questions but the approach I'm about to show you more accurately targets the real problem with childhood PTSD or complex PTSD that's what it's called when the trauma symptoms come from long-term ongoing exposure to intense stress which is what happens for abused and neglected kids and the approach that I'm going to show you points you more directly to the spots where you need healing and where healing is actually possible right you can't change what happened in the past but you can work on healing your

symptoms right now and present time is a powerful place to be when you're healing and as a survivor of early trauma myself I can tell you firsthand how important it is to have tools in your hands all the time tools to help you handle cptsd symptoms right when they're happening not just in weekly appointments if you're even lucky enough to have those but right now on your sofa in your car on the bus at work we have to have a way to get relief from that intense distress when the old stuff is triggered we are

so vulnerable in those moments and when we're triggered is when all the bad stuff happens the emotional outbursts that hurt our relationships the terrible choices the loss of focus that has cost us money and time and progress in our careers I mean if you had a way to prevent the life catastrophes that have happened for you when your cptsd symptoms were triggered your life could be very very different do you agree so I'll come back to triggers in a moment but any Solution that's genuinely going to help you heal the trauma and turn around the

damage that it's caused you in your relationships your career your family life your mental and physical health it has to both give you relief now and it has to give you a way to make lasting changes so that a year from now or 10 years from now or even a month from now you can look back and say yeah I'm happier and stronger and more free now to live the way that I want to live now I'm not talking about external circumstances I'm talking about internal limitations the way that we avoid sticking our necks out

to go for what we want we latch onto sick relationships and then we don't leave we spend years avoiding people in social situations that are hard for us just because it's too triggering now if your cptsd symptoms are going to pop up every time you try to expand your life it really is safer to avoid life so you can see how we got into this kind of scared stuck oh what's the point place where we don't do what we want to do we might be holding on to justifications for playing it small like oh people

are so awful or the world never gives a chance to people like me but the truth is that when we haven't learned to manage and heal our cptsd symptoms making our world small is pretty much our only defense against triggers that we can't control now you're probably like me you've tried you've railed against the world you've probably noticed that it's actually not really possible to make triggering events stop happening not forever you leave one situation then you get yourself into another one the triggers are going to keep coming because that is the nature of life

that's how the world is all you can really change is your triggered reaction your response and when you no longer get triggered by certain things that flood you with adrenaline and emotion and throw you onto a Shaky Ground when you no longer get triggered by it it's not a trigger anymore that's how you get free whether you tell the story of your past trauma three times or a thousand times it's your triggered reaction to events that are beyond your control that will block your healing every time so how do you diffuse the triggers I'm going

to tell you how I've done it for myself and what I teach my students obviously people are different and there are many approaches but I've tried to keep it really simple and doable and have therefore narrowed it down to just three aspects of complex PTSD these aspects are where I believe the trouble all is concentrated they're the primary manifestations of our adult symptoms and likewise they're the big areas of opportunity for healing it's where you can focus the three things are one dysregulation of the brain nervous system and emotions two difficulty forming and handling relationships

with other people and three a tendency to fall into self-defeating behaviors so dysregulation disconnection and self-defeating behaviors I call these the trauma Trifecta is kind of a goofy term but it works to describe the three sources of virtually all of our cptsd related problems dysregulation disconnection and self-defeating behaviors these three affect every level of our being our thoughts our emotions our work our relationships our neurology our physiology basically everything now we know scientifically that all these parts of life are are directly impacted by past trauma but what's causing that what's causing the symptoms right now

it's not the past directly anymore it's our ingrained reaction to day-to-day life right now and this is good news because it's pretty hard to change the world when you're focusing all your healing on other people in the past those are two things you cannot change you might learn more or make discoveries about why you are the way you are but healing is rarely cognitive it's it's not all about knowing I wish it were a lot more people would be healed we know a lot healing might involve knowing but mostly it's about changing taking action practicing

