Why Your Productivity is a Roller Coaster (4-video compilation)

if you had trauma in the past you probably struggle sometimes to get things done to stick with things that you begin so why is that even when you're actively healing PTSD from childhood there are trauma patterns that can come out of nowhere that can make you fragile at times one day you feel like you're good you're full of energy and ambition and you're focused you're working hard and then the next day you're like hey why why don't I step up a little here and you take on something new or you put yourself out there in

a new way and then bam you crash it's a thing trauma survivors do like a cycle or a wave pattern you know have you had that where you go up you go up you're doing good you keep busy and then you withdraw it's it's not depression that I'm talking about here it's more like going into a shell is it bad it be very bad it can ruin your chances of success in life people don't really talk about this but I've seen it over and over again I suffered with it myself and yes there is a

way to heal it so here's what crashing looks like first complex PTSD involves neurological disregulation that can activate when you're under stress or sometimes for no reason at all when you're disregulated it can be hard to focus you get spaced out you can't really feel how much time time is passing and you feel really sensitive sometimes or even overreactive to negative things like criticism or feeling left out so these subtle ups and downs of neurological functioning and there are so many of them you know in your life throughout the day it means that working 8

hours straight on a regular schedule is like forcing a square peg into a round hole I've noticed that people with past trauma more than most people work in irregular bursts Sprints and and quiet times when you're on a roll you can focus for a period of time it might be hours it might be days if you're lucky could be even longer than that oh that's a happy state right so let's call that humming along and then usually following a big step that you take because you have some confidence because you've been humming along H you

crash and crashes don't always look like anything but they are very much something it's a terrible counterveiling force that comes to pull you back down when you start getting a little too free a little too real a little too open and that fragile side of you reaches in and tries to just pull you back where it thinks you're safe down here so the motivation is safety to pull you back down you know something in you is trying to keep you safe but the outcome is self-sabotage so you get a promotion you feel guilty or you

lose some weight you gain it back and you get a little money you waste it cptsd feels uncomfortable when you ascend to a new level Now crashes aren't always devastating or life- destroying it's usually more like a period of sleepiness or vagueness or sometimes resentment or resistance you know you have your reasons like I I really don't want to be productive right now that's what it feels like in the moment it doesn't look like any big thing necessarily you might stop going to work but usually you keep going to work and you keep going to

the things that you go to but you're totally hiding if you're not trying to do anything big in your life you can hide that pretty well but if you're trying to do something big and you're crashing you might keep showing up for work but things you know it might be not be dramatic it's just that things don't go anywhere you know you take on a project and it goes on longer than you thought it's not really getting off the ground everyone knows what that's like the project gets no lift off you make a start but

you can't get it done or you never start it's just talking about it I know that one and because it's cyclical eventually you'll have the urge to try something again maybe months or years later when things have been going well for you and you've got a little momentum you know and then you put yourself out there and Bam the crash cycle begins again so there are hard crashes and there are subtle crashes which can be just as destructive to anything real and true and important you're trying to create in your life for me it was

back when I wrote my first book when I made my first film also I did really well for a first timer in both of those areas and I was encouraged for real to keep pursuing both of those things film and writing but it was hard work and it involved a lot of putting myself out there and even getting some criticism and feeling exposed to the public and I remember after the film was done a woman friend who had participated at a couple of the shoots as an extra was talking to me and it was this

great little film everybody in it and their families came to the screening we had a party the film won an award and I was over the moon with my accomplishment you know I did it all in my spare time while I held down a full-time day job as an admin assistant at a hospital and this woman friend who had some issues of her own just out of the blue said something like you think everybody had a had a fun time but actually it was really awful for everyone because you were awful and she called she

said I was a and I started crying and I really took it in like I believed her and I was I remember I was sitting on the floor next to the coffee table in her living room and she said yeah you know it wasn't just me it was everyone who felt this way and it was like you know it's was like a knife in my heart and I felt ashamed and that night I I called everybody who had been in the film and I asked them you know was it really was I really bad and

they all said no no that was really fun you were fine we loved it that was great let's do it again but what did I do I gave up I crashed I learned so much from making my first film and instead of taking all that learning and fun and making another one I turned against myself I kept just being an admin assistant and instead of writing scripts and setting up shoots with my friends I just fell back into watching TV at night like for years and this happened with my book too the book did well

