Wellspring Wednesday|Week 20: Time

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“Time heals all wounds.” The end. Episode over. Go out and just wait for your healing to come magically to you.

…

I find this statement to be personally unnerving and a bit offensive. I don’t think the Greek poet 2,000 years ago who seems to be the author meant it to be hurtful. In fact, I think he probably meant it for good. A soothing salve to help others get through their difficulties, losses, and grievances. I get the heart, but I don’t like the statement.

Not that it doesn’t have some truth. As you remember from episodes Nearsightedness and Objectivity, there is a quality to time and distance that allows for your mind to expand outward to even be receptive to healing. That is true. I agree with that. However, it’s not just some magic wand that waiting 15 years after a sexual assault that you’ll be wound-free. Just as there is not prescription of “add 17 months after you leave your abusive mother’s home and you’ll be cured”. In fact, beyond the original abuse, we know that trauma survivors — especially of childhood trauma — are much more likely to have recurring traumatic relationships, have a more reactionary trigger to new traumas like the death of a friend or a car accident, and are more prone to addictions, crime, and other coping skills that shorten their lifespan. So should we really be waiting around for time to fix all our woes?

I know that sounds dramatic, but as years go on with unhealed trauma, survivors are still suffering the aftereffects, struggling to keep the hope, and can become more isolated away from treatments that can help as the days go on. For some survivors, there is a desperation.

In the practice of IFS (like I spoke on weeks ago), strong protectors are working hard to keep the vulnerable, exiled inner children inside of survivors protected from pain and more suffering. As time goes on, a protector that has a lot of trust issues — for example — will only be proven right again and again as people fail them and the world remains scary. Ultimately, they are doing a great job protecting the ‘exiles’ inside — but they are doing a disservice to the system as a whole. As time marches on, this protector may indeed become more and more resistant to help, and another protector who is “tired of the trust issues” can come to cover that original protector. So now you have an inner child who was taught that people are scary from their original abuse, a protector who works to keep that exile safe by not allowing it to trust anyone, and then another protector who layers on top who is sick and tired of not trusting and getting hurt. Then your Self is sick and tired, and yet days are marching on. It can seem to be getting worse.

Again, I know the author of the saying meant well. I just feel the need to add on here that no matter the trauma, time is just one of the players in the game. It’s what you DO with that time that most matters. Even if it wasn’t childhood trauma, this is true. Let’s say you are in a really terrible accident and lose the ability to walk. You wouldn’t just sit in your wheelchair waiting for time to heal your legs. You would work hard with PT, special treatments, and therapies. With time, multiplied by a lot of work and tons of pain, you can relearn how to walk. Let’s also say that there are no therapies that will help you regain the ability to walk. Now you are just sitting in your wheelchair — but it’s still about what you do with the days after that reality. It takes time to rebuild self-confidence, and that’s only after accepting the truth and dealing with the grief of the loss of your legs as well as all the freedom that goes with it. It takes time to allow others to take care of this new dependent you, and it takes time to work at the small ways you can learn some independence even with your new condition. That’s time multiplied by work and tons of pain again.

Same is true for all types of survivors. Truth is, here you are — a Survivor! Let’s stop and take a moment to applaud that. Next, what can you do with your time post-trauma to work at your healing? What’s the next right step for you? How are you manifesting your healing in the time you’ve been given? Do you need to allow yourself to be angry at your abuser? Do you need to forgive yourself and recognize you aren’t even to blame? Can you learn to be okay with your aftereffects that trauma gave you all the while working to supplant some of the maladaptive coping mechanisms with new, healthy ones? Are you ready to try some modalities of therapy? Are you at a place where having a coach is right for you? Have you allowed yourself to grieve someone you lost? Have you sought out help for your addiction? What do you need in order to be successful at a new relationship or a career move? Are you happy in your current living situation or do you need to make some changes? Have you designed a regimen of self-care and accountability to help you along the way?

Time multiplied by nothing is nothing. Time multiplied by hard, arduous work is healing. Time alone can’t heal all wounds. Time and doing “the stuffs” — that can heal all wounds. Trust me, I know that, eventually, with enough of the time, patience, work, and support — you can heal. If you need a hand, reach out and let me know. Keep on keeping on. Time is marching on, and so come the opportunities to heal and return to your authentic Self. You are amazing!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 18: Red Flags

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One of the key internal resources you gain in your trauma healing is to be able to hear, trust, understand, and follow your gut instincts. I listed those out separately because it’s very common for trauma survivors to have self-trust injuries. It’s a relational aftereffect of the trauma or abuse they have endured. During the period of trauma, if it involved another person, which we call interpersonal trauma, the survivor may have been manipulated, coerced, or controlled. Because of that, they struggle to allow their own feelings and thoughts to be welcomed in their life. They may consider themselves the “bad one” in the relationship — which is often true for parent/child abuse if the trauma was during childhood. We’ve talked about how it’s unsafe for a child to think their caregivers are evil, unwell, or unfit, so they often take the blame on themselves. This can happen with any type of relationship trauma. If someone is used to being lorded over, controlled, disrespected, unheard, and belittled for making a choice for themselves — the period of that traumatic relationship will leave them out of touch with their own sense of self. It actually can break their own intrapersonal bridge — the self-trust mechanism inside themselves.