strengthening your ability to re-regulate yourself to form good relationships with other people and to set boundaries and to just stop sabotaging yourself with destructive choices they cause waste and tragedy in your life they set you back from everything you're trying to do the focus has to shift from what other people did to what we are doing that re-traumatizes us and what we're not doing that needs to be done if we're going to become our real selves and live life for real it's easier said than done I know but that's how we heal it's totally possible

that's why I'm saying recovering old memories and feeling your feelings it's it's nice it's part of the journey but it isn't going to be enough what we need is more concrete and present time Solutions than that what we need is a way to get emotional relief right away when we're triggered we need a way to neutralize triggers so we're not held hostage by people and circumstances we can't control just because they set us off and we need to honestly face the life problems that have piled up in our lives that's what happens when you have

cptsd you get life problems and there's no way out but through these three things dysregulation disconnection and self-defeating Behavior have a way of flowing into each other one causes the other and that in turn makes the other thing worse and what they all have in common and this is important because this is where we have aha an opportunity to break that cycle what they have in common is that they're all activated by triggers if you don't get triggered these Tendencies may not even show up from day to day when you're calm and you don't disregulate

and that in turn makes it easier to connect to people and feeling connected calms the tendency towards self-defeating behavior and that leaves you calmer and more regulated well that is how the path to Healing unfolds one step after another they flow so for right now where do you start where can you break that cycle where can you strike a crack into the into it and change the dynamic the answer is absolutely anywhere in the circle you can start anywhere you find the opportunity you can learn to re-regulate I have a free course to get you

started on that the daily practice I'll link that in the description section too you can change a self-defeating Behavior maybe start with something easy to change or you can practice being more present with people who are in your life right now and consciously develop Your Capacity to feel connected any one of these little things you do will have a ripple effect and make it easier to do the next thing which can be anywhere else in the circle you don't have to push so hard that you freak out and give up don't do that just take

small steps every day there is no more powerful strategy for integrating real change in your life over time then small steps taken consistently you'll hear me say that over and over again what doesn't work is just avoiding the whole thing and trying to get to the end of your life without more trouble all right you've probably already spent some time doing that and that's sad what doesn't work is Raging or venting or demanding that people apologize or change so that you don't have to feel your triggers nobody could blame us for wanting that but I'm

telling you it doesn't fix cptsd and it doesn't work to blame other people for giving you the wrong kind of help you're always going to need your own tools the solution is to get more regulated more connected and more committed to supporting yourself you're a good Soul no matter what you struggle with I want to show you the big picture what I've noticed from my own life and from teaching and coaching thousands of people who suffer with PTSD symptoms from childhood and what I've noticed is that healing tends to flow through five crucial phases okay

so the first phase of healing is to realize what trauma is actually doing to you obviously everybody's different but the effects of abuse and neglect in childhood tend to follow very common patterns they're so common that I think you'll find it comforting to find out that no a lot of your challenges and mistakes are not as you may have thought some kind of personal failure when you learn the common effects of trauma this is something I teach in all my courses you're going to find out how many of your problems are normal you can totally

let go of all the blame on yourself you don't have some kind of crazy preference for drama you're not seeking out people who hurt you you're not trying to recreate your childhood have you ever been told these things the common symptoms of cptsd from childhood are normal responses to abnormal circumstances during your developmental years yes there are psychological elements yes we sometimes sabotage ourselves but at its root cptsd is a neurological injury that disrupts brain and body systems and this affects your health it can cause chronic disease it can cause learning problems relationship problems financial

problems depression anxiety addiction and this is a big one that gets overlooked it can make it impossible to make clear-headed decisions right when you need to make a clear-headed decision there's a lot of wrong information out there you see it on TV and movies a lot a traumatized person finally just talks about it and everything magically gets better if only it were that easy right of course it looks from the outside like we just aren't seeing that we're traumatized we're not admitting what's actually at the root of our problems it looks like that because our