and I started getting all these invitations to speak and be on radio shows and to write columns but I had a boss at the time in my day job who said that the head of the whole organization had said that my writing was a conflict of interest and that if I wrote any more I'd be fired well my boss said you know that if it were up to him of course I could write but you know the boss's boss wasn't okay with it I did stop writing but 2 years later I was at a conference

with the president of the big National Organization who had supposedly said this that I couldn't do it anymore and I asked her and I said you know I now that we're kind of friends I just want to ask about something that happened a couple years ago you know I I wrote a book it was doing really well and you said I had to stop writing or I'd get fired and she was just like what I never said that I would never say that we want people who are you know ambitious like that we loved your

book we thought it was great we bought it we we loved it I could hardly even compute it for a minute I was like what so I was like okay thank you but what I had to face is that the boss that I had been working with for years sabotaged me that he you know shut me down out of who knows we can speculate if he was jealous or I don't know I don't I can't really see a scenario where he was sincerely worried that I wouldn't do my job I did a great job on

that job so I was faced with the horrible reality that somebody I trusted would do that to me and so what did I do did I go back to him and say Hey you told me your boss said I couldn't publish again or I'd get fired but that's not true like I know her really well now and she didn't do that so why did you threaten my livelihood like that why did you make me stop doing this great thing that was making me successful well that's not what I said I said nothing I never said

anything I crashed so I kept working for him for years and because I participated in his sabotage of me I didn't write again for 18 years until I started the crappy childhood fairy blog in all I worked under that guy for 10 years and I wish I had just cut it short as soon as I recognized that that kind of level of sabotage was going on it was such a dead end for me but because I took took it on inside and got you know Frozen and melted down and then also then I was having

kids and all these things happened that I didn't carry on so technically I could have written but sometimes the greatness in you is held back by a fear that seems small but is so significant that you could go your whole life never becoming your real self or doing the the really good thing that you're capable of doing so until I started crappy childhood fairy uh I didn't write and now I write and write and right and I do it every week I do it every day so six plus years ago I wrote my first blog

post for crappy childhood fairy and I was very Rusty at first I had a really hard time getting anything on paper I did a blog post I don't know first maybe every month or something sometimes I go three months it was really hard to do and I was doing it on the side on top of the job I already had and what happened was that Movement Like beginning you just start writing and then you get momentum like something is liberated in you because now you're Freer and I'm Freer because every year that goes by in

my life I've used my daily practice more and more to really like like unearth the the real me out of all the fearful and resentful thoughts that have been just suppressing me and thinking I had to go along with somebody who would tell me I can't write or I'd lose my job right so I'm following my calling and if you're going to do that and I I Rec recommend you you seek that out because this is where happiness is where you really get to do what you're best at What You're Made to do but you

you get stuck from doing it when you feel suppressed by your life circumstances by the fear and resentment that you've got and how that will manifest is that you try but you cannot sustain it that's what a crash is it's just it's the unsustainability of you following your natural path so you're making it sustainable and until you can do that when you're suppressed like that through outer things and inner things when you can't get yourself you know just out there to do what you were made to do you will feel frustrated there will be a

low-level depression every time you think about it you'll be confronted sometimes with the indignity and the sort of insult of people being hard on you about doing things that were not really what you were meant to be doing anyway and you took the job so it's their right to expect you to do the job right but you took the wrong job you followed the wrong path because you were you were so accustomed to crashing you thought that you could not dare to follow the path you wanted so it's all about get back on your path

get back on your path and make it sustainable for yourself so how do you do that here it is I learned to modulate my crashes that means make them not like this but like this not so intense if you're a person who crashes if you fall off your game from time to time to the degree that it's really taking away from the quality of your life and your sense of freedom and confidence to pursue what you really want to be doing I want to tell you how to modulate your crashes crashing follows a very similar

pattern to a lot of other things that go with cptsd notice that crashing looks a lot like neurological disregulation it gets triggered by something you don't notice it at first necessarily distorts your perception making you really vulnerable to discouragement and criticism it comes with a physical state sometimes it's like physical agitation or a bit of a torper you know you can't get your energy going there is often a full self attack involved and self attack doesn't help right it can feel like the crashing experience is something someone is doing to you like so and so

really upset me and now I can't focus but notice that even when another person goes along with you on this maybe apologizes for upsetting you it doesn't solve the problem they can't fix it because the the crash has already been set in motion so it's inside that's because it's about the brain state that you're now slogging around in and this is a lot like disregulation if you're on this channel much you know I talk about neurological disregulation it's a common you know little little glitch that your nervous system can go into it goes with childhood

