i don't know what's worse when you're in a argument with the loved one if you lash out
in anger or give them the silent treatment and the silent treatment is what we're going to talk about
today on ask the fairy this is where real people send in real letters to me and i answer them in
a way that everyone can hear and if you like you can weigh in in the comments section with kindness
all right with kindness and love and support for these vulnerable letter writers who have
done us the honor of sharing what they're going through with cptsd for our benefit
alright so today's letter is from a guy named bob who's 31 years old and bob says my girlfriend left
me in october last year the reason she gave was that we couldn't communicate and she was right
throughout our four-year relationship whenever i felt threatened by criticism i became triggered
and disregulated although i didn't recognize what was happening in those terms at the time i would
shut down and ignore my girlfriend for over 24 hours at a time only when i was too exhausted
to be angry anymore would we make up but i would continue to hold on to subconscious resentment
this happened on several occasions until just as you describe in your videos my girlfriend
no longer felt comfortable to raise her concerns and our
connection withered so today i can see that my behavior was unacceptable and even manipulative
however i deeply regret the fact that i made no effort to educate myself about this sooner
stonewalling as i've since learned the tactic is called is an old habit for me
after experiencing repeated rejections for being overly emotional as a child i started
to shut myself off from my mother in the same way she passed away when i was 16. that is so young
i desperately wanted to stop this pattern of behavior of closing myself off from people
i love until one day they're gone and i'm left alone with feelings of profound guilt and shame
i never want to hurt myself or anyone else like this again but the thought arises that deep down
i'm a monster who will do the same thing to the next woman in my life the tactics you discuss are
great tools which i plan to use the next time i'm triggered but what can i do to let go of
my shame instead of adding it to the pile how do i learn to be honest and vulnerable with a
future partner without appearing broken or messy or damaged goods please keep up the great work
sincerely bob thank you bob i think you're actually in a wonderful place
um i think sometimes when we get our hearts broken we become extremely teachable
and you have just been given a gift to that's going to push you to start learning how to stay
regulated in a conflict in in the relationship and to do things differently at last now i don't know
what caused your mom to reject you when you were little but i'm guessing that's what gave you cptsd
is whatever you did as a small kid who couldn't possibly have done things better it caused you
to get rejected and i don't blame you at all for learning to cope with it by just withdrawing that
seems like a very sensible strategy for a little kid and it's a terrible strategy for a boyfriend
or husband so this is so good you're in the right place you sound to me like you get dysregulated
so i want to take it from the part where you said you feel shame and you want less shame
and work backwards from there so shame you you know in the techniques i teach the daily practice
we deal with fear and resentment and resentment can be directed to other people or ourselves and
that's what shame is is resentment itself now how when when we've written that and gotten to the
fear underneath what what you'll almost always find is that there's free-floating shame that
isn't really from anything you did it's just kind of like a fearful idea that you should be ashamed
and then there's earned shame and that is from something you did that you feel bad about
and the urn shame sort of sets the other shame on fire and it feels like this giant you know
explosion of shame but actually it's just a couple things you did and when you work on those when you
clear them up you'll find that all this stuff just sort of evaporates and it's not really a thing
anymore and that's how to reduce your overall shame so that's how you can deal with what you're
feeling about this right now like oh i screwed up and i should have done better and you know what i
mean everybody says this but i'm going to tell it to you again you couldn't have done better you had
to get your heart broken for you to take seriously that there was a better way than just going silent
and honestly i wouldn't be surprised if if you know going going silent it's a coping mechanism
you were probably trying to spare both of you from something worse like a big explosion
hoping the silent treatment was somehow more innocent and the weird thing is the silent
treatment is just as aggressive as yelling it actually is it really hurts people um for people
for other people who have cptsd it can it can be crazy making when somebody won't talk to you
a couple yes people couples need to talk to each other about what's bothering them that is how the
connection stays alive so if you can't talk about it because one person's going to flip out you know
or go silent this the other person becomes afraid to say how they really feel about things and yes
the connection withers as you said so to be a good partner we've got to be somebody you can
talk to even if the person has something critical for us and taking criticism is not our strong suit
it can feel life and death when somebody's got a problem like it just triggers like old
abandonment and rejection wounds and it gets very like out of proportion the monster does come out
so so here's the task in front of you it's it's really quite finite and it's to learn to tolerate
the the uncomfortable feeling of somebody being unhappy with you and i don't mean to go silent
or pretend it's not happening but to tolerate it without going to your coping mechanism behavior
that causes breakdown of relationship you you want a coping mechanism that
allows continued communication and i i have a good one to suggest to you i love this one
and this is the art of taking a break all right do you ever do you ever start having an argument and
you start to feel overwhelmed and that feeling comes up that you become very angry and hurt
and you want to get control over what's happening maybe your partner is raising her voice or you can
see on her face that she's thinking about you you know maybe she doesn't like you so much and it's
starting to give you adrenaline okay that's your signal that you're getting dysregulated i have
this really beautiful signal that i'm getting just regulated my nose starts getting numb
and it starts happening even before i'm aware there's a problem so it's this really great signal
and in the dysregulation boot camp which you may have taken um we have that you know i teach
