First, I want to tell you the bad news, you cannot make a person with complex PTSD change. You can't
make them heal, you can't make them learn about the adult effects of abuse and neglect
in childhood, and you can't even make them admit there's a problem, which you probably noticed.
But the good news is there are things you can do to help a loved one accomplish all these things
themselves without being controlling or judge-y because i'm telling you, we don't like that. I'm
Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy and I teach people practical steps that help
heal the symptoms of childhood PTSD and CPTSD and in this video i'm going to give you five
tips for how you can genuinely help another person's healing and at the same time help
yourself to enjoy more kindness, less chaos, and more closeness with this person you love
who's still struggling with trauma symptoms. Now if you are the person with CPSTD, this is for you
too, to give you words to ask for what you need and to share if you need to give the people who
you care about a road map for what actually helps you in the healing and the change that you are
working on. I get at least one letter or comment every day from someone who's hurting because of a
loved one's CPTSD behavior, things like being shut down and cold or flying into rages and
saying cruel things that are out of character. And for the people who love people like that,
witnessing this behavior and getting hurt by it becomes its own kind of trauma doesn't it? And so
in these letters a lot of people ask me what can I do to get this person I love to see that this
is complex PTSD and that they need to change? And they're probably right, it probably is CPTSD, they
probably need to change but i'm going to tell you what I tell them; for you, the person who wants
their loved one to freaking heal already and change, here's the thing what actually helps them
is probably not what you're doing right now. It's counterintuitive I know and in fact your pressure
could even be making things worse. I'm talking about those of you who are doing all the research,
you're the one watching my videos and writing me letters and you're knocking yourself out
trying to construct this better reality where your loved one gets it, they get help, they get better
and if you've been in this situation before, you know how heartbreaking it is to love someone who's
struggling and it feels like you can see like right there what the problem is and it seems
like you know exactly what they should do and it feels like hope but...but it makes you suffer
doesn't it? It's a vision of how someone could be if they could only do what I want them to do,
what i'm seeing, what seems so obvious to me. Maybe you've learned this the hard way too,
it doesn't help. It doesn't help people when we push a vision like that in fact it can make
things harder, it can get in the way of a natural process where they feel the need to change and
their next step just appears to them in their own vision of their lives. Now the fact is we don't
honestly know really what another person needs to do. It's easy to be wrong about some vision
we have about another person's possibilities. What it really is, is an effort to control an out of
control situation and it's totally understandable because the situation really is out of control.
And if you're a parent, it's appropriate to step in and take control of your kid's life
but even then it doesn't always work and if you're not a parent but a spouse or a friend,
unless we think a person is in imminent danger to themselves or other people,
it's actually not appropriate to control them. If you've ever had someone try to control you,
it's not only insulting and hurtful but it does what I call jamming your radar, it fills up your
awareness with noise when really what you need to heal trauma is some space, some calm awareness
to notice what's happening in your body and your emotions and then to allow awareness to form what
you might do about it, to conceive of your next steps, to maybe ask some questions or even ask
for help. But that's the key to ask, asking is readiness it's openness, a person who is
asking for help can be helped. This is not like performing CPR, helping a person who also needs
to help themselves, it requires an invitation so you're invited to give your opinion and help.
So until your loved one with CPTSD invites you to help what can you do? Okay here are my five tips:
first of all, be safe! This video is all about helping the many many people with CPTSD
who are very safe, not going to hurt you, but in a few cases abusive behavior is also connected
to trauma symptoms. So I just need to spend a moment here saying you should never ever tolerate
violent or abusive behavior from anyone. Anything from physical hitting or making threats or say
driving recklessly while in a rage with family in the car, that is not okay, so it's your job
to remove yourself and any children from dangerous situations like that. Now could it improve later?
Yes, but in the moment where there's danger talking it out or trying to help is not what's
needed and you also don't need to excuse their behavior just because they had a hard childhood,
it could be a factor, but it's never an excuse. Most of the time the thing that
makes a loved one's CPSTD symptoms hurtful is not abuse per se it's more like unreasonableness
or emotional chaos, sadness, being unreliable, being very reactive or argumentative,
creating tension around the house. Now this is all stuff that feels pretty bad when it's happening
but in a lot of cases it's not happening all the time and if it were happening all the time, it
doesn't matter what you call it, you always have a right to remove yourself or leave. And sometimes
leaving is the right thing to do but if you're safe and you want to be in this relationship
and you have a desire to be helpful, let's go over the tips! So number one was to be safe, number two
is to be encouraging. You...you keep hearing me say this lately discouragement is poison
and encouragement is medicine, encouragement; it's way better than trying to control someone,
it's giving them space and support and love to get their clarity and their strength together
to make the changes they long to make in their lives. It's so much better for you the encourager
and it's so much better for the person who needs encouragement yeah. So what does that look like?
