The Roller Coaster of Recovery
When we start our recovery journey, our controllers have big plans. We are going to find the right approach and helper the first time. We are going to find the shortest distance between point A and point B. We are going to work hard because we are good at that. We are going to figure it out. It won’t be messy or emotional. We will travel a linear path in one direction. We will finish recovery as quickly as possible and then our real life will start. That all sounds great. It won’t be much different than a college degree. All we need is a syllabus and we are good to go.
But if you are reading my blog, you know this is not how recovery works. You also know how loud the controller can get when their plans don’t work out. When they realize recovery is a messy struggle through the muck and the yuck of a traumatic past, they will fill our heads with huge resistance. It will probably sound like this:
“It has to be easier than this. l need to find a different way.”
“Other people don’t have to work this hard.”
“It shouldn’t take this long.”
“I’m not doing this right.”
“I must be backsliding. I should feel better by now.”
“There must be something wrong with me to feel this bad.”
It is so easy to believe. In recovery, every day can feel different. One day might feel great and the next day might feel horrible. Our other inner parts will tell tales of punishment and unworthiness, but this is recovery. This is how it works. Recovery is incredibly difficult to interpret. The stages we go through are not easily explained. This is why I love parts work. We can make sense out of almost anything by using parts work as a foundation for our understanding. Let’s take a look at some of the phases of recovery and what is actually happening.
Anxiety. When anxiety or panic hits, we are defending against something trying to come to the surface. This is often triggered by something similar to the past, but it doesn’t have to be. It can come out of nowhere too. But no matter what is happening in the external world, anxiety is an attempt to block an internal response. This response could be fear, anger, futility, shame or grief from an inner part. But anxiety is the interaction with our defenses trying to push it away. When we feel anxiety, it means a part is trying to communicate with us and being blocked. In those moments, try to write from the parts who don’t want you to feel anything.
Depression. When depression comes, we have a part sharing futility with us. Depression will often show up when we have decided to do something new and risky or have just done it. It can also be a response to a life pattern which won’t stop repeating. It can feel like sabotage, but it is also an invitation to release the futility and hopelessness so we can do something new. Try writing from the part who is sharing how hopeless their childhood was and how it will never change.
Manic Behavior. Manic behavior can show up in many ways. It can feel like extreme happiness. It can look like an inability to stop moving or quick shifts in direction or focus. But it is a sign that we are not grounded. It is a sign that the controller is attempting to keep us busy in the mind and the external world to block new information from coming forward. These experiences are invitations to slow down and ground into the body. This might bring anxiety and/or depression forward, but you can write from those to discover what is trying to come forward.
Forgetfulness, Fuzzy Brain and/or Numbness. You may already know what I am going to say here. But these are all signs of dissociation. Dissociation is a process meant to block us from our traumatic reality: the story and the emotions. It is deployed by the controller when things are getting a bit too close to the surface. Dissociation blocks many body manifestations including other defenses. It is a first-line defense. And the only way to battle dissociation is with small, repeating bits of grounding. This will help rewire your tendency to leave the body and let you come back your truth. When you write from dissociation, it will almost always sound like a controller trying to block progress and keep you focused outside of self.
These stages of recovery can come up many times in a day, week, month or lifetime. They can show up in any order at any time. If we can avoid the controller’s language about the “backslide”, we can learn to see them for what they are. They are signs. They are telling us that information lives right under the surface. If we stop and listen and express from our defenses, we might just see the truth that is desperately trying to heal us. Allow them to be your messengers instead of roadblocks. And you will see your recovery process accelerate and deepen. This is how we heal with parts work.
The Toll of Toxic Shame
Toxic shame is one of the most detrimental epidemics in a world filled with childhood trauma. But it isn’t easy to see. It is often heavily defended by our dissociation, anger and futility. It is hidden under our defenses like anxiety, depression and addiction. Even when we are in touch with it, we aren’t aware of exactly what it is because we don’t know what it looks like. We just know that it feels awful and our first instinct is to run from it. It is more confusing because the mind works so hard to cover it up. We intellectually understand that child abuse is not the victim’s fault. We assume there is nothing to heal since we already know it wasn’t our fault. But we are missing the shame that lives in the unconscious beliefs. And unfortunately, those are the most powerful when it comes to our life’s manifestations. So let’s talk about what we might be holding under the surface of our conscious mind because we can’t heal it if we can’t see it.
You were not supposed to handle things like an adult when you were 8, 13 or 16. Abusers have a tendency to parentify us. They will ask us to do impossible, age-inappropriate tasks and shame us when we inevitably cannot. So we begin to see ourselves as not good enough, stupid or incompetent. In reality, we were never supposed to be able to do that task. Many parentified survivors feel paralyzed to take any risks or try anything new. We don’t think we have what it takes to succeed and we don’t want to be shamed if we fail. But when we can uncover this hidden traumatic shame, it can help us let go of these fears.