actions don't make sense we probably seem diluted and it makes no sense that we would keep making the same self-sabotaging mistake over and over so to someone who doesn't have cptsd it's easy to assume this is some kind of decision we're making or a choice and if someone believes that they can dress it up with all kinds of reasoning about why that would be but the Telltale sign that an idea or an assessment isn't really the right one in your case is that applying it doesn't do anything for you results matter there might be a

tiny puff of belief when you first hear an explanation for your symptoms oh you just you just want things to be bad but if you give it a few days and it still doesn't work well there It Is Knowing some idea of what's wrong with you is not a solution if it doesn't lead to you healing it might work for other people but if it doesn't work for you you know it's an idea not a solution and if your failure to respond to Common treatments is making you feel ashamed like there's something wrong with you

then internalizing this it's just a misunderstanding it's wrong information this should come as a relief we now have a much better understanding of what trauma actually does to people you're not a bad person you're normal your symptoms are not your fault knowing this is the first crucial phase of healing the second phase of healing is to understand the root cause of your symptoms for most people this is dysregulation chronic stress and Trauma in childhood can cause brain and nervous system changes that affect every system of the body those normally regulated systems become dysregulated and you'll

hear me use that word all the time dysregulated there's emotional dysregulation and there's neurological dysregulation including dysregulation of brain activity from like a flowing pattern to a chaotic pattern and this in turn leads to dysregulation of hormones and chemical signals that govern your immune system your heart function your reproductive system your metabolism your attention span your ability to stay calm and present and not melt down emotionally or your tendency to totally space out at crucial moments and in this stage of healing you learn to notice when dysregulation is happening what are the signs that you

have it what triggers seem to set it off this sets off a huge wave of growth for the people that I work with just like it did for me they'll often say oh my God that's what I have no one's ever described this before and and it's the dysregulation that throws me off every time now if you have that that's what's made it almost impossible to stop making those same mistakes it's made it impossible to solve problems in your life that seem to just hang around or get worse even though you do everything right it's

the dysregulation and guess what you can learn to re-regulate you can learn to do that it's strange at first and it'll surprise the heck out of you to find that simple techniques can stop a trigger from turning into an upset and then a full day or three days of dysregulation you might still get dysregulated sometimes but you'll notice it sooner and you'll be able to turn it around quickly and get back to being okay and doing what you're doing focusing being calm when you're regulated you're a lot less likely to lose your temper or have

an anxiety attack or feel overwhelmed or overeat you have a way out of all that and when you're free so many things in life become possible I love teaching people about this in my coaching programs because it's one thing to read about how to re-regulate or watch a video about it but being in a small group connecting every week with people who know you and sharing what you're trying what you're noticing having people hear you and be happy for you and sharing their discoveries about what works you know I get to see this light go

on in everyone's eyes like oh that's it we're not failures we're not stupid we're dysregulated and this can be healed and we watch each other do it you can see this transformation in people and so that is the third crucial phase of healing learning to connect with other people this is probably the single harshest impact of childhood trauma on your adult life feeling like an outsider feeling like you didn't get the memo on how to act or you're good at acting like you're fine but you never feel like you're safe to be yourself you feel

lonely even in a crowd and of course romantic relationships can be dreadful for us we can get obsessive we could end up having no relationships it's not supposed to be this way and I say it again and again childhood PTSD is an injury to our ability to connect with other people it's an injury but this capacity to connect can be learned when you're more regulated it's easier to connect and it works the other way more connection handled slowly and consciously can help you get more regulated so healing is kind of an upward spiral it's not

a straight line and sometimes it goes fast and then slow and fast and slow but you can keep progressing if you stick with it the fourth crucial phase of healing is all about facing your own self-defeating behaviors do you ruin relationships with anger are you isolating do you have addictions or a problem with food and weight that's hurting your health do you feel stuck in an abusive relationship these are all trauma related and a lot of traumatized people stay stuck with these problems all their lives when you're re-regulated and connected a little more you can