trauma everybody in fact gets disregulated sometimes most people virtually all people can eventually reregulate but when you had trauma it can be harder to come back you go down farther you stay there longer it's harder to come back so when that crash gets activated it colors everything you see it makes you think your efforts are they're all a waste your talent is absolutely worthless nobody cares or wants to read your stupid book or watch your idiotic movie or eat the horrible dinner you made or be your boyfriend or whatever terrible thought fills your mind in

there when you put yourself out out there and get met with discouragement it is so important when you realize you're in a brain state that it's a normal reaction to stress or discouragement which are always part of life and therefore you can stop beating yourself up beating yourself up only makes it worse right when you notice you're crashing just treat it like a brain State and get to work supporting your brain it's like you know you were trying to get things done oops crash let's get to work on my brain you you know change paths

build myself back up so that I can get back to work so here's how you do that you can develop routines our brains like routines and they find them relaxing especially when trauma has made things kind of chaotic and it's hard sometimes to stick with routines but you're going to need to keep accepting that and embracing your efforts anyway and it can take time to get consistent you want consistency because any kind of emotional drama or a crazy schedule it drains your energy and it's putting you at risk for a crash so do you go

long spells without eating well I never do but I know some people do you want to stay consistently nourished do you stay up all night and then sleep all day that's going to set you up for a crash that irregular sleep schedule if you tend to lose your temper if you're emotionally disregulated if you're a people pleaser if you end up in quick relationships with people you don't know all those things mess up the gentle routine your brain loves and it sets you up for a crash now you don't have to be boring or live

like a perfect little princess that's my worst fear it's good to live your life and do new things sometimes but you want to overall keep things within parameters that don't drain everything out of you when you're emotionally or physically exhausted your mind plays tricks on you and self- sabotages right when things are hard right when a new job brings a challenge in front of you if your well is full you can get through the challenge if you're already drained from a bunch of crazy stuff happening in your life you're going to want to find an

excuse to withdraw and you will you're call in sick fall into resentment you believe that you're helpless hopeless you lash out at Society you give up and disappear so you don't want big swings here no big swings just walk in the path remember cuz you have cptsd and in a way it's like having diabetes where yes you have it but if you take care of it and follow a way of life that supports you you can keep it under control and maybe even reverse it so cptsd is like that and this model also it's similar

to crashing diabetics take insulin and in the same way you might need to do things that keep you balanced and resilient and able to handle hard things risks criticisms little embarrassments periods of intense effort that wear you down you keep yourself balanced with decent sleep decent diet support from friends don't skimp on that one hardly anything works when you try to do it in isolation you can learn to calm the triggers that tend to set off the crash by becoming aware and learning to discharge the fearful and resentful emotions and thoughts that cloud your thinking

when you're crashing now if you get those hamster wheel negative thoughts I really want to encourage you to try my daily practice techniques if you watch my videos I I this always comes up but I've got a free course it's linked in the description section under all my videos it's on the free tools page of my website where there's a bunch of free tools and the course is the the diamond in the gem pile there it's the most important thing you can do uh in my program and this is a good way to get some

calm some ease inside which helps you keep your brain and emotions Just a Little More Level a little more attentive each day we talk all the time about shame toxic shame getting shamed shame spirals fat shaming but what do you actually do about shame depending on who you ask shame is just something that other people put on you or that they do to you and then maybe you internalize it but I believe it's more of a mix it's shame like that the kind that comes from other people's judgment and then the kind that is earned

if you will shame that we genuinely feel about things we regret things we said or failed to say or ways that we acted and these two kinds of Shame when they get mixed together they're confusing and they get tangled up into kind of a toxic mix that's really hard to take apart but if you can break them apart if you can put them in two piles what other people think is wrong with you what where you think you fell short you can start to detoxify that shame you can sort it take action on the things

where you wish you could have done better and you know it's not your fault that you were hurt as a kid or that it became hard for you to handle yourself in the best way possible that's really normal but we don't want to walk around in that toxic cloud of Shame either denying that there's anything wrong or completely like turning it against ourselves we want to be real about it so no matter what we've done the best thing that we can do is clear it up and the more you work on that the the earned