So the first part of the process is to reconnect a survivor with their own self — body, mind, and spirit. This will allow them to even be able to identify a red flag feeling however it presents to them. From there, once a survivor can even begin to hear their own gut instinct again, they then have to work on trusting it. This comes with practice, often by re-enforcing a gut instinct that wasn’t responded to. This can be a painful process because now the survivor feels or even hears something inside them, they still don’t trust it but instead ignore it, and then they learn a hard lesson.

If this has happened to you, I can offer a bit of a reframe. This is exactly the right place to start because this is the working part of re-trusting yourself. The hindsight of the experience, which can have devastating consequences, can show you that you COULD HAVE trusted your instinct and that also in the future you CAN trust it. This re-frame can take the sting away from the situation a bit and allow for a calmer response next time. Remember that what fires together wires together in the brain, so as you work on retraining your brain’s intuition you want to not feel angry toward yourself for NOT following your knowing. Instead, you want to allow for a lot of grace and calmly allow the visceral feeling that you got BEFORE the situation to be praised because it was right. This allows for deeper self-trust to development for next time.

After working to trust, the understanding comes in. What exactly is your gut telling you in a circumstance? Is it just afraid of something — like failure? Does it not want to take the leap into a new career path or an online course because it’s nervous to try something new? In this case, you can now work on trying to grasp what your intuition is trying to get you to do. Not always does your gut throw up a red flag because it’s definitely something potentially dangerous and you definitely should run away. Delineating between a red flag and a trauma response is really important. It takes time to listen to what’s behind your intuition. Does it just not want you to get hurt? Is it feeling like something is too good to be true? Is it worried you may get embarrassed? Those are trauma responses that may keep you from a really good thing or an opportunity to grow. You’ll start listening to, trusting, and then finally grasping what your feelings and hunches are actually about. You get curious about them, ask them questions, dig down to the roots of where they are coming from. You can work on your trauma responses differently than just fight, flight, freeze. That’s a main focus with several clients as they start to identify their trauma reactions v. their gut.

When it is truly a red flag, lastly comes the following part. This is always a work in progress. Figuring out how to sense your intuition, learning to trust it, and then training your understanding are all hard enough sometimes. However, when you’ve heard it, self-trust it, and then decipher that it’s an actual red flag that needs to be attended to — you have to take the leap and just follow that. This is obeying your own best knowing, honoring yourself with respect as you make a different choice, and move away from the red flag. This is often going to occur in a relationship where the co-worker, friend, or intimate partner starts showing you their true colors. Your insides start churning with info about how this looks similar to an old relationship that you’ve been through before. Their red flags start looking like the red flags that you ignored in the previous abusive relationship, and your whole being wants you to run. You can take some time to understand your intuition with curiosity, and if it does seem like this person is resembling something controlling or dangerous, you can follow it. It’s not just that your heart is nervous about caring about someone again, or the trauma response of fear of intimacy, but these are legitimate red flags that you need to honor. In this way, you can have confidence to get as much distance as you need and then congratulate yourself for following your instincts (maybe with a Jubilation mindfulness moment?)!

These are not easy tasks. I have done a lot of work on my self-trust bridge inside, and yet I still sometimes waiver in my intuition. I recently was headed somewhere that my gut kept telling me not to go. I could hear it, feel it, and trust it. It was a legit circumstance to avoid. I knew it. My gut knew it anyways. I even almost asked the Uber to turn around three times while on the ride. I didn’t listen and put myself in an unsafe situation. Later, I really gave self-compassion and praised my gut for recognizing the red flags and for trying to keep me safe. I forgave myself for not listening and then was able to re-affirm that my red flag button works just fine. In the future, I’m much more likely to listen to it and be kind to myself. That story comes after years of doing really good work and making big strides against self-abandonment and not being connected to my body. So, you know, this is a process, and no one is going to be perfect. Be patient with yourself.

Trauma taught you to be small, quiet, invisible, in self-doubt, to self-abandon your wants and desires, to put down all your own emotions for your abuser’s, and to not speak out. Your trauma recovery now is teaching you the exact opposite — to reconnect to your true self, show up and speak out for yourself, reunite with your emotions and desires, and go after them with your whole heart. It starts today and will continue as a journey for the rest of your days. Its prize comes even in the small wins, small gains, small choices, and small insights. You got this!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 16: Processes

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I want to chat about the word process in all senses of the definition today. Trauma recovery starts with a lot of processing — in the sense of “sorting through” the trauma you’ve endured whether that means thinking on it, talking about it, facing your emotions about it, finding professional help to cope through what you uncover, etc. This fire-starter of processing can be a lengthy ordeal. It takes patience with yourself as you move through the truth of your abuse or trauma, but eventually you will be at a place of some sort of acceptance where real healing can begin. You can also process through your trauma — as in “refine or rectify” — not as easily as you can distill water or decontaminate hazardous areas though. In the sifting and sorting that you are already experiencing, you can find some purification. Some may call this purging — maybe a cleansing of things that remind you of your abuser, going no contact with a toxic family member, moving out of a house where your tragedy happened, or anything you need to find solace.