Your body did not betray you when it responded to sexual abuse. I will use some intense language here because I don’t like saying this lightly. We often hold shame about the way the body responded to sexual abuse. But in reality, it was not wrong. When the body experienced any kind of arousal during rape or sexual abuse, it is protecting us from damage. It is doing what it needs to do. It is not an indication that we are enjoying rape. Abusers will tell us this to shame us, but it is never true. If the body gets pregnant, that is also not a betrayal or our fault. The rapist is responsible for getting their victim pregnant. That’s it. There is no gray area here. If the body miscarries from the tremendous stress we are under or from physical abuse, this is also not the body’s fault. This is a natural response to traumatic stress and abuse. When we see these beliefs and stop blaming the body, our relationship with self shifts dramatically.
The behaviors you have picked up to keep yourself alive are not an indicator that something is wrong with you. We often find ourselves taking actions that we are not proud of. This could be in the form of addictions, isolating behaviors and abusive actions. While we can never excuse behaviors that hurt others, we must acknowledge that they were an understandable result of what we went through. If we are swimming in regret, we won’t heal. We need to take responsibility. But then we need to give ourselves some compassion and let ourselves heal. That is the only way to ensure the cycle stops with us.
You were not old enough to stop your abuse or the abuse of any other children around you. We often believe there was a time when we should have been able to stop it but didn’t. We blame ourselves because abuse happened to us or others. But the responsibility for the abuse lies with the adults. As children, we did not have the resources to stop what was happening. We need to take that responsibility off our young shoulders. It was not possible for us to stop anything.
If you did not stop abuse in your teens after spending an entire childhood dissociating from it, you were not the problem. If we didn’t stop abuse when we were older, it does not mean we liked it, wanted it or were too weak to stop it. It means we were primed for it. We were prepped for it. Our abusers knew exactly how to set up our defenses so we would immediately dissociate when we were older. We were taught that “no” was unacceptable and that there was no help available. We learned helplessness so we defaulted to the only thing left. We only had one option in childhood and that included the later years.
So how do we stop the shame that is holding us back in our adult lives? First, we have to see it. It helps to search for the beliefs I have listed above. It can also help to watch the mind chatter for signs of regret. If we are obsessing over past experiences, what we could have said, or actions we could have taken, there is shame beneath the surface driving our thoughts. If we feel angry and we are suddenly swimming in regret, we are using shame to hold ourselves back from our healing. When that happens, take the second step and write from the shame itself. Write from the self-loathing beliefs that spin beneath the surface and drive everything. As you honor your inner parts who feel shame and let them express, you will come to holistically understand the truth. You are not to blame for what has happened to you in any way. And you never were.
Reigniting Joy
My trauma led me to understand emotions in a one-dimensional way: “bad”. They do come in two forms of “bad” though. There are emotions that are a bit uncomfortable, but tolerable. I can power through them and still function even if I am exhausted at the end of the day. This has been my norm for many years. And there are emotions that are debilitating. These are my controller’s worst nightmare. They make productivity impossible. They leave me stuck in bed or writing like crazy for some kind of release. Nothing else gets done or at least not well. Dinner is going to be pizza delivery on those days.
So when I consider that emotions can be “good”, it is hard to comprehend. To me, feeling “good” means feeling successfully numb. This has always been my goal in life. If I feel nothing, I feel good. This is my controller state and I have come to be very comfortable in this place. That is why it is so hard for survivors to feel. We live in numb. And numb feels safe. The idea that there can be joy is utterly ridiculous to many of us. If we “feel” joy, it is very often a mask because we have to behave a certain way for a particular event. If we feel real joy, it is often a fleeting experience that can’t be sustained. So the idea of being joyful can elicit a roll of the eyes.
But what if joy is a real thing for everyone? What if it can even exist for those of us with the worst trauma? But let’s take it further. What if it already does? What if joy isn’t an emotion so much as it is the essence of who we are? I have to admit, I think a lot. I am always considering possibilities. But I can’t let go of the idea that we understand joy wrong. We search for it. We make a “decision” to feel it. We put on a mask to pretend we have it. But what if our search for joy is our search for self. Maybe joy isn’t missing. Maybe it is the self. There is good news and bad news with this idea. This means joy exists for every person. And it means we can get back to it. But it also means it won’t be an easy journey. Coming back to self is our very reason for existence. It is going to be a complicated journey.
