If you were abused or neglected in childhood, I can almost guarantee
you've had more than your share of ruined friendships. That's what complex PTSD does,
at its heart it's an injury to your ability to connect with other people. You've probably
been aware a long time that connection is hard for you and this is a terrible way to go through your
life, you're robbed of the most important things that make life happy, love, belonging, a tribe.
And here's the thing, if the connection wound is there, it doesn't tend to get better by itself.
It needs to be healed and i'm calling you out, that if friendships are not working out for you,
now is the time to change that. I'm Anna Runkle, also known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy and I
teach people how to heal from the symptoms of PTSD from childhood by learning to calm
triggers and healing that connection wound so that you can become fully yourself and stop
ruining perfectly good friendships. I'm going to talk about what these symptoms look like and
how you can heal them. So let's start with the first and most obvious one, and that is
lashing out. The most destructive symptom of unhealed trauma is the way negative emotions,
which are normal, get oversized in our minds and come bursting out of us without a filter. How many
times have you expressed yourself and then, within a minute or two, had that strange feeling that
maybe your anger came out a little too strong? It's the worst feeling and part of this behavior
could be what you learned at home from parents who raged right, but a lot of it probably has to
do with how your brain and nervous system handle stress and negative experiences, even little ones.
When you feel criticized or judged or treated unfairly or left out,
there can be this burst of brain activity. There are studies where they've measured this reaction
in people who had intensely stressful childhoods and when something negative happens now,
what you'll see on a brain scan is on the right front cortex where emotions happen it's like boom!
Off the charts activity and at the same time this dampening of the left front cortex where
reasoning is supposed to be happening. That is what it feels like right? Not so much reasoning,
a lot of emotion. Now people who don't have that trauma injury going on,
would probably have a little on both sides you know some emotions, some reasoning
and they'd be thinking to themselves "I should put this in perspective, I should ask some questions
and pause a little, find out why this is happening and see if I can mitigate it." Now remember
how normal people do that because this is your work around too, you can teach yourself to do that
process and override the CPTSD response. You get hurt by something a friend says it's like a five
alarm fire over here! You're like oh! It's a big surge of emotion and your instinct is to fight it,
to make it stop because it feels like all that emotion is being caused by the other person
but actually, your reaction, which is generated in here, is exaggerating the reality. Sure people do
and say hurtful things, but with CPTSD something this big, feels this big and you're getting all
these body signals, adrenaline, cortisol, a feeling of being gut punched or even panicky
and you're either gonna go into fight flight fawn or freeze mode, and when you lash out
that's fight mode. We all know how it feels to be on the receiving end of somebody doing that,
it hurts, it feels unreasonable and crazy making and you want to protect yourself.
So when you react with that fight mode, you'll get a lot of people pulling away from you
and in a moment i'll teach you how to prevent that. Okay sometimes it's not overt anger that
you're expressing, it's a negative emotion it's usually anger or a feeling of being threatened,
but you're dressing it up as concern, as in i'm only saying this because I care about you or
i'm just speaking my truth right, have you done this? You say things that you think are just
true or caring or clarifying statements but your words are loaded, they're full of little prickles
and it's because even though CPTSD stops you from seeing this in the moment,
your words are full of hurt and it's hurt directed at the other person and what is it? It's the same
criticism judgment feeling of unfairness that sets off your triggers. So before you even know
what you're doing your brain is like, you hurt me? I'll hurt you right back. Your CPTSD brain thinks
it's protected you but it's totally messing everything up, you actually need friends and
CPTSD is sabotaging that. Another way negative emotions come in and wreck your friendships is,
you abandon people. This is that same thing where your CPTSD brain is trying to protect you
and this time by shutting people out, not speaking, not responding to them,
giving them the cold shoulder. All because the reaction in here is more than you can handle
and it feels like they did it to you, and maybe partly they did but CPTSD is characterized by
that intense emotional reaction to things that's out of proportion to what's going on. And I know
a bunch of you are going to say "..but so-and-so is a narcissist and they were abusive to me!"
But i'm not talking about them i'm talking about friendships, people that you want in your life.
So if you're feeling a little too much emptiness where your friends are supposed to be, this could
be one of the reasons alright. Alright sometimes your anger or defensiveness isn't directed at the
person in front of you it's directed at someone else and you're having a lot of drama about it
and if your CPTSD isn't healed yet, you can be a bit helpless in keeping drama out of your life or
staying calm about just regular ups and downs that are in all lives. So having been there, i'd say
having drama feels a lot like living in a house where there are no doors and windows and all this
cold air and wind is always getting in and there's strangers sleeping on the couch and there's whole
rooms piled up with problems, and when that's happening you can hardly think of anything else,
it's all you can talk about; "ah there's no doors, i'm freezing, there's somebody on the sofa!"