From there, the process — as in “a fixed series of actions leading to a result” definition — is now the trauma recovery. You are looking for a combination of events or activities that start improving and healing the aftereffects of your trauma. This is a good time for coaching to begin — when you feel in more of a growth mindset and are at the place where you are examining the traumatic disturbances and looking to find relief. The groundwork that you do here is like setting into motion a path toward recovery. You can continue to sift through the side effects that you are suffering from — not just the trauma but the coping skills you adapted to survive your trauma. This is the pivot point we talked about weeks ago where now you are ready to begin thinking about helpful resources, therapeutic interventions, support groups, and getting your mind, body, spirit realigned and reconnected.

This is where a good routine becomes the blueprint for your healing. This may mean trying medications for the psychological struggles — which can be a difficult road to travel to find the right one and the right dose. This takes time, patience, and cooperation with your medical care team. This may mean trying bodywork or energy work to destress your nervous system, or meditation to begin to slow your mind and allow a new adaptation of mindfulness to emerge. This may mean a dedication to your therapist or coach — which also can take some hit or miss chances before settling into the right one. Once there, building a bonded relationship will be paramount to explore safety in yourself and others, and to grow in trust and intimate conversation. This is also a time in the process of strategizing to find creative outlets and long-lost passions to move you from trauma identity back to your authentic self.

After you’ve developed the system, you are in the process — as in “forward movement” — which is the progression phase. This is where the headway you made begins to reap benefits of healthy life functioning, a solid mind, body, spirit connection, peace, good relationships, improved sleep and physical health, replacing trauma lies with beautiful new affirmations, and supplanting harmful coping mechanisms with new, safe ones.

This of course is all under the umbrella of one, big, years-long process. The healing work is the healing, remember. The recovery road is the recovery. You may never find an end to it, to be honest. Some professionals say there is no truly “healed” trauma survivor, but along the way, the journey becomes more sustainable, more productive, more healthy, and more enjoyable as you grow and do the work. Remember that it’s not a linear road, and sometimes the process has detours and cul-de-sacs. Keep your head forward though, so you can also be proceeding onward.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 8: Hypervigilance

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Ah, yes, my old friend, Hypervigilance. I don’t mean “old” as though it’s gone; I mean “old” as in how long it’s been with me! Let’s start with defining what hypervigilance is. “The state of being highly and abnormally alert to potential danger or threat” is a good start from the dictionary, but with psychology in mind as we learn about our inner world, let’s add the phrase “accompanied by behavior that aims to prevent danger”.*

To be clear, this has nothing to do with being paranoid. Paranoia is based on a misconception about a current threat, believing there is a very real, specific threat befalling you right now. Hypervigilance is an ongoing lifestyle of anticipation and staying ready for any threat that may happen. This is a constant, overwhelming alertness — staying in a state of arousal to be ready to turn the engines on for a 4F response (like we discussed a couple of weeks ago). It’s a watching, waiting, scanning, and hyperfocus or expanded view observance. Hypervigilance comes in a few different flavors of what one is waiting for and why. For some, it’s always at the ready to run and hide. Others may be looking for things, people, places to avoid altogether. Still others stay guarded and poised to fight or lash out. While still others, my particular flavor, are at the ready to rush toward any threat like a firefighter. For me, this is a combo of fight and fawn response, it’s also why I said weeks ago that I believe there are several more that the Four F trigger responses where I added things like “fix” and “function”. It’s because those were some of responses I have to danger or threats. In fact, my flavor isn’t talked about often — so much so that for a while I rejected the term Hypervigilant for myself for a long time because I thought it was mainly about running, hiding, or preventing danger. Sometimes it’s about stopping it, calming it, or saving people after it. To the body, the hypervigilant responsibility is similar no matter what the brain plans to do when the threat actually arises.

The brain’s choice of what it’s waiting for, why, and what it plans to do about it is how the symptoms present for each person. Any number of things can happen to a person with hypervigilance. Most have a hard time following conversations in a room of people because their brain is so occupied with scanning the room. Many will be jumpy at loud noises, vocal tones changing around them even from strangers in a restaurant. This also looks like overanalyzing other’s body languages or hyper focusing on one person and all their movements if your brain perceives a possible threatening attitude. For some, it means that, around others or in unfamiliar groups, the hypervigilant person is always sweating, has dilated pupils, rapid breathing, etc. Even if they appear normal, the uncomfortability felt in the body can be overwhelming. This is all very distressful, often exhausting, emotionally taxing, and can be a conflict with our social norms.

For me personally, while driving on the highway, my brain is constantly playing out scenarios of what I would do if I was in or witnessed a car accident. For me, it’s about being ready to safely and quick pull over to help, while calling 911, and simultaneously not worrying about whether I would get hurt or not. In a room of people, I am a scanner for sure. I have learned really well how to carry on a conversation — but my peripheral is always aware of its surroundings. I am hyper aware of people’s tones and will start moving closer to anyone who seems they are getting angry or distressed because my brain’s specific course of action will be to try to calm the person and protect anyone that they may be getting angry at. If I hear a loud crash, bang, or yelling voice — my entire system revs immediately into overdrive in order to save anyone who may be hurt WHILE my brain is using logic to try to decide what I even just heard and where it came from. By the time my brain realizes it was just a kid at the playground squealing with joy, my body still takes several minutes to calm down from the pumped-up adrenalin it produces thinking it had to save said child from a kidnapping. My hypervigilance, to be honest, has actually saved several people and potential real-life problems. I have barged into a neighbor’s home and grabbed their children during a domestic violence incident where I heard them yelling about a weapon. I have (against 911’s pleading with me) walked up to a window-covered car to stop what I thought was a woman being raped. I am still very fuzzy on what actually was happening in that car, but those siblings were definitely harming one another. I stopped the last 60 seconds of it before the police came. There are even a few other large case scenarios where my firefighter instinct was very helpful. However, on a daily basis, what this constant state of hyperarousal has done to my body is immeasurable.