Contrary to popular belief, we should not be looking for joy. We need to be looking for what resists the joy within us. We need to track down the blocks to the joy. They sit in the way of our truest expression of self like a dam in a river. As we honor and express from the resistance, our ability to hold our joy will increase. Here are some of the most common resistance points to our joy.
The controller says joy is dangerous. The controller has developed survival skills in the midst of their traumatic experiences. And those survival skills include hypervigilance. When we are truly embodying our joy and true self, we cannot maintain hypervigilance and a manic mind. We can be present OR we can be hypervigilant. So joy feel dangerous. If we are feeling joy, we cannot be prepared for the dangers the world will throw at us. And this is a huge problem for the controller. Try writing from: “I cannot let my guard down.”
The karma kid says we are not worthy of joy. We have grown up in a world where our own needs, desires and preferences have been denied. We learned that we didn’t matter. And if we ever did consider what we wanted, it might have been labeled as selfish. So the karma kid will tell us we must uphold our role of supporting others to avoid punishment. We must understand our worthiness. There are things others can have and we can’t. Happiness is not for people like us. This is one of the most significant blocks to joy. Try writing from: “I am not worthy of feeling joy.”
The freedom fighters say it is impossible to reach. The freedom fighters have been trying for a lifetime to bring you closer to the authentic self. They want to experience joy, but along the way, they were thwarted in every possible way. They were stopped by society and their standards. They were thwarted by jealous family members. They were blocked by organizations developed to push fearful perspectives about the world. And as we grow up, the internalized beliefs from these sources continue to block the freedom fighters. And they feel hopeless about continuing this journey. Try writing from: “It is pointless to keep trying because of others.”
As you continue to express from your resistance and the evidence your parts carry, you will start to see small openings to that true self. You will have snippets of joy showing up in your life. It won’t happen when you think it will. It won’t happen when you are doing something new and amazing. Those are the moments when the resistance can be intense. Those are the moments when fear is high. It will be in moments which seem irrelevant. You will be sitting in a park or taking a shower or walking the dog and you will feel it for a fleeting moment. It will catch you off guard and motivate you at the same time. And that will build. One day, you might hear from your inner children as they ask if it is really possible to feel joy. Tell them yes. The answer is yes.
Come join us in Survivor’s Guide for February as we discuss reignite joy.
The Reality of Fear
There is no single emotion that drives our world today, but if I had to choose the most impactful, I would choose fear. Fear is the most prevalent emotion on this planet and most of our decision making is driven by it. But we don’t know this is happening. We don’t know we are driven by our fear because it doesn’t look like fear. Our fear disguises itself in other behaviors from our defenders. Fear doesn’t sound like, “I’m scared.” Fear sounds like “I am always right. You are stupid. I know the only truth. I have the only story that matters.” It builds a wall around itself and won’t let anything in. Other people, perspectives and possibilities are strictly forbidden to challenge it.
Unfortunately, when we don’t see our fears, we can’t see the patterns they are creating or how to get out of them. This can be devastating to our lives. And our fear will be further encouraged by those in our circle, who hold similar fears. Instead of being pushed to consider new ideas, we will become further entrenched in our fear-based decisions. The two primary parts who hold this fear are the controller and karma kid. They are the two most powerful defenders, so without awareness and separation from people encouraging our fears, we will not break free of this. In reality, it is a struggle no matter what.
But there are truths about these fears that we can learn. Those truths can help us to break free over time. Let’s walk through some of them now.
Our fears come from childhood. Even our most adult fears come from childhood in some way. The events that initially caused those fears might be a bit symbolic. But let’s face it, they are often unmistakable. If we fear connection, our relationships in childhood were not safe for us. If we fear vulnerability, it was not safe to express vulnerability as children. If we fear we will never be successful as an adult, we were told this in childhood. We may have been “shown” this with impossible, age-inappropriate tasks. And these fears are evidence-based. They are full of examples from childhood and adulthood because these fears are self-fulfilling. This is why the patterns are so hard to break. If we don’t poke holes in the stories behind the fears first, it is hard to manifest anything new.
Our fears are held by children. Our parts are children. There are people who will argue with me about whether or not parts can be adults. But parts do a great job of acting like adults. And adulthood starts between 25 and 27. So parts can be older. But they were never allowed to develop to a full adult perspective. We only have one adult in our system. That is our grounded adult self who we are trying to reach. Children will often hold fears that come from the disempowered life of a child. They respond to life as if they have no choice in the events of it. And this is what we can help change within our system.
Our fears show up in unusual ways. As I mentioned earlier, fears don’t always look like fears. They can look like anxiety. They appear highly logical and rational. They can look like condescension toward other people. They can show up as an unyielding opinion or story about self or life. They have reasons and those reasons make sense to our mind, the mind who is creating them. Of course, there are more obvious signs of fear including paranoia and panic. And it is important we do not dismiss them as over-reactions or drama. They are based in our past realities and we must allow them to express.