shame the part that you actually feel bad about the more that toxic cloud just kind of loosens up and and evaporates and you break out of that confusion and for whatever reason being clear and feeling better about yourself just kind of repels it just pushes away that judgment from other people or if they do try to shame you it just doesn't get internalized because you know that your house is in order and wouldn't that feel good I'm Anna rle also known as the crappy childhood fairy and in this video I'm going to lead you in

a guided relaxation it's not a meditation exactly this is relaxation where you will have your eyes open most of the time and you may even be writing some and I'll help you take some easy steps to notice where you're feeling shame and then to kind of sort it into those two piles I talked about where you can start to see what's going on and then loosen the grip of the both kinds of Shame and you'll come out of this with an action plan all right so to get started you'll need a pen and paper where

you can make some notes and ideally you would want a big full-size pad of paper with a firm back so that you can you can write while you're sitting somewhere comfortable a bed a a chair a sofa and it's totally fine if there's some noise around you just maybe want to turn off your notifications so you can focus for a little while and you're just giving yourself time to consider where you might be holding some shame in your mind so now that you're sitting and you've got your pen and paper in hand I'd like you

to close your eyes for a moment and just kind of feel the weight of your body in the chair and your feet on the floor and just take a few moments there to feel yourself here in present time not remembering much necessarily not looking for things not anticipating what this exercise is going to be about but just kind of hanging out and just feel yourself being right here right now that's your that's your power position okay now open your eyes and see if you can just keep feeling yourself in the chair just kind of stay

with yourself not getting disregulated not worrying about how you're going to do this just feeling easy in yourself breathing in and out and now I want you to take the pen and paper open your eyes and write ways that other people have made me feel ashamed okay you're going to be thinking of things and writing them down that bother you and it's nothing to fear it's just a list of things that already bother you you don't have to bring up anything Dreadful or conjure anything that will be sufficient to put on the list just you

know ways that other people have made you feel ashamed you can write big General things like people think women my age don't know anything about technology and now I dread asking questions on support calls I have that and you might also write very specific things like um person X told everyone I was difficult to work with and people stopped inviting me to be on teams or Sharon in second grade said I was stupid you can be specific like that but just stuff where other people made you feel ashamed and it affected you enough that you

even remember it now so just take some time to write things other people have done and said that make you feel ashamed if you're over the shame don't worry too much about it you can use this time to just write the things that still have a little like charge in them that are still bothering you okay so just get three or four ways that you felt shamed before and if you have more that's fine too they don't need perfect grammar they don't have to be handwritten nicely just jot them down and I give you a

moment to do that and then I invite you to close your eyes for a moment to just see if any other ways you've felt shamed pop into your mind you don't need to get them all right now but if it's in your mind write it down try to have two or three at least more is okay it doesn't need lot of detail and then open your eyes and sitting with your eyes open I invite you to take a new piece of paper and on this one you're going to be writing things that you feel you

did that make you feel ashamed so maybe you know very well you feel ashamed about something you said or did and you can write those things down maybe you're a bit fuzzy on whether your feeling of Shame is appropriate or not and actually it doesn't matter if if a memory or thought causes you to feel you did something wrong just go ahead and write it down just hang out just gently with those thoughts we're not getting into fixing ourselves or being mad or anything just write it down don't worry too much whether you've got it

all whether it's right these are just things that bother you because you feel you did something wrong okay give you some time to do that okay so you have two lists now if you think of something that really belongs on the first page the one where you're listing how others have made you feel ashamed you can move it over there no problem you can add something you can cross it off and then vice versa if you think of something that really belongs better on the the ways that you feel ashamed of your own actions then

you can move it over there add it cross it off whatever you need to do you can think of it like cleaning out a drawer full of Rags that you're going to sort into two piles right the ones that are yours and then the ones that came from somewhere else and you're going to lay them out and see where they go and as you're writing the things that have made you feel ashamed if you tip over into any kind of mental attack on yourself just pull back from that writing these things down is something that

you're doing to change your life so that you can feel good about yourself facing doubts and the things we regret is the way out of Shame it's positive you're doing something very wholesome and responsible for yourself and and for everyone you encounter really hiding from from that vague sense of Shame is just a way to feel bad and be stuck and you being stuck doesn't really do anyone any good so don't use this to attack yourself all right go ahead and take these two pieces of paper one in each hand and just hold them a