For others, this would be a constant state of ready to run, ready to hide. So much so that most hypervigilant people will just avoid a lot of life’s social situations — for example, never entering any room with a lock where they are alone with someone else even a harmless co-worker. This also means that we aren’t generally relaxed enough to enjoy ourselves or kick back and let our guard down for anyone, ever, in some cases.

So — this doesn’t sound healthy, right? So, let’s just stop doing this, right? Well, I can say that after years of working at it, I have learned how to at least calm the arousal state as soon as I realize that the threat I perceived is not real. I use breathwork to come back to a relaxed state as quickly as I can. I am also learning to be slower with my reaction periods. This has taken years of diligent work, but now I can sit on the couch and hear someone yell in a neighboring apartment, and I won’t ratchet up until I hear it at least twice. That’s progress! It doesn’t seem like much, but I’m still working on it. I constantly (like a meditation practice) am now able to draw myself back to the present moment in the road and driving rather than getting too far swept up in the visions of car accidents all around me. Yes, years later, I still, every few miles, have to catch myself in the car accident POV, ask my brain to stop thinking about that, take a few breaths, and refocus on the present moment. Mindfulness practice is a regular for me in a car.

What’s important to realize is that for trauma survivors — hypervigilance is very common and normal. Also helpful to remember is that everyone’s brain is just trying to keep them safe. So for someone who’s been through something horrific or a lifetime of trauma responses in developmental trauma, your brain uses the same tools of vigilance as a normal brain. Because it knows things that a non-trauma person doesn’t know, it has to do everything extra to protect you. Common sense is what keeps you from not walking down a dark street alone at night, but if you MUST, you are going to be happy your brain knows how to be vigilant. Vigilance is useful when you are in a different country and don’t know the language, areas of danger, the laws, or exactly where to go if you do need help — so it’s best to just try to avoid danger altogether by being cautious of your surroundings and keeping your personal items close, etc. Vigilance is healthy when you have a new baby, and you have to remind people to wash their hands before they touch your infant. Vigilance is what a normal brain uses to avoid a car accident, and arousal will happen IF and WHEN a normal brain is in an accident or witnesses one and can decide what to do. Hypervigilance and hyperarousal is driving in that constant state of being activated and ready for an accident at any moment, like what I was describing. Do you see the difference? Vigilance, like most things, can be really purposeful. It’s the extreme of these things that it becomes an issue.

So your brain learned hypervigilance as a child to sustain your abuse or neglect or dysfunctional home, right? Great! Thank your brain. Maybe life was great for you until a horrible trauma happened at college, and now you are hypervigilance around anything that reminds you of that incident. Thank your brain. If your spouse is abusive, you have learned to constantly be watching tones and facial expressions of everyone around you because you are so used to doing it at home with your partner. Thank your brain.

However, your inner world can learn to realize that you are safe now and to retrain itself if you recognize hypervigilance as a problem. If it’s become a maladaptive coping skill that you no longer need and is now actually damaging you (by not being able to relax, the physiological effects happening, the inability to sleep well because of it, and problems within new healthy relationships), this is what we say as “no longer serving you”. It WAS adaptive in your trauma season. Now, it doesn’t serve you anymore, and instead, you may be serving it by continuing on the path of damage to your nervous system, poor social habits, and lack of physical and mental wellbeing because of it. There are great therapies for this. Like we discussed a month ago, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a key one. EMDR, hypnosis, exposure therapy, breathwork — these are also available.

Firstly, by recognizing that you may suffer with hypervigilance, understanding the effects it has on you and your body, and being ready to make a change, you can start to believe there is a better way. And that, to me, was the very foundation inside me to want to pursue calming my hypervigilance. The primary step to healing is always to take all the wisdom and knowledge into your inner world, show yourself the reality of what’s going on, and decide you want something new. That is the Full Circle Pivot I spoke on recently. There is a better lifestyle beyond the constant anxiety of hypervigilance.

If you need help in this area, it’s a space I feel very confident coaching in. Not only from all the knowledge and training I’ve received for myself, but my fresh perspective as a person healing-from-hypervigilance, I would be honored to help support you on this journey. Feel free to send me a message on the Connect tab of my website or schedule a Complimentary Discovery Call to meet with me to discuss coaching. We don’t want to aim to become absent-minded, but we can find a proper balance of mindfulness without hyperarousal attached. You got this!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 7: Good Enough

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You may have heard the term “good enough parent”. If you have, bear with me while I quickly explain it because I’m actually going to turn the tables and bend this toward trauma recovery as an adult. For those that haven’t heard this term, it’s a concept that comes from British psychoanalyst and pediatrician, Donald Winnicott. He coined the term “good enough mother” which was his observations about how mothers hold and nurture their children, while attending to their needs. He called this the devoted mother, and further realized how the mother’s holding techniques helped the child recognize they were safe in their own body as a tiny human. He went on to see how this holding and safety translated to how the child felt safe around others as its human circle grew with other relatives, eventually friends, then lovers. Later, Bruno Bettelheim’s book, A Good Enough Parent, really psychoanalyzed this idea. A lot of the focus in his book is on a good enough parent’s ability to not attempt to be perfect, which in turn lets them recognize that the tiny human they created also isn’t perfect. It allows for flaws, and in willingness to accept said flaws, it teaches the child how to cope someday with a world that also will not be perfect. The author insists that there is a proper balance between too much parenting and too little parenting. (As you probably remember from weeks ago, I’m a huge fan of balancing things. It’s the Libra in me!)