Some of our fears are true, but they don’t have to stop us. Here’s the hardest part. While some fears are no longer accurate when we live in our empowered adult self, some fears can never be fully dismissed. The people we grew up with may have made empty threats. But they may have made very real threats. In many cases, we can dismiss those threats as wimpy adults attempting to control children to make themselves feel better. In other cases, those that threatened us are dead or in jail. That helps. But sometimes, we can’t deny the very real possibility that threats could become a reality. We cannot allay the fears of our parts completely, nor should we try to lie about it. But over time, we can come to understand that life is not about succumbing to the fears for survival purposes only. Life is about living while we still can. And the more empowered we are, the less those nasty people want to mess with us. After all, they act like they do because of their own fear. This understanding takes time to cultivate, but we can get there.
So don’t run from your fears. Don’t invalidate them or ignore them or justify the behaviors meant to hide them. Let them express. Let your body shake. Let your vulnerability come forward if only to yourself for now. Allow enough self-compassion for you to be human because you are. Let your parts share their very real evidence. And you will find yourself taking small steps in new directions. Will it feel scary? Yes. But for the first time, you won’t feel paralyzed to do it. The empowerment that comes from acknowledging your fears is life changing. Give yourself this amazing gift.
The Isolator: Navigating Relationships after Trauma
I’ve been working with some intense battles in my system lately. I have a tendency to focus on my defenders when I am feeling blocked and I often discuss them in my writing. To be fair, the defender fears of recovery and change are not the only inner obstacles we face as we bring our lives to the next level. Our freedom fighters are usually fans of recovery. But there are times when their years of seeking freedom fuel an intense futility stopping us in our tracks. One of the primary freedom fighters is the isolator. In many instances, they are the first freedom fighter we meet. Their goal is authenticity through isolation.
The problem is that the isolator is not short on evidence to support their perspective. When we have suffered through complex trauma, we likley experienced betrayals and manipulation from the majority of people in our childhood. And that would have continued into adulthood with patterns stemming from our unhealed relational trauma. All relationships would have been questioned and all behaviors would have been searched for signs of control. And if someone was too nice, truthful or authentic, they would have been rejected as “not real”. The isolator can keep us distant, inconsistent and aloof in relationships. And as you might imagine, this doesn’t help us form the kinds of relationships that are healing.
The isolator’s tactics are not all bad. They are good at countering the distractions created by the controller and love seeker during recovery. They will put barriers up against the people who keep us triggered and spinning and distracted from our inner world. I often refer to the isolator as the “path clearer” because of this tendency. And they will push you to cut ties with toxic people despite the resistance from the controller, love seeker and karma kid. All these actions will facilitate recovery. And that is a good thing.
But lately, I have been noticing that my isolator is holding me back a bit. They have done a great job of removing the people who needed removing. And they have kept my loneliness at bay during some of my hardest moments in recovery. But they have some detrimental beliefs that will keep me from finding the next level of my purposeful work and the social life I would like to have. So I am going to break down a few beliefs that can stop us in our tracks when the isolator steps forward.
I will lose myself in that person. This is one of the biggest fears of the isolator. It is one of their primary motivators into action. They wholeheartedly believe that we cannot keep the love seeker at bay in relationship. To be honest, they may be right. Until we begin to shift our love addicted parts who will erase self in relationship, the isolator will always be on standby. And that may be best. The love-addicted parts will overlook red flags of abusive behaviors which look similar to childhood relationships. They will potentially put us in danger in the process. The isolator can come in and protect us from abuse. But they can also act when the relationship is not abusive, leaving us isolated from everyone.
That person only wants to control me. I need to avoid them. The isolator truly believes that control is at the foundation of most relationships. Who can blame them? It is most of what they have witnessed. They will look for hints that another person is controlling us. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are over-reacting to a statement that might be triggering. Either way, when they believe someone is not good for us, it is difficult to convince them of anything else. This belief can be problematic in therapeutic or boss relationships where suggestions are common and there is an unavoidable power dynamic. So we have to watch and ground when we feel controlled and are moving toward cutting someone off.
Nobody can be trusted. Let’s face it. The overall perspective of the isolator is that nobody can be trusted. They start every relationship already believing that something will go wrong. Unfortunately, this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy because the desperate love seeker loses self while trying to prove the isolator wrong. And this ultimately makes the isolator necessary. As you can imagine, this further entrenches the isolator in their beliefs and makes the next relational experience even more likely to fail. Eventually, we isolate in extreme ways to avoid any more damage.