And we all know what it feels like to be around someone who's overwhelmed by their own drama,
you can't help them, you can't reach them, and they're usually way too loaded up with their
own stuff to care about you or anybody. The thing to remember is that drama is a natural byproduct
when a person is out there living life which is good, but thanks to being raised maybe in
a dysfunctional family maybe not having such good red flag detector skills, drama gets in. So when
you're going through drama, how are you going to not talk about it or have bad days? It happens,
and this can be healed but just for the record some of the people who have left your life,
even though you wanted them to stay, maybe left because there was too much drama.
The people who might stick around when dramas running high in your life, are usually other
traumatized people who are maybe attracted to drama or have so much of their own,
they're not worried about what's going on with you either way, it's not a good dynamic.
Okay here's a different kind of symptom that pushes friends away and it's when you have too
many rules for other people about what they can and can't say and do when they're around you. Now
there is such a thing as boundaries, like please don't give alcohol to my teenager or don't touch
this wound on my leg, those are boundaries. But if you're someone who gets triggered easily into
CPTSD symptoms, and I don't think you'd be watching this if you were not,
it would be better if you could stay un-triggered because in that regulated state of being
un-triggered, you can have your boundaries and allow other people to be their wonderful selves,
that's what everybody wants including you. So what can you do to contain your CPTSD symptoms while
your healing is still in progress and still open up your life to better and better friendships?
The first and best thing you can do is to learn to calm your triggers
from inside rather than trying to make other people protect you from getting triggered.
It's not your fault that you have CPTSD but it's not their fault either, the power to change things
is actually here in your own brain and emotions and thinking. This is the only place where change
is possible even if it's not instant or easy. You absolutely have the power, in any moment
any interaction, to pause and soften down and listen and be attentive to what's going on so that
your negative emotions can kind of go over here and your friend's feelings can be safe over here.
If there's something you need to communicate or express anger about or set a boundary around,
it can usually wait a minute or two and that little cushion of time between trigger
and reaction is your friend. Doing this also helps to keep your focus on the values
and behaviors that you're trying to hold for yourself or grow into. Now maybe it's kindness,
maybe it's a more accepting attitude, maybe it's encouragement for other people,
and you know that little bit of time can also allow you to realize that you want to step away.
Like when other people bad mouth others or rant as a way to just be social, not participating in that
is a value too. And no you don't have to criticize them or judge them on the way out the door,
they get to be them, you get to be you, even if being you means not having them in your life.
Now having CPTSD can mean that on some days or for an hour here and there, you might
get very stuck in your negative emotions and thinking, it happens all the time. There's a
time to talk with friends about it but there's a way that the intensity of CPTSD can make you
talk a little too much about it, too intensely. Good friends need your time and attention too,
so force yourself if you have to, to give them the floor sometimes maybe half the time. What
you can do with those negative emotions is funnel them out of your mind and onto paper, and I don't
mean journaling, which maybe that's been helpful to you in the past, but the techniques that I used
and how I recovered from CPTSD are different and I teach them in a free course where you can learn
the writing and the meditation technique that go together to clear that negativity out
so that you can be more yourself. I..as always I put a link to that below in the description
section, I think it's under every video I ever make. When you do have criticisms of other people
you don't have to speak all of them and you don't have to flee either, you can ask yourself
when you have the urge to criticize, is it really necessary? Usually it's not. You don't have to say
"I'm not going to your fundraiser because I think the organization is stupid and I don't like the
people there." It might be true, but you can just say, "oh thank you for the invitation, i'm not
able to come to that but good luck with that." You can actually do that. When you have hurt someone,
which is going to happen, just be quick to see it, admit it, do something about it. Don't wait,
don't make excuses, don't tell your friend all the reasons why you couldn't help but be hurtful
you know whatever because of your past, because of the problems you're having, just open your
heart to them and own it and apologize. I'll put a little link below too to a video I made about how
to make a really good apology. I had to be taught, I made a video about it. Good friends appreciate
it when you just say hey i'm sorry, what I said was really hurtful and I want to take it back.
That kind of honesty and humility is something we all admire in other people and if you can do it,
your friend is much more likely to open their heart again to you. Now if you're into this
topic of connection and why it's so hard for people with CPTSD, i'm going to recommend that
you watch this video here, it talks a lot more about how we got that way and what to do about it