One can over-parent into oblivion with massive expectations of the child’s accomplishments, servanthood, always demanding the child have a great attitude, and helicoptering to ensure the child is always safe. This teaches the child that they are only as worthy as their achievements. That they are only loved by those who they are serving and only when they are serving. That any emotions are not welcome because they interfere with the need to whitewash the family dynamic to look perfect. That the child is only safe when a caregiver is there to make certain they are. It creates a perfectionist tendency, an inability to feel and live out their own dreams and desires, a lack of emotional intelligent, and a feeling of being unsafe with oneself as an adult.

Of course, we know more about the under-parenting dynamic because this often looks like neglect, abuse, or abandonment. However, it’s important to understand the coping skill developed by an under-parented child is often parentification of their caregivers, themselves, and to anyone else who looks like they need it. This begins an adult power and control cycle from a child who felt like nothing was in their control. Neglect is one of the trickiest psychological abuses because, in those developmental years that we spoke on a couple weeks ago, this leaves a child with a void that can be nearly impossible to fill. It’s said that, as painful as what happened to you was, sometimes it’s what didn’t happen to you that was worse. And not being loved, cared for, heard, respected, chosen, sought after, or attended to as a baby/child has devastating after effects.

The good enough parent allows a child to be a child and is more focused on their current development than on what they’ll become someday as an adult. They parent them because they love them not because of what value they’ll bring to them someday by way of pride and accolades. A good enough parent allows the child a safe space with some distance to learn to trust themselves, and a place to grow, play, laugh, be free, make mistakes, learn some consequences, apologize, forgive, understand that all this is part of the human experience. Good enough parents don’t overreact at one bad grade or blame the child’s worthiness on a lack of ability to do something. Good enough parents allow their kids to make mistakes and make atonements. They even admit their own mistakes as well and allow the child to see humility and reparations! They include their child in just enough adult activities and conversations that they get a taste, but not enough that the child gets overwhelmed by adult problems. They give their child just enough responsibility to foster skills of diligence and industry, but not so much that they are workaholic perfectionists who feel terrible resting and playing as adults.

So what does all this have to do with trauma recovery? For me and most other trauma survivors, one of the hardest things we have to work through in our journey is re-parenting ourselves. In my opinion, it’s also one of the most beautiful parts. Re-parenting is a topic for an entire other episode, but in re-parenting yourself, you can actually find for yourself a “good enough life” along the way. You can be a good enough parent as an internal adult now and be the good enough parents you maybe didn’t have.

With that, I also can attest that this re-parenting has layers — layers that look a lot like a childhood path from infancy to independence. Starting the re-parenting process can look like giving birth to yourself all over again. It’s painful because the first thing you have to realize and accept is that you didn’t have good enough parenting in your childhood. You spend the next while of your recovery in the infancy stage — which is a bit overly self-focused. You need to cry and attend to yourself, hold space for your big emotions, be gentle with yourself, allow yourself to be needy as often as you must, and to give yourself the basic unconditional, tender love an infant is innately worthy of having.

From there, you are sifting through re-parenting yourself like a toddler and preschooler metaphorically looking for independence by trying new things, encouraging yourself along, giving yourself comfort when you fall down and get hurt, allowing yourself to try and fail and make mistakes and to be okay with all that.

Then comes the primary grade stage re-parenting yourself with symbolic self-help talks as you build (or rebuild) your adult social life — one that has boundaries, where you have a voice and choice, deciding who you want to hang around with, and what kinds of activities you want to engage in.

Middle school parabolic self then enters into being good enough as your voice grows stronger, you start to discover who you are and who you want to be, looking at yourself in the mirror and (no matter what) being okay with the weird body that’s staring back at you. (If only we could go back to crazy hormonal junior high and not say all those creepy things, not wear those weird styles, and not announce to everyone we were definitely going to be X career because that’s what your parents want!)

When you step into the maturing stage of re-parenting the inner teenager, this is where you really start to shine on your trauma recovery journey. If the inner infant and inner child can have some serious healing and post traumatic growth by learning to be okay with themselves, to feel safe inside their body, use their voice and boundaries, make healthy relationship choices, fall in love with who they are, understand that failure is just a perception, and not be afraid to try new things because they know they’ll always have their own back — this is the good stuff because now you’re re-parenting of teenagehood doesn’t have to be as painful as it was when you were a bag of trauma bones. You will know that as your now-stand-in-good-enough-parent-self that you are free to decide who you actually want to grow up to be, what you are good at, what you love, and to never be afraid to follow your dreams. This part of the recovery road can often look like a few big life changes. When you start realizing you’ve been living your life without proper love or care for yourself, going along with societal norms, trapped for years listening to your own inner critic, afraid of your own body and wants and needs, too nervous to speak your mind or reveal your true self with the world — that’s when you now have built good enough freedom through trauma recovery to leave a bad relationship, walk away from a job you aren’t passionate about, take that mini-retirement trip, end a friendship that’s been holding you back, not accepting indifference or ambivalence in any area of your life.