begin to change these that is sacred and honorable work to keep facing your own mistakes don't be shy of it it feels good making day-to-day changes in a positive direction this is where Life starts to get much more open much more happy and then comes the fifth crucial phase of healing and that's when you're able to shed your old limited idea of yourself stuck in resentment or hopelessness or paralysis or trying to please people who are never going to be pleased with anything you do anyway this is the phase where you're able to discover who

you really are the real you and the gifts that you were meant to bring into the world this is the phase of joy and sharing and healing with others what I'm seeing as I hear from all the people in the channel in my in my online community who engage with my content about patterns that are helpful and patterns that really just make people who want to heal feel miserable okay so I noticed two basic self-concepts out there the first is what I notice in people who are working hard to figure out the problem caused by

their experiences and to find the solutions that seem to help them get better now not everything they've tried may have been helpful but they're active in this project and noticing where they get lifted up and where they fall short and when they comment they'll tell you these little nuggets of wisdom they'll say you know I tried X I did y I did Z and X was horrible y was okay but Z was amazing and that's what really helped me and there are clear signs that someone is healing too that they get along better with people

they feel more at ease in groups or when they're alone and their talents and Gifts start emerging and filling up their lives with purpose and hopefulness and and and a helpfulness for other people as well and they'll begin to tell you that so for this first group they're subscribing to my channel because and this is what they tell me it's practical it's solution oriented and it's based on not just Theory but real experience that they can relate to they feel seen they feel not alone anymore I love that I feel that way too and for

people who are having a breakthrough in their healing like this it is so exciting to try out new tools new ideas and see if there's something in there that they can use they want inspiration they want to hear how other people heal they want action steps they're ready to go now you can tell I'm very fond of this group right I also love the second group but these are the folks where the Breakthrough hasn't happened yet they're they're good people they've worked really hard on their healing and a lot of them are knowledgeable about the

treatments out there and they've tried a lot of them but the healing hasn't come yet and so this group is really really discouraged and they they come to feel helpless and hopeless and you can see it in the comments they write now deep down inside they've stopped believing that healing is possible for them and all that leaves them and you see it in their comments is bitterness so people who are going through this will have a lot to say about things outside of themselves family members exes Society the people who said they would help them

but couldn't or wouldn't anybody who made them feel unimportant and unseen and unloved and that's all real and I know it hurt them people in this state of discouragement can tell you very clearly what's wrong with all this what ought to change and what their pain is like they're very very in touch with their pain and most of us have been there that's part of it right for all of us but this second group this discouraged and stuck group what's also clear is that they have a very vague or non-existent concept of themselves of what

they would be like without that emotional pain the pain becomes everything as if it's who they are and so they can't see themselves in a different future state where things have changed for the better they can't even imagine it what they might be like what day-to-day life would feel like if they weren't trapped inside their own symptoms so that's what I mean by stuck now getting stuck in pain and isolation is a very traumatized thing to do it happens to everybody sometimes but if you want to break out of that you have to do what

I call breaking the wheel and what I mean by the wheel is the churning negative thinking and emotion states that go round and round with us the blame the obsession with people who hurt you the struggles the failures the ways that you were never accepted or seen in the stories that you told yourself over and over about why you are the way you are and it's not that these stories are not true necessarily but if we can't stop the spinning the wheel just gets stronger and faster it's like a centrifuge right something spinning that throws

off and scatters everything that comes near it it throws off people who love us it throws off wonderful opportunities it throws off Financial Security and joy right all gone Noel is very seductive at the same time and that's why I use this metaphor you can't just slow the wheel down you don't ask it a lot of questions or analyze the trajectory of everything that's flying around the room you just have to take a big metaphorical stick and shove it in there and break that wheel and don't worry the wheel's made of air and when you

break it the whole thing evaporates it's not going to hit you in the face with fragments or anything it just evaporates it's gone it's like waking up from a bad dream you thought the wheel got the better of you but it didn't and you thought it protected you but it actually just kept you stuck in pain and made you seem nothing but helplessness but you know what you're not helpless there's a whole wide world of experiences out there if you can get a little breathing room just to get started from that cycle of fear and