minute just lightly in your hands and this represents your good intentions to be Freer and you might do this exercise again sometime or you might sit down after this video is over and keep going but for right now you've named a few things that make you feel ashamed on two pieces of paper and I want you just for a moment to focus on the other people list and just read it over okay may not be pleasant and just read it over see how you feel about that is it good to write it down is it

unpleasant to read it I want you to just appreciate that you got those shame items like out of your mind and onto paper and that's progress so take that piece of paper set it down and just say okay all right and then sit for a moment eyes open or closed and let your attention come over to the list of things that you feel that you've done the me shame all right the things that you've done that caused you to feel ashamed of yourself so maybe you said something sharp to someone that's pretty common with cptsd

maybe you've let some aspect of your life get messy something about your health or your money or your relationships and that's also very common with cptsd it's hard to avoid but there Comes A Time and this may just be that time for you that you take some steps to stop making those mistakes or to clear up any hurt feelings that you may have caused so you wrote two or three things down if you have more that's fine whether or not the things you wrote are really true or not you don't really have to know right

now whether the list is incomplete doesn't matter it let's just assume there's going to be more as time goes by but this is your good work work to try to bring your awareness to things that you've done or said that you think maybe you don't feel right about and that is what good people do they reflect on their own actions periodically to see if there are ways that they might heal that if there's a sore point if they need to amand a hurt that they caused another person so just know that you're doing something very

positive all right for yourself and everybody who who comes into your sphere what you might notice is that there's one item on the list of things you've done that you are today in a position to improve maybe you could take care of something that you've been delaying on or you could apologize to somebody you've been avoiding or you could make a decision to stop a self-defeating behavior that made it onto your list you don't have to choose anything or if you do it doesn't have to be the biggest thing on the list but if you

can find one small action that you can take today to start clearing that list it it might even be to take something off your list because you realize you didn't do anything wrong and you don't actually feel badly about it but you are doing something very good here and so I want to give you a big virtual hug just for being willing to do it even if you have no idea what you're going to do about any of this shame you don't have to know that yet you've just written it down and it's going to

come to you gradually day by day all you have to do is keep this with you look at it every day and take a small action just keep chipping away at it and soon you'll find that you feel a lot more light-hearted the less shame you feel the easier it is to clear up more items on the list so small steps taken daily help you chip away until it's very short or gone all together now what about the other people list you can keep that one with you too for a while and if you like

you can add to it you can change it you can cross things off you'll find that some things just fade away once you've given your attention to them but the main thing that's going to cause things to drift off of this list is the work you do on this list on the things that you feel and that's the secret of Los Shame by working on the stuff that you actually needed to resolve all this free floating shame that you're sort of vague about other people judging you maybe there's something really terrible about you it just

tends to drift off okay the list gets shorter it's lighter and soon it's gone so you're a good person for facing these things and one thing that you can do to support yourself in this process of inner house cleaning is to use my daily practice if you haven't learned it these are two techniques it's a writing technique and a simple form of meditation that I teach in a free course and I'll put the link to that below so you can access that if you want but this is something I share as much as I can

because these are the techniques that I use twice a day to just calm stress to lower the PTSD symptoms and to get more clarity the daily practice is kind of like WD40 it's you know that spray you put on Rust it loosens things up where you where you used to feel stuck or hurt and it makes way for fresh new ideas to come in and stuck spots just tend to dissolve you can't make people respect your boundaries and you can't make them care about what you need so people ask me all the time how do

I make that happen and I totally understand why you would want to be able to do that but my answer is that you can't and for people who grew up with abuse and neglect and Who as a result have to basically like teach themselves as adults how to interact with people how to set boundaries what is a boundary what do you do when someone doesn't respect your boundary well it it seems like the problem is other people and yes sometimes the problem is other people for example if they attack you or violate you sometimes yes

there's a violation of a boundary that you could have done nothing about but a lot of the anger and frustration at other people that you might go through around boundaries is really caused by a misunderstanding about what a boundary is and who owns it so let's talk about that so yeah a lot of people ask me how they can get loved ones to better honor the boundaries that they've set how to get them to be more sensitive about their cptsd symptoms in particular and it's totally normal and appropriate to want that kind of support and

respect and you deserve it but I'm going to say something very tough love here you can ask a person to understand you in your needs and you can even ask them to help you avoid getting triggered you can ask but they are not obliged to do any of it and that doesn't mean they don't care about you and it doesn't mean they don't support you and in fact when they give you space to notice your own trauma reactions and work on those in here it might be the most loving supportive thing that they can do