Well, friends, to me that looks like Full Circle healing if I do say so myself. The self-loved, confident, non-judgmental good enough person you can become is the reason you started making the pivot and changing the course of your path in the first place. Like I said, I know personally that re-parenting is an uppermost step in healing. I welcome you to start small by just letting yourself mourn for what happened to you, or for what you lacked, in your developmental years. One of my favorite passions right now is helping people heal inner child wounds. If this episode has you recognizing a need to re-parent yourself, I’d love to hear from you. Click on the “connect” tab on my website in the link below and send me a message. Maybe it’s time to see if my “good enough coaching” is right for you. Either way, never give up on your inner child. Healing is completely possible and possible to complete. You’ve got this, Survivor.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 6: Four Fs

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

The title is a trick subject because as you’ll see there are more than four Fs when it comes to trauma and the nervous system.  It is still called “the four Fs” in psychology though, and I bet you’ll know at least two of them.  The 4Fs are the main stress response types of mammals.  I think it’s important to understand each of them and to be able to recognize which ones you generally have used in traumatic situations and use currently during a trauma trigger reaction.  With this knowledge, you can begin to realize when you are going into a “4F response” and learn how to calm yourself during the event, as well as perhaps start to pinpoint what prompted it.  This is great inner wisdom to know about yourself, I find. 

In basic terms - inside your brain, you have an amygdala whose job it is to watch out for danger.  When a danger is perceived (whether real or not), the amygdala sends a message to the brain’s hypothalamus to start turning on the engine for the autonomic nervous system (the ANS).  The ANS then kicks your heart rate up, speeds up your breathing to get more oxygen to your muscles (or holds your breath in certain responses), dilates your pupils to let in light to see better, makes your blood thicker to help with clotting in case of injury, causes sweating due to the increased heart rate to try to cool the inflamed system, and a few more things. 

All this happens to save your life.  Full stop.  Your brain is trying to save you from what it thinks is danger.  Even if you recognize there isn’t danger, your logical mind will begin to slow the system once you tell it it’s safe, but you probably notice that you are still activated in your body.  It takes a bit to calm down all the areas that heightened in preparation for the danger.  If there is a real threat to your life, this ANS activation is what gets you to react quickly to jump back on the sidewalk if a car is coming at you, to slam on your brakes to avoid an accident, or to run away from a dog attacking you.

The main four Fs are called: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.  The fight or flight response is as old as human existence is.  Run away or duke it out is what our ancestors did forever.  In humans now, these responses have sometimes become normal ways of life in everyday circumstances to anything that may seem hard at all – not just fear of a true danger.  For trauma survivors, your brain has suffered enough pain and anguish that it tends to imagine that anything COULD be bad, dangerous, fearful, strange, unfamiliar, unsafe, or uncomfortable.  Your brain has adapted to learn to respond to things in these ways on a regular basis, sometimes no matter the reason.  Like we learned in Monday’s mindfulness practice – a trauma survivor may have something as small as a familiar dangerous smell (like the cologne of an abuser) that sets them into a 4F trigger response, and they can’t even comprehend why. 

For some examples, the fight response now could be asserting power over someone else or fighting inwardly with yourself rather than just wrestling a lion like our ancestors.  The flight response could be any type of escape used to avoid conflict or potential danger, not just to run away when you are in it.  This even translates to escaping into your own world of thoughts, or workaholic syndrome.  Freeze is a big one because, in the mammal world, this shutdown response - based on the circumstance - is to either try to trick the opponent into thinking you are dead or to literally start shutting down your body in preparation for death.  The freeze response may be dissociating regularly throughout the day or avoiding human contact altogether because you believe humans are innately dangerous to you.  In trauma, the freeze response looks like the body shutting down for death – the heart rate slows and breathing slows because it is bracing to die.  The fawn response is said to be the people pleasing response.  In a traumatic event, this is the child who is trying to calm the people around them as to avoid the danger that they sense is imminent.  In regular post traumatic events, this becomes a people pleasing perfection – which is a developed coping skill to try to keep everyone else happy, so they don’t become a safety risk.  It’s born out of fear. 

If you are a trauma survivor, you may have a hybrid of some of these tendencies.  You may try to placate an aggressive situation that reminds you of an abusive father that you used to be able to calm with fawning, but you may completely run away from the first signs of deep connection with a friend because your brain remembers the way your siblings would use your vulnerabilities to manipulate and psychologically abuse you. 

There is so much to say on this topic really. I tend to find anything related to human personality and characteristics fascinating.  If you are interested to know your 4F type but are struggling with the self-introspection to do so, I’d love to help you support you in learning more about these and getting to know your responses and reasons behind them. 

I also like to add more Fs to this conversation because I believe there are also stress responses like: Fix (akin to doing and helping), Function (just keeping on going in the system of your inner world), Feel (stopping and feeling the stress and healing it), Flow (finding rhythm in your chaos and moving through it), Follow (looking to authority for cues of how to respond), Flop (related to flight escape, turning inward to laziness and couch potato lifestyle to avoid life), Forget (repressed memories can lead to inability to even recall daily stressors), Force (just pushing on pretending that you aren’t stressed), Fun (seeking adventurous ways to release your activation), and Forgive (using the triggered moments to recognize where the activation came from to forgive your trauma for causing it). 