It is possible to come out of these patterns by recognizing these parts at work and expressing from them. As the unconscious thoughts of these parts are moved to the conscious mind, we can start looking for evidence that our patterns aren’t always true. I call this the “trust re-wire”. As we find small bits of evidence that go against our isolator’s impression of the world, we can allow ourselves to set boundaries instead of putting up walls. As we consider other possibilities, we can allow more relationships which will decrease our desperation and our need for self-erasure. As we prove to our isolator that we will no longer lose our power in relationships, we will see the wall start to come down and life will change for the better. There is no shortcut to a more grounded isolator, but if you put in the work, you will find peace in the most challenging area of post-traumatic life: relationships.
Not This Time
Depression is a global problem and it is affecting many more people than we think. And it is powerful in its impact on us. It stops us in our tracks. It keeps us from our purpose and goals in life. It changes the way we see the world. It disconnects us from the people we would love to love. And it is incredibly hard to overcome when it hits. But the biggest problem with depression is not its existence. Based on the world we live in, it is an inevitable manifestation. The problem is that we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know what is triggering it. We don’t know how to resolve the problem it is creating. And the problems are big. When we can make sense of depression, we can change how it impacts us.
You may be wondering what I am talking about here. Depression doesn’t make sense to most people. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. It shows up whenever it wants and it seems completely vague in it’s nature. But what if I told you there was a message in our depression? What if I told you there are patterns that trigger our depression? And if we can spot them, if we can bring our awareness to them, we can begin to make sense out of our depression. We can use it as a way of getting to know ourselves on a deeper level. It’s not easy. It might even be the hardest thing we do. But it is possible.
Contrary to popular belief, depression is not sadness. Depression is a hopelessness, a futility that makes us feel like there is no action worth taking. It is a siren song that says, “Don’t bother. Don’t waste your energy. It isn’t worth it. Nothing will change.” And it is very convincing. It is triggered by patterns that can be very hard to see. But it is also triggered by patterns that are easy to see. Depression might show up after a rejection or abandonment in relationship. That one might be clear. It might say , “I told you so. Nobody will ever love you.” But depression can also show up when we are about to take steps toward what we want. It might say, “Don’t try anything too bold or visible. You will get hurt again.” It might show up after a business failure and say, “You will never be able to have what you want.”
These messages are based on evidence and that evidence has been proving itself since childhood as one self-fulfilling prophecy after another. That may sound like the meanest thing you could do to yourself. And in some ways, it is. But it’s not on purpose. It is meant to protect you from the pain of the losses that live underneath it. It is meant to protect you from taking any more chances and risks only to be crushed by them. It shuts things down before they get out of hand. In other words, it shuts you down before you can shift your patterns and get a new kind of evidence. But there is a way out. Here are four steps I have used to work with my very prolific futility in my own life. It is also what I teach my clients.
Write from it. I know you are not surprised to hear this from me. But the most important thing we can do is get the message from the futility behind depression. At first, it will sound like it is about now. Nothing is okay now. And maybe nothing it okay now. But the message started in your childhood. You felt the futility when you didn’t have the ability to change your circumstances in childhood. You didn’t have power then. You do now. But you haven’t found it yet.
Question it. When we start writing from futility, every word of it will sound true. The body will be intensely impacted. We might even struggle to hold ourselves up right. This is where we will feel the biggest struggle to stay alive. So we are not going to be able to argue with it very much. But maybe we can throw out a question or two. We don’t have to believe the question. It is okay if it sounds stupid. I prefer to use “what-if” questions. We might ask ourselves, “What if it won’t fail this time? What if things can get better?” We don’t have to believe them, but when we ask them and inevitably get a raging response from the futility (inner part), something new starts.
Detach from it. This is the new thing that starts. When we begin to have a conversation with our futility, this tells us something very important. There is something there that is not the futility. There is something having the conversation with the futility. What is that something? It is an aspect of self that is not futile. It is the grounded adult self who can see past the futility. This self can see that the futility is an emotion, a flashback, a story and most of all, temporary. This self can hold space for the inner part with futility without becoming completely engulfed in it. This detachment takes time to build, but as it builds, your ability to process out of depression grows.
Answer it. Once you build this detachment, you can gain more awareness about the pattern that started it. You can see how the present is looking like that past (sometimes in spooky ways). You can make sense of the message that the depression is bringing. And you can stop seeing the pattern as inevitable. You can start to see the way to end it for good. It won’t be easy to break the first time. It will feel like moving a mountain. Your entire inner system will scream about the impossibility of what you are doing. You will be inundated with evidence in the form of emotion and memories. Write from all of it. But you can answer it from that grounded adult self who has the power to make change happen. You can tell it:
Not this time!