and I'm going to tell you why even though you've been told a lot of things to the contrary like that you have a right to respect around your boundaries even when your boundaries are extreme even when you're acting out of that hurt place inside I don't actually think it's a right all right a right you have rights but this is not exactly a right it is your right to ask for what you want for what you think would be helpful it's your right to leave somebody who doesn't honor your boundaries but trying to force other

people to help you manage your trauma reactions first of all it's not fair and second of all it's not going to work and it can end up backfiring and becoming in effect a form of control you controlling other people and everyone in our lives has the right not to be controlled by us or anyone else so you have the right to ask and you have the right not to spend time with that person but they have the right to be themselves now someone who cares about you might be willing to change the way they do

things if you ask them uh they might find that a reasonable thing that they can do but they might not it's not always something they can do or it's not something they agree with or they're willing to take the risk that the relationship isn't going to work for you anymore because what you're asking is just not something they can give and PTSD thinking will tell you that someone you love who you're attached to who's doing something that bothers you owes it to you to change they're a bad person if they don't but I want to

teach you why in any situation where you're not actually restrained that these people are not actually doing anything to you they're being themselves which you may or may not like but they're not preventing your healing and I would just point out that when you're setting boundaries you're being yourself so you get to you get to say what you like you get to express yourself that's you being yourself but they get to do the same okay right now you're thinking what but that's what I'm saying when people do their own thing and give you space to

work out your own triggers and learn to calm your own PTSD symptoms you then have an opportunity to learn the only thing that really works or can be sustained around changing your triggers and that is self-regulation self-regulation now when you're regulated you have choices so one of your choices if you don't like what someone's doing is to not be around that person and for example like if you don't like drinking alcohol you don't like other people drinking alcohol you don't have to be around people drinking alcohol when your brain is regulated you might see more

clearly that this person isn't really doing anything wrong or you might see they're really a jerk you have Clarity for that maybe they're a bully maybe they do drink too much maybe you ask them to change once or twice and if you ask them three times and they still don't change even if they say they will they're not you're up against that dilemma right to ask anymore is an attempt to control them and even if you succeed at making somebody do something like stop drinking it's not going to bring that Harmony and the good feeling

of being supported and connected that we all crave that comes from people being themselves you're not going to be comfortable with everybody being themsel around you you get to be choosy about that so at the point where you've asked and they don't do it if change isn't going to happen you either let go of your grievance or you leave the relationship because if you push and push and nag and repeat your demand that they change it'll only suck the soul out of you and and everybody who hears you doing that it's not a good life

thing it's a great idea that if someone else would change that you'd be okay but even when you get someone to strike that bargain with you to try to fix you by being what you want them to be you only put your cptsd into this little like sealed chamber that where you can't touch it what prompts our healing is usually friction it's problems with people people do their thing around us and we get triggered and it's impossible to control or avoid getting triggered and that's why so many people with childhood trauma end up retreating getting

as far away from people as they can now isolation might prevent triggers but it also prevents a whole lot of other good things it prevents fulfillment it prevents connection it prevents growth so our challenge is to stay away from people who who might abuse us and with everyone else to just be a little bit easier going to be at peace with people as they are now you do not have to be around people who trigger you when you're in the process of healing and and and getting triggered is just more than you can bear but

I'm asking you to keep the focus on the fact that the trigger is inside other people aren't really causing your trigger like their behavior you're reacting to it in such a way that you're triggered but I'm trying to teach you to like take the responsibility off of them and take the control off of them and bring that responsibility and control inside where you learn tool control your triggers peace with other people comes with accepting and knowing that healing happens inside so other people in our lives they totally matter they're so dear their behavior matters but

they don't have the power to heal us and even if they were willing to try you will sometimes meet somebody who will try they can't they can't heal us have you been through this experience before where you're trying to help someone and you just know what they need and they they even try or they do it or they don't do it but they don't change and it's so frustrating and painful or when someone tries to help you it's probably been the other way too it happens all the time it could happen when you read a

self-help book or you see a therapist or you ask a friend for advice or when you watch one of my videos I can't change you okay I can't change you and neither can anyone else maybe I can influence you but only if you want to learn from me only if you're actually taking something from that could you call it influence you're going to heal yourself when you can get the obstacles to your healing out of the way and other people are going to actually help you by triggering you a little bit a little bit of