There is a lot to explore here and even more to discover about your inner world.  If you need help navigating that, shoot me a message on the “Connect” tab of my website, or check out the “Work with Me” tab to see if coaching is right for you.  Knowing your body and brain’s response choices is helpful in figuring out where your trauma response came from, unlocking ways to calm your activation, and finding some freedom from these triggers.    

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 5: Easy v. Simple

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

I have been known to say that “nothing is easy, but everything can be simple”.  This isn’t always the case, of course, but this kind of blanket statement motto has been a constant reminder for myself in my own trauma recovery journey.  For me, because I believe in the almighty optimism of life, I just trust things the simpler they are.  It’s almost like when searching for an answer – I tend to have it fall into my lap.  However, then, when something comes too easy, I tend to be a skeptic!  Yet when something tangible and logical comes to me – like in a dream or something – it seems simple and feasible.  This could be an answer to a question, a confirmation I needed for something, the next right step that I’m searching for, the proper response, or just what I must do to move forward from a situation.  However – this comes after taking time to learn to self-trust and trust the universe.  If you aren’t there or you are bent toward pessimism – I’m not going to try to change your mind.  If you hear me out though, I will challenge you with a concept that may turn into a powerful inner resource on your healing path.  Either way is okay, but I’m going to share it because I believe it to be true - if only for my own life.

The way toward self-realization is realizing who you are; the way toward self-actualization is actually realizing who you are. 

The End…Just kidding.

Trauma survivors – all of us – would LOVE an easy solution, an easy cure.  We want the PTSD to stop, the emotional disconnection to end, the relational and intimacy issues to go away, the physical pain to be gone, etc. We know there really isn’t an easy one-step-cure-all to fix each of us.  What if it could be broken up into simpler steps though?  What if there was a perfect path for trauma recovery with YOUR name on it?  Different for each survivor; tailored to your specific trauma, responses, coping skills, and aftereffects.  Instead of asking how CAN you live your best life – what if we asked ourselves how SHOULD we live it?   What I mean by that is what if we had a felt sense of knowing in our gut that is our authentic self that is guiding us back to our truth.  

I don’t say this to sound woo-woo.  I’m not woo-woo; I’m just woo.  I believe that survivors have their own tools and keys buried inside them like a hidden treasure.  Trauma covered it up with earth, magma, rocks – like a volcano that covers everything it touches.  But – underneath is still preserved the tools that you were born with, the person you still are even before the trauma happened.  The purpose, the passion, the right path for your perfect life.  Now, those tools may be altered from the lava, ash, and soot.  They may work differently; they along with you have been changed forever.  That’s all true.  It’s also true that the coming back to yourself is the healing.  Then you realize, uncover, and rediscover (or maybe just discover) who you are.  This can’t be an easy task – but it can be simple if you trust that you are still in there.  If you are sure that you are, you are willing to do the work, set a plan, and show up for yourself over and over – the rest can be simpler.  Your self-actualization can then be freed to bubble over and do great things. 

Way back on Week One, I discussed some basics of this in episodes called: “Agency” and “Acne of the Soul” which I’ll link to in the show notes for reference.  Finding what works for you and what you actually need is part of a self-inquiry process. If you are struggling with sifting through this – I recommend asking your trauma recovery coach or therapist for help.  This is similar to Life Coaching – which I am passionate about in helping people find their life’s mission – but if you have a trauma history, this may be bringing up so many emotions that you may need extra support.  Feel free to send me a message and ask how I can help.   

Once you do this self-inquiry process, you’ll start having freedom to ask yourself questions about goals, careers, relationships.  You can search out answers to life’s big questions.  You’ll want to figure out how you want to live, where you want to live, who you love and why, how to be a good parent, how to break addictions and cycles, and so much more. 

And all that can be simpler because you’ll ask your inner knowing what SHOULD you do instead of what CAN you do.  For instance – if you asked yourself what you can do for a living … you could think of 10 things off the top of your head. You could pick off the option’s list by narrowing it down based on how long the commute is and how much the salary is.  You then decide on whatever one, and then go and get it.  Probably in a year or two with the right certification or degree or application process – in no time, you could be a (insert career here)! 

However, if you ask yourself deep down what SHOULD you do for a living … then, you have to simply be quiet, patient, still, and listen.  Aligning with your purpose deep in your inner being, you can actually find out what career bests suits your purpose.  Then – you won’t be given a random list to choose from, you’ll be given an answer.  

I do know from experience that this trauma recovery thing is really difficult at times, and it requires consistent, hard work.  Picking an easy road – like remaining where you are, not growing, allowing your family to keep manipulating you, not setting boundaries, losing yourself in everyone else, striving to be perfect, just staying where you’ve always been – this won’t take you to where you want to go.  Choosing the (albeit) harder recovery road– doing the work, being coached, figuring out who you are, getting help for your addiction, emotionally releasing all the junk, discovering your authentic self – will give you the long-term gains in the future to live your best life and walk in your healed, whole self. 