Instead of Resolutions
It’s resolution time, but I’m not a big fan of resolutions. The idea of resolutions was most certainly created by a controller-enmeshed society who wants to constantly chase goals. It is a great distraction from our inner pain. It keeps us running and fighting and pushing. It keeps us striving for that top-notch version of self. In theory, these aren’t bad things. We should always be considering our next step in self-development. But the problem is the lack of balance that almost always accompanies the pressure to make resolutions and stick to them. And the other problem is the inevitable failure of those boundaries because we aren’t looking at what stands in our way internally. And with that failure comes another ding to self-worth. If you are like me, that is the last thing you need. So this year, I would like to bring you some other possibilities for embracing the new year.
Try a new way of setting intentions. Intention setting has become a popular way of creating change in our lives. But when our inner resistance to our intentions is too strong, the intentions will not be productive. And once again, we will be left wondering if something is wrong with us. Instead of setting intentions and repeating them incessantly, try setting intentions to connect with your resistance to what you want. When we set intentions, we can often sense a “no” in our system. If we write from this “no”, it can reveal how we have been set up by others to believe we aren’t worthy or won’t be supported in our desires. If you process and write from this resistance, you will have much less sabotage when you attempt to make change happen.
Try a new form of self-compassion. Self-compassion is often discussed in self development circles, but it can feel like a foreign language to those of us with complex trauma. It can be difficult to grasp or figure out what it means. We will often start by accepting the parts of us we have always accepted and it’s a good place to start. But try looking at what you don’t accept about yourself. Can you give yourself compassion for the mistakes you make? Can you validate the tough emotions you wish weren’t there? Can you allow yourself to rest when you feel tired? This type of self-compassion brings us closer to the balance we really need.
Try a new method of self-care. Self-care is touted as critical to recharge our batteries so we can keep running. But maybe we can look at self-care in a new way. What if self-care was meant to teach us how to find balance? Maybe self-care was meant to be a bit messy. It isn’t always about a day at the spa. Self-care is about what we need in the moment. Sometimes what we need is to be heard … by our own self. When we take time to listen to self, when we allow our emotions and stories to come forward, we bring our system back into balance and alignment. We care for self in ways that are bigger than almost anything else.
Make it an inner year instead of an outer year. There is a lot of focus on external goals this time of year. We bring our attention to the body, living spaces, jobs and financial status. But if we can turn that focus around and reconnect with self, we would connect with a much clearer understanding of how to attain those external goals. So try putting those external goals on hold and focus on what your inner parts have to say about their own experiences and beliefs. This will bring you closer to your external goals than any forced and desperate behavioral shift could.
I spent years forcing my life to happen and I accomplished quite a bit this way. I met all the milestones, at least for a while. And did well enough with having lots of things and even experiences. But on the inside, I was in pain and empty simultaneously. I had no idea what really mattered to me and was in a total panic about how I could possibly keep up the façade I felt obligated to build. It wasn’t until I turned my focus around that I found a way to live a balanced life with a sense of direction. So this year, don’t let the external world push you toward another set of impossible goals. Sit with self. Look at the yucky shadow stuff you have been running from. The real answer to the new year already lives within. It is waiting for you to see it. Go on an inner expedition. You will find it.
The Battle of the Contracts
I’m tired today. I don’t know if it’s lack-of-sleep tired or soul-is-sick-of-everything tired or dissociated tired. Honestly, it would be easy to figure out if it is the latter. All I would have to do is ground, but my controller doesn’t want to. So that’s probably my answer. I guess I am dissociated tired. But that doesn’t rule out the first two. My system is battling. Sometimes the battles aren’t too hard to figure out. I have learned a lot over the years. But sometimes they are complicated. Sometimes there are contracts that are mutually exclusive and yet, I hold them simultaneously. How can a system survive that way? There is constant chaos in that situation. And chaos is exhausting. So I’m tired.
Today I will process in my blog because figuring new things out feels hard at the moment. To be honest, I am always processing in my blog. But today, it might be a bit more raw, more obvious, more unedited. My hope is that you might be able to relate to some of it. But my hope is also that you won’t be able to relate to any of it. Why? It’s hard. It’s hard to deal with the battle of the contracts. But you probably will relate. So here goes.
Karma Kid. I can’t. I can’t break free. There is no freedom for me. They told me that. They told me there was no hope. They told me I would never ever escape. They said they would come after me. They said they would come after the ones I love. They are out there right now. They are following me. They are watching me. And the minute I decide to be free, they will come and get me. They know everything. And I am not free. I cannot be free. I want to be free, but that is not my life. That is not what this life has for me. That is for other people. Other people get to have special lives and freedom and love and friends and abundance. But that’s not my life. I can’t have that. And I can never be free from this contract. I don’t have that luxury. I just need to get through this life and forget about any hope I might be considering. That’s not real. That is not for me.