people to start like getting very very in touch through like daily just keeping paper with them
and writing down like when do you get dysregulated what sets it off what are the signs that you're
just regulated because if you know it's happening you can take emergency measures and you have the
self-control to do that like i i feel like i want to bail i feel like i want to do this hurtful
thing but i'm going to stick around i'm going to stick around and i'm going to use my tools
step 1 notice that you're dysregulated step 2 get yourself a little bit of pause and usually
that means taking a break for me five minutes is usually enough actually to calm back down
you might need half an hour you might need even longer but the important thing is to give
yourself a break time that you will actively use to re-regulate without hurting the other
person so here's how you do that you say i feel like i'm getting disregulated i worry that i'm
just going to end up you know acting angry and hurting your feelings and i definitely don't
want to do that can i have five minutes to just kind of pull myself together so you're asking for
a favor you're being transparent you're taking responsibility you're not saying you've got me
all dysregulated nobody wants to hear that even if it's true so so you ask for some time to pull
yourself together and you give a time when you're gonna come back when are you gonna come back
so if it's five minutes you say could we come back together here in five minutes and continue
this conversation now validate them say i really do want to have this conversation i do want to
hear what you have to say but i just i need a few minutes to kind of pull myself together
so that i can really be present for you and you know most people can say yes to that sometimes
you know sometimes a person feels impatient with it it's like oh come on just sit here just have
the conversation but you can talk your way through it and anybody who's been through a blowout with
you will start to have an incentive to go ahead and give you the five minutes
hopefully it's not going to come to that so you take a break now while you're taking that break
you don't just go look at your phone you know you don't just go storm around and stomp and think how
terrible they are you use your tools so there's an emergency set of tools and then there's something
a little bit more durable the emergency set of tools is the emergency measures to re-regulate
and i'll go ahead and put a link to that you can download it and have a copy for yourself
but it's stuff like washing your hands um squeezing yourself into a
corner so your nervous system can feel a hug stomping your feet and saying to yourself
left right left right sitting in a chair and feeling the weight of your body you're just
doing emergency measures to bring yourself back from a totally like a nervous system going amuck
back into feeling yourself and it's it's pretty effective too then um if you have more that's
if you have like one minute you can do those things if you have five minutes you can actually
get some paper and a pen and you can start to write your fears and resentments probably it's
going to be resentment i'm resentful at name of partner here because i have fear they're saying
and you start getting that on paper and you don't even have to make it legible and you're not going
to read it to them you're letting it out you're getting it on paper to take the electricity out
of it you're draining it of its monster power and all it is is a bunch of fear and resentment
now it might be important and it might be pointing to you know what this person's no good you don't
want to be with them that's possible that's a possible outcome i'm not saying that you just like
discard all your impressions of everything but you take all of it all the fear and resentment and
get it on paper and then either ask for it to be removed i describe the technique in the link you
should take the course don't don't let me give you this shoddy like quick explanation take the course
you can learn it and try it in 40 minutes that way you're not acting crazy and i don't mean you're
crazy but have you ever talked to somebody who's just completely like flipped out about something
and they're absolutely sure that what you meant by what you said is that they're awful and
you're trying to tell them but they can't hear you so you don't want to come at somebody with
that energy and nobody nobody wants to hear us like that either so you take it to the paper
that's where that intense stuff goes and even if all you have is five minutes what's ready to
come out of your mouth after that when you explain what's going on or say what it is you want to say
is going to be ever so much cleaner and calmer and something that they can hear
you might need 10 minutes or 15 minutes for that you might need to also meditate afterwards but if
you're in the middle of a conflict like leaving for too long can make the person feel abandoned
and remember we don't want to make them feel abandoned we want them to trust us we want them
to stay in communication with us because that's how we're going to build closeness and intimacy
no matter what the cptsd is telling you that punishing them that's what it tells you cptsd will
say i'll show them i'll show them how it feels now they're going to be sorry they said what they said
i'm not going to talk to them i i've been there i know that feeling and it's not it's the trauma
talking you don't want to do that don't listen to your trauma don't ever punish people don't do it
just try to stay straightforward and communicating where you are doing the least harm possible with
your words so that's it you need an actual proper break sometimes and i think you'll find that if
you can take a break and re-regulate the need for silence and punishing is going to go way down
so that need for a break is nervous system that's not you being a bad person punishing people
that's that's what that's how we're bad people we don't but our worst behavior comes out when we're
dysregulated so i think you'll find when you are re-regulated when you've mastered re-regulation
your worst traits are going to just come way down you're rarely going to see them again
when you've mastered re-regulation so i hope that helps this is i'm telling you this is relationship
gold it makes all the difference give it a try and come back and tell me how it went i want
to hear about it now if anybody listening has something that you'd like me to answer on ask
the fairy send me an email send it to hello at crappychildhoodfairy.com and put in the subject
line ask the fairy that tells me that you've given your permission for me to talk about it
in a video i will only use a fake name for you and you can even suggest one for me if you like
and if you like this topic i want to point you over to this video right here i picked it out
because it's kind of a continuation of this topic goes a little deeper and i will see you very soon
you