And that’s the end.  That’s the goal of this human life thing we do – finding ourselves and our purpose and then being our best self. On this week’s Full Circle Friday (week 5: Eat, Pray, Love), we’ll talk more about the idea of goals and goal setting (which is a big part of what I do as a trauma recovery coach).  If you are overwhelmed at the challenge of today, send me a message on the “Connect” tab on my website to let me know.  I promise to reach back with any help I can offer.   If you are feeling overwhelmed, there is a reason for that, and we can figure it out together. 

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 2: Basics

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

This may seem elementary to some, but it’s actually very common for trauma survivors to struggle with any type of self-care.  An especially important part of discovering, storing, and knowing how and when to use inner resources comes from having a good relationship to self-care.  So if you aren’t really sure what self-care looks like for you or you have no practice of self-care (yet), you aren’t alone.  When you don’t have a regular self-care practice, for trauma survivors, it may be because you don’t have a very strong relationship to your own mind, body, or spirit.  This is also very common, and nothing to berate yourself for. A big key for a lot of survivors when they are first stepping into their healing journey is to initially recognize that they don’t often check in with or feel like they have a communication with their thoughts, body, or inner spiritual world.  If that’s you today, maybe today is just your moment to realize that and acknowledge it.  If you are ready, you may want to explore some of the basics of getting into a healthy space with yourself before you go too big with self-care.  Remember, the self-care regimen and practice that you can eventually develop will look quite different from person to person.  It’s a very special, personal plan of things that feed your own being.  You can get great ideas and suggestions from others – but self-care is actually much more than a spa day or a bubble bath.  Although self-care CAN be those things, it’s not truly just about those things. 

However, a good place to start is always at the beginning. There are actually things that are needed for human survival before one can fully thrive.  If you are at that place today where you are noticing how little you hear from your heart and body, these basics will help you grow some of that inner intuition by being kind to yourself in a very “human needs” sort of way.  Some of these basics that I’m referring to would be cornerstones like sleeping, eating, grooming, hygiene, moving the body, and kindness to yourself while you learn. I’m not in any means saying it’s time to start a major diet or start working out 3 hours every day. I mean taking an inventory of your regular daily habits to see where you may have some deficits.  This is by no means either a way to judge yourself against some standard.  This inventory is to get really honest with yourself in your “activities of daily living”.  This term is used by many health professionals as a measure of fundamental things one needs for independent living. 

As a trauma survivor, for instance, your sleep might be problematic – from being unable to get to sleep or stay asleep, to full fledge insomnia, or major disruption like nightmares.  If you have used eating as a coping skill during abuse or stress, it may be helpful to just recognize this as an unhealthy mechanism that may be hindering your health in your mind, gut, body, and spirit.  This is just an inventory – and trust me when I say, it is extremely common for trauma survivors to have impediments in these basic fundamentals.  What you have been through has left you with maladaptive survival skills, overactive stressors, fear trapped in your body, and weights of epic proportions on your spirit.  Recognizing that something such as ‘personal hygiene being limited’ may unlock an eye opener to help you realize that your hygiene or basic grooming is representative of how you see yourself.  Then, maybe seeing that limited care for your outer body, this can clue you into how it mimics the way you haven’t cared for your inner being. 

Once you can begin to acknowledge some of these things in the ‘school of basics’, you can itemize out anything that you find to be lacking that you would really like to change.  It’s also okay if you understand your eating habits are a way that you control the stress in your life, for instance.  It may not be something you are fully ready to work through yet because without that coping skill you may not feel equipped to face the stress of your trauma.   With some of these functional skills, you honestly may want to work on your trauma healing much more before you are able to tackle something like your eating choices or body image.  For a lot of survivors, they need to address the mental health aspect of their trauma and find recovery before they can address sleep issues or physical exercise restrictions. This is all okay.  Today is just a challenge for you to examine what is working for you and what isn’t.  This type of investigation is helpful but may be triggering.  If you have a trauma recovery coach or a therapist or close friend, you may want to ask them to help you sort out a list of your daily habits and general self-care.  With my clients, we go through an Activities of Daily Living assignment once a month for three months to get a baseline of what a day in their life looks like. Then we check in with it periodically to see how things have been changing as they move forward down their trauma recovery path.  It may be daunting to write out “sleeps just 2 hours at a time” or “sleeps all day” – but trust me when I say there is NO judgment to this record.  It’s just the truth about your situation – with no story behind it.  It takes practice to recognize a need this great yet to have kindness and patience with yourself as you do it.  If your basic life health has taken drastic downturns due to your mental health or your trauma, please recognize that this activity of exploring these things is best done with a professional or close partner.  It’s helpful to have someone there to remind you that these truths about yourself are totally normal and totally okay.  Then, you’ll also have someone available to help you sort out what areas that you’d like to make changes and help you figure out how to go about starting to do that. 

The basics are an important stepping stone to finding genuine care for yourself.  Beyond the basics, it’s then safer to take a look at those more stereotypical self-care routines and practices that you read about in the magazines – which are truly more about what fills you with joy, what makes you feel alive, and stops the clock while you do it. In fact, in the care of a professional, I would even encourage you to start searching out those things that are “big S” Self-care for you even while you are still working on tackling the basics.  The more you grow in your healing, the quicker some of the basics will start to align to your preferred values. Always remember to give yourself a ton of grace with this type of topic.  You have been through things that others haven’t, and you owe a large appreciation to your body and coping skills for helping you survive here today.  Kindness is really the key here.  You can’t experience self-care without first learning to care for and about yourself.  Be patient.  You got this!