Inner Rebel. Are you fucking serious with this shit? I am tired of spending my days worrying about these losers from my past. I don’t have any more time to give to these people. I don’t have one more damn second or ounce of energy to expend on these losers. What the hell are we doing here? Why am I still talking about this? Why am I still stuck in this messed-up world that is my past? Leave these losers alone and let them live their miserable fucking lives. I don’t give a shit about any of them. I don’t owe them a thing. They owe me for all these wasted years. They owe me for all the time I sat around waiting for them to do the right thing so I could be free. I am tired of this discussion. I am moving on. I am done. I am going to do what I want and I don’t care about them or anyone else. I won’t be held back for one more day.
Controller. I think it is so important that I give this some thought. I can’t just run around willy-nilly and do whatever I want. I need a plan. I need to cover my bases. I can’t just do whatever I want. The world doesn’t work like that. I am burning every bridge I have ever had. What if these people come through? What if they finally do the right thing? If I burn these bridges now, I’ll never know. And walking away from these contracts is a huge risk. They could come after me. They could do damage to my life and reputation. They could discredit me. They could lie to others and ruin everything I have built. Nobody will accept me after that happens. And I can’t build a life if everyone hates me. I have to be more careful. I have to watch myself and make sure this doesn’t end in disaster. These people promised they would take me down and I can’t ignore that.
Mean Kid. Shut the fuck up controller! I am tired of your shit! I am tired of being suppressed by all the overwhelming caution about every damn thing. Good grief. At this rate, I am going to be sitting around until I die. But that’s the plan, isn’t it? Well, I am done letting them get away with their horrible actions. They deserve the worst of the worst. And the best revenge is living well. And the best life is making change happen. So screw all this caution crap! Stop letting them win! I am done with them winning the fight. What is the price of letting that fear rule all the decisions? It’s too big for me. I am done.
Love Seeker. They are finally going to do the right thing. They are finally going to be here for me. I just know it. They will finally show how much they love me. I just have to hold on a little longer. I don’t want to let go yet.
Isolator. I need to stay alone. I need to stay isolated. It is a bad idea to open myself up to new people and experiences because there will be more boundaries invaded, more abuse. I want to break these contracts because the people from my past are horrible. But if I open up to life, I know it will lead to more trouble from new people. People just can’t be trusted. That won’t ever change.
The Attack on the Outgoing
I hear it often from my clients. “I’m quiet.” “I’ve always been an introvert.” “I just don’t have much to say.” “I used to talk too much but I matured, and I don’t do that anymore.” There seems to be a general acceptance among survivors of trauma that their tendency not to express is coming from their inherent personality. Or at least, they believe it is a choice they are making. But I have trouble believing that. I have an introverted daughter and she is never short on words. Sure, she recharges with her alone time (with cats of course), but I’m an extrovert, and I do that too. Sure, she likes to think about things before she speaks. But when she speaks, it is prolific. She can even give a pretty awesome middle school presentation when she has no other choice. So I think we have been told a big fat lie. And I think I know why.
There is nothing that scares an oppressor more than a “talker”. And they are on the lookout for them. They are born with a certain something. I can see it when I meet a very young child who has not been oppressed yet. They have so much to say. They are curious beyond measure. They are creative. They don’t care how the world has always done it. They don’t know what it means to conform. And for an abusive person, they are a tough nut to crack. They are a danger to a family who needs to keep a huge secret. And to be honest, there is jealousy. There may be something in this child that others have lost in their own traumatic experiences. I can see the intolerance in people. They say, “Wow. She’s going to be trouble. You are going to struggle to contain this one.”
And that’s just it. The problem isn’t with this child. The problem is with the containment. Why the hell are we attempt to contain them? Well, I knew the answer to that one before I asked it. So what do abusive families need to do with children like this? They need to program them, brainwash them, gaslight them and confuse them. And they need to do it with more fervor and consistency than with other children. They may even need to do it well into adulthood (but often in subtler ways). So they start to build a story about who the child is. And this can go in two directions.
First, they may choose to gaslight the child to believe they are entirely different than they are. They will constantly shut down their expression with invalidation and aggression. Then they will tell them they are a quiet child. They will say they are introverted. They will keep reiterating how they really don’t say much. They use this often with outsiders to try to explain the oppression happening beneath the surface. Eventually, the child will come to see themselves this way even if it doesn’t make any sense. They lose the ability to express and stand up for themselves. But they excuse it as a personality trait. Deep down, they will know the truth. And they hate themselves for it.