When you love someone with CPTSD you're going to come face to face with some of their deep dark
discouragement thoughts that come up out of the past and they're going to get dysregulated
sometimes- that is a brain state where thinking and emotions can get discombobulated and
it's..it's happening at the level of the nervous system, it can be really difficult to notice
or control for those of us who get dysregulated and this is a great place for people with CPTSD
to start their learning. I've made a ton of videos about this, there's a whole playlist and
I even teach a course on dysregulation so you can learn more about that in the links below or maybe
if you're invited, you can share those links with someone who you think might benefit from them. So
if your loved one seems dysregulated or says they're dysregulated and they're getting
overwhelmed or intensely frustrated or flaking out or overly criticizing themselves for mistakes,
all of this is really common and you can remind them that when they feel broken or like a failure,
dysregulation could be part of the problem and it's normal with CPTSD and it's not their fault.
You can help them focus on that and then remind them of all their good qualities and all their
progress, you can encourage them to accept that CPTSD often involves a neurological injury. It's
a temporary malfunction, it's not their fault, happens to people who weren't kept safe and loved
as kids and the symptoms can be healed. And when you help them accept that this happened, you can
accept it too, you don't have to accept hurtful behavior, but you can accept that CPTSD symptoms
happen and it can take time to change them even for people who do their very best to heal. And
you can encourage them, really gently no pressure, to practice re-regulation. It takes persistence
but it's easy and it usually feels pretty pleasant and makes a huge difference in moving healing
forward quickly, learning to re-regulate, so I want to tell you something else about that in a
moment but, the third thing is be aware. Sometimes you're going to be the first one who notices
symptoms of trauma kicking in and you can help turn that around without making a big thing of it.
So how do you know it's happening? Each person's a little different obviously but
you might start hearing your loved ones say some yucky phrase that's become familiar to
you that you know tends to lead to an upset and these are sometimes signs of what's known as
an emotional flashback, and i'll put a link to my video about that below too, you'll hear them
say things like "you obviously don't care" or "you never do this loving thing that I want" or
"you only want me because..." whatever their fearful bad dream perception is in that moment
and what's happening is a flashback. It's not what they're seeing, but all the emotions are coming up
of a terrible time in the past when these things were true and they were helpless and scared.
So it's really hard to reason with someone who's having an emotional flashback, it's not a good
time to ask big deep important questions, it's time to just offer a little help with a symptom.
You can say, "You seem like maybe you're getting a bit overwhelmed, can I help? And if your loved
one knows about dysregulation and agrees that it's a thing, you can use that word you can say,
"You seem like you're getting a little dysregulated, should we take a little pause?"
And I would encourage you not to use trauma jargon words even the word dysregulation if that's not
the language that they use, then it just feels like judgment and someone on a high horse.
You can say things that are not judg-y but just reassuring you can say, "If you need a break
i'll wait for you it's not a problem i'll be right here." And this is really good in
fact when the fear of abandonment has a grip on them. Sometimes people say hurtful things in this
fear state like they don't need you and you should just leave them and get it over with,
things they don't mean. And in this case, it's just the abandonment one talking,
it's a very crude defense mechanism and it's a terrible thing to say when you don't really
mean it and it can border on emotional abuse but if you're in a situation where you know
they don't mean it and you just want to help them through this bad moment you can say,
"Nah, i'm not going to leave, i'm staying with you and i'm not going anywhere." And it can be
like you're talking to the person inside that defense mechanism, it can be really helpful.
Now again, i'm not recommending you just turn into a numb person and let yourself get traumatized,
you're going to have to use your judgment about when you want to stick around and give reassurance
and when it's better to just step back and protect yourself. Now some people ask me "If my loved one
asks me a loaded question like 'do you think i'm actually crazy?' or 'your mom told me I ruined
Christmas do you think I ruined Christmas?" You're right, you should proceed with caution because
while this person is in a CPTSD state it's a terrible time to discuss criticisms that you
actually have. This is a good time to be extremely gentle, the slightest criticism is going to sound
really huge to them when their CPTSD symptoms are up. So if there's anything you need them to
know that you must have them know, you can make it very gentle and very small and still get through.
You can say the least amount of hard stuff necessary and then later, when everything's calmer
and stakes are lower, you can talk about more what happened and what bothered you about it. Finally
the fifth tip is that, if you want to help someone recover, recover yourself. You wouldn't be with
this person if you didn't have a little bit of this stuff yourself and if you didn't have it when
you met them, you have it now right? You can take my courses, you can use the techniques I teach for
calming dysregulation and gaining more clarity, more freedom to be yourself and not only will this
help you deal with a loved one who stresses you out, but you just might attract them to sit down
and try the techniques too. And i've been teaching this stuff for 26 years and i've never succeeded
in pushing anyone to try it, I tried, but the only people who came to it came because they saw
what healing looked like in me and started to ask me about it. So, if these tips are
hitting the spot and helping you understand how to help someone else with CPTSD, you might want
to try this video right here that goes a little deeper into symptoms that are common with CPTSD,
it might help explain what you're noticing in them and maybe in yourself and I will see you soon!