triggering is a good thing to help you start practicing and learning now I'm not saying everything is a construct of our minds it's not a construct of our will you know if only we could just heal ourselves because we decided to it's not that simple obviously but people do influence each other deeply for good and for evil and this is where I suggest you put your focus on choosing carefully who will influence you and thinking carefully about how much you can expect to influence others when you ask them to change so let's talk about what's

realistic for you to expect from other people they can potentially provide a calm safe environment not everyone can do that but that would be a good thing a good influence they can encourage you when you're freaked out or they can help you get your tools together so that when you're disturbed you have a way out for me the tools are pen and paper and it was a person who showed me that and who prompted me to do that and to this day the people closest to me are often the ones who say hey do you

want to write and meditate and I actually take offense at that sometimes because it seems like they're criticizing how I'm behaving but I love having people to support me doing it all in all it's the most supportive thing that people can do is to suggest it to me and even to write and meditate with me I love that too you'll be amazed when you learn to regulate your trauma symptoms the overreactions that you have the unreasonableness the demands that you put on other people because it seems like all that's needed is for them to change

something about themselves but seriously you will be amazed how much easier it is for other people to love you and be close to you and hang out with you when you're not putting that Demand on them when you're handling it as an inside job so how do you actually do this when you're in the place where you want to make a demand on someone it usually means it's time to do what I call stop and drop just stop the action that's escalating the conflict and drop into a chair where you can start writing your fears

and resentments writing fears and resentments is one of the twin techniques that I teach in something I call the daily practice I'm just talking about it here like you already know but if you haven't tried it before in this video and in all my videos there's a link down in the description section it's a free course you can learn and try these techniques in less than an hour see if they help you all right and if you do take the course you'll be invited to zoom calls with me every two weeks I have them roughly

every two weeks we write together we meditate together and I take questions to help anybody who's trying to learn these techniques Master them and then we have some more workshops and things for for intermediate levels too if you're interested but when you get relief from the fearful and resentful thoughts things start to get clearer the fire burns off and the truth is is there the truth is just laying there for you to see so it's not your fault that you were abused and neglected as a kid but now it's you you're the one who needs

to stop acting out on the trauma and the reason is of the best possible reason it's because it's time for you to bring forth the best in you and to stop being limited and self-hating and self- attacking because of what happened to you that's what I hope this video will help you do I want to help you learn and and try things and notice your triggers when they happen and develop techniques to calm them okay some people are going to be very open to learning what you're working on and they're going to support you but

probably when you're yelling at them and telling them how they need to act it's going to defeat the purpose people are going to pull back from you and that's that's the most painful thing about cptsd is that disconnection that it imposes so so how can you get there how do you get neutral you'll hear me say this a lot it helps if you don't talk about about it when you're triggered and you know it just pause just your thinking is getting disregulated if it's anger then by definition it's going to feel unreasonable to other people

it's an argument that's trying to happen but you'd be better off not having that argument so if you have to argue just remind yourself you can have an argument later you you don't have to suppress your the fight in you just have it later later is always better because when you're regulated again when you can choose your words and not just have them fly out of you out of that triggered place that cptsd thing where your brain is doing its thing that's going to cause damage it would be crazy for me to tell you that

you can do this I know how like what a strong grip cptsd symptoms have on us but it's not crazy because there is in fact a way to get regulated we can do that it starts with owning the problem not blaming other people not blaming them with our words not blaming them in our minds like believing that other people are doing this to us because healing can really move forward fast when we can just recognize ah I'm having a cptsd reaction it's a reaction that I have and then this is the hard part resist the

urge to say a lot about how you're feeling you can say something like oh dear I'm having one of my reactions hold on a sec while I get myself sorted out but don't wave your triggered feelings out there like a flag it's like I'm triggered this is so bad you're doing this to me you're not GNA get a good reaction and trying to get other people to deal with your reactions has it ever worked well so this is your new approach you notice your triggers you calm them you own them you give yourself a little

time out to write your fears and resentments and that will work wonders for you to return to the conversation and have communication about whatever is bothering you you can say it in a way that will be heard after that whatever you need to discuss is going to be simpler and lighter and easier for another person to hear now I'm not guarant aning that they're a good caring person who can hear you sometimes you're going to run into that but you can do your part towards that good communication you're going to get better results no M