Second, the family may go in the opposite direction. They will acknowledge the tendency to talk, but never in a positive way. Strong emotions will be labeled as volatile and unstable, even demonic. If the child stands up for themselves, they will be labeled as difficult and less “good” than other children. They will be compared to other children in negative ways. “Why can’t you be more like this other child who is quiet and conforming?” If the child talks often, they will be labeled as talkative and unruly and difficult to tolerate. Abusers will tell others how the child talks nonsense too. “They can’t be believed. They are not credible.” In the end, they will be shamed repeatedly because of who they are. While the child still may acknowledge their outgoing nature, they will acknowledge it with shame and humiliation. And they hate themselves for it.
That’s how they want it. They want to take the biggest threats and destroy their self worth. They want the outgoing, the optimistic, and the world-changers to feel shameful and hopeless. This has nothing to do with extroversion or introversion. It is about children who refuse to accept the lies. If they are full of shame and hopelessness about who they are, they will never rise up. They will never say, “Enough is enough!” They will never tell others about what is happening to them. If the world stays the same, the oppressors stay in charge.
One of the biggest questions survivors ask is “Why did this happen to me?” And I get it. We have to ask the question even though there is no real answer to it. There is nothing we can know with absolute assuredness. We can discuss the generational trauma. We can talk about what that does to mental health. We can discuss how it is not our fault. It definitely isn’t. But what would happen if we turned the story upside down? What if we could respond to our intense shame with a different question? For a long time we have asked, “What is wrong with me?” But take a minute to consider another perspective, a more empowering question.
“What intimidates them about me?”
“How do I scare them?”
4 Challenges of Parenting after Trauma
There is nothing more confusing than parenting after trauma. Our complex trauma teaches us to erase ourselves. It teaches us to ignore our most basic understanding of how the world works. It tells us that our emotions are not valid. And it instills generational messages of unworthiness and mistrust. We lose our inherent intuition and instincts. And with that, we lose our understanding of how to relate to our children naturally. This makes parenting so challenging for us. We know what we want to do, but we just can’t seem to get there. When we can see what is happening, we can start to shift back to who we were meant to be. So in honor of my twins turning 13 a few days ago, I thought I would devote this blog to the habits that tend to plague us as parents with trauma.
We will project. Projection is a word that is overused and underexplained in the psychology world. But the overuse is justified because projection is everywhere. So I will explain it a bit more. In parenting, projection happens when we are taught to suppress our own behaviors. We put these behaviors away and label them as bad or unsafe. When our external children exhibit the same behaviors we are suppressing within ourselves, we use our suppression tactics on them. Projection leads to a generational impact because the only way to stop it is to deeply heal the trauma at the source of it. And unfortunately, it is unconscious and hard to reach without practicing daily awareness building.
We won’t know what to do with their emotions. Suppression can apply to many things, but it almost always applies to emotions. Children are emotional beings. And adults with complex trauma have learned that emotions are unacceptable. At the least, we view them as inconvenient and unlikely to attract positive attention. But at the worst, we see them as dangerous. While projection is a part of our suppression of emotion, there may also be the feeling that our children’s emotions will also get them in trouble with others. The fear of these emotions can make us suppress them in children for their safety and our own.
We live with guilt and regret. There are no parents who get it right all the time. That is impossible in parenting. But when we have been through complex trauma, we have been loaded down with shame. We have been taught that we are unworthy. We have been projected upon until we believe that we are just as bad as our abusers (which isn’t true by the way). We will liken our small mistakes with our children to the traumatic abuse we experienced. And we will spin and spin in our minds about how awful we are. But there is another side to this tendency. If we can keep our focus on our guilt and regret, we can stop ourselves from feeling anger at our abusers which often feels dangerous to our defenses.
We will feel jealousy toward our kids. This might sound awful, but it happens. We have inner children who wanted the life we are trying to provide for our external children. And it is normal for them to feel jealousy. It is normal for them to be angry at the lack of gratitude from our external children. It makes sense that we want to tell them, “You have no idea how good you have it.” And that’s a tribute to how hard we have worked. Don’t forget that. We have worked hard to make change happen and now we are seeing the results. Take that in.
So how do we deal with these challenges in parenting? It is so important to allow our real feelings and not to squelch them like we were forced to do in childhood. If we feel fear about our children’s behavior or emotion, we can allow that fear and express from it. If we shame at our mistakes, let that shame speak up in writing. If we are angry with our children, we can find healthy ways to express that anger and get to the real target (hint: it’s not our children). Let that expression come forward. Accept the struggles that come with being a human dealing with generational trauma. You are allowed to feel how you feel. The more compassion and care you can provide to yourself about this, the more compassion you will be able to find for your external children. And that will create a huge break in the generational cycle of trauma.