anger and Analysis and diagnosis and blame and then fear again thinking and talking about this stuff doesn't make it go away it goes away and remember all you need is just a little bit of breathing room it goes away when just for a moment you can just release the story open yourself up to a fresh and new experience of yourself and your capabilities in present time the focus needs to come off of time past and other people and on to the only thing you can heal which is yourself and the knowledge that right here right

now through practical steps you open the door to that healing process by changing your mental state not helpless hopeful and for there to be hope you need to have a vision an ideal you need to have a belief that healing is possible inside inside your own healing whether or not other people change whether or not circumstances change this is the crucial sign that someone is on a good path they recognize their own agency do you know that term they begin to see choices that they can make even when cptsd puts nothing but hard choices in

front of them you always have a choice and despite the symptoms you have today you can move one foot in front of the other toward the healed life that you deserve now you can choose to learn a new way to respond to the inevitable stressors and hardships of Life they will never stop life's going to keep throwing this stuff at you but you can change it starts in here it starts in the way that you regard the possibility of your own healing can you see it do you believe it's possible that things could be better

and easier in the future than they are right now and are you willing to make some changes starting with the way you talk to yourself about your trauma because if you're telling yourself that you're hopelessly screwed up then whether you mean to or not you're disconnecting with your life and all the people in it people generally have a lot of compassion but when they sense that negative wheel is spinning it's like a hum you can feel it in other people right and it makes you want to pull away so it ends up isolating you when

you go there the very thing you're longing for isn't happening for you when that wheel is spinning and you're like why can I not get some support why doesn't anyone believe in me can't they see that I need some help and that is a really hard place to be and worst of all that Spinning Wheel of negative ideas about yourself blinds you to who you really are to all the good things that you're capable of bringing to this world your life is real your life is important so how do you even begin and this is

one of the reasons childhood PTSD is so hard is because it can make even Little Steps just seem overwhelming and God forbid there's a whole list of things that you need to do and you know it it can be paralyzing but if today you can just do one thing I'll keep it really simple for you just get it into your mind what it will feel like when your PTSD reactions to life are reduced you want to give it a try let's take a minute and I'll walk you through it imagine you're in a stressful situation

you're making a mistake at work or visiting your family or getting your feelings hurt by a friend who lets you down pick something that's both hard for you but also that's likely to happen at some point in your future it's realistic now remember what it's like when your cptsd triggers start firing up and that wheel starts to spin here it goes and you start getting dysregulated and you start reacting in the old ways you hate you feel tight your heart races you want to lash out maybe you start getting numb and you get scared that's

that same old part of you that always comes out when you're triggered is going to happen one more time okay now let that go now imagine you're in that situation the bad thing happens but now your PTSD symptoms are 50 less you feel a little rise when you're triggered but it doesn't go over the top you don't lose control you still have choices about the words you say your facial expression the harsh thoughts that are going through your head you you can see them but you can decide not to say anything in the moment would

a 50 reduction in symptoms change how that all turned out okay probably right same situation but this time let's take the symptoms down a little more to say 20 of what you're used to what would that be like the bad thing happens you feel it it hurts but it doesn't carry you away would you be able to express yourself better would you be able to stay present and keep your choices could the relationship that in the past would have blown up in your face instead survive without damage even though something hurt your feelings would it

make a difference in your life if you could do that long term whenever stressful situations come up right would strength in this area allow you to change some of your circumstances would it be easier than to make friends with people who fit you a little better than the ones you have right now in your life and if that were all going well could you imagine other things going well your relationship with a partner your career your physical health your ability to share your gifts with the world well now you just joined the ranks of the

first group I mentioned that's how you do it the ones who can see imagine a better future and the ones who are more likely than anybody else to actually make it there starts by allowing yourself to believe that you're capable of changing your life foreign [Music]