even if they're a jerk so it's a good thing when it happens the nicest feeling of all is knowing that whatever happens whatever present day reaction Rises up out of your childhood trauma you will be able to deal with it you are in the time now when you can begin to bring the best part of you forward the best part of you can start running your life you do not have to be identified anymore with the old triggers and the old events that happened you are in there somewhere and we need you hi I'm Anna

rle also known as the crappy childhood fairy in this video which is another in my series on resilience for people with childhood PTSD I want to talk about another strength that can transform us from the traumatized state to a healed State and that is the strength of showing up it's super common for those of us who grew up with abuse and neglect when we were small to feel as adults that we're on the outside somehow we feel like we're on the outside of groups kind of part in and part out but never truly included or

we start as a full participant but we pull away over time we unincluded ourselves and The Telltale sign that this could be a personal choice even when it doesn't feel like it is that we're almost always at about the same distance from the center like in my case I used to always like to settle about 80% out from the center and if I got motivated and moved toward the center of the group maybe took on a more active role got involved sooner or later usually sooner I was highly likely to find some reason to bounce

out of the group altogether being part of something was and in some areas of my life still is really uncomfortable for me do you have that I used to think it was just one episode of bad luck after another oh dear I guess I joined the wrong group and I never saw that it was a consistent pattern for me until I had a lot of healing from disregulation and started to have some clarity and it makes sense that being in a group when you have the sensitivities of childhood PTSD it can be too much and

dealing with a lot of people it can be like an assault on your senses it gets really emotional it's like high school that never ends and childhood PTSD is not the same thing as introversion but I suspect there are similarities and that being social with people can take more energy than it gives because we're just working so hard to deal so it's natural that we'd gravitate to groups but toward the outer edges it's a little more manageable we can be around people and be social a little bit but just keep one foot out the door

in case we need to get the heck out of there and avoiding full participation like this would be fantastic if it worked long term but the problem is that peripheral relationships to groups make it really hard to develop social skills and what starts as kind of a delay in our development can become a full-on deficiency and next thing you know we're becoming that old neighbor who stands at the window banging on the glass to scare the kids away from his driveway that is how it happens and when we're not connecting and risking ourselves or having

the normal ups and downs of being in friendships and groups we not only don't get included anymore but we can start to get hard to include if you know what I mean and what that is and this will sound harsh but we get self centered not sharing ourselves with other people is an emergency protection measure but not a way to to live our whole lives the possibility of sharing ourselves is all around us and whether it's you're bringing a dish to a potluck dinner which I think in the UK is called a porridge party or

if you decide to join a choir or take a parenting class or you invite friends out for a hike when we show up for people in our lives we grow less fragile and more flexible and more connected and more included yes it's demanding to be included and isolation sounds so peaceful as an option but if we allow isolation to take root long term it will take over and our very worst traits will have a field day we grow crabby we get self-centered we get bitter we get paranoid and then it gets harder to turn the

ship back toward connection again because frankly we've gotten too weird have you ever felt this beginning to happen to you so take your alone time and then keep chipping away at Your Capacity to stay connected because remember in the video where I talk about the worst fear that every everyone shares and I know that because thousands of people have confided their fears to me it's that we'll end up alone and that does happen I know many of you watching this video are there right now wondering if any change is possible or if any change is

worth it and I just want to tell you yes and yes you just start with one small action you just show up take a shower put on your coat and go say hello to some people go back to a group you used to like pay a visit visit to a friend you've been neglecting sign up for a litter cleanup day or a blood driver whatever Community get together happens to show up in your community and show up if you do one thing like this every other day in a couple of weeks you'll find yourself included

again now the need to be included is not just a weakness it's Primal we are born into community and as much as we want to escape it sometimes and be independent we never can be it's not possible and evolutionary biologists will tell you it's a survival strategy so you have warmth and food and protection from predators and so on but it's not just physical inclusion is just as important for the growth and development of your being of your spirit because without inclusion in human relationships the blossoming of your whole real self is arrested it can't

fully happen so fulfillment can't come to us if we don't connect with people it feels hard it's okay it is hard I have to push myself all the time and probably always will in my own case I noticed that a lot of my isolating Tendencies had a certain poisonous thought tucked inside of them and the best way I can describe that is I just want to be excused the PTSD and me just doesn't want to be accountable to other people for no better reason than it's hard so I face what's hard and I do it

anyway and the reward for that is that I get to be included and being included is secretly exact where we all want to be all this gets easier when you're healing the disregulation and other symptoms of childhood PTSD [Music] [Music]